You are a purchasing agent for a large corporation or a secretary or a mid-level manager, or you are a waiter, a teacher, a used car salesperson. You took the job twelve years ago or fifteen years ago or twenty years ago, just out of college where you earned a degree in English or history or accounting or teaching. But what you really want to be, what you've always wanted to be, is a writer.
You wrote the first few chapters of your novel on your lunch hour but soon had to start getting up early to write and spend evenings and weekends at the computer. You realized early on that it's not quite as easy to write a novel as you thought it would be. You took some writing classes and joined a writing group. You wrote some short stories and even got a couple published and won a fairly prestigious literary prize. You gave up on the novel you were writing to write what you were told would sell, genre fiction, a murder mystery that transcends it's genre. It took you seven years to write it but when it was done it was really quite good. You had a few friends read it and they loved it. You even had a critique done for which you spend a big chunk of money and followed most of the editor's suggestions.
You sent out queries to a number of agents and publishers and got no response or a form rejection--unbelievable after how hard you've worked. You sent out more queries and tried a number of regional small presses. You got a new, small publishing company to pick up the book, no advance, no book tour and you have to pay for review copies but you are getting twelve percent royalties and are assured that the distributor is one of the best in the industry, whatever that means.
The publisher says the distributor will peddle your book to book stores and of course your book will be available on Amazon.com and through Barnesandnoble.com. No book tour is fine with you because you really don't want to have to speak in front of large groups of people. You might have to go to a couple of conferences to sit at the publisher's table with your book. That's fine so long as you don't have to travel too far and stay overnight anywhere because the publisher won't pay for it--aren't they supposed to cover travel expenses?
Okay, the book is being published. The initial print run is five thousand copies. You are calculating your royalties and it seems pretty good. The publisher will send pre-publication review copies to pre-review companies to get quotes to put on the jacket and in the distributor's catalog, so a second printing will be a sure thing, right? You'll be able to quit your day job and live off the royalties with maybe a part-time job on the side until your next book comes out after which its easy street, you can devote all your time to writing. Or maybe you can move to someplace like the Philippines where life is easy and cheap and you can spend all your time writing the next book.
Suddenly your publisher wants revisions. Lots of revisions. But you were done with this manuscript. You have started the next one. You don't have time to spend going over the manuscript another time. But you do it and send back the revisions. Another round of revisions and a bit of a nasty rejoinder from the editor when you complain. You consider scrapping the deal but the book will be out any day, right? But months pass before you get the galleys and now they expect you to go over the galleys to be sure there are no errors—isn't that their job? Then the review copies go out and you are told the book will be in the distributor's fall catalog eight months from now. Eight months! How can it take eight more months? Then production is pushed back six month but the publisher won't tell you why. The book will come out spring of the following year. By then almost two years will have passed since you signed on with the publisher. You are still working as a purchasing agent for the large corporation. Progress on the second book is slow and you wonder why you even bother.
Then the book comes out. You get a couple good reviews in the local paper, your friend at the library says the reserve list for your book is through the roof and the library system is buying twenty-five more copies. You watch the numbers on Amazon.com jump around. You're anxiously awaiting your first royalty check and the announcement that they will be doing a second run of ten thousand this time. But the royalty check, when it comes months later, is seven hundred dollars and you are at over a million and half in Amazon's ranking down from three hundred and seventy-five thousand and you realize you don't really know what these numbers mean. There are no more reviews because the book has been out for six months and it is old news. The publisher hasn't even asked you to sit at their table at another conference after the first one when you complained that you had to drive five hours to get there and the motel was going to cost sixty-five dollars, and you declined a book tour at five independent books stores in New York and New England arranged by the distributor—your book is set in Connecticut--because you already said you didn't want to do a book tour and the publisher wasn't going to pay expenses.
So now what?
Now you readjust your expectations and take a look at why you are writing. If you are writing to make it big, unless you are brilliant, you might be better off buying lottery tickets—Oprah no longer champions undiscovered, living writers the way she once did. If you are writing to make a living that will allow you to keep writing, you will probably have to live modestly and work a part-time job with benefits if you can find it until you have at least four or five books out and have developed a readership. Or you could become a career writer.
I wrote about the writing life in my last post. Anonymous, a career writer, commented that he/she made a living writing magazine pieces, articles for newspapers, advertising copy, pieces for medical journals and has worked as an editor and copywriter. One can also become a technical writer writing manuals and instruction booklets or maybe even ghost write for other writers. One can also teach writing classes or become a consultant or develop a blog with a readership and host advertising to bring in some revenue. There are lots of ways to make a living writing if what you want to do is write. It is a lot of hard work and constant hustle at least early on if you work freelance. For those who don't enjoy this kind of writing and want to write fiction or “creative” non-fiction, writing as a job may leave the reservoir dry.
Many people who have started their own businesses—even the ones who are successful--report that if they'd known what they were getting into, they never would have done it. I am in touch with many fiction writers who are very upset to be disillusioned by the whole process. They don't actually come out and say that they never would have started writing had they known how difficult it is to earn a living as a novelist but the frustration level speaks volumes. Somehow they got the idea that it should be easier, that if they found someone willing to publish their novel, the rest would fall into place. But writing the novel is the easy part, the hard work comes once you have that contract signed. Much of the work for making a success of a first book falls to the author. That's the simple reality—publishing is not for the squeamish.
Sept 1 - Oct 1 2008 deadline: Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize Submission Guidelines: A $12,000 advance and publication by Graywolf in 2010 will be awarded to the best previously unpublished, full-length work of literary nonfiction by a writer not yet established in the genre. Robert Polito will serve as the judge.
Graywolf Press's prose guidelines can be found at Prose Submission Guidelines.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Thursday, August 21, 2008
On the writing life
I recently spoke with a would-be writer who had produced something less than 20,000 word, the first he had written as a writer. He wanted to get a publisher to tell him if his words were any good or if he should just hang it up. Less then 20,000 words. He contacted four publishers and was ultimately referred to The Queue. I spoke to him about the writing life.
The writing life is what writers like to write about when they aren't writing what they really want to be writing or should be writing. Those who can, do; those who are stuck, write about whatever they can, the writing life being a favorite.
The writing life means something different to every writer but one thing is probably common to us all. Writing defines our lives in ways that demand a tremendous sacrifice of time and money. We give up time with spouses, kids and friends to devote hours everyday to writing. If all is going well, we crave the time spent writing. We have created a habit, an addiction, that must be fed. Dry spells mean we loose the habit and we are often despondent when this happens.
I live with a writer and I call myself a writer between long periods of dormancy. I have three novels on my computer hard drive and have won a couple of significant competitions. I have one publishing credit beyond this blog--a short story published as part of the prize for one of the competitions I won. For a lot of writers, writing demands the time and energy that could be used to pursue other careers. That choice can mean a life on the edge of poverty without savings, without health insurance. Periods of dormancy for me have coincided with periods of seeking to build a career--retail management, computer programming. Being poor gets old.
For twenty years, from the time I decided I would write, I have taken hundreds of hours of classes, spent hundreds of hours reading what a writer needs to read, devoted hundreds of hours in writing groups, reading other writers' work and listening to mine be dissected. I've spend thousands of dollars on classes, on books, on paper and ink, on paid editors to critique my work. I have probably paid hundreds of thousands of dollars on the opportunity costs of choosing jobs that would not interfere with my writing.
A friend once said that being married is a choice one has to make every day--he's a guy of course, most women only have to choose about once a week. I think being a writer is a choice we make everyday. It's a choice we agonize over and when we choose otherwise we feel a profound sense of loss.
The writing life is what writers like to write about when they aren't writing what they really want to be writing or should be writing. Those who can, do; those who are stuck, write about whatever they can, the writing life being a favorite.
The writing life means something different to every writer but one thing is probably common to us all. Writing defines our lives in ways that demand a tremendous sacrifice of time and money. We give up time with spouses, kids and friends to devote hours everyday to writing. If all is going well, we crave the time spent writing. We have created a habit, an addiction, that must be fed. Dry spells mean we loose the habit and we are often despondent when this happens.
I live with a writer and I call myself a writer between long periods of dormancy. I have three novels on my computer hard drive and have won a couple of significant competitions. I have one publishing credit beyond this blog--a short story published as part of the prize for one of the competitions I won. For a lot of writers, writing demands the time and energy that could be used to pursue other careers. That choice can mean a life on the edge of poverty without savings, without health insurance. Periods of dormancy for me have coincided with periods of seeking to build a career--retail management, computer programming. Being poor gets old.
For twenty years, from the time I decided I would write, I have taken hundreds of hours of classes, spent hundreds of hours reading what a writer needs to read, devoted hundreds of hours in writing groups, reading other writers' work and listening to mine be dissected. I've spend thousands of dollars on classes, on books, on paper and ink, on paid editors to critique my work. I have probably paid hundreds of thousands of dollars on the opportunity costs of choosing jobs that would not interfere with my writing.
A friend once said that being married is a choice one has to make every day--he's a guy of course, most women only have to choose about once a week. I think being a writer is a choice we make everyday. It's a choice we agonize over and when we choose otherwise we feel a profound sense of loss.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Lazy days of summer
Now that most of the bugs have left and I can enjoy my deck overlooking wetland and woods and a small sluggish river that wends its way past our place here in beautiful northwestern Wisconsin, I am wont to let things slide. Okay, I am wont to let things slide anyway. I have never had trouble relaxing. I count it as one of the great pleasures of living and a key to happiness. Relaxing, not letting things slide. Letting things slide can actually undermine relaxation. In the back of my mind there is a nagging spark, a synapse that keeps firing, telling me there is something else I should be going.
Blogging is what I should be doing today. But it is 68 degrees, a slight bit overcast, with just enough of a breeze to stir up the heady fragrance of pine, cut grass and sodden vegetation (one has to love the smell of sodden vegetation to live so close to a slow moving stream with stagnant backwaters)--the perfect conditions for taking a pillow out to the glider, or maybe hanging my Mexican string hammock between the poles of the clothesline, grabbing my half-read Richard Russo's The Risk Pool--man that man can write--and lolling away the better part of the day.
But I have work to do. I'm supposed to be blogging twice a week, a standard I set for myself so it is sometimes easy to let it slide. Too easy. Is it really so important to The Queue, the company I represent, that I blog regularly? Don't people already have enough to read without me asking them to pop in and see what I have to offer as an adjunct to our business--the business of helping writers improve their writing?
My goal for this blog is that it will become a place writers come to for information, inspiration and entertainment. I'd like to be able to provide a one stop timely source for what's coming up for writers in the way of conferences and contests--two months out so we have some time to plan. I'd like to provide information on the craft of writing and resources to help us improve our skills, stay motivated, find the right agent or publisher, find an audience, market our books ....
I'd like this blog to showcase short pieces of writing from my readers--excerpts, short poems, essays, lists, musings, whatever--to help inspire us to keep at it. Writing is its own reward.
And I'd like to entertain or to inspire writers to seek out entertainment. The playful, open and relaxed mind can not help but produce great and lovely ideas. All work and no play squeezes our minds into hard little rocks that rattle in our skulls when we move our heads!
Relaxing and reading on a lovely summer day is my entertainment. So really, I am obliged to let things slide once in awhile.
Luckily, with a good book and a good loll in the sun, I can shut off, for short times, that nagging spark at the back of my mind that interferes with my relaxation . Just the other day I let myself take half an hour to drift off to sleep on the glider in the sun, my book on the ground beside me, only to become aware of a wet canine tongue lapping at my nose. My sleep was so deep that I had to struggle awake. I walked around the entire yard looking for a dog that didn't exist before I realized the slobbering tongue was part of a dream. Hmm, I wonder ....
Relax, let things slide for a little while, you're allowed!!
Blogging is what I should be doing today. But it is 68 degrees, a slight bit overcast, with just enough of a breeze to stir up the heady fragrance of pine, cut grass and sodden vegetation (one has to love the smell of sodden vegetation to live so close to a slow moving stream with stagnant backwaters)--the perfect conditions for taking a pillow out to the glider, or maybe hanging my Mexican string hammock between the poles of the clothesline, grabbing my half-read Richard Russo's The Risk Pool--man that man can write--and lolling away the better part of the day.
But I have work to do. I'm supposed to be blogging twice a week, a standard I set for myself so it is sometimes easy to let it slide. Too easy. Is it really so important to The Queue, the company I represent, that I blog regularly? Don't people already have enough to read without me asking them to pop in and see what I have to offer as an adjunct to our business--the business of helping writers improve their writing?
My goal for this blog is that it will become a place writers come to for information, inspiration and entertainment. I'd like to be able to provide a one stop timely source for what's coming up for writers in the way of conferences and contests--two months out so we have some time to plan. I'd like to provide information on the craft of writing and resources to help us improve our skills, stay motivated, find the right agent or publisher, find an audience, market our books ....
I'd like this blog to showcase short pieces of writing from my readers--excerpts, short poems, essays, lists, musings, whatever--to help inspire us to keep at it. Writing is its own reward.
And I'd like to entertain or to inspire writers to seek out entertainment. The playful, open and relaxed mind can not help but produce great and lovely ideas. All work and no play squeezes our minds into hard little rocks that rattle in our skulls when we move our heads!
Relaxing and reading on a lovely summer day is my entertainment. So really, I am obliged to let things slide once in awhile.
Luckily, with a good book and a good loll in the sun, I can shut off, for short times, that nagging spark at the back of my mind that interferes with my relaxation . Just the other day I let myself take half an hour to drift off to sleep on the glider in the sun, my book on the ground beside me, only to become aware of a wet canine tongue lapping at my nose. My sleep was so deep that I had to struggle awake. I walked around the entire yard looking for a dog that didn't exist before I realized the slobbering tongue was part of a dream. Hmm, I wonder ....
Relax, let things slide for a little while, you're allowed!!
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Another September competition and the importance of not going it alone
Here is a competition for our wild west loving, short story writing friends.
Deadline: Sept 15, 2008, Tony Hillerman Mystery Short Story Contest, Co-sponsored by Cowboys & Indians magazine, Seeking 2500 word unpublished mystery short stories set in the Western or Southwestern United States, Story must include at least one cowboy and/or Native American character, Prize: $1500 and publication in the March issue of the magazine.
The importance of not going it alone.
This short piece about the importance of not going it alone as a writer was submitted to me anonymously. I have often wondered if most writers are introverts. I know I am which makes it hard for me to connect with other people in most areas of my life. Were it not for The Loft, a terrific writing organization in Minneapolis that offers top notch writing classes, and a writing group that I came upon serendipitously, I would probably still be going it alone.
Don't Climb the Mountain Alone by Anonymous
I'm not a mountain climber, but I assume that if I were to take up the sport I would need a lot of help learning the skills needed to be successful. Would any novice climber in their right mind ever tackled the Matterhorn, K2 or Everest alone and without instruction, practice and support? I don't think so. So what makes us think we can write a novel all by ourselves?
Arrogance, ignorance and unfettered enthusiasm. That's my excuse, and that's why my first book languished in a box in my closet for years before I realized that I could not learn to write from books alone. I needed real, live help in the form of classes and other writers.
As with climbing where there are a lot of people involved in a successful ascent--sponsors, outfitters, fellow climbers, guides, Sherpas--there should be many people involved in the writing process from the beginning--writing instructors, classmates, writing groups, critical readers and editors. One can claim all of the glory when the book is finished, but every experienced author knows that the completion of a book is never a solo ascent. That's why most books include, and should include, an acknowledgments page.
