Monthly Archives: January 2011

Niche Markets

31 Monday Jan 2011

Posted by in Breaking Boundaries, Uncategorized, Writing

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In the past few weeks, I’ve been doing some serious thinking about where I’m trying to head as a writer–doing productive daydreaming sessions about what I’d like my career life to look like, thinking over what kind of writing I could happily do or not, and writing up 5-year plans (if there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s plans). One of the things that jumped out at me is that if I’m going to get anywhere with this, I need to seriously step up my submission rate. Doing three a week tires me out at this point, and my guess is I need to get at least to about 25 a week if I wanted to consider supporting myself with writing. Goodness.

So I was looking through my Writer’s Market guide, trying to put together a file of potential story and article ideas, and I have to tell you something: there are some strange magazines out there. Like, I understand that people have different hobbies and interests, but we are talking some niche stuff. Here are five of my favorites:

5. Atlantic Salmon Journal: This seems kind of normal–lots of people like fishing, and salmon are pretty neat fish, if you’re into that–but you need to think long term. This is a group of about 8,500 people who are prepared to put money into the promise that every three months, enough is going to change in the arena of this one fish to merit some hundred-odd pages of news.

4. Balloon Life: I’m just really excited this magazine exists at all. It makes me happy to think of the thousands of people who love hot air balloons so much that they can say, without sarcasm, that they have adopted a balloon lifestyle. They are balloonists. You get up in the morning, in your house for once because the new issue’s coming out, grab Balloon Life, hop in the ginormous red hot air balloon tethered to your chimney and head back to your natural habitat. This is what Jules Verne wanted Heaven to be like, I promise you.

3. Toy Farmer: I would expect there to be magazines about collecting toys. I would expect there to be a market for farmers’ magazines. Toy farmers, though? I’m not even sure I knew that was a thing. And I went to the website, and they have a Toy Farmer blog, for when the new issue can’t come out fast enough to keep up with the changes in the world of toy farming, and–AND–they have this link. It’s “Zeke’s Toy Box.” I’m not making this up. And you click it, because how do you not click something as adorable as “Zeke’s Toy Box,” and it gives you even more than you had imagined. “Zeke’s Toy Box” is where kids send pictures to “Grandpa Zeke” of their own toy farming inventions, or their dad’s combine, or what have you, and it is so cute I could cry.

2. Vintage Snow Mobile Magazine: Who knew? I may have been unsure of whether I knew about toy farmers before, but I promise you, I had never before in my entire life been aware of such a thing as vintage snow mobiles until I found out there was a magazine dedicated to them. Two and a half thousand people subscribe to this magazine, too. Think about that for a moment. Two and a half thousand people care about vintage snow mobiles so badly that they pay money to read about them. I don’t even know how many people are out there buying single issues off the grocery stand (in Alaska, I guess? Canada? On which newsstand do you find this magazine?), or just walking around feeling like they’re the only people in the world who are passionate about snow mobiles that have been around for a really long time. How old does a snowmobile even have to be to qualify as vintage? I don’t even have a basic starting point to know a vintage snow mobile if I walked outside and one literally hit me.

Finally, with this last one, I knew what these must be when I read the title, and I think I maybe had a book with one in it when I was very little, but the fact that there is a magazine for this proves to me that it does not matter what it is that you care about: you are not alone. There are probably thousands out there with you, writing articles, taking pictures, hanging out in whatever pocket of the Internet posts breaking news, and painstakingly printing hundreds upon hundreds of magazine copies about it. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you:

1. Miniature Donkey Talk. Oh my goodness. I wasn’t even going to say anything here, because the title alone is better than any words I could give you, but I just read the home page of their website, and you need to see these quotes:

“The best donkey magazine being published!” Dr. Julian Cable, DVM

AT LEAST 4 times greater distribution than ANY miniature donkey publication!!!

…which suggests there are more. I think I’m feeling about the same right now as if I’d just come across incontrovertible evidence of extraterrestrial life. I have actual goosebumps on my back.

