Midge’s blog about writing . . . reading . . . and everything in between

I (finally) saw the film Up in the Air, and as I watched it with my Midwestern husband, I learned a few interesting things. One, that the wedding scenes’ “rural Wisconsin” hotel was actually the Chesire Inn in St. Louis. Two, that George Clooney’s character’s “Omaha, Nebraska” apartment is actually in the Mansion House, also in St. Louis. And three, that the Vera Farmiga character’s “Chicago” brownstone is also, yes, in St. Louis (right down the street from my brother-in-law’s house, in fact). Had I not been sitting with a St. Louis native, I’d have known none of this — other than that Lambert-St. Louis International Airport did play itself in the movie (though, as this article notes, it also served as a setting for a few other airports as well).

Of course, not everyone picked up on (or cared about) these little details — and we all know that film crews go where the locations are cost-effective and convenient. As writers, though, we really have no excuse for misrepresenting place in our writing. Watching Up in the Air reminded me of the workshop I did a couple of weeks ago at Warwick’s, at which we talked about, among other things, this very issue — how best to write accurately about place, especially knowing that somewhere out there, a reader is going to know if you’re trying to fake your way through it.

The best option for a writer is to visit the place about which you’re writing — but, like filmmakers, we too have budgets (and they’re usually a lot smaller). But if you can’t visit a place, you can always interview someone who’s from there; you’ll probably find all that you need, and more. When I began writing the story “First Sunday” (which appears in Forgetting English), I’d never been to the Kingdom of Tonga and had no hope of visiting any time soon. So I did some research on my own and also called and nagged my sister for information, translation questions, and random fact-checking. She’d lived in Tonga for two years and not only helped make sure my story was accurate in terms of setting and culture, but she also gave me a few ideas that helped shape the story — ideas I’d never have gotten from doing book or Internet research alone.

While no writer will please every reader (especially when each person’s experience of any one place can vary widely), I think we should strive to be as accurate as possible with our settings.

So if you are able to visit a place in person, here are a few tips…

- Take a ridiculous amount of notes. You will always want to have far more information than you can use.

- Take photos. Yes, you’ll look touristy, but places fade from our memories faster than we think. And having such “visual” notes will come in handy later.

- Talk to people. If you plan on writing dialogue, which is likely, you’ll want this to be as accurate as your details. Every region has a local dialect of some sort; every place has nicknames for landmarks, shops, taverns, etc. Find out what they are.

- Visit a museum. Even the smallest of towns may have a history museum, a historical society, etc . — check them out. You might discover wonderful ideas that will add layers to your story.

And if you still worry that your details aren’t adding up to an accurate portrayal? If you’re writing fiction, you can simply create a fictional place. This is a great option, especially if what’s happening in a story is less important than the place itself. For example, in my fictional world, Seattle now has a hospital called “Bayview Medical Center” because I found myself needing to set a scene in a hospital and didn’t want to worry about the details (what neighborhood? how many floors, and on which one is the ICU? and on and on…). So with my fake hospital, I can focus on the characters and what’s going on in the scene rather than worrying about a doctor or lab tech reading my story years from now and wondering where I got all my bad info. And who knows … maybe it’ll seem so real that one day someone will ask where it is — like the woman on 6th Avenue last week who asked me for directions to “Seattle Grace Hospital” (anyone who’s seen Grey’s Anatomy will know why this was amusing).

Happy researching … and/or creating.

In honor of National Poetry Month, poet and blogger Kelli Russell Agodon has gathered together 51 generous people to give the gift of poetry, i.e., free books. What better way to celebrate?

To enter the drawings, visit Kelli’s blog for links to the participating bloggers/poets/poetry lovers.

Enjoy — and spread the word!

Happy National Poetry Month.

This weekend, spend some time outside (if possible — I know “spring” doesn’t always mean good weather; but you can also do this exercise by sitting in a cafe, pub, etc., as long as you’re near a window).

Write two pages about a stranger you see — on the street, in the park, near you at the movies, etc.

The idea is, whether you’re working on a novel already filled with characters or whether you’re starting a new piece from scratch, it’s great to take some time to observe those around you. So pick someone and start writing. Begin with a physical description of this person, then fill in his/her background as you imagine it. Envision what this person was doing in the place and time you saw him/her, and write about why. If you’re immersed in a writing project, see if there’s any room in it for this new character — and if not, see if this person (and your observations) leads you into a new story.

Enjoy.

