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For just a few days, I imagined a well thought out plan for what I was going to do to promote my Civil War book at the Athena Club meeting in Belle Plaine, Iowa last night. That all changed last Tuesday with a sizable dent in my car’s driver door. My door won’t open until the repair work is done so I’m stuck with driving the car like it is. Until that happy moment when I can get in and out of my car like any other driver, I’m getting in on the passenger side and squeezing between the gear shift lever and arm rest one leg at a time. There went the idea of wearing my full skirted, floor length homesteader dress. It’s hard enough to double up and maneuver myself into and out of the driver’s seat in slacks. Not that this little inconvenience dimmed my enthusiasm for talking about my books. I slipped on my pioneer bonnet and told the audience I wore it to get in the mood. That got me a chuckle from everyone which put them in a good mood as well I hope.

But I didn’t go to the meeting with just a bonnet and my book. I took the Vernon County Missouri 1887 history book that tells about the Mayfield family Bushwhackers, pictures of Bushwhackers, tombstones I’ve taken and death certificates. Also, I have a picture of my Great Grandfather Charles Wesley Bullock, a Union soldier, sitting beside a former bushwhacker, a picture of my Great Grandfather’s drug store and information that tells that my Great Grandfather was probably in Sherman’s March To Atlanta and a copy of his discharge paper. I tied Vernon County’s connection to Iowa together with the fact that Iowa Calvary was sent to Ft. Scott, Kansas to catch all lawbreakers which included Jayhawkers as well as Bushwhackers. I had a 1903 plat map that showed the sections around Montevallo and a terrain map that gave the audience an idea about the rugged timber, caves, rolling hills and creeks that made it easy for the Bushwhackers to hide from the soldiers.

I can’t imagine how girls in the thirties had any freedom to be adventuresome, wearing dresses. My mother-in-law was a teenager in Arkansas at the time. Mom assures me I’m wrong. Women wore dresses no matter what they did on the farm. They didn’t know any different. In fact, when the first two women in the area dared to put on slacks, they were considered sinners. However soon after that the fad caught on and northern Arkansas had many sinners wearing slacks.

In the middle of my struggle to get from one seat of my car to the other, it reminds me of sitting on a horse’s saddle while I sit on the hump with the gear shift lever in front of me. I asked Mom if she ever rode a horse in a dress. Turns out at fourteen, she was riding one of her father’s work horses bareback with a bit and reins. She is only 4 feet eleven inches tall but could grab the horse’s mane, give a leap and straddle that large animal. I asked, "How did your dress work out for you then?" She said it wasn’t a problem. Dresses were longer in those days. Was she adventuresome? Oh yes! She met up with a group of boys from school at a little used country road and together they raced to the other end. Now I know this lady likes to be the best she can at anything she does so I asked if she ever won the races. She smiled cagily when she told me it wasn’t that kind of race. They just ran the horses for the fun of it. Sounds like a smart woman to me. At fourteen years old, she had figured out to let the boys win the race.

Last night at the meeting, I talked about another woman with a competitive nature. During the Civil War, Ella Mayfield, lady Bushwhacker, was determined to fight to the end for her cause. Not only was she a crack shot, she rode her horse better than most men. While hiding from Union Soldiers in the Ozark timbers of Vernon County, Missouri, a messenger found Ella to deliver a message from a friend that lived near Ft. Scott, Kansas. The doctor needed to see Ella right away. It was a matter of life and death. This was 3 in the afternoon. Ella raced west and arrived at the friend’s house at dusk. She found out the problem was the doctor had sent her mother a picture of a Union soldier that killed Ella’s two brothers. One brother’s widow had put a bounty on that soldier’s head. Now the rough men in Kansas wanted that picture so they would know who to shoot for the bounty. If the doctor didn’t give them the picture in 24 hours, they were going to kill him. Ella rested an hour, got back on her horse and headed back to Montevallo, Mo. She arrived at her mother’s cabin, explained the doctor’s dilemma, secured the picture and raced back to the doctor’s house. She made it in the 24 hour time limit and had rode at break neck speed for 125 miles with only two hours break. As well as Ella knew the land, traveling at night had to be dangerous for many reasons. What if her horse stumbled in a gully or stream? What if the Union patrols, camped all over the area, were alerted by their horses knickering at Ella’s mount? Her only warning when she came near a camp was smelling smoke or seeing the flicker of a campfire. If Ella came too close to a cabin in the dark, she could have gotten shot by a homesteader that thought she was a murderous Jayhawker. Wild animals were plentiful such as wolves, bobcats and mountain lions. Those night predators could have easily pounced on Ella. Not only was she in good shape physically, but her horse must had very good stamina. However once Ella rejoined her Bushwhacker band in the timber camp, I can imagine she and her horse took a well deserved rest. Oh yeah, and she did all that in men’s trousers.

