Loving The Job

Boy, it's been a while. I apologize for that. Can I chalk it up to busy-ness with the business? It's true. I've been completely submersed in Damnation Books and Eternal Press needs.

Did you notice my word choice there? I said I'm submersed but not drowning. That's because I love every second of this. I don't mind the long days because I find publishing a full-filling thing. I love books and enjoy talking to readers and writers about books. I love the creation processes involved and I have to tell you I'm just as proud as the author when a new book is released. It may not be my baby but I was in the delivery room at its birth.

Publishing can be awe-inspiring and it can be humbling. I have to admit a sense of perverse pleasure when I find a manuscript in the submissions which is so incredible, I cannot believe someone else hasn't already snatched it up. It's very tempting to clutch it to the chest and glare around to ward off any invisible someones who might want to take it away. Okay, so that's overly dramatic but you get my point.

I realize now I didn't really have a point when I started this post other than I'm just so excited about what I do. Did I have to share? Heck yeah! Just maybe someone else will read this and know they can follow their dreams. It's a scary prospect but one worth pursuing. Go for it!

Writing is Eternal

The other night I was walking my dogs. I’ve got three. They’re big and strong and one of them seems to suffer from ADHD mixed with Speed. Nevertheless they’re good dogs and mind me pretty well. Being rowdy, I like to walk them at night.

Sometimes I don’t get started until rather late but I like it that way because it’s just us and the night. No pestering pedestrians to gawk at the stranger and his pouches as they pass people’s lawns (don’t worry, I do clean up after them).

During these walks I have an opportunity to clear my head and think on things. One such night I stopped by my wife’s late grandmother’s house and pondered life’s brief stint. Right after as I continued down the path I noticed the beautiful moon and considered when the next group of people would stroll its surface. That’s when something occurred to me.



Think for a moment of some writers of old. Kipling, Twain, Longfellow, Dickens and Stevenson.





Their work still exists. They’re dead but their work is still with us. Every book you pick up, regardless of your feeling for the author, those words were first created by people from long ago. Faces that smiled and cried in the Victorian era. Feet that walked the market places of ancient Greece. Hands that toiled Colonial soil. Minds that were inspired to share stories, ideas, concepts from lives we can no longer fathom, minds long dust, whose children are long dust. Their words are still with us.

Have you looked up at the moon and thought that one day, long after the politics of today have changed a hundred fold, we might step on that ivory surface again? Sure, not us, but people. People with our words tucked in their computer chips. Fun reading while they wait for their lunar test results. Just like those authors of old, will our words last long after everything we know has changed?

Will what you write now, what you edit for the thirty-seventh time, will it be loved by children centuries from now? Will souls thrill, cry or laugh at those very words you wrote today?

Why not? Shelly, Hawthorne, Shakespeare, and the rest are still with us. Sure, they’re all worm food, but their minds still entertain and show us new ways of thinking.







Why wouldn’t yours do the same?

So next time you struggle with that painful critique or review, think on the generations of people who could gain from the finished draft. Those men and women of old had nothing more than you. They had a drive, an idea and the gumption to learn and do what they must to get their words out into the world.

Why can’t we do the same?




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Jack Roberts lives in a small town in the western US. He’s married with four children and six pets. As the scribe of Annabelle and Roland, he chronicles the vampires many adventures through the last three hundred years. Along with their YA fantasy stories, he also has plans for more fantasy and some Sci Fi.Check out Annabelle and Roland, The Site.

Pacing

Pacing

I never even realized it was a problem. When I came up with Annabelle, I simply sat down and started to write. The story wrote itself. What that means is that the characters traveled the paths they wanted and as each story idea presented itself, I wrote it. Obstacles were resolved and a conclusion finally happened.

Boy was I green. I feel for those first beta readers. I knew stories needed beginnings, middles and ends but what I didn’t realize is the journey needed to be tighter.

