By: Alice,
on 1/14/2016
Alban Berg’s Lulu is generally acknowledged as one of the master pieces of twentieth century opera. However, because of its many musical and theatrical challenges, it is seldom performed. The last time Lulu was seen at the Metropolitan opera was in 1980.
The post Lulu at the Met (November 2015): A good thing becomes too much appeared first on OUPblog.
By: [email protected],
on 7/19/2015
It’s not enough to just want something and hope that it will be delivered to you on a silver platter. Unfortunately for most of us, life isn’t that simple. What we try to teach our kids is that you absolutely can achieve your aspirations, your goals, your dreams, but it takes work, persistence and determination. […]
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By: [email protected],
on 7/19/2015
At first glance, life on the icy floes may seem appealing. (Unless you reside in SE Queensland as I do with no real concept of what cold is until you have to live through ‘an unseasonably cold winter’ with little more than a cotton tee-shirt and a pair of bed socks). In Lulu’s world, there […]
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By: Jack O'Rourke,
on 6/27/2014
Briefs was an experiment. It got all the reviews you could want, under the circumstances. And also because Danny worked there I got a lot of services that if you self-published in Lulu, you'd have to pay for. For example, the expensive business of sending books to reviewers. My self-published electronic book was treated a bit like the old way that my hard copy books had been. A publicity service sent books to the media and tried to get me interviews. A publicity person promoted and followed the book's progress. Books were made available in conventional hard copy format, so that was cheating in a way. The results don't tell a lot about self-publishing or electronic publishing per se. My conclusion after the whole thing was that even with the extras I got, a self-publishing venture was premature. It still is premature, for a person of my status, used to having a certain kind of attention. You're taking a real leap of faith and financially, you're giving up, in my case, what might be a substantial advance.
Not being on bookstore shelves killed Briefs. Someone browsing in that nice bookstore ...is not going to see Briefs. A bookstore has to pay for copies of Briefs, and then they own the copies, can't return them. The other thing is the Times refused to review Briefs, because it was self-published ...They did run a story about the manner in which Briefs was published, but it was not a review. Almost all the articles about the book were not reviews; they were general interest pieces about the publishing industry. That meant no reviews of the book, and at the same time no one was going to trip over the book in a bookstore. So why would anyone buy it? Where would they find it? As far as merchandising strategy, Briefs fell into very predictable cracks. I was disappointed, but I'd do it again. I liked the adventure; I liked working with Danny; and I learned a hell of a lot.As might be concluded from the foregoing discussions and interview excerpt, ISP is a works in progress. There are pluses and minuses in it for most authors, but the business model of the traditional publisher has contemporary issues that need to be addressed, also. One thinks of the music recording industry, which had a business model that served them handsomely for many years and did well for a relatively small number of artists, too. However, the internet opened up possibilities for many more artists that had been shut out by the traditional gatekeepers' system, and brought with it upheavals to the business model that are still ongoing. Now, the book publishing model's turn may have come.
By: Jennie,
on 3/29/2013
Hilary McKay has a great new early chapter book series out.
Lulu is known for animals. The rule in Lulu's house is "The more the merrier, as long as Lulu cleans up after them!"
Every week, Lulu's class goes to the local pool for swimming and walks back to school through the park, where they take a small break. The kids love their time at the park, sitting by the pond. Lulu especially loves the area known as "duck row" where many ducks have made their nests under the bushes. This week, two dogs get loose and scare all the ducks. In the process, many of the nests and their eggs get smashed. Lulu notices one egg left unbroken, rolling away, so she scoops it up and takes it back to school.
Mrs. XXX has just instituted a rule saying that the kids aren't allowed animals in class, so Lulu has to keep the egg hidden, and safe, and warm, but what will she do when it starts to hatch?
When Lulu and her family go on vacation, she sees a dog that seems to come from the sea. Everyone know town knows about the dog from the sea-- he's the reason you have to take your trash can inside the house at night. Stealing hot dogs from the hot dog stand an understandable thing for a dog to do. Stealing (and eating!) a shovel (the most expensive, nicest shovel) from the postcard stand? That dog is a nuisance!, but the dog catchers can't get him.
Lulu wants to get to know the dog from the sea, so she breaks all the rules to lure him closer, to get to know him. I mean, the more the merrier, right? But another hamster or rabbit is one thing-- can Lulu really handle another dog?
*****************************
I was a little apprehensive of this series-- I love McKay's Casson family books, so there were high expectations going into this-- could she maintain the same level of awesome for an early chapter book?
Short answer--yes.
I love Lulu's relationship with her cousin Mellie, especially because they don't always enjoy the same things or understand each other. I like how there's more to Lulu than animals (such as jumping off the swings at the highest point possible) but everyone remembers the animals.
As an adult reader, I love the adults. They're done with enough comic timing to make kids laugh, but adult readers will understand where the book adults are coming from and with sympathize. It's also the little touches-- Lulu's mom brings a book for every day of their vacation, plus War and Peace, just in case.