That’s just one of the stories I told last night about Ella’s brave deeds from the book Ella Mayfield’s Pawpaw Militia – A Civil War Saga In Vernon Co. Mo. It was a fun meeting with a very interested audience. I enjoyed myself, and I hoped the Athena Club did, too.

Now I have to get back to my November writing contest story. I’m doing all right so far with word count, but the month is young.

Comic books. I’ve been known to read one on occasion. I even enjoy them, especially the newer ones like Yak’s Pub. And yet I never gave any thought to the indie spirit behind the comic book phenomenon. At least not until reading Jaebi’s post “What Can Self-Publishers Learn from Comics?“

It seems that many comic book artists began as independent authors of a sort, pouring themselves into creating a quality product and then selling it directly to their readers. Today that same go-getter attitude is still active in the world of graphic novels as market savvy entrepreneurs like Questionable Content‘s creator J. Jacques move into online comics with numerous hard-line products such as t-shirts. For authors this would be similar to serializing a story on a blog and offering books and other products on the side. Not such a bad marketing technique in my opinion.

So what can independent authors learn from these quirky people telling their stories with pictures? A solid product, hard work, and some creative marketing can pay off on The Road to Writing.

This is a reprint from Virginia Ripple‘s The Road to Writing.

This post, by Pete Morin, originally appeared on his blog on 10/26/10. It invites comparison between the "fat" in a piece of writing to the excess material goods sometimes accumulated in life.

Over the past week, I have been distracted by the excruciating task of emptying our parents’ house in Florida and preparing it for sale. I’d been on a pretty good writing jag for several days before, but came to a screeching halt the minute I got off the plane in West Palm Beach.

My parents were exuberant consumers of … stuff. When my father went out for something, he came back with three. He once went out to purchase a new pants presser and bought four – and sent one each to his sons. I used mine at most a half-dozen times. He took me hunting on the Eastern Shore of Maryland once years ago. On the Annapolis side of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, we stopped at a sporting goods store to pick up hunting licenses and ammunition. We walked out with that, plus two shotguns worth about $1200 apiece. Several years after my mother had her stroke, he thought it would be nice for her to get around, so he bought one of those JAZZY electric wheelchairs. On her first test spin, she ran into the butcher’s block and took a chunk out of the door frame. Ol’ Jazzy sat in the corner of the guest room for the next four years.

In light of this, you can imagine what a daunting task it was for me and my brothers to start opening cabinets and drawers. Four flashlights. Countless “extra” batteries. Owner manuals for appliances long since discarded. Cuisinarts, blenders, knife sharpeners, juicers, salad bowls, Woks. It was like the domestic version of clowns in a Volkswagen.

Read the rest of the post on Pete Morin‘s blog.

This article, by Henry Wallop, originally appeared on the Telegraph UK site on 11/3/10.

Read the rest of the article on the Telegraph UK site.

This article, by Marc Johnson, originally appeared on the Longshot Publishing blog on 10/20/2010.

Unfortunately, a lot of indy authors don’t pay for editing. I think the primary reason for this is most people don’t know how much it costs. I’m here to help people with that and tell you how much my experience cost. I believe you should edit your manuscript before you publish, but before you decide you should know what you’re getting into. At some point, I’ll talk about choosing a good editor and my experience in working with her.

On a thread on one of the forums I frequent, the prices people thought editing was varied greatly. For your standard 300 page manuscript, people thought it was as little as $100. Others thought it was as much as $50,000. Most people thought the price of editing as at least $10,000. To be fair, the $100 quote was someone who thought that was just basic copyediting, but most of the people either grossly overestimated or underestimated how much editing was.

The type of editing I was looking for my 90,000 word manuscript was a developmental edit. That type of edit dealt mainly with the structure of the story. There was also some light copyediting involved. I emailed about a dozen editors to get their quotes. To the eight or so editors that could take me on, their prices were as low as $1500 to as high as $6000. The average ranged from $2000 to $3000. The editor I chose cost me $2000. You don’t have to pay all at once. You put a deposit down, about a third of the price, then pay the rest when she’s finished.

The one thing I’m not sure about is if prices are different based not only on the type of editing you want and how long it would take, but also on the genre of your work. I’m working on a fantasy series. Would that be harder to work on because it’s based in a made up world than working on mystery series set in today’s world? In any case, I emailed editors that worked in my genre.

Read the rest of the article on the Longshot Publishing blog.