As writers, we get caught up in our worlds. We want to spend all day with our muses. We’d be happy sitting at a kitchen table with them, chatting away. But that’s not interesting to our readers.

People want to read stories that keep them entranced. We as writers want the same things. Recently a professional editor taught me a few things on this subject. I can’t profess to be an expert and when I get my manuscript back, I’m sure they’ll still be pacing issues to work on. Regardless, I did learn some very valuable lessons.

I had a beginning and followed it with the main threat and a turn around event that set the story agenda. But afterwards my story went from event to event. Sure, there were threats and the main characters learned things, but the big bad guy didn’t constantly threaten them. He seemed to be ok with leaving them to stir and stew.

Shouldn’t he have a vested interest in them? Why isn’t he trying to kill them more? Or at the very least, why aren’t his servants doing more to further his goals? It may be fun to see vampire children learn to be bats, but what if there’s a time limit to learn before the big bad returns to kill them?

There were plenty of fun scenes that I originally showed. Things that even helped the characters grow. But these scenes had no bearing in the story I wanted to tell this time. If they don’t add to the general story, cut and paste it into a new file and tuck it away for later. Tell them this story.

Create a Novel Elevator Pitch, create an outline from it, and then sit down with your novel and remove anything that doesn’t contribute to the story goals. Keep in mind that as the story continues, your events should add to your goals.

What is this story about? Where do I want my characters to be by them end? What conflicts will there be and how can they ramp up the story? How can these events or new events keep the readers invested and help my characters to grow?

Take a good look at your story structure and you’ll make a better novel.

Here Comes Peter Cotton Tail

Well, it’s April and with that statement we should see flowers blooming and baby livestock running. It’s true in my town those small horses and cows are falling over themselves. But the flowers are scared.

I live in Utah and Mother Nature never understands a simple thing like seasons. The last few days we’ve been pelted by snow. It’s freezing at night and scorching during noon. Ah well.

Another sign of the first weeks of April is Easter. I won’t wax religious here. That’s not what this blog is for and besides, it’s not my style. I will say that Eater is about living again. Spring is about rebirth, too.

So, how to tie this season into a topic about writing? Simple. Editing.

We come up with these great ideas and eventually write them down. We create these rough drafts and are so proud of our babies. But unless we want them to simply live forever on our hard drives, we want to share them. Some of us want to get them published.

Problem is, they’re not ready. All sorts of imperfections run rampant through them. Things like improper POV shifts, telling far more than showing and even problems in story flow and continuity. Face it writers, our babies aren’t as “cute” as we thought.

The only help available is to find fresh readers to look it over and be honest. After the proper blood bath they create with their red pens, our poor child has fallen into the dirt. All it’s blood oozing on the pavement.

What to do? We pick it up and begin to apply edits. We fix the POV, we unpack scenes to show instead of tell things. We cut and change and fix.

In other words, our baby is reborn. This resurrection of word will happen multiple times. It’s where I live as a writer at this very moment. Like the butterfly from the caterpillar, something far better comes forth.

So have a good Easter, writers, and don’t be afraid of the edits.

Review and Author Interview: After The Workshop by John McNally

I was a media escort.

With those five words, John McNally begins his fictional biography of Jack Hercules Sheahan, a once promising graduate of “The famous Iowa Writers Workshop”. Jack, is suffering one of the greatest bouts of writers-block and underachievement to come out of The Workshop since its founding in 1939. For those blessed (or cursed) with the need to write, the travails of Jack Hercules Sheahan will be, if not memories, nightmares and fears that keep one up at night. Jack, who had his story, “The Self-Adhesive Postage Stamp”, published in The New Yorker and selected for The Best American Short Stories prior to graduation from “The Workshop” has not written one word on his post-MFA novel in ten years. (Now that is an impressive block by any writer’s standards.) Jack, remains in Iowa City in a small Victorian apartment near the campus, barely surviving by escorting authors around Iowa on book tours. The media escort, as Jack describes it, is the lowest rung of the publishing industry. Through Jack we get a glimpse of the quirky and often barely sane beings commonly called “writers”.

