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Imagination Meets Life

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Good Morning,

Today I realize how totally out of shape I must be. The only parts of me that don’t ache are my fingers. That’s what walking for hours on rough ground and rocks did for me yesterday, but I wouldn’t have traded the beautiful day or experiences for anything.

We spent yesterday at the Old Thrasher’s Reunion in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa and throughly enjoyed it. I highly recommend going if you like to go back in time to see how hard it was for farmers before all the modern equipment. It’s on through Monday. Hay making, corn shelling and wood cutting demonstrations abound. Two trains, trolley cars and tractor pulled carts haul people. On the hour, three lawmen have a shoot out with bank robbers or train robbers. Saloon girls put on a show. Two schools are in session through the day. We were invited to join a spelling bee, but I declined. I told the woman I didn’t spell a word without spell check on my computer.

For me, the adventure was like research from studying people to taking pictures of antiques that I might use in a story. The highlight for me was a young woman I watched weaving a rug in a log cabin in the settlers village. I talked to her about helping my mother weave rugs on Mom’s three looms. One of those looms was of 1900 vintage and steel. Took four men to get the loom into Mom’s house and that was in pieces.

Next we talked quilting and I told her I had been to Kalona in April to see the Amish quilt show. The woman mentioned she was in Home Health Care in Kalona and had a client that was Amish – Mennonite. She had visited on a day there was a quilting bee in session which thrilled her. What thrilled me about the story was how close my imagination came to real life in my latest book – A Promise Is A Promise ISBN 0982459505 . This is the story of a Home Health Nurse working in Amish country. I had every intention of telling the woman about my book but we were interrupted so I moved on. So much to see and so little time.

Of course, we had to sample as much food as we could consume and not much of it met the food pyramid. Funnel cakes about two inches high that filled a paper plate, homemade ice cream (close to a pint in that cup), a hamburger, popcorn in a sack larger than a microwave sack and a quart of homemade ice tea. By the time we got home, we weren’t hungry.

We stopped in the theater and walked through all the memorabilia from early stage productions complete with letters on the wall from some famous actors. Suddenly, we were joined by a greeter. She wanted to tell us the story of her family’s stage career in the twenties to forties. She was one of 8 siblings who performed with their parents in juggling and acrobat and actors hired by her father did plays. They lived in hotels and later a grayhound bus and performed out of tents as well as theaters. The scrapbook, she complied of their travels, had been put together from Internet research and newspaper archives. Proudly, she showed us her family history. Finally, she said humbly she hoped we didn’t mind her butting in on our tour. I told her I was delighted. Without her, I would have walked on by that scrapbook and showcase full of memorabilia. It was a thrill to meet her. I hope she continues to suddenly appear for others that come in to look around. The event program says the theater is air conditioned. That might persuade people to venture in just to cool off. Boy, are they in for a treat.

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

God, Living Is Enormous

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This essay, from Benjamin Anastas, originally appeared in the Sept/Oct/Nov 2009 issue of bookforum.com, as well as in the print edition of the same issue of Bookforum magazine.

It’s typical of God’s vanity that, after creating the heavens and the earth and all that goes with them, he had to go ahead and claim the word for his son’s business. “In the beginning was the Word,” the opening lines of the Gospel of John instruct, “and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Ever since, the power to capitalize the w has been the prize that nearly every writer would kill for—or die trying.

If the poem is a salvo at the skies and the play a pincer movement, then the novel is a full-blown putsch. It creates its own firmament between two covers, divides light from darkness, fills the waters with odd life-forms, and chokes the earth with abundance. The novelist’s word is almost the Word. One problem: What about the God who invented it? He must be killed, captured, or paid off handsomely and sent into exile. He must be dealt with.

The first volume of Susan Sontag’s journals, edited by her son, David Rieff, and published last year under the title Reborn, begins with an entry dated November 23, 1947—Sontag was fourteen—listing the precocious Californian’s core beliefs. At the very top, marked “(a),” is “That there is no personal God or life after death.” Before Sontag has ever published a word, she has written God’s death sentence.

