Seattle Wrote.

Of Bookstores, Book Lovers, and Supporting Local Businesses

2012-02-23T12:38:00.008-08:00

The storefront, photo from Rebels by Bus.

Let me start by saying that I wish I had the capital to buy Queen Anne Books. Its owner, Patti McCall, is putting it up for sale, and I would love to be the one to continue its growth in the Queen Anne community! I first moved to Queen Anne in 2007 and I vividly remember coming up the hill from Seattle Pacific University to check out my new neighborhood, and upon finding Queen Anne Books nestled under a viney pergola next to El Diablo coffee, I was immediately enchanted with the Hill.

The bookstore has been the location for author events over the years, book signings, readings, and more - all the while selling books and happiness to book lovers who live on the Hill or are just visiting. I've never been much of a Barnes & Noble fan, seeing it as an over-priced place to just kill time - I'd much rather spend my book money at a local shop, and (other than the impact on the book market as a whole) I wasn't all that sad when Borders closed its doors.

I love what Queen Anne Books has put forth as a cozy spot to discover, savor, and collect literary treasures. So I seriously hope that the person who picks up Queen Anne Books continues McCall's community interest, and overall, that this person is addicted to and is all about reading and sharing the works of storytellers from our age and those past.

Oh, and readers everywhere - shop local when it comes to getting your reading fix ... these local business need and totally deserve your support!

Seattle Author: Author and Publisher

2012-02-21T11:58:00.000-08:00

I'm excited to feature a Q&A I had with short story author, Midge Raymond! From her short stories, to other fiction writing and journalism, Midge has also worked with numerous big-name publishing houses, including Penguin, St. Martin's Press, Bantam Dell, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. She is also the co-founder of Oregon's Ashland Creek Press with John Yunker, and I'll be featuring some guest posts later this spring that feature the Press and the publishing side of things. But for now, let's talk about Midge...

Midge Raymond, photo by John Yunker.

Q: When did you first begin writing, and what drew you to the craft?
A: I began writing (awful) stories when I was very young—probably seven or eight years old. I wrote my first decent one in ninth grade, then got interested in journalism and psychology and didn’t write another short story until after graduate school. As it turned out, I think what drew me to journalism and psychology was the same thing that drew me to fiction and then back to it again: an interest in the human psyche, a need to understand it, and a way to express what I think I’ve learned.

Q: How did you get your first short stories published? How has that process developed or changed for you over the years?
A: I began sending out my short stories in the mid to late nineties, and I published my first story in 1999. The process itself has changed a great deal since then; when I first began to research publications I wanted to submit to, I would visit libraries and bookstores to read them and find submission information. Now that literary magazines have websites, writers research and buy them online with a few mouse clicks. Another big change is that magazines accept electronic submissions, which is wonderful. So I do more from my desk than I used to, without running out to the library or post office—but otherwise it’s mostly the same: I still research where I submit, still read the magazines, and still revise a hundred times before sending anything out.

Q: What inspired you to take your short stories and put together Forgetting English? What inspired the stories in the collection?
A: The stories were written over a period of five years or so, and I didn’t realize they would be a collection until I noticed a theme emerging: the way traveling away from one’s everyday life could open up the mind and allow in things that had previously been unseen or unrecognized. So it didn’t start out as a collection; each story was inspired by completely separate events: the day a stolen ring arrived in the alumni office where I worked (“The Road to Hana”); the moment I saw a Japanese couple clap their hands at the Zozo-ji temple in Tokyo (“Translation Memory”); the time I picked up a hotel room phone to discover someone else’s message (“Rest of World”). It was fun to see them come together on their own and then to eventually have a collection.

Q: How did you get Forgetting English published, after being published in journals and magazines for years, and how was this process different for you?
A: Short story collections are an extremely hard sell, especially in today’s market, and so I focused on the small and university presses, which are wonderful champions of short stories. And the process was actually very similar to sending out story submissions, though in this case I entered an annual contest of Eastern Washington University Press, the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction, and won—and this was how I got the publishing contract. Unfortunately, the press closed a year later, but I was fortunate to find a new home for the book at another terrific small publisher, Press 53, which reissued it last year with two new stories and a gorgeous new cover.

Q: What challenges have you experienced with writing, publication, etc., personally? How have you overcome those hurdles?
A: The biggest and most surprising challenge when my book was first published was the promotion involved—I knew I’d have a lot of work to do but didn’t realize how all-consuming it would be. It was far more challenging than writing the book itself! It was difficult to get comfortable with the idea of shameless self-promotion, which is exactly what you need to do as an author to find your readers—this is true of all authors, but especially if you’ve published a short story collection with a small university press. But once I dove into the promotional work, it became easier… though I still far prefer the writing. And the biggest challenge for me, writing-wise, is finding the time to fit it into my crazy schedule.

Q: Have your writing and publishing classes and teaching experiences influenced your writing or your perspective on the literary craft? How so?
A: Absolutely—teaching always reminds me to practice what I preach, which is invaluable. And writers tend to spend a lot of time alone, and being out among other writers is always inspiring; teaching is a great way to connect. Probably the best thing about teaching is discovering what writing students have to teach me—I’m always amazed by the wisdom and talent of my students—the writers Hugo House, for example, are amazing. I don’t ever teach a class without learning something from the students.

Q: How did your experience as an editor and copywriter at various publishing houses influence and shape your writing?
A: Working in publishing didn’t really influence my writing, but it did teach me a lot about the industry and what I was in for as a writer. In other words, I still write what I want to write and don’t worry about how marketable it is—yet this also means I know I have an uphill battle in terms of getting published. I love writing short stories, but the major publishers aren’t terribly interested in them, and agents are usually interested only if you also have a novel as well. And while I loved working in publishing, it was sometimes a little disheartening to see the business aspect of publishing overshadow the love of literature. I saw amazing authors get dropped by their publishers if their books didn’t make enough money—which is why small presses are so important; this is where most of them went in order to keep their work alive. Seeing all this gave me a realistic view of the industry, for which I feel fortunate. Thanks to having learned about the challenges, I’m optimistic yet realistic—hoping for the best, being prepared for the worst, and accepting it all for what it is—and mentally, for a writer, that’s a good place to be.

Midge will have some advice for writers along with her guest posts later this spring!

Moonlight and Oranges: A Book Review

2012-02-16T12:15:00.000-08:00

I featured Seattle author Elise Stephens back in December, but I also wanted to give her debut novel, Moonlight and Oranges, a little review! (As a side note, the Kindle edition is free through the end of the day today - Feb. 16 - on Amazon!)

Moonlight and Oranges is, in simple terms, a modern-day retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth. Lorona and Kestrin meet at a Seattle Halloween party, and go through a whirlwind romance over a couple of days that culminates in a quick wedding. Sounds crazy, right? Well the book tells a more complicated story, about how Kestrin has experienced foretelling dreams (including one that vaguely tells him about the woman who is his true love), Lorona’s shy and trusting nature that turns when friends give her more detail about Kestrin’s past relationships and the foreboding dream. Lorona makes a mistake that breaks Kestrin’s trust in her, sending the couple on a painful and alarming journey that will end their fateful relationship forever, or maybe bring them back together …

So here goes with my review, which I’ve based on my SeattleWrote book review policy.

Plot: Elise follows the Cupid and Psyche story loosely for her book, but the plot overall is engaging and interesting. The story flows and although there are one or two moments of confusion for the reader (or for me at least, with trying to grasp why things happen a certain way), it is generally a pleasant read. It follows the classic plot style, with exposition, conflict, a climax, and resolution. Star Awarded.
Characters: I felt like more could have been done with this portion of the book. Both Lorona and Kestrin, the two main characters, seemed to only be partially developed as characters, and I wanted to know more about them. For instance, what kind of background does Lorona have that would allow her to trust a guy whose past is full of other women, and trust him enough to marry him after knowing him only a few days? Or why Kestrin is so suddenly distrustful of Lorona after she reads his journal, but he still speaks to his mother – who stole it a week before. Basically, there was so much to the story that could have been expanded and enriched if the characters had been developed more. No Star Awarded.
Setting: Based in Seattle and California, the setting is pretty straightforward. Elise does a beautiful job describing a rainy night, and the scene for the climax of the book. Setting is not distracting in Moonlight and Oranges, and it adds fullness to the story to make it feel more real despite the strange circumstances. Star Awarded.
Originality: This section is mostly moot because the story is inspired by an ancient myth, however I felt that Elise did a great job updating the tale and bringing modern reality into it. The loosely based origins really flourished into something new with this book. Star Awarded.
Style: I didn’t notice errors in spelling, grammar or style, so this is an easy “A” for style! Star Awarded.

Summarily, I think that Moonlight and Oranges is a great book for young adults, and adults alike. Although there were some pieces to the story that just seemed too coincidental or ‘out there’, (their shotgun wedding, the sudden depth of distrust that Kestrin has when his wife reads his journal – granted, without permission, but still…) I generally really enjoyed the story. I also have to admit that Elise’s work with the climax literally had me hanging on to the last page, biting my nails with anxiety, and experiencing a much more rapid heartbeat than normal! Even if the beginning of the book is a bit slow, but way to fast (for the couple’s relationship, that is), it draws you in and gets you hooked.

Seattle Author: Writing for Women

2012-02-14T12:26:00.000-08:00

Happy Valentine's Day! It's perfect that today's feature is an author who writes about what's important to women, and she's also written some romances too! Meet Sheila Roberts:

Family and relationships are some of the central things that matter to women, and Sheila Roberts makes a point of bringing those elements to the forefront of her novels. Her stories “are inspired by everyday life experiences and relationships,” she says, referencing that one, On Strike for Christmas, was inspired by her husband. The book eventually became a Lifetime movie.

Roberts has “always dabbled in writing. I started out writing as a child, and thought, ‘isn’t this fun?’ And then it kind of became a sick addiction that I couldn’t put down,” she laughs. Her first book was published in 1989, The Light Fingered Lady – a novel in the regency romance genre.

“I hardly did any research about publishing. I sat down with a friend and a copy of “Writer’s Digest” and just picked an agent and sent her a query. The book wasn’t even done yet!” Sheila says. “I really fell into my publishing career … but I always say that as a writer, you pay your dues at some point. Most authors struggle to get published in the beginning, but I just happened to pay my dues a little more toward the middle of my career.”

Sheila's first novel, under her other name, Sheila Rabe

Challenges are expected for any occupation, but writers seem to experience more than most in some areas. For Sheila Roberts, it’s “to keep writing when I’m in a slump period. It can be a tough business, and be really discouraging, but you have to keep going … These days, I’m getting pretty busy, so the current challenge is keeping up with deadlines. But, how many people get to do what they love for a living?” she said.

To get through the difficulty of the writing and publishing business, Sheila advises that new authors “Spend a little more time researching the business and learning your craft … spend a little more time working on your writing and tailoring it,” Roberts said.

After more than more than 20 years being in the thick of the writing world, Sheila has really honed her craft. “My voice has gotten stronger, and I’ve zeroed in on what I want to write: friendships, relationships, and family stories for women,” she said. “I’ve found my forte: anything women are interested in. I’ve found my voice. And the more you write, the better you get.”

Small Change by Sheila Roberts.

She has published dozens of books, from regency romances to modern day women’s novels, from devotionals to nonfiction pieces. Her most recent works include The Nine Lives of Christmas and All I want for Christmas.

“Make sure you’re really prepared [for the publishing world],” Sheila says. “Educate yourself. Check out a book on writing, go to conferences … get a critique group, band with other writers, network. It takes awhile to develop your voice. Be patient and allow yourself time.”

Writing is about more than words on paper, on a screen, or in your head for her. At the end of the day, “You need to remember to enjoy what you’re doing. Don’t put too much pressure on yourself to succeed. It’s a journey, not a destination. The destination really is just more of the journey anyway, with different scenery!” she said.

In fall of this year, her newest series is planned for release, “Life in Icicle Falls”. The first book is planned for release in September 2012, Better Than Chocolate.

The Artist's Genius

2012-02-09T12:42:00.000-08:00

Inspired by Joanna Roddy’s mention of it in Tuesday’s author feature, I watched Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk on nurturing creativity. She’s the author of Eat, Pray, Love, and her talk was about how much is expected of artists.

“When it comes to writing … is it logical that anybody should be expected to be afraid of the work they were put on this earth to do?” She says. “Creative people across all genres have this reputation for being enormously mentally unstable … they are really undone by their gifts.”

Her idea is that we should change our thinking. We as artists, writers, dreamers, etc. are not geniuses on our own, because that brings about the current thinking: “Creativity and suffering are somehow inherently linked, and that artistry will always ultimately lead to anguish,” she said.

The way to change that thinking is to, “Create a protective psychological construct,” according to Elizabeth Gilbert. Ancient Greeks and Romans held the idea that creativity did not come from human beings, it came from divine attendants, or geniuses that lived in the walls of the artist’s studio and shaped the outcome of the artist’s work. If you did well, and your work was brilliant, you couldn’t become egotistical or arrogant, because the ‘genius’ deserved some of the credit. If your work fell flat on its face, it wasn’t entirely your fault and you wouldn’t experience the extreme psychological defeat of individual failure.

“I want to go back to that ancient understanding of genius,” Gilbert says. “Release the genius back where it came from … Maybe [art] doesn’t have to be quite so full of anguish … [what if the] extraordinary aspects of your being didn’t come from you, but are on loan to you from some other form of life to be passed on to someone else when you’re finished?”

I like her thought process, and I think I’m going to apply it to my art. Do any of you have thoughts on how this relationship works? Would you prefer this type of creative conscious, or would you rather wallow as an anguished artist like Ernest Hemingway?

Like she says, we all need to show up to fulfill our end of the artist-genius relationship: “Just do your job. Continue to show up for your piece of it,” Elizabeth said.

Oh, and don’t forget to remind your genius to hold up their end, too, if needed!

Seattle Author: Developing the Writing Life

2012-02-07T11:54:00.000-08:00

Up and coming author Joanna Roddy is completing the final edits on her debut young adult fantasy novel, Jules and the Djinn-Master. She's wanted to write from early into her college studies. "I was studying creative nonfiction, which was interesting, but I was also trying to develop a writing life out of nothing - out of my academic life," she said. "I love Anne Lamott's quote, 'Write what you would love to come upon,' and I was trying during that time to create the writing life for myself."

After graduating college, Roddy spent as much time traveling as she could, learning her own writing life. "When I first started to write, there was so much about the process that made me wonder if I were 1. a crazy person, 2. a total slacker, or 3. simply a hack," she writes on her blog. "Then I read other writers who shared about their own processes ... I realized I wasn't crazy thinking that it was hard."

About five years ago, in the spring of 2007, Joanna says she had the first idea for Jules and the Djinn-Master. She became focused on writing and developing the story, and by spring of 2009 she had completed half of the book. "Then I took some time off. I was so glad to have that time, that chance to pursue my writing," she said.

Joanna began teaching off and on in the English department of a Seattle high school, and she discovered that in order to develop her writing life further, "I needed a writing group and the accountability to show up to write," she said. So, with a few friends and connections in her position of authorship, she created one.

"That fall, I re-imagined the story and had a hunger to finish. I began pitching at writing conferences ... I got serious about it," Roddy says. She attended the Pacific Northwest Writers' Association conference in August 2011, and by November of last year, she had signed an agent for her novel, Sally Harding from The Cooke Agency. "It's hard when you've never done something before to know that you're making the right decision. Trust your instincts. The agent-author relationship really is a partnership, and I feel like I have that with my agent," she said.

"I feel like my strength as a writer lies with thought and ideas - I don't really start with character ... a lot of my characters are based on people I know, although ironically, my main characters are not," Joanna said.

From working on her writing life to writing her novel, overall, "I just hope to be published ... my biggest priority is that my novel will get to readers. As a debut author, I'm not interested in e-Publishing as a self-published author - I'd much rather be under the umbrella of a parent publisher," says Joanna.

For aspiring writers, Roddy recommends establishing a writing life, as well as a process and practice in daily and/or weekly life. She recommends writer's conferences, but "They can become a security blanket. It's important to query agents that are not at the conference."

Also, "Take yourself seriously," she advises. "The difference between a hobby and a job is showing up for work everyday - it's like that, not transcendent - the cumulative result of showing up is the product." She references a TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert on creative genius, saying, "Our job is to show up and do the work, then the muse shows up to bring the quality."

Tips for Critiquing and Working With a Writer's Group

2012-02-02T12:39:00.000-08:00

It works for some and not for others, but many writers swear by their writing critique groups. These groups, if you find the right one for you, can be invaluable for helping writers to grow and develop their craft. Here are some tips for working with a writing group, and how to get the best out of your participation in a group:

Finding a group: Network and find writers in your area, genre, and level of dedication. Keep in mind that you will be writing together, reviewing each other’s work, and helping each other along in the path to publishing. You don’t want to be dragged down by members who aren’t as determined to finish and publish their work, and you also want people who will try to offer good constructive advice without attacking others.
What to do when you meet: This part is completely up to your group’s desires. Some groups have dedicated writing time, others bring completed sections of manuscripts to the group to be read aloud or individually, and still others send the manuscripts ahead to be read before the meeting and the group time is spent completely in discussion. Just go with what works best for your group, and don’t be afraid to change things up if you all want something different.
How to critique: When you critique someone’s work, remember that it is a deep part of the writer, so always start with positive feedback. Then follow with an assessment of the overall structure and story, asking questions about the plot, premise, clarity of the story or information, consistency with characters, etc.
Advantages of a critique group: You gain accountability and deadlines from the regular meetings, when you need to be bringing new content to the table. Additional edits and thoughts from your group are also invaluable for helping you to see your work from another perspective, and for giving you an edge before you take your work to publishers. Keep in mind that this group is your first line of defense to iron out the kinks so you don’t embarrass yourself when you go looking for an agent or editor.
Some final tips: Always be open to constructive criticism, never show up without having done your work, always be respectful and sincere with your criticisms, take notes as you receive criticism (it may help you later, even if you don’t think so now), and write, write, write!

