Category Archives: Toasted Cheese

Writers Read

In which I share an assortment of reading material I may or may not ever have time to actually read. 😉

Stack o’ books from annual pilgrimage to The Book Shop. Not that I needed more books. But you know, resistance. futile.

Books from The Book Shop

$80 (used books ftw!)

Magazines!

Magazines 1

20 Under 40

Magazines 2

$74 (!)

BTW…

Cost of reading Toasted Cheese? Free.

Number of hours the TC editors put in each issue? Innumerable.

Amount the TC editors are paid? $0

Number of years we’ve been publishing TC? Almost 10. (That’s like 100 in print years!)

Your donation? Priceless.

The best editors edit because they want to

To encourage writers to write about big issues is all well and good, but writers in an open society are going to do that regardless. The best writers write because they have to, but the best editors edit because they want to. It’s the editors, not the writers, who need encouraging.

—Jay Baron Nicorvo

True enough. Still… if anyone wants to leave their estate to Toasted Cheese (a la Poetry), please do get in touch.

(P.S. Why is the Poetry Foundation still soliciting donations? They have two. hundred. million. dollars. If you are able to donate to an arts organization, please choose one that’s less well off!)

Be an Innovator

Starting with the fall 2011 issue, [Shenandoah] will be entirely online. A paid subscription will be a thing of the past. “It is perhaps inevitable when we look at what has happened to other literary journals,” said [editor R.T.] Smith. “Literary magazines per se are going to have to change their way of conceiving themselves and of reaching their audiences. And this is all tied up in the deep inquiry going on in our culture about the future of print. There is time to make that transition and be an innovator.”
…
For the reader, Smith said, an online journal “also leads to more accessibility and an increased audience.” If a reader feels an immediate yen to read a literary magazine like Shenandoah, it’s just a click away.
…
“We will bring all of the very best features of a physical magazine except three-dimensionality,” said Smith. “We believe that we’re going to be gaining in terms of interactivity, accessibility, audio, the kinds of things that have made the whole concept of the Internet interesting to start with.”

—Washington and Lee University

[If Shenandoah is ”an innovator” (!),  what does that make Toasted Cheese? Just asking.]

Writers and Authors

[originally posted at Toasted Cheese]

I just saw that Stephenie Meyer has a new book coming out. It turns out to be a Twilight-tie-in book. And that’s when this occurred to me…

No doubt you’ve heard writers say something like “I write because I have to” or “even if I never get published (again), I wouldn’t stop writing.” IOW, writing, being a writer, is part of who they are, it’s something they have always done, and will always continue to do because they enjoy (or get something from) the process of writing as much as the finished product (and its associated rewards).

OTOH, you have people like Meyer, who had not written anything prior to the Twilight series. I’m highly doubtful that she’ll produce anything of note that’s not Twilight-related (although she may try). Part of this is being typecast, of course; nothing she does (JK Rowling has the same problem) is going to be able to match that first hit.

Of course, both Meyer and Rowling have enough money that they never have to write another word again, if they don’t want to. But if they’re writers at their core, we would have no doubt that they would continue writing regardless of the fact they’re now filthy rich or that readers aren’t interested in anything that isn’t Twilight/Harry Potter.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that maybe this good/bad writing argument we’ve been having is not really about good or bad writing. Maybe it’s about writers vs. authors. Everyone expects a stack of JD Salinger manuscripts to show up sooner or later because everyone thinks of Salinger as a writer. He could stop publishing, but no one believes that he could stop writing. OTOH, if you read Dan Brown’s Wikipedia entry, it’s pretty clear that while he’s an author, he’s not a writer per se. He just kept trying different things until one of them worked out for him—and it happened to be writing novels. It could just as easily have been music or acting or something else.

Is this making sense to anyone besides me?