I can't stress enough the importance of taking classes, joining a writer's groups and getting critical evaluations. The writing classes and writing groups I've been a part of have helped me tremendously to rewrite my first novel and to draft, revise and revise again my second and now my third novel. I have learned in classes and from fellow writers how to distinguish premise, plot and story, create setting, write description, balance expositions with scenes and dialogue, develop dynamic and believable characters, maintain voice and point of view, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And I have honed these skills of my craft by seeking out critical evaluations from readers and paid editors.
I advise any new writer who has not taken writing classes to enroll ASAP. If no classes are available in your area, check out on-line classes.
I would advise any emerging writer not part of a writer's group to find a group or create a group. Meet every week or at least twice a month, and push each other to contribute regularly.
The writer's group I joined five years ago has grown and shrunk over almost 20 years from as few as three to as many as eight members. We email each other our chapters at least two days before our meeting so that everyone will have time to print the pages, read them critically and make notes in the margins and at the end. On group night, we go over each work carefully. We're critical, yet supportive and we have a lot of fun.
Everyone in our group is working on a novel length manuscript but we submit short stories and other pieces of writing to the group as well. We get advise on agencies and publishers to query, how to write queries and synopses, we share information on conferences and contests and we help each other deal with reject and celebrate triumphs.
You can find writing groups through local writing programs and classes, at coffee shops and sometimes at your local library. Or you can create your own group by posting notices at these locations. Meet in member's homes or at coffee shops or the library. If you can't find a writing group in your area, look for a group on-line.
Take my advice, don't try to climb the mountain alone. It's more fun with other writers who understand the writer's life, the life you have chosen.
Class link
Class link
Group link
Group link
Links provided here for on-line classes and groups have not been vetted. Research any website thoroughly before enrolling. Other classes and groups can be found by searching on "Writing Classes" and "Writers Groups"
Deadline: Sept 15, 2008, Tony Hillerman Mystery Short Story Contest, Co-sponsored by Cowboys & Indians magazine, Seeking 2500 word unpublished mystery short stories set in the Western or Southwestern United States, Story must include at least one cowboy and/or Native American character, Prize: $1500 and publication in the March issue of the magazine.
The importance of not going it alone.
This short piece about the importance of not going it alone as a writer was submitted to me anonymously. I have often wondered if most writers are introverts. I know I am which makes it hard for me to connect with other people in most areas of my life. Were it not for The Loft, a terrific writing organization in Minneapolis that offers top notch writing classes, and a writing group that I came upon serendipitously, I would probably still be going it alone.
Don't Climb the Mountain Alone by Anonymous
I'm not a mountain climber, but I assume that if I were to take up the sport I would need a lot of help learning the skills needed to be successful. Would any novice climber in their right mind ever tackled the Matterhorn, K2 or Everest alone and without instruction, practice and support? I don't think so. So what makes us think we can write a novel all by ourselves?
Arrogance, ignorance and unfettered enthusiasm. That's my excuse, and that's why my first book languished in a box in my closet for years before I realized that I could not learn to write from books alone. I needed real, live help in the form of classes and other writers.
As with climbing where there are a lot of people involved in a successful ascent--sponsors, outfitters, fellow climbers, guides, Sherpas--there should be many people involved in the writing process from the beginning--writing instructors, classmates, writing groups, critical readers and editors. One can claim all of the glory when the book is finished, but every experienced author knows that the completion of a book is never a solo ascent. That's why most books include, and should include, an acknowledgments page.
I can't stress enough the importance of taking classes, joining a writer's groups and getting critical evaluations. The writing classes and writing groups I've been a part of have helped me tremendously to rewrite my first novel and to draft, revise and revise again my second and now my third novel. I have learned in classes and from fellow writers how to distinguish premise, plot and story, create setting, write description, balance expositions with scenes and dialogue, develop dynamic and believable characters, maintain voice and point of view, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And I have honed these skills of my craft by seeking out critical evaluations from readers and paid editors.
I advise any new writer who has not taken writing classes to enroll ASAP. If no classes are available in your area, check out on-line classes.
I would advise any emerging writer not part of a writer's group to find a group or create a group. Meet every week or at least twice a month, and push each other to contribute regularly.
The writer's group I joined five years ago has grown and shrunk over almost 20 years from as few as three to as many as eight members. We email each other our chapters at least two days before our meeting so that everyone will have time to print the pages, read them critically and make notes in the margins and at the end. On group night, we go over each work carefully. We're critical, yet supportive and we have a lot of fun.
Everyone in our group is working on a novel length manuscript but we submit short stories and other pieces of writing to the group as well. We get advise on agencies and publishers to query, how to write queries and synopses, we share information on conferences and contests and we help each other deal with reject and celebrate triumphs.
You can find writing groups through local writing programs and classes, at coffee shops and sometimes at your local library. Or you can create your own group by posting notices at these locations. Meet in member's homes or at coffee shops or the library. If you can't find a writing group in your area, look for a group on-line.
Take my advice, don't try to climb the mountain alone. It's more fun with other writers who understand the writer's life, the life you have chosen.
Class link
Class link
Group link
Group link
Links provided here for on-line classes and groups have not been vetted. Research any website thoroughly before enrolling. Other classes and groups can be found by searching on "Writing Classes" and "Writers Groups"
Friday, August 1, 2008
Dennis Cass: "Everybody’s a marketing genius."
Reading Under the Covers is a Bella Stander's blog subtitled, Commentary on Writing, Publishing & a Bunch of Other Stuff. Bella is a publishing industry writer, speaker and connector based in Denver, Colorado, according to her Blogger profile. She has been blogging since 2005. On Monday, July 21 she posted an interview with Dennis Cass of Book Launch 2.0 fame.
If you have not seen Book Launch 2.0, it is a wonderful example of what is an internet phenomenon--short video clips that are so engaging they spread like wildfire and can circumnavigate the earth in a matter of minutes. BL 2.0 is not a book trailer (short video clips advertising an author's new book viewable on publisher's and author's websites as well as on Amazon.com or Barnesandnoble.com) because it does not mention the title of the Cass's book (HEAD CASE: How I Almost Lost My Mind Trying to Understand My Brain). The clip did translate into sales for Cass's books however. Accoring to Cass, the clip was an experiment that proved to be quite successful.
Dennis Cass is a past student of Ian Leask. Ian is the founder of Scarletta Press and The Queue. A British transplant, Ian has been part of the literary scene in Minneapolis for over twenty years, has been teaching writing courses for almost that long, providing private manuscript consultation and is a producer/host for KFAI radio's Write On! Radio. Ian sends his congratulations to Dennis Cass.
Check out the interview then go out and find yourself a video making friend!!
If you have not seen Book Launch 2.0, it is a wonderful example of what is an internet phenomenon--short video clips that are so engaging they spread like wildfire and can circumnavigate the earth in a matter of minutes. BL 2.0 is not a book trailer (short video clips advertising an author's new book viewable on publisher's and author's websites as well as on Amazon.com or Barnesandnoble.com) because it does not mention the title of the Cass's book (HEAD CASE: How I Almost Lost My Mind Trying to Understand My Brain). The clip did translate into sales for Cass's books however. Accoring to Cass, the clip was an experiment that proved to be quite successful.
Dennis Cass is a past student of Ian Leask. Ian is the founder of Scarletta Press and The Queue. A British transplant, Ian has been part of the literary scene in Minneapolis for over twenty years, has been teaching writing courses for almost that long, providing private manuscript consultation and is a producer/host for KFAI radio's Write On! Radio. Ian sends his congratulations to Dennis Cass.
Check out the interview then go out and find yourself a video making friend!!
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
August and September writing competitions
Here are some writing competitions that offer cash prizes or publication. Most require entry fees. Information given here is not complete nor have I vetted these competitions so please research the organizations before submitting. Sorry for the short notice on early August competitions!
August Deadlines
Deadline: August 3, 2008 Rose City Romance Writers 2008 Golden Rose entries of 55 total pages of a completed manuscript excerpt and synopsis (both judged). Completely electronic submission. $35.00 fee. Prize is exposure to editors and possible contract.
Deadline: August 8, 2008, The 5th Annual Gival Press Short Story Award , submissions of a previously unpublished original (not a translation) short story in English must be approximately 5,000 to 15,000 words of high literary quality, $1,000 prize, $25.00 fee.
Deadline: August 15, 2008, ERIAN PRESS and THE BEST BOOK AWARDS, $50 ENTRY FEE, Best Book Awards were established to recognize meritorious works by writers who self-published or had their books published by a small press or independent book publisher. POD books are eligible. Open to selected book length fiction and non-fiction titles with a 2007 or 2008 copyright, published in the English language and targeted for an adult audience in the North American market. Two Grand Prizes of $500.
Deadline: August 15, 2008, Warren Adler Short Story Contest , humor theme from satire to farce, from the whimsical to the uproarious, 1,000 - 2,500 words, entry fee up until August 1st is $15, after August 1st entry fee is $20.00. Five prizes: 1st Prize: $1,000, People's Choice Prize $500, remaining finalists receive $150 each.
Deadline: Aug 29, 2008 KATHERINE ANNE PORTER PRIZE IN SHORT FICTION, Prize: $1,000.00. Entry fee: $25.00. Entries can be a combination of short-shorts, short stories, and novellas, from 100 to 200 book pages in length (word count between 27,500 and 50,000). Material should be previously unpublished in book form.
Deadline: Aug 31, 2008, Glimmer Train is running monthly competitions, August--very short fiction up to 3,000 words, $15.00 fee $1,200 first place plus publication and copies other prizes $500/$300
September Deadlines
Deadline: Sept 1, 2008, American Literary Review, The winner in each category (Short Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, and Poetry) will receive $ 1,000 and publication in our Fall 2009 issue. Short Fiction (limit 8,000 words), Creative Nonfiction (limit 6,500 words), one work per entry ($15), per work.
Deadline: Sept 1, 2008 MIGHTY RIVER SHORT STORY CONTEST Prize: $500.00 and publication in Big Muddy: A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley. Entry fee: $15.00, best short story relating to the Mississippi River, the River Valley, or a sister River: its landscape, people, culture, history, current events, or future. Semi-finalists will be chosen by a regional team of published writers. The final manuscript will be chosen by Susan Swartwout, publisher of Southeast Missouri State University Press.
Deadline: September 10, 2008, Hunger Mountain, The Vermont College Journal of Arts & Letters, Second Annual Hunger Mountain Creative Nonfiction Prize One $1,000.00 prize winner receives publication in the Spring 2009 Issue; two honorable mentions receive $100.00 each, $15.00 fee.
Late addition, deadline: Sept 15, 2008, Tony Hillerman Mystery Short Story Contest, Co-sponsored by Cowboys & Indians magazine, Seeking 2500 word unpublished mystery short stories set in the Western or Southwestern United States, Story must include at least one cowboy and/or Native American character, Prize: $1500 and publication in the March issue of the magazine.
Deadline: Sept 20, 2008, LITERAL LATTE ESSAY AWARDS, Prize: $1,000.00. Send unpublished essays, 8,000 word max. All styles and subjects. First Prize: $1,000. Second Prize: $300. Third Prize: $200. Include $10 reading fee per essay or $15 includes fee for 2 essay. All entries considered for publication.
Deadline: Sept 21, 2008, GLASS WOMAN PRIZE, for a work of short fiction or creative non-fiction (prose) written by a woman between 50 and 5,000 words. The top prize for the fourth Glass Woman Prize award is US $600 and possible (but not obligatory) online publication; two runners up prizes of $100 each. Subject must be of significance to women. Citerion is passion, excellence, and authenticity in the woman’s writing voice. Previously published work and simultaneous submissions are OK.
Deadline: Sept 30, 2008 Glimmer Train is running monthly competitions, Septerber is open fiction 2,000 – 20,000 words, $20.00 fee $2,000 first place plus publication and copies other prizes $1,000/$600
Break a leg!
August Deadlines
Deadline: August 3, 2008 Rose City Romance Writers 2008 Golden Rose entries of 55 total pages of a completed manuscript excerpt and synopsis (both judged). Completely electronic submission. $35.00 fee. Prize is exposure to editors and possible contract.
Deadline: August 8, 2008, The 5th Annual Gival Press Short Story Award , submissions of a previously unpublished original (not a translation) short story in English must be approximately 5,000 to 15,000 words of high literary quality, $1,000 prize, $25.00 fee.
Deadline: August 15, 2008, ERIAN PRESS and THE BEST BOOK AWARDS, $50 ENTRY FEE, Best Book Awards were established to recognize meritorious works by writers who self-published or had their books published by a small press or independent book publisher. POD books are eligible. Open to selected book length fiction and non-fiction titles with a 2007 or 2008 copyright, published in the English language and targeted for an adult audience in the North American market. Two Grand Prizes of $500.
Deadline: August 15, 2008, Warren Adler Short Story Contest , humor theme from satire to farce, from the whimsical to the uproarious, 1,000 - 2,500 words, entry fee up until August 1st is $15, after August 1st entry fee is $20.00. Five prizes: 1st Prize: $1,000, People's Choice Prize $500, remaining finalists receive $150 each.
Deadline: Aug 29, 2008 KATHERINE ANNE PORTER PRIZE IN SHORT FICTION, Prize: $1,000.00. Entry fee: $25.00. Entries can be a combination of short-shorts, short stories, and novellas, from 100 to 200 book pages in length (word count between 27,500 and 50,000). Material should be previously unpublished in book form.
Deadline: Aug 31, 2008, Glimmer Train is running monthly competitions, August--very short fiction up to 3,000 words, $15.00 fee $1,200 first place plus publication and copies other prizes $500/$300
September Deadlines
Deadline: Sept 1, 2008, American Literary Review, The winner in each category (Short Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, and Poetry) will receive $ 1,000 and publication in our Fall 2009 issue. Short Fiction (limit 8,000 words), Creative Nonfiction (limit 6,500 words), one work per entry ($15), per work.
Deadline: Sept 1, 2008 MIGHTY RIVER SHORT STORY CONTEST Prize: $500.00 and publication in Big Muddy: A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley. Entry fee: $15.00, best short story relating to the Mississippi River, the River Valley, or a sister River: its landscape, people, culture, history, current events, or future. Semi-finalists will be chosen by a regional team of published writers. The final manuscript will be chosen by Susan Swartwout, publisher of Southeast Missouri State University Press.
Deadline: September 10, 2008, Hunger Mountain, The Vermont College Journal of Arts & Letters, Second Annual Hunger Mountain Creative Nonfiction Prize One $1,000.00 prize winner receives publication in the Spring 2009 Issue; two honorable mentions receive $100.00 each, $15.00 fee.
Late addition, deadline: Sept 15, 2008, Tony Hillerman Mystery Short Story Contest, Co-sponsored by Cowboys & Indians magazine, Seeking 2500 word unpublished mystery short stories set in the Western or Southwestern United States, Story must include at least one cowboy and/or Native American character, Prize: $1500 and publication in the March issue of the magazine.
Deadline: Sept 20, 2008, LITERAL LATTE ESSAY AWARDS, Prize: $1,000.00. Send unpublished essays, 8,000 word max. All styles and subjects. First Prize: $1,000. Second Prize: $300. Third Prize: $200. Include $10 reading fee per essay or $15 includes fee for 2 essay. All entries considered for publication.
