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The National Book Awards and the Intoxicated Writers
From: www.writerswrite.com

" OK, so by now you know that Joan Didion won the National Book Award for her memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking (Knopf). But what were all the nominees doing during the pre-awards cocktail hour? Campbell Robertson tells all:

[I]t was the cocktail hour, a time when writers get together, postpone for a little while any forging in the smithies of any souls the uncreated consciousnesses of their respective races, and return to the raw material of the literary life: envy, competition and desperate, mind-numbing intoxication.

"I'm feeling fine," said ADELE GRIFFIN, who was nominated in the Young Adult category for her book "Where I Want to Be," but did not end up winning. "I have taken so many Valium that I am actually not feeling anything," she added. Valium? "Yep! Want some?" She patted her bag and shrugged. "I have a bunch."

In the meantime, the photographers had left Mr. Mailer to drink in peace. Just as he was becoming content, one of his sons told him it was time to go to the main ballroom. "Well," Mr. Mailer said, gazing fondly at his drink. "I'm already in the barrel, but you should go in and have a good time for me. Have a good time!" He waved his hands around, and returned to his glass. But they hoisted him up anyway, and he slowly made his way into the ballroom, leaning on two canes.

We turned to his agent, and asked what Mr. Mailer talks about when he isn't talking about writing. "Plastics," the agent replied. "He is completely irate about plastics, the plastics industry and prepackaged goods. The whole consumer culture has got him crazy. He thinks it's the end of the world."

HarperCollins said it made the change to avoid the appearance of encouraging smoking and did so with the permission of the illustrator's estate. But Mr. Hurd's son, also a children's book illustrator and author, said he felt pressured to allow it. And the move has touched off something of a tempest in the nursery, with some children's booksellers expressing outrage. One has even mounted a campaign to have the original picture restored.

The photograph of Mr. Hurd cheerily grasping a cigarette between the fingers of his right hand has been on the book for at least two decades. Kate Jackson, the editor in chief of HarperCollins Children's Books, said it only recently came to her attention, at a meeting to discuss how to publicize the book's 60th anniversary in 2007.

"We had a lot of copies out on a table, and all of a sudden we realized that in the photo on the back of the jacket he was holding a cigarette," Ms. Jackson said. The company was about to reprint the hardcover and paperback editions, so "as a quick fix, we adjusted the photograph" to eliminate it.

"It is potentially a harmful message to very young kids," Ms. Jackson said, "and it doesn't need to be there." The publisher said it printed 20,000 hardcover and 50,000 paperback books with the altered photograph. No photo runs in the popular board-book format, for younger readers, which accounts for three-quarters of the 800,000 copies of "Goodnight Moon" HarperCollins said it sells annually.

It's how a product is used, not where, that's important, says Michael Schrager, head of the Entertainment Marketing Firm, a product-placement agency that works with the Mayflower moving company and Monster energy drinks. "If the show is CSI, and, say, a maid is using the product to clean up after the fact, that's a good placement," Schrager tells this B!tch.

Hey, did you see that CSI episode the other week? The one featuring a kidnapped little girl who strews Bubblicious gum all over her neighborhood in an effort to tell someone, anyone, that's she still alive, even though her folks have all been shot and chained to the bottom of a lake by marijuana-maddened youth? Why, sure, the girl's parents were decaying into small bits of chewy fish food just as that little girl turned to those gum wrappers for solace. But despite the morbidity, in the world of marketing, such placement goes by the brand name of Brilliant. "The gum wrappers were her bread crumbs," Schrager explained. "People found a path to her. What's important is to protect a company from a negative connotation."

Right. Now, if the CSI writers wanted the drug-crazed youth to, say, light the Bubblicious wrappers on fire and use them to crash a plane full of seventh graders, the gum manufacturer would probably said no. Context, you understand. Context.

Companies even let their products take a pivotal role in a character's death, as long as the product is the clear victim of nefarious dealings. A con artist tampered with a Mercedes-Benz on CSI: Miami last month, resulting in the awful demise of some random guy. According to Schrager, car companies gladly let that kind of stuff happen, "as long as the radiator doesn't just suddenly go out, or the accident isn't the fault of the manufacturer."

The unions called for a code of conduct that would make it clear from the start of a program that viewers would be watching scenes in which companies have paid for their products to be used. The unions said that revenues generated last year from product placement deals reached more than $1 billion.

In an eight-page policy paper on the issue, the Writers Guild cited as an example the third season of NBC reality show "The Apprentice," in which Burger King, Dove Body Wash, Sony PlayStation, Verizon Wireless and Visa reportedly paid upward of $2 million apiece have their products incorporated into an episode of the show.

Patric Verrone, president of the Writers Guild, West, said traditional network standards governing commercial product placement "are increasingly being swept aside in favor of product integration and branded entertainment." He added: "In their race to the bottom line to create the so-called new business model, network and advertising executives are ignoring the public's interest and demanding that creative artists participate in stealth advertising disguised as a story."

SAG and the WGA added that if they could not win an agreement with producers on the issue, they would file a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates broadcast television.

A trip to the Southeast Asian country of Burma (also known as Myanmar) inspired her new novel. With it, she created a story involving 12 Americans who are like herself in various ways and whose lives intersect. The story ultimately explores human-rights atrocities in Burma ? a subject many readers might not want to confront. "I decided I should write a story that would seduce people," Tan said recently from Portland, Ore. "Suddenly, you can find yourself very quickly submersed in the unfamiliar." "My hope is that they enjoy the story and that they remember Burma," she says, when readers hear of the country that was renamed Myanmar after a military regime took control.

*****

At the workshop 20 years ago at Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, Tan had a dozen or so pages about a Chinese girl and her mother. Giles told her that there wasn?t a consistent voice in the story, and Giles went through it and noted about a dozen places that could be the beginning of a short story. Giles told Tan to pick one and write that story, then repeat the process for each. Tan simply said "OK." "Hardly anybody says, 'OK,'" Giles says. "Instead of being horrified, I was so excited," Tan recalls.

*****

"Even if I was violently opposed to what she?d suggest, she was often right," Tan says of Giles. "She?s tough. She just cuts to the chase."

*****

Tan says she likes that Giles bluntly delivers criticism and that she knows how Tan works. Tan writes profusely and then starts shaping and directing her story. "I?m more like a sculptor than I am watercolorist," Tan says. Tan also likes that Giles comes to her writing with unselfish motives. "She?s not concerned with the marketing issues or the commercial side of publishing. She?s concerned with the work," Tan says.