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The Stages of an Author's Journey
From: www.writerswrite.com

" Elizabeth Royte, author of Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash, wrote a very funny essay for The New York Times entitled "Publish or Perish," in which she describes the stages of the journey of a published author as a cross between Elisabeth K?bler-Ross's stages of grief and Stendhal's stages of love. The journey begins with the initial Fog of Love (when the galleys are being printed) and continues to Naked in Public, Denial, Bitter Recrimination and the "What About Oprah?" stage.

For any writer, the publication of a book, labored over for years, is an exciting event. But excitement is a fleeting emotion, and the business of publicizing the book, so that it sells and the author can earn out his advance, quickly displaces any initial euphoria. The writer then embarks on a tortured journey toward acceptance of the fact, several months after publication, that his book isn't going to vault him into the empyrean of fame, or even improve his life. At the intersection of Elisabeth K?bler-Ross's stages of grief and Stendhal's stages of love, the contemporary author trudges along a predictable path that can only be described, in hindsight, as self-induced misery.

The Fog of Love: Galleys are being printed, and the final installment of the book advance has been spent. You give the galley to your agent, "who gets paid to tell you you're great," says E. Jean Carroll, the author of a long-running advice column for Elle magazine and of "Hunter: The Strange and Savage Life of Hunter S. Thompson." "You're still in that mad, golden phase." The galley goes out for review and, says Mary Roach, the author of "Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife," "you can't believe people are actually reading it." So far nothing bad has happened.

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Euphoria: A positive review creates a craving for more positive reviews. "It's a feedback loop, and it's totally addictive," Roach said. Negative reviews, obviously, extinguish Euphoria. Author skips directly to Denial (see below).

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Denial: Author speed-dials publicist to ask, "Are you sure there aren't any other reviews?" Hires private publicist. "For nine weeks, you keep hope alive," Carroll said. "You check Jane Austen's ranking on Amazon, and if you're outselling her you figure you're O.K. You overcome your doubts."

Bitter Recrimination: Disappointed by lackluster sales, author blames in-house publicist for not sending out enough books for review; publisher for releasing it in the wrong season, choosing a bad title, commissioning bad jacket art or miscategorizing the book, so buyers can't find it.

"What About Oprah?": "Every author eventually asks this question. I tell them, 'I'm sure someone has thought about it,'" said Nicholas Latimer, the director of publicity for Alfred A. Knopf.

In a telephone interview, Jacques attributed his success as an author to the allure of a good story. "It's the thing that has been forgotten, the good yarn," he said with a brogue that reveals his Irish ancestry. "The kids love this sense of timelessness, and I love it, too."

But his yarns of mice and squirrels aren't just tales for kids. Jacques notes that his readers cover a span between 9 and 90 years of age. His books feature adult-oriented themes, including death and oppression, and the battles are violent, although Jacques said he's careful not to make the violence gratuitous.

Jacques said he sees his books as a way to prepare children for the often-harsh realities of adulthood. "They're object lessons for kids," he said. "Kids will come up to me and say, 'Why did this particular character die?' At some point in your life, somebody who you love very much will die." But Jacques injects plenty of playfulness and humor in his books as well. And his woodlanders love to eat in lavish feasts that the author describes in mouth-watering detail. He said this is a product of his upbringing in a poor family in England during World War II. Food was scarce. He recalls how as a young child he'd read adventure stories and want to know what the characters ate. "It really annoyed me that they never told you about the food," he said.

Jacques said he doesn't know how writing found him, but he still loves it -- although coming up with stories has become more difficult as his series approaches its 20th book. Still, he said that three months out of the year, he's able to slip away from the trappings of being a successful author and revisit the fantasy world he's nurtured for all these years. "The joy of it is there's a lot of child in me," he said.

"Yes, we're trying some new stuff," Cherry tells the Associated Press. "Some of it might work. Some of it might not. This, of course, is the nature of episodic television. They can't all be gems."

This season, all the critics seem to be finding are zircons. "The writers seem to be drawing some of the characters too broadly," squawked USA Today, while New York's Daily News complained, "The show still doesn't seem to have any traction. Even the twists aren't as twisted as they used to be."

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Perhaps the problem, the critics suggested, is that Cherry has yet to write any of this season's episodes. (They also complain that there has been no subplot or even scenes in which the housewives are linked.) But Cherry ? who's been signed as a co-executive-producer of a humorous new murder-mystery series to be called Kill/Switch ? calls the critics' claim "patently untrue. ... I am as involved in the writing process as I've ever been. I help come up with the story lines, I give notes and, indeed, I rewrite things constantly. I take the credit and the blame for everything that goes on the screen," he says.

Furthermore, "I'm paying attention to my audience's response and am trying my darnedest to please them," he insists. "And I will continue to do so as long as I've got that executive producer credit above my name."

The dacha near the village of Rodzhestvo, outside Moscow, was acquired by Solzhenitsyn in 1965. The dissident retreated there after his expulsion from the Soviet Union Of Writers and wrote the seminal account of his time in the Soviet prison camps system, The Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel prize for literature in 1970 and returned to post-Soviet Russia in 1994 after 20 years' exile.

An official at the local fire department said the dacha burned down on Wednesday night. The newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets said it was being rented by a Georgian man and that faulty electrics had sparked the blaze. It was unclear how much of the writer's old papers remained there, although the newspaper said there were rare photographs and writings about the writer's life.

Ba is one of the most revered Chinese authors of the 20th century, standing alongside Lu Xun, Mao Dun and Guo Moruo. He was born into the family of a Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) official in southwest China's Sichuan Province and received a good education from private tutorship. But Ba was a high-spirited youth who rebelled against the bondage of feudal family life.

The May 4 Movement in 1919 filled him with democratic ideals. The Movement was a student revolt against the government following the decision by the Allied powers at Versailles to hand Shandong Province in northeast China to the Japanese. He went to France for studies in 1927 and from there released his first work "Destruction," an expression of his sadness over China's status in the world and his hope for revolution.

He wrote at a furious pace. During the 1929-1937 period, he was so productive that Lu Xun, the father of modern Chinese literature, praised Ba as "a writer with passion and progressive thinking."

His collection of writing includes novels, short stories and essays, totaling more than 6 million words. His famous tomes include the 14-volume "Works of Ba Jin" and the "Select Works of Ba Jin" with the stories "Family," "Spring," "Autumn," "The Trilogy of Love," "A Dream of Sea" and "Autumn in Spring."