Secret Origins, The Story DC Comics

When it comes to the two big names in comic books (DC and Marvel), I am entrenched in neither camp. I love certain Marvel characters, their creators, writers, and artists - like Jean Grey (X-Men), Galactus, The Silver Surfer, Magneto - too much to declare myself full on Team Marvel, but my first brush with comics came courtesy of William Moulton Marston's star spangled Wonder Woman and she has always been my favourite. Then there's Batman, The Green Lantern, and Julius Schwartz's revamp of The Flash.

It took me a long time to hunt down "Secret Origins, The Story of DC Comics" and am I glad I did. To hear greats like Neil Gaiman (whose reimagining of The Sandman was genius), Alan Moore, Jim Lee, and see the old clips and the old timers was worth the effort. It was like watching a movie about my friends. Not just the heroes, anti-heroes, and even the villains that I adore, but the people who brought them to life.

Comic books have had a special place in my heart for nearly three decades. I fell in love with Wonder Woman comics before I could read. I knew from the pictures she could deflect bullets with her bracelets and that she was on the side of "good". I aspired to, like my heroine, do good deeds.  This idea that good people do good things has stuck with me ever since.

I literally cheered during this documentary. Cheered when I saw Julius Schwartz and Neil Gaiman herald Alan Moore as a genius because he is - The Swamp Thing, Watchmen, V for Vendetta prove it. I was inspired by these people who loved something so intensely. Just as I cannot police the universe because I don't have Hal Jordan's power ring, I was not blessed with the gift to draw comic books. I'm not even sure I could write them. I say not sure because before seeing this documentary I'd have said I couldn't even write them.

Now I feel a little differently. Now I see that same passion and fire for comics I feel has been infused into every comic book ever written, so maybe one day. Maybe one day I'll toss off my glasses and ummm peel off all my clothes and I'll be a hero...

And if you feel inspired to read comics and never have, let me give you a few tips.

• Start from the beginning.
• If you can afford it, buy colour omnibuses.
• Watch the films made about comics to see who you might be interested in knowing more about. I recommend: Stardust, Watchmen, X-Men First Class, Batman (Tim Burton's or Christ Nolan's series based on Frank Miller's Batman), and certain cartoons such as the 90's Batman, Superfriends (which was amazing), and the animated X-Men series (which was also amazing).
• Ebay.
• Enjoy.

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Beyond the Nuts & Bolts

Since producing a rough draft of a manuscript, I've been more and more aware of what the heck I should be paying attention to as the time approaches for me to seek representation and eventually, publication.

It's a vast and confusing world out there for writers. What kind of agent should you be looking for? What kind of contests can be a springboard for your career? What should you avoid? All kinds of questions are filling my head these days, and I've been dedicating one hour a day to answering these questions.

I found a very useful resource for this kind of information, but I can't repost anything here without permission. Hopefully I'll hear back soon and will be given permission to share, but in the meantime, here are a few things I've learned from my searches this past week that I've noted as particularly important for us first timers:

• Start learning how to read contracts and fine print.
• It might not be a bad idea to have a lawyer in mind that is used to working within the publishing industry for when you need one, and undoubtedly you will.
• Same goes for an accountant.
• Make sure the agents you query are "reputable" meaning:

1. They've sold work for other authors to commercial publishers. There are a lot of scams out there. Agents who try to refer you to vanity presses they own for example. In the end you pay an agent and you pay to publish your own book.
2. The fees they charge are not out of the ordinary. You have to find out exactly what fees the agent would charge you in advance. While certain fees are just outright scams there are some fees which appear to be "okay". Such as fees incurred over the ordinary cost of business to market your manuscript to potential publishers. In this case you need to know if they're going to charge you, what for, and how you will be billed. Ideally your agent believes in your work and agrees to deduct fees from your advance.
3. The agent provides a service worth paying for. Is your agent going to represent your manuscript? Or is the agent going to shove it with a bunch of others and send them off? Very few publishers accept non-solicited (meaning agent represented) manuscripts. An agent is almost mandatory. Is your agent going to make sure your manuscript gets read? Do they already have ideas of which publisher might want to accept your manuscript for publication? These are questions you have to ask and answer before signing anything.

Now when it comes to agents, I'm working on making my top three choices. I'm looking for agents who have a lot of experience with what I think of "after publication", meaning not only will they shop your book, but they will help you with film options, foreign rights, etc.