Hopefully these tips help you in your critique groups! Please post any additional ideas or tips in the comments section – I’d love to hear them!

Seattle Author: Psychologist, Teacher, Freelancer, but Always a Writer

2012-01-31T11:30:00.000-08:00

Jerome Richard photo by Bradley Enghaus.

In the 1950s, Jerome Richard moved from New York to San Francisco. He had a Master's degree in Psychology, and had worked part-time and temp jobs before his move, when he chose to get a Master's in English from San Francisco State to have a career in teaching, but that wasn't the start of his writing; "I had been writing somewhat all along," he says. When he graduated from San Francisco State, he did a collection of short stories for his thesis, which were never published.

Moving to Montana to teach, Richard published some of his short stories in magazines and journals across the country. The college where he was working had a policy of letting professors go after three years of teaching to 'pursue further education' - Jerry later found that this was the college's way of avoiding bringing their teachers on for TIAA (Teachers' Insurance and Annuity Association) where they would be required to match each teacher's paycheck pension deduction of 7 percent. He left for a fellowship to a school in Indiana to study folk music because he had an interest, but "I hated it. It wasn't intellectually stimulating, so I left after a year," he said.

After a brief time teaching composition and creative writing at Fresno State, Jerry was offered a teaching position at an experimental school in Vermont. "It was a fun place to teach, but the school was dying," Richard says. "But it gave me opportunities, the 'experimental' part of the school basically asked me, 'What do you want to teach?' and I got to do it."

He moved on to Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA in 1969, where he acquired a teaching position. During his time at Western, Richard's collection of essays, The Good Life, was released in 1973. Jerry wrote it because he was interested in the idea of communes, but "I never quite had the courage to drop everything and join one," he says. "There was a lot of talk during the 60s about communes, and people thought it was a new idea, but I made the connection between them and the 19th century utopias." It was published by New American Library, but Richard had to get the permissions for each essay himself.

After branching out to Seattle with an evening studies program developed by two Western students, the Western educational department took over the program in the early 1980s and Richard had the option of moving back to Bellingham with his family or commuting. "I tried commuting for a quarter or so, but it wasn't working so I retired and took up freelance writing. I had been writing fiction all along," Jerry said.

Back in Montana, he had begun a novel. "I started by thinking about the idea of responsibility and what kinds of scenarios would cause someone to take responsibility," he says. What came about was The Kiss of the Prison Dancer, a story of a Holocaust survivor who witnesses a murderer's getaway, then struggles with that knowledge when a neo-Nazi is blamed for the crime.

"I tried different publishers, and many expressed interest but never bought it ... then I showed it to a friend, Priscilla Long (author of The Writer's Portable Mentor), who said there was no hope at the end of the book, so I changed it a bit," Jerry said. The Permanent Press liked the book with its revisions and bought it, releasing the novel in 2004. It was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for best first novel by an American author in 2005.

Since his novel, Jerome Richard has written short stories, articles, and other freelance work, and he notes that at the beginning of his freelancing career, "I didn't really know what I was doing ... after selling a piece to a magazine, I realized that I needed to learn something about freelancing, so I took a course," he says. He did some travel writing, social commentaries, etc. Jerry is currently sitting on another novel, which he has entitled "The Apple Years". The story is about an 11-year-old boy in Vermont, who looks out the window one evening to see his parents burying his grandfather in the backyard...

After his first experience with publishing The Good Life, Richard encountered some practices of ill-repute with publishers and their royalty disbursements, which is partially why today he is a grievance officer for the National Writers Union. "The Union has helped members retrieve more than a million dollars owed them by deceitful publishers, so I am proud of my small part in that," he said.

He advises aspiring authors to, "Be something else first. Have a career, it'll give you stories, experience, and authentication ... With freelance writing, you have to do a lot of research and hope you've got it right," Jerry said.

The Secret Life of Copernicus H. Stringfellow: A Book Review

2012-01-26T12:34:00.000-08:00

Lorin Barber contacted me before the holidays to request that I review a pre-release version of his latest book and first novel, The Secret Life of Copernicus H. Stringfellow. The young adult novel is a quirky read, but full of action and intrigue, and it is set for release on March 13, 2012 according to Amazon. Get some background on Mr. Barber by reading my author Q&A below, and enjoy!

The Secret Life of Copernicus H. Stringfellow tells the unique adventures of Copernicus, or 'Nick', as he moves to Seattle and begins a new life for himself. His special skills that are not quite superpowers allow him unusual abilities for healing and protection, while his incredible intelligence has earned him more than imaginable Ph.D's and doctorates. He downplays his gifts, though, and uses them to help his friends and those in need to completely transform the people around him for the better. The young adult novel is a fun and active read, ideal for readers from 6th through 9th grade, in my opinion.

I’ve based the following on my review policy:

Plot: Barber has a unique style with weaving the plot together, including bits from Nick's past, his present adventures, and a nearby serial kidnapper. Although there are a few threads of the plot that don't really get resolved and end without clarity, the plot is generally pretty easy to follow, and provides for an interesting and somewhat unexpected ending. Star Awarded.
Characters: Personally, I was a little bit bored with the characters in The Secret Life... Even the protagonist, Nick, was only developed to a point, and I didn't relate to or understand the motives of some of the other characters. Occasionally, it seemed like a character's mood or actions were tweaked unnaturally to fit with the storyline, rather than letting the character come out as him or herself. Take this rating with a grain of salt, because I'm better accustomed to reviewing novels for my age group, and this depth of character development may be perfectly suited for early young-adult readers. Half-Star Awarded.
Setting: As little as Barber details the setting, you really get a feel for the place of each scene. I could picture things in my head without much struggle, and walk with the characters through different settings. Star Awarded.
Originality: While the story comes across initially as being something new, its premise is pretty much a classical superhero story without the initial superhero character's inner turmoil ; individual with gifts uses them to help others, bad guys don't like it and try to stop him, superhero escapes, wins the girl, and saves the day. No Star Awarded.
Style: I noticed a few spelling and grammatical errors along the way, but this is a pre-release, un-edited reader's version. Half-Star Awarded.

Overall, I think The Secret Life of Copernicus H. Stringfellow would be a fun and interesting read for junior-high aged readers. It's a decent story with interesting elements. Parents beware, though, Nick eats Twinkies all the time as brain food, so you'll want to make sure your teens don't try to pull that one on you - although, with Hostess (Twinkies brand) and Wonder Bread going bankrupt for the second time in the last decade, you might not have to worry about that!

Seattle Author: Not Your Run-of-The-Mill Storyteller

2012-01-24T12:05:00.000-08:00

Photo courtesy of Lorin Barber.

Lorin Barber is the author of 28 Tips to Become a Great Grandpa, and most recently The Secret Life of Copernicus H. Stringfellow (to be released in March 2012). He graciously participated in a Q&A with SeattleWrote, which I'll post below. Come back on Thursday for my book review of the pre-release version of The Secret Life.

Q: When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?
A: Perhaps strangely, I’m not one who always wanted to be a writer. In fact, when my 1st grade teacher gave me a C- in penmanship I decided I hated writing. Later in high school, when I learned to type and my parents gave me an electric typewriter I decided it wasn’t quite so bad.
I went on to college for a BA in Japanese and an MBA. I always thought I would like to write a book someday to leave my name for posterity, but assumed it would be a non-fiction, business related book. Meanwhile in business I was learning to be an extremely concise communicator, a practice to which I believe I was born.

Q: What has your journey toward becoming a writer looked like?
A: About 10 years ago my work took me to live in Wisconsin for a year while my family stayed here in the West. The winters are awfully cold in Wisconsin and you can only watch re-runs of Die Hard so many times. It dawned on me that perhaps I could write a novel.
I wrote that book and sent it to about 50 publishers. One of them was kind enough to tell me what they didn’t like about it. Over a three-year period I wrote another and another though I sent them to fewer publishers. My wife even liked the third one and a publisher told me what I ought to change in it. I changed those things and then the publisher rejected it.
Not easily discouraged I started from scratch on a fourth book. My work changed to the point I had no time to continue writing. During that time I talked with a friend who had a relative in the publishing business.

Q: What caused you to go from nonfiction (28 Tips to Become a Great Grandpa) to fiction with Copernicus?
A: I actually went from fiction to non-fiction then back again. My friend told me that the publisher liked to do holiday or activity-specific non-fiction items. Having progressed to grandfather status I asked if something about being a grandpa would fit in that realm and he thought it would.
Having my own business and in the midst of it failing in the winter of 2009-10, I had time sitting in my office to put my thoughts about grandfathering to paper. I accomplished the entire work in about three weeks. If you read it you’ll see it’s quite simple.
The grandpa book is not what I expected. When the publisher buys your book they own it. They dropped the two children's stories I had written and included. Instead they filled the book with blank lines intended (I guess) to become kind of a journal for grandpas to write in. I think that sunk any chances of success.
Though the grandpa book was a flop, I had the publisher’s attention and with a few more months of work, and my business going under, I finished and sold them my fourth novel, The Secret Life of Copernicus H. Stringfellow.

Q: What inspired "The Secret Life of Copernicus H. Stringfellow"?
A: Having failed to get three previous novels published, I spent some time reflecting on my literary career. My propensity for being concise, which had served me well as a businessman, hurt my writing. Still, I knew I would never do well in descriptive mode. I can’t spend two pages describing the beauty of a meadow. I want to know what happened in the meadow and get on to the forest. That’s true in my reading as well as my writing.

In Copernicus, I sat down and outlined a plot with enough meat in it to make a full novel without a lot of description. I needed a plot that would pull the reader through, always wanting more. I was inspired by Dean Koontz’ “Life Expectancy”. I was bowled over by his ability to weave gut-splitting humor into gut-wrenching suspense. Copernicus had to be both suspenseful and fun.
To me the name of the character was a key to framing the book. I chose Copernicus to indicate his incredible intelligence and Stringfellow to indicate both his tall skinny stature and, in concert with the first name to give him a sense of quirkiness. (By the way I got Stringfellow while riding a Metro Bus. One of Metro’s employees of the quarter had that last name and was pictured on a wall plaque. When the book is released I intend to look him up and give him a copy.)

Q: Can you share a little bit about the journey and process to getting "Copernicus" published?
A: After my earlier failures, I took a book that I knew was superior to the earlier attempts and leveraged the connection I had with the publisher of my grandpa book.

Q: What challenges have you experienced with writing, and how have you overcome them?
A: I was born with an intense imagination and have not yet, nor do I ever believe I will experience writer’s block. There are times I get burnt out and quit for a while, but never because I can’t imagine the next step. Still creating the story is a grind. I much prefer re-writing to writing.
Brevity is a curse. I once had an employee dub me “brevity incarnate”. I have to force myself to allocate a sentence or two to description of a character or scene before plunging in to the action.
When attempting to build suspense I repeat to myself “make them suffer, make them suffer”. That refers to the way I suffer while reading, waiting for the author to get to the point. As I re-write a story, I always remind myself to make the reader suffer as a means of building the suspense of the situation.

Q: Do you feel that publishing books later in your life has helped or harmed your writing career?
A: Personally I didn’t have the desire to write any earlier in my life. I’m sure that having experienced a lot of life prior to writing adds to the depth of my work. That isn’t to say my writing is deep, I consider it cheap thrills. I hope that my writing is fun. I’ve had a fun life and have learned to find joy in even the most serious situations. Whatever philosophy of life shows forth in my writing I’m sure has developed more fully than if I’d written as a young man.
If I come to great success over the next few years, which I intend to do, it will be because I haven’t the time to let my fame grow slowly, and because of the business acumen I’ve gained in other fields. If in five years I’m a bestseller, it will not be from the quality of my writing, but the quality of my business sense. I’ve read plenty of bestselling trash and am confident that there’s lots of quality unknown material. Marketing is the key to success in any venture. A better mouse trap will not sell if no one sees it on the shelf. I’m hoping I’ve learned enough business in my life to make writing a success.

Q: Can you share any tips or advice for aspiring writers?
A: Dean Koontz made a deal with his wife; she’d support him for five years during which he would become a successful writer or get a real job. That’s a great deal if you can work it. My advice would be to get a real job and if you love writing you will find time to do it. We always have time to do what we love. Either that or move to Wisconsin, the winters are very cold there.

Fan Fiction: Jane Austen, Star Trek, and More

2012-01-19T12:09:00.000-08:00

NPR's KUOW aired a bit on fan fiction on Jan. 2nd, and I thought it was a really interesting piece on how the idea works and the all-around idea of fan fiction. Sheenagh Pugh, author of The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context spoke with NPR about how the readers are interacting with the characters and story of the books they've read when they write fan fiction, and also how it expands on the work that's already there in the audio piece.

Recently, I read Jane Eyre's Husband about the background of Mr. Rochester and his future life with Jane, and I loved what Tara Bradley did with Mr. Rochester's character. It works with the different standards we have now with sex and scandal in literature, where Charlotte Bronte alluded to Rochester's dark past, and the details of it, but the reader doesn't get to be a part of it and the depth of the Mr. Rochester character until Jane Eyre's Husband.

I was surprised by the comment that Pugh makes, "I don't think any author really knows their characters as well as they think they do." It's really interesting that she makes note of the fact that the reader is part of what makes the character as well, because they form an imagination around the people they read about, what they do next, etc. I thought it was very interesting too, that bit about Darcy's last words to Lizzie. It's so true! Totally not his voice there!

Characters exist outside of the fiction story itself, like with Mr. Rochester, I always wanted to know what happened to him and Jane after she finds him outside the burned-down Thornfield. What was their life together like?

Another thing mentioned is that people may write fan fiction partially because they don't want the book to end. What fan fiction pieces do you think are next? The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo?

Seattle Author: Books for Kids and Anyone Else With an Open Heart

2012-01-17T12:21:00.000-08:00

I'm very excited to feature Sundee Frazier, author of Brendan Buckley's Universe and Everything in It, The Other Half of My Heart, and a nonfiction adult book: Check All That Apply: Finding Wholeness as a Multiracial Person. Her most recent children's novel, Brendan Buckley’s Sixth-Grade Experiment was released last week on January 10. Here's the Q&A session that I was privileged to have with her recently:

Author Sundee Frazier, photo by Emerald England.

Q: When did you decide you wanted to be a writer? What has your background in writing looked like?
A: I recently discovered a book I had as a child (my family lived on Queen Anne Hill in Seattle at the time). It was a Dr. Seuss book in which you filled in blanks about yourself, including what you wanted to be when you grew up. I wrote, “a famous writer.” I was eight. So I guess you could say I decided as a child. Then I forgot. But writing didn’t forget me. I majored in journalism, so of course I did a lot of writing in college, but then I ended up going into ministry for ten years, so I suppose you could say I forgot again. But, once again, writing didn’t forget me. It was in the context of speaking about being biracial at a national conference for this campus ministry that an editor from a major Christian publisher asked if I would consider writing a book on the experience of being mixed race. Check All That Apply: Finding Wholeness as a Multiracial Person was the result.

Q: What made you decide to write about multiculturalism, and to write for children?
A: My husband and I were newly married, on a plane to somewhere, and he turned and asked, “If you could do anything, without regard to money, what would it be?” I replied immediately: “Be a children’s writer.” And that’s when I knew I had to do it. I find it a great honor to write for young people.
As for the subject matter I’ve chosen, it’s all come out of my personal experience. My African-American heritage is very important to me and I believe a part of my calling is to keep the history and contributions of Black people alive through the stories I write. But I also see the world through the eyes of a black-white, mixed-race person. I suppose I am multicultural by birth. As author Paule Marshall once said, “Once you see yourself truthfully depicted, you have a sense of your right to be in the world.” Another part of my calling is to let mixed-race kids or kids who are multicultural by birth or adoption or experience know that they have a right to be in the world, too.

Q: How did you get "Brendan Buckley's Universe and Everything in it" published? Was it a struggle to get a first novel published, even after having your work published in collections and anthologies, and after "Check All That Apply"?
A: I gave myself ten years to get a children’s book published, thinking that would be no problem, right? It took nine! But only one rejection letter. (I got a few more for a picture book, but shelved that project to focus on novels). That one letter was all it took. After that, I determined I would not submit again until I was sure I had something publishable. I enrolled in Vermont College’s MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adult program, which is where I started Brendan Buckley’s Universe and Everything in It. After I completed the manuscript, a mentor from Vermont College connected me with a literary agent who sold my book within a few weeks. So I would say the struggle was all in learning and honing the craft of fiction writing, and in particular, fiction for young people, which has some of its own unique requirements (staying in a young person’s point of view, for one, and letting the child propel the action and be central in solving his or her own problem).

Q: How do you juggle the difference of writing nonfiction for adults, and fiction for children? How do you balance the two in your mind?
A: At this stage in my life, fiction for kids is what I feel most compelled to write and that’s all I’m doing. So there’s no juggling act—except the one involving being a mom of two young children and being a writer.

Q: What inspires your children's books?
A: In the case of Brendan Buckley, it started with a family story and the question, “What if my white grandparents had not changed their minds about my parents’ interracial marriage and I had grown up not knowing them?” That’s how the idea of a biracial kid who doesn’t know his white grandpa and wants to know why came about.

For The Other Half of My Heart, a news story about mixed-race twins—one who looked more black and the other who looked more white—provided the initial idea for the novel, and it came from my editor, actually. I brought in a lot of my personal experience (including being in pageants as a teen) to develop the main character and plot. Some family history—this time from my black grandmother and her experience of being raised by her fair-skinned grandmother—influenced the story, as well.
Mostly, I aim to be honest with my readers—not to avoid uncomfortable subjects like race, because I know young people are thinking about these things and it serves them to read and talk about them.

Q: Tell me a little more about getting started with the idea of a 'sketch' when you struggle to get started on a book or story.
A: Getting started is just the most awful, gut-wrenching, difficult part for me. I suppose because I am a perfectionist and I hate how necessarily bad my writing is when I first embark on a project and am groping along, trying to find my way to the characters and their stories.
So, part of how I’ve tried to make myself feel better is to think about the first draft as a sketch, just as visual artists create sketches before they put paint to paper. Sketching frees me to play around more and gives me permission to allow big gaps in the writing or long stretches of extraneous stuff I know will never end up in the final “painting.” Sketches never look like the finished product. They’re not meant to.

