fishingboatproceeds:

I am thinking tonight of a year ago, when Sarah and Henry and I were preparing to leave for Amsterdam, huge swaths of the book that would become TFiOS still either unwritten or horrible (and still without a title).

I was sick, and I was also overwhelmed with anxiety, all these constant humming fears: You’re going to die. You won’t finish this book and they’ll have to push back the pub date again. Or you will finish it, but everyone will hate it because it’s a cruel and exploitative book. Your stomach hurts because you have cancer. You will run out of money. etc.

We went to Amsterdam. I got sicker. (Only several months later did it become clear that my gallbladder needed removing.) I also became more and more paralyzed by fear, which generally does not make for great writing. Or any writing, for that matter.

And yet, I wrote. Certainly, my family was insanely supportive—like, impossibly supportive. My editor guided me through with patience and faith and never mentioned how much of both our careers was staked on the book. I also think the memory of Esther made me keep going. 

But I don’t think I would have ever finished The Fault in Our Stars without nerdfighteria. The Dutch nerdfighter community, which has been strong since Tobias was making Hank’s songs into mp3s back in 2007, cheered me on during my months in the Netherlands. But more broadly, nerdfighters offered tremendous inspiration without intending to do so. People say the Internet is a distraction, and it certainly can be, but every day, I saw tweets and emails and YouTube comments and tumblr posts that helped me work. (That’s still true.)

The messages could be about most anything: pennies or Syria or friends or books or love. But what I saw, and what I see so often in nerdfighteria, was people trying to focus outward, trying to imagine others complexly, doing the hard daily work of paying sustained attention to the big and small stories around them. Seeing that, every day, pulled me out of myself enough to finish the book. You showed me how to write, even in pain, and even amid fear.

So I guess all I want to say is thank you for that.

this post was so great. you’re so great, john. nerdfighteria, you’re also so fantastic. I am now going to make myself some toast.

but before I do, I can’t miss an opportunity to say:

I have been thinking about this a bit: http://antispec.com/hq/penguin  

…just sort of contemplating really how the communities we imagine ourselves as part of work but above all how they’re seen from the perspective of people who don’t consider themselves part of the nf community/youtube community/however you like to put it.

Firstly, let’s get this straight: I’m not a designer. In fact, I’m so disgustingly far from a designer that anything I draw looks like the scribble monster out of “Fear Her” and it’s especially embarrassing when my rare scribbles are contrasted with my sister’s masterful creations — she is an actual artist and stuff. My other sister might not have a BA in fine art but she too is amazing at art and is one of those wondermummy figures who papier maches with one hand and plays with trains with her toddler with the other hand. I’m a university student in my final year, I work in holidays, during termtime when I can etc. and the way I earn my living is only connected with the often beautiful artwork, covers, posters and so on created by designers in that I sell the books behind the jackets.

The thing I find frustrating about part of the response to this (and I really don’t want to make it seem like I’m attacking the anti-spec movement as a whole, I’m not, I think it’s an important campaign to tackle an important and widespread problem) is that in the conversation about the campaign there’s this assumption of what a fan is. Most specifically, I read the assumption as being that fans (and thus, fan art) only exists in relation to an exploitative dynamic between the fans and the “celebrity” they “idolise”.

Not to get too tangential about it but I’ve felt increasingly aware of the treatment of that dynamic just through watching the YouTube community change since I first joined in 2006. I have seen many of my friends making things, talking about them and then their audience feeling betrayed because it’s the first time they’ve ever put something they’ve made out there for anyone to buy, as though that YouTuber were secretly creating some sort of campaign against them. Equally I (sometimes, not often) see creators treating their audience appallingly, making them feel like they have to buy something out of some strange entitlement. However, and this is a big however, that is not the community we’re a part of, that is not the community from which the amazing covers we’ve seen be uploaded sprung and however big a company is or however many books the author has sold, this is not automatically an exploitation situation. I suppose what I’m saying is… I know how it looks but that’s not a sufficient assessment of the ethics of this competition. Commenter James Mathias put it well I think when he said of potential entrants, “And those who do make a living doing design work, know what they are getting into, and are fans as well”. This competition is transparent in its aims and rewards and follows months of seeing people of all ages come up with great, fun and interesting covers for a book they haven’t even read yet!