Deadline: Sept 21, 2008, GLASS WOMAN PRIZE, for a work of short fiction or creative non-fiction (prose) written by a woman between 50 and 5,000 words. The top prize for the fourth Glass Woman Prize award is US $600 and possible (but not obligatory) online publication; two runners up prizes of $100 each. Subject must be of significance to women. Citerion is passion, excellence, and authenticity in the woman’s writing voice. Previously published work and simultaneous submissions are OK.
Deadline: Sept 30, 2008 Glimmer Train is running monthly competitions, Septerber is open fiction 2,000 – 20,000 words, $20.00 fee $2,000 first place plus publication and copies other prizes $1,000/$600
Break a leg!
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
The capitalistic publishing game
My favorite blogging literary agent, Nathan Bransford, should be charging tuition for his blog posts. The industry's best kept secrets are being revealed almost daily--if they really are secrets. Asking the right questions is a big part of the learning curve in the publishing world. Nathan answers the questions most of us don't know enough yet to ask.
Check out Monday's post at NathanBransford.blogspot.com. The more we learn about what agents are looking at in their query mail, the better we will be able to gauge how well our query is apt to do--will my query stand out because my concept, the premise of my book, is something new that the market needs and will clamor for, or am I tauting a concept that is just like the last one and indistinguishable from the next one. Is my manuscript at the forefront of a trend or at the tail end, or so far out in left field that agents and publishers can't get to it.
As a follow up to Monday's post, Tuesday's post at NathanBransford.blogspot.com , Following the Market, explores the power that agents and publishers have to make or break a book. That power extends not much farther than an educated guess about what the marketplace will embrace and then putting into the funnel those books which seem to fit--an agent's reputation and credibility in the industry depends on being right at least some of the time. Beyond that, there are layers upon layers of decisions being made that will make or break a book.
If Nathan can help us think more like agents and publishers, book dealers and book buyers, retailers and readers, more of us will produce original, engaging work and on-target queries that will help our work get published. There are still far more manuscripts out there than there are book contracts waiting to be signed but forewarned is forearmed, as some original thinker once said.
Thanks again Nathan for two more great posts.
Check out Monday's post at NathanBransford.blogspot.com. The more we learn about what agents are looking at in their query mail, the better we will be able to gauge how well our query is apt to do--will my query stand out because my concept, the premise of my book, is something new that the market needs and will clamor for, or am I tauting a concept that is just like the last one and indistinguishable from the next one. Is my manuscript at the forefront of a trend or at the tail end, or so far out in left field that agents and publishers can't get to it.
As a follow up to Monday's post, Tuesday's post at NathanBransford.blogspot.com , Following the Market, explores the power that agents and publishers have to make or break a book. That power extends not much farther than an educated guess about what the marketplace will embrace and then putting into the funnel those books which seem to fit--an agent's reputation and credibility in the industry depends on being right at least some of the time. Beyond that, there are layers upon layers of decisions being made that will make or break a book.
If Nathan can help us think more like agents and publishers, book dealers and book buyers, retailers and readers, more of us will produce original, engaging work and on-target queries that will help our work get published. There are still far more manuscripts out there than there are book contracts waiting to be signed but forewarned is forearmed, as some original thinker once said.
Thanks again Nathan for two more great posts.
Friday, July 18, 2008
Self-publishing no longer self-defeating
Dara Moore, in the most recent Beaver's Pond Press newsletter, discusses the very topic I wanted to write about for this post. On Monday I posted the text of a talk given last month by a Twin Cities author, a self-published author, who opted twice for self-publishing for two reasons: the first, the freedom to write the books he wanted to write without that self-editor on his shoulder nagging him about whether his "target audience" would like what he wrote; the second reason, he did not have to send out queries, partials and manuscripts to countless agents and publishers looking for someone to tell him his books were worthwhile. He knew they were worthwhile.
Writers self-publish for other reasons as well. They may have a book that has a specialized audience that they can reach, book in hand, at conferences and sales meetings. They may teach a course for which there is not an adequate textbook. They may be writing family history with a limited audience that they can reach through family newsletters and websites and genealogical and historical societies. They may want their book beautifully printed and professionally bound for sending out to agents and publishers--there is something about a manuscript in print and bound that gives it credibility. Dara Moore, in the Beaver's Pond Press Newsletter, writes about the self-published authors whose works have become part of the literary canon or award winning best sellers--among these are Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Margaret Atwood, Stephen King.
Dismissing self-publishers and self-publishing as somehow less than "legitimate" is an attitude that needs to change and is changing. The idea that the quality of the writing and editing of self-published books is lower than traditionally published books has been proven wrong over and over. Not only do most self-publishers provide editing services for their authors and recommend those services when needed, traditional publishing houses have, on the whole, stopped providing the kind of editing that was once their stock in trade.
That bookstores and other book outlets have traditionally rejected self-published books is changing also but was probably more of a function of limited floor space and the overabundance of titles offered by the distributors with which they did business than of quality. That distributors rejected self-published titles in the past seems to be changing as well as self-publishers broaden their publishing models and on-line ordering opens up the marketplace.
The model for many self-publishers has been evolving. The hybrid publisher combines the traditional self-publishing model with the traditional publishing model. Manuscripts found to be of high quality with market potential are put under contract where in the publishing house absorbs some of the costs of publishing while the author absorbs other costs. The returns on the books are distributed between the author and publisher similarly to traditional publishing contracts.
Nathan Bransford, an L.A. agent with a prolific blog, has been writing recently about new publishers coming out of traditional houses creating their own publishing models. Some of these models are very much like the hybrid publishing model now being employed by what were traditionally referred to as self-publishers.
One of the most important things that an author can do before choosing a publisher, whether a self-publisher, hybrid publisher or a "traditional" publisher, is to learn everything they can about that publishing house, their business model, the services they offer, their access to the market, the marketing services they offer, and the honesty with which they are willing to discuss your manuscript. Whether publishing traditionally or with a self-publisher, having your manuscript printed and bound launches it into a life of its own, beyond you. Make sure that your words are the best they can be.
For a wealth of information on self-publishing and the services offered by a top-notch self-publisher, Beaver's Pond Press has one of the best websites I have found.
Writers self-publish for other reasons as well. They may have a book that has a specialized audience that they can reach, book in hand, at conferences and sales meetings. They may teach a course for which there is not an adequate textbook. They may be writing family history with a limited audience that they can reach through family newsletters and websites and genealogical and historical societies. They may want their book beautifully printed and professionally bound for sending out to agents and publishers--there is something about a manuscript in print and bound that gives it credibility. Dara Moore, in the Beaver's Pond Press Newsletter, writes about the self-published authors whose works have become part of the literary canon or award winning best sellers--among these are Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Margaret Atwood, Stephen King.
Dismissing self-publishers and self-publishing as somehow less than "legitimate" is an attitude that needs to change and is changing. The idea that the quality of the writing and editing of self-published books is lower than traditionally published books has been proven wrong over and over. Not only do most self-publishers provide editing services for their authors and recommend those services when needed, traditional publishing houses have, on the whole, stopped providing the kind of editing that was once their stock in trade.
That bookstores and other book outlets have traditionally rejected self-published books is changing also but was probably more of a function of limited floor space and the overabundance of titles offered by the distributors with which they did business than of quality. That distributors rejected self-published titles in the past seems to be changing as well as self-publishers broaden their publishing models and on-line ordering opens up the marketplace.
The model for many self-publishers has been evolving. The hybrid publisher combines the traditional self-publishing model with the traditional publishing model. Manuscripts found to be of high quality with market potential are put under contract where in the publishing house absorbs some of the costs of publishing while the author absorbs other costs. The returns on the books are distributed between the author and publisher similarly to traditional publishing contracts.
Nathan Bransford, an L.A. agent with a prolific blog, has been writing recently about new publishers coming out of traditional houses creating their own publishing models. Some of these models are very much like the hybrid publishing model now being employed by what were traditionally referred to as self-publishers.
One of the most important things that an author can do before choosing a publisher, whether a self-publisher, hybrid publisher or a "traditional" publisher, is to learn everything they can about that publishing house, their business model, the services they offer, their access to the market, the marketing services they offer, and the honesty with which they are willing to discuss your manuscript. Whether publishing traditionally or with a self-publisher, having your manuscript printed and bound launches it into a life of its own, beyond you. Make sure that your words are the best they can be.
For a wealth of information on self-publishing and the services offered by a top-notch self-publisher, Beaver's Pond Press has one of the best websites I have found.
Monday, July 14, 2008
A really fantastic reading
I went to a really fantastic reading a few weeks ago at a little cafe called Trotter's in St. Paul, MN. I was enthralled by the way the author, John Hershey, described his writing process--a magical process even when Hershey dissected it for us.
I asked John Heshey if he wouldn't mind sharing the text of his reading with other writers on this blog and he graciously agreed. This is one of my longer postings but well worth reading.
Here is the text of John Hershey's talk about his books Window Dressing (2006, Outskirts Press) and The Healing Stone (2007, Authorhouse):
I want to start with some caveats.
First, Jim Rogers kind of twisted my arm to do this reading and what seemed a not-so-good idea at the time really seems like one now. I just don’t like being the center of attention all that much and I’ve never done a reading before. So I’m kinda anxious up here.
Second, when I asked my wife if I should do this reading, she responded immediately by saying “Yes, that’s what writers do…”
I’d never thought of myself as a writer, kind of like I don’t consider myself a fly fisherman even though I’ve fished with flies for trout for 30 years.
I know I am a husband, a father, a good citizen. I have some faith. I’m a guy who goes to work everyday…so let’s just leave it there and you can decide if I’m a writer or not.
Only much later did Jim tell that I couldn’t do a reading the Irish Way. He said Americans are more interested in entertainment than in literature and that got me feeling really uneasy because I write literature and I’m certainly not an entertainer.
Then Jim downright scared me by telling me a story about a person who did a reading in a coffee house while a stranger made an Amway presentation at the front table…. Great.
And finally, you can see that I’m published but let’s be up front about it. I paid for the right—and how it came to that was a total whim. I had no intention of seeking publication or self-publishing. And after I did decide to do a book, I refused to purchase any of the marketing packages the publishing houses try to sell you.
I certainly didn’t think practically about a “target audience” as I wrote. But you can see things got kind of carried away and here I am. So I’ll share some of that process with you.
I like a good story. I listened to radio stories as kid – Johnny Dollar, Long John Nebel, liked to hear grown-ups talk, listened to books on tape, and for several years as I browsed in libraries or books stores, I thought how I’d like to write a story. So when I turned 50 I decided I’d like to write a book and kind of challenged myself. I wanted to see if I could write a longer story that would keep people turning pages.
I figured having short chapters would help.
I really wanted it to sound like I was telling a story. Like you might hear it said. I used one of my favorite writers as an example. Before John McPhee submits anything for publication, he reads it aloud to his wife and hearing it read aloud became important to me.
So I didn’t have a story, but I knew what I wanted in it.
I had a vivid dream about the magical qualities of black stone I’d picked up on the beach. So started with that.
I knew I wanted my story to occur in a small town because I like small towns. So I invented one with a trout stream in it because I also wanted to have trout fishing in the story—and the stream also gave the town an identity and water to supply a bottling plant.
Ultimately, I settled on the name Clear Spring, which has a double meaning.
The story had to have a barber shop because I wanted to have a place where people could gather and talk. Furthermore, I wanted the barber to speak guy-speak and call shots plainly. To be a conscience for the main character. In this case Fenton Carmody. Though one could argue that point.
I knew I wanted the town to have a comfortable watering hole and I kinda used Mauer’s in Elba as a prototype. Except the place I invented, the Artesian Well, serves much better food and beer.
I knew I wanted to infuse bird watching and star gazing and cooking and dinner table conversation in it because I like those things.
Then it occurred to me to write about something I knew about. Granted, there are those who will disagree with the premise that I know about basketball but I am nevertheless content with laboring under that delusion.
So I began thinking about a story loosely based around one autobiographical premise (I have coached college basketball for over 30 years): How a middle aged white guy committed professional suicide by coaching small college basketball at an institution where the juxtaposition of its name with the word athletics is an oxymoron. In the text, I define a successful basketball season for fictional Augustus Parker College as follows:
Respectable for the lowly Augustus Parker Mustangs meant a .500 season. A win for every loss. In truth, not a bad result for a school where the general public derided the institution’s traditional and longstanding athletic ineptitude.
Then I had a vision.
Several years ago, a young couple bought the house out across our back yard. We got to know them casually and a time came when I began to see the woman through my kitchen window in her upstairs study: She sat framed by a window before a desk or some kind, her image dimly lit by a lamp. She concentrated on some project before her and I just saw a head shot. But for a time—late at night, early in the morning—she never seemed to leave that spot. So I used that vision as the opening gambit and, to use a pun, I dressed it up, or rather undressed it, to start a book.
I knew all these things but I needed to populate the tale. And in the process, I discovered that I liked to make things happen through conversation and not by events. I liked working with characters.
I had a definitely flawed protagonist in mind, one who needed meaning in his life and didn’t know how to ask for it…
I gave him a bunch of things he wanted and took them away…a wife, a child, a career. I emptied his house through divorce of all but a few meager possessions. Then I started to give all those things back … and then since I’m not big on outlines I just trusted my pen. I figured that first draft would be my outline.
And that’s how it worked out. So even though I like The Healing Stone better than Window Dressing, I’ll share a few readings from Window because it better illustrates where and how I started. It all starts in Fenton Carmody’s kitchen…
This from the first chapter, titled DISTINCT ENOUGH TO LAUNCH A DREAM:
Fenton Carmody tipped his chair on two feet, draped his legs on the kitchen table, and pondered the cold November pre-dawn light. He unconsciously massaged his graying temple in a futile attempt to ease the headache that wouldn’t dissipate. He sipped strong coffee sweetened with dark brown sugar, welcoming the caffeine infusion which exacerbated the pain. That and alcohol. And the beer he’d consumed last night after the game at the Artesian Well hadn’t helped on that score. So Doctor Carpenter said. Carmody never thought the day would come when he’d be older than his general practitioner. That he’d drop his drawers for a yearly exam before a female physician who’d matter-of-factly grope his prostate. Life was full of surprise for Fenton Carmody.
Fenton continues by musing over last night’s loss and of his failings as a coach…ultimately, he decides to do what most coaches do when they’re not quite sure what to do next. They go watch game film.”
So he rises from the kitchen table and peers out the window at his bird feeder in early morning light:
He caught movement in the upstairs window of Dorothea Christian’s house across the back yard, an unusual light in an unused part of her third floor. Fenton Carmody looked after the elderly widow. He mowed her lawn, shoveled her walk, and did occasional odd jobs for the retired sculptress who owned the substantial dwelling that fronted on Boundary Avenue. Her house towered over a neatly kept ribbon of park land, which edged the banks of Clear Spring where the healthy trout stream bubbled through town even on the coldest of days. The person he saw in the window was definitely not Dorothea Christian. Fenton Carmody stood stock still, transfixed by the vision, as if his feet had sprouted roots.
A younger woman stood naked from the waist up, her tawny skin illuminated softly from the front by a table lamp in the window frame. She pulled a towel from her head and bent slightly to run a brush through long dark hair. Definitely brown, maybe auburn? A vision, a maid in her bower—pure, clean, innocent. Sexy, he thought. Life without fig leaves, indistinct enough to leave much to imagination, distinct enough to launch a dream.
