James Howard Kunstler is the author of many books including nonfiction The Geography of Nowhere, The City in Mind Notes on the Urban Condition, Home from Nowhere. My New Book A Safe and Happy Place. Clusterfuck Nation. Now appearing Mondays and Fridays. Support this blog by visiting Jims Patreon Page As you might imagine, I often hear from wannabe professional writers who have finished a book length project and are horrified to discover that getting it published is harder than writing the damn thing. They think I can help them ha I offer them the sagest bit of wisdom I possess, which is that perseverance counts more than talent. A harsh message perhaps, but essential to incorporate in your world view if you want to take up the vocation. I came by this knowledge the hard way, having been fucked around by morons in the publishing industry my whole career not to put too fine a point on it. If you cant suck up endless adversity and carry on with the task at hand, then culinary school is probably a better career path for you. Its especially troublesome if you produce something original, something that doesnt fit into a tried and true marketing template. There is surely an inverse relationship between originality and success in mainstream publishing. Go ask Herman Melville. The truth is, you are producing work that nobody asked for and that no one especially cares about. You have to grind away at this lonely business day after day to get the job done. The only thing that avails to keep you going is your own conviction that it is worth doing. Thus, the second morsel of wisdom I offer wannabes is to give up seeking validation from friends and relatives. I never ask friends to read my works in progress. If nothing else, reading loose manuscript pages is a pain in the ass. And most of the people I know spend so much time working in front of a video screen that the last thing they want to do is read your novel on a computer at home. As for mom and dad, they are understandably terrified that they will turn up as odious characters in the pages of your book, and in my case they often did. So I actually hoped they wouldnt even crack one of my books open in the aisle of Brentanos. Happily, I have no evidence they ever read my published works. Now that the book industry is whirling around the drain, like the music business before it, managing a career in letters is harder than ever. Publishers grow desperate and therefore only interested in works that seem like absolutely sure things preferably books by celebrities with a TV based following. They are, least of all, serious about literature these days if such a quaint term is still comprehensible. For them, its down to throwing spaghetti at the wall to see if itll stick. There must be another way and I was forced to find it. I finished my latest book project last year around Halloween. In late December, my publisher turned it down. Id been with The Atlantic Monthly Press, part of the Grove Atlantic group, for seven books, starting with The Long Emergency. There was a story in my landing there. In 2. 00. 4, my then agent didnt want to even bother trying to sell The Long Emergency. It was too dark, he said. This left me no choice but to drop the guy. On my own I tried to interest a half dozen other experienced agents. They wrinkled their noses. So, I sent the manuscript out to two editors who had expressed some interest in my work over the years. The first guy, Daniel Menaker at Harper Collins, had a snit when he learned Id made a multiple submission a no no for authors in those days and told me to get lost. The second guy, the editor in chief at Grove Atlantic, Morgan Entrekin, offered me a contract. Nokia Bb5 Software. The Long Emergency turned out to be my best selling book. They eventually published my four book World Made By Hand series of novels about life in a small New England town after the sort of economic collapse I described in The Long Emergency, a natural progression for me. Un libro del latn liber, libri es una obra impresa, manuscrita o pintada en una serie de hojas de papel, pergamino, vitela u otro material, unidas por un lado es. I sensed they were none too happy about the project, but perhaps the chance that the series might be picked up by a cable network kept them on the line. My advances sank with each book. In any case, they never offered a kind word e. Hey, nice job I enjoyed it. They did absolutely nothing in the way of marketing the books. So, when I handed in A Safe and Happy Place last year, they dumped me just in time for Christmas. Ishmael An Adventure Of The Mind And Spirit Pdf' title='Ishmael An Adventure Of The Mind And Spirit Pdf' />My current agent didnt want to try to sell it elsewhere, either. He said it was off my brand of hard hitting polemical non fiction and no other publisher would want it. So I decided to publish it myself on Amazon, the arch enemy of the mainstream publishers and booksellers. I enjoy writing fiction and believe that I do it pretty well, and I intend to persevere at it. Im not convinced that the long form work of fiction packaged as a novel will continue to exist as a literary artifact a whole lot longer it is mainly a product of the past two centuries, which featured great advances in printing and the arrival of a middle class with leisure time that could be filled with literature but the novel is not quite dead yet. Anyway, human beings do like stories, whether printed and bound, played upon a stage or screen, or told around the campfire. We like to hear how the rest of the human race is doing. And so here is A Safe and Happy Place, my story about a hippie commune in Vermont in the 1. Why did I decide to write the story of the Sunrise Village commune from a young womans point of view Because I hadnt done anything like it before. It was an interesting challenge, and with all the attention these days on the grievances of women, I wanted to create a plausible heroine who was not a complainer or a sap or a doormat or a designated victim, but a fully imagined capable person without an annoying ideological agenda. I knew that a lot of people would bristle at the attempt as if I lacked the credentials to try such a stunt. And, who knows, it may be a reason that my publisher dumped it and me in this idiotically hyper politicized moment in history. Anyway, I feel that I successfully channeled my narrator, Erica Pooh Bollinger from the first sentence, and she lived in my head vividly until the job was done. And now I rather miss communing with her every day. In case youre wondering, I did not suffer any personal gender confusion in the process. I liked Pooh more and more the deeper I got into the story her pluck, her common sense, her humor, her skepticism, her moral compass. The things that came out of her mouth often surprised me. I enjoyed imagining the male female dynamics of young love from a point of view different from my own cis het white privilege bunker. Forgive me for saying it wasnt that difficult. Sure, men and women are different, but they operate in the same universe and are programmed for a similar menu of emotions. Mostly, I was rooting for Pooh to come through her adventure safely and happily, and in the course of 3. In real life, that journey for me was rather difficult, and that liminal period of development what we simply call growing up is one of the themes I find myself returning to in my fiction. It also happened that I was there, I was in college through the heart of the hippie era, I saw a great deal of the action though I skipped Woodstock, thank you very much crowds were not my thing. I never lived on a commune, but I visited several of them and saw how they operated. Free Drum Fills Samples. I was susceptible to the military draft, but I enjoyed a student deferment from 1. I drew nearly the highest number, 3.