I’m not usually one to make New Year’s Resolutions (because I inevitably break them), but while out of town (and mostly disconnected from the Internet), I did make an April Fool’s Day resolution: to spend at least one day a week offline.

As it turns out, I chose the right holiday to make that one.

I’ve since spent not a single day offline, but, as I used to say back when I made New Year’s resolutions, it’s early yet. And I’m still thinking I’ll give it a try. I discovered last week that there’s a lot of peace in not being available by email at every moment, in not having access to the news of the world at every moment. And, as a writer, all that offline time paid off: One day, while staring mindlessly out at the ocean, I got a new story idea. Now that I’m back home and back to work, of course, I need the time to write it, which means staying offline as much as possible.

I was glad to come across this post in Rough Type, about a cartoonist who’s attempting a four-month trial separation from the Internet, noting that “Disconnection is the new counterculture.” When I see someone attempting four months offline, I think that surely I can handle one day a week.

But I’d also come across this LA Times blog about the writer Edan Lepucki going off Twitter and Facebook for three months (which also sounds very liberating), but the post notes that someone like this — “a talented writer who is making her way in the literary world, going to residencies and teaching … hoping to publish her first book soon” — is “exactly the kind of person who should be active in online communities.”

So it seems that emerging writers need to strike some sort of balance — and that’s the tricky part. As the LAT blog notes, “On the one hand, a writer should walk away from anything that keeps them from writing … On the other hand, I wonder whether it’s particularly vital for new writers to stay connected online.”

For me, a one-day vacation from the Internet sounds like a good start. Maybe I’ll even get up to two or three. Meanwhile, I’ll keep you posted (during one of my online days only, of course).

UPDATE: So, I did it. I stayed offline for one entire day. (Sort of.) I declared Offline Day an official Day of Writing, and I did cheat a little in that I hopped online a couple of times, to use an online thesaurus and to do a teeny bit of research. And then the Internet connection went out in our entire neighborhood, which means I had no Internet access for much of the day, even if I’d wanted it (does that count, if no willpower is involved?). But the lesson was a good one: It was nice to be unplugged, and I got tons of work done. And I’m already looking forward to this week’s Offline Day.

A couple of months ago I was struggling, as I often do, with an unwieldy first draft when I decided to let go of it for a while, work on other things, try to come back to it with a little more objectivity. I felt guilty about taking a long break from a project that I’d hoped would keep moving forward — but a couple days later, wandering through the Seattle Art Museum, I had an epiphany about this very project, and it sent me racing back to the computer.

What is it about getting away from our writing projects that brings us so much insight? Not long after my epiphany, I ran across this New York Times article, which notes: “Researchers have discovered that when people are conscious but doing nothing … the brain is in fact firing away, with greater activity in regions responsible for recalling autobiographical memory, imagining the thoughts and feelings of others, and conjuring hypothetical events: the literary areas of the brain, you might say.”

The article is actually more about boredom than writing — and I was far from bored at the museum. But I could see a connection there somewhere: While the Times story talks about thaasophobia (fear of boredom), “manifested in our addiction to iPhone apps, the cable news crawl and ever mutating varieties of multitasking,” I wonder whether writers suffer from some sort of similar phobia, one in which we’re afraid to not be typing, to not sit at our desks — in other words, to appear not to be writing. (As I write this, I’m in fact developing a new fear of splitting infinitives, but that’s a whole other blog post.) I often have to remind myself that I don’t cease to be a writer when I’m not at my keyboard — the same way that simply sitting at the computer typing doesn’t ensure a great story. It’s all about the ideas, the great lines, the details in a scene — all the things we writers get from our experience of the world, all the things we can’t get if we too often glue ourselves to the desk.

Discipline, of course, is necessary if you’re ever going to complete anything. But don’t be afraid to take some time off, to get away from your story for a while. See how a new activity lets your brain rest, and see what this resting period brings. And it’s okay if you choose to do nothing at all. As the article points out, “Boredom isn’t just good for your brain. It’s good for your soul.”

As a writer, I’m always looking for new ways to define and explore character, and this Sex I.D. test from the BBC is a cool one. Its enticing web site offers: Get a brain sex profile and find out if you think like a man or a woman. See if you can gaze into someone’s eyes and know what they’re thinking. Find out why scientists are interested in the length of your fingers.