I loved a scene in the first book when Lulu's teacher tries to read the kids Harry Potter but they keep interrupting to tell her that that's not right, because that's not how the movie was, and that she was doing the voices wrong. McKay has an excellent touch for the small details of life.
This is an excellent series, up there with Clementine.
Come back tomorrow, where I'll actually be interviewing Ms. McKay! Squee! So exciting! Also, a giveaway!
Books Provided by... the publisher for blog review and book tour stop.
Links to Amazon are an affiliate link. You can help support Biblio File by purchasing any item (not just the one linked to!) through these links. Read my full disclosure statement.
By: ARIS,
on 8/26/2011
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By: Meg Harper,
on 12/1/2010
This won’t be an erudite blog – it’ll probably be more of a venting of current angst – but hopefully it might be helpful to anyone else involved in what I call para-writing ie. all the work that writers do that has something to do with writing but isn’t actually the thing itself! I love it – I’m not someone who wants to write all day, everyday – but it certainly has its moments.
So – the history. For the last three summers I have run a 3 day creative writing course for adults, with the aim of publishing an anthology of their work. The first year we published ‘Banbury Stories’, the second year we published ‘New Stories for Old’ and this year we are still hoping to publish ‘Oxfordshire Originals’.
This year, one of the students approached me to explain that he was a small publisher himself. He publishes directories. He knows the process and thought he could do a better job than could be done through Lulu. He was interested in the idea of us forming a sort of co-operative. We would all agree to buy 7 books but would not contribute anything else to the cost of publication and he would aim to promote the book commercially. He thought he could cover his expenses and even make a small profit for us all. For him it was an experiment in publishing something more creative, he explained – and the group would get their work published to a higher specification at little extra cost. He hoped, if it was a success, to publish further anthologies of Oxfordshire Originals on the same basis – not quite vanity publishing but heading in that direction.
I am not a risk-taker on the whole, but on this occasion I thought it was worth a shot. The student seemed to know what he was doing and be very genuine and I still believe that he is. I agreed to be the editor of his version of the anthology as an experiment. Unfortunately, I don’t think he had enough awareness of how time-consuming editing is and we have, I think, had a misunderstanding about what was meant by ‘the stories are to be ready by the end of November’. To cut a long story short, despite my best efforts and protestations, he has gone to press with a book which has far too many minor errors in it for my liking.
I explained my discomfort and asked him to get in touch with his printer urgently to delay the print-run but he has refused and instead is threatening to abort the whole project . I therefore emailed the contributors to ask if they would prefer to go ahead or for me to do my usual Lulu version after Christmas and I’m waiting for the verdict. So far, its 2 all! Meanwhile, the student has emailed the contributors, telling them that I’ve lost faith in the project (untrue) and offering them a different deal which really is vanity publishing.
Deep sigh. What do I learn from this apart from not to take risks?
1. Not all publishing is done to the same high standards of editing! Clearly certain directories are not!
2. Just because someone is a publisher, he/she won’t necessarily know how long the process of editing fiction takes.
3. We are vulnerable. I feel my goodwill has been taken advantage of here. I have put more time into this than if I had been creating my own publication, all unpaid, but am not being treated as an equal partner in the process. I may be being paranoid but I think there are people out there who see publishing as a way to make a quick buck because other people are so keen to be published. That makes writers who also work as creative writing teachers vulnerable and also their students.
4. Some people don’t care about perfection – they just want something published. Others care
By: Susan Mitchell,
on 11/14/2009
The calendar is finished and now up for sale here: Lulu
*Edit*
If you enter the code: BUY2010 at the checkout, you will save 15% (until 31 Dec 09).
Yay!
I have also made another calendar available at:
Red Bubble
This is an Australian site, but shipping is very reasonable and the format and paper is a little different.
By: Meg Harper,
on 1/23/2009
Ha! This is a bit risky! Normally I write in word and then post on this blog - but today I'm posting late at night on a friend's computer because I'm away from home! So this might be brief through sheer fear - will this disappear at any moment?!
Now then...a quick scan of the keyword list suggests no one else has written about the glories of www.lulu.com here but apologies if they have and you're bored of reading about it! I'm sure you all know that Lulu is an on-line self-publishing company which an be used to create anything from a single copy of a small paperback booklet to an infinite number of case-bound illustrated tomes. I have recently had my first couple of flirtations with this entertaining plaything and I'm pleased to wax somewhat lyrical about it.
Last summer I ran a 3 day creative writing workshop for adults on the theme of Banbury Stories. We sought inspiration from Banbury museum and local history books and then got cracking. We weren't aiming to write hugely well-researched local history - instead we wrote fiction and poetry inspired by what we gleaned and had an immense amount of fun, all with the aim of publishing a small booklet that we would sell in the museum and the arts centre where we were based. The head of adult education had agreed to take over the publishing side, once I'd edited the ms. Lovely! Fantastic! We finished the project and were all thrilled. And then disaster struck. The H of AE became seriously ill. Suddenly, I had to find another publishing solution - and decided, having heard so much about it, to try Lulu.
