McCarthy – The Road

Posted on by February 6, 2015
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Some Ideas Hinted At

the_roadMcCarthy, Cormac (2006). The Road. New York: Knopf (306 pp).

The planet has been stricken by something like nuclear winter. The skies are perpetually dark and the sun is not visible. Black soot falls from the skies continuously.  Somehow, the hydrologic cycle remains intact anyway, since it rains a lot. Most animal life has perished, save a few marauding bands of humans and, unaccountably, one dog. Plant life is all dead, although “grass” is often mentioned and apples fallen from trees have miraculously not rotted. No mention is made of insects, which could probably survive anything, and microorganisms have made it through unscathed (viruses, bacteria, and catabolic organisms). Whatever happened, years or decades ago, a man and his son of about 10 years, pushing a grocery basket, walk the abandoned state highways in the U.S., scavenging. They find just enough food to survive, just enough clothing to keep from freezing, and just enough water. They avoid being eaten by groups of savage cannibals who try to get them. Where they came from or what they’ve been doing for the past few years is unknown, so we must simply accept the stage as it is set, as we do in Waiting for Godot.

Most of the book is narrative description of the rain, the cold, darkness, hunger, fear, danger. The duo investigates numerous abandoned farmhouses, suburban houses, stores, gas stations, a train and a boat, always searching for food but everything has been extremely picked over already. Part of the fun of the novel is how the father always seems to find something that so many others have overlooked, such as a few ounces of motor oil that can be used for starting fires. The story is extremely repetitive. Find house or store. Search it for goods. Search for a campsite before dark. Hide the basket. Hide from bad guys. Get rained on. Try to stay warm.

A small percentage of the book is dialog, mainly between the man and the boy. It is sparse and extremely repetitive. The boy declares he is scared. The father says, I know – it will be fine. The boy says okay. There is a certain Beckett-esque rhythm to the dialog that is noteworthy, but that is unfair to Beckett.  This dialog is extremely banal.

Another small percentage of the word count is the man’s reminiscences. Some of these are the best parts, such as when he tells the story, or at least alludes to the story, of what happened to his wife, who couldn’t face the future and killed herself. This brief passage is the core of the book, because what it’s really about is how you face a future that is no future. Do you take your life? Do you abandon your humanity and become a cannibal to survive? How would a person be if the future were utterly without hope?

The omnipresence of the wire shopping cart evokes the hopelessness of homeless people we see in our cities. How do they face a future that is no future?  The abundance of intact though ransacked buildings is also an interesting element of the story. Does it say that our built environment gives us a false impression that the future extends forever?  It’s important to the boy that he and his father be counted among the “good guys,” apparently because they are not cannibals, and because they “carry the flame” (whatever that means).  This raises important questions about morality in a world without civilization. “Good guy” in relation to what? Is cannibalism not a rational response to the circumstances? Unfortunately, none of these interesting themes is explored. Instead, we get scene after scene of highly repetitive (some almost verbatim), material describing a stark, but not-believable world, with shallow characters who never change. The book is a missed opportunity, despite its Pulitzer Prize.

Calvino – The Baron in the Trees

Posted on by January 31, 2015
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The_Baron_In_The_Trees-198x300Arboreal Fairy Tale

Calvino, Italo (1959). The Baron in the Trees. New York: Random (217 pp).

In 1767, a 12-year-old Italian boy climbs a tree and vows never to come down. And he never does. Living the rest of his 50 years in the trees, he learns to travel far and wide in a thickly forested Europe, branch to branch, never touching the ground again. In the early chapters we learn how he adapts to arboreal life, hunting food, building shelter, staying clean, dry, and warm.  He meets people, who think him strange, but he is friendly and articulate. He takes part in village life, falls in love, travels with thieves, fights off pirates, takes a lover in Spain, reads books, writes letters, helps with the grape harvest, and leads a revolutionary movement. It’s a charming fantasy, told in anecdotes, with no over-arching plot. Eventually he gets old and dies.

The story is told by his younger brother, an odd device, because his brother did not accompany the arboreal baron in his adventures so could not, as a practical matter, report them. He claims he is telling what his brother told him, or surmising what must have happened. A standard, third-person narrator would seem to have worked better. For much of the book, the brother fades away and the narrator is functionally a 3P anyway. Perhaps having the brother intrude from time to time helped keep the story from floating away in pure fantasy.

Besides the delightful fantasy of a boy, then man, living in the trees, is there any point to this novel?  Two main elements stand out. One is that by living in the trees, the young man (of a minor Italian aristocratic family – when his father dies, he inherits the title of Baron), rejects the status quo. He spurns the aristocracy and his own family. He lives outside normal human society. He literally looks down on other people. He chooses freedom over conformity, despite the ridicule he must endure, the creature comforts foregone, the strained relationships with everyone, especially the love of his life, Viola.