So if course, I did it — for myself this time (kind of fun: as it turns out, I’m very empathetic but not much of a systemizer). But it’s also a great way to get inside the heads of your characters. If you sit down and take this test as your character, you’ll get all sorts of insights into who this fictional person is: how well does your character read others’ emotions? Does he/she prefer feminine or masculine faces? How does he/ she feel about money?

The test takes fewer than thirty minutes, and each of its six portions are timed — but you can stop at any time and return to it later. You’ll probably want to know a good deal about your character before taking this on (i.e., it’s not very useful for trying to dream up a new character but rather for deepening your understanding of one) — and there’s one segment that requires you to measure the length of your fingers (you could try to make that part up, but the results might be very odd). Still, because we as writers spend so much of our time trying to figure out how people’s minds work, it’s a great exercise — and you never know what sort of new info you’ll learn about the characters inhabiting your stories.

Inspired by Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, the Guardian recently asked other writers for a few rules of their own, including Margaret Atwood (“Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine”), Roddy Doyle (“Do be kind to yourself”), Richard Ford (“Don’t drink and write at the same time”), and Helen Dunmore (“Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite”).

You may also enjoy responses to this piece from writers at The Huffington Post (“NEVER WRITE AGAIN”) and Salon (offering “five recommendations for the flailing novice”).

In other news, the Nieman Journalism Lab has an interesting feature on a bookstore working with self-published authors to get their books on the shelves. At Boulder Book Store in Colorado, authors pay the store $25 to stock five copies of a book, replenished as needed, with higher rates for additional benefits ($75 to appear in the “Recommended” section; $125 for a mention in the store’s email newsletter and on the Local Favorites page, and to be available for online purchase; and $255 for an in-store reading and book-signing. It’s an interesting model — and one that will definitely appeal to self-published authors who consistently have trouble getting into bookstores — but of course, bookstore browsers will now have to wonder whether a “Recommended” book is on the shelf because it’s good, or because the author has paid for it to be there.

In this wonderfully in-depth interview, Philip Graham, editor of Ninth Letter, talks to The Morning News about getting into the New Yorker, writing about place, and teaching creative writing (which he does at at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), among other things. Check out the interview as well as his blog.

This just in from Bellingham Review: the contest deadline has been extended to for the magazine’s annual fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction awards.

And, last but not least, here’s something for both readers and writers: Melanie Rae Thon has published a new poem, appearing online at On Earth As It Is, “a cycle of prayer narratives, or dramatic monologues addressed to God, from writers of different faiths.” New work will be posted each week by contributing writers.

Happy reading and writing!

I suppose it was only a matter of time before it happened again — publishing drama in the form of a publisher pulling a nonfiction book because significant parts of it are, in fact, fiction. This NY Times piece offers details: Charles Pellegrino originally claimed he’d been duped by a source while writing The Last Train From Hiroshima, and then the book’s publisher later learned that other people in the book may not exist, and that the author’s Ph.D. may not exist either.

This is certainly not the first or even the most dramatic revelation of questioned work — remember James Frey? Margaret Selzer? Herman Rosenblat? to name just a few — but it comes at a time when publishing is at a precarious spot in its industry’s history. As novelist Kurt Andersen told the Times: “If book publishers are supposed to be the gatekeepers, tell me exactly what they’re closing the gate to.”

Amid the struggle to get published, my fellow writers and I end up talking a lot about self-publishing, which usually has been viewed as the only option for writers who aren’t “good enough” to find a “real” publisher. Yet many writers are choosing to self-publish these days — and it’s not because they’re not good enough (Steve Almond is certainly good enough – check out his story in this LA Times piece) or because they won’t be able to sell enough books (we all know John Gray, author of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, can sell books, and Publishers Marketplace recently announced that he is self-publishing his latest, Venus On Fire, Mars On Ice). They’re choosing it for other reasons, among them making more money, having more control over the process, and, as Steve Almond puts it: “No marketing plan, no guilt-inducing advance, no royalty statements, no remainders.”

This is not to say that, just because another questionable nonfiction book has slipped through the cracks, we should abandon the publishing world and do it all ourselves — not at all. Self-publishing, of course, is not for everyone — having no marketing plan, for example, is only a good option for someone who already has an audience or has a great deal of experience in book marketing — and in general, having gatekeepers is necessary and good. But for those with great books that can’t sell in today’s market, it’s good to have other options, and slipping under the gate might not be such a bad idea.

Victoria Patterson, author of Drift, wrote in a recent article about autobiographical fiction for The Millions that her writing group would call her by the name of her protagonist, despite her assertions that her character was fictional — and that she endured a “condemning two- to three-month silence” from her family after her book was published.

