What If You Could Not Fail

Indie Book Sellers Are Still Around

In previous life I worked for a trade association in the high-performance automotive industry. I also used to speak to many a bicycle shop owner when I was writing on the sport of bicycle racing. Both groups of people would tell me the same thing.

“We are enthusiasts who were forced to become businesspeople.”

One successful owner once told me, “If I knew then what I know now, I would have quit this business years ago. I was too stupid to quit. I would work twenty-four hours just to make twelve dollars.”

According to the Huffington Post, there are a lot of independent booksellers and bookstore owners out there who are experiencing the same sentiment. A decade ago the superstores, specifically Barnes & Noble and Borders, put everyone but the strong, the smart and the stupid out of business. Then e-books and self-publishing came along and put the super boys out of business, or on life support. Guess who is left? The strong, the smart and the stupid—along with a bunch of devoted readers who remain loyal to the hard copy book, and a lot of readers who got too close a look at a world without bookstores. Now they are coming back.

For the fourth year in a row membership has increased in the American bookseller association. Industry wags cite things such as younger owners taking over stores and the subsequent embrace of technology to help them market more efficiently and compete the e-books. Independents don’t have stockholders to keep happy, so they can experiment with open mic nights, readings and other promotions.

I should have seen this coming several years ago. Our critique group used to meet at Borders, but with their demise we moved to B&N. We got thrown out of there when B&N decided we took up too much floor space. “You weren’t buying enough books,” one employee told us. “Corporate said we had to make better use of the space.”

True, we didn’t buy a lot of books, but we sure spread the word that B&N threw us out. Why they didn’t see that one coming, I’ll never know.  

See ya’ later.

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Photo by Ian Muttoo from Mississauga, Canada (BOOKS  Uploaded by Skeezix1000) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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Barnard Malamud

“There comes a time in a man's life when to get where he has to go--if there are no doors or windows--he walks through a wall.”

“Without heroes we're all plain people and don't know how far we can go.”

“Teach yourself to work in uncertainty.” 

“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilisation from destroying itself."

“Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.” 

See ya’ later.

WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

 

The Wisdom of Crowds

One of the challenges of having a manuscript lying around in search of a publisher is the temptation to go back and tweak things. Every time I open the computer file for Rules for Giving I find myself making a change, deleting a word, tightening something up.

Then there are the bigger temptations—making more large-scale changes.

Chapter 4 of my novel recounts the protagonist accompanying his teenage girlfriend to a clinic for an abortion. Things take an unexpected turn.

I have considered on several occasions making this the opening chapter in the novel because of the gravity of it. A reader of one of the early drafts told me she didn’t think it was a good idea. The chapter deals with a heavy issue. Without any vested interest in the characters the reader might be turned off.

I took her advice and left the order of chapters untouched—until the rejection letters from agents started coming. Any agent who requested the first chapter as part of the initial query answered with a rejection.  I feared that the opening was a yawner. I felt as if I had to inject an in-your-face attitude into the plot. A visit to an abortion clinic should do it. I rewrote and re-arranged the chapter, but wisely shared it with my critique group.

They shot me down.

“This is a great chapter,” one lady told me, “but I didn’t want to hear it.”

“I had no interest in these characters,” another told me. “This was a harrowing moment in their lives, but I didn’t care.” She went on to explain how in the original draft the reader met the characters, began to like them and by the time this chapter came along, the reader had empathy and concern.

They were right. I was so intent on developing a whiz-bang first chapter that I didn’t see the obvious. Thanks to my critique group, though, I now see the wisdom.  

See ya’ later.

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Calling the Author to Task

Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis

Thanks to Stephan Pastis, who has the audacity and the humbleness to allow his characters to call him on his corniness. 

Got an Extra Three Grand--Whoops, Make that Four Grand?

That's what I figure it's going to take--minimum-- to get a character named after you in the novel Michael Connelly will be writing in 2014. Connelly emailed an offer today using Ebay to take bids on getting a character named after you in his upcoming novel (not the next one--The Gods of Guilt--which is scheduled to debut this fall).

Connelly put out an email this afternoon advertising the promotion. When I logged into EBay the highest offer was hovering around $2,500, with a little more than five days left in the bidding. An hour later the highest bid was more than $3,000. The proceeds of the sale will go to FairWarning.org, a nonprofit investigative news organization focused on public health and safety issues, and related topics of government and business accountability. 

I have followed Michael Connelly since his first Harry Bosch novel--Black Echo--hit the paperback racks back in 1993. He has two series novels: Harry Bosch, an LAPD Homicide detective, and the Lincoln Lawyer series about Mickey Haller, a Los Angeles attorney who uses a Lincoln Towncar as his office.

One of the quirks I like about Michael Connelly is that he intertwined Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller by making them half brothers. Turns out that Mickey Haller's father had a soft spot for hookers and Bosch was the result of one of the indiscretions. Connelly has also written several other one-off novels, but all of his characters walk in and out of each other's lives. I find it entertaining, sort of like deja vu all over again.

Connelly also has trivia quizzes based on his novels, photo albums of various Los Angeles locales featured in his novels, advance chapters and a lot of other unique marketing tactics.

Better than all of that, though, he was one of the first ones to do it, and as marketers will tell you, the first one out there with a product or promotion has a big jump on everyone.   

It pays to be original.

See ya’ later.

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Web-based TV Interview of Walter Mosley

I joined Spreecast this morning.  I found out about it through Facebook. Looks as if it is a way to post videos, maybe similar to YouTube, althought with a lot more social media and live broadcasts involved. What got me to sign up was an hour-long live interview this Friday with Walter Mosley.

