What’s It Take To Be Number Four?
What’s It Take To Be Number Four? James Frey’s Small Army of Starving Artists
In college I wrote a Young Adult, Sci-Fi novel about aliens. It was actually a drafting I’d started at seventeen, but I did finish a novel. I started thinking about agents. About publishers. About book tours and signings and fancy interviews where I’d get to talk about all my hard work. I was ready to be a book star.
And this new term, the book star, is exactly what James Frey, author of the controversial “memoir” A Million Little Pieces, is willing to make you if you sign on with his new writing company. The company, called Full Fathom Five, is one in which Frey signs on work-for-hire writers, for little or no pay, for the chance to become the next Twilight or Harry Potter-sized author. As New York Magazine’s Suzanne Mozes, an alum of Full Fathom Five, describes it in a recent feature on the company:
In exchange for delivering a finished book within a set number of months, the writer would receive $250 (some contracts allowed for another $250 upon completion), along with a percentage of all revenue generated by the project, including television, film, and merchandise rights—30 percent if the idea was originally Frey’s, 40 percent if it was originally the writer’s. The writer would be financially responsible for any legal action brought against the book but would not own its copyright. Full Fathom Five could use the writer’s name or a pseudonym without his or her permission, even if the writer was no longer involved with the series, and the company could substitute the writer’s full name for a pseudonym at any point in the future. The writer was forbidden from signing contracts that would “conflict” with the project; what that might be wasn’t specified. The writer would not have approval over his or her publicity, pictures, or biographical materials. There was a $50,000 penalty if the writer publicly admitted to working with Full Fathom Five without permission.
J.J. Abram’s Awesome, Unfocused 2007 TED Talk
Of course J.J. Abrams has a mystery box that he’s never opened. The writer/director did this TED Talk in 2007, and it’s an interesting peak into how he functions as a storyteller, director, and writer. Worth a watch, especially if you’re a fan or writer. Tangentially Related Posts:What’s It Take To Be Number Four?OMG! The [...]
Poem: “Arch(r)ival”
arch(r)ival By Shae Rue A virgin in a holy war battling against the page inkwells of rage stuck in the waves. Child of God, Sister of Dust. You do the things you know you must. Even when the pain has spread, swelled up. Journals of uneven length chronicles of sad rapport burned against my pride [...]
Blog: Amongst Neighbors
Recently, my friend Travis told me how discouraging it was to be working for pennies as an intern at an ad agency while all of his friends traveled the world and enjoyed the limitless freedom of their twenties. Well, luckily for me, my friends have the courtesy to blog about their travels, so that [...]
OMG! The Oxford English Dictionary Hearts LOL
The English language’s newest additions might surprise you. Oxford English Dictionary just released its list of additions and revisions for their coming June edition, and the terms LOL and OMG were among the new members of the English language. This means they’re actual words now, and not just figments of our demented collective imagination. Interestingly [...]
Radiohead Download: “The Universal Sigh” Newspaper
In case you aren’t able to pick one of these babies up today, we’ve got The Universal Sigh, Radiohead’s newspaper and companionpiece to their new album, King of Limbs. The printed newspapers are “available on this day,” Tuesday 3-28-11, being distributed in cities all over the world, for free while supplies last. Here in Los [...]
Abandoned Masterpiece Theatre: “Cattz”
It was only in 2007, which puts me at about 24, and therefore leaves me no justification for writing a novella told completely from the first-’person’ perspective of a male cat… Reading it now the whole thing seems really sick, somewhere on the spectrum between terrible judgement and mental illness.
Russian Roulette: Red Harvest
Russian Roulette is a classic life-or-death game of chance; spin the barrel, pull the trigger, hope for the best. Our version is a little different, and significantly less fatal. Grab a book, notebook, album, movie–whatever–flip or skip to a random excerpt, and hope for a BANG. Today’s barrel is loaded with Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett. Hammett, [...]
Two Spaces After a Period is Wrong.
“What galls me about two-spacers isn’t just their numbers. It’s their certainty that they’re right.” -Farhad Manjoo, Slate A couple of years ago, I noticed something funny in a document a friend had written. It looked horrible. It took me a moment to figure out what it was. And then a floodgate opened up somewhere [...]
Abandoned Masterpiece: Run Away, Sally
The idea was simple enough; write a Young Adult novel and, given the timeliness of the idea, become an overnight success. I was going to be rich and famous, but more importantly, relevant.