In Which the Weekend Has Both Various and Sundry....

[lagilman]

Saturday:

Day Off. Slept in. I mean, I didn't get out of bed until 10am. It was silly-nice, and I probably could have lazed about all day except there were Things To Do. Two craft fairs, wherein I fell in love with but with common sense and moral guidance (thanks, BF) did not buy a $650 hand-smithed ring of silver, orange garnet and diamond (not my usual thing at all but lovely), but did buy maple syrup, maple sugar, a wooden carved spoon, a (replacement) down quilt, pillar candles, and cornbread. And since it decided not to rain, walked many miles along the UWS, taking photos.



Also, I saw a dragon.


(more NYC2012 photos here)

Sunday

CLANG THUD BANG CLANG Cats, wide-eyed & fluff-tailed: WhatTheHell?! Me: "It's just the Beast waking up for winter, relax."

Yep, the PowerCenter, aka the Beast, aka the furnace for my building, was waking up, a bit at a time, stretching through the pipes and radiators.  A little early by my standards, but we have old folk living here, too...  I note that ElderCat is getting plushy again.  The Catalmanac suggests a hard winter.

The rest of the day: editing, cooking, cleaning, footballl.  In other words: an Autumn Sunday.  Finestkind. Giants won. Sesame-maple ribs for dinner.   Not enough work done, but enough that I feel ok about the day.  Suffice until Monday the evils therein.

And, via the Twitterverse and a discussion of "aspiring author" as a non-useful phrase... I call myself a writer.  I write.  "Author" is a label other people put on me after the fact.  However, some folk seem to think that "writer" isn't enough, that "author" is the longed-for and preferred title.

Discuss?

(I'd love to hear from published and unpublished writers, and also readers-who-don't-write)

Comments

[liari (from livejournal.com)]

As a writer who was only once published in a school publication, and thus not a professional, I don't know that I aspire to the title of "author" so much as I would just like to eventually create a story that touches more than the people in my immediate vicinity that are reading over my shoulder. Since I'm not really a big proponent of titles in general, however, this may not say much.

[blairmacg.livejournal.com]

The older I get, the less I care. :)

I write. Sometimes I collect payment for what results.

[girasole.livejournal.com]

Writers write. I don't know what authors do . I have called myself a writer, and sometimes still do, because I have written stuff for which I have been paid. I do not write fiction, however, and once someone I love and admire told me I wasn't a writer because of that. It made me quite angry.

Aspiring author seems to me to be completely non-useful as a descriptor. Either you write, or you don't.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Way I heard it, lots of people write. Authors have gotten published. A dubious distinction, at best -- at this moment, I am not writing anything. I am still published . . .

[cepetit.myopenid.com (from livejournal.com)]

<SARCASM>
An "author" is the named person or entity who/that holds the initial copyright in a creative work. See U.S. Const. Art. I § 8 cl. 8; see also 17 U.S.C. § 201 (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/201)(a), (b); compare Community for Creative Non-Violence v. Reid, 490 U.S. 730 (1989) (http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=3326238332286533012).

A "writer" is the person(s) who actually create(s) a creative work based on the written word. This is especially true with works for hire, such as H'wood and Penthouse Letters.
</SARCASM>

Sorry if that's too much: I've just spent the last two months transforming a "writer/author" into a "conservatee," and marshaling that estate and seeing how that individual was mistreated by his publishers and agent is making that distinction even more painful than it usually is.

[moonwolf1988.livejournal.com]

To me the only minor distinction is that an author has been professionally published, and when I say professionally I mean by one of the publishing houses that exist whether that's a micro publisher or a big one. An author can also be a writer, because a writer writes, whether that writing is published or not. I don't think so much of web fic writers as authors, because there's a different skill set needed.

Personally I'm a writer. I'm not sure I'd want to be called an author, because it feels both bigger than what I do and I don't have the same skill set I think of when I hear the word author. I don't think I'm making a lot of sense here, to be honest. If I think of the word author I see someone who is, normally, working for someone else, as the publishing house buys the work and then has some say in what happens in that book (and the sequels if there are any). A writer seems to have a bit more freedom, because they don't have anyone telling them that what they're writing may not sell and a lot of the time they don't care.

[camille-is-here.livejournal.com]

They seem like to different concepts to me. When I am writing, or talking about what I do, I am a writer. When describing a relationship to a particular work, in a parenthetical way, I use "author of." So I'd say that I wrote A Legacy..., but would expect someone else to say, "Camille is a writer, and the author of A Legacy..." But I can't imagine saying "I am an author, because author doesn't seem to be an activity, and the relationship it describes is not fully realized in that statement.

[anisosynchronic.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I worked as a tech writer for a while. I don't think of myself as "an author."