Q: What did you learn writing "The Other Half of my Heart" that you will take with you to future books?
A: To remain calm. It’s not worth it to stress yourself out over the messiness that is novel-writing. And also that I cannot control one little bit how people respond to my stories. Some will love them to the point of tears, finding a connection to the characters that validates their experience; others will be only lukewarm about them or primarily see the flaws. What matters is that I write the best story that I can, and that only happens by digging deep into the reservoir of my experience and empathizing with others in their experiences—and not letting myself off the hook when I know what I’ve written is not the best I can do.

Q: Do you have plans for future books? Can you share a little bit about them?
A: My most recent novel, which just came out last week, is a sequel: Brendan Buckley’s Sixth-Grade Experiment, in which Brendan enters the world of middle school and is trying to figure out girls, friends, and his relationship with his dad, all while attempting to win a national science competition by creating methane from cow poop. The highlights of researching this novel for me were spending a day aboard the RV-Centennial out of Friday Harbor and holding a green anole. (No cow poop was handled in the creating of this book.)
I’m working on a novel about an enterprising nine-year-old who plans to run a conglomerate by the time she finishes fourth grade.

Q: What advice would you share with young writers, specifically ones with a multicultural background?
A: My best advice would probably be what Brendan’s dad says to him at one point in the first book: “Don’t let anyone tell you who you are, or what you can or can’t be.” You have stories that only you can tell; if you don’t tell them, they will never be told, so be brave and write (or draw or record or act or dance) them out. The world (and you) will be better because of it.

Horse Bite: A Book Review

2012-01-12T12:17:00.000-08:00

Hopefully you all got some background on Dave O'Leary through Tuesday's author feature, and today I'm reviewing his debut novel, Horse Bite. Dave O'Malley traverses Seattle's coffee shops, bars, band gigs and poetry readings over the course of about 15 months, during which time he experiences 'Forty', has a one night stand or two, falls in love, and makes some major life changes. O'Malley is a programmer who is a poet, freelancer, and musician when he's not at his office job. He is on the verge of turning 40, and is in somewhat of a reflective and restless state for most of the book until he meets Yvonne, who brings with her fascination, love, and heartbreak, but Dave is without the regrets he seems to have experienced in other relationships.

The book was fascinating to read, mostly because I've never read anything like it. It's tone was easy to relate to, and I felt like I was a fly on the wall for his natural and unusual (for me) experiences. I’ve based the following review on my policy:

Plot: Unconventional and against form at first glance, Horse Bite seems to simply wander in chronological order of events. But there's so much more to it. Dave experiences life and reminisces about his past throughout, and it's not until you recognize that Dave is the plot that things really start to come together. Star Awarded.
Characters: Although no one other than Dave O'Malley is really dealt with on a level of character development, the reader really experiences his mind and feelings in a way that honestly feels like you're really in his head. It was a very interesting way to learn a character, from the inside out, and it wasn't of bad taste, either (like being inside the head of some male characters has been before). Star Awarded.
Setting: It's Seattle. Setting doesn't really come into play for this book, except to describe the bars and coffee shops that Dave works in from time to time, but when he gets into describing it, he does so with you hardly noticing, but feeling, smelling, touching, tasting all the way. Star Awarded.
Originality: I said in his feature, and I'll say so again; this whole story and style feels new and unique. It's unexpected, interesting, and different. Star Awarded.
Style: I didn't notice any issues with grammar or spelling, so we're clear here! Star Awarded.

That's my first 5-star review for SeattleWrote. Honestly, Horse Bite and Dave O'Leary really do deserve it. If you're looking for something new and interesting to read, something that flows and moves like poetry without being confusing or archaic, this should be the next book on your stack to read.

Seattle Author: A Fiend of the Arts

2012-01-10T11:40:00.000-08:00

Musician, writer, music writer, and now novelist, Dave O'Leary is certainly an artist when it comes to appealing to the literary and audio senses. "I always wanted to do a book, write and play," he says.

After majoring in English in college, he was in a lot of bands. "Back then I was more of a musician than a writer, because I took a number of years off of writing. I felt that I wasn't ready, I was forcing it," O'Leary said.

He moved to Korea for eight years to teach English, then to Seattle where he's been ever since. "After moving here, I felt like I was ready to write, so I started a blog in summer 2008 as something to get myself to write everyday," Dave says. "I started to get a few readers, and I really respected them."

His readers suggested that he write a book, based on his experiences which he chronicled on his blog, DaveMusic. In the summer of 2009, he began writing Horse Bite, an alter-ego novel that includes some events from Dave's own life. "I began developing more of a story, about my life, my experiences ... the original idea was to springboard from the blog to writing short stories," he said.

Dave reading about the Shit Woman. Photo by Stacy Albright

What came was a novel. One with a very unique voice and story that captures and draws the reader into the life of a musician, programmer, and writer on the verge of 'Forty' and the women (one in particular) that he encounters. Come back for my review of Horse Bite on Thursday.

At the time he was writing Horse Bite, Dave O'Leary was also writing about local musicians and bands for Seattle Subsonic. Someone who knew him had approached him and asked him to write for the blog, "and at first I was hesitant," he says. "I was always the musician, not the critic. So I wrote the music articles as kind of an extension of my personal blog, reviewing the band is as much about me experiencing the band and music as it is about the band themselves. [Bands] tend to like that."

As Dave says it, "I enjoy the music writing ... I've met a lot of great musicians, and built up a little community of sorts around the bands I've written about. They've been as supportive of my book and blog as I have been of their music. [They are] good people. My passion, though, is my personal blog."

He was working full time as a programmer while writing every day for sometimes three to four hours when he got home. "It was very quiet, sometimes lonely, but very tiring. Sitting in front of the computer," he says, mentioning Charles Bukowski, his favorite author.

Favorite Bukowski works of his? Love is a Dog from Hell, You Get So Alone Sometimes that it Just Makes Sense, and The Captain is Out to Lunch. "I do love his poetry, (it was his great strength I think) and some of his prose (especially The Captain is Out to Lunch), I don't love everything thing he wrote," O'Leary said. "He had his successes and his failures, but the motivational thing is that he wrote, all the time. And he wrote, too, about that drive to write."

And poetry is also something Dave has had more than just read, he's had his own moments in the craft:
"Years ago poetry was my preferred form of writing, but it left me at some point. That's how those things go. I even mention it in the book. Sometimes something dies. People stop creating," he said. "But the poem came back when I met the woman Yvonne is based on, and it mixed in with the prose. I even put poems on my blog from time to time and my readers like them. I wanted to work that into the book because I saw no reason why a novel couldn't also have some poetry since I do try to make the prose poetic in a way. So there are a few poems in the book, and it even ends with one."

The poems came back for Dave for those moments in Horse Bite, but not all things have a happy ending. That's part of why Dave's book is so relatable (even to someone like myself, who got married young and has little to no musical talents). "I lost a woman near the end of writing Horse Bite. Yvonne is based on her. She was my inspiration. I had to get past that to finish it. I don't know how I did," he says. We all go through ups and downs, and O'Leary captures that humanity and feeling expertly in his novel.

Lucky for him, "Publishing kind of fell into my lap. After I finished Horse Bite, I started doing more music writing, getting more readers. At a Flight to Mars concert, I met the guy who wrote about the year he spent with Pearl Jam," Dave said (That's Jason Leung, author of This All-Encompassing Trip). "I asked him to read Horse Bite, and he offered to publish it through his publishing company, Infinitum. Then Barnes & Noble placed an order for the book..."

Since Horse Bite's release on Halloween 2011, Dave has been signing and reading for it around Seattle. He's currently working on another book, as well as a screenplay.

He has lots of writing advice for authors, so I'm just going to bullet-point them for you:

"Have faith that it can happen. Force yourself. Make it happen. One of the best parts is when you get down to that sentence, then you stand up and it's all clear."
"Write. Believe in what you write, because if you don't believe in your writing, no one else will."
"Stick to your guns, write about what you want to write about. Don't apologize."
"You're going to have a lot of long, dark, lonely nights, and you've got to get through that."
"Push yourself, try something new."

Seattle Author: Five Books and a Movie, Plus Some

2012-01-03T12:02:00.000-08:00

As the first author that I ever spoke with professionally, I am extremely excited to be featuring Sarah Gerdes, author of Chambers, the first book in a forthcoming book and movie series (check out her blog here). A successful businesswoman and nonfiction author, Sarah wrote her first novel while on bed rest during her pregnancy with her now 6-year-old daughter. But her writing started long before that in elementary school, when she would make up stories, write short stories and poetry. "I remember I wrote my first book in high school, then in college, I didn't think writing was a good career so I went into business," she said. "I kept writing, but nothing I thought was really good."

From a business consulting and marketing development background working with Microsoft and other clients, Gerdes wrote a business book, Navigating the Partnership Maze: Creating Alliances that Work, which was published by McGraw-Hill in 2002. "It was very hard after that, because when I went to publish fiction, it was worse than if I had never written and published a business book because they thought I was stodgy, boring, and flat," she said.

Sarah Gerdes, photo from her website.

As for that first novel while she was pregnant? "I wrote it on a lark," Gerdes says. A friend of hers from her work with Microsoft had his son read the book (it was young adult fiction), who loved it. She ended up self-publishing 3,500 copies, which sold out in 45 days, leading Sarah to connect with an agent in New York, "who sent it to 12 publishers, but there was one thing or another wrong with it," she says. "After that, I was writing about a book a year, but never showed them to anyone."

Four years later she was pregnant again, and she really got into writing Chambers. Sarah showed her manuscript to a producer friend of hers, Lucas Foster (produced Mr. & Mrs. Smith and Jumper, among others), who promptly told her to "Age it up," (to the 18-25 audience), and that he wanted "Five books. Not one, not three, five. And he wanted an overview of the five books to come," Sarah says. That was August 2010. She had an overview for him in the beginning of September, and then he told her to move ahead on the first five chapters of Chambers.

In December, she had a 450-page book, and Lucas called a meeting in their Los Angeles studio in February. Lucas, Sarah, and others went through the details of the characters, plot, story, and more - asking details about book four when they had only read book one! She had a list of things to change, and by April 2011 she had the revised book. In May, the Chambers series was optioned, and the studio decided to produce the first book as an eBook to get it released in two months as opposed to the two years Gerdes would be looking at with traditional publishing.

"I could have waited for a regular publisher, but the studio wanted to get it out fast, in order to build as much awareness for the movie as possible pre-release. The studio also wants to use the content in other ways, like games and phone applications," Sarah says. "[The eBook option] was everything I needed for publishing, and everything [Lucas and the studio] needed for a movie."

Sarah's literary agency took Chambers to the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2011. "It was shocking to me," Sarah says. "You could have stopped me there. I couldn't believe that I was going to have a title at the Frankfurt Book Fair!" By the first week of November, a total of about 18 countries had requested manuscripts. The offers began rolling in.

As of December 2011, Sarah Gerdes had nearly 30 countries in review, negotiating with her agent for the book. She told me the reason why this is totally different from the typical way American authors get published, so I'll give you the simple version, since this is really valuable information for authors:
Typical Author:

Gets Agent
Signs with a Publisher for an advance (good advance if lucky)
Publisher prints the book
'Markets' the book to bookstores in the U.S., other countries where they have presence ('markets' is in quotes, because this job is 99% done by the author themselves these days)
Author gets royalties, blah, blah, blah

Sarah Gerdes:

Works with producer
Producer tailors book for movies
Gets agent
Publishes eBook
Takes book to Frankfurt Book Fair
Receives offers from dozens of publishers in dozens of countries, each of whom can pay her for the rights to publish Chambers in their country, including the U.S
Oh, and she has a movie for the first book, which will go into production this year...

With Chambers, it hasn't all been so fast and easy. One of her biggest challenges is balancing her audience. "Young adults are experiencing adult-like issues. When I'm writing at a 17-year-old level, they're adults! They are making decisions as adults, they understand that the consequences of a choice make a difference," Sarah says. "I have to take them to a point of being adult without crossing the line with nudity, profanity, etc. That's the blessing of having the historical confines, with social boundaries, etc. I'm speaking to the people who are sick of the nudity and profanity."

Martial arts definitely comes into play, though. And, it's all her! "I've been studying eight types of traditional martial arts for nearly 6 years, though I got booted out when I got pregnant," she writes on her website.

She's working on the second book in the Chambers series, but she also has other ideas in progress. "I have four in various stages, one is for a two-book adult suspense fiction," Gerdes said. "I finished 110 pages of the second Chambers book recently, and then wrote four chapters of an adult pulp fiction - it was so freeing, I'm in my age group!"

"The same advice I was given by my first agent has been invaluable to me for helping me with my craft: (1) Write every day. (2) After reaching a milestone, stop for a week and take a break. (3) Read out loud. I did an authors' workshop for 5th graders, and I heard them reading their work aloud. Words on a page can be musical, and have a cadence to them," Sarah advises aspiring writers.

Sarah also recommends the following books:

Elements of Storytelling: How to Write Compelling Fiction, by Peter Rubie
The Elements of Narrative Nonfiction: How to Write and Sell the Novel of True Events, by Peter Rubie
The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them), by Jack Bickham
100 Ways to Improve Your Writing, by Gary Provost

From traditional publishing to self-publishing, and now e-publishing, Sarah has "experienced every channeled market," and she's still going. "It's a rare saga that the books are made for movie," she says. It seems to be working for her, though!

I personally read Chambers last summer, and really enjoyed the historical fiction aspects of it (my genre of choice), and didn't feel that it was at all out of my scope of enjoyment, even though it's technically "Young Adult". I really felt like I was there with the characters, experiencing the action, magic, and emotion myself. Chambers can be purchased online at Amazon for your Kindle, at Barnes and Noble for your Nook, and in the iTunes Bookstore for your Apple products (search 'Books', 'teens', 'fiction', and 'sarahgerdes').

Keep up with Sarah's life and Chambers developments on her blog: Sassality.

The Fool's Journey: A Book Review

2011-12-29T12:27:00.000-08:00

As my second book review for SeattleWrote, author Mary Chase (previously a local Seattleite) asked me to review her novel, The Fool’s Journey.

As a modern day depiction of Lizzie Borden, Deirdre Kildeer has spent her life running and hiding from the events of her childhood. She shot her abusive father when she was 13 years old, saving her mother from death at his hand. Now she’s living in the old servants’ quarters of a Queen Anne mansion-made-apartment building, making great strides in the recognition of her poetry, and is teaching at a local university. Then mysterious events begin to spiral out of control, leaving Deirdre terrified and unsure. She has the support and help of her spiritual cleaning lady, Rosa Ruiz, and Rosa’s detective/law student son, Manny. But will she come to the bottom of things before her background publicly alters the quiet life she’s worked so hard to build? Or will she become fodder for a fake poet’s scheme to steal her work and drive her to insanity and death?

With its twists, unique idea and gripping story, The Fool’s Journey is an exciting and fun read. I’ve based the following review on my policy:

Plot: Mary does a great job of transitioning the story from one scene to the next, and I really enjoyed the originality of the plot. The book follows a comfortable rhythm and reaches its climax at just the right moment. The story could have been deeper and more developed, but it all flows well enough to keep the reader on track and interested. Star Awarded.
Characters: I was a little disappointed in the character development with The Fool’s Journey. I felt that Deirdre could have used a lot more depth, particularly in explaining where she’s been since her father’s death and why certain events frighten her so much (they are definitely creepy things, don’t get me wrong, but it doesn’t quite explain why Deirdre nearly faints of fear when they happen). Other characters could have used more development and personality as well. No Star Awarded.
Setting: Seattle is gray and rainy, and Mary definitely portrays that in the book, but not to the extent that a local reader would be put off. She does an excellent job of setting the scene for a rainy day without making the reader bored, and her descriptions are natural and easy to visualize. Star Awarded.
Originality: I’m going to start by saying that this was a very unique idea. Although Mary may have developed the story more for my taste, her combination of a poet’s life and struggles with the creepy Lizzie Borden story was a completely new one to my knowledge. Star Awarded.
Style: Spelling, grammar, etc. seemed to all be in order with The Fool’s Journey. I wasn’t distracted by any misspellings, misused words, or grammatical failures. Star Awarded.

The Fool’s Journey receives a total of four stars, and I really appreciated this book. Although the biggest thing that I think it needs is more story and character development, the book is a solid and smooth read, and kept me on the edge of my seat waiting to discover what would happen next.

Seattle Author: The Paranormal, Novels, and Meshing the Two

2011-12-27T11:53:00.000-08:00

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas! Now it's back to the flow of things...

Here's a Q&A I had with Mary Chase, author of The Fool's Journey. Mary ties the paranormal world, intrigue, thrill, and mystery together with her debut novel to create an exciting story, and I'll publish my review of The Fool's Journey on Thursday. Check out her blog here.

Enjoy!

Q: When did you start writing stories? What brought you to this point in your literary career?
A: When I was about 10 years old, I read my first small book by Edward Gorey. Soon I was writing and illustrating all kinds of gruesome stories about Victorian waifs and unlikely occurrences. I wrote a lot of poetry when I was growing up and one play in college, but nothing commercial until I was almost 40. The day after I defended my dissertation I was still stuck in writing mode and stated a fluffy little story which became my first Regency-set romance. I wrote Regencies until about twelve years ago. About that time, publishers (probably for economic survival and not evil) cut down on mid-list writers and most got rid of Regencies entirely. I started Fool’s Journey as a way to break into mainstream and a different genre. I couldn’t find an agent for it, let alone a publisher. They all told me it was too academic, the heroine was too passive and that no one would want to read it. Fine. I still loved my story, and that’s why I finally decided to publish it myself as an ebook and print-on-demand. Apparently a lot of other writers feel that way as well.

