Post-Late Shift Meanderings Inspired by a Couple of Mystery Writers

Don't know how many of you have ever looked over to the right under "Noteworthy Blogs" and clicked on "A Writer's Life." If you have, it's taken you to the blog of Lee Goldberg--a writer of detective fiction and TV shows (some of which I wouldn't watch if you paid me, but he's also worked on some of my favorites--including two of the best episodes of A&E's Nero Wolfe--as show that never should've been cancelled becau--but I digress). Reading blogs by writers takes me back to the time when my major hope was being a professional writer, when I could--and would--spend hours talking about technique and characters, not for the purpose of analyzing, but for the purpose of learning how to do the same thing. For a variety of reasons--some good, some showing a deficiency in my character--that hope has gone the way of the dodo--for example, using a phrase like that. But reading Goldberg's blog (and others) takes me back to that. Give him a read sometime, he's clever, he's incisive, and he has some interesting perspective on writing/publishing/TV.

If you do start reading Goldberg, it'll take you no time at all to realize two of his biggest pet peeves are fanfic (see here for an example) and Publishing on Demand Services portraying themselves as legitimate means of being a published author (see here for a great example). The fanfic thing doesn't do much for me, but the POD stuff resonates with me for reasons I won't bother going into.

Wow. That's a long introduction to what I wanted to blog about (too much fluff, another reason I've given up on being published). Goldberg today linked to an email exchange that writer Joe Konrath posted on his site between a POD company and himself after he'd signed a book deal with an actual publisher. Not only is the cluelessness of the POD employee hilarious, but the content of Konrath's proposals is laugh inducing. Best yet, it's educational--great look at how POD's work.