One of the most interesting things about Patterson’s article is a conversation she had with her father, who brought up an event that he said he wished “had gone better,” to which Patterson replied, “Dad, that never happened. It’s fiction. I made it up.” Which is another challenge of autobiographical fiction: If people recognize parts of the story as true, they may well believe it’s all true.

I’m often asked about how much of what happens in the stories of Forgetting English actually happened in real life. Last week, when this came up at a book club I was visiting, we joked about how they all might want to lock up their jewelry (and their husbands) … but the truth is (quite boringly) that Forgetting English isn’t autobiographical — at least not in the strict sense. Every story contains bits and pieces of my life — some more than others; “The Road to Hana,” for example, was inspired by a real stolen ring, even if I wasn’t the one to steal it — but these pieces are not necessarily reenactments of my own experiences.

In a reading I gave last week at a local college, I was asked about “The Ecstatic Cry,” the Forgetting English story about a scientist living in Antarctica — a character about as opposite of me as one could imagine, in that I hate the cold and barely passed most of my science courses. Yet I acknowledged that this character — a loner who spends as much time as she can at the bottom of the world, who cares more for animals than for humans — does reflect a concerned (and rather cranky) part of myself, a part that wishes we all treated animals and the planet a little better. And while in my everyday life, I express this part of myself in small ways by volunteering and supporting organizations with similar goals, I enjoyed giving it a voice and a life of its own.

If you’re writing purely autobiographical fiction, then you already know about the questions that will await you. And even if you’re not, those same questions will still await you. This is because readers know as well as we do that nothing is ever entirely fictional — even if we did make it all up.

This New York Times piece outlines the costs for both traditional paper books and e-books, and helps show, in numbers, what the issues are — and why we’re all better off with e-books priced higher than $9.99.

The article outlines who gets what slices of the hardcover and e-book pies — money goes toward not only paying authors but to copyediting, design, marketing, printing, storage, shipping, and, for e-books, converting to and typesetting in digital format. After all the math is worked out, the e-book emerges as slightly more profitable.

But as the article notes, “e-books still represent a small sliver of total sales, from 3 to 5 percent. If e-book sales start to replace some hardcover sales, the publishers say, they will still have many of the fixed costs associated with print editions, like warehouse space, but they will be spread among fewer print copies. Moreover, in the current print model, publishers can recoup many of their costs, and start to make higher profits, on paperback editions. If publishers start a new e-book’s life at a price similar to that of a paperback book, and reduce the price later, it may be more difficult to cover costs and support new authors.”

Another worry, of course, is that bookstores will be unable to compete: “As more consumers buy electronic readers and become comfortable with reading digitally, if the e-books are priced much lower than the print editions, no one but the aficionados and collectors will want to buy paper books.”

Mike Shatzkin, chief executive of the Idea Logical Company, a consultant to publishers, believes that publishers need to go into e-books slowly to avoid this happening: “The simplest way to slow down e-books is not to make them too cheap.”

Many authors remain concerned about what e-books will do to the industry, but I like what Anne Rice had to say to the Times about it: “The only thing I think is a mistake is people trying to hold back e-books or Kindle and trying to head off this revolution by building a dam. It’s not going to work.”

I enjoyed seeing this LA Times blog post about England’s new American Idol of publishing: TV Book Club. Perhaps one day, like other British programs, an American version will make its way across the pond. How great would it be to see an entire show dedicated to books?

And I’ve been following William Boot’s “Do I Have To Read…?” series for the Daily Beast on reviewing commercial books. In Boot’s opinion, only 44 of the 279 pages of Elizabeth Gilberts’s new book, Committed, are readable. The number of readable pages in Kathryn Stockett’s The Help? “All of them.”

As I schedule new events and classes, I’ve found a handy resource in Teach Street. Whether you’re a student of writing or a teacher of writing (or of anything else, for that matter), check it out, if you haven’t already. It’s a great way for students to find classes and for instructors to list classes.

If you’re into publishing news and you’re also on Twitter, you might get a kick out of following FakeBookNews, satirical tweets about publishing and literary culture. Among the stories: “Success of bestselling novel leads to blog deal for author” and “Michiko Kakutani gives up using ‘fierce,’ ‘limn’ and ‘deeply felt’ for Lent.” (Note: Click here for a non-satirical piece on going from blog to book.)