Q: What inspired "The Fool's Journey"?
A: It’s hard to say. I just started with the scene in the Pike Place Market where Deirdre is writing poetry and the book premise and plot kind of un-spooled as I wrote. A lot of writers talk about this phenomenon of following characters around and writing down what they do. That’s what happened here. When I started, I had no idea that there would be paranormal elements or even that there would be a mystery.

Q: How do you personally view paranormal activity? Why do include elements of the other world in your book?
A: I was raised to believe that there was a lot more in the Cosmos than what we imagined or science could prove. It’s like wearing bifocals: what you see depends on the lens you’re looking through. As a writer, paranormal elements provide latitude for character insight, symbolism, the human psyche, fear and wonder.

Q: How do you approach the task of writing about the activities and legends of ghosts?
A: It’s important for these elements to serve a distinct purpose besides lending scary stuff to the plot. You can do that with a rogue elephant or a piano dropping out of a window. It has to contribute to mood, setting, character and message. My note to self is: don’t stretch credulity too far and don’t depend on a paranormal event as a deus ex machina.

Q: Do you plan to write more thrillers with hints of paranormal activity?
A: That’s the plan. I just started a new book – the working title is The Ghost Doll but that seems a little blatant so I’ll probably change it – which centers on reincarnation.

Q: Do you have any advice for aspiring writers who want to include ghosts, demons, and the like in their books? Does it take a special perspective or balance?
A: I think anyone who wants to add paranormal elements should do more than watch America’s Most Haunted. They have to have believed in this stuff or been unnerved by it at some point, even if it was just a childhood experience. Even if your protagonist is the Amazing Randi there has to be an element of true feeling or the story won’t work.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

2011-12-20T08:57:00.000-08:00

The holiday craziness has gotten to me, and I won't be posting an author feature this week. Come back next week for my feature of Mary Chase, author of The Fool's Journey!

In the meantime, enjoy your holiday festivities!

Q&A Between Brian Jacques and His Editor

2011-12-15T12:34:00.000-08:00

I was thinking the other day about Brian Jacques, the British author of the Redwall series, which I read when I was a kid. Those were some of my favorite books between age 8 and 13, mostly because they felt so epic while retaining very comedic qualities (you've got to love the rabbits!). Anyway, he died back in February of this year and I'm ashamed to say that I wasn't aware at the time, so I didn't post about him on SeattleWrote. Well, better late than never! Here's a sweet little tribute video about him:

I also came across this Q&A between him and his editor on TeacherVision, which other writers may find interesting and helpful:

Patricia Lee Gauch is the Editorial Director of Philomel Books, and has been working with Brian Jacques on the Redwall tales since their first publication here in the United States, more than ten years ago. Recently, she and Brian talked about his life as an author.

Patricia: Brian, there are so many things we could share, working together as we do, but there are some things your readers would like to know, I'm sure. For example, Brian, where do you write?

Brian: It's a corner of my garden, up near the angle of the wall. There's a lilac bush that grows there, a dwarf apple tree that grows next to it, and a little hut that I built for my granddaughter. Inside there is a little den, and that's where I go to write. That's where I go!

My son also built a nice extension to my house so that I can write there in bad weather. But I've been doing a bit of writing outside today and was just watching two bluetits and a little bluetit with his Mum and Dad feeding on some nuts. A robin red breast comes too, he feeds on the bits they drop.

P: I always think of you writing in one particular time of year, in March, April, and maybe May.

B: Well, I love to write around Easter, when spring is in full bloom, the earth is renewing itself, and it's getting towards summer and you get nice warm days. That's the time I like best, although I do like to write in the autumn as well, even though it can get a bit chilly and rainy in the autumn over here.

P: But you've been known to write out in your garden, even in the rain haven't you?

B: Oh yes, under the famous grouse umbrella! Sure, I just go back under the lilac bush!

P: Have you been writing longhand lately, or on your typewriter?

B: I've been using the typewriter a lot. I've found that when I've been writing for awhile, my longhand gets a bit sloppy, although I still write all my poems and rhymes and riddles longhand.

P: Do you set an amount of time out for yourself to write each day, Brian, or are you apt, when an idea comes to you, to just write and write until you are done? Do you let the idea carry you?

B: Well, what was happening was, I was sitting there, stuck to the chair, writing and running away with these ideas and sometimes producing up to 25 pages a day. I realized that wasn't good for my health, being there that long. So, now I say to myself, if I'm in no hurry, I'll write between 5 and 7 pages. If I can "see the stable door in sight," then I can do between 12 and 15 pages. But, what I do is leave myself time for other things now: take the dog out for a walk, go out to the shops, go down to the radio station, or go across to the School for the Blind. I feel better for that because you can just overdo writing.

P: Then writing becomes something other than a joy, you might as well do hard labor.

B: Yes, that's right.

P: Do the ideas for your stories start to come before you sit at the typewriter?

B: Oh yes! Halfway through the last book, I'll have an idea and think – isn't that a super idea for a book! And then I have to store that away. Sometimes I'm just champing at the bit to get through the other book.

P: Do you talk to anyone about it, or do you prefer to store it up until you're really ready for it to come out.

B: Oh no! I don't talk to anyone about a new idea. But, when I'm near the end of the book, I might say to my partner, Liz [Crampton], I had a lovely idea, and then I'll start to tell her about it. Then it's out and I've got to do it then.

P: Do your characters all have their roots in people you've known, Brian?

B: Oh yes, and especially the accents. All the different people I knew in the Merchant Marine – some of them are virtually unintelligible!

P: And your grandmother was Irish, right?

B: Yes, and so was my granddad. And my other two grandparents were French.

P: It's been very interesting to me how young people love the accents in your books. When we first did them, we were a little nervous about how much sanitizing of those accents we might need to do for American children. But the children here love the accents, they love imitating the foremoles, the shrews.

B: It gives me so much pleasure when you hear students in the schools in America trying to imitate the Somerset burr of old men in little English villages. I remember a time that I was in a school and a little lad came up to me just as the bell rung, and he said, "Hullo, old chap and how are you doing, what? what?" I said, "I'm doing just fine." And he said, "How was that for an English accent?" and I said, "Pretty dreadful!" He said, "Oh, rats!" and ran away!

P: Brian, authors have editors, we know that. What value have I been to you as an editor? What has been the most use to you? I know you don't always love my editorial comments on your manuscripts.

B: I take kindly to constructive criticism, and I've always found that your comments are sensible, if a bit nebulous! I do like reading your notes. And, you're not like other editors who write criticism, criticism, and criticism. What I like about your reaction, and what lightens it, is you write "Oh, look at this bit, I love this bit!" It is nice to receive compliments from an editor, it boosts your ego! And, being a friend, you know me as a person, you know my temperament and my ups and downs, lows and highs. It's nice to have somebody like that.

P: You've often said that you were a cut up and a card in class. You weren't escorted out of school at 14, but you weren't encouraged to stay on either. Yet the information you have is just endless and your sense of language and story is so strong. How did you this happen?

B: Well, I like to say that I was a student in the University of Life. I was running with the hare and hunting with the hound. Being on both sides, learning how to speak in polite company, but knowing how to speak on the street. Observing life, and above all reading. Of course reading books was an escape from life in the 1940s.

P: I can imagine that is true. Where did you read when you were little?

B: Well, Liverpool was devastated during World War II because it was a seaport – almost bombed flat. Everything was so dreary, so drab, and so heartbreaking! But, the public library still stood and you could sit in there, even if you had no money. It was nice and warm, because they had central heat, and all the books you liked. You could sit there and disappear into the pages of those books. There's a line in a poem that says:

Outside, there may be men on the dole
Selling papers and carrying coal
But in my mind I'd love to go
Sumatra, Java, Mandalay, wherever trade winds blow...

You know if you can go there from wartime Liverpool – there must be something right with books, isn't there?

P: Indeed! What feeds you as an author now, Brian? What's good for you? What are the meat and potatoes of being an author?

B: Several things – one, is that I never thought I'd be an author. It's like waking up one day and finding that you're a great tenor or director. You are something big in life – you're an author and you're successful. And then of course, the old stigma. There's money – I mean, I was poor all my life. I decided once I was an author, I'm not going to be poor anymore. And of course, there are the accolades. I don't worry so much about the prizes for books, the accolade for me is the kids. And the librarians, who've had an education, who are looking at a scalawag, who's conned his way in – an ex-longshoreman, ex-seaman, ex-truckdriver, who's suddenly popped up as an author – and they say, "Oh, Mr. Jacques, we love your books." I think, isn't that nice, here are these people with this great education speaking to me as if I'm somebody – it's a big thing.

I was always running around, jumping up and trying to hit the brass ball. I was a standup comedian, after-dinner speaker, folksinger, poet, radio personality, and theater playwright. I was just dabbling in it all. I'd look at people who'd made it and think – why did they make it? What talent did they have? Then I realized, all I had to do was concentrate and focus on one thing. Liz kept telling me this, and I didn't believe it. Then one day, I brought my great mentor and friend the script for Redwall and he said to me, "Now I know what you do – you're a children's author."

I still have bad dreams that it's all gone and I'm looking for a job. But I've come to realize how lucky I am, to be who I am, and to able to wake up in the morning and find I'm still me and I can still write.

Seattle Author: The Young and The Dedicated

2011-12-13T12:04:00.000-08:00

It’s always impressive to me when an author gets their first book published before they are 30 – there aren’t too many young published authors running about, particularly in Seattle. One of the few is Elise Stephens.

“I wrote my first stories at about age 10, when I first learned to type and get acquainted with a computer. I took my first official writing lessons in high school – my mom’s only writing prompt was to ‘make it interesting’, so until that class, everything I wrote I did with that in mind,” Elise says.
Those early years of writing quickly turned into a career for her. “I completed drafts for two novels while in high school, and I knew by then that it was what I wanted to do. It was what I was all about,” she said.

Elise Stephens, photo by Nadia Ifland.

Stephens studied creative writing at the University of Washington, where according to her, the best class she took was on writing critique. The students in that class focused on using Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process for assessing their writing. While in that class, Elise started a writers’ group, which became her primary source for critiquing and improving her writing through and after college.
Later, in 2007, she received the Eugene Van Buren Prize for Fiction from the UW as well.

In 2008, she went to a local writer’s conference – one that was booked, that she hadn’t registered for, and didn’t even have a ticket. She walked in the door and politely begged the woman at the registration desk to let her attend the full conference. It worked! Elise ended up meeting the keynote speaker at that conference, Brian McDonald (author of Invisible Ink: A Practical Guide to Building Stories that Resonate, The Golden Theme, Freeman – A Novella in Screenplay Form, co-author of Lost in Space, and others). When she ran into him again, the two began collaborating and McDonald offered his experience as a kind of mentor for Stephens’ writing. When she finally got up the courage to ask him to look at the novel she’d been working on, Moonlight and Oranges, because she wasn't getting through to agents with her query letters, he offered to show it to his publisher, BookTrope.

Two months later, Elise was told that BookTrope wanted to publish her novel. She was excited to work with the small publisher because they allow their authors much more control than a traditional publisher. “I got to choose the cover art, and in my case, BookTrope didn’t have a problem with me choosing the artist – who is actually a 16-year-old younger brother of a childhood friend of mine!” she laughs. “I also get to work personally with the person who markets the book, and went through the whole editorial process with my personal critique group – which was then copy edited by a BookTrope editor.”

Moonlight and Oranges is a modern-day rendition of the story of Cupid and Psyche, where there’s a bride chasing her groom and dealing with a difficult mother-in-law. “Initially, I wrote the story as a fantasy, based heavily on the myth. After showing it to my critique group and seeing their reactions along with how I felt after writing it, I put it aside,” Stephens said. “I knew that it wasn’t the book I was supposed to write. I re-wrote it in Seattle, and the characters immediately came to life.”

For Elise Stephens, one of the most difficult parts of writing is, “Creating characters with a huge back story, and then trying to jam it all into the book. With Moonlight and Oranges, I did that after the fact – sketching the back story – and I’ll never do that again!” she says. Her book has made some successes, however. Moonlight and Oranges was a quarter-finalist for the 2011 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, and it's only been out a few weeks!

Another challenge is making sure each scene has purpose. “My first draft had 90,000 words, which I slashed to 60,000, and then added more in. It was really traumatic for me, but then after a certain point, it’s not traumatic because you’ve become angry that it’s not working,” Elise said. “It requires a certain desperation, a certain hardness of heart toward the words and making sure everything has a purpose and is worth being heard.”

Before Elise began working full time on her writing, she was working for a small publishing company. Her hours were going to be reduced in August 2010, and she and her husband decided she should take a couple of weeks off of work to write and develop her novel. “Two weeks developed into two months, which then turned into six months, and now it’s been 16!” Stephens said. “I like to say my husband is my first patron – he works so hard so that I can do this.”

She’s definitely busy! “Right now, I’m aggressively marketing Moonlight and Oranges – we’re in full swing with that. I’m also working on another book, a young adult urban fantasy,” she says.

Aspiring authors need to write daily, but also remain true to themselves, according to Elise Stephens. “Write without censoring yourself as much as you can,” she said. “Make time for your writing on a daily basis, with something that’s measureable, because if you say you’re going to write for two hours, but you only get a few sentences written, that’s no where near as productive as writing 1000 words per day. Find a measureable minimum that you can write each day.”

Guest Post: 10 Tips on Writing Dialogue

2011-12-08T12:23:00.000-08:00

Melanie Slaugh contacted me about writing a guest post for SeattleWrote, and today I'm publishing her 10 Tips on Writing Dialog!

By Melanie Slaugh

Do it – Getting started is the hardest part. You have to write dialogue over and over again to get good at it. You have to practice.
Listen – Listen to real people speaking. They don’t use correct grammar. They don’t use full sentences. Sometimes they talk over each other. Write dialogue like it really sounds. Dialogue is rich in its own way- the pauses, the crosstalk, the things left out are just as important as what’s actually said.
Say it – Read what you wrote aloud. You’ll hear where it sounds stuffy or stiff. You’ll hear where it doesn’t flow and where it does flow. If you read fast enough, your brain will inevitably correct what you’ve done wrong, so listen to yourself as you read aloud. You’ll learn a lot.
Relax– Don’t worry about making your dialogue perfect. Let your characters speak. They may say things that you never dreamed of. If you know your characters inside and out, let them speak through you. You’ll end up with a much better story.
Beat Around the Bush – Feel free to ramble on. People rarely get right to the point in a conversation. Unless your character is a police officer or doctor giving a report, don’t expect them to give just the facts. People go off-topic; it’s a fact of life. Let your character ramble and they’ll end up much deeper and authentic.
Keep it Simple – Don’t make your characters tell everything they know. No one does that. Simplify your dialogue. A ‘yep’ or ‘nope’ can speak volumes about a character. They don’t always have to respond to others, and they don’t always have to finish a thought. Let your readers fill in some gaps. Letting the readers fill in the blanks adds layers to your story that even you, the writer, might have missed.
Jargon – What you speak is a living language. It changes. Let your characters’ language show who they are and where they come from. If they want to say ain’t, then let them. It’s not your job to be the grammar police for your characters. People speak badly. They dangle participles, they use fragments, and they swear. Remember that it’s not you that’s speaking- it is your character. They have their own say, so let them be who they are.
Less is More - Don't go crazy with the accents. Tell the reader what accent a character has and then give hints in the dialogue. No one wants to read a page of apostrophes and deliberately misspelled words. A ya’ll or a gotta once in a while will remind readers of who’s talking, without the hassle.
Clarity – Make sure your readers can track who is talking. A he said, she said will do miracles for a dialogue-heavy piece. If you have more than four quotes without stating who is talking, you might want to throw that in. It doesn’t have to be complex. ‘He yelled’ works just as well as ‘he screamed, shouting to the firmaments as his bellowing cry resounded off the walls’.
Show It– Remember that people are reading your dialogue, not speaking it (unless you’re a screenwriter). If you want a character to pause, take a breath, or even stutter, you’ll have to write it down. Breaking up a quote is an easy way to show a pause. ‘It’s like this,’ he said, ‘I’m leaving.’ Because of that break, the reader sees the pause without being told it’s there. Unless you have a character doing something distinctive with the time between words, make it visual but not explicit.

Here's a bio:
Melanie Slaugh is enthusiastic about the growing prospects and opportunities of various industries and writing articles on various consumer goods and services as a freelance writer. She writes extensively for internet service providers and also topics related to presenting the consumers with the information they need to choose the right Internet package for them. Email her.

Seattle Author: Young Adult Books with Attitude

2011-12-06T11:41:00.000-08:00

Amber Kizer, photo by Norelle Done.

Amber Kizer has always been a reader, and after starting schooling for a career in law with a long commute and a nerve disease (Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy Syndrome) in her legs that made every day painful, she decided to try her hand at writing. "I had some talent, and I had the work ethic, so I thought, why not try my hand at it?" she says. Looking back, she probably would have telecommuted for work, but because that didn't really exist as a possibility when Amber's disease became a problem. "If it had happened to me nowadays, I probably would have done something else, but writing was it for me then!"

She began with writing romances, and at one point, when she reached an intimate scene, "I heard this 13- or 14-year-old girl's voice in my head, critiquing what was happening in the scene, so I opened a new Word document to give her some time to talk," Kizer said. That voice turned into the character of Gert Garibaldi, a "very snarky and very frank" teenage girl who is the heroine of Amber's first published young adult novel, Gert Garibaldi's Rants and Raves: One Butt-Cheek At a Time.

Publication for One Butt-Cheek At a Time happened really fast, according to Amber. She queried 10 agents, received four offers from them, and had book deal offers from three publishing houses all within a couple of months. It was her fifth manuscript, and she'd written four books in seven years before the success of One Butt-Cheek At a Time happened. "I'd worked so hard, and this success was a culmination of all of that," Amber says. "I remember thinking, 'this is validation that this [writing] is the right path for me'. I know how lucky I am, and I don't take it for granted."

Not everything is as easy for Amber, though. "My biggest challenge is the adult gatekeepers," she says. "Kids and teens are underestimated, and they get condescended to constantly. You have to get through the buyers, booksellers, teachers, librarians ... You have to ask yourself, do you write the books the adults want the kids to read, or the ones the kids want to read?"