The Baron in the trees rejects civilization, but does not turn his back. He does not become a feral animal. He helps the villagers, fights pirates and bandits, writes books, leads discussions. Right about when this book came out, Calvino left the Communist party, declaring that it had become something he could no longer participate in. So maybe there’s some of that sentiment reflected. The Baron rises above the conventions of civilization, but does not forsake his humanity.  Only a madman thinks he can escape society.

The second major element is the time frame. The Baron enters the trees in 1767, and dies in the early 1800’s, so he experiences the French Enlightenment, the French revolution, the Napoleonic wars, the Reign of Terror. He corresponds with Voltaire and Denis Diderot.  The message seems to be that despite the noble ideas of the Enlightenment, especially those about the sanctity of individual freedom, which the Baron emphatically chose, human beings will never change. They will continue to steal from and kill each other, armies will wreak destruction, politicians will be venal, peasants will struggle in bewilderment and in the end, you die anyway. Freedom does not redeem life.  Not even love redeems life.

The book falls into the category of “a fun read,” with plenty of good humor and delightful invention, but since there is no character development and no overall dramatic development, it amounts to a well-written, allegorical fairy tale with historical, cultural, and political allusions. I’d recommend it to any high school student.

Rag Doll, Ooh

Posted on by April 30, 2015
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Rag DollFrom Where I Dream?

Robert Owen Butler wrote an influential how-to book for writers,  From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction (2005), in which he emphasized right-brain (non-intellectual) processes. Writers are not (supposed to be) intellectuals, he wrote. We are sensualists, and we need to write from raw experience, not thought. Dreams are perfect source material.

I tried to take that advice to heart, because I am a left-brainer, often to the detriment of my work. Since studying Butler, I now sketch my scenes in a semi-trance state, typing with my eyes closed while I imagine what the characters are feeling, sensing, and doing.  It’s a method that sometimes produces surprising results (and sometimes spectacular nonsense when I find that my fingers have been on the wrong row of keys for several minutes).

But I’ve never tried writing from an actual dream. My dreams are too bizarre to be useful.  So I was pretty excited when I recently had a long, recurring dream that seemed (in dream-time) like a fantastic idea for a story or part of a novel. I’d probably had too much coffee that day, and the dream was partly lucid. While having it, I was (semi-) thinking, “This is great stuff! I could use this!”

I reviewed the idea of the dream multiple times during the night to make sure I was capturing the details. I continued doing this all night (it seemed) right up through the hynapompic, semi-awake stage in the morning. When I finally awoke, for real, I reviewed my thoughts on the dream and burst into laughter, waking my wife. The whole thing was so incredibly ludicrous I could hardly believe I had “invested” any effort into it at all (dream-effort anyway).

So what was this exciting dream-idea?  It centered on an old Four Seasons song, “Rag Doll.” How that tune got into my skull, I have no idea, but during the dream, it was sung in full throat, numerous times. Not that I knew the words (are there words?) but the tune was intoxicating in this dream.

Lyrics I might know:

Four Seasons in background, descending tones: Rag doll, ooh.
Four Seasons, descending: Hand me down.

Valli: When she was just a kid, her clothes were hand-me-downs
Four Seasons: Hand-me-down.
Valli: They always laughed at her when she came into town
Valli: Called her, rag doll!

What I like about the song are two things. One is the exuberant chorus where Valli celebrates “Rag Doll!” two octaves above the other singers. For some reason that’s thrilling. The other is the refrain, “Rag Doll, ooh.” The songwriters (Crewe and Gaudio) obviously needed three syllables to complete the musical phrase and “Rag Doll” was only two, so they just added “ooh” to the end.  It’s ridiculous, and it’s wonderful.  Rag Doll, ooh.

The secret of the dream was that this song, or the part of it I knew, anyway, revealed some deep truth.  I imagined a literary structure in which the song played, loudly and exuberantly, leaving behind a remnant on the page, parts of a story. I would read that story fragment, which appeared as a blue bar-chart, and determine that it was an interesting but superficial story line.

Then the song would play again, perhaps in a different chapter, and it would be apparent that this time, the remnant left behind concerned a deeper reality, well-worth mining. How songs play in chapters was never questioned. They just did.

The third time through, after the song, the remaining story fragments would reveal a profound truth, perhaps an epiphany.  I was excited by the literary possibilities.