This small matter settled, she follows up with her second belief: “The most desirable thing in the world is freedom to be true to oneself, i.e., Honesty.” Sontag is free to think her own way into understanding. Like the apostle Paul, she has learned to “put away childish things.” She has turned to literature for guidance. The rest of Reborn—if not the rest of Sontag’s life—is a testament to this. Sontag exhorts herself to read Stephen Spender’s translation of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, immerses herself in the work of the principled French libertine André Gide, judges Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain to be “a book for all of one’s life.” She compiles laundry lists of novels, plays, stories, and books of poetry that she aspires to read like a mystic seeking out new and ever more demanding spiritual disciplines. In 1949, when Sontag joined some friends for an audience with Mann at his home in Pacific Palisades, her journal entry describes the encounter this way: “E, F and I interrogated God this evening at six.”

Reborn, just as much as it provides a glimpse into a cultural celebrity’s fiercely guarded private life (and we don’t have many left that hold such fascination), gives us a record of how Sontag gained the visionary powers that every fiction writer covets. She approaches the novel with a certainty so fervent that it is clearly on par with religious belief—not even Gide, or Mann, would question the affinity. Sontag acknowledges this fact in one remarkable line from Reborn that could be adopted as the novelist’s credo: “God, living is enormous!”

God, living is enormous. As a pure sentence, it is almost perfect. There is no end to its reverberations or bottom to its mystery. There is murder in the “God” but also reverence; fiction may be “the slayer of religions, the scrutineer of falsity,” as James Wood writes in The Broken Estate, but what novelist can dream of competing on the playing field of the printed page with a Maker whose every word arrives as truth, whose every idea is fact, and whose pride of authorship extends to all creation? Despite the long odds, one of the novel’s chief concerns from its beginning has been to try and steal a little thunder from the Divine— or at least his home office on earth, the church—through satire, mockery, and, at times, outright sacrilege. The trope had already been well established by medieval literature (see The Canterbury Tales); Cervantes, then Fielding, continued the ritual undressing. It wasn’t until the late nineteenth century that Victor Hugo would stop the action of Les Misérables for a polemic against the institution of the convent, although his broadside makes a crucial distinction: “We are for religion, against the religions.”

This stance, with its haughty backhand to the church for its hypocrisy and all-purpose endorsement of religious mystery—no matter what form it takes—kept the belief necessary for the novel’s survival alive, while preserving a place for the novel as a kind of opposition party to scripture. Perhaps no novelist’s work has embodied this paradox more than Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s—and he managed it by virtue of an imagination so all-encompassing that it might have been a gift from God himself. He even offered his readers a prophetic taste of modernism in a speech the Grand Inquisitor gives to the returned Jesus in The Brothers Karamazov:

How many among those chosen ones, the strong ones who might have become chosen ones, have finally grown tired of waiting for you, and have brought and will yet bring the powers of their spirit and the ardor of their hearts to another field, and will end by raising their free banner against you!

Read the rest of the essay on bookforum.com.

Freemium For Writers Is Two Debates

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This post, from Dan Holloway, originally appeared as a guest post on Guy LeCharles Gonzales‘ Loud Poet site on 9/3/09.

The battle isn’t getting people to pay; it’s getting people to read. If they do read, they might not pay. If they don’t read, they’ll never pay.

Writers who use the “freemium” model face two distinct challenges, and the harder one isn’t always the one you think.

What a delightful piece of coincidence that I should be asked to write this blog the day before I headed off to the Reading Festival. My wife and I were going for the headline set by the most important band of the 1990s,  Radiohead (sorry, Kurt), who propelled the issue of providing content for free into the public consciousness (sorry, Trent) when they released their album In Rainbows on a set-your-own-price basis; 60% of people chose, in the event, to pay nothing.

A delightful coincidence, but not actually that significant. Radiohead are still the most important band in the world; Trent Reznor is one of the most important figures in [re]shaping the music industry; Stephen King is about the most long-term successful writer on the planet. And Chris Anderson is, well, Chris Anderson. But these are the names that come up again and again in the freemium debate – “look how great they are; see what they did!” on the one hand; “it wasn’t a success, it was a disaster; and the free wasn’t properly free!” on the other.

I want to make two points. First, the exploits of established megastars have nothing to do with the relevance of the freemium debate to new writers. Second, they actually skew the debate rather dangerously, because they focus attention on the wrong challenge, not the one that’s most important to new writers.