She went on to publish a second book in the Gert Garibaldi series this spring (2011), titled, Seven Kinds of Ordinary Catastrophes. Kizer has also started a young adult fantasy series about the white light that people see just before they die and go to heaven, called the Fenestra series. The first book, Meridian, was released in August 2009. "I'm the type of person, who, when I don't know something, I want to find out everything about it," Amber said. When her grandfather, who was a minister, died, "He had an awesome experience with light at his death. I wondered to myself, what if the light is a person who helps you get from this life?"

Death takes a major role in Kizer's Fenestra series (the second book, Wildcat Fireflies came out in Fall 2011), and that has had different receptions around the world, since Meridian is sold in German, Australian, Turkish, and Spanish. "We're afraid of death as a culture," says Amber. "It fascinates me that people handle death so differently around the world."

In all of her books, character development is huge. "Often times with characters, what I'm doing is peeling the layers off of them rather than making them up," Kizer said. "I'll often know who a character is, but not yet where they fit until I get to that part of the story. Then I'm like 'oh, that's why you're here!'" That happened in a crazy way when Kizer was writing Wildcat Fireflies. "I had auctioned off the naming of a character, and the people who bought it named the character Nicole for their niece who had a really hard life, grew up in foster care, and then died at 16 in a car accident. They sent me a photo, and when I saw it, I was like, 'It's HER!'"

Currently, Amber Kizer is working on a pandemic novel that's slated for release in 2013, called Echoes of 1492. She's also working on a couple of adult books as well. For aspiring writers, she encourages them to work hard. "Writing is a set of skills that you have to develop and keep writing, or you lose them," she said. "Writers always think there's a secret magic, a muse. But it's about working hard. I don't believe in writer's block. Like Picasso said, 'Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working'."

The Simpsons' 'Book Job'

2011-12-01T12:26:00.000-08:00

Did you see the Simpsons episode this week? I don’t normally watch the show, but my husband saw “The Book Job” and told me that I had to see it. The episode is good for a chuckle for those of us who spend our days in front of the computer screen, typing away on our life’s work; stories.

After Lisa discovers that her favorite Y/A author is really a fake, and the woman featured on every book cover is just an actress, she decides to write her own novel. Sadly, she gets major writer’s block, or is it more of a case of a lack of discipline?

Lisa can’t put words on paper, procrastinating and putting it off until she gives up entirely. We all can relate to the trouble of making ourselves write, and trying to avoid distraction, but I seriously hope that Lisa’s experience is the extreme!

As Lisa struggles to get past the words “Chapter One” for her novel, Bart and Homer team up with a group to make bank on a novel collaboration project. They learned from Lisa’s discovery that young adult authors are actually a bunch of Lit majors typing their lives away on stories that will be published under a made-up author with a ‘good story’ so that the publishers wind up rich.

And surprise, Neil Gaiman steals the show – ‘just like always’ according to the Simpsons.

The episode was quite entertaining – writers young and old should check it out, if only for a few laughs and inspiration to write.

Seattle Author: Girls Run the World

2011-11-29T12:04:00.000-08:00

You have to nod to a man who can write about a future Earth ruled by women, even if it vilifies the ones in control as evil masterminds. Still, we ladies run the world in Dave Patneaude's sci-fi novel, Epitaph Road. (And yes, the title of this author feature is a salute to Beyonce for those of you following the music icon).

For Patneaude, writing is a constant. "I thought about it forever, wrote a few short stories," he said. Then, while working on his degree in Communication from the University of Washington, "I took a course on writing for children. It seemed like something I may want to do, and it got me writing. The more I wrote, the more I liked it!" Dave said.

David Patneaude, photo by Norelle Done.

He had his first short story published in a magazine in 1989, and his first novel was published in 1993 - called Someone Was Watching. "I wrote Someone Was Watching on the bus to and from work. I had an hour-long commute at the time," Dave says. "I kept at it. It took a year to write, another year trying to sell it, and another year and a half to publish it." It was worth it, though. The book was made into a movie released in 2002.

Since then, he's written nearly a dozen other books, including Thin Wood Walls, a book about a young Japanese boy during his family's internment after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Patneaude originally wrote it as a picture book written completely in Haiku, but then his publisher asked him to change it into a novel. "It went from 1,000 words to 50,000," he said. Thin Wood Walls is his most researched book, and it's even used in school curriculum.

Dave considers himself an author for readers anywhere from the middle grade to young adult, the tweens. "My challenges mostly come from coming up with the ideas. I enjoy the writing part. The next challenge is getting someone interested," he said. It's the story of so many authors. But he continues to work at his craft, and push it forward. "Most of my stuff hasn't had someone lined up to publish it. Every one has been a struggle, which is OK as long as the end result is good."

"I've always liked the speculative stuff," Patneaude says. "I've always liked that kind of spooky, Edgar Allen Poe, Stephen King type of thing. Epitaph Road just came as an idea." The book is his latest novel, about a plague that wipes out 97 percent of the male population of Earth. Women are left to control and manage things. "Doing something like writing Epitaph Road stretches your imagination, you're speculating about the reasonable possibilities and changes to the world if something like that were to happen," he said.

Dave likes the young adult, middle-grade genre, and plans to stay awhile. "I wrote an adult mystery novel once, but no one bought it, so I'm making it into a Y/A book now," he said. We all know that writing and getting published are no small tasks, and neither comes without challenges.

To aspiring writers, especially of sci-fi novels, David recommends that you do a lot of reading in that genre. And read recent bestsellers. "Writers remember what was being published back when they were kids, not whats being published now," he says. Patneaude also recommends taking writing classes, and getting into a critique group because, "You don't really know how your work will be perceived until you have someone else read it and tell you." Beyond that, "You have to be persistent. You're not going to get better unless you keep writing ... Be willing to take advice," he said.

Overall, David Patneaude enjoys his craft. "It's been a lot of fun, this writing thing," he said.

Happy Thanksgiving!

2011-11-24T12:35:00.000-08:00

Happy Thanksgiving, writers! I'm thankful for the stories you imagine, the words you write, the characters you bring to life, and the great works of literature you bring to this world. You guys truly make my life better!

Oh, and don't forget to come out of your offices, writing rooms, and come away from your computers to eat some good Thanksgiving dishes!

Seattle Author: Writing From the Corporate World

2011-11-22T11:56:00.000-08:00

A vivid imagination is necessary for most novel writers, and George William Parker is no exception. "I loved to write in school, and I always liked writing because I have an active imagination," Parker says. He published his first novel, The Fifth Woman, earlier this year. He began the novel and impending trilogy (The second book, Inside the Shadow, will be released in December 2011 and the third is scheduled for release in early spring of 2012) after receiving a job offer that he declined.

George William Parker, author of The Fifth Woman.

"An acquaintance loaned me her editor, then one day we had a book!" Parker laughs. He's currently an independent accounting consultant, which somewhat inspired his primary character, Rick Morgan. "I've always wanted to be a Chief Audit Executive like Morgan, or some kind of insurance investigator," he said. "A thousand little things inspired the trilogy, though. Five characters in the book are based on real people, and I've had years of experience in this kind of world. The story is a conglomerate of a thousand things, and it was originally supposed to be one book, but then it came out so well that we decided to make it a trilogy."

He brings a compelling and edge-of-your-seat storyline in The Fifth Woman. "My editor says, 'Your imagination is fantastic, but your grammar stinks'!" Parker laughs. He has one or two other challenges as well: "I certainly experience normal mental block. It's amazing how one word can change everything! You can feel it, taste it, but you can't grab it. Then it comes to you and it does change everything," he said.

Getting the emotion into the story is another occasional challenge. "Sometimes it gets too perfect and technical that it's boring. This book takes the reader from their boring life and they can escape reality and enjoy themselves," George says. "If they can escape their lives for a bit, then I've done my job."

Parker published The Fifth Woman through Author House, but he had an unusual story for funding the publication of his book. "My wife let a friend of hers read the book in Word document format, and the woman's husband, after hearing so much about how she loved it, asked me how much I needed to publish it, and wrote me a check!"

Beyond the next two books in the Rick Morgan trilogy, due to release in December 2011 and early spring 2012, Parker plans to write more. "I plan to be an author for the rest of my life," he said.

Talent and skill is something G. William Parker is not likely to let sit aside unused. He advises aspiring writers to "Go for it. There is a season for everything. You'll never know what you can do until you try," he said. "If this is your season, it'll happen. Don't let people discourage you."

And don't forget to write. Just start writing and see where it takes you. According to George, "There's nothing like when someone you've never met tells you they loved your book, or that you've become their favorite author."

Support Literacy with the Holiday Book Signing

2011-11-17T12:09:00.000-08:00

Seattleites, book lovers, authors, and gift-givers, I hope you're ready for this Saturday's Holiday Book Signing! Put on by the Seattle7Writers, to raise money for literacy through the 826 Seattle program, many authors from around the area will be poised with Sharpies in hand to sell and sign their books. This is a great way to support literacy, local authors, and the reading habits of those special people on your gift list!

Here are the details of the event:
What: Seattle7Writers' Holiday Book Signing
When: Saturday, Nov. 19th, from 3pm to 6pm
Where: Phinney Neighborhood Center at 6532 Phinney Ave N
Why: To raise money for 826 Seattle
How: Drive up, bring your cash, checkbooks, and a big book bag!

The following authors will be there, with books and Sharpies at the ready:

Kathleen Alcala, author of "The Desert Remembers My Name", "Treasures in Heaven", and "The Flower in the Skull" [SeattleWrote feature]
Erica Bauermeister, author of "500 Great Books by Women", "Let's Hear it For Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14", "The School of Essential Ingredients", and "Joy for Beginners" [SeattleWrote feature]
Sean Beaudoin, author of "Going Nowhere Faster", "Fade to Blue", and "You Killed Wesley Payne" [SeattleWrote feature]
Dave Boling, author of "Guernica"
Lynn Brunelle, author and illustrator of over 40 books, including "Chicken Scratches: Poultry Poetry and Rooster Rhymes"
Deb Caletti, author of "The Secret Life of Prince Charming", "Stay", "The Fortunes of Indigo Skye" and more [SeattleWrote feature]
Carol Cassella, author of "Healer" and "Oxygen"
Randy Sue Coburn, author of "A Better View of Paradise", "Owl Island" and "Remembering Jody" [SeattleWrote feature]
Thea Cooper, co-author of "Breakthrough: Elizabeth Hughes, the Discovery of Insulin, and the Making of a Medical Miracle"
Robert Dugoni, author of "Murder One", "Bodily Harm", "Wrongful Death", "Damage Control", "The Jury Master" and "Cyanide Canary" [featured on SeattleWrote]
Laurie Frankel, author of "The Atlas of Love"
Elizabeth George, author of over 20 books, including "This Body of Death", "What Came Before He Shot Her", "Careless in Red", and "With No One As Witness"
Maria Dahvana Headley, author of "The Year of Yes", and "Queen of Kings" [SeattleWrote feature]
Stephanie Kallos, author of "Broken for You" and "Sing Them Home" [SeattleWrote feature]
Erik Larson, author of "In the Garden of Beasts", "Thunderstruck", "The Devil in the White City", "Isaac's Storm", "Lethal Passage" and "The Naked Consumer"
Clare Meeker, author of "Soccer Dreams: Playing the Seattle Sounders FC Way", "Charge Ahead", "Arctic Journey", "Lootas", "Partner in Revolution: Abigail Adams" and more
Boyd Morrison, author of "The Vault", "The Ark", "Rogue Wave", and "The Catalyst"
Peter Mountford, author of "A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism"
Kevin O'Brien, author of "Disturbed", "Vicious", "Final Breath", "One Last Scream", "Killing Spree", "The Last Victim", "Left for Dead", "Watch Them Die", "Make Them Cry", "The Next to Die", "Only Son", and "Actors" [SeattleWrote feature]
Suzanne Selfors, author of "To Catch a Mermaid", "Fortune's Magic Farm", "Mad Love", "Smells Like Dog", "Coffeehouse Angel" and "Saving Juliet"
Jennie Shortridge, author of "When She Flew", "Love and Biology at the Center of the Universe", "Eating Heaven" and "Riding With the Queen" [SeattleWrote feature]
Garth Stein, author of "The Art of Racing in the Rain", "Raven Stole the Moon" and "How Evan Broke His Head and Other Secrets"

Seattle Author: Surviving The Next 15 Minutes

2011-11-15T11:54:00.000-08:00

Although she'd always been a writer, local author Kim Kircher hadn't published her work - she was busy with her other love, skiing. She's been a ski patroller for about 20 years, and "One of the strategies I have learned on the mountain is to focus on smaller increments of time to get you through a difficult moment, like just 15 minutes," she says.

Kim Kircher, photo by Melissa Henninger.

Her experiences on the mountain helped her get through one of the most difficult times of her life, when her husband was diagnosed with cancer and needed a liver transplant. "When John got sick, he had a lot of pain. They had him on a pain killer that he could administer by pressing a button every 15 minutes, so I'd encourage him and say, 'You just have to get through the next 15 minutes.' I really learned how to take care of myself and other people during that time," Kircher said.

During John's battle with cancer, Kim was writing newsletters to chronicle John's progress to family and friends. "It was a very cathartic process, and I really used it as a creative outlet," Kim said. "I had a lot of great feedback from family members, saying, 'You should write a book.' It seemed like a good idea." After the ordeal was over, and John received his needed transplant in the nick of time, some of those same friends returned the newsletters they had collected. She began to piece together a memoir, which became The Next 15 Minutes: Strength From the Top of the Mountain.

"When you're in a place like that, you almost have to stop your heart from feeling, because if you do feel, you'll panic," Kim says. "When I began to write about it after the fact, it really became a cathartic process." Writing about the experience, and the relation to her experiences on ski patrol and avalanche control at Crystal Mountain also became a necessity for Kim. "I'm of the belief that life gives you lessons, and if you don't learn that lesson, you're destined to repeat it. I didn't want to go through that again, so part of writing everything down helped me to make sure I learned it," Kircher said.

Writing a book is one thing, and then there's the process of selling it. "Memoirs are pretty popular, but they're really hard to sell," Kircher said. When she attended the Pacific Northwest Writers' Association conference in 2009, she was told that she needed to make the book more about the skiing aspect. She also became a finalist in that year's writing contest, so when she returned the following year, she was able to wear a finalist's badge. "That badge really helped, because when I pitched my story to people, they knew I had already written something and that it was at least somewhat good, so they could just listen to my pitch," Kim said.

She pitched the memoir to an editor from St. Martin's Press, and "I knew I had the right pitch because when I told it to her, she said, 'F*** yeah! Send it to me!' Then I had two editors fighting over me. Then a few agents were interested, because the editors were already interested," Kim said.

Because of that experience, "I sing the praises of going to a writers' conference," Kircher said. "I think I enjoyed it especially because I'm pretty sociable, and I feel like I can connect with people."

Now that Kim has finished and published a memoir, she's moving forward with her writing. She is now working on a novel, and (of course) it takes place in a ski area. "I'm totally interested in the process of writing a novel, developing characters and the story," Kim said. "I'm really excited about the book and where it's at now."

Kim on the slopes, photo by Chris Morin.

For aspiring memoir writers, she recommends resources such as conferences and that they read really good memoirs. "Read especially about what your topic is. I read the memoir by Joan Didion about her husband's death, The Year of Magical Thinking. Reading great examples about what you're trying to accomplish in your book will help you a lot," she said.

Don't be worried about 'copying' the people you read, Kim says. "For a long time I felt like such a hack, because when I'm reading something really good, and then I sit down to write, I always hear the voice of the other author in the back of my mind," she said. "I read a quote recently that almost gave permission: you're an echo of the voices you've heard, you're a mirror. That's OK. If you want to be a better writer, then read better stuff."

5 Steps for Plotting Your Novel

2011-11-10T12:17:00.000-08:00

For seasoned novelists and writers out there, this information will probably be like preaching to the choir. Aspiring writers however, sit up and pay attention. Creating a captivating and fluid plot for your novel can be tricky, especially if it's one of your first manuscripts. Try using these 5 steps when you sit down to write your storyline:

Read one of the many books about plot.
Describe the story you plan to write in one sentence. If you can’t say what your book is about in one sentence, you don’t have a clear enough idea of what you’re trying to do.
Write a character description of the protagonist that includes appearance, likes, dislikes, fears, childhood trauma, occupation, etc. Plot is behavior. The kind of experiences your character has had in the past will determine how he behaves in the future. What he fears will affect his actions. Plot grows from character.
Decide what the main character wants more than anything else in life. The plot will grow out of this desire.
Make a timeline for the events of the novel. This will give your plot anchor points. Then make a map that shows where all the action will take place. This will help you gauge distances and figure the length of time necessary to move your characters from one place to another.

Seattle Author: The Dino Writer

2011-11-08T11:55:00.000-08:00

I love meeting and talking to children's book authors, mostly because they have such open and fun personalities (not that I dislike adult authors, it's just that I have yet to meet an unfriendly children's author)! Deb Lund is one of those kind children's authors, and wouldn't you know, she was a teacher (music, classroom, and library) for over 20 years!

Deb Lund, photo by Jeffrey High.

"Back then I would work with kids to put together musicals, and after one of them a parent came up to me and asked, 'Where can I get the book this is based on?' I told her there wasn't one because I'd made it up," Deb said. Then, when she was going on sabbatical and the school district wanted her to spend the time studying something related to her field of work - she had a master's degree in writing - she decided to focus on that! "I did a lot of workshops, and I joined the Society for Children's Book Writers & Illustrators (SCBWI)," she said.

Then, she got pregnant. "I had always wanted to write, but I wanted to do it 'when I had more time'. When I got pregnant, I realized I was never going to have time, so I should just start writing," Lund says. She wrote Tell Me My Story, Mama, about her son's birth story. That book wasn't the first to be published, however. "I was at a conference on Whidbey Island ... I showed [an agent] Tell Me My Story, Mama, and he asked if I had any other manuscripts. I pulled out DinoSailors and that was the one he wanted!" she said.

