Mardi's Link

5 Reasons to Fight the Fear

Fall is here in northern Michigan which means it's time to winterize. Time to put away the window air conditioners, time to cut back all the perrennials, time to add Stabil to the lawn mowers and the tillers, time to store the fishing boat.

Winter can be scary here along the 45th parallel if you're not prepared. Being prepared is a good way to fight that fear.

Watching my husband hitch up the boat trailer and move Moby Dick into the barn, it reminded me of what happened when he brought it out last spring. It was early May when he pulled off the tarp, swept off the cobwebs and dust, and rolled Moby -- an 18' Starcraft decked out with downriggers in the stern, fish finder, drink holder, and ship-to-shore raidio next to the steering wheel, and a big cooler bungie-corded at the bow -- into the sun.

I stood nearby and watched his grin spread. The man loves to fish. Then, something odd. Interrupting this annual ritual was an unexpected sound. Mewing. Mewing and hissing.

A barn cat had kittens over the winter and one of them was hiding deep in the boat's motor compartment. My husband spent more than an hour taking the whole back of his boat apart, but the kitten just kept squirming deeper and deeper. Eventually, the black bag of fuzz lodged itself into a recess too small for my husband's hands to fit into, and too far back for my arms to reach. We couldn't just leave it there but we couldn't get it out, either.

Enter my middle son, Luke.

His arms are long and thin, his hands dexterous, and his heart brave and kind. Which was all good, considering that this kitten was wild, afraid, and fully aware of the power of its teeth and its claws.

(It might be tempting here to remind me of the importance of spaying and neutering. It would be in vain. My pets have always been spayed and neutered but accomplishing this on a barn cat is tantamount to capturing a small panther.)

Gloved and resolved, Luke pried the kitten loose. Just after this photograph was taken, it spit in his face and shredded his gloves in appreciation of his heroism. She didn't trust him; she had no idea he was just trying to do the right thing. These days, trust seems just as rare in the human world. 

I was reminded of that this past weekend at the Grand Rapids Public Library's Book Fair. After giving a talk on "Funding the Writer's Life," a small line of people gathered to chat. I've found myself in such a line when I've gone to hear a writer speak, so now that I'm sometimes the one at the podium, it's interesting to experience it from the other perspective.

I was anticipating questions about literary contests, agent searches, and Kickstarter. I certainly wasn't expecting questions about copyright, but that's what I got.

The first three people in line asked me versions of the exact same thing: "I'm worried about editors stealing my idea. Do you copyright your work before you submit it?"

And it occurred to me that while trust is unthinkable for a kitten stuck inside Moby Dick, it can be just as difficult to master for a new writer trying to get published.

My answer to these three writers was probably not all that helpful. I told them that I'm a trusting person by nature, and so I send my work out, cross my fingers, then start a new project. I've published two books, I told them, plus hundreds of articles, essays, and opinion pieces, and I've never had anything stolen.

"Not that you know of," one writer said, walking away scowling.

I've spent some time thinking about this issue since then and here's how I wished I would have answered the question.

Which brings me, the long way round, to my Five Reasons to Fight the Fear:

1. Being afraid is no way to go through life. Think of the joy you're missing out on if you're constantly afraid, constantly thinking the worst of people, constantly expecting the scary to come true. Expectations are reality. If you expect the publishing industry to be a scary place where everyone is out to cheat you and no one values your work, you'll act accordingly and surely find the one bad seed in the sunflower. Try focusing on how happy the whole flower is instead. Try a positive attitude. That might sound hokey, but try it anyway.

2. Being afraid is no way to gain readers. Think about the books, essays, magazines you like to read. Is it all paranoia all the time? Of course not. Even peoople who like to read horror or thrillers enjoy them because of the contrast between safety and danger. If all they had was fear, they'd be boring. Your attitude permeates your work. And if you come to your work from a place of fear, your work will be one dimensional and boring. Fear comes from a sense of scarcity. Ask yourself, is what you're really afraid of that you don't have any more ideas?