And god, I don’t even know, it’s 2.45 here now but I understand, as much as someone outside the design industry can I think, that there are people who think this competition is demeaning to designers and I totally agree with the assessment that spec as a whole is very damaging to the design industry. Images are more commodified than ever before and as such they’re integrated into a system which looks for the highest quality for the lowest price. The production of images can be done from most people’s homes (whether or not they’re quality images is a different story, but still they can be produced). But this specific case isn’t a case of spec, I really, hand on heart don’t think it is because of who it involves and who it is and is not engaging.

& now I shall read a book or something. dftba.

feel free to put your thoughts in my /ask, write a post of your own, reblog & comment, or respond courtesy of the box that will appear once I’ve included this question mark guy —> ?

I am sitting in the café in the English building listening to Laurena and reading through the unbelievably kind messages twenty two of you sent me after my thoroughly wobbly moment last night. Thank you.

It’s really nice here. I’m much calmer, trying to write my way home, though mainly via essays and annotated bibliographies for my classes. The last seminar I had today was my two hour American Novel class for which we read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and I loved the discussion. I think the seminar room is my happy place, you know? Not to oversimplify it or anything but when we’re comparing and contrasting Eggers’ lattice to Whitman’s grass or when we’re looking at the problems of Nancy K. Miller’s suggestion that the appeal of memoir is national identification or when we’re playing with old issues of McSweeny’s… then my mind is calm and makes sense of things.

There’s part of me that’s really not sure how I’m going to face the world when I can’t sit in a seminar room for two hours and discuss Dave Eggers. Luckily I have friends who like to read and am a proud resident of the best online community a young woman could ask for (and no, I don’t mean tumblr).

Today at work it occurred to me that Gene Zion was filthy.

Par exemple… family favourite: Harry the Dirty Dog In Your Pants.

And then the follow ups and other titles:

• Harry and the Lady Next Door in Your Pants.
  
• No Roses for Harry In Your Pants. (A tale of abstinence? Disappointment? A woman who’d had asparagus that day?)
• The Meanest Squirrel I Ever Met In Your Pants is much more of a let down than The Sugar Mouse Cake In Your Pants. From now on gentlemenparts and ladyparts shall be exclusively referred to as Sugar Mice Cakes.
• All Falling Down In Your Pants.
• And classics for the neighbourhood, Dear Garbage Man In Your Pants and The Plant Sitter In Your Pants.
• The Summer Snowman In Your Pants intrigues me/makes me think this must be a cautionary tale about STDs.
• Miss Nelson is Missing In Your Pants!

fishingboatproceeds:

cityclearsandsunascends:

I’m not going to get The Fault in Our Stars the day it comes out.
I’ll probably get it in the mail a few days after.
Be warned.
If I see any spoilers on my dash

Seriously. I know the book doesn’t come out for five months, but early warning is fair warning: Posting TFiOS spoilers will indeed result in Tobuscus peeing on everything your love.

On a related note: Six years after Looking for Alaska was first published, people feel very comfortable posting spoilers. But you have to remember: Many nerdfighters haven’t read Looking for Alaska. It’s not their fault they were in fourth grade when it came out. So no spoilers for my other books either, please!

There is, of course, a surefire way to avoid spoilers: Preorder now and read it on January 10th. :)

Wikipedia tells me fourth grade is 9/10 (so Year Five). It is terrifying to me that there were people in fourth grade when LFA came out. I know  there are lots of these people but I make the weird and perhaps narcissistic assumption that I am always the youngest. It’s like people who were MINUS NUMBERS when Philosopher’s Stone came out. MINUS NUMBERS!