In my on-going quest to document all the tons of hard rock and heavy metal related books that are published these days, I thought I’d mention this new one.

Beyond just an attention-grabbing title, Not Just Tits in a Corset: Celebrating Women in Metal by Jill Hughes Kirtland examines Lita Ford, Doro Pesch, Roxy Petrucci and many other female headbangers in their struggle to perform in a male-dominated genre.

I generally abhor the “ripped from the headlines” style of books and television shows. To the point that I’ve often wondered if the writers for those Law and Order shows get reduced rates since they’re not really creating things from whole cloth.

But here is a situation that could make for amazing fiction.

In Andrew Solomon’s New Yorker article “The Reckoning” which features exclusive interview material with Peter Lanza, father of Sandy Hook Elementary shooter Adam Lanza, there’s an especially noteworthy passage.

As soon as she got home, they called Ryan and began the two-hour drive to his place, in Hoboken. Ryan had also left his office early; by the time he got home, the police had taped off his apartment building. Adam had been carrying Ryan’s I.D., which had led to the confusion. Ryan approached the police with his arms up and said, “You’re looking for me, but I didn’t do it.” He was taken to a police station, so Peter and Shelley headed there, too. They were questioned for a couple of hours and were made to wait for two more before they were allowed to see Ryan. They went to the home of an aunt of Peter’s to regroup; they were shuttled to a hotel, then to Shelley’s family’s house and other safe houses, with a canine unit supplied by the police for security; they were interviewed by the F.B.I., the state police, and various local authorities. “We didn’t even have clothes,” Peter said. “I had to borrow my lawyer’s pants.” Eventually, they headed to New Hampshire to arrange Nancy’s funeral, and had to evade a stakeout by news media, which wanted to cover it. I asked what they had done about a funeral for Adam. “No one knows that,” Peter said. “And no one ever will.”

Without making excuses, or celebrating a tragedy, or passing judgement on anyone, that situation right there seems like a loaded opportunity for fiction. The whole article is worth reading and it is certainly getting lots of mainstream media coverage. But I’m just left wondering what fiction writers could do with those few hours and days.

I’ve just imported all of the old data from Slushpile since 2005 – no mean feat – so it should all be here. I’d love to hear from you all about why you read Slushpile and what you’re looking for. I’m trying to make this a bit more lively at the very least. Please comment below!

Artist John Campbell, creator of the site Pictures For Sad Children, has started burning printed copies of his book after hitting $50,000 on Kickstarter yet finding himself still unable to ship the books.

He posted video of the burning on Kickstarter after receiving complaints from customers.

“After a decade of putting personal work on the Internet in public for free and realizing I didn’t have what I felt what I needed, my online persona committed suicide,” Campbell said.

Writes DNAInfo:

I suspect it’s the dead wasp that did him in. Those things are expensive.

Thanks to the jubilee we’ve been given with the site, it would be great if we could start fresh with some new content and new writers. We can get you books. We need you to review them. Want to join us? Email [email protected] with a few sample reviews and your specific reading/writing interests. We’d love to work with you.

During a move we lost some of the data for Slushpile. We’ll be updating the site and all the SP goodness you expect should keep coming. Bear with us in this time of great peril.

The great Louis D. Rubin passed away recently. Perhaps most well-known for co-founding Algonquin Books, Rubin was also a fine and frequent writer.

The Los Angeles Times has a great overview of Rubin’s life. Check here to read the obit.

The 2013 National Book Awards will be held tonight in New York City. All the finalists are great, but around here, we’re pulling for George Saunders, who has had a special place in our heart ever since hearing him read “Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz” from CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.

Fiction Finalists
–Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers
–Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland
–James McBride, The Good Lord Bird
–Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge
–George Saunders, Tenth of December

Nonfiction Finalists
–Jill Lepore, Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin
–Wendy Lower, Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields
–George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America
–Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832
–Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood & the Prison of Belief

Poetry Finalists
–Frank Bidart, Metaphysical Dog
–Lucie Brock-Broido, Stay, Illusion
–Adrian Matejka, The Big Smoke
–Matt Rasmussen, Black Aperture
–Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems

Slushpile’s Scott McKenzie will be at the Kentucky Book Fair on Saturday, November 16 in Frankfort, Kentucky. The event is being held at the Frankfort Convention Center. Stop by and say hello!

Galleycat points to the latest data that states more than 391,000 books were self-published last year. That’s an astounding 59% increase from the previous year.

Amazing.

Over at TechCrunch, Anthony Ha has a pretty lengthy look at bestseller and entrepreneur Tim Ferriss’ new audiobook venture.

Ferriss always seems to be trying something new, and this “book club” as he describes it proves to be an interesting enterprise. One thing’s for sure… He’ll certainly document every success and every setback with incredible rigor so it should make for an educational exercise.

According to report on the New York Times, bestselling author Dr. Michael Palmer has died at 71. Reports state that he suffered a heart attack while returning from an African safari.

What I find most interesting about the article is the way it focuses on Palmer’s writing as a therapeutic tool to overcome drug and alcohol dependence.

“I loved the feeling of being in control when my life was not,” the article quotes Palmer has having said.