“Can writing be taught?” asks this Atlantic piece, which offers advice on writing from Wallace Stegner, Francine Prose, Gail Godwin, and others. John Kenneth Galbraith, while acknowledging that the difficulty of writing is enough to drive any writer to drink, nevertheless advises staying away from booze: “Any writer who wants to do his best against a deadline should stick to Coca-Cola. If he doesn’t have a deadline, he can risk Seven-Up.”

And finally, for anyone who’s ever thought about using a pen name, check out this blog post from literary agent Nathan Bransford. (Important: Deal with the pen name after you’ve found your agent: “When I receive your query,” Bransford writes, “I don’t want it to be from your pseudonym.”) The post has an interesting list of pros and cons, especially tuned in to the Internet age, and includes reasons I’d never really thought of — for example, if you have a very common name, like Jane Smith, you might consider a pen name for search engine optimization (of course, with a name like Midge, you can see why I’ve never thought of this).

Enjoy.

I always enjoy presenting at the Southern California Writers’ Conference in San Diego, in part because it’s a great excuse to travel south from Seattle in February (it was not only sunny but in the 70s!) — and also because it’s an exhilarating, exhausting-in-a-good-way weekend. Even better, I get to see old friends and meet amazing writers.

Among the friends at this year’s SCWC were Clare Meeker, who presented on creating commissioned stories (she’s in San Diego all week promoting her book Charge Ahead, commissioned by KPBS public television in San Diego as part of a national “Raising Readers” grant to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting from the U.S. Department of Education). Among the gems of Clare’s presentation were reminders that a writer always needs to be thinking outside the box, and not to take no for an answer: an editor who once told Clare that they only used in-house writers later published two of Clare’s books.

During the banquet I got to catch up with Judy Reeves, whose A Writer’s Book of Days will be reissued this fall; keep an eye out for that, even if you already have a copy  — the new edition will have all new prompts and literary quotes. I also had the pleasure of sitting with Tammy Greenwood, whose new novel, The Hungry Season, was published in January. She gave an inspiring keynote that evening, as well as a great session the next morning on creating substantive characters.

I always enjoy the agent/editor panel, and this year, I felt a bit more optimism about publishing in the air. The panel talked about book promotion, making a few important points, among them: Writing and selling a book is half the process, while promotion is the other half; there’s less and less money available for in-house publicity, so this job is falling more and more to authors; authors must be creative with marketing and/or save some of their advance dollars to put toward hiring a publicist.

They also talked about e-formats, and none had any violent thoughts on the subject, which indicates that the non-retail part of industry is becoming more accepting. One editor noted that the e-formats do not affect print runs at her publishing company — they do the same print run they’d do with or without e-books, and adding e-formats only increases readership beyond what they’d be seeing with traditional paper books.

In response to a question from the audience, the panel addressed self-publishing, noting that they don’t normally take on self-published books (the average sales for a self-published book is about 100 copies), but that their interest is piqued whenever a self-published book sells 2,500 copies or more.

And of course, members of the panel talked about their pet peeves — and I always think this is worth noting in detail. The list seems to be the same year after year, but apparently this is because writers are making the same mistakes year after year. So take note: among the most common submission mistakes to avoid are…

- approaching an agent or editor the way he/she does not want to be approached (calling when guidelines specify email contact only, for example)

- sending material the agent doesn’t represent or the editor doesn’t publish

- sending work that has not been edited or proofread

- sending work that is too long (noted one agent: “Anything over 100,000 words is a red flag — it’s hard to sell anything over 90,000 words”)

- sending emails to multiple agents at the same time

- misspelled words in a query letter (including — and especially — misspelling the word query)

- telling agents or editors that they’re going to “miss out” or that the book is “a guaranteed bestseller”

- writing, “here is my fictional novel”

- forsaking professional writing when using email – queries should still be written professionally

Overall, the conference was informative and also inspiring. One of the best things about this conference is that because it’s in February, it’s still early enough to make good on the new year’s writing resolutions. So now, back to work…

As someone who loves traditional books — the look and feel and weight of them — I have a confession to make: I really like using the Kindle.

I am the co-owner of a Kindle; I probably wouldn’t have bought one on my own, but my husband is a geek (though he prefers the term “early adopter”) and got one right away. It’s mostly his, and I’ve only used it a couple of times … until this week, when I brought it with me on a solo trip. And I have to admit, the Kindle makes an awesome travel companion.