3. Your writing is already copyrighted. According to copyright law, your original work is copyrighted the second you put it into print. Note I said "print," not "publish." You own the rights to your work until you give them away or sell them.

4. Editors are your friends. Chances are, the editor you're sending your work to has spent years honing his or her craft. They live for the day they find something fresh, something helpful, something entertaining to publish. Finding good work is a reflection on them, on their taste, their eye, their connections. Editors see hundreds, sometimes thousands of ideas a week. Theft is a product of scarcity and scarcity is not an issue for editors. They'd like nothing better than to open your submission and find something publishable.

5. Fear is an excuse not to write. It's easy to say that you haven't sent your work out because you're afraid it will be stolen. It's much more difficult to spend the time crafting something of value, revising it, researching markets, following submission guidelines and sending out work you care about and worked hard on. Fight the fear with preparedness and hard work.

So then, about that kitten.

After Luke freed it from the boat, he put it into a plastic bucket, I covered the bucket with a towel, and carried it, scratching and hissing, back to the barn. Once inside, I took off the towel and gently tipped the bucket on its side. The kitten fled into the dark. A few weeks later, a sighting. It was running behind it's mother in the field, hunting mice.

MFA: Master of Frigging Anything

I have always thought that online nit-picking was silly.

I mean, Twitter wars? Facebook fights? Grow up, people.

I enjoy social networking, mostly for keeping up with friends and family, funny one-liners from my favorite writers (Moms Who Drink and Swear!) and photos of picturesque places around the Midwest. But if I want bickering, I can just tell my sons to mow the lawn or clean the bathroom in the real world. I don't need the internet for that.

But then I stumbled on a seemingly innocuous question (it's always the innocent looking conversations that get me into trouble . . . ) in the Book Publishing Professionals group on Linkedin.

"I was accepted into an M.F.A. in Creative Writing program, at a senior stage of my life, but a junior stage of my writing," asked a group member named Phillip F. "I feel I am starting at the right time; others say I'm too late. Ideas?"

Bring on the warm fuzzies, I thought to myself, and the responses were almost all encouraging. "Sometimes it takes a lifetime of experience before you have something worthwhile to say," was a standard reply. 

Then, this reply showed up in the discussion: "DO NOT PAY FOR AN MFA," someone named "Amy Charles" lectured. (Amy, lowercase letters are your friend.) "Unless you really want to make a gift of money to the university and the professors in the writing program, who make more money than you likely ever will from writing."

About this same time, I clicked over to some blabbering in the London Review of Books that advised writers considering an MFA to get a real degree.

And I am here to tell you, I nit-picked. And I bickered. Since when does someone named "Amy" know what's right for every single writer? Since when does the London Review of Books get to compare Master of Fine Art in Creative Writing programs to "Stuff White People Like" and get away with it?

Not here and not now. I'm paying for an MFA, I'm white, and you know what? I don't like that stuff. Not at all.

Blanket statements get me riled up because no matter how well intentioned, they are the voice of the oppressor. Do as I say, or else.

Well, my life to date is practically a living, breathing monument to doing the exact opposite of what people in authority have demanded. And you know what? Things have turned out even better than I could have hoped for. And, unintentioned side benefit? My struggles have made a half-way decent story.

Looks like I've made it this far; there's no reason for me to start listening to bad advice now. Guess what, Amy? I'm currently a tuition-paying MFA student in Queens University of Charlotte's low residency program. When I graduate in another couple of years with my MFA degree, I plan to be a Maelstrom of Future Action. If I really apply myself, Marshal of Funky Authority is not out of the question. And maybe, just maybe, if I keep up with all the required reading, this intense and devoted study of writing will truly make me a Master of Frigging Anything. 

You don't earn a title like that by paying attention to blanket statements that begin with "don't," "can't," or "won't."

Hey, stranger things have happened. And you know what? Most of them have even been good ones.

 

Bad is the New Good: Why We Love Anti-Heroes

 

   

Lately I've been busy mourning the passing of two bad seeds: Breaking Bad's Walter White and Gone Girl's Amy Dunne.