Palmer was the author of Extreme Measures, Political Suicide, and many others.

Here’s a headline for you:

“Nebraska author sues Texas publisher over books involving werewolf sex”

Got your attention? Check out the full article over at Omaha.com. It’s an intriguing situation. But what really caught my attention was the statement that writer Erin R. Flynn churns out 15,000 words a day and can do a book in a week or two. Amazing output.

Sam Grobart has an amusing, and pretty harsh, review of Randi Zuckerberg’s new childrens book, Dot. over at BloombergBusinessweek.

I’d be curious to see the artwork of the book given that Grobart points out the sum entirety of the opus is a whopping 101 words.

Wow.

Over at Salon, Anna Davies offers her experiences with ghostwriting and shares “My dirty secret writing life.” It’s an interesting look into the world of book packagers and those folks who churn out amazingly popular titles.

Now, as one of the commentors suggests, in some ways, ghostwriters are no different than the ranks of studio musicians who perform on record after record. That’s a profession I’ve always admired. While unique, distinctive musicians are certainly appreciated and applauded, I think it also takes a very unique and talented person to play on a jazz record in the morning and then rock out a metal tune in the afternoon and then maybe do an acoustic gig at a coffeeshop in the evening.

Certainly, I enjoyed my own time as a ghostwriter and co-author and would do it again. So I don’t look back and feel as though I’ve lost my soul or anything, as Davies states happened to her.

Nonetheless, the challenges and trials she relates in the article do have some merit. Ghostwriting isn’t for everybody. And for folks who think it’s all fun and glamor, then Davies’ piece is a useful word of warning.

Bookish interviewed bestseller Ben Mezrich in a discussion that raises a number of interesting discussion points.

When the discussion turns to the writer’s place in pop culture, Mezrich says that we’re at the very bottom.

“Writers are now the lowest on the totem pole; you’ve got actors, directors, sports stars, chefs and, at the bottom, authors.”

He goes on to detail a possible explanation for this situation, but what do you think? Why aren’t authors bigger pop culture figures than we currently see today?

Add another hard rock memoir to the constantly bulging list of headbanging books…

But in this case, there’s definitely a different story to be told, beyond just the usual “banging chicks, doing drugs” story.

Publisher’s Marketplace is reporting that Randy Blythe, lead singer of Lamb of God, has signed a book deal with Ben Schafer at Da Capo. Blythe was incarcerated for slightly more than 1 month (and tied up in criminal wranglings for almost a year) after a fan in the Czech Republic was killed in Prague.

Blythe stood trial and was acquitted, but the legal turmoil took a heavy toll on the band. Drummer Chris Adler recently told The Virginian-Pilot that the court case bankrupted the band.

Expected to be on bookstore shelves in the spring of 2014, Blythe’s memoir will certainly stand out from the rest of the heavy metal bookshelf.

Tim O’Brien has been named the 2013 winner of the Pritzker Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing. The honor comes with a $100,000 honorarium. O’Brien is the first fiction writer ever to win the award. Although all his books are great, he is, of course, most well known for The Things They Carried.

Super nice guy, fantastic writer… Congratulations on a well-deserved honor.

For more details, check out the full announcement.

Slate has been running a series on the rituals and techniques of great artists. Today’s article, focuses on ignoring the idea of waiting for inspiration.

“Waiting for inspiration to strike is a terrible, terrible plan,” Mason Currey writes. “In fact, perhaps the single best piece of advice I can offer to anyone trying to do creative work is to ignore inspiration.” It’s not necessarily earth-shattering to most serious writers, but it is a useful reminder.

The people who can most obviously benefit from this type of advice are the — for lack of a better description — posers. The folks who spend all day at Starbucks with their computer open, hoping someone will ask them what they’re working on so they can spout off their lofty ideals about the muse, and art, and all that.

But even writers with a fairly dedicated routine can still benefit from the prescription to ignore inspiration. Even if you’re diligent about sitting your ass in the chair for a set number of hours a day, worrying too much about getting in the zone can lead you to bail out too quickly, to say, “It’s just not happening today.”

Finances are rarely as they seem.

The sports media blasts $100 million dollar deal headlines on an almost daily basis. But it’s only been in recent years that they began drawing the distinction between the guaranteed portions versus the purely imaginary Monopoly money the player will never actually receive. While basketball and baseball contracts are locked in, football contracts can be broken at any time by the team.

The entertainment media reports huge recording contracts, without referencing that the deal also covers merchandising and tour support. A band might “receive” a certain amount of cash in their agreement, but that pays for their studio time and tour bus rental, as opposed to pure profit.

Of course, lawyers, agents, assistants, and everyone else takes their cut as well.

As a result, we often assume that people have more money than they do. Just because TMZ and other outlets reported that Farrah Abraham “struck a deal” for almost a million dollars for fucking in a fake amateur sex tape doesn’t mean the Teen Mom star is depositing a check for exactly seven figures any time soon.