Inside the dream, I labeled the discovery so I wouldn’t forget such a tremendous insight. It was called the “Rag Doll, Ooh” dream.  I didn’t have to write it down. I knew I would remember it.

When I woke up, I did remember it, and it was so crazy I laughed out loud. So much for lucid dreaming!

Butler’s point, that we should write from where we dream, is overstated. I cannot write from where I dream, because that place is populated by incomprehensible nonsense.  I like using the semi-trance state for sketches, but actual dreaming? Impossible. Too bad.

Rag Doll, ooh.

Egan – A Visit From the Goon Squad

Posted on by January 11, 2015
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Coruscation Beats Content

Visit from the goon squadEagan, Jennifer. (2011). A Visit From the Goon Squad. New York: Anchor.

One of Elmore Leonard’s famous ten rules of writing is: “If it sounds like writing, rewrite it.” Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad is painfully contrived. Chapters are written in first-person (with different narrators), third-close (with different POVs), and second-person (unidentified narrator). These glaring shifts in narration serve no purpose other than to draw attention to the writer.

The first 130 pages make a decent story, which I enjoyed. A group of young people are fans of punk rock in the 1980s or 1990s, it seems. Some are performers, some groupies, one a record producer. They have romances and breakups, are confused about the directions of their lives, and generally live in a fog. Toward the end of that section we see them as grown and asking themselves, “How did my life turn out like this?” Some are successful but soul-dead suburbanites, some recovering addicts, some homeless bums. They still live in an unknowing fog, but now with ageing bodies and dim prospects. That’s a theme worthy of a novel.

The last 200 pages fall off a cliff. They are directionless scenes and snippets; unconnected, arbitrary characters doing arbitrary, uninteresting things. It’s writing for the sake of writing, with random shifts in narration and POV, and even a horrible 70-page PowerPoint that has all the interest and drama of a PowerPoint. It’s novelty for the sake of novelty.

How do gimmicky, patently contrived books like this get published? It’s a deep mystery, considering that this one also won a Pulitzer Prize, and was named a New York Times Book Review Best Book, not to mention the National Book Critics Circle Award and a PEN/Faulkner finalist. The New York publishing/marketing industry obviously marches to its own drummer.

Writing at the sentence level is quite good. some passages are well-observed, and some scenes have great tension. I admired the way Egan was able to seamlessly weave backstory and flashback into the narrative, a task every writer struggles with. Her use of prolepsis (pulling the future into the present: “She would never see her sister again.”) was clunky, but overall I’d say Egan is a master of time management, one of the most powerful tools a novelist has. So it was not all bad.

It’s hard to write 130 good pages; even harder to write 330. Egan succeeded at the first, but not the second.

Print-On-Demand

Posted on by April 30, 2015
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H&H on KindleI recently decided to print up some physical copies of my first ebook, Hunter and Hunted, which has been for sale at Smashwords, Kindle, and Nook for two years. At 51,000 words, it was the first novel-length piece I wrote, an international thriller involving art fraud. It sells the occasional copy, heaven only knows to whom or why, perhaps 6 copies a year. Its problem is what the industry calls “discoverability,” or lack of same. Nobody knows of this book’s existence, and among people who do happen to find it, there is no reason on this earth why they should buy it. Such is the fate of self-published ebooks.

Still, on reading it again, I realized it’s really not too bad; much better than a lot of what’s out there. So I decided to print a few physical copies that I could sell at book fairs and book meetings I often attend. In those contexts, people want a physical book. They will politely take a flyer describing an ebook they can get online but they won’t follow up and order it.

Nook Press

Nook PressI first turned to Nook Press, which recently launched a print publishing division (https://print.nookpress.com). My understanding is that they will soon spin this division off from Barnes & Noble as a stand-alone company to serve the market for making personal copies of a manuscript. What happens to all those millions of words generated during nanowrimo, for example? They have to end up somewhere, so Nook Press printing might as well get the print business.

I have already published Hunter and Hunted electronically with Nook (www.barnesandnoble.com/w/hunter-and-hunted-revised-edition-william-adams/1113980266?ean=2940016093451), and it’s listed for sale online with B&N. The print publishing arm of Nook will not get you a listing at B&N however. It is simply a way to print up a physical copy of your manuscript to impress your mother – B&N will not sell it.

Nook Quick QuoteSo fine, all I want  for now is a few copies to hand-sell, so I went to the Nook Press print site, created an account, and signed in. The first thing I did was use their easy “Quick Quote” algorithm to see what this was going to cost me. I put in an estimated 250 pages, all black-and-white, using white paper and 6” x 9” trim size (the most common for novels), and I got back an estimate of $8.00 per book, plus an estimated $4.00 for shipping and handling, for a total of $12. That seemed a little high, but certainly not exorbitant, and there is no minimum order, so that would be my total cost for one printed copy of my book.