Walter is a high school chemistry teacher who learns how to manufacture meth, and Amy is the "cool girl" every man dreams of but who actually seethes hot lava on the inside.

So why do I mourn them, you ask? Because I miss them.

I miss Walter's descent into his worst possible self and I miss Amy's attention span for revenge. Having arranged my weekends so that I could watch the AMC television series, and having read the Gillian Flynn mystery novel in one neck-cramping sitting, I can say that I no longer exist in the pre- Walter & Amy world, but must muddle along in the post.

And let me tell you, post- Walter & Amy land is a much more wide-awake kind of place.

Walter took glee in lying to everyone who cared about him, murdered a drug dealer here, a kingpin there, and even poisoned an innocent little kid for god's sake.

As for Amy, she manipulated things. And "manipulated" is probably too passive a verb; she basically manhandled any and all life forms in her path -- and some inantimate objects, too -- with her crafty brain. (I'll leave it at that in deferance to those of you who still live in the pre-Amy world.)

And yet, I rooted for these characters. I was on their team, on their side, cheering on each of Walter's blue batches of meth, fist pumping every one of Amy's verbal end-arounds. People suffered in these fictional worlds. People exploded, people begged for their lives, people messed up in their jobs, people went crazy.

And there I was, the reader and the watcher, just a howling for joy.

For a while, I couldn't shake the feeling that there must be something wrong with me. I mean, why else would I root for the bad guy? Am I bad, too? Am I, horrors, some kind of mommy sociopath next door???

I thought about my reading and television watching preferences and yup, there's lots a bad guys in there. And girls, too. A whole alphabet of them. Artemis Fowl, Batman, Holden Caulfield, the Dude, Edie Sedgewick, Fritz the Cat, Gordon Gekko, etc. Love. Every. One. Of. Them.

Truly, just the mention of their names gives me the warm fuzzies. So, that means I'm doomed, right?

But then something else occurred to me. Something that probably saved me thousands of dollars on therapy: I root for the bad guy because the bad guy feels real. Often, feels a lot more real than the good guy, who, let's be honest, can be a putz.

And real isn't bad at all, it's good.

It's great, even.

Who's your favorite anti-hero?

 

5 Tips for Writing Groups

There are five of us and we meet behind the muffins.

It is early evening when we hurry into an ordinary grocery store, fresh from our jobs and our families, from the weather and from our obligations.

We are adult women with mortgages and pets and degrees and assorted people like students and children and bosses and husbands who count on us, so our obligations are not insignificant.

But we are also writers.

And in the previous month we've either started a young adult novel, finished a personal essay, drafted a new chapter of a memoir, or revised the tricky part of a literary novel. And so we show up, smiling, excited, often confused by our own work but every once in awhile, dare I say it, almost proud.

Mostly, we're ready for what's next. The carnage. Loving, tender carnage, but carnage nonetheless.

Because we are, though surely you've guessed this by now, a writing group. We are the Powerfingers, a name we didn't choose but that chose us after someone's keyboard mangled the title of Neil Young's dark ballad. But that's another story.

Back then I was just happy to be in a writing group that was truly working -- that met regularly, where the members brought new work and offered useful critiques and revision ideas.

When we started in the summer of 2010, it felt like all five of us had been riding separate waves of writing and language, of publication and rejection. Then somehow, after years of swimming alone, those waves randomly aimed us at the same beach.

Now, after two years of getting together in the grocery store's cafe every month, after two years of (lovingly) tearing into each other's work and offering up our own, I know it wasn't random at all.  Yes, we were lucky to find each other, but each of us had already been swimming for quite a long time.

Here are five tips for organizing a writing group of your own:

1. Choose Members Carefully

You probably don't want your best friends in your group, even if your best friends are also writers. Drinking wine together and making catty remarks about arrogant writers or the latest NYTB's cover boy can be a worthwhile way to pass the time, but won't do your writing a whole lot of good.  Instead, find writers who are actively working on a long term project, who are willing to devote time to the group, and who have both manners and opinions. That may seem easy at first but I've found this to be a rare combination of personality traits. When you have your group just right, don't feel guilty about turning new members away.