Given all the airline restrictions and baggage fees, I wanted to travel as lightly as possible, which for a writer isn’t always easy (notebooks, laptop, books, etc.). But instead of carrying three or four books with me, I downloaded a few books onto the Kindle — books I’ve been wanting to read but didn’t yet own in physical form. And so I had all my reading material in one lightweight, slender place.

Well, almost all my reading material. I did bring a couple of magazines with me because Kindles are among the devices that must be put away during takeoff and landing.

Among the things I appreciate about the Kindle are: being able to enlarge type size so that I don’t have to dig through and/or haul my bag out of the overhead bin looking for my glasses, which are likely in my checked baggage anyway; being able to read one story, flip to another collection or anthology to read another, then return to the first, all without doing the aforementioned digging around; being able to look up a word at the click of a button; being able to buy a new book at the click of a button.

Spending some quality time with this e-reader made me glad that Forgetting English is available on the Kindle. Many writers would still prefer that their books be available only in traditional form — but I think this is changing. While I still believe that those who love traditional books will continue to buy them — I’d have bought the books I’m reading now in paperback if I hadn’t had a Kindle for this trip — I’m hearing of more and more readers who read exclusively on the Kindle these days. And once I saw how easy it is to download a book — within moments, it appears in your library — I was glad to know that my own book is available at the click of a button. Yes, it’s cheaper and we all make a bit less money — but given the choice, I’d rather have fewer dollars than fewer readers.

I can still remember the first story I ever wrote, when I was maybe eight or nine years old, on school notebook paper in what was then my fairly neat, legible handwriting. I think it may also have been illustrated. Perhaps because, back in my day, we still wrote high-school English papers by hand (I had a word processor in college but didn’t get my first computer until graduate school — and yes, that does make me feel old), I still often write out scenes by hand. I find writing longhand especially helpful when writing a first draft, or when polishing a close-to-final one. I’ve always loved what Natalie Goldberg says about writing by hand: “Arm connected to shoulder, chest, heart.”

But I do remember taking both computer and typing classes (on actual typewriters). And these days, nothing makes you feel quite as old as admitting you used to write by typewriter. Sometimes, when I’m in the Seattle Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park, I hear people younger than me wondering what this odd sculpture is:

(Note to young people: It’s a typewriter eraser. We use to employ these to get rid of typos before we had backspace buttons and the delete key.)

Eventually, the keyboard took the place of the pen and the notebook in my academic life, and even in my writing life. But not for long: I always continued to write by hand, whether taking notes during an interview or scrawling out an outline. And now I use some combination of the two.

Many writers are particular, even superstitious, about the way they get their words on the page. I enjoyed discovering this site featuring Authors A-Z, “an ongoing project featuring the lives, works, and typewriters of the most outstanding authors around the world.” Here, you’ll find out that Harper Lee wrote on an Underwood portable. That Joseph Heller used an SCM Smith Corona Electra. That even Joyce Carol Oates has rejected the computer: She writes in longhand, then types her notes into scenes using “a Japanese made Swintec 1000 electronic typewriter with ‘a little memory’ but no screen.”

And if you’re interested in owning a piece of these antiques, here’s even an (expensive) online store where you can browse old typewriters and jewelry made of their keys. (Check out eBay and flea markets, too.) Over the last few years, my husband and I have been picking up typewriters here and there (we have three Underwoods and and have recently added a Remington), and will probably keep adding to the collection, at least until we run out of space. Only one of ours is in any sort of working condition, but that’s not why we bought them. Even bent and broken, with sticky keys and dried-out ribbon, we think they’re pretty cool — maybe because they always look as if they’re smiling.

Last week, when Macmillan announced it would begin setting higher prices for e-books, Amazon reacted by removing access to the publisher’s Kindle editions as well as its printed books. As you probably know by now, it’s Amazon, not publishers, that sets the prices for e-books — and at $9.99, which includes new releases and bestsellers, publishers and authors worry about books being devalued (not to mention pirated).

But on Sunday, as the New York Times reports, Amazon agreed to Macmillan’s terms, though not at all happily: “‘We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles,’ Amazon said [on its web site]. ‘We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books.’”

Apple’s new iPad has set the stage for giving publishers the upper hand again, by allowing them to sell books in its iBookstore at their own prices, and it looks as if this is having a ripple effect. Under Macmillan’s new terms, reports the Times, the publisher will serve as an agent, taking a 30 percent commission and setting e-books at prices between $12.99 to $14.99. The Macmillian arrangement will happen in March, around the time the iPad tablet hits the stores.