In the end, the actual book came out at 269 pages and cost $5.40 per book, with $5.50 shipping and $0.41 tax, for a total of $11.31 for one unit. Their Quick Quote prediction is relatively accurate overall.

Then the fun began. The first thing is to make sure that the manuscript is well-edited for spelling, grammar, and obvious formatting mistakes. Nook Publishing will sell you professional editing services for $300 to $1000 dollars, depending on the level of scrutiny you want. Since I am a cheap bastard, I took my chances with my own eyeballs. That’s generally not a good idea for most writers, because you can’t see your own work objectively. “What you meant” gets in the way of “what you said.” But I’ve edited this puppy a million times already, so I decided to go with that. Even so, on a final read-through, I made several changes, proving that the “perfectly clean” manuscript is a mythical object.

Next, I had to produce a print-ready PDF copy of the manuscript. You can start with a Microsoft Word document, then save it as a PDF and submit that to the Nook web site, which will automatically evaluate the format for suitability. It takes several tries to pass their evaluation. They provide a template set up with the proper margins, which is helpful, but still, there are innumerable tiny details to take care of, such as spacing, chapter headings, italics, and page numbers. It took me a couple of days to get a copy that Nook would accept. (They do provide a detailed formatting guide which helps avoid unending trial-and-error).

Then you need to create the book’s cover. Nook provides another template with the correct margins and a selection of photographs and background designs you can use. You have to position your title, author, and other information on the cover, to create a total cover design. Nook Press will sell you professional cover design service for $300 to $400, and that is probably a good way to go. Cover design is an art and a craft that mere mortals are generally not good at. But I am a cheapskate, so I uploaded my own photo and designed my own cover, all in Word, then saved as PDF.

H&H Nook CoverThen there was the back cover, much easier than the front, but still a challenge. I used the Nook back cover template and positioned my back-cover blurb, my pricing information and ISBN, saving it as a PDF and uploading to the Nook site.

When finally my three PDFs were accepted by Nook, I had everything in place. I reviewed everything, clicked my approval, and paid my $12. The book was delivered in about 10 days, and met my expectations. It looked good, inside and out, and was professionally manufactured. There were a few tiny errors (always!), such as, there should have been a page break between the final line of the body text and the “Author Bio” heading; the author photo was not high enough quality for print, and a few small elements like that. I would go back into the web site and fix those errors before I ordered multiple copies to sell. Overall, it was a good process that produced a reasonable product at a fair price.

Create Space

H&H on CreateSpaceNext, I turned to CreateSpace, the division of Amazon.com that prints paper books on demand (www.createspace.com) in a similar way. I’ve had Hunter & Hunted listed on Amazon for sale as an electronic Kindle book for two years (http://www.amazon.com/Hunter-Hunted-William-Adams-ebook/dp/B00RBYZ47W/). This was a chance to let readers order a print copy if they preferred. Unlike Nook Publishing, CreateSpace is directly linked to Amazon’s distribution and sales network so when you create a print copy, customers can order it as a POD (Print-On-Demand) paperback from Amazon.com. This is a considerable advantage over Nook, if you’re interested in selling the book to the general public, because a lot of people prefer a physical book.

So I went to the CreateSpace site and signed in with my Amazon credentials and began the process of designing my physical book. I went through the same steps as I had done for Nook, except that CreateSpace has slightly different formatting guidelines, so basically, I had to reformat the entire text, changing manual page breaks into section breaks, for example. It wasn’t too difficult, using Word’s search and replace function but it was tedious and ultimately required a complete page-by-page re-proofing. CreateSpace also provides pre-formatted templates that take care of things like margins and trim size.

As with Nook, CreateSpace is happy to sell you professional editing services, interior design service, cover design, and so on, all for reasonable (but not cheap) prices. As before, I skipped all those and did it myself.

In the end, the CreateSpace formatting for the interior text was better-looking than for Nook, but it was more difficult to satisfy their criteria. For example, CreateSpace objected to a set of artifacts that Microsoft Word arbitrarily inserts into text (probably XML code) and which had to be hunted down and deleted – no easy task. The Nook system had simply ignored them. CreateSpace also would not accept my low-resolution author photo, which was a good thing – it wasn’t really sharp enough for a professional look. So I had to fire up my ancient copy of Photoshop Elements and do some bicubic resampling to increase the image density to the 300 dpi required by CreateSpace, and the result was a much better picture. So CreateSpace has more stringent criteria to satisfy, but in the end that forces you into a better product.

