Tuesday, December 12, 2006 Treat yourself to a day of beauty
Well, I have to say, so far I never did end up running off to Tahiti, with a sexy panhandler or otherwise, but I did tell you I was going to talk more about Laura Ingalls Wilder and Uncle Wiggily, so I'm going to tell you quickly, because I am so effing bored with this convention.
When Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote herself into a corner like this, all she had to do was skip ahead to the plague of locusts, or mention Ma's horrible bigotry.
The writer of Uncle Wiggily, Howard Garis, had no such luxury. He was a ghostwriter, and so was his wife, Lilian, and later, so were their children. They were Tom Swift, and the Bobbsey Twins and a bunch of others I confess I've never heard of, but probably would've loved if I'd found them in like, 1912. Some site I clicked on claimed that they (the Garis family, not the Bobbsey twins) wrote thousands of books between them.
I can't imagine, cranking out book after book, week after week. I have only ever written a few books, and only one of them made it to print, and that's because I handwrote and illustrated it. It was ghostwritten, actually. I was the ghostwriter. My housemate Josh came up with the plot and concept, which was about a little sheep who heard voices.
In this way, Josh is similar to Albert Stratemeyer, who started the ominously-named Stratemeyer syndicate, a publishing company that was the first to mass-produce serialized childrens fiction. Babies after babies grew up on this stuff. The syndicate owned the series concepts and the names of the authors. They supplied basic plots. Ghostwriters all over the place turned them out, and kids' chapter books became a consumer product.
What this has to do with me is how much my childhood household scorned formulaic kids' books, and how much it revered "quality" kids books like the ouevre (gross) of Laura Ingalls Wilder, even though without the army of Stratemeyer Syndicate and the precedent they set, Laura Ingalls Wilder would have died broke in the Ozarks.
Funny, too, is how much debate there is about the role of Rose Wilder Lane, Laura Ingalls Wilder's daughter in the Little House books. The three-clicks-worth-of-internet consensus is that it was a collaboration between the Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter, but how boring! Some Little House on the Prairie conspiracy-theorists hold that Laura Ingalls Wilder was a shill, a figurehead, and Rose all but guided the pen in her mother's hand.
The point is, the point, it doesn't matter if I can produce much of much when it comes to books or anything like that. Some of us our ghostwriters and some of us are plucky pioneer girls. Right now I'm not writing, but that's OK, because I'm out fording streams and riding wild ponies.
J/K. This is all made-up rationalization. Maybe I can be both. (Ghost) writer and pioneer girl, I mean. Not both wild ponies.
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that I'm going to update more. I hope it's not all going to be this long-winded, or dragged over so many days. But, if the cats don't fight so loudly they shake the walls off the house, I guess I'll see you soon, internet. posted by Frenz | 12/12/2006 08:02:00 PM
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