For most writers, winning an award or contest is a great honor, and for a novice scribe, can really get their literary career moving. Many awards, aside from offering a monetary award, can also be the key to the world of publishing.

But there is one award I don’t think any serious writer wants to even be associated with. It’s the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest sponsored by San Jose State University. Whereas most writing contests look for the best, this contest looks for the worst. It’s the one award where cliches, bad metaphors, incoherent sentences, and overall bad prose can earn you this prestiges prize.

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Once upon a time an aspiring author had to jump through hoops, fire, an army of dragons, and maybe even a few lava fields to get on the road to promote their new book. And even then there was no guarantee that anyone would show up. In fact,  it’s not all that uncommon for an author to hold a book signing and no one comes. Sad, isn’t it?

Thanks to the internet, which is once again proving itself as the "great equalizer", the infamous book tour is now becoming a little easier.

A new website, booktour.com, connects authors and readers alike. Authors can set up their own free page (yes, it’s all free) that promotes their upcoming signings, speaking engagements, and other public events. And readers can sign up to receive news about appearances their favorite authors will be making. But it’s much more than that. Any organization, whether it’s a local college or a public library, can set up author speaking engagements through the booktour website.

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During my wanderings on the internet today, I came across an article on the Guardian Unlimited website that really struck a chord with me. Write for the pleasure of writing, not to get a contract with some big publishing house.

Desperate for publication
I’m guilty of this: writing with only publication in mind – so much so that I start becoming to self-critical and all the fun of writing, the process of creation, is flushed write down the metaphorical toilet.

And I know I’m not alone with this problem. Look at all the writing workshops out there that advertise they’ll help you get published. There’s an entire industry based on helping writers get that elusive publishing contract from a traditional publisher. Everything from books to workshops to seminars and magazines all feed into this frenzy that your writing only matters if it’s backed by one of the big publishing houses. Nonsense!

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I’m very happy to announce that my internet is back online and working great! I don’t know all the technical details of what went wrong, but from what I gathered, it was a complicated problem that involved a lot more than just the local DSL network around where I live. Fortunatley though, a tech that came out today to look at the problem is the one who got it figured out, and managed to get some strings pulled to get us back online today. If it wasn’t for him, we’d be waiting until sometime next week to get our internet back.

But this whole experience of not having any internet service for an entire week got me thinking. It wasn’t too long ago that the internet was in its infancy and people were communicating the "old fashioned way" (ie. telephone, snail mail). In fact, I remember in my younger days dialing into these bulletin boards (called bbs) that people would run from their home. Once logged on, you could exchange messages with others. How exciting! There were no fancy web pages. No fancy email. And no high speed connection. But that was okay, because everything was text-based and I couldn’t stay logged on for very long because I was tying up the phone line.

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A lot of the music I listen to is called "jam band" music (ie. Grateful Dead, Allman Brothers Band, etc) and a large part of the jam band scene is letting regular concert-goers record their concerts – free of charge (they still buy a ticket, however). In fact, the Grateful Dead, probably one of the most well known jam bands, even set up an area just for "tapers" as their called, to make recording more easy and accessible.

This type of free recording and exchanging of music helped bands like the Grateful Dead achieve cult status with an enormous following.

What in the heck does this have to do with writing or literature? Good question!

In my most recent issue of "Poets and Writers" Magazine (aff link), there’s an article entitled "Creative Copyrighting". The article details how Jonathan Lethem, a best-selling novelist, is approaching the copyrights of his books and how the exclusive movie adaptation rights to one of his books will be awarded. It won’t be to whatever Hollywood blowhard offers him the most money.

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The violent massacre at Virginia Tech is, no doubt, a national tragedy. And it hits close to home for the writing and literary community – especially those of us who are English Majors. I’m going to assume that over the next several months, much of Cho Seung-Hui’s own writings will come under increasing scrutiny as people try to find anything that might have given a clue to his impending violent outburst.

Looking to his fictional works is the wrong place to look. Violence is nothing new in literature. Shakespeare had plenty of violence in his plays, and even some of his contemporaries wrote sinister plays dealing with everything from rape to necrophilia and, you guessed it, murder. Even Spenser’s magnum opus The Faerie Queene has its moments. Lots of writers include violence in their writing, hardly any of them go on shooting sprees in college classrooms. In other words, Cho is definitely an exception, not the rule.

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No matter how old you are, or how old you feel, it’s never too late to start writing. Just look at Harry Bernstein! At the ripe young age of 93, faced with lonliness after the passing of his wife, he decided to start writing as a way to deal with the loss and other ghosts from his past. The result turned out to be the novel The Invisible Wall. He says he doesn’t worry about little details like deadlines, he just writes until there’s nothing more to say. He’s now 96 and working on yet another book.

Surely Mr. Bernstein is an inspiration to all of us in the "younger generation." In fact, I felt guilty after reading the article about him by the Associated Press. All my excuses and procrastination some how seem petty when compared to what Mr. Berstein has accomplished.

The other lesson found in Mr. Berstein’s story is that you never know where your writing will take you. What started out as a form of therapy for him, turned into a new career as a novelist. He didn’t sit down one day and say "I’m going to write a novel now." So even if you think you’re writing crap, don’t give up on it because you never know how it’s going to turn out, or who’s going to like it.

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