Carmody knew he shouldn’t watch but could not tear himself away. Emotions he hadn’t felt in the years since Annie left stirred in his breast and elsewhere. He finally broke the trance and moved from the window, navigating on slightly wobbly legs through a largely empty house to gaze in the coat closet mirror. He made a frank evaluation. Bags under his eyes, gray running through a beard in need of a trim. A face like his father’s, especially the eyes.
Who is that guy? Carmody wondered. Not the same one who took the Parker job ten years ago. The one who delighted in his work. The one who passionately wanted to succeed as a college basketball coach. He had the world by the balls. An important job, a pretty wife, a Victorian house in town. A baby boy. Everything he always wanted. Trouble was, he got it.
That’s where I started and I had no idea what would happen, what substance I’d give to the characters I needed to invent, or where it would go. I just kept writing and using the things I wanted to write about.
That’s one of the beauties of being your own editor. You can write what you want. I’m my own publisher. I can include what I want even when people tell me not to. And I do. So anyway, I wrote Window Dressing as a kind of challenge and then I followed it up with The Healing Stone because I just wanted to see if I could take the story to a different place.Now they’re both done and I’m done with them. In some ways, I feel like I don’t own them anymore.
So because I don’t know what else to do at a reading, let me introduce you to some of the characters. Some people swear they know who they are but they’re really not. At least not in my mind.
The protagonist needed a foil. So I invented a “mean dean”, someone looking for reasons to fire the coach who represented a threat to the dean. It was important to for him to be unlikeable. Here’s Owen George, new dean for student affairs, a power-hungry control freak:
Folks on campus called him ‘Dog’ behind his back. Owen George owned a nasty habit of dogging coeds with his eyes, a not so subtle weighing and measuring of anatomic parts of interest. The acronym connected the verb to the first letters of his title and initials.”
The protagonist needed someone to keep him on track. To keep him honest and that’s where the barber comes in.
Rennie is Fenton’s truth-teller and calls things as sees them to keep Carmody in line. Rennie is the only one not to handle him with kid gloves. There are chapters where he bluntly and frankly berates the coach with tough love. In fact, the first time we meet Rennie, he blames the coach for a last night’s lost game. I give him free profane reign and gradually reel his language in, but I wanted to Rennie to reflect how I hear guys speak a lot when they with other guys. I wanted him to be authentic. So here’s Rennie:
Rennie was an iconoclast, to say the least. A sixties holdover who sounded like Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider, the wiry, pony-tailed barber served time for armed robbery, a teenage mistake. He took to styling hair in prison, read way too much Alfred Adler, and ultimately invented an award-winning hair curler that he made from a chicken bone. The recognition earned him a job in a Manhattan salon.
“I lasted a week,” Rennie said, “and couldn’t fuckin’ take it. I wanted to do my own styling, not what someone else told me to do, man. That didn’t cut it. I quit and hit the bottle and went on a two-year bender.”
Ultimately he landed on Commerce Street in Clear Spring. Rennie Michaels opened a town-and-gown barbershop where locals gathered to drink coffee and talk sports, weather, politics, and, when women weren’t present in his equal opportunity shop, women.
That still wasn’t enough to go on, so I gave the protagonist more problems. I invented a floundering parental relationship and introduced a laconic father who had succeeded precisely where the son had failed. I made him a successful high school basketball coach, revered as an icon in New York. But the same coach was so harsh on coaching his own son that he drove him away. So harsh, in fact, that even though they both loved fly fishing, they’d never done it together.
Sean Carmody loses his wife to cancer and then loses his way in the world. He sells his house, leaves his fretting full-grown daughters worrying, as he outfits a pick up for an extended western camping trip where he plans to fish all the trout rivers he’d never seen.
His first stop is Clear Spring where it becomes clear what he’s really doing is trying to mend a relationship: from her death bed Sean’s wife challenged him to make things right with his son.
So in a twist of fate, Sean Carmody finds himself in Clear Spring, living in his son’s house for the winter while working for his son as an assistant women’s basketball coach, an irony because Sean’s never had time for the women’s game.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was creating a second main character—another person trying to define a new life.
Next I invented Kate Skinner, fashioning her after a vision I had in my head of a girl I had a grad-school crush on.
First I planned to use Kate as a way for the father to talk to the son.
Second, I needed a reason to keep Sean in town for longer than the basketball season and a person to encourage him to make good on his promise to his wife.
Kate became that person.
In this segment, I introduce Sean and Kate. Over a couple of pints, the good Father Geary has convinced Sean to do a good deed for a widow on crutches … to take her grocery shopping since she has trouble driving.
It sounds good to Sean in theory but when the day comes, he’s reluctant. Sean has now arrived in front of Kate’s house.
This is part of IT WOULDN’T BE ALL THAT BAD
… Sean Carmody braked uncertainly in front of the house on Pomfret Street. Pommes frites. French fries, he thought absently. He mounted the shoveled steps, noting as he walked that he seemed to be adjusting to the cold weather. Five degrees didn’t feel all that cold. The air tasted crisp and clean. He knocked, eliciting a series of barks from behind the door.
A trim, bright-eyed woman appeared and pushed aside a jet black border collie with her crutches. “Scout,” she commanded. “Sit.” The dog sat.
She wore jeans and a white oxford button-down, tucked in at the waist, and a simple gold cross on a chain around her neck with matching posts in her ears. Katherine Skinner brushed at her chestnut hair, elegantly streaked with silver, moving it away from her face. She waited for the man to speak.
He’d expected an old granny, not a contemporary. Handsome, Carmody thought, not beautiful but handsome. Surprised, Sean Carmody felt even more surprised he was pleasantly surprised. “Mrs. Skinner?”
“Mr. Carmody? I’m almost ready.” Her handshake was firm, sure. Her voice sounded steady and belied the anxiety she felt at this ‘set up’ courtesy of Father Geary’s meddling in the lives of widows and widowers. “I’ve got my list.” She braced her crutches against the door and reached for her coat.
Sean Carmody moved to help and bumped against the crutches which bumped Katherine and she stumbled. Carmody grabbed for her and they folded in slow motion on the carpet, Carmody’s right hand pressed firmly against the woman’s breast.
“Ah … I’m sorry.” He regarded her awkwardly from a distance of about six inches. “Are you okay?” Aware of the placement of his hand, he felt powerless to move it. Scout stood over the entangled couple and tentatively licked Carmody’s cheek.
“I think so. I guess it’s good to get the formalities over, though. And you must have passed some kind of test. Scout’s pretty fierce when it comes to strange men at the door. If she likes you, you can’t be all that bad. But it’s been some time since someone felt me up. You may remove your hand now,” she said calmly.
He retracted it as if he’d touched a hot griddle and in the process, lost his precarious balance and rolled off her onto the floor. The thickly furred dog, her black muzzle going gray at the edges, slurped him again.
They burst into simultaneous laughter and, aware of each other’s bodies, regained upright positions. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” she said. “But now that we’re introduced, please call me Kate.”
So as the chapter I’ve just read from proceeds, I start to put together a quasi-family for a group I call the Clear Spring orphans. The same group will ultimately establish a B&B in Dorothea’s spacious house but that doesn’t come until the second book.
In this segment, Sean and Kate are shopping for the group’s first communal meal, Thanksgiving dinner, in a place I call the Red Rabbit, named after an IGA in Apalachicola, Florida.
I put Sean in awkward position in the grocery store where he doesn’t know what to do or say so he has a reason to talk to Kate.
At the same time, I let Sean see a bit of his son’s pain because one thing is certain. Father and son aren’t sharing. They can talk basketball but not much more.
So in the Red Rabbit, Sean and Kate meet Fenton’s ex-wife and her lover.
“Sean Carmody?” a familiar feminine voice queried. “Sean Carmody?” The man turned to face his ex-daughter-in-law.
“Annie?”
They hugged—or rather Annie hugged Sean—and stepped back to arms’ length. Neither knew what to say. “I heard you were in town. Sooner or later, I figured our paths would cross,” she started. “Rumor has it you’re here for the season.”
“I am,” he said with hesitation in his voice. He shifted the conversation. So much to know.
“Annie, it’s good to see you. How are you?” He added, “I’m sorry about … well, I’m sorry.”
She said, “Me, too. But I’m good. I’m fine.” She peered at him, giving him an evaluative once-over. “You look good,” she said. “How’s Carolyn? And how on earth did you convince her to come along on such an extended trip?”
“You didn’t know?”
“What?”
“You didn’t know Carolyn died? Cancer. A couple of years ago now.” He knew exactly. Three years, eight months, six days.
She didn’t and her smile evaporated and her eyes brimmed with tears. “I’m so sorry. Fenton never told me. He never said a word. But we don’t talk anymore.”
The chapter continues and Sean responds to her sympathy:
“It doesn’t hurt like it used to.” He spoke the truth. It didn’t hurt that much anymore—but he did feel empty, used up.
“And I’ve sold the house,” he offered. Moved into the truck outside. I wanted to get away from the Island and all the attachments there. Gonna be a fishing bum. There’s a lot of Western rivers I’ve wanted to see. A new chapter in my life. I guess you, too.” He hinted at the divorce and Caleb’s death.
“Forgive me.” Annie Holbrook motioned in the direction of her companion. “Casey Redfield, this is Sean Carmody. Fenton’s father.”
“I know. It’s in the eyes. Besides, I’ve seen you around the gym.” Redfield looked familiar to Carmody and the tall, athletically built woman stepped forward to shake his hand. “I’m the trainer at Parker. I’m sure Fenton would feel awkward introducing us.” She clarified the moment by sliding her arm into the crook of Annie’s.
Sean Carmody took the hint. I’m talking with my son’s ex-wife’s lover and she’s a girl?
The chapter continues with Annie offering to tell Sean her side of the story and then Sean and Kate sit quietly in Sean’s truck outside the Red Rabbit, Sean still pretty much in a daze starts to talk:
“You know a place where we can get a cup of coffee? Help me sort this out?” Carmody uncertainly asked for help and his question seemed to come forth from his subconscious. The unbidden invitation caught him off guard but he continued. “Funny thing is,” he added, “I’d like to hear her story.” He started the truck and put it in gear. “I’d like to hear Fenton’s, too.”
“Maybe Fenton would like to hear yours,” Katherine Skinner said.”
I want here to circle back to the title of the first book. Window Dressing has three meanings but I think most people only get two.
First there’s the obvious. From time to time, the Window Dresser we come to know as Susannah Applegate re-appears in her window late at night and Carmody is drawn to that window but, as he begins to know her, he is unable to tell her what he’s seen.
Second, the father uses the term in a brusque way when describing actions or events that are insincere and false. I introduce it first through his son who thinks of it in a meeting he has with his boss, Owen George:
“Suddenly (Fenton) remembered a phrase his father used. Window dressing. It defined Dean Owen George. Appearance over substance. Carmody let the thought go. No sense in making matters worse. He rose to leave.”
But the third part of the meaning is the obscure one. I use Susannah Applegate because I wanted a flawed and mysterious romantic interest for Carmody.
Someone to bring him back to town after he leaves.
I wanted Susannah to be a wounded healer, a seer, a herbalist, a kind of mystic, a reader of the heavens.
And I gave her those qualities because it was my prerogative.
This begins to create Susannah’s mystery in THE PROGNOSTICATION PROVED ACCURATE. It is a time when Fenton and Susannah have not yet met. It’s late at night and Fenton is tracking Susannah via his kitchen window.
She sat at some kind of desk, her face indistinct but illuminated as before from the front by a table lamp. Carmody could see her from the shoulders up as she bent at a task he could not discern. The mysterious woman with long dark hair swayed slightly while she worked, as if moving to music. She concentrated on the job before her.
Fenton Carmody concentrated on the woman. Dorothea hadn’t mentioned anything about taking on a boarder. As usual, basketball and the onset of cold and snow reduced their contact. But still. I think Dorothea would have mentioned it. Who is she? And what on earth is she doing? Especially at this time of night? With some effort, he turned his back to the scene and trudged up the stairs to bed. Will I ever see her getting dressed again?
Ultimately, we discover that Susannah is tying trout flies to make extra cash but, like every thing else, I kinda take my time getting there and, as usual, Fenton is always the last to know.
But understand that when one ties a trout fly, it can be called dressing a fly.
Throughout the story, I did my best to keep Fenton from Susannah and the other way around. I don’t know why—other than if I got them together I was afraid the story would end. But I introduce the mysterious Window Dresser to Fenton Carmody this way:
Fenton has just risen early to blow new snow from his drive and from his neighbors’ sidewalks and he’s returning to his garage after discovering someone else has cleared the sidewalks and driveway for his elderly neighbor whose house is behind his. This is from IT’S CALLED A SINGING BOWL
…He noticed a young woman sitting in the snow in a lawn chair underneath a set of bird feeders which hung from Dorothea’s stately sugar maple. Carmody recognized her by the dark hair and tawny skin. He imagined the rest.
The woman sat still, intent on some thought, and stared vacantly into space. She wore a heavy Norwegian sweater and held a rimless, cereal-sized, gleaming brass bowl in her left hand. She rotated a short, lathe-tooled wooden spindle around the edge of the bowl. Then he noticed the soothing sound emanating from it—low toned, serene, calming; trance-inducing, like a humming choir.
The yard vibrated with bird life, all seemingly unaware of her presence. Cardinals, juncos, a few white throated sparrows, and some mourning doves fed on the ground at her feet alongside the neighborhood’s resident albino squirrel. Redpolls, gold finches, house finches, chickadees shared feeder perches with chunkier, more aggressive English sparrows. Several nuthatches and downy woodpeckers worked at nearby birch bark. This modern day St. Francis seemingly attracted the birds with the bowl. Carmody’s mouth dropped open and he stood transfixed as one brave chickadee perched lightly on her left thigh and selected a sunflower seed she’d evidently placed on her jeans for that purpose. The kind of scene pictured only in bird feeder ads.
“It’s called a singing bowl. It’s made in Nepal,” she said.
The birds scattered, their combined fluttering audible. Carmody gazed blankly at her and kept rubbing his hand…
The conversation continues awkwardly and Susannah notices his hand.
She stood up and walked to the fence. “Your hand hurt?”
Carmody’s tongue unknotted slowly. “No. Not really.” He paused and admitted, “Actually that’s not true. It’s nothing new. I’ve got some arthritis. From too much racquetball.” He added, “The snow blowing doesn’t help. Gripping the handle an all.” It occurred to Carmody he very much wanted to say the right thing, to make a good impression. He hadn’t felt that way in quite some time. I have absolutely no idea how to talk to this woman, he thought…
It’s at this point I introduce star gazing to the story and add another dimension to Susannah. As the story unfolds she will host full moon gatherings for her friends but that hasn’t happened yet.
“You’ll see the moon tonight,” she nodded at the clearing sky. “It’s full. It’ll rise a little after sunset. In colonial days they called the November moon the Beaver Moon. You can find Saturn, too. We’ll have three planets to see.
Carmody wanted to say something smart or clever but all he could manage was, “I’ll be watching.
The chapter concludes with Susannah accepting an invitation to see Carmody’s team play basketball. He gives her a pocket-size schedule:
She accepted it, imitated a small curtsy, and offered her serious gaze. “Thanks.” She started to move away. “I gotta be going. Nice to meet you. I’ll be watching, too.”
You’re not the only one, Fenton Carmody thought.