John McNally knows his subject well, having been a media escort and holding an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop. But McNally, unlike his fictional protagonist, has several critically acclaimed works to his credit, including, America’s Report Card (2006) and The Book of Ralph (2004).

The travails of Jack Sheahan will resonate with anyone compelled to write or in love with books. This novel is a peek behind the curtain to see how writers create (or don’t create) art. McNally’s tale of Jack’s adventures in trying to locate a missing writer he is escorting who may have gone over the edge, his encounter with a best-selling author who has been hiding out for ten years and may have caused Jack’s writers-block, are as humorous and engaging as his dealings with his perpetually nude neighbor, M. Cat during a raging Iowa blizzard.

John McNally broke away from his current writing long enough to answer a few questions about After The Workshop, and talk about what he is currently working on.

Rocky Cole: What has been the initial response to After The Workshop, and did writing this book alter your approach to writing or to book tours?

John McNally: The initial response from pre-pub reviews (PW, Booklist, Kirkus) and readers has been very positive so far. I couldn’t be happier about it. It took a while for the book to get picked up by a publisher for fear that it was “too insidery,” but to me the book has always been about a guy with a crappy job who wonders if it’s too late to do something with his life, which almost everyone I’ve ever known, in every walk of life, has dealt with and wondered at some point. There’s definitely some “insider” stuff in the book, but my hope has always been that a reader who isn’t a writer can still appreciate the book. I was happy to see (today, in fact) a non-writer Amazon reviewer say just that.

I had a great time writing this book. It’s the first time a novel of mine has fallen into place. What you read is pretty close to what the first draft looked like, with a few exceptions. The actual writing of the book reminded me of why I wanted to be a writer in the first place — because it’s something I enjoy doing. It’s easy to forget that and to focus all your attentions on publication, but I’ve always had better experiences when I don’t think about publication and take pleasure in the act of writing itself.

And it has changed my approach to writing. I’ve returned to writing fiction long-hand, which I’d quit doing about twelve years ago, and I just bought a refurbished IBM Selectric typewriter, so that I can type up my handwritten drafts and revise them in that form before transferring everything onto a computer. In other words, I’m getting back to those things that attracted me to writing in the first place, and I’m trying to be more patient about it all.

RC: How have your peers from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop responded to the book?

JM: I haven’t heard anything yet.

RC: This book seems to be very different than what you have written before (The Book of Ralph) – have you already started on a new work, and can you say anything in general about where your next project is headed?

JM: I’ve taken a break from a long historical novel to write a short novel that’s very different from anything I’ve written before. All I can really say about it is that it’s from the points-of-view of several women, and I’ve used a classic book as a springboard, not unlike how my character Tate Rinehart writes novels, much to the irritation of my novel’s narrator, Jack. The new one is a twisted little novel, and I’m having a great time with it. The novel is set in L.A., where I lived for a year not too long ago.

RC: And I understand that you have a new book on the craft of writing that is forthcoming?

JM: Yes…I have a book coming out in September that seems right up the alley of your website. It’s titled THE CREATIVE WRITER’S SURVIVAL GUIDE: ADVICE FROM AN UNREPENTANT NOVELIST, and will be published by the University of Iowa Press.

RC: Since reading “After The Workshop”, I am eager to get my hands on your next book, Good luck with the book tour and don’t be too tough on your media escorts.

Deadlines

Recently I’ve been working hard on my novel. I’ve been tasked with edits and re-writes. My editor has given me two months to get this manuscript in place and that’s plenty of time.

This means I have to get serious and knuckle down. Some scenes only need to be reworked a bit and folded into the general story. Other scenes have to be completely thrown out and new ones put in to replace them. It needs to be tighter, more interwoven and the pace needs to be brought up quite a bit.

Now, if I decided to put off my edits until later, one of two things would happen. I’d either find myself at the end of the second month, scrambling to meet my deadline and producing shoddy work, or I’ve have to confess I wasn’t ready and couldn’t accomplish the job.

