What If You Could Not Fail

Odds and ends

Have not been able to blog for a few weeks.  Last weekend I was busy with paying-client work, the kind of stuff that keeps the lights on in the office.  Then I came down with a chronic sinus headache.  Hasn’t been enough to put me to bed, but enough to make we want to lay around and do nothing at the end of the day when ordinarily I would take time to blog.

I have recruited an alpha reader for Rules for Giving.  I hope to hand him an edited manuscript around December 1.  This is someone I know is going to be brutally honest.  They will tell me what works and what doesn’t.  What I need to cut and what I need to elaborate on.

A friend of mine who works in publishing read the manuscript a few weeks ago.  She gave it a resounding thumbs-up. But we know each other very well, and she is familiar with the real-life story that inspired one of the plotlines.   In fact, she is the basis for one of the characters.  She is confident that she can see past those prejudices, but I want to be sure.

The alpha reader I recruited is not familiar with the story and again, I trust him to be honest about it.

Also, I asked a woman I know who is a lesbian to give me some input on the character of Leo the Knuckle.  I was concerned that as a gay woman, Leo violated some rules.  I could imagine lesbians reading the book and saying, “That would never happen.”  As it turns out, Leo works as a believable lesbian.  I also asked my friend about what kind of insecurities Leo might have.  I got some good anecdotes that I am going to work into the novel.

All this is in preparation for the Southern California Writers’ Conference in San Diego, which I have signed up for in February of next year.   If anyone has advice about how to milk the most out of a writers’ conference, I’m all ears.

I have also been giving some thought to my next novel.  The preparation for this one is going to be more structured.  The backdrop for the novel is the Catholic Church in the late 60s, a time when the clergy was reeling from Vatican II.  Nuns were giving up their habits, they were showing a little bit of ankle, and the altar in the church was turned around. I’m a product of ten years of Catholic schools, but I didn’t listen very well in the Catechism classes, and it has been forty years since I set foot in a Catholic church except for weddings and funerals.  There is some research to do.

I have access to some former nuns and priests and I’ve already been able to amass some great information.  My near-future reading list includes a biography of Pope John the 23^rd, and The Spiral Staircase, Karen Armstrong’s autobiographical story of leaving the convent.

That’s all for now.  I’m having lunch with a writer friend today, so maybe I’ll have more to talk about and blog about tomorrow. 

 

The One-Line Pitch

I'm planning on attending a writers' conference early next year.  As I prepare for it, I realize I need a one-sentence pitch for Rules for Giving. This podcast from Writing Excuses has given me some guidance. 

http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/10/09/writing-excuses-6-19-pitching/

The Courage of Cormac McCarthy

Last week I finished All the Pretty Horses, a novel by Cormac McCarthy. This is my third novel by this author.  I have also read No Country for Old Men and The Road.

McCarthy has come up with some of the best lines I have ever read.  In All the Pretty Horses, I stopped reading and actually looked for a pen when I came across, “He’d half meant to speak but those eyes had altered the world forever in the space of a heartbeat.” In The Road, describing a father and his young son surviving in post-apocalyptic American, he writes, “Then they set out along the blacktop in the gun metal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire.” That line gives me chills every time I read it.

What amazes me most about McCarthy, and what I admire, is the courage of his style. He’s not big on punctuation.  He uses periods—most of the time.  Commas are kind of hit and miss, and he never uses quotation marks—ever.  What’s real interesting is when he drops a period and forgets a capital letter at the same time.  You don’t know where one sentence ends and the next one begins. But McCarthy’s prose is such that you can figure it out.

And he gets away with it. McCarthy tells such compelling stories that his readers forgive him for his style. He has won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer, and a host of other awards. His name and the Nobel Prize are often mentioned in the same sentence.

I am amazed that he found an editor who would publish him back in the late 50s.. (His first editor at Random House also was Faulkner’s editor. That explains everything.) His manuscripts would never make it through a critique group.  People would go crazy.

Then I came across a blog post by Seth Godin (let me admit right here that I am not a big reader of Seth). He argues, “ … the contradiction (it seems) between Poke the Box, which argues that you must consistently ship innovations to the market (and frequently fail), and The Dip, [these are both books by Godin] which argues that quitting a project in the middle is dumb, that the real success comes after the quitters have left the building.”

On occasion you hear about writers who are working on an experimental novel (poking the box), but McCarthy started early and never quit (pushing through the dip). It takes a lot of courage. I only hope I have as much.

Accessible Literature?