2. Meet in a Neutral Place

When the Powerfingers first got together, we met at my house. Which meant I spent the whole week before our get-together worrying about how messy my house was, and then the whole day before, cleaning it up. I spent more time cleaning and thinking about cleaning than I did on considering the other members' writing. Which did give me an occasionally clean house but wasn't fair to the other writers in the group. Now we meet in the grocery store cafe, which is cleaned and mopped regularly by teenaged bag boys. Who, by the way, seem to have no interest at all in five grown women discussing their writing. Imagine.

3. Share Work in Advance

You'll receive the most valuable feedback, and be able to offer it yourself, if you have at least a week to read members' work before you meet and comment. The Powerfingers email each other that  month's submission a week in advance, then we come to the meeting with printed copies on which we've written notes, jotted ideas and suggestions, and asked relevant questions. Take this deadline seriously.

4. Be Quiet

French scientest Pierre Paul Broca rocked some serious mutton chops in the mid-1800's, formed a society of free thinkers, and was described by detrators as a subversive corrupter of youth. My kind of guy. He was also a surgeon fascinated with the human brain and one of the first medical scientists to understand why it is virtually impossible to talk and listen at the same time: The same area of the brain, "Broca's area" as a matter of fact, is responsible for both activities. So while your work is being discussed, pipe down.

5. Be Tender and Helpful

No writer wants to hear that their newly finished essay is shallow. Even if it is. Especially if it is. No writer wants to hear that their protagonist is as dull as a mud fence, or that their memoir has no arc. The goal of a writers' group is to encourage each other to keep writing, and to get better at it. Destructive words like "shallow," "dull," and "no" will have the opposite effect. Discuss what the piece is about, what it is trying to do, what it does well, and finally, what it could do better. Don't patronize with false praise, but don't show your teeth, either. Save your fangs for tossing a snarl into situations like this.

The Powerfingers' successes have been both internal and external. We write with more confidence and knowledge of our own abilities and we know we have people we trust to help us work out literary challenges both large and small. Between us, we also have an NEA grant, book deals with two major publishers, a produced play, a semi-finalist in Amazon's Breakthrough Novel Contest, and several literary awards.

Not bad for a group of women writing away in the corner of a grocery store.

 

Kickstarter for Writers

 

For years internet cheerleaders have been promising writers who go digital everything from ebook millions to an instant audience for the the quirky, the how-to, even for monster romance novels.

I can't vouch for the authenticity of any of those opportunities, but I can offer some information on Kickstarter, a newish funding platform for creative endeavors. Including literary ones.

Kickstarter works like this: Creators describe their project, set a funding goal, and submit their project to the site. If it follows the basic guidelines, the project goes live on a specified date and remains open for backers to pledge funds for between 1 and 60 days.

Some recently successful publishing projects from Kickstarter you just can't help but love:

Hannah Stevenson of Lily & Thistle Creative Studio launched a project to publish her paper doll coloring book. Her goal was $2,000 and she received $4,434 from 181 backers.

Novelist Keri Topouzian received $6,556 from 107 backers to get her novel, A Perfect Armenian, edited by a professional editor. It took her seven years to write and is based on historic events and cultural conflicts. The author says, "If it weren't for fiction, I believe we would know very little about our world. A list of historic facts might come and go, but when our imaginations become involved, we learn."

Documentary filmmaker Ron Faiola will turn his film, Wisconsin Supper Clubs: And Old Fashioned Experience, into a book thanks to $3,011 in pledges from 32 backers.

And, yours truly has a Kickstarter project that's live until April 20th, titled, Secret Cuts: A Cherry Orchard Mystery. At the time of this writing, my $2,500 project is 92% funded by 53 backers with 7 of my 30 days remaining. 

So, here's what I've learned about getting a writing project funded in this way:

One, take some time to define the project for yourself before you launch it. I wanted to write an investigative article about a local crime and publish it as a Kindle Single. The more specific you are, the more likely you can communicate your idea to others.