In observance of Halloween, Publetariat is going dark—and spooky!—for the night of Sunday, October 31st, which means no new content will be posted to the site until Monday night at 6pm Pacific Standard Time. Have fun, drive safe, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow night. (no need to click through – this is the end of the post)

I’ve been without an internet or phone for two days. As I’m writing this blog post, I have a connection but it keeps coming and going. Seems the wind gusting up to 50 miles an hour is interfering so I’m making this short.

I’ve always liked to read westerns and watch cowboy shows. Maybe because I was raised that way. In the fifties my parents took us to western movies in a vacant lot during the summer. We sat on hard benches on Saturday evenings and enjoyed every minute. Since westerns were the only movies we went to see I didn’t realize there were any other kind for a long time.

When I worked with a woman that loves westerns, she encouraged me to write one. That’s when I wrote The Dark Wind Howls Over Mary – my first Stringbean Hooper Western. I didn’t think there would be another one until the same woman asked me to continue with Stringbean Hooper’s story. She even gave me a story line to follow. All right, so here it is the book she is waiting for – Small Feet’s Many Moon Journey – ISBN 1453899448.

Back Cover

Looking forward to a journey across country to San Jose, California, Stringbean Hooper and his wife, Theo, have no idea just how much trouble they can get into. Theo considers this trip their honeymoon and a change to be at her brother, Brock’s wedding. Stringbean has been in one place too long and is eager to see country he hasn’t seen before.

Stringbean gets them lost in Indian territory and upsets the Indians. The couple escapes a flood, a mad bear, spends the night in a run down cabin with a woman crazy with prairie fever and more.

Through it all, Stringbean meets the challenges with his usual sense of humor, but he notices as the journey drags on Theo is getting crankier by the minute. He sure hopes she lightens up by the time they get to her brother’s wedding in San Jose. It didn’t help him any to have warning advice freely handed out to Theo, known as Small Feet, by Indian shaman Matilda Vinci. The old woman warns Theo to be careful while traveling with Stringbean who’s Sioux name is Walking Dead. He might get her killed.

Now I’m waiting until November 1 to start my next book in the NaNoWriMo contest. This will be the third book in the Nurse Hal Among The Amish Series I’m working on during the contest. So because I am in earnest this year about getting my 50,000 words in, I’ll be working on that instead of posting to my blog. Last year was my first time in the contest. I found getting to the finish line was harder than I thought it would be. Too many days I was away from the computer, and I just couldn’t catch up so this time I’m prepared to stick with writing. I’ll let you know how I did the last of November.

This post, by Mary W. Walters, originally appeared on her The Militant Writer on 1/5/10.

(This essay was first published in a slightly different form in The Rumpus in Oct. ’09.)

Wise employers have learned that in order to maximize results in today’s fast-paced work environments they must tailor their managerial skills to the dispositions of their various employees. A proliferation of books, articles, workshops and on-line seminars exist to help human-resources personnel understand the nature of those who work for them, and develop appropriate individual strategies to stimulate productivity.

Until now, one entire class of worker has been overlooked in these analyses: the undercover writers—to be specific, those poets, dramatists and creators of literary fiction and non-fiction who have for one reason or another eschewed careers in academe, and whose parents and/or spouses and/or children are no longer willing to support them. Unable to make a living from creative enterprise, they have been forced to conceal their true vocations in order to seek employment among the rank and file.

The men and women who make up this segment of the workplace population are intelligent and crafty, and they have very little to lose. Indeed they could be dangerous if they worked together—but fortunately it is not their disposition to operate in groups. It is not due to any danger to the employing organization that managers will find it of value to identify such people on their staffs; in fact, most writers will contribute knowledge, creativity, experience and a range of other skills and talents to their jobs, almost in spite of themselves. However, these people can best be encouraged to maximize their workplace contributions when managers know who they are, and are able to tailor administrative strategies to suit their particular strengths and weaknesses. This guide is intended to assist them.

Identification pre-employment

Creative writers can be difficult to detect during job interviews. Over time, many of them have built entire careers as fallback positions for their art, some even having acquired degrees in interesting areas of specialization like astrophysics or early-Victorian stage design. As result, they can be found not only in writing-related occupations, but in fields that range from railway maintenance to health care. However, they have learned that it does not suit their short-term goals to explain to job-selection committees that they intend to support a highly time-consuming writing vocation, quite aside from themselves and any dependents they may have, on the proceeds of the position for which they are applying.

Read the rest of the post on Mary W. Walters‘ The Militant Writer.

This post, by John Betcher, originally appeared on his Self-Publishing Central blog on 10/8/10.

I apologize for the long time between posts here at Self-Publishing Central. I was out of town for a week. My "day job" has been busy. I’ve been doing a lot of editing on a new manuscript. AND I’ve been preparing for my very first Blog Tour.

Although my tour won’t start until November, I’ve already learned a lot about blog touring, and I thought I’d share it here.