My weapon in finding an agent besides "The Writer's Market" is a little website I found www.querytracker.net.

I am really impressed with this website, and if you're going through the same process as me, you might be too. I didn't take a premium membership, but I'm not sure I'm not going to if only to toss a little money (it's $25 a year) towards the people who made this site.

Here's a quick run through of why I like this site:

1. You can search by author to see who represents them.
2. You can also search by agent.
3. Once you find the agent that represents the author, or you would like to represent you, there is an option to generate a "query report". The query report allows you see reponses of people who use the site as regards to their interaction with said agent/agency from the delay in response time, how they agent/agency prefers to be queried, how many people were asked to submit a partial MS or full MS, and whether or not they were offered representation.
4. You can see how people were rejected. Form letter, helpful rejection, etc.
5. You can keep track of agents you'd like to query in the future or have already queried.

Here's a snapshot of the querytracker website, click on it to enlarge for a closer look at the report the site generates or visit the site and perform your own search.

Now using this website has been a bit disheartening. The two agents on the top of my list aren't really accepting manuscripts at the moment. Great. They also have relatively small amounts of queries. I happen to know they're pretty good agents and rep some pretty fantastic authors, so to compare, I clicked on one of the most queried agents via querytracker, Diana Fox at Fox Literary.

Now keep in mind Diana Fox seems to accept almost every genre I can think of, and when I clicked on the Amazon links of her clients it came up with a lot of horror/sci-fi/fantasy type stuff mostly written by women. Now if that was my genre I'd take that as a good sign given I'm a woman, but it's not my genre.

When I generate the report for Diana Fox I learn that she prefers emails, doesn't send paper rejections anymore, and that she's been queried 1700+ times, of which she rejected 1400+. She did send out 85 helpful rejections though.

If you're in the querying phase now, be sure to check out this site. I however will never be in the querying phase if I don't get some actual writing done, so I'm off to walk the hound, and spend my afternoon doing exactly that.

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A Well Deserved Bit of Thanks

I really need to say thank you. I was a bit of an absentee blogger there for a bit. I can say I was busy, yada, yada, yada, ad naseum - and that'd be the honest truth, but to anyone who reads my blog regularly it's okay to be a little pissed off at me. Usually I'm better about blogging. I swear.

I'm hoping to have a few more exciting things to blog about in the near future, again, I swear. But in the meantime just know my thanks is sincere and from the heart. I just needed to recover from the shock that people keep on reading, even when I've neglected them (and should receive a thousand, nay, two thousand lashings for doing so).

But seeing the people who visit, well it makes me want to give you more to read. So I shall make it a priority to blog this week. In the meantime,

It's you, the reader who keeps me motivated to blog. Sometimes (well not lately) it's the only writing I do. It keeps me from wanting to pull my own fingernails off when I fail to write elsewhere.

So check back this week. I'm going to find some great books to talk about this week and share some good news if things pan out.

Bonne nuit et à demain!

(Good night and see you tomorrow!)



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More on the Diane Arbus Exposition @ Jeu du Palme

"The first part of my story is mostly taken from my imagination.

You also must use some imagination. I am not born yet..."

I've been to the Diane Arbus exhibition (in French it's exposition) and was I ever glad I went.  Plus, I had the benefit of going with a really talented photographer, my friend Nina. It was really worth the trip. I don't rave often about exhibitions, but when I left this one I had an urge satisfied. I felt like I understood Diane Arbus, her life and her work better than ever.

I'd like to share how I first discovered Diane Arbus. I was 14, taking photography in school (having bought a Pentax K1000 for the purpose and yet 20 years later I used my friend's and couldn't remember how to advance the film.), and I got this idea to run away to New York with said camera and take pictures like her. I made it to the bus station in Boston and from there I took a Greyhound bound for New York City.  Except it made a stop before Port Authority. In Harlem.

Needless to say Harlem wasn't the gentrified place it is now in parts, but a nice old man gave me money for a cab to take me to the Port Authority. He made me promise that I'd go straight back to school. I didn't get to snap a single picture. But the love continued.  When I finally got to visit New York City when I was older, I made it a point to take a few pictures. Obviously compared to Diane's they were quite crap, but I took them. I even borrowed a Pentax K1000 to make it official. They have since been lost or are packed up somewhere.