I have not yet, I have to admit, submitted any articles or queries to any of these fine magazines. I’m not sure I’ll ever be qualified to swim in those waters. But I’ve developed a whole new appreciation for what’s out there. I’ve already started writing down the more esoteric of my interests. We’re gonna go explore.

The Mendacity of Hope

13 Thursday Jan 2011

Posted by in Books, Breaking Boundaries

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I was a little hesitant to post this for a while. My concept of the What I’m Reading section of this site was to give some insight into what kind of reading material inspires me as a writer, and this isn’t even close. Still, I read it, and that plus honesty in blogging counts for something to me.

A second caveat: I am, I admit, one of those Americans who really doesn’t care about politics. I want to care. I wish I cared the way certain people wished they could stand the taste of coffee. Caring about politics is one of those marks of sophistication; knowing what’s happening in the news is a decent litmus test of savviness, and a kind of adult mentality. I fail every time. I try to watch debates or Presidential speeches, and halfway through I end up shamefacedly reading webcomics, typing the url really slowly in hopes that no one will realize what I’m doing. It’s like inching through a red light in hopes that people won’t recognize that you’re moving til you’re through. Then, as if that isn’t enough, the opinions in The Mendacity of Hope aren’t even ones I necessarily agree with. I like Obama. I voted for him proudly in 2008, and since then I’ve let him be and assumed he’d do a decent job with the country.

So why in the world did I pick up this book to read, if it’s such a literary and political anomaly for me? A couple reasons. I realized an election is coming up in the not-too-distant future again, and since I refuse to vote blindly, I’ll need to put together some idea of what’s going on if I want to participate again. I miss my college Sociology classes. With my double major, I got to spend plenty of time writing creatively, but also plenty of time reading the works of great social theorists, and arguing, living in logic as well as creativity. Nowadays, I’m just in the one program, the MFA. Sure, I’ll read a few articles on spiked.com from time to time, but I missed reading something big, something I didn’t always understand, something that would force me to think hard just to keep up. Jumping into politics with a book on why Obama is disillusioning the country seemed like a great way to get a mental argument rolling. Mostly, though, expanding my horizons is incredibly important to me. I am never happy with how much I know right now, and as long as I can squeeze any amount of time from my schedule and energy from my mind, I’m determined to find a way to learn things. Now, on to The Mendacity of Hope:

The book itself is very well done, I have to say. What I appreciated was how self-aware the author strived to be of his own leanings. The introduction establishes that yes, clearly, Obama is miles better than W., no matter what complaints still exist. Hodge acknowledges that in his quest for directness, he may come off rude, which is nice, and for the most part he doesn’t. He comes off as someone who is frustrated with the American political system as a whole, and frustrated anew by the fact that a president who swore to change how that system operated is not, in fact, doing so. A large portion of the book explores political thinkers when America was a baby: Jefferson and Hamilton and so on. The question of The Mendacity of Hope is less about whether Obama lied to/misled his voting audience, and more about the patterns of power and, inevitably, money in American politics. The great lie at stake isn’t any campaign promise, but the idea that the country can operate according to the “by the people, for the people” dream it was built on at all. It’s not the most hopeful stuff, but it is really interesting. I don’t understand most of the details of what he’s saying, but the whole piece he’s putting together here has some neat questions wrapped in it.

That said, I do have a few complaints. There’s one instance where he basically comes out and says he thinks Christianity is belief in a bunch of fairy stories. I think there was no call for that. He wasn’t talking about voters’ religions influencing anything, or Obama’s, or even the founding fathers. It came off as a stab from his own personal agenda against religion, and without having a properly justified context in the book, I don’t see it having any result other than alienating readers. Religion is still overwhelmingly the norm, and even if many intelligent people are atheists, I doubt they’d stop reading a book if an author failed to make a crack at Christians. There are plenty of other analogies out there that don’t strike at the most important aspect of many people’s lives, and I’m sick of people insinuating that I’m less intelligent because of what I believe.