All of which is to say, I get it. You might seem like a big time player in a particular industry, but that doesn’t mean you’ve got piles of cash buried in the backyard, ready to be invested at a moment’s notice. Whatever your accomplishments may be, your bank account might not line up accordingly. Once again, I get it. But I’ll be goddamned if I can understand why we should subsidize a self-described successful Hollywood producer’s efforts to publish a book about becoming a successful screenwriter.

GalleyCat reported that Gary W. Goldstein, producer of Pretty Woman, The Mothman Prophecies, and other movies launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise $12,000 to self-publish a book described as a “practical roadmap of every insider strategy I’ve learned on how to make it in Hollywood as a successful screenwriter.”

Let’s highlight the keywords and phrases in that description: “insider” and “make it” and “successful.”

In fact, the word “successful” is used about five times in the Kickstarter profile. Doesn’t this conjure images of someone who can make an investment in their own business and product? Maybe he’s not cruising a Bentley up and down the PCH on the way to his Malibu pad, but at least you’d think someone choosing to self-publish would, ya know, cough up the money to pay for self-publishing. I suppose you could argue that Goldstein’s fundraising effort is, on a small scale, precisely what a producer does: he seeks and puts together money from a variety of sources. Leveraging other people’s cash is old hat to Hollywood folks (and Wall Street) so maybe that’s what’s going on here.

Goldstein’s IMDB profile doesn’t show any projects since 2002 so maybe he’s hit a dry spell. Which doesn’t necessarily negate his knowledge and expertise on the subject. We’ve all gone through fallow periods or maybe changed careers and direction.

But the whole online fundraising thing is simply out of hand. No longer relegated to truly indie projects, charitable efforts, low budget start ups, and outrageous, outlandish flights of fancy, now Kickstarter and Indiegogo are employed to make a success of how-to-be-successful book from a success guru?

During my time in graduate school at the University of Mississippi, I was lucky enough to work at Square Books in Oxford. So I was particularly pleased to see the news today that Publishers Weekly named the store as Bookseller of the Year.

Check out the full article here.

Congratulations to all the gang down there on a well-deserved honor!

GalleyCat referenced an interesting post by Arthur McMahon in which he expresses a bit of amazement at the fact that “Completing a novel didn’t change my perception of life like I expected it to.”

Some commenters at GalleyCat claimed they didn’t expect completing a novel would have any change, they write for themselves, not riches or fans or feedback, and all that.

But I totally understand what McMahon is getting at.

In his full post, available here, he writes that it’s a long-haul proposition. The completion of the first book is but a step towards the next one. And so forth.

It’s worth checking out and then examining your own opinions… Do you think that completing a book will change your life?

A reader passed along this Tumblr account, dedicated to Lousy Book Covers. Now, obviously, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that, so yeah, maybe this one shouldn’t be included or that one isn’t that bad or whatever. But it’s at least a pretty humorous gaze through the results of ten minutes with Photoshop.

Also, while enjoying this one, I stumbled across a blog dedicated to Bad Book Covers.

Like record covers, some of these are so bad as to be almost cool.

When I was in graduate school at the University of Mississippi, noted William Faulkner biographer Joseph Blotner visited campus. I met him in Square Books, the well-known independent bookstore where I worked at the time.

I was heavily into Faulkner, stacking up class upon class, filling my transcript with as many Faulkner courses as possible. And one of my teachers introduced me to Blotner.

He signed his book to me, “To Scott, a certified Faulkner scholar.” I realized he was only being nice, but still, that autograph and brief note meant the world to me.

So I was saddened to see the announcement of his death in The New York Times. Blotner passed away in Oakland, California in mid-November. The Times has a pretty lengthy bio of Blotner with details of his friendship with Faulkner.

A while ago, there was an uproar of discussion regarding the nature of book reviews and whether the critic should be, in the most simplistic way of speaking, “nice” or not. Quite a bit of the conversation centered on William Giraldi’s self-congratulatory, excessively assholish, show offy, “Let’s see how many references and allusions I can cram in because I’m so smart” critique of Alix Ohlin’s work.

As a rule, I don’t think book reviews have an obligation to bend over backwards to be complimentary, nor do I think critics should be hard-hearted, impossible-to-please ogres either.

But lost in this discussion of nice-versus-mean was another problem that plagues many book reviews: Critics who don’t criticize positively or negatively.

Check out this entirely non-commital Janet Maslin review of Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore.

I’ve read this review three times now and I’m still not sure if Maslin likes the book or not. There are a handful of seemingly positive comments tossed in:

–A series of fantasy novels “are parodied here with great affection…”
–The author’s characters are “wittily-drawn…”
–The author “niftily embellishes his book…” with another character.

But that’s about it. There are no outright declarations of success or failure. Take for example the following passage: “Mr. Sloan is intent on connecting these Tokeinesque types to the bookstore’s real-world existence. That’s a big burden to place on such a mild-mannered, easygoing novel.” But instead of following up with letting us know about Sloan’s skill at shouldering that burden or his weakness under the weight, Maslin goes back to plot summary.

Ultimately, reviews like this are little more than book reports. And while I don’t believe readers need to be spoon-fed with explicit star systems or thumbs up/thumbs down methods of conveying quality at a glance, it is frustrating to read a review and not know whether the book is any good or not.