When he went to the office later that day, the vacant gym closed for the long weekend, Fenton Carmody Googled for a star gazing site. He discovered a sky calendar created by the Abrams Planetarium at Michigan State University and printed out the November edition.
Fenton Carmody vowed silently to learn more about the firmament. He had stars in his eyes.
Then there’s the stone itself. I wanted to use the stone as a way of adding a sense of magic. I was trying to make the unbelievable believable.
After a communal Christmas dinner with friends, Susannah stayed behind to give Fenton a present. This is from IT’S GOT SOME MAGIC IN IT
…Susannah lingered that evening after the group dispersed. She held out a small mahogany box, wrapped with a single red ribbon, and handed it to Fenton Carmody. “A present,” she said. “Merry Christmas.”
Carmody undid the bow and flipped the lid on the brass-hinged box. He extracted a gleaming black stone, its crystals so dense it felt smooth and polished—about the size and shape of a Vintage Brass No. 5 Smoke Stone cigarette lighter. The rock nestled in the palm of his hand and lay there as if it belonged. “It’s beautiful,” he said.
“It’s a healing stone, forged from magma heat. It’s metamorphic rock. That’s a sedimentary rock that’s been heated and pressurized. It started forming when Europe and Africa crashed into North America. When the continental tectonic plates collided they pushed the Appalachians into the sky. They were the size of the Himalayas but that was like two hundred and fifty million years ago. Then, during the Triassic, the continents separated and this rock came up from the rift. Only recently—like about forty thousand years ago—the Wisconsin glacier dragged it from the area around the Connecticut River Valley to what would become Long Island. I happened to pick it up on a North Shore beach. So,” she finished her geology lesson and got to the point, “it’s an ancient rock from the heart of the earth and it’s got some magic in it.” She reached out and touched his hand, molding his fingers around the stone, smoothed and polished by centuries of salt water action. “For the arthritis. It eases the pain. Feel the heat.”
Fenton Carmody gripped the object loosely in his right hand and immediately felt soothing warmth spread into his muscles and articulations. He glanced from her to his hand and back to her as surprise spread across his face. He tightened his grip. “Wow. This feels great.” He opened his hand and closed it again. “It fits,” he remarked as if trying on a glove.
“Merry Christmas,” she said again and slipped out the door, stepping into a wash of full moon light. She turned to Fenton Carmody who stood in the doorway, gripping his warm gift, quietly watching her leave, a black border collie at his knees. “I’m a healer, remember? But you must want to be healed.”
“I need healing?”
“You know the old question about the pope being Catholic?
“It’s that obvious?”
“What do you think?” She disappeared into the night.
I used the stone to monitor the strength of the relationship between Fenton and Susannah. Ultimately I titled the second book after the stone and there does come a time when the magic stone loses its healing powers.
But first I had to give Susannah troubles of her own, keep all her jobs mysterious at the same time.
I need to let Fenton Carmody think he’ll lose his coaching job. I’ll delay his firing and then surprise him with it.
I’ll forge a friendship between Sean and Kate and introduce a cast of minor characters.
I needed some players for Carmody to coach and I had fun giving life to them: a black woman from Mississippi, the daughter of cattle rancher from Saddlestring, Wyoming; and my favorite, Jenny Roanhorse, a shy first-year Navaho fresh off the rez who struggles with her identity and the betrayal of her body.
There’s a female assistant coach who ultimately gets her boss’s job. Like Fenton, it’s a dream come true for her. Then she realizes there are much better things a young woman can do with her life.
I give depth to Rennie’s life by giving him a special friend. He changes his life for the better while attending the Sturgis motor cycle rally.
There’s a wily female college vice president who unsuccessfully presses Carmody for damning I information about Owen George. The VP manages the college with a deft touch.
I should not forget my favorite character, widow Dorothea Christian whose husband was an advisor to Dwight Eisenhower. Dorothea comes from money and is a retired but influential sculptress. But she is largely estranged from her family. Don’t ask because I don’t know exactly why. But Dorothea and her home play a prominent part in the proceedings.
I also had fun with a classical guitarist, a Brit named Peter Blackstone who teaches music at the school.
Then there’s a fishing guide named Seth, a mysterious woman named Tasha, the good Father Geary who likes a dram or two, a host of barber shop kibitzers.
Of course, I weave a lot of basketball lore into the tale—but I get most of that out of my system in the first book—and that’s for the better—but I had some things to say.
The only true to life character in the book is a dog named Scout.
In the book, she is a good fishing companion. In real life, she is not. She swims in the water and scares the trout away.
Finally, I need to exact vengeance on the Mean Dean. Many assume he dies at the end of the first book…But to find out about all of that … well, I guess you’ll have to read the books for yourself.
John Hershey has worked in five colleges and universities for 33 years as a basketball coach, administrator, outdoor educator, teacher, and community relations liaison. He writes for the fun of it as time allows. He lives in St. Paul and is grateful his wife still loves him and his “late-teen” boys still talk to him. One day he hopes to find a situation where he can just write and keep his wading boots from drying out.
I asked John Heshey if he wouldn't mind sharing the text of his reading with other writers on this blog and he graciously agreed. This is one of my longer postings but well worth reading.
Here is the text of John Hershey's talk about his books Window Dressing (2006, Outskirts Press) and The Healing Stone (2007, Authorhouse):
I want to start with some caveats.
First, Jim Rogers kind of twisted my arm to do this reading and what seemed a not-so-good idea at the time really seems like one now. I just don’t like being the center of attention all that much and I’ve never done a reading before. So I’m kinda anxious up here.
Second, when I asked my wife if I should do this reading, she responded immediately by saying “Yes, that’s what writers do…”
I’d never thought of myself as a writer, kind of like I don’t consider myself a fly fisherman even though I’ve fished with flies for trout for 30 years.
I know I am a husband, a father, a good citizen. I have some faith. I’m a guy who goes to work everyday…so let’s just leave it there and you can decide if I’m a writer or not.
Only much later did Jim tell that I couldn’t do a reading the Irish Way. He said Americans are more interested in entertainment than in literature and that got me feeling really uneasy because I write literature and I’m certainly not an entertainer.
Then Jim downright scared me by telling me a story about a person who did a reading in a coffee house while a stranger made an Amway presentation at the front table…. Great.
And finally, you can see that I’m published but let’s be up front about it. I paid for the right—and how it came to that was a total whim. I had no intention of seeking publication or self-publishing. And after I did decide to do a book, I refused to purchase any of the marketing packages the publishing houses try to sell you.
I certainly didn’t think practically about a “target audience” as I wrote. But you can see things got kind of carried away and here I am. So I’ll share some of that process with you.
I like a good story. I listened to radio stories as kid – Johnny Dollar, Long John Nebel, liked to hear grown-ups talk, listened to books on tape, and for several years as I browsed in libraries or books stores, I thought how I’d like to write a story. So when I turned 50 I decided I’d like to write a book and kind of challenged myself. I wanted to see if I could write a longer story that would keep people turning pages.
I figured having short chapters would help.
I really wanted it to sound like I was telling a story. Like you might hear it said. I used one of my favorite writers as an example. Before John McPhee submits anything for publication, he reads it aloud to his wife and hearing it read aloud became important to me.
So I didn’t have a story, but I knew what I wanted in it.
I had a vivid dream about the magical qualities of black stone I’d picked up on the beach. So started with that.
I knew I wanted my story to occur in a small town because I like small towns. So I invented one with a trout stream in it because I also wanted to have trout fishing in the story—and the stream also gave the town an identity and water to supply a bottling plant.
Ultimately, I settled on the name Clear Spring, which has a double meaning.
The story had to have a barber shop because I wanted to have a place where people could gather and talk. Furthermore, I wanted the barber to speak guy-speak and call shots plainly. To be a conscience for the main character. In this case Fenton Carmody. Though one could argue that point.
I knew I wanted the town to have a comfortable watering hole and I kinda used Mauer’s in Elba as a prototype. Except the place I invented, the Artesian Well, serves much better food and beer.
I knew I wanted to infuse bird watching and star gazing and cooking and dinner table conversation in it because I like those things.
Then it occurred to me to write about something I knew about. Granted, there are those who will disagree with the premise that I know about basketball but I am nevertheless content with laboring under that delusion.
So I began thinking about a story loosely based around one autobiographical premise (I have coached college basketball for over 30 years): How a middle aged white guy committed professional suicide by coaching small college basketball at an institution where the juxtaposition of its name with the word athletics is an oxymoron. In the text, I define a successful basketball season for fictional Augustus Parker College as follows:
Respectable for the lowly Augustus Parker Mustangs meant a .500 season. A win for every loss. In truth, not a bad result for a school where the general public derided the institution’s traditional and longstanding athletic ineptitude.
Then I had a vision.
Several years ago, a young couple bought the house out across our back yard. We got to know them casually and a time came when I began to see the woman through my kitchen window in her upstairs study: She sat framed by a window before a desk or some kind, her image dimly lit by a lamp. She concentrated on some project before her and I just saw a head shot. But for a time—late at night, early in the morning—she never seemed to leave that spot. So I used that vision as the opening gambit and, to use a pun, I dressed it up, or rather undressed it, to start a book.
I knew all these things but I needed to populate the tale. And in the process, I discovered that I liked to make things happen through conversation and not by events. I liked working with characters.
I had a definitely flawed protagonist in mind, one who needed meaning in his life and didn’t know how to ask for it…
I gave him a bunch of things he wanted and took them away…a wife, a child, a career. I emptied his house through divorce of all but a few meager possessions. Then I started to give all those things back … and then since I’m not big on outlines I just trusted my pen. I figured that first draft would be my outline.
And that’s how it worked out. So even though I like The Healing Stone better than Window Dressing, I’ll share a few readings from Window because it better illustrates where and how I started. It all starts in Fenton Carmody’s kitchen…
This from the first chapter, titled DISTINCT ENOUGH TO LAUNCH A DREAM:
Fenton Carmody tipped his chair on two feet, draped his legs on the kitchen table, and pondered the cold November pre-dawn light. He unconsciously massaged his graying temple in a futile attempt to ease the headache that wouldn’t dissipate. He sipped strong coffee sweetened with dark brown sugar, welcoming the caffeine infusion which exacerbated the pain. That and alcohol. And the beer he’d consumed last night after the game at the Artesian Well hadn’t helped on that score. So Doctor Carpenter said. Carmody never thought the day would come when he’d be older than his general practitioner. That he’d drop his drawers for a yearly exam before a female physician who’d matter-of-factly grope his prostate. Life was full of surprise for Fenton Carmody.
Fenton continues by musing over last night’s loss and of his failings as a coach…ultimately, he decides to do what most coaches do when they’re not quite sure what to do next. They go watch game film.”
So he rises from the kitchen table and peers out the window at his bird feeder in early morning light:
He caught movement in the upstairs window of Dorothea Christian’s house across the back yard, an unusual light in an unused part of her third floor. Fenton Carmody looked after the elderly widow. He mowed her lawn, shoveled her walk, and did occasional odd jobs for the retired sculptress who owned the substantial dwelling that fronted on Boundary Avenue. Her house towered over a neatly kept ribbon of park land, which edged the banks of Clear Spring where the healthy trout stream bubbled through town even on the coldest of days. The person he saw in the window was definitely not Dorothea Christian. Fenton Carmody stood stock still, transfixed by the vision, as if his feet had sprouted roots.
A younger woman stood naked from the waist up, her tawny skin illuminated softly from the front by a table lamp in the window frame. She pulled a towel from her head and bent slightly to run a brush through long dark hair. Definitely brown, maybe auburn? A vision, a maid in her bower—pure, clean, innocent. Sexy, he thought. Life without fig leaves, indistinct enough to leave much to imagination, distinct enough to launch a dream.
Carmody knew he shouldn’t watch but could not tear himself away. Emotions he hadn’t felt in the years since Annie left stirred in his breast and elsewhere. He finally broke the trance and moved from the window, navigating on slightly wobbly legs through a largely empty house to gaze in the coat closet mirror. He made a frank evaluation. Bags under his eyes, gray running through a beard in need of a trim. A face like his father’s, especially the eyes.
Who is that guy? Carmody wondered. Not the same one who took the Parker job ten years ago. The one who delighted in his work. The one who passionately wanted to succeed as a college basketball coach. He had the world by the balls. An important job, a pretty wife, a Victorian house in town. A baby boy. Everything he always wanted. Trouble was, he got it.
That’s where I started and I had no idea what would happen, what substance I’d give to the characters I needed to invent, or where it would go. I just kept writing and using the things I wanted to write about.
That’s one of the beauties of being your own editor. You can write what you want. I’m my own publisher. I can include what I want even when people tell me not to. And I do. So anyway, I wrote Window Dressing as a kind of challenge and then I followed it up with The Healing Stone because I just wanted to see if I could take the story to a different place.Now they’re both done and I’m done with them. In some ways, I feel like I don’t own them anymore.
So because I don’t know what else to do at a reading, let me introduce you to some of the characters. Some people swear they know who they are but they’re really not. At least not in my mind.
The protagonist needed a foil. So I invented a “mean dean”, someone looking for reasons to fire the coach who represented a threat to the dean. It was important to for him to be unlikeable. Here’s Owen George, new dean for student affairs, a power-hungry control freak:
Folks on campus called him ‘Dog’ behind his back. Owen George owned a nasty habit of dogging coeds with his eyes, a not so subtle weighing and measuring of anatomic parts of interest. The acronym connected the verb to the first letters of his title and initials.”
The protagonist needed someone to keep him on track. To keep him honest and that’s where the barber comes in.
Rennie is Fenton’s truth-teller and calls things as sees them to keep Carmody in line. Rennie is the only one not to handle him with kid gloves. There are chapters where he bluntly and frankly berates the coach with tough love. In fact, the first time we meet Rennie, he blames the coach for a last night’s lost game. I give him free profane reign and gradually reel his language in, but I wanted to Rennie to reflect how I hear guys speak a lot when they with other guys. I wanted him to be authentic. So here’s Rennie:
Rennie was an iconoclast, to say the least. A sixties holdover who sounded like Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider, the wiry, pony-tailed barber served time for armed robbery, a teenage mistake. He took to styling hair in prison, read way too much Alfred Adler, and ultimately invented an award-winning hair curler that he made from a chicken bone. The recognition earned him a job in a Manhattan salon.
“I lasted a week,” Rennie said, “and couldn’t fuckin’ take it. I wanted to do my own styling, not what someone else told me to do, man. That didn’t cut it. I quit and hit the bottle and went on a two-year bender.”
Ultimately he landed on Commerce Street in Clear Spring. Rennie Michaels opened a town-and-gown barbershop where locals gathered to drink coffee and talk sports, weather, politics, and, when women weren’t present in his equal opportunity shop, women.
That still wasn’t enough to go on, so I gave the protagonist more problems. I invented a floundering parental relationship and introduced a laconic father who had succeeded precisely where the son had failed. I made him a successful high school basketball coach, revered as an icon in New York. But the same coach was so harsh on coaching his own son that he drove him away. So harsh, in fact, that even though they both loved fly fishing, they’d never done it together.
Sean Carmody loses his wife to cancer and then loses his way in the world. He sells his house, leaves his fretting full-grown daughters worrying, as he outfits a pick up for an extended western camping trip where he plans to fish all the trout rivers he’d never seen.
His first stop is Clear Spring where it becomes clear what he’s really doing is trying to mend a relationship: from her death bed Sean’s wife challenged him to make things right with his son.
