On Wordstock, Day 1
or
On No Ghosts That Anyone Was Particularly Afraid Of
Wordstock! The somewhat confusing literary festival! The one with that chair on fire! My impressions of day one were hampered by an inability to take notes (a problem I will come to resolve on day two) and a blinding hangover (a problem I will emphatically not resolve on day two). However, here are some general thoughts to warm us to the subject.
Thoughts!
Maybe it’s just me, but the combined reliance on a bright red and white color theme, interrogatory declarations, and the occasional volunteer arm patch/sticker things lent the fest a somewhat totalitarian air. Everyone was very nice, this is Portland after all, and the actual administration of the fest felt very loose. It’s just that someone made some very intense design choices. It wasn’t a uniformly bad choice, I’m sure it contributed to a sense of convention energy, but I like to buy books in a more cozy setting. For instance, the actual chair looks cozy. I wish they’d done more with that. Also, there were a bunch of people wearing sandwich boards. I’m not sure what that was about.
More of the same after the break, but then I dish on Sweet Valley High.
The Convention Center itself felt better used than last time. I actually like the Convention Center, and sitting in one of those goddamn couches in the halls is like falling in love. But it can feel cavernous, and this time it felt less so. It gives me hope for the Stumptown comics fest being held there next year. Also, I discovered for the first time that one of the bathrooms has a picture of a different Oregon waterfall over each urinal. Who ever came up with that is a damn national treasure.
The program, which would not generally merit comment, was an assault on reason. Whatever graphic design powerhouses were behind the general aesthetic were out to lunch on this one. Or (as I suspect) were replaced last minute with a team of quite mad reference librarians whose fevered dreams concocted a document that took longer to make sense of than it did to actually make. Seriously, there were two different maps, 6 pages apart. It was a poor showing, let’s just leave it at that.
Ghosts!
As for the panels I saw, the prize find for me was entitled “The Ghosts With the Most” (Amanda Howells, Emily Chenoweth, Vanessa Veselka) and yes, I went thinking it would be people telling ghost stories. Not so! It was about ghost writing. Which is kind of like what the ghost in Ghost Writer did, only they were not ghosts. They were, as it happened, foxy as heck though. Anyway. The decision to hold this as a panel and not individual readings was brilliant. I’ve been to some surreal events, but listening to three ghostwriters trade shop talk has got to be one of the surrealist. The best exchange “wait your person isn’t real? I always thought she was a real person.” “No, mine isn’t. Wait, yours is?” and so on.
The whole thing was a really fascinating safari through the strange world of authorial identity. None of the three women on the panel were using their real names, even now that they were publishing “their own” books. The impression I got was that they were so used to slipping on and off different names for their published material, the finality of their own, actual names was imposing. Like, there was nothing they’d write that would be quite “literary” enough to ascribe their own names to. They all discussed how freeing it was to write as a ghost, how you could be trashy and anonymous and at the same time, influence a large audience that you didn’t have to build up yourself. It actually seemed like some of the appeal of anonymous blog commenting, oddly enough (not that I’d know anything about that).
I bet you are wondering about the hierarchy of author pseudonyms:
- Your real name on a series: Francie Pascal was the example given here. Her name was on everything, and her bio was in the back, and she got a bunch of money, but she mostly lived in France and didn’t actually write anything.
- Your pseudonym as a series writer: This is a version of “you” that is somehow associated with your works. If for instance, you write twelve books under the name “Rusty Dodgefeffer” and then move on to greener pastures, someone else may write under that name but you get some royalties.
- An invented pseudonym: this is a pseudonym that doesn’t correlate to anyone. You and any other writer working on the series write under this name, which may be used in the “co writer” credit on the book. You don’t really get any money for that.
Also! Do not bother with a literary agent for this sort of thing. Apparently, the money involved isn’t really worth their time. If you have the particular skill set for ghostwriting, you might write a half dozen books, but you’re only “assigned” one book at a time with no guarantee of any more if you bone it up.
Sausage Making Fact: Amanda Howells noted that her run of the Sweet Valley High series, each assignment would come with a single paragraph detailing the expected plot, and then a character bible with all of the back stories continuity stuff. Emily Chenoweth, who works on slightly more “literary” material, got a several page outline and a figurehead who “was under the impression that she knew how to write.”
During the Q&A, I asked if they were ever tempted to insert a little signature plot device or phrase, to sort of mark that they’d worked on a particular series. They responded, to the ghost, that they named all their villains and awkward misanthropes after ex boyfriends, which I thought was delightful. It was by far the best response to a question I’ve asked at a reading (and I ask pretty good questions, if I might say so).
Hat Tip!
Meanwhile, the inestimable Portland Mercury has an extensive write up of the Viva Las Vegas, Monica Drake, WIlly Vlautin, Kevin Sampsil joint that I went to afterwards. I don’t have much to contribute, other than to confirm that Monica Drake can indeed shut down a bad question like a house on fire, and that Willy Vlautin has the perfect name for what he looks and sounds like. And also that I could listen to him read the phone book. Or, if it came to it, the Wordstock program.