At the end of the exhibition there was a room with tables and the various books being offered for sale in the museum giftshop stowed away nicely in these desks that were built for the event. In the same room where quotes of Diane's all over the wall; her camera bag and a few cameras; her agenda; a notebook opened to two pages (which were hard to read because Diane tended to let her words run together in cursive); and my favourite bit - books from her library.

I didn't want to shell out for the book that was printed by the Fraenkel Gallery, but you can purchase the book here if it interests you. Instead I sat down at one of the desks and wrote down all the books that I had in my library that matched Diane's and all the ones I didn't have. Some were a surprise, others were not. I also have a little theory.

If you'd like to see what this picture (and some other famous pictures have sold for at auction click here.
If only I could find $7000 in my sofa cushions...I'd hang it on a wall in front of my writing desk.

In 1968 Diane photographed Jorge Luis Borges in Central Park. She also took a picture of Borges with his wife. What little I can deduce of Borges' personality from reading his conversations and various interviews, I'm pretty sure Borges must have recommended Diane a few good reads. After all, despite the misprint in the Fraenkel Gallery's book of her library, Diane had three copies of Louis-Ferdinand Celine's "Journey to the End of the Night" (Voyage au but de la nuit). She also had several other books that were beloved by "the librarian" such as Dante's "Divine Comedy", Rimbaud's "Illuminations", and two works by Borges himself ("Ficcones" and "Inquisitions" - which we have the same copy of).

I didn't write down all her books of course, but here are the highlights, and I've included every word I wrote down from Diane's notebook as well. It would be my wish that everyone could see this exhibition. In a world that often focuses on the external and superficial, Arbus' pictures force you to look deeper. I've never reacted to a photographer's work as I first responded to Arbus' many years ago. I sometimes wonder if I ever will.

Books in Diane's library and mine:

• First Edition, Tuttle Publishing, "Zen Flesh, Zen Bones"
• J.L. Borges, "Ficcones", "Inquisitions"
• New Directions, Arthur Rimbaud, "Illuminations"
• Louis-Ferdinand Celine, "Journey to the End of the Night", "Death on an Installment Plan"
• various works of Henry James
• Edith Wharton, "Age of Innocence"
• various works of Thomas Hardy
• Dante's "The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso"
• Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"

Books in Diane's Library I'd like to maybe own:

• "Complete Home Care of Your Family Wardrobe", Constance Talbot
• "Division Street America", Stude Terkel
• "Fingers Pointing Towards the Moon: Reflections of a Pilgrim on the Way", Wei Wu Wei
• "Beasts and Man and The Seed", Pierre Gascar
• "Writers On Revolt", featuring the writings of Terry Southern and Alexander Trocchi
• "Oblomov", Ivan Goncharov
• "Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl", Marguerite Schehaye
• "Marius the Epicurean", Walter Pater
• "The Temptation to Exist", E.M. Cioran
• "The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story", Joseph Conrad and Ford Maddox Heufer (he didn't change his last name to Ford until 1919)

Here is the text I wrote down from Diane's notebook. I'm pretty sure it refers to subjects from photographs she took while visiting a mental hospital.

(Left page)

Phyllis is the one with glasses and large eyes. Solemn, intelligent mongoloid.

Barbara is sweet and bright and modest.  When I did her in bed in her flowered nightgown she lowered her eyes before raising them.

I think Johannes, the one with the cowboy hat.

At night they sat on their beds and said prayers in unison.  Hail Mary full of grace...I pray the Lord my soul to take.

I want to runaway from here and I don't know how to run. I don't like the girls in my building.  They boss me, call me low grade.  No one comes to visit me.  You're better off dead.

(Opposite page, right)

Marlene Woodruff posed in the rose garden.  I've got a boyfriend.  He says I'm beautiful.  I told him you haven't seen the pretty parts.  Eddie, 45, going to school.  Around her neck on a string was a key.  Her girlfriends gave it to her before she died. It's so to remember people who die.

Then pocketbooks seem to keep her alive.

Nancy is the slightly bearded one who lay in bed like an odalisque against the wall on _?_. (Couldn't make out the word.)

Sally is blind in a wheelchair laughing (25). 'Reading" her name. Red hair.

Carmelia is fat and crosseyed. Julie is her blonde friend.


Here are some other works of Diane's from the exhibition:

And Diane herself, at work in Central Park.

If you are in Paris or planning to be, make sure to check out this exhibition. It's worth a visit.

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