Besides that, which is admittedly a pet peeve, although also a sloppy moment in a mostly crisp book, I wasn’t convinced by Hodge’s arguments that Obama is to blame for what he feels is a rather toothless health care reform. I seem to remember, even from the political hole I usually live in, that for about a year, anytime Obama mentioned the topic, it would go like this:

Obama: Health care–
Opponents: You want to murder my grandparents!
Obama, No, I just wanted to say that health–
Opponents: You’ll club them to death like baby seals!!!
Obama: Hea–
Opponents (jamming fingers into their ears): BABY SEALS!!!!!

There were people who didn’t make it easy to pass things, is what I’m saying.

At any rate, this was still supposed to be more book review than political rant. Expanding horizons is all very well and good, but if you want to stay smart when you talk, probably stick with what you know! So: did I enjoy The Mendacity of Hope? Yes. Will I become involved in the political news du jour from now on? Almost certainly not. Will I pick up another political book to read sometime soon? Maybe. I’ve only seen the one side now, after all. There’s another story out there.

The year of winning

06 Thursday Jan 2011

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Bring it, 2011. For about the last three years now, I have promised myself in New Year’s Resolutions that this was the year I was going to become a Successful Writer. I’ve come at it from all kinds of angles: write a novel, edit a bunch of short stories, produce a completed new piece every week, Get Published. So far? Goose egg.

I think part of the problem is that the aspirations I’ve been choosing are either too rigid (produce a new piece every week? that’s an invitation not to attempt a novel if ever I heard one), or externally based (whether I get published is at least as much up to the editors as it is to me. heck, if it were up to me I’d be a bestselling author by now). One of the pep talks in NaNo last November pointed out that the writing is what’s on the page. Anything else, glorious as it may be in the head of the writer, is just thought.

This year, I’m tackling the leap between the brain and the page. I’m trying to create resolutions that will encourage me to stretch myself as a writer, but also allow enough flexibility that having an off day once in a while won’t make me feel like I’ve failed. Here they are:

1. Write every day. The rules are that it must be creative, blog posts don’t count, and I have to give a good effort to finishing a piece I start, rather than ending up with a thousand opening lines by the end of 2011. Beyond that, if I write a sentence one day because I’m exhausted and the story’s not coming, so be it. I’m taking even that token time to dedicate to writing. So far this year, my low is 88 and my high is 524 in one day. Not NaNo numbers by any means, but I’m hitting a pretty steady 200-300, and hoping to increase as the year continues.

2. Blog once a week, minimum. This site does wonders to make me feel like I’m taking writing seriously, so even though I might have been using the time it took to write this post to work on my actual story, I think it’s worth it to make this blog and site an active part of my life. Besides, when I make it big and people search for me, don’t you think they should see something that has relatively recent content? Yeah, me too.

3. Read at least one book a week. Normally I’d scoff at such a basic “requirement,” but I’ve been finding that my new schedule gives me less time and energy to read than I’m really happy with. This is more of a safeguard to help me remember that reading is something that recharges me and gives me pleasure, and I don’t want to let it slide in favor of my other responsibilities. Plus, if I read a book per week, I can at least update what I’m reading here, so making time to read lots of awesome books will help me fulfill resolution #2. Double points!

Incidentally, I wish I could crank out 500 words of story as easily as 500 words of blog. My new system to make sure words happen has been to pull up a blank Word document when I get to work. Anytime I think of the next sentence of my story, I stop what I’m doing for fifteen seconds to write it down. Since I’m in front of a computer for eight hours a day, I thought, why not be thinking about stories for part of that time? So far it’s working out well. One particularly slow, particularly creative day, I had over 1000 words by closing time. On busier days, I’ll squeeze in just about 100. Anything helps push the story along, though, right?  know I have all of one reader right now, but if anyone comes across this and has other tips for how to fit writing into a cramped schedule, let me know!