Ah, the literary life...

So, you want to be an author. Before you quit your day job, check out this New Yorker article to see what you’re in for. This satiric piece take the form of a memo from an overwhelmed publisher’s representative, who doesn’t quite seem to know what book you wrote, detailing what you will be expected to do to market your book.
...
The note includes a strong suggestion that you start a blog and pump out 600 words a day, making sure to include numerous pictures of yourself; then you should friend everyone you ever met on you Facebook page; also, you will be participating in the publisher’s RAP (Readings by Author by Proxy) program, in which, to save money, you will do readings at bookstores close to where you live, not only for your own book but others your publisher designates. The memo is loaded with indecipherable jargon-- e.g. “We like Reddit bites (they’re better than Delicious), because they max out the wiki snarls of RSS feeds, which means less jamming at the Google scaffold.”
...
The piece presents a witty and insightful glimpse of the shaky state of the book publishing business today.

Writing and Drinking

Though this blog is more about reading than writing, I thought I’d note “When Novelists Sober Up” in the online magazine More Intelligent Life. The piece chronicles the effects of alcohol on authors. Perhaps the most sobering point in the article is the line, “Of America’s seven Nobel laureates, five were lushes—to whom we can add an equally drunk-and-disorderly line of Brits: Dylan Thomas, Malcolm Lowry, Brendan Behan, Patrick Hamilton, Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, all doing the conga to (in most cases) an early grave.”

I can remember a teacher in graduate school advising students in his seminar class not to lubricate the writing of term papers by drinking; he suggested that one glass of sherry could affect one’s writing. In the same vein, the article quotes Ernest Hemingway saying “When I read Faulkner I can tell when he gets tired and does it on corn just as I used to be able to tell when Scott would hit it beginning with Tender is the Night.”

The article does note a number of writers who sobered up—e.g. John Cheever (pictured above) and Stephen King. Not surprisingly, the change affected their writing. Of Cheever’s novel Falconer, written after he sobered up, the New York Times commented “It is as if our Chekhov had tucked into a telephone booth and reappeared wearing a cape and leotard of Dostoyevsky’s ‘Underground Man’.”