New writers who want to make a living (or to supplement their living) through their writing need readers who will pay for their work. They always have done and always will. What the freemium model does is claim new writers can get readers by providing content for free, and that enough of those readers will buy their content in alternative formats, or with added extras, to provide them with an income.

For the average newbie writer (or musician*), what matters most is getting any audience at all. So I want to come back to the first point, but I want start by exposing a couple of bits of faulty logic in typical objections to the second point.

 

*NOTE: I really don’t want to go into the shambles the UK government has made with proposed anti-file-sharing legislation, but I’ll say for the record that as a content producer struggling for an audience, I don’t want any boundaries put up between me and my audience. It’s something authors don’t talk about much, but I’ve yet to meet a musician who disagrees.

Read the rest of the post on Loud Poet, and also check out Dan Holloway’s Year Zero Writers Collective.

Awkward. Again.

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Recently submitted short essay dealing with getting older — younger folks need read it if only to find out what to expect….

The awkward years. Again.
by Richard Sutton 8/30/2009
All Right Reserved
Remember how uncomfortable you felt most of the time when you were between, say 12 and 18?  Someone once called these the awkward years, and I readily agree. I remember. I’ve watched it happen as our daughter grew through the transition of her teen years, and I’m beginning to notice it with my older grandson. Making the transition from childhood into adulthood is awkward.

On the plus side, eventually it’s over, and you leave it behind you.

Or do you?

Read More…

Patience! Patience!

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Last night, as my family gathered around a backyard firepit — our September ritual — I found myself sipping on a glass of something red, and engaging in a boisterous discussion over the future of healthcare here in the USA.  The combination, I believe, was responsible for my failure to keep my passions checked.  We all finally agreed to disagree, and no feelings were irreparably hurt, but  I woke up this morning with a fuzzy headache, and the realization that I had not been a patient man the night before.

For many novelists, that’s an all-too-common condition.  I’m no different — when I recall the hours, no…weeks, no … years of work that I’ve put into my writing, trying to be patient while waiting for publication, waiting for a review, or waiting for some better sales seems to elude me, sometimes. 

It seems, writers often become impatient with themselves. Sometimes we expect a solution to suggest itself quickly.  We feel the driving momentum leading to a critical point of a WIP, and then…..despite our ongoing focus……nothing. 

That hasn’t happened to me often — I don’t get "blocked" I just change the channel — but when it does, I feel like I’ve let myself down.  Then, every time, the inspiration arrives from some unexpected source, and I go on again, as if nothing had slowed me down. 

I need to remind myself, that writing is the vocation of patient people. Impatience in writing, or marketing, or speaking, never brings the satisfaction you had hoped, and often confuses the issue at hand — even turning good ideas into garbage.

So, as I sit here, waiting to hear from three different reviewers, I’ll remind my self of that fact. Patience, Man! Patience!

The Paper Decision

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Paper is such an important part of any book, it’s incredible that many independent authors don’t really consider it as part of the design process, when preparing their book for press.

Most POD publishers use the sheet-fed offset printing process, as the run quantities are usually short.  This is actually a very good process for quality control, although the actual printing is slower than high speed web printing.  It uses a different kind of paper, that is finished in a different way than high-speed paper. 

Text papers, for inside pages, have a surface that is optimized for the printing of text, of course, but there may be different levels of finish available from your book’s printer.  Be sure to request printed samples on the stocks they offer. They may be able to make these available before the contract is signed, or not — it varies from press to press.

At the lower end, you’ll find basic newsprint, which you’ll remember as being the lightweight, easily smuded stock that the pulp novels you read in college were printed on.  It’s similar stock to what most newspapers are printed on, and is designed to be first, inexpensive – -as any product printed on it is not expected to be around very long.  It is not very resistant to tears, or abrasion, and would not be my first choice for a novel, non-fiction or reference book which would expect a lot of handling.

The next step up is basic text stock, often available in two or three shades besides white.  An off-white color is a good choice, especially for smaller than 12 point typography, as it minimizes eyestrain from the high contrast a pure-white sheet would create.  You can also consider the context of the book — for a novel, it’s setting, etc. and the age of the typical reader.  A whiter sheet, or a more creme colored sheet may add page appeal, depending upon the "style" of the prose, the subject matter, the setting — all the things that make your book special.  Look at other books you’ve enjoyed and see what kind of stock they’re printed on.