DinoSailors was followed by All Aboard the DinoTrain, and DinoSoaring will be released in Spring 2012. She's now writing full-time, but she still teaches through conference speaking engagements and she is finishing her certification to be a creativity coach.

Writing for children is a passion that Deb relates to their learning and development - she's a teacher through and through! "I recently learned that reading is related to children developing empathy, and I love that idea," she said. "It's really important that they can be in the place of a character and be in those places, sharing those experiences."

The Dino books are partially the creation of those experiences and adventures, but also to encourage kids with self-discovery. "I was always interested [during her teaching years] in helping kids figure out what their dreams were and who they wanted to be. These dinosaurs head off on all of these adventures, and they're just trying to figure out who they are and where they're going," Lund said. "Sometimes you have to discover who you're not before you find who you are."

Photo by Jeffrey High.

Part of the fun with being a children's author is working with an illustrator to make the characters come alive in pictures. "Howard Fine is my illustrator for the Dino books, and I was thrilled when I learned he was turning down illustration jobs for other books by saying, 'It's good, but it's no DinoSailor!'" Lund said.

Dinosaurs aren't the only characters that Deb writes about. Monsters on Machines is another children's story, published in 2008 - there's even free coloring pages from the book available on Deb's website!

DinoSailors was inspired by a trip Lund took with her young son. "Writing is part memory and part imagination - the ratio just changes. We sailed with the Shifty Sailors down to Olympia - they do a lot of water festivals. We took the train back because I had some nausea from the water," she said. Fine (the illustrator) had a surprise for illustrating this part of the book. "He told me he had a surprise for me in the book, and when the FedEx guy brought the pages, I mentioned they were the illustrations for my new book and asked if he wanted to see them. He did, and when we got to that page, I wasn't sure if it was the right illustration. But, everybody likes that page in the book, it's like a pretty green fountain!"

Aspiring children's book authors should "Write, and give yourself permission to write the worst junk in the world," Lund advises. "We stop ourselves before we even get started. I'm always surprised by what I see on the page sometimes, just playing with the words on the page." For Deb Lund, writing is a process and sometimes in order to succeed, we have to ignore ourselves. "We all have that inner critic, and we just need to get rid of him or her until it's time to edit or revise. Part of my coaching is helping people to understand that process because they just assume that everything is harder for them than everyone else, but it's just as difficult for anyone who wants to write," she said.

Advice From Famous Authors

2011-11-03T12:13:00.000-07:00

In all of my author features, I include each author's tips and suggestions for aspiring writers or genre-specific ideas. These kinds of tips are generally that each writer should read more and write regularly, but sometimes a little more detail sneaks in.

We can all take a few tips from the best, though! I found this great list of 101 tips from the world's most famous authors, and I wanted to list a few of my favorites:

Mark Twain

Mark Twain. Substitute "damn" every time you want to use the word "very." Twain's thought was that your editor would delete the "damn," and leave the writing as it should be. The short version: eliminate using the word "very."

EB White. Just write. The author of Charlotte's Web, one of the most beloved of children's books, said that "I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all."

F. Scott Fitzgerald. "Cut out all those exclamation marks. An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke."

John Grisham. Keep your day job. Grisham suggests finding your career outside of writing. Experience life, suffering, and love to be able to write effectively.

Margaret Atwood. Don't be afraid of failure. "A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason."

Roald Dahl. From one of the most magical of storytellers: "And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it."

EL Doctorow. "Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."

T.S. Eliot

TS Eliot. Seek life experience. "Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express."

Robert Graves. Write poetry because you want to, not because you expect to earn a living. "There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money either."

John Cheever. Looking inwards and learning from yourself provides great material for writing. "The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness."

Jack London. "You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club." Sometimes you need to actively seek your sources of inspiration.

Robert Frost. Learn to separate emotion from knowledge. "Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence."

Charlotte Bronte

Charlotte Bronte. Embrace the opportunity to see beyond your known world. "Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education; they grow there, firm as weeds among stones."

Ralph Waldo Emerson. Believe in yourself. "Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising which tempt you to believe that your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires courage."

Benjamin Franklin. "Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing."

Seattle Author: Murder, Fear, and Good Ol' Hitchcock

2011-11-01T12:12:00.000-07:00

Fear drives us to do some pretty amazing or crazy things, and for Seattle author Kevin O'Brien, it drove him to write, and inspires his stories even today. The youngest of six kids, O'Brien grew up in Glencoe, Chicago. "I loved scaring myself as a kid," he says. "I watched scary anthology shows, and I loved tales of the crypt ... my oldest sister was afraid of taking a shower when no one was in the house after she watched Hitchcock's Psycho."

During his younger years, there was more than just Alfred Hitchcock's movies to drive O'Brien's fear. Chicago Senator Charles Percy's daughter Valerie was bludgeoned to death in their home in 1966, and the murder is to this day unsolved. Eight student nurses were brutally tortured and killed by Richard Speck that same year in Chicago. All of these things happened within miles of where Kevin was living at the time, and "I still tap into the fear of that year for my books," he says.

Author Kevin O'Brien, photo by Marc Von Borstel.

O'Brien started writing when he was young, and remembers his first major writing assignment as being a school project in 6th grade. "It was sort of a biography on Alfred Hitchcock, because he was an inspiring figure to me at the time," O'Brien said. "In college, I was still interested in writing, so I took a creative writing class from Ann Powell ... [she] was the first teacher that ever took a stance on the practical side of writing, telling us to use The Writer's Market, and teaching us how to solicit agents." During that class, Kevin learned about Ed Gein, the murderer who inspired Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and other gruesome horror movies.

In 1980, O'Brien moved to Seattle where he took a promotion from his job as a railroad inspector to become the Transportation Director in the city. He took a class from acclaimed writer Zola Helen Ross and wrote some short stories. On one of his stories, Ross wrote "'You ought to try your hand at a novel', because I would always write really long short stories," O'Brien said. "I began working on Actors in that class, and finished it in the writer's group that a few of us began as an offshoot of the class."

Still working a day job at the railroad at that time, O'Brien wrote Only Son - a story about a kidnapping, where the kidnapper isn't necessarily the 'bad guy'. Only Son was pitched to a producer first, and Tom Hanks was on board in 1993 to play the leading role. Then a publisher got interested, and then Reader's Digest wanted to publish the story in sections. O'Brien was finally able to quit his job at the railroad to write full time in 1997. Hanks backed out, and the book was dropped as a movie, but it did get published!

It was time for O'Brien to write thrillers. His next book, The Next to Die was his first thriller and became a USA Today bestseller. "I discovered that I had to outline for thrillers, and that was new to me," he said.

Starting to write thrillers was a new experience for him, "All I was thinking was, 'it's gotta be scarier'. I think I have a good combination of confidence and a lack of self-confidence," O'Brien laughs. "I'm always striving to make it better. I still write at night, and I think that if I can creep myself out and tap into that fear that I had as a kid. That's the charge I get out of writing thrillers."

O'Brien's editor creates the titles, "And he goes through different cycles. First, it was the rhyming pattern, with The Next to Die, Make Them Cry, and Watch Them Die. Then we had the 'final' stage: The Last Victim, One Last Scream, and Final Breath, and now he's in his one-word title phase: Vicious, Disturbed, and then Terrified is coming out in March 2012. His one break from the pattern was Killing Spree," O'Brien laughs.

Kevin O'Brien is a firm believer in writer's groups, and enjoys his participation with the Seattle7Writers. "My editor rarely asks me for major changes because I've already been through it with friends, my writer's group, or myself - I like to rate each scene," he says.

As a member of the Seattle7, Kevin participated in the Novel Live! event last fall. "I was one of the only ones going in knowing what I was going to write," O'Brien said. (He had been asked to write the chapter where Alexis' uncle figure gets killed in an explosion - check out more info on The Hotel Angeline: a Novel in 36 Voices here). He visited the Richard Hugo House almost every day during the event, watching everyone else take their turn at chapters for the book. When it came time for him to write, he drew out the death scene as long as possible. "Everybody was chanting, 'kill him! Kill him! Kill him!' and Garth kept reminding me that I only had a couple minutes left, and was I going to kill him yet?" O'Brien said. "I was so wired. Sometimes I wish I could have that kind of energy while writing at home, but I was also so exhausted afterward."

His strongest piece of advice to aspiring writers is to "Join a writer's group. As a thriller writer, see how much you can creep out your friends ... if you can creep yourself out, then you've done something right," O'Brien advises. "Also, try to make people care about your characters, because it's so much more suspenseful if readers have something invested in the characters."

Seattle7Writer's recent 'Up Late Reading' event raised $10,000 for literacy, and plans to have a holiday book sale and signing on Nov. 19th from 3-6 p.m. Dozens of local authors will be there!

9 Book Promotion Tips

2011-10-27T12:09:00.000-07:00

One thing that I constantly hear from the authors I meet and speak with is the challenge of marketing and promoting your own book, even when you've sold it to a major publishing house - that's not even including the work to print the thing if you've decided to self-publish. These days, it's mostly up to the author to get their book read, especially if it's their first go at publishing.

So if you're having a little trouble promoting your work, or you need some pointers to boost your book's popularity, try these tips (inspired by Marilyn and Tom Ross at Go-Publish-Yourself.com):

Get Online: I don't care what some people say, if you're not online, your fans won't grow beyond your friends and family. You must have an author website (either in your name or your book's, but if you plan to write more than one book, your name is a better option), a Facebook page (not profile, page - although managed by your personal Facebook profile is fine), and a Twitter account or blog is an added perk, but only if you plan to update them regularly (at least once a week or so) - otherwise they won't do much to help your following. If you can swing it, it will really help you to pay someone a bit to design your website - it will help you look like a million bucks. There are ways to get this done cheaply (broke college students in web design are a great option! )
Know Your Competition: Look in the Subject Guide to Books in Print in a major library to determine what other books are available on your topic. Look for well-written books in your genre, read them, and learn from their writing skill to make yours better.
Create a Bookmark: It's a cheap and easy way to spread the word about your book. Include a photo of the book, sales copy with bullets, testimonials, how to order, plus your Web address for people who want more information. Then, give them out, put them inside your book at signings, etc.
Ask for Exposure: Contact all local and applicable media (if your story takes place in another city, contact the media outlets for that city) and offer them a free copy of your book in exchange for an interview or write up. The few dollars it will cost you to send out a copy of the book to one media outlet will come back with the sales and exposure your book will receive from the review or interview.
Get Reviews: Do whatever you can to gather reviews on Amazon, GoodReads, and other major book reviewing web sites. Offer prizes for your reviewers, offer to send free copies to bloggers to get their help promoting your book with a review, and even ask friends and family to review your book. Always request honesty (especially from family and friends), because even a bad review will help you improve your writing.

Talk To Your Readers: Create an email newsletter list so that you can regularly contact your readers and fans to keep them in the loop, share offers, and ask for their help. Keep your favor-asking emails to a minimum, and always include an option for people to unsubscribe from your list. You don't want to become 'spam' to them.
Recycle Your Publicity: Often it’s the second or third time around that’s more powerful than the first exposure! Include reviews, feature articles about you, interview pieces, etc. in speaking proposals, media kits, everywhere! People like to jump on an already-moving bandwagon.
Get Out There: Contact your local libraries and bookshops to offer yourself for a book signing, and if you're able to schedule one, market the hell out of it. Do not expect the bookstore or library to market the event for you, and even if they do, you should still do your best to pack the place and run out of your books. Go to conferences and writer's events or book events, network with other authors and join groups.
Volunteer: There are some great book and writer's nonprofits out there that you can join and volunteer with, which will help your name grow alongside those groups. It's a rewarding experience that helps a good cause and also boosts your name in the industry. Plus, it could grow your fan and reader base!

Seattle Author: Biography, Essay, and Creative Writing

2011-10-25T11:35:00.000-07:00

My apologies for the long silence - we had a death in the family and had to handle all of the little things that go with that, but I'm back on track and have a cache of features to post in the coming weeks! To start back up again, here is a Q&A I was privileged to have with award-winning author and writer Margot Kahn, of Horses That Buck: The Story of Champion Bronc Rider Bill Smith.

Q: When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?
A: In first grade, Ms. Weibush had us writing books on flimsy newsprint paper. When we’d finished a book, we got to bind it from a selection of wallpaper samples and then share it with the class. I loved the whole process.

Margot Kahn, photo by Steve Case.

Q: What has your literary journey looked like up to now?
A: When I graduated from college I really wanted to write fiction, but I never could quite finish a story let alone a novel. I didn’t feel like I’d “lived” enough to write interesting fiction. And of course I needed to pay the rent. My first writing job was at the Seattle Jewish Transcript where I wrote obituaries and, later, some profile pieces. About a year later, I was on vacation in Colorado and met an old rodeo cowboy. I thought he’d be a great person to write about (not for the Jewish Transcript!) and he and his wife invited me to come visit them on their ranch. I said, “I’ll come visit you if you let me write a book about you.” I thought it would be just like writing a profile piece for the paper, only longer. That turned out to be accurate, in a way. My profile pieces were usually about 2,000 words and took a couple of weeks to research and write. The book was 65,000 words and took seven years.

While I was writing my book I worked as an editor of financial research, a speechwriter for the New York City Economic Development Corporation and a junk mail proofreader (for four days). I also earned my MFA at Columbia, which was an instrumental couple of years for me as a writer.

I moved back to Seattle in 2004 and worked for seven years in the nonprofit world, first at Seattle Arts & Lectures and then at Richard Hugo House. Both jobs were fulfilling in that I was providing creative writing opportunities for kids in and out of the classroom and I saw a lot of kids discover a passion for creative writing and/or find an outlet for self-expression. But there’s no question it’s hard to be a writer and work full-time doing something you care about.

These days, I’m staying home with my baby. I’m finding some time to write, and this summer I went to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference which was a real treat. I’m also editing the blog In Yr Shoes, a collection of reader-submitted vignettes about life and the shoes you were wearing when ...

Q: Did your different experiences with writing (obituaries, junk mail, teaching creative writing, and speech writing) affect your style for writing longer works like "Horses that Buck"?
A: Two jobs really affected my creative work as a writer. While I was working as a speechwriter, I learned how to sink myself deeply into another person’s voice – to learn to think the way they talk, to be able to write what they would say. In Horses, I wanted the text that is my voice to sound like me, but I wanted the language to reflect my subject. In other words, I didn’t want my prose to be flowery when I was writing about broken bones and dirty boots, so being able to think in the voices of my characters was extremely helpful.

Later, when I started working in the non-profit world I was asked to help with a lot of grant writing. When you’re asking people for money you have to be short and to the point, get right to the numbers and the specifics. You have to be very clear, you don’t get points for gorgeous language and you often have a word limit. This experience helped me get sharp, helped me chisel my often long-winded paragraphs into more exacting sentences. I liked the result.

Q: How did you get it published?
A: I talked to a few agents in New York about Horses and the response was about what I expected: they wanted it to be more of a memoir, more of a love story, not just a biography about an old-time rodeo cowboy. But I was 27 years old and I didn’t want to write a memoir. I was also moving across the country, finding a new job, getting married; I didn’t want to rewrite my book. So I sent query letters to 10 Western university presses and the manuscript was accepted by two of them. I chose the University of Oklahoma Press. They helped me arrange a trip to the Donald C. & Elizabeth M. Dickinson Research Center in Oklahoma City to do some fact-checking and choose photographs from their archive.

In the end, I was glad to work with people who really loved and understood my book. One of my editors, for example, caught that I had written about someone driving a Dodge F250. It was a silly mistake in a chapter that had been through so many revisions - the ranch had one Dodge and one Ford and somewhere along the line they got merged in this chapter – but that’s the kind of detail that would lose a rancher’s or a cowboy’s trust. I don’t know that someone in New York would have caught it.

Q: From writing biographies, essays, short stories, and other forms, which is your preferred genre? Why?
A: At the moment I’m loving the personal essay because it can be short and accomplished in the space of a few weeks or months. I loved the process of writing a biography, but I don’t know that I could do it again. The people I wrote about became like family to me, and I don’t get to see them nearly as much as I would like. I don’t think I have it in me to obsess about anyone else like that for a long time. That said, I loved the research aspect of writing a biography – learning bits of history, listening to people tell stories – so I suspect I may find my way into another project that involves research.

Q: What struggles have you experienced with writing, and how did you push through them?
A: I really believe that writing is something you do because you have to. When I don’t feel like writing, I don’t. Why would you? There are so many other fun things to do! I love to bake and hike, to ski and read, to spend time with my family and friends. Writing is too much work and too solitary to do for fun. When I feel compelled by a subject – when I feel like I just have to write about something – then I get to work.

Q: How has your award-winning work inspired and pushed your other writing forward?
A: Every little bit of recognition has been helpful to me. In some cases, an award or a reading has facilitated an introduction to someone who’s asked me to write or read or publish or teach. In other cases, a financial award or someone’s kind words have given me that little push of confidence to keep working.

Q: Do you have plans for future books?
A: I’m working on a collection of essays at the moment, although everyone knows that collections of essays are impossible to sell.

Q: What advice would you offer to writers who are just getting started with a literary career?
A: I don’t think I’m the best person to ask about this, because I’ve never thought of my writing as my primary career. I’m too afraid to put all my eggs in that creative basket, so I’ve always held another job of some sort. And because I don’t do too well in jobs that I can’t stand, I’ve steered toward jobs that I really care about…and then I put a lot of energy in that direction instead of into my writing. So, I guess I’d say you kind of have to choose: Do you want to be a (possibly/probably) starving artist? Or do you want to write on the sidelines of another job or career? Really, I mostly would advocate for the latter, whether it’s doctoring or teaching or construction – you’ll be able to collect stories every day, and you’ll write when the story is most compelling.

