Here's a very interesting article in Time by Lev Grossman, about the future of publishing and of literature. Reading it, I felt alternately grumpy, scared, and exhilerated. Grumpy, because I'm a middleaged guy who doesn't handle change well; there's a reason there are so many cats in my books, mainly because I'm so much like a cat myself. I like my comforts and my routine and my little patch of sunlight, and I get snarly and petulant about any changes.
And I'm scared, because I'm a midlist author with a new book coming out in a publishing environment that's changing daily. It's not quite as big a change, say, as the comet that killed the dinosaurs—though maybe it is, and if I follow that metaphor through, I have to wonder if I'm a dinosaur myself (albeit a small one), or one of the early mammals, a scurrying, furry little critter (see above about cats) engineered to survive and even thrive in the new world after the comet.
And I'm exhilarated, because the wild, wide-open new world of writing that Grossman predicts sounds kinda thrilling. Not particularly lucrative, though, but when was it ever?
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