The finish of the paper itself will also affect the appearance of your book, and a good rule is that as the fine-ness of the type increases — with fine serifs, for example — the smoothness of the paper surface should also increase.  If there will be spot illustrations, unless they will be rendered in a rough manner, such as with block prints, or some scratchboard art, a smoother stock surface will also provide better detail, and what is called "ink hold out". 

Ink Hold Out, refers to the ability of the paper to keep printers ink on it’s surface with less and less bleeding as the hold out increases. Better hold out keeps illustrations and text proofing out, after printing, as close as possible to what you intended, including color fidelity, if you are utilizing spot or process color elements along with the text.  Poor hold out can result in print through, which is what happens when you can see the text on the backside showing through a page, and irregular color fidelity.  You don’t want that, if you can help it! 

As you make paper choices, you’ll also begin seeing your book differently than you did when you were writing it.  Now, you’re creating a product, where before, you had a manuscript.  The product will need a lot of polishing to get it just right, just as the manuscript did. At this point, you’ll be changing"hats".  I believe that seeing your book as a product will help you keep your priorities straight, when setting your retail price.  It will also help connect you with your readers — I mean, consumers.

As we move up the ladder of paper quality, the price also goes up exponentially.  Paper cost is one of the fastest rising components of publishing cost, and it is one that is showing no sign of retreating.  Better paper, useful in hard-bound books, will begin to show what is called "rag" content — actual cloth fibers in the mix with the pulp fibers that give a page more strength and make it less likely to yellow with age because of the acids left in the regular pulp paper from the manufacturing process.

At the top end of text stock, are "laid" finish stocks, with textural patterns in the paper itself, from the way the paper is made, that resemble the weave in cloth, for example, a "linen" finish.  They can be much heavier weight, and usually completely out of the range of price that could be considered for a retail book, although sometimes, specialty bound keepsake volumes use these papers in extremely short print runs of under 30 books.

Another level at the very top, are 100% rag contect papers, or archival stocks, used for mounting fine art  prints and fine photographic prints.  These stocks usually are certified for a life-span in excess of 100 years without yellowing or any acid damage to anything attached to them. They can be found in laid finishes, plate finishes, with varying degrees of roughness to the touch, and finally in high plate finishes, which are especially smooth and hard surfaced papers designed for fine-art level full color printing. 

There are also plate finished and coated text stocks, in lighter weights, that are designed for color reproduction.  Cast-coated sheets, like Chromecote (R) are designed for the absolute highest color fidelity and resolution.  They have a high, glossy finish, but coated text stocks are also available with matte and low-gloss coating. If you are producing a coffe-table, art folio, or a cookbook full of beautiful images, you will want to investigate these stocks.  Your POD printer may or may not have these available to you, and if you will be producing this kind of book, you will need to choose your printer wisely, in part according to the paper options they offer.

Color reproduction on lesser text sheets can be dicey.  You’ll need to request printed samples of pages with approximatelky the same coverage as the pages you will be providing  them, to see if the quality level is what you want.  Of course, the cost of such production is much higher than black ink on a medium grade text sheet, and you will see how much your choice of paper will affect your retail price.

MOst POD printers will offer only one cover stock choice, which is, more and more, a heavier text stock, plate finish, with a lamination — an actual plastic film heat set over your image.  They resist moisture, spills, and tearing pretty well, but one drawback is that unless shelved, they tend to curl. This is casued by the inside of the cover absorbing mopisture from the air and expanding slightly.  If you are going to purchase inventory in these type of books, keep them lying flat, in sealed boxes with a weighted cover over them to keep the covers flat.  If you are going to shelve them, they will need to be covered with a moisture barrier — a plastic sheet, for example, along the tops so that the covers won’t spring curled when removed from the shelf.  Most of the paperstocks used for trade paperback ccovers from POD printers are selected for good ink hold out and white color. They can reproduce well to 300dpi resolution and beyond.  You may want to take a few extra days with your final proof, to see how it reacts to humidity, etc., before giving the final approval. My novel, The Red Gate was proofed 3 times to check cover consistency.