As of late I have learned a new literary term:  Accessibility.  It refers to how easily a piece of literature, or an author is understood.  John Steinbeck is very accessible.  Hermann Hesse, not as much.  

Confessions of a Male Chauvinist Reader

I have a confession.  I read more male writers and female writers. I can’t get away from it. But I’m trying.

There are two things you must do if you want to write fiction. First, you must write, a lot.  It’s not going to write itself. You put the words down, cross them out, re-arrange them, and then do it all over again, and again and again. The second thing you must do is read. Yes, you need to read the classics (some of which would never make it out of a critique group today).  Read the contemporary stuff, too.  Stuff that sells.  Read John Grisham and Michael Connelly, Lawrence Block and Walter Moseley.

There I go.  Did you catch that?

I didn’t list any women authors.  I’m a chauvinist.  I don’t read any.

This is a weakness. I’ve read some Janet Evanovich, and recently I read The Bean Trees, Barbara Kingsolver’s first book (The Poisonwood Bible is next on my list).  Last year, on a whim, I read A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka. I recommend it, especially for anyone with older parents. I also read Bump by Diana Wagman, after seeing her on a panel at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.

Some of these I read before I was conscious of this female deficit in my reading. I’m proud of that.  Others I have purposely read since then. As I write this, I also realize that I have read To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (photo right)—at least twice and maybe three times—and that was way before I realized I was a male chauvinist reader.

So here’s the question:  If you are a man, do you read women authors?  Why or why not?  If you are a woman, do you real men authors?  Why or why not?

 

Visiting a Book Fair

I went to the West Hollywood Book Fair this past Sunday with a friend of mine from my literary critique group. If you’ve ever been to the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, it was a lot like that, only much, much smaller. But it was still good.

 These types of book festivals typically have a slate of panel discussions talking about various aspects of writing and publishing, and lots of booths with everything from small publishing houses, to special interest groups with books, to book sellers and local book stores, and lots else—some pertinent and others more in the category of, “What the hell were you thinking?”

Throughout there were tables of authors selling their books, most of whom you have never heard of.  In particular there was one lady—not a day under eighty, armed with a Sharpie for signing autographs—sitting behind stacks of her books.  An equally aged man (I’m guessing her husband) was next to her, looking supportive.  No one was buying or even talking to her, and we passed her several times. At another table there was a fellow selling his books and he had a crowd. 

My friend, a little-known but widely published poet who has also published about a dozen short stories, commented on the scene.

“Are you willing to do that?” he asked, referring to the older lady.  “Are you willing to sit there all day to sell two books?”

Later we passed the spoken word stage and a fellow was reading his poetry in front of forty seats, of which only three were occupied, probably because they offered a place to sit in the shade.  “That’s my nightmare,” he said.  “I’ll do a reading and three people will show up.”

I’ve been thinking about this and realized that you have to be smart about it.  There are some things you can if you want to sell yourself and your books at an event like this.

• Be cognizant of your venue.  West Hollywood is a gay community.  Does your book have a gay character and gay themes?  You need to push those. Maybe you need to invest in some signage or graphics.
• You need to mobilize your ground troops.  This is where Facebook and social media come in.  Let them know where you are going to be.  I go to many of the seminars at these events based largel y on who is speaking, and more and more they let me know through social media.    
• Invest in some giveaways.  Book markers are popular at these types of events.   Some of them were printed off a computer printer, but I picked them up anyway. Include things like your website and email, and where the book is available.  Is it available electronically and for what devices: Kindle, Nook, etc?
• Bring a posse if you can.  People go where people are, so if you can bring some friends who will hang around the front of your booth and act excited about your book, all the better. Buy them a bag of burgers at In-‘n-Out  or Five Guys on the way home.
• Have a reason for people to come out.  Does your website include videos or podcasts?  You need to be able to touch people through a variety of venues to keep them excited (check out www.sethharwood.com).  Take photos of your fans who show up and post them on Facebook.  I have not done a video yet, but I am thinking about it.
• Announce that anyone who is a friend of yours on Facebook, or who as “liked” your author page, can drop by and say hello to you at the event and you will put their name into a goldfish bowl.  At the end you draw a name, and that name will be a character in your next book.  
• Volunteer for panels at book fairs.  An area I need to research is how to volunteer for various panel discussions.  I have been to several of these discussions and I have Googled all the writers.  Many times I have read or purchased their books.  I don’t think I’m alone. 

I’m looking for other ideas, so if anyone has some, let me know.  I don’t want to be sitting by myself at some book fair a year from now.