So in a twist of fate, Sean Carmody finds himself in Clear Spring, living in his son’s house for the winter while working for his son as an assistant women’s basketball coach, an irony because Sean’s never had time for the women’s game.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was creating a second main character—another person trying to define a new life.
Next I invented Kate Skinner, fashioning her after a vision I had in my head of a girl I had a grad-school crush on.
First I planned to use Kate as a way for the father to talk to the son.
Second, I needed a reason to keep Sean in town for longer than the basketball season and a person to encourage him to make good on his promise to his wife.
Kate became that person.
In this segment, I introduce Sean and Kate. Over a couple of pints, the good Father Geary has convinced Sean to do a good deed for a widow on crutches … to take her grocery shopping since she has trouble driving.
It sounds good to Sean in theory but when the day comes, he’s reluctant. Sean has now arrived in front of Kate’s house.
This is part of IT WOULDN’T BE ALL THAT BAD
… Sean Carmody braked uncertainly in front of the house on Pomfret Street. Pommes frites. French fries, he thought absently. He mounted the shoveled steps, noting as he walked that he seemed to be adjusting to the cold weather. Five degrees didn’t feel all that cold. The air tasted crisp and clean. He knocked, eliciting a series of barks from behind the door.
A trim, bright-eyed woman appeared and pushed aside a jet black border collie with her crutches. “Scout,” she commanded. “Sit.” The dog sat.
She wore jeans and a white oxford button-down, tucked in at the waist, and a simple gold cross on a chain around her neck with matching posts in her ears. Katherine Skinner brushed at her chestnut hair, elegantly streaked with silver, moving it away from her face. She waited for the man to speak.
He’d expected an old granny, not a contemporary. Handsome, Carmody thought, not beautiful but handsome. Surprised, Sean Carmody felt even more surprised he was pleasantly surprised. “Mrs. Skinner?”
“Mr. Carmody? I’m almost ready.” Her handshake was firm, sure. Her voice sounded steady and belied the anxiety she felt at this ‘set up’ courtesy of Father Geary’s meddling in the lives of widows and widowers. “I’ve got my list.” She braced her crutches against the door and reached for her coat.
Sean Carmody moved to help and bumped against the crutches which bumped Katherine and she stumbled. Carmody grabbed for her and they folded in slow motion on the carpet, Carmody’s right hand pressed firmly against the woman’s breast.
“Ah … I’m sorry.” He regarded her awkwardly from a distance of about six inches. “Are you okay?” Aware of the placement of his hand, he felt powerless to move it. Scout stood over the entangled couple and tentatively licked Carmody’s cheek.
“I think so. I guess it’s good to get the formalities over, though. And you must have passed some kind of test. Scout’s pretty fierce when it comes to strange men at the door. If she likes you, you can’t be all that bad. But it’s been some time since someone felt me up. You may remove your hand now,” she said calmly.
He retracted it as if he’d touched a hot griddle and in the process, lost his precarious balance and rolled off her onto the floor. The thickly furred dog, her black muzzle going gray at the edges, slurped him again.
They burst into simultaneous laughter and, aware of each other’s bodies, regained upright positions. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” she said. “But now that we’re introduced, please call me Kate.”
So as the chapter I’ve just read from proceeds, I start to put together a quasi-family for a group I call the Clear Spring orphans. The same group will ultimately establish a B&B in Dorothea’s spacious house but that doesn’t come until the second book.
In this segment, Sean and Kate are shopping for the group’s first communal meal, Thanksgiving dinner, in a place I call the Red Rabbit, named after an IGA in Apalachicola, Florida.
I put Sean in awkward position in the grocery store where he doesn’t know what to do or say so he has a reason to talk to Kate.
At the same time, I let Sean see a bit of his son’s pain because one thing is certain. Father and son aren’t sharing. They can talk basketball but not much more.
So in the Red Rabbit, Sean and Kate meet Fenton’s ex-wife and her lover.
“Sean Carmody?” a familiar feminine voice queried. “Sean Carmody?” The man turned to face his ex-daughter-in-law.
“Annie?”
They hugged—or rather Annie hugged Sean—and stepped back to arms’ length. Neither knew what to say. “I heard you were in town. Sooner or later, I figured our paths would cross,” she started. “Rumor has it you’re here for the season.”
“I am,” he said with hesitation in his voice. He shifted the conversation. So much to know.
“Annie, it’s good to see you. How are you?” He added, “I’m sorry about … well, I’m sorry.”
She said, “Me, too. But I’m good. I’m fine.” She peered at him, giving him an evaluative once-over. “You look good,” she said. “How’s Carolyn? And how on earth did you convince her to come along on such an extended trip?”
“You didn’t know?”
“What?”
“You didn’t know Carolyn died? Cancer. A couple of years ago now.” He knew exactly. Three years, eight months, six days.
She didn’t and her smile evaporated and her eyes brimmed with tears. “I’m so sorry. Fenton never told me. He never said a word. But we don’t talk anymore.”
The chapter continues and Sean responds to her sympathy:
“It doesn’t hurt like it used to.” He spoke the truth. It didn’t hurt that much anymore—but he did feel empty, used up.
“And I’ve sold the house,” he offered. Moved into the truck outside. I wanted to get away from the Island and all the attachments there. Gonna be a fishing bum. There’s a lot of Western rivers I’ve wanted to see. A new chapter in my life. I guess you, too.” He hinted at the divorce and Caleb’s death.
“Forgive me.” Annie Holbrook motioned in the direction of her companion. “Casey Redfield, this is Sean Carmody. Fenton’s father.”
“I know. It’s in the eyes. Besides, I’ve seen you around the gym.” Redfield looked familiar to Carmody and the tall, athletically built woman stepped forward to shake his hand. “I’m the trainer at Parker. I’m sure Fenton would feel awkward introducing us.” She clarified the moment by sliding her arm into the crook of Annie’s.
Sean Carmody took the hint. I’m talking with my son’s ex-wife’s lover and she’s a girl?
The chapter continues with Annie offering to tell Sean her side of the story and then Sean and Kate sit quietly in Sean’s truck outside the Red Rabbit, Sean still pretty much in a daze starts to talk:
“You know a place where we can get a cup of coffee? Help me sort this out?” Carmody uncertainly asked for help and his question seemed to come forth from his subconscious. The unbidden invitation caught him off guard but he continued. “Funny thing is,” he added, “I’d like to hear her story.” He started the truck and put it in gear. “I’d like to hear Fenton’s, too.”
“Maybe Fenton would like to hear yours,” Katherine Skinner said.”
I want here to circle back to the title of the first book. Window Dressing has three meanings but I think most people only get two.
First there’s the obvious. From time to time, the Window Dresser we come to know as Susannah Applegate re-appears in her window late at night and Carmody is drawn to that window but, as he begins to know her, he is unable to tell her what he’s seen.
Second, the father uses the term in a brusque way when describing actions or events that are insincere and false. I introduce it first through his son who thinks of it in a meeting he has with his boss, Owen George:
“Suddenly (Fenton) remembered a phrase his father used. Window dressing. It defined Dean Owen George. Appearance over substance. Carmody let the thought go. No sense in making matters worse. He rose to leave.”
But the third part of the meaning is the obscure one. I use Susannah Applegate because I wanted a flawed and mysterious romantic interest for Carmody.
Someone to bring him back to town after he leaves.
I wanted Susannah to be a wounded healer, a seer, a herbalist, a kind of mystic, a reader of the heavens.
And I gave her those qualities because it was my prerogative.
This begins to create Susannah’s mystery in THE PROGNOSTICATION PROVED ACCURATE. It is a time when Fenton and Susannah have not yet met. It’s late at night and Fenton is tracking Susannah via his kitchen window.
She sat at some kind of desk, her face indistinct but illuminated as before from the front by a table lamp. Carmody could see her from the shoulders up as she bent at a task he could not discern. The mysterious woman with long dark hair swayed slightly while she worked, as if moving to music. She concentrated on the job before her.
Fenton Carmody concentrated on the woman. Dorothea hadn’t mentioned anything about taking on a boarder. As usual, basketball and the onset of cold and snow reduced their contact. But still. I think Dorothea would have mentioned it. Who is she? And what on earth is she doing? Especially at this time of night? With some effort, he turned his back to the scene and trudged up the stairs to bed. Will I ever see her getting dressed again?
Ultimately, we discover that Susannah is tying trout flies to make extra cash but, like every thing else, I kinda take my time getting there and, as usual, Fenton is always the last to know.
But understand that when one ties a trout fly, it can be called dressing a fly.
Throughout the story, I did my best to keep Fenton from Susannah and the other way around. I don’t know why—other than if I got them together I was afraid the story would end. But I introduce the mysterious Window Dresser to Fenton Carmody this way:
Fenton has just risen early to blow new snow from his drive and from his neighbors’ sidewalks and he’s returning to his garage after discovering someone else has cleared the sidewalks and driveway for his elderly neighbor whose house is behind his. This is from IT’S CALLED A SINGING BOWL
…He noticed a young woman sitting in the snow in a lawn chair underneath a set of bird feeders which hung from Dorothea’s stately sugar maple. Carmody recognized her by the dark hair and tawny skin. He imagined the rest.
The woman sat still, intent on some thought, and stared vacantly into space. She wore a heavy Norwegian sweater and held a rimless, cereal-sized, gleaming brass bowl in her left hand. She rotated a short, lathe-tooled wooden spindle around the edge of the bowl. Then he noticed the soothing sound emanating from it—low toned, serene, calming; trance-inducing, like a humming choir.
The yard vibrated with bird life, all seemingly unaware of her presence. Cardinals, juncos, a few white throated sparrows, and some mourning doves fed on the ground at her feet alongside the neighborhood’s resident albino squirrel. Redpolls, gold finches, house finches, chickadees shared feeder perches with chunkier, more aggressive English sparrows. Several nuthatches and downy woodpeckers worked at nearby birch bark. This modern day St. Francis seemingly attracted the birds with the bowl. Carmody’s mouth dropped open and he stood transfixed as one brave chickadee perched lightly on her left thigh and selected a sunflower seed she’d evidently placed on her jeans for that purpose. The kind of scene pictured only in bird feeder ads.
“It’s called a singing bowl. It’s made in Nepal,” she said.
The birds scattered, their combined fluttering audible. Carmody gazed blankly at her and kept rubbing his hand…
The conversation continues awkwardly and Susannah notices his hand.
She stood up and walked to the fence. “Your hand hurt?”
Carmody’s tongue unknotted slowly. “No. Not really.” He paused and admitted, “Actually that’s not true. It’s nothing new. I’ve got some arthritis. From too much racquetball.” He added, “The snow blowing doesn’t help. Gripping the handle an all.” It occurred to Carmody he very much wanted to say the right thing, to make a good impression. He hadn’t felt that way in quite some time. I have absolutely no idea how to talk to this woman, he thought…
It’s at this point I introduce star gazing to the story and add another dimension to Susannah. As the story unfolds she will host full moon gatherings for her friends but that hasn’t happened yet.
“You’ll see the moon tonight,” she nodded at the clearing sky. “It’s full. It’ll rise a little after sunset. In colonial days they called the November moon the Beaver Moon. You can find Saturn, too. We’ll have three planets to see.
Carmody wanted to say something smart or clever but all he could manage was, “I’ll be watching.
The chapter concludes with Susannah accepting an invitation to see Carmody’s team play basketball. He gives her a pocket-size schedule:
She accepted it, imitated a small curtsy, and offered her serious gaze. “Thanks.” She started to move away. “I gotta be going. Nice to meet you. I’ll be watching, too.”
You’re not the only one, Fenton Carmody thought.
When he went to the office later that day, the vacant gym closed for the long weekend, Fenton Carmody Googled for a star gazing site. He discovered a sky calendar created by the Abrams Planetarium at Michigan State University and printed out the November edition.
Fenton Carmody vowed silently to learn more about the firmament. He had stars in his eyes.
Then there’s the stone itself. I wanted to use the stone as a way of adding a sense of magic. I was trying to make the unbelievable believable.
After a communal Christmas dinner with friends, Susannah stayed behind to give Fenton a present. This is from IT’S GOT SOME MAGIC IN IT
…Susannah lingered that evening after the group dispersed. She held out a small mahogany box, wrapped with a single red ribbon, and handed it to Fenton Carmody. “A present,” she said. “Merry Christmas.”
Carmody undid the bow and flipped the lid on the brass-hinged box. He extracted a gleaming black stone, its crystals so dense it felt smooth and polished—about the size and shape of a Vintage Brass No. 5 Smoke Stone cigarette lighter. The rock nestled in the palm of his hand and lay there as if it belonged. “It’s beautiful,” he said.
“It’s a healing stone, forged from magma heat. It’s metamorphic rock. That’s a sedimentary rock that’s been heated and pressurized. It started forming when Europe and Africa crashed into North America. When the continental tectonic plates collided they pushed the Appalachians into the sky. They were the size of the Himalayas but that was like two hundred and fifty million years ago. Then, during the Triassic, the continents separated and this rock came up from the rift. Only recently—like about forty thousand years ago—the Wisconsin glacier dragged it from the area around the Connecticut River Valley to what would become Long Island. I happened to pick it up on a North Shore beach. So,” she finished her geology lesson and got to the point, “it’s an ancient rock from the heart of the earth and it’s got some magic in it.” She reached out and touched his hand, molding his fingers around the stone, smoothed and polished by centuries of salt water action. “For the arthritis. It eases the pain. Feel the heat.”
Fenton Carmody gripped the object loosely in his right hand and immediately felt soothing warmth spread into his muscles and articulations. He glanced from her to his hand and back to her as surprise spread across his face. He tightened his grip. “Wow. This feels great.” He opened his hand and closed it again. “It fits,” he remarked as if trying on a glove.
“Merry Christmas,” she said again and slipped out the door, stepping into a wash of full moon light. She turned to Fenton Carmody who stood in the doorway, gripping his warm gift, quietly watching her leave, a black border collie at his knees. “I’m a healer, remember? But you must want to be healed.”
“I need healing?”
“You know the old question about the pope being Catholic?
“It’s that obvious?”
“What do you think?” She disappeared into the night.
I used the stone to monitor the strength of the relationship between Fenton and Susannah. Ultimately I titled the second book after the stone and there does come a time when the magic stone loses its healing powers.
But first I had to give Susannah troubles of her own, keep all her jobs mysterious at the same time.
I need to let Fenton Carmody think he’ll lose his coaching job. I’ll delay his firing and then surprise him with it.
I’ll forge a friendship between Sean and Kate and introduce a cast of minor characters.
I needed some players for Carmody to coach and I had fun giving life to them: a black woman from Mississippi, the daughter of cattle rancher from Saddlestring, Wyoming; and my favorite, Jenny Roanhorse, a shy first-year Navaho fresh off the rez who struggles with her identity and the betrayal of her body.
There’s a female assistant coach who ultimately gets her boss’s job. Like Fenton, it’s a dream come true for her. Then she realizes there are much better things a young woman can do with her life.
I give depth to Rennie’s life by giving him a special friend. He changes his life for the better while attending the Sturgis motor cycle rally.
There’s a wily female college vice president who unsuccessfully presses Carmody for damning I information about Owen George. The VP manages the college with a deft touch.
I should not forget my favorite character, widow Dorothea Christian whose husband was an advisor to Dwight Eisenhower. Dorothea comes from money and is a retired but influential sculptress. But she is largely estranged from her family. Don’t ask because I don’t know exactly why. But Dorothea and her home play a prominent part in the proceedings.
