The Stigma of Self Publishing

You bet there is a stigma to self publishing. Get over it. If you are a writer then you have a commitment and that is to the work. Publishing may go into deep freeze or they may be burning the house down to bring out your next work. Either way the work is what drives you to get it out there in whatever form you can. Art is never greeted with open arms and neither will your book. There may be a million reasons why reviewers and publishers and agents and everyone else view a self published novel as something less than standard. You cannot worry about that.

Your first responsibility is to write the book. Your second is to get it out there where people can read it. If you only want to see your name in print then that is not going to take you far. If you truly believe in your work then you will do what is necessary. That is why you only want to put out your best work because you will have to stand by it through thick and thin. This is not for the I want to publish a book before I die crowd. This is for the I want to give the world something new crowd.

In Our Time. Hemingway's small chap book of stories was self published by Ezra Pound in Paris on a rotary press. No one would publish the fellow with the strange stories. My first book was brought out by a printer in Chicago who had never published a book before. Hemingway went on as we all know and the very people who turned my book down bought it on auction years later. The point is you are part of the big struggle and you may well be trampled underfoot anyway, but use every tool at your disposal and then make up some along the way.

Being a writer is not for the feint of heart, but who knows, you might just buck the odds. Either way, it is the work that matters. Only the work.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Hemingways Attic...surviving as a writer

The Dream of Midnight in Paris

Woody Allen's film Midnight in Paris is  A Moveable Feast. Most of us who write or read seriously know about the Left Bank crowd of writers and painters who set the bar in the twenties for all to follow for the next hundred years. It was an amazing amalgam of creative talent centered in post WWI Paris and more centered in the bars and bistros where the writers and painters cross pollinated and created literature and art that is probably unparalleled since the Renaissance. Who hasn't become a writer or a painter and think about going to Paris to live the life less certain?

I did and so did the Owen Wilson character who is struggling between art and commerce and a wife who wants the finer things. In his fantasy or Woody Allen's we meet Hemingway and Fitzgerald Dali Gertrude Stein Picasso Zelda Mcleish and are mindful of the lingering presence of Joyce and Faulkner and the many others who came to the heart of the world of art and writing to make history and live  the artist life in a world where art is preeminent.

This is the assumption and the dream and Fitzgerald is refined and Hemingway is coarse and hilarious and Gertrude Stein is the Grande Dam of writing and Picasso is conflicted and Zelda is brilliant and heading toward insanity. This is the world we dance through and of course Paris is the magical background that makes us want it all the more. And Owen Wilson wants it and when he finally throws over security for a life in Paris we say but of course.

And then the movie ends and leaves us with the dream of the Left Bank fantasy intact. And why not? Those people took a chance and went to Paris to be artists and live a life apart. Undoubtedly there was hardship and people starved and did not find literary fame. But Paris is not a dream, it is a real city, and as Owen Wilson says, just walking in the rain in Paris at night is enough. One can  only imagine.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Hemingways Attic-- surviving as a writer