Two, don't skip the video. If you haven't ever made a video before, consider this an opportunity to learn how to work in this increasingly important medium. It doesn't have to win an Academy Award, but it does have to describe you and your project well. According to Kickstarter, 50% of projects with video in the description get funded; only 30% without one do.

Three, you can launch it, but that doesn't mean they will come. Don't just launch your project and expect Kickstarter to do all the work of getting it funded. The site gives you some very easy to use tools to get the word out about your project and to communicate with your backers. Link your project to your facebook page, blog about it, and send an email to friends, readers, supporters, your dog groomer and librarian.

Use tact and retraint when doing this -- don't spam and don't overdo it. There's a difference between letting people know about what you're up to and repeatedly clogging their inbox, their facebook timeline, and their voicemail.

Don't forget to drop a line to the media - Kickstarter is still relatively new, so it's news. As in, here.

A couple caveats: Kickstarter works with Amazon to deliver pledges to creators and funding is all or nothing. If you meet your goal, your backers' credit cards are charged and the money is transfered into your bank account. If you don't meet your goal, all pledges are cancelled. And, even if you do meet your goal, Amazon holds onto the money for about two weeks.

The site only allows projects that have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and that makes something. You can't fund your trip to Europe unless you plan to create something about the trip too, like write a book, make a film, or paint a series of landscapes.

After identifying a project, making the video, launching it on the site and working to get backers, I can say that for me, this has been a rewarding process. I made a promise to myself that I would use this as a test case and wouldn't do the project if it wasn't funded. The process itself has made me anxious to get going on the real project though, and I'll consider using Kickstarter again.

So, if you've been thinking about launching a Kickstarter project but haven't gotten around to it yet, what are you waiting for?

 Update: My Kickstarter project funded April 20, 2012.

 

 

Writing for Revenge

Believe me, I’ve checked, and when it comes to revenge writing, the universal advice is, Don’t Do It. Ever. Do Not Do It. Don’t even think about doing it. And if you do somehow manage to fantasize about doing it, even in private when no one is looking, well, you should just stop. Right now. Writing out of some twisted and infantile need for revenge, the conventional wisdom goes, is bad form, bad news, and just plain bad juju.  

“If someone is writing to take revenge, or embarrass or punish someone, it’s not going to be a very good book. It’s immoral, and it’s bad writing,” says Heather Sellers, author of, You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know.

“It is a natural fantasy to imagine getting even with someone by exposing them in your memoirs, and revenge can fuel great writing, but for the most part complaints suffer like bad novels from one dimensional characterizations and an overly simplified Manichean vision of the world,” says Tristine Rainer, in her classic how-to guide, Your Life As Story.

I didn’t read it myself, but I have it on good authority that Donald Rumsfeld’s 815-pager, Known and Unknown, falls prey to the exact problem Rainer explains.

There are, of course exceptions. I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough when reading Joyce Maynard’s At Home in the World. She balances confusion and youth with focus and revenge and the result is a memoir I devoured. Most of us are no Joyce Maynard though; we were not on the cover of the NYT magazine as a teen, and didn’t spend strange months in rural New Hampshire with iconic literary hermits.

Marion Roach, the author of a readable and newly published guide on memoir writing, The Memoir Project, has a list on her blog of eleven no-no’s to observe when writing about one’s own life. They include tips like don’t make your writing only about you, don’t give readers a boring list of events, and don’t complain. By my calculations, pushing back against an urge for revenge factors in on numbers three, four, five, six and eleven on her no-no’s. That’s almost half.

And yet, and yet. I feel myself slyly protest this “No Writing For Revenge” rule, hypnotized as I am by the sheen on a cold antipasto platter.

Salt, vinegar, and red meat. Yummy.  

Ah, Revenge, that tasty appetizer before the power steak, served bloody. Because however fleeting, exacting revenge with words will make the writer feel strong and back in control. For about ten minutes. Ten glorious, fang glinting, back-arching, howl into the emptiness minutes.

But then what?

The real problem of acting on this dark urge in print is not only that it’s wrong. The real problem is that by doing it, you’re using someone else’s story to tell your own. Writing for revenge gives away your literary power, instead of claiming it.  