Margot has also had her writing appear in a number of anthologies and collections, like Night Lights: Stories and Essays from Northwest Authors Guaranteed to Keep you Up Past Bedtime. Look for more of her work in the coming anthologies, What to Read in the Rain 2012 and YOU: An Anthology of Essays in the Second Person.

Don't Screw Up! (Avoid the Most Frequent Writer's Failure)

2011-10-05T11:52:00.000-07:00

First off, I want to apologize for the lack of an author feature yesterday. Things have been really busy at the new job, and although I've been emailing authors to request interviews, it seems they are very busy too! So, if you're an author located in Western Washington and you're interested in some free publicity, I'd love to talk to you! Send me an email and we can schedule a chat.

Now, I want to republish a blog post I came across this summer, about the most frequently made mistake for writers: conflict. According to literary agent Scott Eagan of the Greyhaus Literary Agency, there are three scenarios for conflict that fails in a story. Be sure to avoid them!

1) The conflict is too easy to solve - This is a big one. If the story can be summed up in a single conversation, or one of the characters just has to make a simple decision, then the story has no legs. There is nothing that is driving the story. This is really that "sit-com" approach. You know what I am talking about. Someone overhears a conversation and thinks there is something bigger going on. In other words, had someone heard the whole thing, there would be nothing. This is part of the reason why these approaches only last for a 15-20 minute episode.

2) The conflict is impossible - In an effort to make the story really big, the author creates a conflict that simply cannot be fixed without an act of God or amazing coincidence. When readers see something like this, we simply tune out. We know the characters will never make it, and yet, we know that when the author decides to get them out of a jam, the resolution will be unsatisfying. Honestly, the only place I believe the impossible conflict works is with the James Bond series.

3) The conflict would never happen - This one is the last of the three issues. The conflict you created in your story is one the characters would have never gotten into in the first place. The girl from Beverley Hills dating someone that isn't in her "world" and then goes camping in the back country of the Nile River. Ummm, probably not.

So, stay away from too much, too little, or absolutely outrageous conflict in your storyline!

Choosing Your Genre

2011-09-29T12:43:00.000-07:00

Sometimes a book declares its genre outright, without much confusion or searching, but a genre can also be difficult to pin down - especially if your book crosses a number of genres and really could fall under more than one.

Pick the perfect genre for your book, using this quiz from Truby.com.

Before you take the quiz, you might want to read through these pointers about choosing a genre:

Genres are simply the classifications of literature. The broader classification includes drama, comedy and action-adventure. These are artificial lines and all genres can overlap. Classifying stories by genre helps people select movies and helps them define their expectations for the movie.
The most important part of genre is avoiding confusion. If people expect one genre and read another in your book, that creates confusion.
Genre often is only different based on emphasis. The genre you choose - drama, comedy, action-adventure - will most likely reflect an attitude and perspective about the story you write, but not necessarily your own perspective. Any topic and any situation can be delivered in any of these formats. Each genre will usually have elements of the other genres in them, it's just a matter of emphasis.

Seattle Author: From Nonfiction to Novels, and Back Again

2011-09-27T11:53:00.000-07:00

From nonfiction, journalism, nearly a dozen novels, and even a shared Pulitzer Prize, William Dietrich is a literary force to reckon with. He kindly answered a few of my questions about his work and his career as a Pacific Northwest author and writer.

William Dietrich, photo by Susan Doupe.

Q: When do you remember deciding to be a writer/journalist?
A: I wrote a short story in the second grade! But I was inspired to try creative writing by teachers in junior high and high school, and majored in journalism in college as a way to turn my writing interest into a paying career. Books, including novels, were always in the back of my mind so I took a stab at them in mid-career. I was no prodigy, and needed those years of newspaper work to practice long-form feature writing and get comfortable with the idea of a book-length work. I tell aspiring writers that they don't need to be an overnight success or young genius; that most writers evolve their skills over a long period of time.

Q: Did you end up leaving your advising position for the Planet student magazine at Western in June 2011? What impact has that advising position and leaving it had on your writing and teaching career?
A: Yes. I advised the magazine and taught environmental journalism and publishing industry basics at Western for five years, and I probably learned more than the students did! Teaching forced me to think about how and why I do what I do, and trying to make students better writers made me a better writer as well. Being a good teacher is very time consuming, however, and my half-time pay was relatively modest. I left to spend more time on my own writing…we'll see if it helps.

Q: What kinds of struggles and successes did you experience along the way for getting "The Final Forest" published? How has your journey progressed through the world of publishing with your other books?
A: The Final Forest, a nonfiction account of the Northwest timber wars, was my first book, published in 1992. I was fortunate that an editor for Simon & Schuster was looking for a book on the subject, but it was an immediate challenge to veer from the day-to-day, play-by-play reporting of journalism to tell a book length story that could stand the test of time. I decided to tell the story through the lens of a single community (Forks, WA, without the vampires!) and through the lives of people, rather than focusing on science or politics. The book was in print many years and then republished in 2010 by University of Washington Press with a new introduction and conclusion. I've subsequently worked with five different publishing companies, at least 11 editors, in both fiction and non. I've found it useful to be flexible and opportunistic because what publishers are looking for is constantly changing. I've had to develop confidence I can write in different styles and genres and work with editors of very different character. My first novel was a gamble both on my part and that of the publisher, and I had to be willing to radically rework it before publication. Some contracts have come easily; one novel (Hadrian's Wall) took more than a year to sell. Hang in there.

Q: Can you share a little bit about your inspiration for moving from writing nonfiction to novels (for Ice Reich)? What was intrinsically different for you with the two forms of books (more than just fact vs. fiction)?
A: I started Ice Reich because I wanted to write about Antarctica (after visiting as a journalist) and couldn't interest anyone in a nonfiction book on that subject. It's based on a real-life Nazi expedition to the continent, but the imaginative license required was a leap for me. In journalism you have the comfort of sources and notes; in fiction you do just as much research but ultimately I had to imagine piloting a plane, a wartime romance, combat, the bombing of Berlin, and so on. I found the transition intimidating but liberating, moving from reporting what other people thought to discovering what I thought. None of my novels is autobiographical, but all fiction reveals something of the writer, so that "exposure" was new to me too. Obviously I enjoy it, having written 10 novels now with more on the way. In the end the two forms are more similar than different; journalism strives for the truth, and the novel strives to be true.

Q: From journalism to nonfiction books to novels, which has become your most personally-enriching genre? Which do you prefer to write?
A: For book-length projects, fiction right now. It's a psychological state of mind I try to sustain; imagining other times and places. But I periodically write non-fiction pieces and experience the joy of clicking into something familiar and intellectually challenging. Once a journalist, always a journalist.

Q: In your opinion (as stated on your website), what makes Blood of the Reich your best novel?
A: I think it's my best-paced, a deliberate page turner. In terms of structure it was my most challenging to outline because the present-day and 1938 storylines interweave and ultimately join a large number of characters. Another challenge was creating a sympathetic female heroine. Readers tell me Rominy is convincing. And the book was particularly challenging to research because it delves into such arcane corners of history and science. I had to travel to Tibet to experience that part of the world. And I read a great deal of Tibetan history and mysticism, Nazi and SS history and present-day physics to provide my way-out premise that, I think, works. Authors usually like all their books, but some we have a fondness of because of background creation experiences that may not be apparent to the reader. For me, examples include Getting Back, Hadrian's Wall, and Blood of the Reich – even though my Ethan Gage books have been the most successful.

Q: What challenges have you faced and overcome in your writing career that have completely changed the way you write, publish, etc.?
A: Writing provides a lot of freedom but with that goes a lot of responsibility. In newspaper work, I had to learn to write in all moods in a noisy environment, meet deadlines, submit to editing, deal with sometimes hostile reaction from readers, find hidden information, and so on. Frenetic and fun. In books, you're self-employed. There's no "down time" of dozing through company meetings or gossiping at the water cooler; that monitor and keyboard are always staring back, saying, 'Feed me!' So it's harder work, and less glamorous, than non-writers often imagine. In moving from journalism to books, there is actually less editorial supervision so you're more responsible for the end product and its accuracy - I can't blame the boss! You also have to speak and use the Internet for self-promotion, which I dislike but which is necessary in a crowded marketplace. It's immensely rewarding psychologically, but challenging.

Q: What was your experience like with The Novel Live! event?
A: The idea of making a "performance" of writing is so odd that I'm still trying to decide if we succeeded. The Seattle 7's attempt to make writers real by writing in a real-time webcast is very imaginative, but of course watching any writer work is typically comparable to watching paint dry. The "action" is invisible, going on in the writer's and reader's brains. So it was flattering to be involved, and fun to try, but not quite "American Idol." I think there is an opportunity to make authors more public and, by doing so, creating more reader interest in a nation that is up to 20 percent functionally illiterate and 50 percent divorced from books; this is a nation of anti-literary idiocracy. When I was growing up, writing books was what "other people" did; it was an unreal, abstract idea to a working class family. Anything that eliminates the mystery and encourages kids to be readers or writers is a great idea.

Q: Are you currently working on any books? Would you share a little bit about them?
A: I'm working on additional Ethan Gage novels - the next one, "The Treasure of Montezuma," set in part during the Haitian slave revolt, should appear June 1 - and on a young adult book set in prehistoric Africa. I've got additional ideas but at this point they are just that, ideas.

Q: What advice would you share with aspiring writers?
A: You need talent, perseverance, and luck. Some combination of the first two sometimes produces the third, but to quote Seneca, "Luck is preparation meeting opportunity." There is an aptitude for writing, but I think "talent" can also be learned through practice. Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" suggested outstanding successes (Bill Gates, the Beatles) spent 10,000 hours mastering their skills before their "overnight success," and perhaps that is a benchmark for writers as well. Write constantly. Read constantly, including books on how to write books. Give yourself time to succeed; many writers take decades. Make it your identity, not a casual hobby. Write for yourself - write the kind of book you want to read - and write true to yourself, don't be a poor imitation of someone else. Readers are looking for authenticity in an author, the voice that is yours alone.

Choosing the Right Publisher

2011-09-22T12:37:00.000-07:00

Getting published is getting harder and harder, especially for first-time authors. The difficulty of the trade doesn't mean you should sell yourself short with an ill-fitting publisher.

Take the following tips to heart when you're ready to start submitting your manuscript for publishing:

Read books that are in your genre. If you like the way the book looks, is put together and written, look for the publisher's contact information in the book.
Ask your writer friends who have published books for recommendations. Find out their experiences with their publishers, and ask if they could possibly put in a good word for you.
Check Writer's Market for a list of publishers. Find some that specialize in your genre, and research them more.
Subscribe to publications directed toward the publishing industry, such as Editor & Publisher or Publishers Weekly. These periodicals will keep you informed on the publishing industry. Editor & Publisher is geared toward the newspaper industry, but it covers those authors who have recently published books.
Browse the section in the bookstore or on Amazon that shelves books in your genre. This is a good way to see what books are comparable to yours and what publishers are picking them up.
Look through the Small Publishers Association of North America (SPAN) catalog for a list of small publishing companies. Many times, if you're a first-time author, getting published by a small publisher may be easier than by a larger publishing house.

Good luck with your submissions!

Seattle Author: The Early Days of Self-Publishing

2011-09-20T11:43:00.000-07:00

Writing was in the cards for Matt Briggs long before he had even graduated college; “When I was about 10 or 11, I basically said to myself, ‘it’s time to write my novel now!’ … By the time I was 18, I had decided that I was going to be a writer whether that made me poor or not,” he said.

Matt Briggs, photo from Amazon.

Briggs has lived in the Seattle area since childhood, and his earlier years in the Snoqualmie Falls area have had a strong impression on his prose and novels. Through extracurricular classes and groups with local poets, Matt began making connections and building relationships with the local creative writing culture, the Seattle scene of small presses, and the early days of self-publishing.

I received quite the self-publishing history lesson from Matt, as he explained the zines that writers would make using a mimeograph before the days of Xerox. The trouble with zines, according to Briggs, was that although there were plenty of them being published because they were cheap to make and an easy way to share fan information or poetry, the writers creating them didn’t necessarily know how to grow their readership to really help their literary work take off. “Academic training didn’t train them for gaining an audience,” he said.

After spending some time in the military, Briggs returned to Seattle in the early 90s and began working with a magazine called The Anchovy Review. Where he read the slush pile and stapled posters to telephone poles.

While writing for The Anchovy Review and The Raven Chronicles, Briggs was still writing prose and fiction. In 1999 his first book, The Remains of River Names was published. It was a series of linked short stories based on his studies at the University of Washington and his childhood in the secluded woods, rivers, and creeks in Snoqualmie. Although the book received good critical notice from Publisher’s Weekly, Salon.com, and the New York Times it did not sell well.

Although The Remains of River Names was Briggs’ first book to be published, he had numerous works of prose, essays, short stories, and articles published in journals and magazines. “I’m a small press writer,” Matt says. “It’s frustrating for me to work with agents – I don’t have the patience for it.”

Other small presses published his other books, including Shoot the Buffalo – a novel inspired by his childhood and his parents’ eventual separation and divorce. “I could create my childhood and it was a world I could control,” Briggs said. “My parents had kind of a utopian ideal; moving back to the land, appreciating nature … they were trying to get away from their parents’ way of things, but their ideals eventually fell through the cracks.” His books aren’t so much about a failed utopia, and more about a balance of things. “I wanted to capture the positive along with the negative. You can’t escape your genetic past, and they were running too hard from it,” he said.

Briggs’ most recent book, The Strong Man was published just last year. “I wrote it to sell it to a major publisher, but they wouldn't buy it in the midst of the Iraq war because it is about the setting of this second Gulf War,” he said. “I wanted to create unchallenging syntax for people to follow – the paradox with the first Gulf War … and I wanted it to be of the classic novelistic schema. I think I achieved that.”

His recipe for a ‘self-obsessive, navel-gazing’ (his words) writing career? “Write everyday. Everyone says it, but it’s true,” advises Briggs to aspiring authors. “ Write what you love to read, not what’s going to impress … You’re a student to your own writing, and it’s compulsive and it’s weird, but you need to be at peace with that.”

Publishing Advice from an Expert: Jeanette Perez of HarperCollins Publishers

2011-09-15T12:24:00.000-07:00

Where better to get publishing advice than from an editor at a publishing company? About.com guide Ginny Wiehardt interviewed Jeanette Perez, Associate Editor for the HarperCollins and Harper Perennial imprints on how to publish novels and short story collections. Read the Q&A re-posted below:

About.com: What kind of fiction do you primarily acquire?
Jeanette Perez: Though I'm starting to expand my list into nonfiction, such as narrative nonfiction, memoir, and pop culture, I mainly acquire fiction. In general I would love to acquire more literary fiction, women's fiction, and fiction representing other cultures such as Latin American fiction.

AC: What do editors look for in both authors and submissions?
JP: Of course, we all want something that's written well, but the book also has to have a hook that's easy to pitch. Much of my job as an editor is selling the book in-house to our publicity, marketing, and sales teams. If I can present the book to them concisely and give them a hook they can use when they are selling the book to accounts, the book has that much better of a chance in the marketplace.

As for what I look for in an author, it's always nice to have an author who is connected to the book world in some way. Also, it's wonderful to have an author who's willing to spend some of their own time marketing the book by going to bookstores and introducing themselves or surfing the Internet for websites where we could promote the book. Some of our more successful authors have been great about blogging on their websites and constantly refreshing their MySpace pages so that their networks continue to grow.

AC: How many first-time novelists do you publish each year?
JP: Lately, our paperback imprint Harper Perennial is where many of our first time authors have been getting published. The general sense is that readers are more willing to take a chance on a new author in paperback, where the prices are a little lower. I personally think the paperback original is a great way for an author to gain a following, and as their readership grows, perhaps with their second or third book, they can make the jump to hardcover.

AC: How finished should manuscripts be before authors begin to submit them to publishers?
JP: It really depends book to book. Sometimes a manuscript comes in pretty clean and the editing process is more of a polishing process. While other times, you may buy a book based on half a manuscript and then really work with the author line-by-line once they deliver the whole thing. But normally, if you buy something that's incomplete or needs a lot of work, you're sold on the story or the book has a highly commercial pitch.

AC: Do you recommend that authors get agents before submitting their novels?
JP: I know authors hate the idea of giving an agent a cut of what's often a small advance to begin with, but agents are a necessary part of the process. First, it's their job to know the editors and their interests, so rather than you sending your literary novel to an editor who buys science books because you saw their name somewhere, an agent will know exactly which editor is best suited for your book. Also, when problems arise, as they tend to do, the agent can act as a mediator, telling the author when they are asking for something that's impossible, or fighting for the author when they feel they should. So yes, I think agents definitely earn the commission they make and are good for the author to have on their side.

AC: I've heard that many presses have stopped really considering over-the-transom submissions. Is that true at HarperCollins?
JP: Sadly, there are just so many submissions coming in from agents, that we do not have time to also look at the un-agented materials that come in.

AC: It's said that the publishing industry has changed a lot in recent years, that some of the work once done by editors is now done by agents. How would you describe your role as an editor at HarperCollins?
JP: I personally love the editing process. Though agents do quite a bit of editing before they send the books out, there's usually still more work to be done. Working closely with the authors is for me, the best part of the job. But once the editing process is finished, my role changes from editor to salesperson and marketer. Like I said earlier, one of my main roles is to make sure everyone in the house knows the book and why it will appeal to audiences.

AC: Could you briefly explain what an author can expect once his or her novel has been accepted?
JP: Once the book has been accepted, it generally takes 9 months before it is published. Within those 9 months the book is copyedited, designed, and proofed multiple times. The author will get to see and approve the cover design and interior design and have a chance to see the flap copy. The editor should also send the book out to other authors for blurbs as soon as the manuscript is ready.

About 3-4 months before publication, the marketing and publicity push will really get started. The publicist will do large galley mailings to all the publications he or she thinks the book is right for and pitch the book to radio shows, tv shows, and magazines. The marketing department might do large mailings to book sellers and bloggers, who are increasingly involved in bringing books to audiences. The best thing the author can do is write a letter to booksellers explaining the story behind the book and introducing themselves. It's also never too early for the author to start a website or MySpace page.