All-in-all, your paper choice will play a very large role in the quality and presentation of your book — er, product.  Take some time, research the possibilities thoroughly. Get printed samples from potential POD printers if you can.  Get a feel for what one of their books feels like in the hand, adjust your design as necessary…then make it happen!

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The author is a graphic designer, American Indian arts dealer… and an Indie Novelist.

His first book The Red Gate is available on Amazon

 

 

Finally! Some Press!

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August 27th I finally was referred to as an author by someone besides my immediate family, in print! Stinky, smearing newsprint!  I suppose it should have felt like a graduation or something, but I was mostly happy with the article, and especially that it mentioned the two local places where the book could be found. 

The editor, whom I’ve known for some time, sent my release and material on to a staff writer, who worked at it for two weeks.  After one week’s delay, it was finally published in an Arts pull-out section of the local newspaper.

When my grandson saw it, he exclaimed "Hey! That’s Papa!" 

Anyone who’d be interested on the small-town Long Island take of my Indie-almost launch, should read the article on my book website homepage this month.  www.rlsuttonbooks.com/

Now, I’m goinbg to have to use that to try and obtain some print reviews.  There are a couplke of slick, local lifestyle magazines that occasionally do them for local writers, and both are distributed in shops and hotels in the Hamptons resort area.  I’m keeping my fingers crossed, and will let you know how it goes…..

Time to get out the Press Release Letterhead…..

 

 

Just Say NO!

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I have been reborn! At least I feel like something basic has changed, deep inside my writer’s mind.  I just read "Say No to Your Publishers Advance!" which is located in the Publishing Section of this site.  It is the most compelling, well-thought out presentation on why fiction writers don’t need any publisher but themselves.  No kidding.

I’m not unusual, I found out, in thinking that if I push the boulder uphill far enough, I’ll get a big, fat advance check.  Now I’ve learned why that isn’t such a good thing to hope for — if it comes true, the mathematics may well destroy your career as an author.

The change is simple.  Now I want to sell books. Lots of books. That’s a concept I can understand.  Marketing 101.

Make the best product you can, find a need, and sell it!

 

Commentary — Crusty, but Likeable!

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I guess I’ll have to start doing this — it’s easier than running back and forth between different writer’s sites, replying to lots of different threads — as if my opinion was important!  Well, my wife and my cat care what I have to say, so I guess I’ll have to put that up there for you, too. 

I’ll add something every other day, or so, as the mood strikes me, or as frustration builds, or as my arthritis needs a work-out.  Please be sure to reply and add your own take on my blither.  It wiull prevent my stress-shrunken head from getting any bigger.

Interview with TV's Inside edition turns into salable article

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TV’s Inside edition contacted me about doing a movie review of Brad Pitt’s movie, The Assasination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. They sent a film crew to my home in Kentucky, where we shot some story background footage. I viewed the film at Warner Brothers in New York, and the next day appeared with my review on camera at Inside edition’s studio. My review never was aired by Inside edition. However, the story of what happened turned into a nice salable article, first published as Pitfalls – Confession of a Jesse James Movie Reviewer.

The Writing Life: I Don't Believe In Writer's Block

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This post, from C.L. Anderson, originally appeared on SUVUDU.

I don’t. Really. I don’t believe there is a mental disorder that only strikes writers. As my friend the writer Steven Harper Piziks put it: dentists do not wake up in the morning, go into the office, stare at an open mouth and say “OMG, I can’t drill! I just…can’t…drill…” Or if they do, we call it burn out and the smart dentist changes jobs, or gets a better shrink.

But writer’s block is mysterious, it’s dramatic. It is regarded as a sign of true artistic temperment and possibly genius. Because everybody knows Geniuses are tempermental and a little c/r/a/z/y eccentric.

In short, unlike the dentist’s failure to drill demonstrating the symptoms of writer’s block gets you attention and sympathy and even a weird kind of respect. Kind of like the ladies of old Great Britain with their Nerves and Vapors.

Don’t get me wrong, writing is a tough gig and there are days it does not go well. In fact, there are days it doesn’t go at all. I have been stuck, even mired. But usually this is because of something I’m doing, or not doing. Usually, I am not looking at the scene in the right way. I don’t have a clear handle on the goals of the characters, or, worse, I’ve gotten lazy and ignored something important further up the line, or refused to acknowledge that the way I had planned to write the scene is no longer going to work because of changes I’ve made to the plot.