Joan Didion says that writing itself is, “an aggressive, even a hostile act.” True. Writing dares to say I’m here, I matter, Listen to me. But aggression and hostility are emotions that move a story forward; while bad-mouthing –i.e. revenge- is just the soggy leftovers.

This topic has some resonance for me, after winning Creative Nonfiction’s Anger & Revenge personal essay contest. I was – am- thrilled the editors selected my work. And, a bit daunted, too. My submission detailed what happened to my wedding dress after my twenty-year marriage ended. How to reconcile my own two personal essay writing rules – 1) tell the truth, and 2) don’t give your power away to anyone else – with being recognized for something many writers I respect say is forbidden?

I spent not a small amount of time wondering about this internal conflict.  The conclusion I reached was this: I wrote the piece not for revenge, but to offer my mother an explanation of what happened to the wedding dress she and I hand sewed together, more than two decades ago. And that is just as good an impetus to write as any other.  Right?

 

 

Beginings

Here it is, almost the end of January, and I'm still thinking about beginnings. I'm pretty sure that's because I'm mulling over how to start a new project.

From a recent NPR interview with one of my heroes, Elmore Leonard, here's how the great man sits his story down:

"I have no idea where it's going to go. I don't want to know, because the idea is accumulated in the four months, five months, six months. . .  of the writing process. You get better ideas while you're writing. Ideas come to you, scenes come to you that (are better) than if you were to sit down and list scenes. So I don't outline."

The "to outline or not to outline" argument is one writers have long grappled with. And not allowing rigid A, B, 1, 2 scaffolding to dictate to creativity has always been my instinct, too. I didn't outline either of my two previous books and when I finished them I was convinced that lack of early structure helped, rather than harmed, their narratives. The ideas did arrive just as Mr. Leonard said.

And, I had a pretty good idea of where the story was going when I began my latest project, a memoir now in the hands of my editor. Not because I outlined it first, but because, well, I lived it. 

When you're writing from your own experience, my logic went, it's even more impossible to get off track than when you're telling someone else's story. Stick to the truth, mine your emotional highs and lows, and, as Mr. Leonard also advises, "leave out the parts that people skip."

Do all that,  everything is sure to turn out just dandy, I reasoned. Outline? I don't need no stinkin' outline.

Revisions, though, have a way of picking up the glare the warm sunshine of just writing away, free and easy, without a care in the netherworld of your imagination, misses. I ended up crafting a detailed outline after I finished the first draft.

It was a good exercise, and helped me identify both the cuts and additions the book needed in a way my own "just sit down and write" process had not.

So, despite the advice of Mr. Leonard, I've reconsidered the value of outlining a long work first, before beginning to write. I'm starting to believe outlining will organize my creative impulse, not stifle it.

Writer and writing teacher Adair Lara has a great article about how to do this here. Good advice for those of us writing about our own lives, particularly if, like me,  you have previously eschewed outlines.

January feels like a great time to sit down and dig in to something new, doesn't it?

 

Author Platform

 

I am suspicious of buzz words. Of jargon, sales talk, spokesmodels, infomercials, and even ventriloquists. Maybe especially ventriloquists.

Remember that crazy Howdy Doody-looking dummy from The Twilight Zone? To recap, in case this is not the stuff of your childhood nightmares: Cliff Robertson plays an alcoholic ventriloquist who tries to convince his agent that his dummy, Willie, is diabolically alive. He fails, his agent thinks he's crazy, and Willie begins to take over their stage act. In the final scene, Willie has become the straight man and the wooden dummy on his lap has the face of Cliff Robertson. Very disturbing.

What, you may be wondering, does any of this have to do with author platform?

Well, when something is being concealed, I always wonder what it is. And I always assume it's bad. Because if it's not bad, why conceal it?

(Yes, I do live out in the country and sometimes things are indeed this simple for me.)

So when a friend and fellow writer's book went out on submission recently and was rejected by several editors because she didn't have an "author platform," I felt my innate distrust of buzz words grow.