H&H CreateSpace coverOn the cover design, I had a similar problem. CreateSpace would not accept the low density of my chosen cover photo, even though I had used it on Nook and the result was perfectly fine. It was a photo of some petroglyphs, used as a flat background, and there is no need for the image to be pure and crisp. But CreateSpace wouldn’t take it, and I was unable to resample it without severe distortion.

So I had to pick from CreateSpace’s offerings of cover layouts. I found one that worked okay for me, but the licensing was annoying. I have complete, unrestricted use of the photo for any CreateSpace – produced book. That means I cannot use their photo on a book I produced with Nook Printing, for example, and of course CreateSpace would not like me to use Nook Printing at all, would they? it’s a monopolistic lock-in. In the end, I decided to go with the CreateSpace photo, which was not as good as my own choice would have been, but I was already two days into the design and my patience was running out. This is another reason to consider purchasing a professional cover design, to avoid such forced choices.

I then did the back cover design, which was quite easy, using CreateSpace’s template. Oddly, there was no template for the spine. CreateSpace provides a spine that cannot be changed, and I was not keen on it. The book’s title was in a small font, and the author’s name in a very large font (see illustration above) No doubt most authors are thrilled at that choice, but I wasn’t. Another compromise had to be made, so I accepted it.

I proofed the overall final design, changed a few obsessive details, and finally approved the design of the paperback, paid, and ordered one proof copy. The proof copy arrived just as expected except for the weird font size on the spine. The title of the book is in 8 point and the author name in 24 point. It’s ridiculous, bad-looking, and unnecessary. I dove back into the design software but was unable to find a way to fix that problem, so I had to redesign the whole cover with a different “theme” and completely different background photo. I also had to change my name! The new layout would not accept “William A. Adams,” without a word wrap, so I had to drop the middle initial. The new cover is adequate, though certainly not my first or even second choice. The “Cover Creator” software is basically Mickey Mouse. You can’t control the font at all. But the price is right (free).

Overall, I’d say that CreateSpace is a more thorough process than Nook’s, easy to follow, not always easy to satisfy, but produces a good product. My price per unit came out to be $4.30, about a dollar cheaper than Nook Press, with similar shipping, handling and tax charges. (What is “handling” anyway?)

Once your book design has been accepted by CreateSpace, the web site guides you through publishing on Kindle, showing the cover you designed. I went through that process then deleted (“unpublished”) my old Kindle version, so there would not be two different-looking copies of the same ebook.

H&H Pricing AmazonThe web site also steps you through distribution and pricing decisions. I decided to price the paperback at $6.99, which gives me a 70% royalty (of 13 cents!) in the USA and most other countries, 35% in the rest. They want you to sign up for some exclusive deal with Amazon in order to get 70% payout across the board, but I didn’t want that. I’m not in it for the money. Besides, I sell more ebooks books through Smashwords.com than I do through Amazon, so I am not motivated to restrict myself to Amazon. Amazon manages to keep more of your money, but hey, they’re Amazon.

In the end, I now have a newly-designed Kindle book in the Amazon Kindle store, and a customer can also order a paperback copy if preferred (www.amazon.com/Hunter-Hunted-William-Adams-ebook/dp/B00ROBHZR4/). In addition, I can order a dozen or so copies of the paperback at my cost, which I can then sell at book fairs. Despite the annoying monopolistic practices of Amazon, it turns out there’s a reason why they dominate bookselling in America. They make it easy. To produce print copies just for my own use, I would probably use Nook Press instead, which is a lot more flexible process. But to sell books online, CreateSpace has the game sewn up.

O’Neill – Netherland

Posted on by December 6, 2014
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Cricket is Foreign to New York

NetherlandO’Neill, Joseph (2008). Netherland. New York: Vintage

It’s possible to compare this novel to The Great Gatsby. The first person, highly reflective and articulate narrator, Hans, describes the ambitious economic and social climbing and pretensions of a newcomer to town (New York being the town), a Trinidadian named Chuck. Like Gatsby, Chuck has a secret, revealed at the end. Chuck’s first and futile love, his Daisy Miller equivalent, is the sport of cricket, which he would like to introduce into America, certain it would catch on.

While The Great Gatsby is a compelling story, Netherland is the kind of book where you skim, looking for some gem of fine writing, and there are plenty of those. Perhaps it’s all the cricket talk that gets in the way. One can appreciate that cricket is a passionately loved sport in the old Empire, but Americans don’t give two hoots. And the lyrical gems of writing are not found in the lengthy descriptions and dialogs about cricket, so: lots of skimming.