I also had fun with a classical guitarist, a Brit named Peter Blackstone who teaches music at the school.
Then there’s a fishing guide named Seth, a mysterious woman named Tasha, the good Father Geary who likes a dram or two, a host of barber shop kibitzers.
Of course, I weave a lot of basketball lore into the tale—but I get most of that out of my system in the first book—and that’s for the better—but I had some things to say.
The only true to life character in the book is a dog named Scout.
In the book, she is a good fishing companion. In real life, she is not. She swims in the water and scares the trout away.
Finally, I need to exact vengeance on the Mean Dean. Many assume he dies at the end of the first book…But to find out about all of that … well, I guess you’ll have to read the books for yourself.
John Hershey has worked in five colleges and universities for 33 years as a basketball coach, administrator, outdoor educator, teacher, and community relations liaison. He writes for the fun of it as time allows. He lives in St. Paul and is grateful his wife still loves him and his “late-teen” boys still talk to him. One day he hopes to find a situation where he can just write and keep his wading boots from drying out.
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
What is the difference between...
I use Google to search the web so much that I often forget that there are other search engines that may be more suitable for uncovering the information that I am after. For instance, I was looking for the difference between a book distributor and a book wholesaler but was not coming up with a site that told me anything about what a book wholesaler does that a distributor doesn't or vice versa.
I did find some interesting information. Book Marketing not only offers a page on the top independent book distributors in the US but appears to be a great resource for all kinds of information on marketing your book(s) for authors and publishers.
But I still didn't have my question answered. Then I remembered Ask Jeeves. Could they still be around? So I Googled "Ask Jeeves" and sure enough, Ask Jeeves is now Ask.com. I plugged in my question "what is the difference between a book distributor and a book wholesaler" and I found CLMP, the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses. In their FAQs I found my answer.
Most unpublished writers of book length manuscripts, I would venture to guess, suffer under the delusion that if we could just find an agent or a publisher for our book, life would be grand. And it would be grand until we discover that marketing that book is the bigger issue. Getting published is easy compared to getting your book sold beyond your personal circle of friends and family.
When you are getting ready to sign that publishing contract, be sure to ask who the publisher's distributor is and check them out on line. Distributors have representatives who actively sell your book to retail outlets and can even get your book on the new release table, in a point-of-sale display, faced on the shelf, and can arrange for events and placement of your book in airport book stores and the like. This all starts well before your release date--4 to 6 months before your release date!! So getting a good distributor is important.
There is a lot to learn in this business and while we, as writers, don't want to have to do anything more than be sure we have a great plot and good characters, it behooves us to learn a bit about the industry we are trying to break into. So for every writing class we take or for every how-to-write book we read, we need to be taking a class or reading a book about how to market our book once its published.
I did find some interesting information. Book Marketing not only offers a page on the top independent book distributors in the US but appears to be a great resource for all kinds of information on marketing your book(s) for authors and publishers.
But I still didn't have my question answered. Then I remembered Ask Jeeves. Could they still be around? So I Googled "Ask Jeeves" and sure enough, Ask Jeeves is now Ask.com. I plugged in my question "what is the difference between a book distributor and a book wholesaler" and I found CLMP, the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses. In their FAQs I found my answer.
Most unpublished writers of book length manuscripts, I would venture to guess, suffer under the delusion that if we could just find an agent or a publisher for our book, life would be grand. And it would be grand until we discover that marketing that book is the bigger issue. Getting published is easy compared to getting your book sold beyond your personal circle of friends and family.
When you are getting ready to sign that publishing contract, be sure to ask who the publisher's distributor is and check them out on line. Distributors have representatives who actively sell your book to retail outlets and can even get your book on the new release table, in a point-of-sale display, faced on the shelf, and can arrange for events and placement of your book in airport book stores and the like. This all starts well before your release date--4 to 6 months before your release date!! So getting a good distributor is important.
There is a lot to learn in this business and while we, as writers, don't want to have to do anything more than be sure we have a great plot and good characters, it behooves us to learn a bit about the industry we are trying to break into. So for every writing class we take or for every how-to-write book we read, we need to be taking a class or reading a book about how to market our book once its published.
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Amazon BookSurge AntiTrust Lawsuit
If you are interested in following the developments in the case against Amazon and related issues, you can subscribe to Amazon BookSurge AntiTrust Lawsuit Clearinghouse where you can download a PDF of the actual complaint.
Have a great July 4th!
Have a great July 4th!
Monday, June 30, 2008
The Queue on Wikipedia!
The Queue has a couple of terrific new interns, Robyn and Beth, helping us get the word out to writers who believe they are ready to seek out agents for their manuscripts. The word is: take a reality check! Okay, that's four words, but you get what I mean.
Reality Check:
We know, all too well, that we get one shot, and one shot only, with an agent for our manuscript--agents do not like to see the same manuscript come through the pipeline multiple times as they have hundreds of manuscripts vying for their attention. So, we have to make our one shot count with a great query letter. But great query letters abound. What is more important is the manuscript--it has to sparkle from the very first words of the very first chapter, that we send along with the query letter as a sample, to the very last word of the very last chapter.
How to make sure our manuscripts sparkle:
No one wants to hear this but, to get an honest and "objective" appraisal of a completed manuscript means paying a fist full of cold hard cash to someone who will tell us what we have and what we have to do to make our manuscript stand out from those hundreds of manuscripts that are our direct competition. I would suggest using the terrific editors at The Queue! But use someone other than friends who will probably tell you your book is great because they are so impressed that you wrote a book, or your writing group who can't give you the "fresh eyes" your completed manuscript needs. Just be sure to get a thorough--we say rigorous! at The Queue--diagnostic critique from someone with credentials. This isn't cheap but in the long run it is an investment that will save time, a good deal of frustration and ultimately money.
So that is the word (300 words +/-) that our interns at The Queue are helping us get out. Robyn Correll is working the all important Internet angle.
The Queue now has a Wikipedia article with Face Book, My Space and You Tube exposure to follow! Ah, the brave new world of publishing and promotion. The article on Wikipedia has links to The Queue, of course, but also to two of the manuscripts that Scarletta Press, our parent company, acquired off The Queue: Greater Trouble in the Lesser Antilles and Willow in a Storm. (Did I mention that if you have a dynamite manuscript that goes through The Queue and wows the editorial board we will feature it On Queue while you look for an agent?) These two fantastic books were finalists in the MIPA 2007 Midwest Book Awards.
Greater Trouble in the Lesser Antilles, a hilarious excursion through the lives and lore of the denizens of Flamingo Bay, St. Judas, USVI, won in the commercial fiction category (if you are consulting an atlas, St. Judas does not exist except in the mind of author Charles Locks and on the pages of GTLA). I think of GTLA as a "guy book" but women tell me they are in love with Captain Brian. He is a SNAG after all, a sensitive new age guy!! A sequel, Low Jinks on the High Seas, is in the works.
Willow in a Storm is a memoir of survival. Inspirational and profoundly powerful in a very low-key way, this prison story is told in layers, each layer revealing more of the author's experience and the epiphanies and milestones that allowed him to emerge, in the end, a hopeful and fully realized human being. I do not read prison stories, as a rule, but I couldn't put this one down (as The Queue's general manager I had to read it and I'm glad I did). It is raw and frank and told without sentimentality. It still takes my breath away when I think about it.
Check out The Queue on Wikipedia and check out Scarletta Press on Wikipedia as well!
Reality Check:
We know, all too well, that we get one shot, and one shot only, with an agent for our manuscript--agents do not like to see the same manuscript come through the pipeline multiple times as they have hundreds of manuscripts vying for their attention. So, we have to make our one shot count with a great query letter. But great query letters abound. What is more important is the manuscript--it has to sparkle from the very first words of the very first chapter, that we send along with the query letter as a sample, to the very last word of the very last chapter.
How to make sure our manuscripts sparkle:
No one wants to hear this but, to get an honest and "objective" appraisal of a completed manuscript means paying a fist full of cold hard cash to someone who will tell us what we have and what we have to do to make our manuscript stand out from those hundreds of manuscripts that are our direct competition. I would suggest using the terrific editors at The Queue! But use someone other than friends who will probably tell you your book is great because they are so impressed that you wrote a book, or your writing group who can't give you the "fresh eyes" your completed manuscript needs. Just be sure to get a thorough--we say rigorous! at The Queue--diagnostic critique from someone with credentials. This isn't cheap but in the long run it is an investment that will save time, a good deal of frustration and ultimately money.
So that is the word (300 words +/-) that our interns at The Queue are helping us get out. Robyn Correll is working the all important Internet angle.
The Queue now has a Wikipedia article with Face Book, My Space and You Tube exposure to follow! Ah, the brave new world of publishing and promotion. The article on Wikipedia has links to The Queue, of course, but also to two of the manuscripts that Scarletta Press, our parent company, acquired off The Queue: Greater Trouble in the Lesser Antilles and Willow in a Storm. (Did I mention that if you have a dynamite manuscript that goes through The Queue and wows the editorial board we will feature it On Queue while you look for an agent?) These two fantastic books were finalists in the MIPA 2007 Midwest Book Awards.
Greater Trouble in the Lesser Antilles, a hilarious excursion through the lives and lore of the denizens of Flamingo Bay, St. Judas, USVI, won in the commercial fiction category (if you are consulting an atlas, St. Judas does not exist except in the mind of author Charles Locks and on the pages of GTLA). I think of GTLA as a "guy book" but women tell me they are in love with Captain Brian. He is a SNAG after all, a sensitive new age guy!! A sequel, Low Jinks on the High Seas, is in the works.
Willow in a Storm is a memoir of survival. Inspirational and profoundly powerful in a very low-key way, this prison story is told in layers, each layer revealing more of the author's experience and the epiphanies and milestones that allowed him to emerge, in the end, a hopeful and fully realized human being. I do not read prison stories, as a rule, but I couldn't put this one down (as The Queue's general manager I had to read it and I'm glad I did). It is raw and frank and told without sentimentality. It still takes my breath away when I think about it.
Check out The Queue on Wikipedia and check out Scarletta Press on Wikipedia as well!
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Some good advice for writers
Okay, maybe I'm just being lazy but here are links to three of Nathan Bransford's blog posts that I think are worth reading even if you are way beyond this. Nathan gives some good advice to writers and if you don't follow his blog, you should. He's a literary agent but don't hold that against him--he is also pretty entertaining. His mission with the blog seems to be a good fit with The Queue's mission to help writers get better and the best writing get published!
In my writers group we had a bit of a disagreement over proper formatting of manuscripts for submission. I was told, in so many words, that I was being anal. Okay, I'll accept that but when I get manuscripts at The Queue, this is how I'd like to see them formatted: How to Format Your Manuscript
If an agent or publisher asked you to describe your plot, could you do it? Before you read Do You Have a Plot?, jot down your answer. You might just be surprised.
Character and Plot: Inseparable! is a great continuation of Do You Have a Plot.
Thanks Nathan for making my blogging sooooo easy!
In my writers group we had a bit of a disagreement over proper formatting of manuscripts for submission. I was told, in so many words, that I was being anal. Okay, I'll accept that but when I get manuscripts at The Queue, this is how I'd like to see them formatted: How to Format Your Manuscript
If an agent or publisher asked you to describe your plot, could you do it? Before you read Do You Have a Plot?, jot down your answer. You might just be surprised.
Character and Plot: Inseparable! is a great continuation of Do You Have a Plot.
Thanks Nathan for making my blogging sooooo easy!
Monday, June 23, 2008
Join the Independents Movement
Is it just me or has anyone else noticed that the biggies, Barnes and Noble and Borders, are selling an awful lot of "other stuff." It seems to me the floor space devoted to greeting cards, blank books and gift items is getting bigger. Or maybe it's just my imagination. I have to admit, I avoid the biggies; I can dismiss the "other stuff" but I am overwhelmed by the quantity of books. Browsing in a store with over 100,000 titles on the shelves makes my heart pound and my palms sweat. I get light headed, dizzy and a little nauseated. I think it's the opposite of claustrophobia--a form of agoraphobia maybe. Too much of a good thing is too much.
I like small bookstores. I like the nod I get from the proprietor when I walk in the door. I like knowing that even though I can't scan every title and fondle every book in a twenty minute visit, I can, over the course of a number of visits, become thoroughly familiar with the offerings. And if I don't find a title I'm looking for, they will be happy to order it for me and have it shipped to my home if I prefer, usually within a few days.
I like that the guy in my writer's group who got his book published last year by a small press found his book featured on the new release tables and faced on the shelves at a number of local independent bookstores(1, 2, 3), he had readings and book signings and when he stopped in afterward they knew his name. The biggies weren't interested in carrying the book let alone hosting readings and signings even after he got terrific reviews in the local papers and a county library reserve list in the triple digits. I like the idea of local bookstores owned and operated by someone with ties to my community and an interest in fostering local talent and local celebrity.
Last month Khalid Houseini, recipient of Book Sense's Book of the Year award in fiction for A Thousand Splendid Suns, thanked independent booksellers for supporting him over the past five years. It's word of mouth that makes obscure books into best sellers and its independent booksellers who get the word out. I, for one, would like to thank independent booksellers for enriching my life.
So, join me and join the Independents Movement .
I like small bookstores. I like the nod I get from the proprietor when I walk in the door. I like knowing that even though I can't scan every title and fondle every book in a twenty minute visit, I can, over the course of a number of visits, become thoroughly familiar with the offerings. And if I don't find a title I'm looking for, they will be happy to order it for me and have it shipped to my home if I prefer, usually within a few days.
I like that the guy in my writer's group who got his book published last year by a small press found his book featured on the new release tables and faced on the shelves at a number of local independent bookstores(1, 2, 3), he had readings and book signings and when he stopped in afterward they knew his name. The biggies weren't interested in carrying the book let alone hosting readings and signings even after he got terrific reviews in the local papers and a county library reserve list in the triple digits. I like the idea of local bookstores owned and operated by someone with ties to my community and an interest in fostering local talent and local celebrity.
Last month Khalid Houseini, recipient of Book Sense's Book of the Year award in fiction for A Thousand Splendid Suns, thanked independent booksellers for supporting him over the past five years. It's word of mouth that makes obscure books into best sellers and its independent booksellers who get the word out. I, for one, would like to thank independent booksellers for enriching my life.
So, join me and join the Independents Movement .
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Thriller Fest 2008 and Competition Deadlines!!!
Be sure to consult websites for up-to-date information.
Thriller Fest 2008 will be held at the Hyatt Hotel in NYC July 9 – 12 Appearances by Sandra Brown and James Patterson among others. Sounds like a good time.
Glimmer Train is running monthly competitions, June deadline is June 30, open fiction 2,000 – 20,000 words, $20.00 fee $2,000 first place plus publication and copies other prizes $1,000/$600
American Literary Review, short fiction, non-fiction and poetry competitions open June 1 – September 1, 2008, $1,000 prizes
Fish Publishing Has a number of competitions with closing dates in July and August with money prizes. Check them out. Entry fees apply.
