Sunday, October 08, 2006

Publishing hell and Star Trek

A very low day today - will have to up the dose of my de-stress herbals soon, dammit. Have spent a large part of the day arguing my case on the Writewords (http://www.writewords.org.uk) site that mainstream publishing has its finger too far up its own proverbials to know much about quality as its main focus is sellability (two very different things) and that you have to rely these days on self- and small-publishing a lot of the time too. It's interesting how the support has neatly divided into those who have mainstream deals who say I'm talking stuff and nonsense, and those who write equally good (if not more so) work but aren't lucky enough to have landed a commercial deal, who understand there's a lot of truth in what I say. Have been increasingly annoyed with the attitudes shown throughout the day, I have to say - Lord preserve me from not seeing the "other" side of the street any more if I should ever get a "big name" to take me seriously! I suspect I'm kept fairly grounded from that horror though by the fact that if I ever get a mainstream deal, I believe it'll only be for one or two books anyway, no more, so the self- and small-publishing options are very much going to keep me in business.

Still, all the shennanigans of the discussion have made me feel that for my own sanity I'd like to steer clear of the Writewords forums for a while - at least until people see that we have to give house-room both to mainstream and smallstream authors. This bollocks about "oh it's only ever published if it's good, and anything good always gets published" is nothing but moonshine and arses.

The one good thing about today was the lovely triple bill of "Star Trek" I've watched this afternoon - you can never go wrong with outer space indeed. Would that the world down here was run with honesty and justice - but sadly it's not.

This week's haiku:

Today, I gave up
being the social glue; see
my friends fade away.

Today's nice things:

1. Star Trek.

Anne Brooke
http://www.annebrooke.com
http://www.goldenford.co.uk

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