O’Neill changes scenery frequently, and tries to manufacture episodes with dramatic suspense, but these don’t offset the fact that there is no overall story arc. Hans and his wife separate, try to get back together, fail, try again and succeed. Chuck wants to build a major cricket arena in New York, but that seems delusional. Hans doesn’t know what he wants. He is the main character, unlike Nick Carraway, but he remains lackadaisical throughout. Originally from Holland, he was a foreigner in London and is a foreigner in New York.

After his wife leaves him and returns to London (because she was creeped out by the 9/11 attacks), Chuck befriends Hans rather forcibly, insisting that they play cricket with other immigrants, many from India and Pakistan, and the friendship develops awkwardly within this immigrant community. Chuck is a roughneck who runs a diner, while Hans is a Wall Street analyst, but the garrulous Chuck is avuncular and directive with Hans, who passively tolerates his home-spun philosophizing and grandiose plans. Chuck is a strong and interesting character.

In the end, Hans goes back to London, eventually reconciling with his wife, and there he learns that Chuck has died. The novel opens with Hans in London receiving a phone call from someone telling him Chuck is dead, then the rest of the book is a reminiscence. It’s an annoying narrative structure, chosen, no doubt, merely so the story could open on a rare, (pseudo-) dramatic note.

But quibbles aside, there’s some fine writing and keen observation that make the novel worth reading.
“…While I changed, Danielle wandered around my apartment, as was her privilege: people in New York are authorized by convention to snoop around and mentally measure and pass comment on any real estate they’re invited to step into. In addition to the generous ceiling heights and the wood floors and the built-in closets, she undoubtedly took in the family photographs and the bachelor disarray…Like an old door, every man past a certain age comes with historical warps and creaks of one kind or another, and woman who swishes to put him to serious further use must expect to do a certain amount of sanding and planning” (108-109).

 

In London, it must be recognized, escape – to the country, to warmer climes, to the pub – is a great, bittersweet theme. Sometimes this results in a discussion of New York City, in which case I’m quite happy to listen to somebody report excitedly on the Chrysler building or the jazz riches of the Village…Although it’s not a secret that I lived for some time in the city in question, I’m not accorded any unusual authority. This isn’t because I’ve been back for a while, but, rather, because I’m precluded by nationality from commenting on any place other than Holland…as a foreign person I’m essentially of some mildly buffoonish interest to the English…” (180-181).

SSA-WD Writer’s Workshop

Posted on by May 2, 2015
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Arizona Writing Workshop

Books for saleI attended a Writing Workshop sponsored by the Society of Southwestern Authors (www.ssa-az.org), and presented by Writer’s Digest. It was a one-day presentation of information for authors about publishing, marketing, and selling books.

SambuchinoThis substantial info-dump was conducted by Chuck Sambuchino (www.chucksambuchino.com), book editor for Writer’s Digest and editor of Guide to Literary Agents. He had good handouts and a pleasant presentation style. Some of his own books were for sale. Apparently this is a road show that WD puts on in various cities around the country. About 100 people attended the Tucson meeting. The day before, they gave the same dog-and-pony in Phoenix. Sambuchino said he’d given his act five times in the last seven days. That’s a heck of a way to sell a handful of books.

RantaA big draw to the conference was the presence of three pitchable agents. One specialized in children’s and YA, another in Christian topics, and the third, general commercial and literary fiction. I signed up for that one and gave a 10-minute pitch, which was pretty bad, but did result in a request for a query and 50 pages, so I guess it wasn’t totally horrible. I’m assuming I’ll get better at pitching the more I do it.

A comparison of traditional and self-publishing was useful for confirming what I already knew. Traditional publishing is virtually impossible to break into these days, the economics of it are horrible, it’s an extremely slow process; it’s biased against the author, and commercial success is extremely rare. However, it has two powerful virtues that self-publishing cannot match: 1. It confers legitimacy, and 2. The publisher does all the production work (though not the marketing).

please_review_my_novelSelf-publishing, which means, overwhelmingly, e-publishing, has lost much of its stigma. Plenty of good quality literature is self- published, along with a lot of junk, but there are no gatekeepers. You have a much better shot at finding an audience with self-publishing.

The costs are low-to-zero for e-publishing, although you can purchase, for reasonable fees, independent editing, cover design, publicity, and so on. You retain all your rights and earn higher royalties. On the downside, discoverability is a huge problem. Thousands of new books are e-published every day. You have to do your own marketing, because you will not be “discovered” like Cinderella.