You can do it yourself for free.

If you are enterprising . . . and/or short of funds . . . you can set up your own blog tour. Here are some thoughts for your consideration.

The main objective of a blog tour is to promote yourself and your book to an audience that might not otherwise know you exist. To that end, your first job in setting up a tour is to identify blogs with followers who might be part of your target audience.

Be creative. Use Google. Check to see who the blogs have featured recently. Look for another author in your genre and see if they have a blog tour schedule posted. Maybe you can take a similar tour route. Quality of blogs is more important than quantity.

Once you’ve identified the blogs for your tour, you’ll need to provide the bloggers with the information they want, in the form in which they want it. Some bloggers want a guest post. In that case, you write a blog post on a subject agreed between you and the host blogger.
 

Read the rest of the post on John Betcher’s Self-Publishing Central blog.

Of course it is, but is it the most escapist? A recent blog post by Anne Hamilton (which was part of Helen Lowe’s blog tour for the launch of The Heir Of Night) got me thinking about this subject again. In that post, Anne says:

When I was growing up, SFF was generally derided as ‘escapist’. I’ve come to the conclusion that ‘realistic’ fiction is far more deserving of that title. It’s ephemeral and transient, rarely lasting to the end of a decade. It doesn’t transcend its own culture or time or deal with anything beyond the superficial. However the best of SFF – fantasy, in particular – engages in a struggle with name and thus with identity and destiny.

That’s a great quote. But how accurate is she? I’d suggest that she’s revealed a rarely considered truth.

She says that non-genre fiction, or ‘realistic’ fiction as she calls it, is “ephemeral and transient, rarely lasting to the end of a decade”. It’s true that non-genre fiction, slice of life stories, often date very quickly. But I dispute that that makes them any less relevant. Take a classic like To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee as an example. That book is a masterpiece, a beautifully crafted story with fantastic characters. Pretty much everything about it is still relevant today and it explores some very important concepts. I don’t think a book like that is transient or short lived. I do think it’s escapism though, however much it makes us look at ourselves and question how we might react in a similar situation.

Other non-genre work might date and age more quickly, becoming largely irrelevant beyond an interesting peek into days gone by. Science fiction, however, is way more likely to date very quickly. At the speed of technological advancement we’re currently experiencing, you can start writing a sci-fi novel and the concept is no longer sci-fi by the time you type “The End”.

So why am I suggesting that Anne Hamilton is right? Most non-genre fiction is looking at the trials and tribulations of people whose lives are very similar to our own. They live in the same world, the same time, more or less, and have similar concerns. When we read about those lives it’s pure escapism because those people aren’t us. We might wonder what we’d do in a similar situation, but that’s about it.

When you start to look at SFF, particularly fantasy, you open up doors not available in contemporary non-genre fiction. You get to explore the human condition within a mythic framework where anything goes. As much as stories like this are the wildest kind of escapism, they also serve to hold a mirror up to humanity as a whole. While a story about a white suburban family’s social wranglings might make a white suburban reader consider their own life, a good science fiction story will make us consider humanity as a species. Good SFF takes us on a journey not only of personal exploration but beyond ourselves to our culture and identity.

Of course, non-genre fiction can do these things too, but nothing does it so well or with as much scope as SFF.

Ever since people could speak they told stories. Stories about real people was gossip. Stories about life were myths. Myths are the original fantasy epics. Every race has its creation myths – these great mysterious stories from beyond the human, trying to answer the massive questions about why we’re here and where we come from. Of course, just because we can ask those questions doesn’t mean there’s an answer. Religion is built on the concept that there’s an answer for every question we can ask, and there’s nothing more human than that kind of arrogance. And religion is just where people take a lucky dip of all the great myths and decide completely arbitrarily (though usually by birth) that one is the absolute truth while all the others are funny stories. Which is astounding. But I digress.

With mythology we can escape the boundaries of real life and explore those great big questions far more deeply than we ever can with non-genre fiction. That’s what makes non-genre stuff pure escapism while fantasy is much more. SFF often addresses far bigger questions and concerns than non-genre fiction ever does. Of course, the lines are very blurred and all fiction is escapism. Good fiction is escapism that makes you think. Nothing makes you think more, in my opinion, than good SFF. As Anne Hamilton said, it “engages in a struggle with name and thus with identity and destiny”.

Caveat: I know this is likely to be a fairly contentious post, with people citing many examples to back up one side of the argument or the other. Most arguments find their truths somewhere in the middle, but bring it on. Leave your comments with your thoughts. I’ve written this with a purely rambling mind while I thought about the subject and I’m very open to others’ thoughts on it.

This is a reprint from Alan Baxter‘s The Word.