I long to be a published author. Do I intend to produce crap for my agent and the editor at my future publisher or do I intend to not produce anything at the required hour? Either answer means failure. What’s worse is that after the long, painful period of trying to find an agent and that agent finding a publisher, to throw it all away because I got lazy or distracted just seems purely insane.

Sure, my current situation isn’t that serious, but I must create a working habit of sticking to my writing deadlines. Interestingly enough, when I was working on book two I had no deadlines so I took my sweet time. Now that I have a professional editor waiting on my pages, it feels real.

That’s a good thing. I find that I behave more seriously about my writing now that I have a goal. I have until the last day of April to get all thirty-two chapters polished enough for her to see it. Sure, I don’t have to cross every ‘T’ or dot every ‘I’ as it were, but a complete story must be in place with all the changed.

Heck, it’s a Young Adult Historical Fiction Fantasy and the ‘Historical’ part means research. So to properly tell this tale, I find I’ll need more research, too. This means I’ll need to make time for that research with the time allotted.

Deadlines can’t be matched without writing goals, a chapter a day for instance. They’ve got to be realistic goals. If it takes a day, great. If a week or a month, also great. But don’t set a goal for two months of writing on one week. Be honest with yourself. You know the take before you. You know how long it takes you. Plan out the time you know it’ll take and the time you want to start. Once the time arrives, jump in and get it done.

A big help for me during this challenge is my cheerleaders. Hey, I could tell you plenty of story plotlines for comics and Sci Fi shows but when it comes to who plays which sport, I’m lacking. One thing I do know about sports; they set up pretty cheerleaders to shout praises at the guys while they’re struggling to make the goals.

Same principle. Remember your beta readers and critique group partners? Remember the members in your writing group? How about family, friends, co-workers? These people have either read your story (and it’s not as bad as your inner voice says) or listened to your struggles. Tell them your goals. Tell them what you plan to accomplish the next time you sit down at the keyboard. Set it up so they’re waiting to hear your progress. That way they can nag or remind you.

You may say, “But Scott/Jack, I hate it when my mother calls and nags me. Why would I want to have her voice doing it about my recreational hobby, too?

Well, why are you writing? If you’re serious about getting your work out there and sharing it with the world, if you’re serious about really getting published, then you’ll have deadlines and that means it’s also work. Yes, work you love, but work. That means you’ll need those friendly reminders from the people who want you to succeed.

Ok, my article is finished and it’s still pretty early. I’ve got scenes and chapters to do today so I’m signing off. Can’t let this deadline slip.

A Kind of Spring Fever

You know, I'm a fall kind of gal but I do enjoy the springtime. The gorgeous weather, the neighborhood gardens blooming. Did you ever sing that song as a kid about "popcorn popping on the apricot tree"? I did, so did my sons and my apricot tree out back is popping up a storm. All that warm sunshine, buzzing bees and chirping birds are very inspiring to me. It inspires me to NOT write!

There I said it; I admit it. I want to be out lounging in that sunshine instead of in here, sitting at this desk. The spring bug got me so bad over the weekend that I actually used mowing the lawn as a writing procrastination tool.

I have the house windows open for now to let in the fresh air but I'll probably end up out on the back porch reading a book or writing in a notebook before long. That's okay too, so long as my horror suddenly doesn't take a Snow White turn. Keep back ye songbirds of joy!

What if this hanging out in the sunshine is actually a good thing? For my writing I mean. We all know the health benefits of sun. I'm thinking the change of scenery from these white walls with their dry eraseboard and calendars on them might open up some creativity. At the very least it's a kind of mini-vacation. Writers often put themselves in imaginary different times and places so how can physically putting oneself in another place not be beneficial? Just try to sit outside and not notice the world around you.

Okay, so maybe I'm justifying more procrastination. Who knows? I'm off to the back porch. Come join me, won't you?