Writers: Laugh Last, Laugh Best

There’s life (and a living) after rejection
Bestselling authors are among those who struggled to get their first book accepted

Catherine O’Flynn had her novel What Was Lost turned down by 20 agents and publishers before it was accepted by the small Birmingham firm Tindal Street Press. It has since been shortlisted for the Orange and the Man Booker prizes and last week won the Costa First Novel Award. If your first magnum opus is still waiting to be propelled to Booker-winning glory, take heart from these rejectees.

G P Taylor, a Yorkshire vicar, self-published Shadowmancer before getting a deal with Faber. He now commands six-figure advances.

Doris Lessing was rejected by her publisher when she sent in a manuscript under a pseudonym.

Lionel Shriver’s seventh novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin, was so controversial that it was rejected by several agents and publishers. It became a small underground hit before taking off and winning the 2005 Orange Prize.

Stephen King’s first novel was rejected by Doubleday, prompting him to take a teaching job. He began a short story called Carrie but threw the manuscript in the bin. His wife retrieved it. Doubleday bought the hardback rights for $2,400 (£1,200), and New American Library paid $400,000 for the paperback rights.

Never quit.

Everex Cloudbook: The Asus EeePC Killer?

Judy Lipsett of Gear Diary has done my filthy bidding given in to my crybaby begging acceded to my request and sent me a hot-from-CES photo of the new Everex Cloudbook:

I’ve been interested in this. Read these brief specs and you might be too:

OS: gOS V2 Rocket (oh that’ll be ripped out for XP by the 1337)

RAM: 512MB DDR2 533MHz SDRAM (1GB Max)

CPU: 1.2 GHz VIA C7-M

Screen: 7-inch 800 x 480 pixels

Storage: 30GB hard drive(!) 4200 RPM

Price: US$399.00

For a better view, I have uploaded the original 4MB photo to Flickr.

Thanks, Judy!

The Horror Of The Minisode

Trawling around today to see if there were any CES announcements about the Sony Reader, I came across a press release that boasts about Sony’s “wealth of content.”

It mentioned The Minisode Network.

SPT [Sony Pictures Television] and Google/You Tube [sic] announced a new partnership for ad supported video channels. The first to launch will be The Minisode Network (TMN), beginning this month. TMN, which delivers approximately five-minute versions of classic television shows, will also grow from 18 to 21 channels with the addition of “Married, with Children,” “Newsradio” and a new animation block.

I’d heard a little about this earlier. TV series were being edited down to five-minute … things … that could be viewed on cellphones by eejits who had nothing better to do with their time.

Well, I decided to waste five minutes of my life sampling one of them.

I chose an episode of Starsky & Hutch, a series I watched when it originally aired on ABC.

If David Lynch wants to rail about watching videos on phones, he should start with this hideous bastardization of original programming.

I hope the Writers Guild of America is addressing this issue in the course of their strike. And I hope they can stop it.

If they don’t, Lynch will have something new to scream about. Because eventually his Twin Peaks series will wind up that way.

This is what happens to creative endeavors when The Suits get their mitts on them.

Sony Pictures Television is one of the television industry’s leading content providers.

Get that distinction only a lawyer could love: Content provider.

Sony: We Make Video Sausage.

I Heart Johnny Poison

Who, even though it’s only begun, has already provided the summary of CES:

Every table is like the Hillary Clinton of electronics — absolutely yesterday.

For MacWorld Expo to blow away the dust of CES, all Jobs will have to do is … show up.