In cases like these, the answer is similar to that with any other sticky problem. Step back. Walk around the block. Take a shower. Do a load of laundry. Work on something else. Come back fresh and ready to do the needed work. Amazing how the words almost seem to rearrange themselves and provide the answer.

This can be hard to do, however, when you’re under pressure. And everyone who writes professionally is under pressure. Writing is a performance art and it is also piece work. You don’t produce, you don’t get paid. You don’t produce, you lose your audience. To make your living eventually something of yourself has got to get out there and face the judges and the judges have to buy it, literally.

Read the rest of the post on SUVUDU.

Don't Sweat The Small Stuff Week: Word Up!

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This post, from author Janice Hardy, originally appeared on her The Other Side of the Story blog on 3/23/09.

I’m in the mood for a theme week, so I’m going to talk about the stuff that writers typically agonize over at some point. These are the things we debate on the boards, but ultimately don’t matter as much as we think they do.

On the list for the week:

Word counts
Adverbs
Exclamation points
Back story
Fonts and formatting

One of the first things writers do is figure out how big the book is going to be. You don’t always know, but you usually have a general idea to shoot for. Going over or under can send a writer into a fit of panic. And there’s so much contradictory info out there. For every person who says you’ll never get published with a 145,000 word book, another says BestsellerBob was 145,000 words, so don’t worry. The really frustrating part, is that they’re both right. But it’s all depends on the book. (Doesn’t it always?)

Basic word count for a typical novel runs between 80,000 and 100,000 words. Mysteries often go as low as 60,000 and historical fiction and epic fantasy rise as high as 140,000. Childrens fiction runs 30,000 to 50,000 for middle grade, and 50,000 to 80,000 for young adult. Chapter books run 5,000 to 25,000 words. Picture books come in under 500.

Now, none of these are set in stone, as evidenced that Shifter, my middle grade novel, is 71,000 words. But it still falls under the basic YA guidelines. You’ll also find plenty of people who offer different ranges, which is okay. These are all just rough guidelines to give you a basic idea of how big a typical book runs. Plenty of books fall outside of these averages and nobody cares about that if the book is good.

Here’s something I’ve learned since selling my own novel and working with top-notch, professional editors who do this for a living.

It’s not about how many words you have, but what those words do, that counts.

This, folks, is the holy grail of word counts.
 

Read the rest of this post, about word counts, on Janice Hardy’s The Other Side of the Story blog. Then see her related posts about adverbs, exclamation points, backstory, and fonts and formatting.

Drawing Characters From Real Life

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This article, from Barbara Samuel, originally appeared on the Writer Unboxed site on 5/27/09.

One of the best sources of fresh, original, authentic character development comes from the seas of real life.

As a young journalism student, one of my favorite tasks was to be assigned a feature on a professor or a student with an intriguing history or pursuit. I loved interviewing them, taking notes on whatever details seemed most intriguing.  What did they have on their desks?  What did that little repetitive circle of the arm have to say about them?  What details set this person apart from all others, what made her unique?  I wasn’t particularly interested in making anyone uncomfortable or uncovering some awful thing. I wanted to know who they were and what story they would tell me.

I learned that nearly everyone has a story they want to tell, some story that defines who they are, some moment they carry around day after day, year after year.  Even the worst criminals have some soft moment, a time before they became hardened to the pain of others.  Even the most saintly of church ladies have some moment of shame they cannot shake.

It’s fascinating.  

I didn’t spend long in the world of journalism, but my habit of collecting stories, gestures, clothing, histories, has continued apace.  My partner learned early that if I am exhausted, one way to perk me up is to take me into a new environment where there might be stories for me to harvest.  The old man at the drugstore in Albuquerque, the Frenchman with thickly furred, burly arms who drove us (much too fast!) around Normandy and took me to task for drinking coffee with my meal.  My partner calls my methods interrogation, but I prefer to think of myself as a student of human behavior.