I did some looking around to understand what exactly an author platform is. I learned that there are celebrity author platforms and online author platforms, fiction author platforms and non-fiction author platforms. 

An author platform is simply your soapbox. A combination of your speaking engagements, blog subscribers, book sales, publicity, reputation, contacts, marketing skill, and ability to deliver. Author platform then is your (caution, another suspicious word ahead) "brand." Ok, so now I understand the concept, but I still don't feel much better about it.

Because my friend with the rejected book is a very good writer and a super hard worker. And she was writing with authority and had something new and useful to say about a topic that not only had a huge audience, but one she knows a whole lot about. Parenting preschoolers. This book could change the way we parent our children. In amazing, true, confident and loving ways. But, it was her first book, and to the publishing world, she didn't have enough "platform" to sell it.

And that's my problem with the concept. She had the skill to write it, just not the public presence to sell it. She was a sober, reasoned, and skilled Cliff Robertson with no Willie maniacally grinning on her lap. She researched self-publishing but decided that it wasn't for her. She wanted to be conventionally published, preferably by one of the Big 6.

There are certainly books that tanked despite the author having a very big author platform. And so I started to wonder if the reverse was also true. If a writer can get published and sell well without much of an author platform at all.

In fiction you certainly can. Look at novels like, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski, Tinkers by Paul Harding, and Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon. But there are non-fiction surprises out there, too. Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand, Heaven is Real by Colton Burpo, and a new one, Go the F**k to Sleep by Adam Mansbach.

I understand the push by agents and publishers for their authors to have an author platform. I just think its overated. Maybe that's because my friend's story has a happy ending (And you know how I feel about those!)

An editor at one of the Bix 6 bought my friend's book. This editor has preschool children of her own and tried out some of my friend's ideas when her four-year-old had a meltdown. And they worked. Instantly.

When the screaming hit the eardrum, I'd be willing to bet all thoughts of branding and sales figures evaporated. Skill will always trump platform at such moments. As it should.

What other books suceeded without benefit of a big author platform?

 

 

Repurposing is My Weakness

Perhaps I have pilgrim DNA. Or, maybe it's The Great Depression memories my mother has frequently shared with me. (Lard on toast anyone?) Whatever, I abhor waste.

And when you have a dominant character trait like this, it spills over into everything. I abhor waste in my menu planning, waste in my writing, and waste in my powerbrokers.

Because of this, I have been known to repurpose. Some may even call it recycling. (Though I am not anywhere near the level of this guy.)

Still, that leftover rice? Cabbage rolls. That three thousand word stream-of-consciousness on violent and sudden loss? Chapter Two in my memoir. Political hornswogglers (see above) dominating the headlines? Crow repellant for my vulnerable and just-planted sweet corn.

There is something deeply rewarding about finding a purpose for what otherwise might seem useless. Just be careful not to do this or this.

Happy Endings = Badass

 



Last month I posted a happy ending lament. Ok, not a lament, a gripe. I griped that happy endings in contemporary literature aren't taken seriously often just because they are happy. Not because they don't work, not because they aren't satisfying, not because they ignore plot, but just because they are happy. And I think that is b.s.

I am tickled to see that I have some high falutin' company in that regard. AbeBooks.com has a list of Feel-Good Reads for those in need of some redemption and author Alexander McCall Smith wonders why literature has to be so gloomy. And novelist J. Robert Lennon not only likes happy endings, he respects them. Because they can be, his word, "badass." He talks about this in his Ward Six post, Gimme some happy.

I was lucky enough to have Lennon as a workshop instructor a few years ago. In the spring of 2004 his novel, Mailman had just been published, Library Journal compared him to Joseph Heller and Ken Kesey, and he was hired on to be an instructor at the Bear River Writer's Conference. I was the woman sitting in the Adirondack chair scribbling away like mad, trying to write down everything he said.

Seven years have passed, I'm still scribbling (and occasionally getting my badass on - see above) and I caught up with Lennon on his blog, Ward Six, just as he decided to shut it down. Ending, yes. Happy, no. To quote Axl Rose: Every rose has it's thorn.