The Writing Industry

Holocaust Memoir Book Gets the Axe and Other Tidbits

Angel at the Fence Gets the Boot

Publication of Angel at the Fence by Herman Rosenblat has been canceled by it’s publisher Berkeley Books. This memoir has has been in the news quite a bit because, like the James Frey fiasco of 2006, there is rampant suspicion that the details of the memoir are fake.

In the book, Herman Rosenblat claims that he first met his wife Roma while a prisoner of the Schlieben concentration camp. He tells a story of how she would visit him and bring him apples at the fence surrounding the camp. However, ever since the book hit the scene Holocaust researchers have been voicing doubts over whether events could have happened as he described. Rosenblat defended his book saying :

“The events that are its background are part of history; the book, however, reflects my memories of how the events affected my life. I was a young child at the time my family was caught up in the Holocaust, and I saw things through a young child’s eyes. But I know and remember what I saw [...]“

Unfortunately for Rosenblat, a little investigative journalism by The New Republic exposed the memoir as a fraud. Berkeley Books, who continued to defend their client up until about a week ago, is demanding the author return all the monies paid to him for the book. Ouch!

People Who Don’t Pay

Over the last few weeks I’ve been following a complaint posted on the Writer’s Weekly Whispers and Warnings Board (say that three times fast) involving a literary promotion business refusing to pay a pair of authors for their appearance at an event organized by the business.

According to the emails sent to Angela Hoy, owner of Writer’s Weekly, Kennetta Wainwright promised to pay the authors for their travel expenses getting to and from the event. But now that everything is said and done she is disputing that she owes the authors the amount they are asking for.

Her defense is that she should only be responsible for transportation to and from the event and that the authors were trying to get her to pay for their entire trip which included stops at other places. However, as the emails prove, she approved of the amount beforehand and the authors even have contracts that she signed stating that she would pay what they were asking.

To complicate matters further, Ms. Wainwright claims that the county was supposed to pick up the author’s transportation tab but that they (the country) found the author’s expenses to be unreasonable and thus refuse to pay. However, a city representative emailed Angela to inform her that they had no such agreement with either Ms. Wainwright or the authors.

I did a Google search on Ms. Wainwright and came across this article. She suffers from a debilitating illness which I suspect is at the heart of this dispute. She has thousands of dollars of medical debt and I think she just can’t afford to pay and is looking for any way out. On the one hand I understand her situation but on the other hand she did agree to reimburse these writers.

What do you think about this situation? Should the writers just write off the expense and chalk it up to experience or do you think they should pursue and make her pay?

NaNoWriMo: Writing Like Your Hair is on Fire

November is the official month of the National Novel Writing Month Challenge. This is where you spend the thirty days of November pulling your hair out and desperately trying to type out a 50,000 word manuscript. I attempted to participate this year and failed to hit the goal. I didn’t even make it halfway. I think my actual word count ended up being a paltry 2500 words.

If you ended up in the same boat I did and stalled on the challenge, 2009 brings with it more chances to get in on the action. Over at Absolute Write they are taking pledges for NaNoWriMo participation for January and February with the intent of having pledges for the challenge each month for the year. Which means more chances to stop procrastinating and actually get that novel written.

I’m probably not going to participate in NaNoWriMo next year unless I can do short story collection totaling 50,000 words. I’m not ready to write novels and have decided to devote 2009 to the study of writing and practicing the craft by writing short stories. Once I feel like I’ve got the hang of it, then I will look into expanding into longer stories.

How about you? Any of you planning to participate in a NaNoWriMo challenge in 2009? If so, what will you work on?

How to be a Better Writer

In the spirit of the NaNoWriMo tidbit, I would like to refer all of you to an article by Stephen King about writing. I can’t remember how I came across this article but I have found the advice in it to be invaluable especially tip #5.

I have this bad habit of editing as I write which slows me down and eventually causes me to start procrastinating because I lose focus. Learning to turn off my internal editor (who is fairly loud and obnoxious btw so I’m not always successful) has allowed me to complete three short stories. Yeah, the writing is atrocious and the characters are mere stick figures but at least I’ve got something on paper that I can work with. And we all know that the real writing gets done in the rewrite.

So if you have a minute, read the article and let me know what you think. Any tips you would add to the list?