The point is, all of the material goes into a giant closet in my imagination, a heady cache of fresh, unique details harvested right out of everyday life, ready for the telling later.  Not all at once, of course.  Characters are assembled like weavings, voice from here, a habit from there, gestures from somewhere else.  I might use the Frenchman’s arms and smoking and bluster to fashion a father in a small Colorado town.  I have sometimes lifted a person nearly whole cloth from life because it’s irresistible–the dashingly handsome Iranian who ran the local quick shop in my old neighborhood in Pueblo showed up in the Goddesses of Kitchen Avenue (a fact that pleased him mightily!).

More often, it’s a weaving of various things plucked out of that closet full of details.  I remember one afternoon listening to my late mother-in-law, who was grieving her mother, telling the story of her childhood and how she met her husband.  She was the daughter of a rich farmer in Jackson, Mississippi in the thirties. Her husband was an ambitious and charming day worker seeking work in the fields.  He came to the door for water, and she was smitten from that day forward.  That nugget of story made its way into the Goddesses of Kitchen Avenue, as the backstory of an older African American woman, Roberta, who is grieving her husband.  Roberta was the name of my friend Sharon’s mother, who could pray the world blue, and I used some of her gestures and kindnesses for the character of Roberta.  There was also a hefty helping of my grandmother in the character,  a woman of the same generation, and then my own embroidery from who-knows-where. Voila! A character was born.

Read the rest of the article on Writer Unboxed.

Obtaining Trade Reviews

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We all appreciate reviews. Reviews from other writers, especially can help us focus on areas we have overlooked when polishing our manuscripts. I’ve been very fortunate in having received real, usable notes over the years from agents, editors and other writers, that have helped me make my first novel, The Red Gate, as good as I can make it. 

When the time comes to sell the novel, however, the only review that is important, is the one that comes from the trade.  Without trade reviews, the work, no matter how good, can languish.  That’s where I am now, seeking a pathway into one of the bastions of Big Publishing: The Trade Review.  I’ve found that trade reviewers rarely will even glance at a self-published novel — no matter the genre — well excepting Romance, which seems to always have a ready market.   Despite many TRADE JOURNALS acknowledging the advent of POD as the vanguard of the next big thing, they persist in perpetuating the old saw, that if you publish your own work, it’s because the work is not good enough for a REAL publisher.

Do any of you in the Publetariat ether, have any experiences obtaining trade reviews of their work, that I might implement in getting the word out?

 

 

 

 

 

Selling To Foreign Language Markets

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This article, by author Douglas Smith, originally appeared on his site this month.

When considering potential markets for short fiction, many SF&F writers overlook the many non-English language genre magazines and anthologies published around the world. This article discusses why you might want to consider these markets and how to sell to them.

Why Submit to Foreign Language Markets?

Especially if you can’t read that particular language? First, it broadens the audience of readers who gain exposure to your work. If you write novels as well as short fiction (or plan to), a resume of short story sales in non-English markets can assist in foreign rights sales for your longer work, as can the relationships and contacts that you’ll build with foreign publishers, editors, translators, and illustrators. And it doesn’t hurt your public profile to say that you’ve published stories in twenty-eight languages and twenty-two countries.

Secondly, anything you make from these sales is found money. Yes, you’ll generally get less for foreign reprints than you did for selling first rights to a professional English market, but remember that you can sell your reprints in multiple languages. My foreign language sales have ranged from $30 to $300 per story, averaging about $100 per sale – so with sales to several foreign markets, you can easily pick up an additional few hundred dollars per story.

Finally, if you’re a beginning writer, there’s the fun factor–the chance to see your name alongside of some of the biggest names in fiction. Even when I was starting out writing short fiction, my foreign language sales let my name appear with the likes of Steven King, Neil Gaiman, Larry Niven, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Mike Resnick, Tanith Lee, Neal Stephenson, Orson Scott Card, Frank Herbert, not to mention James Branch Cabell and H.P. Lovecraft. In addition, many foreign magazines will include beautiful illustrations for your story that you won’t get in even the pro English markets and which make a great visual addition to your website.

Read the rest of the article on Douglas Smith’s site to learn about: How To Find And Select Foreign Markets, Other Considerations and Caveats, and Other Tools. Also be sure to access his Foreign-Language Market List (FML) on the site after reading the rest of the article.