The section on creating a writer’s platform was the most informative for me. A platform is basically a marketing strategy, centered on internet media. A typical platform consists of an author’s web site and blog, supplemented with a social media presence, such as Facebook, Goodreads, Twitter, among many others. Marketing is not sales, of course. You can’t actually sell books on social media, but you can build a brand. This conference was apparently a “plank” in Sambuchino’s marketing platform.

Create Writer PlatformI’m temperamentally allergic to social media, but I recognize the value. I need to bite the bullet and try to revive my derelict Facebook page. I can also blog more directly on matters related to my writing.

Another idea is to go in with a few friends on a collective platform. We could take turns writing blog articles, and we could cross-promote and review each other’s books. That sounds like more fun than building up a personal marketing platform.  Probably both formats would be useful.

For a cost of $99 and eight hours of my life, this was a moderately productive conference.

Joyce – Dubliners

Posted on by November 15, 2014
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A Good Place to Meet Joyce

Dubliners-James-JoyceJoyce, James. (1914) Dubliners. New York: Dover.

I’ve tried twice to read Ulysses, and was defeated both times, so I thought I’d start with a simpler Joyce work, and picked up Dubliners. I can report that it’s highly readable. It’s a set of 15 stories, written between 1904 and 1907, concerning Dublin life at that time. The characters and settings are vivid and detailed, easy to imagine. For the most part they are working class people, so you see the grime and squalor of poverty and alcohol, but also you glimpse contemporaneous intellectual life from conversations about politics, religion, and music. It’s a snapshot of a time and a place.

In most of the stories, nothing much happens. Ordinary people eat, drink, dance, and talk, and that’s about it.  A few stories have a genuine dramatic arc, such as “Eveline,” the story of a young girl who falls in love with a sailor who promises to take her to America. Though she longs to escape her oppressive life in Dublin, she stands fixed to the dock and cannot make herself board that ship. We understand her behavioral, if not intellectual ephiphany.

The last, greatest story, “The Dead,” is longer than the others, and is really two stories. In the first part is a grand party where we meet interesting characters from many walks of life, enjoy a richly described banquet, song and dance, drinks and speeches around a fine table. In the last few pages, a main character takes his wife home, almost at dawn, and she unexpectedly confesses to a youthful love in which the young man took his life when she left him. The husband realizes he knows nothing about her, and that probably, nobody knows anything about anyone.

The stories overall roughly track the psychological development of an archetypal person in early 20th century Dublin, from the opening story, “The Sisters,” in which a young man is perplexed by death when an old priest dies, through the camaraderie of youth, the difficulties of the working years, middle age, then  maturity, ending with, in that last story, a meditation on how death renders all of life meaningless.  Most of the individual stories are good, and the set taken as a whole carries worthwhile themes.

The language comes at an angle to modern American English, both because of Irish expressions and allusions, and because syntax and vocabulary evolve over a hundred and fifteen years in any language. Sometimes those changes are fun. I enjoyed expressions like, “Well, doesn’t that take the biscuit!” and, “I’ve got a crow to pluck with you.”

Writers like to study these stories for their concrete clarity and directness, but as exercises in storytelling, most of them lack any dramatic tension. They’re just snapshots of ordinary people doing and saying banal things.  No nail-biters here.

Dufresne – The Lie That Tells A Truth

Posted on by May 5, 2015
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Instruction With a Light Tone

Lie that Tells a Truth- DufresneDufresne, John. (2003). The Lie That Tells a Truth: A Guide to Writing Fiction.  New York: W.W. Norton.

I met the author at a writing conference and decided to buy his book. It covers the basics that beginning writers need to know, such as how to make time in your day for writing, what to write about, how to develop characters, how to create a plot. All the bases are touched. Anyone starting out on the journey of writing fiction would be well-served.

While covering the basics, Dufresne keeps the tone light and conversational. I think it is important to be encouraging and positive with beginners, because the task of writing is severely daunting. To this end, every page of the book includes one or two epigrams, pithy quotes from writers and artists of all kinds, on aspects of writing and the creative life. “The purpose of art is the lifelong construction of a state of wonder.” – Glenn Gould. “Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” – Samuel Beckett.  “Whenever possible tell the whole story of the novel in the first sentence.” – John Irving.

These quotations are of course merely opinions, many, such as Irving’s, of dubious validity, others too obscure to understand, but they’re fun, and that’s the point. Interestingly, Dufresne neglected to include an apposite quote from Albert Camus: “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”

Each chapter concludes with writing exercises, some of them interesting, most of them practical, which the author probably draws from his years of teaching writing. For example, “So today do the following: Read some opening scenes from books that you admire and try to figure out what is working there.”