Now I am a techniphobe. I was expecting hours of frustration, major headaches and serious bad temper. I therefore decided to go for the simplest type of publication possible - which as it turned out was just about all I could do with the small size of ms that I had! With much trepidation, I began, starting with the registration process you might expect. After that, I had to take a deep breath and dive in - I had to START A PROJECT! Believe me, this couldn't be simpler. Essentially, if you have your ms ready to go, all you do is select the size and style of book you want, upload your ms, click 'make print ready file', create your cover - and publish as many copies as you want! I had one or two minor problems but found the on-line chat excellent as a means of help (though that seems to be more restricted now than it was - probably far too popular!). I also needed to consult my resident media expert (18 year old son!)about the photo and lay-out I wanted for the cover, but apart from that it was astonishingly simple. I ordered one copy as a proof and discovered that, sure enough, my on-screen editing skills were dire - but as each copy was only costing me £1.61 plus p&p, I wasn't too bothered! My only real criticism is that the weight of the cover paper could do with being heavier as it is showing a tendency to coil and there is no choice about that for the simplest style of book - but we still have a very professional-looking little product and are almost ready to put in our order. A tragic footnote is that one of our writers (who unbeknown to us was fighting cancer) died on New Year's Day without seeing the finished result but the lovely thing about this type of publishing is that I can easily go back and include a dedication to her before publishing the copies we need.
I'm not about to plunge into publishing my novels this way - though people do and sell them through the Lulu marketplace and Amazon as well as themselves (I have a really excellent drama games book which appeared in my Amazon suggestions and turned out to be self-published through Lulu - so the system works!) - but for creative writing projects and personal use, it's brilliant. I've just created a single copy of a little book for a special present for a friend - and I'm thrilled with it. A member of the group I teach has created a fully illustrated picture book for a friend's new baby - it looks great! Lulu provides a (fairly restricted) gallery of front cover images (I used one for my friend's present) but it's relatively easy to use your own.
Enough? Want to have a go? I've dwelt on the practicalities here but there are wider issues of course. Thousands of people are publishing through Lulu and it's clear from the drama book I bought that there is excellent material 'making it' in this way, rather than through conventional publishing. Publishers beware! There is something very attractive about the autonomy of this - and the speed and the cost! I've just been granted funding to be a writer in residence in two local schools - and guess what I said I'd be doing with the children? So that will be my next Lulu project - but I'm rather tempted to have a go with one of those novels that I think ought to be out there but hasn't found a publisher! I've so very, very little to lose!
By: Stacey,
on 9/7/2008
A few days ago I received two e-mails from one of my former fifth graders that I hadn’t seen since the final day of school in June 2007. He’s now in seventh grade and wanted to get back in-touch. Seeing as all of my students have my personal e-mail address, this was pretty [...]
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By: Chocolate Log,
on 5/20/2008
By: April Henry,
on 4/25/2007
Some years it seems like there is very little interest in turning books into movies. Other times you might get leaked out the back door. That happened to my first book Circles of Confusion.. It got leaked to Fox. Which made my agent mad. I was just so excited to find out I was leakable! There were some movie ups and downs with that book. It was on Drew Barrymore's short list. (She made Riding in Cars with Boys). Meyers/Shires looked at it three times (they divorced, but not before making What Women Want. Now the female half makes movies like The Holiday). Red Wagon (Memoirs of a Geisha, Jarhead, Bewitched) took it to Disney - but didn't get the green light.
The LA Times has an article that "illustrates the cutthroat scramble to corner the market on literary material for films and television."
And Publisher's Weekly talks about how many film people are at the Bologna children's book fair, looking for good material.
I heart movie options!
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Арис, это потрясающе! Какая радость!
Я от души поздравляю тебя!
Дорогая Арис, я вовсе не забыла про посылочку! Через две недели я вернусь домой и тогда... Остальное напишу на почту!)))))))))))))
Крепко обнимаю!
oooh....Lulu...!!
I will smile at her...and its story...!
Wow!!!! Bellissimo risultato, bravissima!!!! In italiano non ci sarà?
che bel traguardo!Complimenti!
Grazie a tutti. L'idea è di tradurre il libro in italiano e inglese, poi ci sarà da trovare una casa editrice che voglia pubblicarlo, ma sono fiduciosa perchè credo sia davvero un bel lavoro :)
Jatka privet!!! ne volnujsja ja znaju chto ty ne zabyla, vse budet posle kanikuli :) Spasibo dlja pozdravlenija :) Ja ochen dovolna, prosto chozhu na 8 mtv ot zemli :D