The Wretched Scribbler

Anna's blog

Adventures on Peruvian Railways

Posted Tue, 10/26/2010 - 10:27am by Anna

Not infrequently, our book projects lead to whirlwind adventures abroad. This isn’t surprising given the fact we have clients in India, France, Sweden, and England, in addition to our clients throughout the United States. But sometimes even we’re amazed by the places we find ourselves.

Take Peru. In August, I found myself riding through the Andes on a freight train. To be more exact, I found myself perched on the front of a locomotive, in the fresh air, as the train sped through tunnels, across bridges, and around sharp curves and counter-curves. From a distance, I must have looked like a fidgety figurehead. Or a life-sized hood ornament.

 

I travelled to Peru with IPI affiliate and head writer John Landry to gather research about the future of transportation for a book we’re developing with Henry Posner III of Railroad Development Corp (RDC). Two other writers, a photographer, and two friends of Henry also made the trip, and our group of eight rode in La Paquita, a 1930s wooden office car, to an altitude of 15, 681 feet. (Until the Chinese built the Qingzang railway in Tibet, The Central—the line we were on—held the record for being the highest railroad in the world.)

 

Topics of conversation during our ascent included mining and shipping in the Andes, the virtues of wooden railroad ties, semicolons (turns out, we all love them), the brilliance of the four-course meals that Hugo, our fearless chef, prepared in La Paquita’s kitchen, and several spontaneous exclamations that went something like, “I can’t believe we’re here. Doing this!” But we were.

This is our work. In the course of our journey through the Andes, we identified and refined the theme of Henry’s book and gathered enough content to move forward on a proposal. As collaborative writers, these face-to-face deep content dives enable us to immerse ourselves in the material and speed the development process in a way that’s just not possible over e-mail. So it may not sound like work, but it is. It’s just the best type of work imaginable.

Collaboration Proclamation

Posted Tue, 06/01/2010 - 9:21am by Anna

Readers love to think that every author is secretly a wretched scribbler, tucked away in the garret, scrawling his masterpiece in longhand on a fresh piece of parchment. And authors love to think that all editors contemplate the phrasing of each line of every manuscript. The idea that writing might not be a sacred art makes most of us feel uncomfortable. And this is why the myth of the solitary author persists.

But the more people in publishing we talk with, the more confident we become that the era of open collaboration has arrived.

Today there exist agents who solely represent collaborative writers, author teams composed of five equally contributing partners, and publishing professionals who wheel and deal in specialized areas such as idea development, pre-launch marketing, and bestseller promotion. (Like us!)

The reality is that many of these people have played a major part in the publishing process for years. But as publishing houses streamline, bootstrap, and reorganize in response to the new realities of the industry, these partners are taking a more public role in the writing process. Publishers need them. And until the stigma of self-publishing is diminished, they still need publishers.

So we offer a vision of a future in which authors and collaborators, developers and packagers, and publishers and freelancers collectively tout the collaborative writing model.

The wretched scribbler has descended from his imagined perch and is excitedly proclaiming the benefits of collaboration. Can’t you hear him?

 

Distracted from Distractions?

Posted Fri, 03/26/2010 - 12:17pm by Anna

Last week Nielsen’s "Three Screen Report" popped into our inboxes and reported that the average person who owns the necessary devices spends 35 hours each week watching TV, four hours watching online video, and an additional 2.5 hours watching "timeshifted" TV, also known as DVR. It also indicated that for 3.5 hours every month, Americans multitask by watching TV and using the internet at the same time. (As if that’s going to make Lost less confusing.)

Our shocked reaction: that’s over 40 hours of video each week! We started mentally tallying our weekly video-watching time. Then that of our family and friends. And then we started doubting the accuracy of the report, or at least what the takeaways should be.

Nielsen records viewer demographics and the time the TV was turned on, assuming that turned on equals tuned in. They also have some panel members keep viewing diaries of the shows they watched, which is likely more accurate in some ways and less accurate in others.

What the survey doesn’t account for are the hours people "watch" TV while preparing dinner or leave the TV on to make a near-empty house feel full. It also doesn’t factor in the use of the mute button when an actual conversation trumps a show or accidental naps.

So while we appreciate the trend of multiple-channel video consumption Nielsen reports, we also take the hard numbers with a grain of salt, or at least with the thought that the findings are one more data point in an ever-evolving picture.