We'll see how this works out. If Anyone else wants to join Spreecast, please do so. Then I won't be so all alone. 

See ya’ later.

WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

 

"The Chemistry Between Fiction and Reality"

I had the honor a few months back of sitting in on a panel discussion about the short story. The featured writers included Ramona Ausubel, whose collection of shorts, A Guide to Being Born, was scheduled to debut the following week.

The literary blog The Millions is currently running an interview with Ramona. Check out some of her comments.

On humor:

"I don’t think about humor logically, as in, I don’t see a dark place in a story and think, 'I could use some comic relief here.' It’s much more instinctual than that, and actually I think that’s a feature of humor in general. . . . Plus, when you get your reader to laugh, they become involved in the story in a new way, they are a participant, and I like that. I like it when everyone’s got their hands in the mud-pile together."

On seeing themes in your stories:

"It’s always amazing to me how long you can go along, not realizing your own obsessions. I first wrote these stories as individuals and not as a book, and then I looked back at the stack and the themes jumped right out at me."

More about themes:

 "I don’t find I do very interesting work when I’m navigating with logic, so I try to let themes rise up if they rise up, rather than setting out to write a book about such-and-such."

". . . I love exploring the chemistry between fiction and reality. As for the fantastical elements — yes, I recognize that no one has ever grown another arm when they fell in love [Ramona is referring to her short story where people grow another arm when they fall in love], but our real, actual bodies are very, very strange and amazing, even though we’re used to them, and love is very, very strange and amazing. So even though I was writing about an unreal variation, to me the magical elements are simply a magnification of what we’re all in the throws of all the time."

The difference between sentences in a short-story versus a novel:

I don’t know if my approach is consciously different when writing a novel vs. writing stories, although I’m sure there are more workaday sentences in [her novel] No One is Here Except All of Us and in the new novel I’m working on, simply because there is more story to tell. 

See ya’ later.

WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Photo courtesy RamonaAusubel.com and Twin Lens Images. 

 

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Jacob’s Ladder and Other Forgotten Phrases

A few days ago I said I am reading Cold Mountain. I mentioned in the same blog post that late last year and early this year I also read Team of Rivals and Gone With the Wind, so I have a basic understanding of the Civil War, which makes Cold Mountain all the more enjoyable.

One of the things that impresses me is author Charles Frazier’s ability to go back to that period and research the way people spoke. The story takes place largely in the western Appalachian mountains of Tennessee. As I recall, there is a distinct pattern of speech and words used in the more remote areas even now. This is to say nothing of how people spoke 135 years earlier in the last year of the Civil War, which is when the action takes place

Some examples:

• He was just a little withy man. I was able to figure out the meaning easy enough, but I’d never heard the word withy.
• The revision in him had come unexpected, he said. This one means an event that made a character change his ways. Again, a unique use of the language.
• By now there’s not enough greats to say how far these goats are distant from the first batch. A character admitting that she has lost track of how many generations of goats have been produced by the original heard of eight goats.

The best one I have come across, though, was a reference to coming out after a storm and seeing a “Jacob’s ladder.” I thought about it for a minute and concluded that he was referring to the rays of sun you see from a break in the clouds after it rains. I looked it up in Wikipedia and the term comes from Genesis 28:10-19, in which Jacob sees a stairway from heaven. As near as I can tell from research on the internet, this is exactly what it refers to.

I would imagine that Frazier read any number of letters from that period to learn the patois. There might even be a few Civil War re-enactment groups that offer some expertise on the language from that time.

In all, a good job of research on any already good novel.

See ya’ later.

WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Image by Frode Inge Helland [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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A sign from the Red Emma’s bookstore & coffee shop in Baltimore.

My Personal Nightmare? Not Enough to Read

I have this recurring fear of contracting some lingering but not too serious malady that keeps me in the hospital and on rehabilitation for several weeks. A ruptured appendix might do it. The main question beyond my survival will be:

Do I have enough literature and reading material to keep me going through this time of recuperation?

As a result, I have a lot of books, both physical and electronic, lying around.

I have another fear, too. I relates to the popular television show Hoarders. You crazed book readers know what I mean.

So yesterday I spent several hours with Mrs. WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com as we cleaned up the garage. To be honest, my distaff cleaned the garage. I sorted books while my appendix twitched like a pyromanic on the Fourth of July.

Some of the books I put in the donate file were no-brainers:

• I have two copies of She’s Come Undone by Wally Lamb. Haven’t read it once yet, so I am surely not reading it twice.  
• I have this policy that I don’t read any books about the Internet or social media. In the time it took to write them, everything changed. If I acquired any such tomes, they are gone.
• Likewise, I have this policy about non-fiction relating to current events—anything previous to the current presidential administration is not getting read. A whole new crop of lies has been invented about those topics. Out it goes.

Beyond that, it’s kind of a hit and miss thing.

• I love Lawrence Block novels, especially the Matthew Scudder series and the Hit Man series. I can’t toss them, almost all of which are in paperback. Chances are, though, that I am unlikely to read them. The same is true for Walter Mosley. Gotta keep those.
• Grisham can probably go. Not going to read those twice.
• On the other hand, I might actually read my collection of books on Russian history. It could happen.
• I have several books—maybe more than several—by historical fiction authors, but after reading one from the group, I realize I don’t care for their style. Those could go.

There are two boxes of books I am donating to the Prison Library Project in Claremont. If I really tried, I could come up with a third one. Maybe before this three-day weekend is over.

What I should do is watch another episode of Hoarders. That should freak me out sufficiently.

See ya’ later.

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