Ban Lifted on Twain Book "Eves Diary"

Seems Mark Twain knew all about book selling. Ron Suskind writing the second he scurries out of government has nothing on him. Salaciousness sells. Just ask the author of the Palin tell all Joe McGinnis. Sarah had  an affair with a basketball player. And he was black. Or Suskinds contention Obama doesn't like women. Even that sells in a sort of reverse misogynistic boys club man cave oeuvre.

But Twain wrote Eve's Diary in 1906 and it was too racy for a library in Charlton Mass and was banned for one hundred and five years. Talk about being out of print. The book about the relationship of Adam and Eve had racy pictures that one Hattie L Carpenter (librarian) did not care for and started the  ball rolling. The ban held and patrons of the library could not find the racy little book anywhere in the stacks.

And Twain knew even then it would be good for sales and called the banning parties "freaks of of the Charlton library." But now all has been forgiven.The book has been restored and people can now read Eves Diary dirty pictures and all. I suppose there is nothing new under the sun. Sex sells. Even anti sex sells. I am sure Hattie L. Carpenter would not have let Joe McGinnis's book into her hallowed library . Maybe she wouldn't have even let that misoginistic Suskind tell all in the door either.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Ebooks level the playing field for Authors

Mass market paperbacks are dying. This is due in large part to ebooks taking away the normal paperback buyer in airports, drugstores and those large racks that used to sit in front of department stores and every convenience store. My second novel came out in mass market and should have been trade. Tobacco Sticks went out the there as a literary courtroom drama set in the South in Virginia in 1946 and had to fight it out with spy novels, thrillers, slasher novels, mysteries and just about every mass genre out there. I had no choice in the matter and the publisher later admitted that trade would have been a better fit for the novel.

The beautiful thing about Ebooks is that the author is in control.  There is only one format and that levels the playing field. No longer is an author competing with hard covers, trade, or mass paperback. No longer is the author stuck in a format that doesn't fit because of publishing realities. The book goes out there as an Ebook and it is on the same footing as every other author. Bestseller or unknown, the reader will receive the same product without the stigma of mass versus trade versus hardcover.

And the book can stay out there. No publisher will remainder your title falling into the dreaded OUT OF PRINT STATUS. You book will not be pushed to the back of the store or worse not displayed at all. One copy will not be stocked while five hundred copies are stocked of other titles. Books will not be sent back to the publisher because they didn't sell out in the first month. The ebook revolution has put the author in the drivers seat finally.

So mass market paperbacks will disappear. Eventually hardcover will  probably go away. The big authors will dominate the ebook sites and will be pushed out there first, but the reader can search for the author he wants and there the book will be for all time in  electronic mass, trade, and hardcover glory. The authors best effort will be there without publisher interference. Can an author ask for anything more?

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Fiction with an agenda or why I couldnt' finish "The Shack"

Novels have to have some sort of moral standing. Not that they have to moralize, but the writer has to be honest with his readers and take them along for the ride. The ride should not be clearly marked. There should be different places where the writer and the reader are surprised. There should be discoveries and clues and honest epiphanies. In short the reader should be as entertained as the writer. Saying all that there is another type of fiction out there that hides under the guise of honest story telling. It is writing with an agenda.

In reading The Shack the agenda stopped me cold. I just couldn't continue on after I got hit over the head with religiosity. This was clearly marked in the beginning but I took a shot and read up to about page one hundred the tragic story of a girl abducted and murdered. The problems begin when the main character goes to meet God in The Shack. It becomes a proselytizing affair and worse it becomes hackneyed and a polemic for why there is a God and why bad things still happen.

Fair enough to write a treatise on the existence of God. But to dress up fiction as a vehicle for this kind of message is disingenuous and worse it violates the tenants of fiction. It is a rigged game and we know where it is going and so the interest wanes. In The Shack, the authors (three of them) come out from behind the curtain and let us know that there is a God and bad things do happen. I felt like I was reading Tuesdays with Morrie or any of the other quasi existential drugstore fare for the everyman. Pop psychology is surely the second cousin of THE GREAT QUESTION books browsed while waiting to check out.

The problem is this is thin gruel if you do have great questions. This is something dressed up in a package to sell, but never really deliver the goods. The first part of The Shack is engaging, but you  have to dig in and roll up your pants once they throw up the tent poles for the revival nd listen to the sermon told between the glossy covers. It's really your choice and I chose to fold.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Sex in Novels

I remember reading novels up in an attic with a friend of mine looking for the dirty passages. His parents had tossed tons of paperbacks in a large box and Tommy and I rooted through them in the dim light of the attic looking for every explicit scene we could find. Mostly we looked for trigger words, throbbing, member, ecstasy, moaning, pleasure, orgasm, groping, hotly, lustily, hungered... and then we read in the dim light until his mother asked what the hell we were doing up there.

Now of course novels have taken a back seat to cinema and television and everything else that puts sex front and center and yet novels can still get steamy in their muted pulp and print fashion or the more esoteric e reader. I have been reading Jonathan Troppers novel This is Where I Leave You and it is amazing but he crams sex into every other page. I don't mean a little sex but a lot and graphic. Take this scene. A man having sex with the main characters wife with her hand up her lovers ass. Our hero discovers the fornication couple and he shoves a birthday cake (meant for his wife) up the ass of the male lover who already has a hand up there. The candles ignite the lovers scrotum because he used lube.

That's in the first ten pages. Now even for people who the sexually jaded this scene is pretty loaded. But the book doesn't give us a breath as people fornicate in basements, apartments, groping, sucking, tonguing in graphic descriptions leaving just about nothing to the imagination. This book is not pornography but mainstream fiction. Which brings along an interesting question...how much sex is too much sex in a novel. For Tropper a little doesn't go a long way.

I remember a friend of mine had some actual pornography. The books were small and thin with silly titles and covers. And they were all sex. No plot. Just sex upon sex. I ran a writing group once where a man brought in very pornographic chapters from his novel in progress. He would read the excerpts and the woman in the group tried to climb under their chairs as the lovemaking went on for pages and pages. The men in the group cheered for more. When the critique started we had to address the sex scenes that basically were pornography. But the question is where is that line? Taste? Intent? Terminology?

I suppose all novels eventually make it into the sex box as Tommy and I used to call it. If I had gotten hold of a Tropper novel I would have felt like a miner hitting the mother lode. If I had gotten hold of real pornography I would have thrown Tropper aside. I guess it is all the lines we draw or don't draw.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/