Fish Unpublished Novel Award: 1st Prize: Publication and 1,500 euros (approximately $1,200 USD) advance on royalties. Deadline: September 30 Eligibility: Open to any writer Entry Fee: $50 USD
WOW! WOMEN ON WRITING QUARTERLY FLASH FICTION CONTEST Wow! Women on Writing, Short Fiction 250 – 500 words, deadline Aug 31, 2008, $5.00 fee $200.00 first prize
open to all writers
Open City short fiction to 5,000 words, deadline Sept 15, 2008, $10.00 fee, prize $500.00 + publication.
ONCEWRITTEN.COM in the Midnight Hour Halloween Contest, Deadline Aug 31, Halloween theme short fiction, $13.00 fee, $500.00/$100.00 prizes
Mystery Novel award, Deadline July 15, Offered annually for the best unpublished mystery, suspense, thriller, or espionage novel, $25 fee, prize is publication with standard contract
Please address any questions regarding these competitions to the hosts of the competitions. I apologize for any errors I may have made.
Thriller Fest 2008 will be held at the Hyatt Hotel in NYC July 9 – 12 Appearances by Sandra Brown and James Patterson among others. Sounds like a good time.
Glimmer Train is running monthly competitions, June deadline is June 30, open fiction 2,000 – 20,000 words, $20.00 fee $2,000 first place plus publication and copies other prizes $1,000/$600
American Literary Review, short fiction, non-fiction and poetry competitions open June 1 – September 1, 2008, $1,000 prizes
Fish Publishing Has a number of competitions with closing dates in July and August with money prizes. Check them out. Entry fees apply.
Fish Unpublished Novel Award: 1st Prize: Publication and 1,500 euros (approximately $1,200 USD) advance on royalties. Deadline: September 30 Eligibility: Open to any writer Entry Fee: $50 USD
WOW! WOMEN ON WRITING QUARTERLY FLASH FICTION CONTEST Wow! Women on Writing, Short Fiction 250 – 500 words, deadline Aug 31, 2008, $5.00 fee $200.00 first prize
open to all writers
Open City short fiction to 5,000 words, deadline Sept 15, 2008, $10.00 fee, prize $500.00 + publication.
ONCEWRITTEN.COM in the Midnight Hour Halloween Contest, Deadline Aug 31, Halloween theme short fiction, $13.00 fee, $500.00/$100.00 prizes
Mystery Novel award, Deadline July 15, Offered annually for the best unpublished mystery, suspense, thriller, or espionage novel, $25 fee, prize is publication with standard contract
Please address any questions regarding these competitions to the hosts of the competitions. I apologize for any errors I may have made.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Small Publishers Feel Power of Amazon’s ‘Buy’ Button
A friend forwarded this link to an article in today's New York Times. Mighty Amazon is once again wielding it's WSD (weapon of selective distruction), the "Buy" button. To access the article you might have to register but the process is fast, easy and free!!
I wrote an open letter some months ago that addressed one of Amazon's initiatives, BookSurge, and the monopolistic way Amazon was asserting this POD (print on demand) service--the use of the WSD. Below is the text of that letter.
What should writers struggle to publish their first book think about these developements in the industry? Is there cause for concern?
21st Century Robber Baron?
The alarm has been sounded. Large and small publishing houses, not to mention non-profit and self-publishers, as well as book distributors and wholesalers, are in danger of having further revenue sources appropriated by the giant Amazon.com. Are we witnessing a reemergence of the industrial robber baron of the 19th century in the book industry in the form of Amazon's BookSurge initiative that will radically change the book publishing and distribution networks into the second decade of the 21st century?
Will Amazon.com do to small and large publishing houses what Borders and Barnes and Noble did to independent book retailers in the second half of the 20th century?
Can anything be done about it?
Should anything be done about it?
Change is the only constant, we are told. Amazon.com itself is an innovation along with print on demand, and the electronic reader. The pace of change has accelerated and it demands that we change along with it or perish.
What innovations, to ensure the survival to hundreds of small independent and non-profit publishing houses and the writers they publish, will be needed to combat the affects of Amazon.com capturing more and more of the revue dollars by their monopolistic demands in the POD (print on demand) and, most probably, small runs book business?
Education is the first defense. Here are a couple of links to information on this latest development in the continuing saga of the ever changing book industry.
http://mayareynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2008/04/publishing-industry-expert-speaks.html
http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/bookselling/does_amazons_shipping_news_hold_water_81358.asp?c=rss
http://amarketingexpert.com/ameblog/?p=245
http://www.writersweekly.com/the_latest_from_angelahoycom/004597_03272008.html
I wrote an open letter some months ago that addressed one of Amazon's initiatives, BookSurge, and the monopolistic way Amazon was asserting this POD (print on demand) service--the use of the WSD. Below is the text of that letter.
What should writers struggle to publish their first book think about these developements in the industry? Is there cause for concern?
21st Century Robber Baron?
The alarm has been sounded. Large and small publishing houses, not to mention non-profit and self-publishers, as well as book distributors and wholesalers, are in danger of having further revenue sources appropriated by the giant Amazon.com. Are we witnessing a reemergence of the industrial robber baron of the 19th century in the book industry in the form of Amazon's BookSurge initiative that will radically change the book publishing and distribution networks into the second decade of the 21st century?
Will Amazon.com do to small and large publishing houses what Borders and Barnes and Noble did to independent book retailers in the second half of the 20th century?
Can anything be done about it?
Should anything be done about it?
Change is the only constant, we are told. Amazon.com itself is an innovation along with print on demand, and the electronic reader. The pace of change has accelerated and it demands that we change along with it or perish.
What innovations, to ensure the survival to hundreds of small independent and non-profit publishing houses and the writers they publish, will be needed to combat the affects of Amazon.com capturing more and more of the revue dollars by their monopolistic demands in the POD (print on demand) and, most probably, small runs book business?
Education is the first defense. Here are a couple of links to information on this latest development in the continuing saga of the ever changing book industry.
http://mayareynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2008/04/publishing-industry-expert-speaks.html
http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/bookselling/does_amazons_shipping_news_hold_water_81358.asp?c=rss
http://amarketingexpert.com/ameblog/?p=245
http://www.writersweekly.com/the_latest_from_angelahoycom/004597_03272008.html
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Wanna buy my Junie doll? How about a T-shirt?
The BEA (Book Expo America) and Paul Krugman, New York Times columnist, seem to have incited a great deal of anxiety, this past week, in the publishing and writing communites with the assertion (or reassertion) that e-book domination of the publishing industry is an inevitability and profits and royalties are on their way out. Just as network television gives away sitcoms, dramas and reality shows to attract attention to advertising, so will writers be giving away our books, in the not too distant future, to attract attention to websites where we will be advertising spinoff products or other people's products and services in order to make a living from our writing.
One of the most interesting takes I have read so far on this topic was posted in response to agent Nathan Bransford's June 11 questions: Is this the future? And how do we feel about it? My question is, should I stop rewriting my novel and start designing Junie Bodine (my main character) T-shirts and action figures? Jackson Perlow, thanks for your insight. Anyone else care to weigh in?
Jackson Perlow said...
The reality of our free market economy is that profit from our endeavors is controlled by supply and demand. As evidenced by the flood of manuscripts that threatens to overwhelm Nathan and his ilk, there is a massive oversupply of fiction out there. The reading public is not screaming for more great fiction, and they rely on the gatekeepers, agents and publishers, to help them find the gems hidden in the river of mediocrity. This is frustrating to those of us who think we've written one of those gems (all of us), and many search for alternative markets to bypass the gatekeepers. What is likely to result is a two-market system. One market will continue to serve up products that have the seal of approval of the traditional publishing industry's gatekeepers--a limited supply that will assure sufficient profit for elite writers and publishers alike. The second market, already developing, will use the Internet to distribute an unvetted, unlimited supply of e-fiction. This market will suffer from greater supply (because of the absence of gatekeepers) and lesser demand (because of the difficulty of separating quality fiction from crap), resulting in dramatically lower prices than could be obtained in the traditional market. Nobody will make money.So I think authors who are part of the traditional market will continue to make their money in the same way they always have--writing and selling great fiction. Authors who can't crack the traditional market--whether because of a lesser quality product or an inability to convince the gatekeepers of the value of their product--will continue to toil in poverty. I doubt the oversupply will diminish the pricing power of traditional publishers because they control access to the one orderly market the public trusts.
One of the most interesting takes I have read so far on this topic was posted in response to agent Nathan Bransford's June 11 questions: Is this the future? And how do we feel about it? My question is, should I stop rewriting my novel and start designing Junie Bodine (my main character) T-shirts and action figures? Jackson Perlow, thanks for your insight. Anyone else care to weigh in?
Jackson Perlow said...
The reality of our free market economy is that profit from our endeavors is controlled by supply and demand. As evidenced by the flood of manuscripts that threatens to overwhelm Nathan and his ilk, there is a massive oversupply of fiction out there. The reading public is not screaming for more great fiction, and they rely on the gatekeepers, agents and publishers, to help them find the gems hidden in the river of mediocrity. This is frustrating to those of us who think we've written one of those gems (all of us), and many search for alternative markets to bypass the gatekeepers. What is likely to result is a two-market system. One market will continue to serve up products that have the seal of approval of the traditional publishing industry's gatekeepers--a limited supply that will assure sufficient profit for elite writers and publishers alike. The second market, already developing, will use the Internet to distribute an unvetted, unlimited supply of e-fiction. This market will suffer from greater supply (because of the absence of gatekeepers) and lesser demand (because of the difficulty of separating quality fiction from crap), resulting in dramatically lower prices than could be obtained in the traditional market. Nobody will make money.So I think authors who are part of the traditional market will continue to make their money in the same way they always have--writing and selling great fiction. Authors who can't crack the traditional market--whether because of a lesser quality product or an inability to convince the gatekeepers of the value of their product--will continue to toil in poverty. I doubt the oversupply will diminish the pricing power of traditional publishers because they control access to the one orderly market the public trusts.
Monday, June 9, 2008
Rejection Can Be Good?
This article was submitted anonymously by one of our staff at The Queue. The premise--rejection can be good--is not what we want to hear. I never believed that old adage that what doesn't kill us makes us stronger. But I have to believe there is something to be learned from rejection. Let's see what Anonymous has to say.
Rejection Can Be Good - to a point.
Serious writers who think their work is mature enough to submit to publishers will likely face rejection in the beginning. In the early stages of one’s writing career, this can be a good thing. For anyone who has experienced it, rejection can be painful but also the perfect wind for stoking the fire of creativity, that tireless blaze that launches one strongly and surely out of bed in the morning.
The first rejection is a rite of passage; you’re in the game.
The second--you’re disappointed but you tweak your work, pulling out what you hope are
the last straggling weeds.
Rejected a third time (the standard rejection without any helpful remarks, and this time it took four months for a reply)--you begin to wonder if your manuscript has any merit at all or if it has even been read.
Multiple rejections--the “notches in the belt” soon become a wearisome string of holes. And a belt full of holes doesn’t hold up much anymore.
One might find consolation in hearing a few rejection stories of famous writers.
E. E. Cummings’ first poems were rejected by a dozen publishers before his mother stepped in to help him self publish. Rudyard Kipling was told in a rejection letter that he ”just did not know how to use the English language.” Madeline L’Engle’s Newbery Award winning A Wrinkle in Time was rejected countless times before it found the right home. And Arthur Golden, in a rejection story recounted at a website devoted to rejection stories, rejectioncollection.com (The Reject’s Rag), tells of his agented Memoirs of a Geisha being rejected and criticized repeatedly for being dull. At one point he asked himself, "Should I ditch this thing and try to get a job somewhere?" Through a grueling IRS audit, Golden rewrote the story in first person from the eyes of a child which made it a compelling bestseller.
Had Arthur Golden succumbed to the pressures of life and become despondent over his countless rejections, he may never have reworked his fine novel and we would have missed out on a truly golden tale. One can only guess at the number of brave writers with equally wonderful reject stories who just gave up.
Rejection Can Be Good - to a point.
Serious writers who think their work is mature enough to submit to publishers will likely face rejection in the beginning. In the early stages of one’s writing career, this can be a good thing. For anyone who has experienced it, rejection can be painful but also the perfect wind for stoking the fire of creativity, that tireless blaze that launches one strongly and surely out of bed in the morning.
The first rejection is a rite of passage; you’re in the game.
The second--you’re disappointed but you tweak your work, pulling out what you hope are
the last straggling weeds.
Rejected a third time (the standard rejection without any helpful remarks, and this time it took four months for a reply)--you begin to wonder if your manuscript has any merit at all or if it has even been read.
Multiple rejections--the “notches in the belt” soon become a wearisome string of holes. And a belt full of holes doesn’t hold up much anymore.
One might find consolation in hearing a few rejection stories of famous writers.
E. E. Cummings’ first poems were rejected by a dozen publishers before his mother stepped in to help him self publish. Rudyard Kipling was told in a rejection letter that he ”just did not know how to use the English language.” Madeline L’Engle’s Newbery Award winning A Wrinkle in Time was rejected countless times before it found the right home. And Arthur Golden, in a rejection story recounted at a website devoted to rejection stories, rejectioncollection.com (The Reject’s Rag), tells of his agented Memoirs of a Geisha being rejected and criticized repeatedly for being dull. At one point he asked himself, "Should I ditch this thing and try to get a job somewhere?" Through a grueling IRS audit, Golden rewrote the story in first person from the eyes of a child which made it a compelling bestseller.
Had Arthur Golden succumbed to the pressures of life and become despondent over his countless rejections, he may never have reworked his fine novel and we would have missed out on a truly golden tale. One can only guess at the number of brave writers with equally wonderful reject stories who just gave up.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Welcome to The Queue blog
If you are a writer with a manuscript that you think is ready to be seen by agents and publishers, but nagging doubts stop you from submitting; if you are a writer with a manuscript that you have submitted to more agents and publishers than you care to enumerate, but are getting nowhere; if you are a writer with a manuscript that never seems to get finished because you know something isn't right, the editors at The Queue want to help you.
Our primary mission at The Queue is to provide writers with in depth, rigorous diagnostic critiques by highly qualified professionals in publishing, academia and specialized fields, in all genres and categories of fiction and nonfiction. The Q-critique is designed to help you get your manuscript agent-ready. This is not an inexpensive service but in the long run investing in a Q-critique will save you money and time.
The Queue also provides a venue for exposing the best of the manuscripts we receive by placing them on the On Queue lineup where they are available for agents and publishers to acquire. All rights remain with the author. When a manuscript reaches the top position on the On Queue lineup and is unacquired, The Queue will contract with you to publish and market your manuscript under The Queue imprint.
In addition to the Q-critique and the On Queue lineup, The Queue also offers a number of Q-tools to help you prepare for publication and your part in marketing your book once it is in print.
Check us out at QueueBooks.com
Our primary mission at The Queue is to provide writers with in depth, rigorous diagnostic critiques by highly qualified professionals in publishing, academia and specialized fields, in all genres and categories of fiction and nonfiction. The Q-critique is designed to help you get your manuscript agent-ready. This is not an inexpensive service but in the long run investing in a Q-critique will save you money and time.
The Queue also provides a venue for exposing the best of the manuscripts we receive by placing them on the On Queue lineup where they are available for agents and publishers to acquire. All rights remain with the author. When a manuscript reaches the top position on the On Queue lineup and is unacquired, The Queue will contract with you to publish and market your manuscript under The Queue imprint.
In addition to the Q-critique and the On Queue lineup, The Queue also offers a number of Q-tools to help you prepare for publication and your part in marketing your book once it is in print.
Check us out at QueueBooks.com
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