On the downside, the author’s example texts go on far too long, and often do not even illustrate the point he was discussing. This is especially true when he cites his own writings, which is quite often. The citations are often so unfocused that they seem like mere filler, if not advertisements for his own published works.

Likewise, in the exercises, he is not content to explain the assignment, but fills up paragraphs and pages suggesting how the assignment might be fulfilled. For example, for the assignment just mentioned about reading opening scenes, he goes on at length to suggest these questions to consider: “What’s the date? Weather? Time? What are the sounds, the smells, the textures, the tastes, if any?  What is your character thinking about? How does she feel? Mood? Who are the people in the scene?”  And on and on and on, until you either have to scream or turn the page. Beginning writers are beginners, but they are not mentally incapacitated.

Despite these shortcomings, I still think that for a naive beginning writer of fiction, especially a younger one, this book will be harmless, yet informative and encouraging.

Carpenter – Hard Rain Falling

Posted on by November 6, 2014
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Grit and Squalor

Hard Rain FallingCarpenter, Don (1966/2009). Hard Rain Falling. New York: New York Review Books

Gritty is too mild a descriptor for this unrelentingly dark character study of a young man in Portland and San Francisco in the 1960’s. Jack is a loser from the start, the product of a harsh orphanage. When we meet him at 17, he is a violent, depressed street tough, drifting through pool halls, drinking, smoking, screwing underage girls, and committing petty crime to make his living. No surprise, he ends up in prison, where we watch him adapt to violent prison life and become romantically involved with another inmate. After his release, he marries a rich, hypersexual alcoholic woman and has a child. In the end, we can guess that the child’s fate will be a replay. There is no uplifting redemption.

The writing is “muscular,” meaning action-oriented, precise, concise, and vivid. At the same time, all characters also have well-rendered interior lives. Jack especially tends to introspective, even philosophical episodes of brooding that prevent him from being one-dimensional. Sometimes these episodes seem inconsistent with his low-reactive, violent and depressed temperament, however.

Another, more subtle problem, is that while Jack is presented as a sympathetic character who can’t get a break in a cold, uncaring world, his thoughts and behavior show him to be merely lazy and selfish, an intelligent, thoughtful person who refuses to take responsibility for his life. He’s not a tragic victim of fate. Is he excused from the chores of living because he was raised in an orphanage? I saw that inconsistency as a flaw in the rendering of his character.

Nevertheless, the carefully drawn characters make this a literary novel, though its moody urban settings, lowlife cast, and violent action give it plenty of genre credentials.  The story line is a biography, just shy of an actual plot, but events do unfold causally, so it’s not merely a picaresque. It’s a nice hybrid.

The book was out of print for decades and has only recently been republished. It’s possible it did not do well on its first outing because of its hybrid status – what audience would read it?  Also, the matter-of-fact account of Jack’s homosexual affair in prison might have been too much for mid-century readers. Whatever the reasons for its earlier neglect, it’s back now and should be read.

Samples of the writing:

[In prison,] he could hear other boys being brought in, yelling, cursing, some of them crying… Maybe in the cells they would learn the truth as he had, and know that nothing existed but a single spark of energy, and that spark could die for no reason, and existed for no reason. They would understand that it does no good to cry out, because a spark of energy has no ears; the ears are a lie, a joke, a dream, to keep the spark going, and there is no reason to keep the spark going. (p 83)

Years before [Billy] had said and meant, “Fuck the niggers” – he had seen too many of his friends swallowed up in bitterness, and he wanted to escape, not drown. But now he was in the awful position of seeing his children grow toward that moment when they would know, would be shown, told, that they were niggers and not human beings.  (p. 187)

She took him to a production of Waiting for Godot, perhaps rather cattishly hoping it would snow him and make him feel inadequate; but when they left the theater and she began talking about Beckett’s use of language, Jack interrupted her and said, “Hell, it seems simple enough to me. They’re waiting, that’s all. It don’t matter what for.”

…It’s not that simple,” she said, but she was not sure why it was not that simple. (p. 261)

“You can’t take care of Billy and stay out all night, too. Forget about me. Think about him.”

…”Why should I?”

Jack gritted his teeth. “Because you’re his mother!”

“You think I don’t know it? What the fuck do you know about it? Have you ever had to sit in a place like this and know you couldn’t do a goddam thing because you had this infant around your neck? That’s what it’s like, you know. The baby is hanging around your neck and you can’t kill it and you can’t leave it and it gets so goddam boring sometimes I want to die and you don’t know fuck-all about it…” (p. 297)

These are characters you don’t forget.