AC: Do you have any final advice for authors seeking to get publish?
JP: Never stop writing and never stop submitting your work to agents and publishers. I've seen some great writers get frustrated because they haven't been offered a deal yet, but perhaps their next book will be the one. I think it's really helpful when writers join workshops or take a writing class. That way they can get the early criticism they need as well as make contacts in the writing world. Also, good authors are great readers. You should read as much as you can. And a little tip -- most authors thank their agents in the acknowledgments. If you're looking for an agent, check out books that are comparable to yours and see which agents represent them. This way you know which agents are interested in representing books like yours.

Seattle Author: An Imagination Gone Wild

2011-09-13T11:53:00.000-07:00

Janet Lee Carey is the award-winning author of eight Children's and YA novels. According to the School Library Journal's starred review, “This is quite simply fantasy at its best–original, beautiful, amazing, and deeply moving.” Janet links each new book with a charitable organization empowering readers to make a difference in the world. She tours in US and abroad presenting at schools, children’s book festivals, and conferences. She answered a few questions for SeattleWrote, so here goes:

Q: When did you first decide you wanted to be a writer? Do you have any funny stories about growing up and your inspiration for storytelling?
A: I was reading up in a tree (age 10) when I decided I wanted to be a writer. I remember the giddy feeling knowing what I wanted to do for the rest of my life and not having a clue about how to get from inspiration to publication. One thing I did right from the beginning – I knew how to daydream. This also got me in some trouble. I spent hours in school staring out the window imagining gigantic vines growing up the walls. Over hundreds of years they'd wrap their great green arms around every building at Old Mill School. They'd creep silently through the windows, and hug the desks until they turned to dust. Eventually there'd be nothing left of my school but a wild jungle and a few oddly shaped stones. Imagining a silent war between greenery and architecture was one of my favorite ways to waste time in school and I blame any holes in my early education on this particular daydream.

Janet Lee Carey, photo courtesy of author.

Q: What began your writing career?
A: It began like all writing careers with the alchemy of dreamtime, writing time, and commitment to bringing the story I’d envisioned to life. I wrote three novels in my late twenties and early thirties, learning the craft as I went. I later joined a dynamic critique group the Diviners (I’m with them still). After much writing and revising, all I had to do was face years of rejection. I came to have a love/hate relationship with my mailbox.

Q: Tell me a little bit about your struggles and challenges as a full-time writer and teacher (for writing workshops).
A: Writing is very time consuming, life consuming, soul consuming. It has to be your passion if you want to succeed. For me, the joys far outweigh the struggles. It’s hard work and it’s the best work I could imagine. Spinning tales is a magical experience. When it’s going well, it works something like lucid dreaming. My inner storyteller knows the setting, the characters, the story source which is the heart of the novel. She has something to say. My job is to listen and try not to get in the way. It took discipline to carve writing time in my busy family life. I had three sons, one with ongoing medical problems. I had to learn to respect myself and my writing hours, learn not to make appointments or do anything else in the time I’d set aside to be with my characters. It’s a challenge to do this before you’re published, before your words have earned a single penny.

I used to teach weekly novel-writing classes and loved the discipline of having to put the elusive wonder of story-spinning into practical, cogent words. Now I only teach writing workshops. I had to cut back on teaching for the best possible reason – too many deadlines.

Q: Have you done other things as well?
A: I’m a hiker (when friends and family can pry my fingers from the keys), and I love to swim in lakes and in the ocean. Say the word MAUI and I go into a trance. But most of what I do centers around writing and the creative life. My blog, Library Lions interviews youth librarians in schools and public libraries across the U.S. As an author, I’m particularly concerned with the current threat to school libraries. Too many are going under.

Along with conferences and school visits, I link each new book with a charitable organization empowering readers to make a difference in the world. This takes time and energy but I love matching the books to outreach. My most recent fantasy, The Dragons of Noor (Egmont USA 2010), deals with endangered forests so I matched it with the Nature Conservancy’s Plant a Billion Trees campaign.

Finally, I’m part of an arts group Artemis. We are writers, painters, sculptors, photographers, musicians. We meet monthly to discuss the wild ride of the creative process.

Q: What brought you to Seattle?
A: We’d traveled around a lot as a young couple, living in the woods and in yoga ashrams, but when I was about to have my first child, I wanted to settle down near my mom. She lived in Tacoma with my stepfather. They owned the Tyee Marina at the time.

Q: What launched the publishing of your first book (Molly's Fire), and how did you go about getting it to the publishing point?

A: I owe the publication of Molly’s Fire (the third I’d written remember) to my critique group The Diviners, who helped me get it into shape, to author Deborah Davis who introduced me to her editor, Jean Karl, at Atheneum Books, and to my agent, Irene W. Kraas, whom I met at a PNWA conference. The manuscript went through three revisions before it was accepted. They wanted to see how I worked with their editorial critique. (All the revisions with the Diviners came in handy then.) After years of rejection, I was so sure I’d never be published; when the day actually came I burst into tears. I was hysterical. My concerned friends thought someone had died. I published four books with Atheneum before I worked with other publishing houses books. Here’s one of my Atheneum Covers (at right):

Wenny Has Wings (Atheneum, 2002) won the Mark Twain award. It was so popular in Japan they turned it into a movie "Ano Sora wo Oboeteru" Remember That Sky, with Sony Pictures.

Q: What do you like about writing children's and young adult fantasy? Do you plan to stay in this genre?
A: It’s not as easy as waving a magic wand, but magic happens. I carry a lantern into a dark wood where I’m led from mystery to mystery. I’m open to other genres, (the latest book I’m writing includes a murder mystery), but I plan to stay with fantasy and see where it takes me. Ram Dass says, “We are all just walking each other home.” Story is the way I walk home.

Q: What kind of part did reading and your love of stories as a child play in your career as a Y/A fantasy writer?
A: The fantasy I read as a child was the reason I wanted to grow up to be a writer. In my “reading tree” I was swept into Narnia, Middle-earth, and other magical lands. I loved going on these journeys and wanted to grow up booking passage to faraway places for other young readers. I’m continually inspired by Ursula K. LeGuin, Juliet Marillier, Patricia A. McKillip, Shannon Hale, Kristin Cashore, and many more.

Q: Are there people and events in your life that inspire your stories, or are they primarily inspired by your imagination gone wild, etc.?
A: Yes to Imagination gone Wild! I grew up in the California redwood forest. The trees were constantly whispering to me. I always thought they were telling stories in a language I didn’t yet understand. I’m still trying to understand their tales. The Dragons of Noor is my “tree” book.

Also People and Events. I write novels to delve deeper into things that haunt me and keep me awake at night. Stealing Death (Egmont USA 2009) asks that basic question, why do we have to die? I started writing it when my mother was dying and finished the book only a few weeks before my stepfather died. I loved them both very much and didn’t want to let them go.

Finally, books provide a great source of inspiration from Grimm’s Fairy Tales (not the Disney versions), to myths, to fantasy novels old and new. I also have to put a plug in here for Shakespeare. The bard had a nose for a good story with lots of trysts and twists.

Q: Do you have plans for future books? Is there anything you can share about them?
A: I’m thrilled to be working with my editor, Kathy Dawson, at Dial Books For Young Readers on my second Wilde Island book. The first, Dragon's Keep, came out with Harcourt in 2007, the second, Dragonswood, will be out with Dial Books in January 2012. Here's a little preview:

I see visions in the fire sometimes, images of the past or what is yet to come. The fire-sight does not lie. But I did not see the witch hunter who would ride in to scour our town of sin, so I did not know to run.

Tess flees the witch hunter and finds help from a mysterious huntsman until she can no longer resist the far off voices that draw her deeper into Dragonswood.

Good news – I recently sold the third book in the Wilde Island series, the fantasy exploring a murder.

Q: Do you have any advice for aspiring fantasy writers?
A:

Keep an open mind. You never know when an unusual thought, image, or a word from someone else will spark an amazing story idea. When I was outlining Dragonswood, My editor and I were talking about the witch hunter when she said the word “she” in our conversation. A female witch hunter? How strange that would be. It got me thinking. Soon Lady Adela and her violent past that drove her to hunt down and burn witches became integral to the book.
Keep a journal. Challenge yourself to jot down your thoughts, dreams, observations, story ideas, poems – everything. A journal gives you a place to develop your unique writing voice in a noncritical place. So many editors look for “voice.” An authentic voice is memorable. A journal is a good place to learn page honesty, a private place where you can really let it rip.
Write for yourself. Revise for your reader.
Keep reading. Keep writing. Keep sending it out and collecting rejection slips.
Finally, in the internet age where everyone is Facebooking and Tweeting – value your words and your work. Don’t be too quick to give yourself away.

What to Look For From Your Copy Editor [Guest Post]

2011-09-08T12:21:00.000-07:00

Jim Thomsen is a copy editor and writer who lives in West Seattle. You can reach him at thomsen1965@gmail.com.

By Jim Thomsen

Most writers, myself included, suffer from what I call “My Words Are My Children Syndrome.” That means that your ability to edit your own work is limited, because after the zillionth rewrite, you’ll have gotten too close it to be objective about it. And that’s after you’ve worked with critique partners or a story editor to polish your story values as perfectly as possible.

You need a copy editor. We do the detail work that big-picture editors don’t deal with (or, increasingly, at any publishing house; they’ve fired most of their staff copy editors and now farm out the work to people like me). Among other things, we tighten sentences, eliminate redundancies, and generally help you say the most with the fewest words possible.

If you’re looking at hiring someone, do the following acts of due diligence:

Check on word-of-mouth reputation. You probably know somebody who knows somebody who’s a copy editor, so tap your writers’ network for referrals. Ask your prospect for client testimonials, with contact info, so you can do a thorough check on the person to whom you might be paying $500 or more. The last thing the editing community needs is some unqualified goof doing a subpar job and spoiling, by association, the reputations of the rest of us.
Get a fair estimate. Rates, and how rates are set, vary widely. Some charge by the word, others by the hour, and still others at a flat rate. One approach: I ask for your first three chapters and overall word count. I edit those chapters and keep track of how long it takes, then offer a quote based on how long it takes, times a proposed hourly rate (which varies by the project’s degree of difficulty), times the length of the rest of the manuscript. So, if your MS is 80,000 words, your first three chapters total 8,000 words and the edit took two hours, I might quote $30 an hour. So 2 x 10 x 30 = a $600 estimate. If you can’t or won’t go for it, I’ll thank you for the opportunity and let you keep the edited chapters for free.
Ask for continuing service. A good copy editor will edit your MS — and then hold your hand, virtually speaking, through the revisions. You’ll get clarification on suggested changes, you’ll get an ear for your questions, and you may even make a new friend. A copy editor who wants to work with you again, and wants to work with your writer friends, will see your relationship as a continuing one. The one to watch for is the one who cashes the check and then disappears.
Find the proof in the proofing. Nobody’s perfect, but if your proofreader — who should always be somebody other than your copy editor — is finding more than an occasional typo or misspelling, you know you didn’t get a first-rate edit. Look especially for places in which something that was correct was changed to something incorrect.

Seattle Author: Winning the Literary 'Lottery'

2011-09-06T11:45:00.000-07:00

Fairy tales don't really happen in real life for authors. Getting your book published after years and sometimes decades of working on it is definitely a dream-come-true, but it pales in comparison to what happened to author and screen play writer Royce Buckingham. He worked for over a decade on his short story, turned screenplay, turned novel, Demonkeeper, and after years of winning awards for it, starting movie work and then getting shut down, the story was bought for a novel by Penguin, and a movie for Fox back-to-back and in less than a month's time!

Photo courtesy of Royce Buckingham.

Buckingham's is more than just a story of following the adage, 'if at first you don't succeed, try, try again'. After studying English in college and trying his hand at short stories, he launched a career in law - crime law to be exact. "If you go to law school, it teaches you to write very carefully. For some people that can make their writing very sterile, but that wasn’t the case with me," Buckingham says. If anything, his career in law inspired a short story that would become his first novel, Demonkeeper. "I was working in juvenile court, and the disappearance of the kid with the green mohawk in downtown Seattle inspired a short story. I don't think it’s a coincidence that the first story I wrote had to do with what I was doing every day."

Demonkeeper was about more than just monsters and fantasy fiction with a little bit of sci-fi. In the bio on his website, Buckingham writes about the green-mohawk kid; "I imagined the chaos of street life as a monster that rose and ate him up while people weren’t paying attention, as it does with so many lost children. I wrote a screenplay from that story. The script evolved into a much more lighthearted and fun tale than that short tale I wrote years earlier, but the message remained—kids need stability, family and a home."

He continued to send the screenplay and short story, Demonkeeper around to producers and to enter competitions. At one point, "I had taken the screenplay to CA, got a producer on it, and it went way along in the process, and then it didn’t sell. I was so disappointed. I knew I needed a new direction, so I sat down and wrote it into a novel," he said.

Short stories remained a part of Buckingham's life throughout the beginning of his career in law, but since "there's no money in short stories", and "screenplays are hard to sell", says Buckingham, "I reached a point when I wasn't doing it enough ... I loved writing screenplays because they were very visual, and when I learned to get that visual element into my novels, I was able to get that joy of picturing things on the page, and then it was more fun," he said.

After years working on and re-working Demonkeeper, Penguin bought the book in December 2005. What had started as a short story in the mid-90s was finally going to be published in a middle-grade fantasy novel. A couple of weeks later, Fox bought Demonkeeper the screenplay to develop for a movie.

"What was it like to suddenly go from giving up writing entirely to seeing your story become a hit? That’s the ‘I won the lottery’ feeling!" Buckingham laughs. "Pick your favorite dream and that’s it ... I’d wake up the next day and wonder if that really happened. It exceeds anything I had thought I would ever get to ... It’s the story that should keep all other writers writing."

Buckingham references Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, who says that if you want to be a professional at something, you need to work on it for at least seven years. "Who can expect to go out and start writing, and immediately be an expert? You’re not a professional right off the bat. You’re competing with celebrities and professionals. The bulk of people that get there have been doing it, and doing it hard," Buckingham said.

Demonkeeper's success was hardly the end of Buckingham's career in law - he's still working hard at that, although he recently reduced his hours so that he could spend more time writing. "Follow your dream, but pay your rent. I want to keep taking my shots, but I also need the security of my day job to support my family and do what's right for them," he says. Buckingham's dream is still in the works; he's had two more books published since his big break with Demonkeeper in 2007. Goblins was published in 2008, and The Dead Boys was published last year. The latter was already nominated for a Cybils Award for 2010 Fantasy and Science Fiction for the middle-grade (see the book on the finalists' list here).

According to Royce Buckingham, "The biggest thing you learn is not to chase bad ideas. You only have so many books in you," he says. "Before I sit down to write, I walk around for six months talking about it. It’s really easy when I go to schools and tell the kids about it, and their reaction tells me if it’s a book. You only have so much time, so work on the ideas that are good."

After years of trying, with competitions won and some progress on his work, but nothing so big as publishing until that 'lottery-winning' time in 2005, Buckingham has quite the experience with 'try, try again'. He suggests that writers in those almost-but-not-quite published-shoes "Enter competitions to get a measure of where you’re at, if you do well, you just need to get your work out there more. If you’re not getting good feedback at competitions, get it from a writing group, go to classes," he advises. "You can work a long time by yourself and not know what you’re doing wrong. Competitions tell you how good your work is. Writing groups are really a substitute for paying tuition to a writing teacher. Get in a group with mature people who can take criticism, and give it without getting upset."

Q&A With Seattle Blogger, Margot Sinclair Savell

2011-09-02T12:15:00.000-07:00

Name: Margot Sinclair Savell
Blog Site: http://writeforwine.com
Blog Summary: Write for Wine focuses on the fine wines, wineries, winemakers and winery owners of Washington State, with occasional posts about other northwest wine regions (Oregon and B.C.), California and Bordeaux.
1st Post Date: June 2007
Day Job: VP of Measurement & Analytics at a PR Agency

Photo courtesy of Margot Sinclair Savell.

Q: What is your blog’s theme, voice, and direction?
A: My blog focuses on the wonderful wines of Washington State. Write for Wine is aimed at wine enthusiasts like me; I am not an expert or a critic, and I do not review wine. I simply want to have fun writing about wine I love, in hopes that others with similar palates will get new ideas for wines to taste, wineries to visit and wine events to attend.

Q: What was your inspiration for beginning a blog to talk about wine?
A: I love writing and I love wine. When I moved to the United States from Canada, I found myself in the middle of Washington wine country. It was my inspiration. There is so much great wine in Washington – but what truly inspires me is when I find the perfect combination of superb wine, wonderful people at a winery or tasting room, and fun events.

My passion about wine stems from the experiences related to its enjoyment. On warm summer evenings, it’s relaxing for my husband and me to kick back on the deck with a refreshing glass of Sauvignon Blanc or Pinot Gris, or to savor a robust Cabernet Sauvignon or a rich Cab Franc at a BBQ. On weekends, going wine tasting means more than sipping glasses of good Washington wine; it’s an opportunity to talk to winemakers and winery owners who have fascinating stories to tell about their experiences with grapes from earth to bottle. We’ve also talked to hard-working growers, who humbly call themselves farmers rather than acknowledging that an incredible wine experience begins with them. And we’ve enjoyed so many wine events, from barrel-tasting to vineyard parties. This summer, we’re going glamping (glamorous camping) at Destiny Ridge Vineyards, the estate vineyard of Alexandria Nicole Cellars in central Washington; I recently wrote about glamping for Seattleite Magazine.
(Full disclosure: Alexandria Nicole Cellars owner and winemaker Jarrod Boyle and his wife/co-owner, Ali became our friends after we joined their wine club and spent time with them at their tasting room.)

Q: Do you have a favorite [recipe, fashion trend, blog topic] that you wrote about recently?
A: I can’t pick one, because I only write about wines I love. My motto, since 2002, has been “It’s Wine O’clock Somewhere!”

Q: What guidelines or goals do you set on a weekly, monthly, or annual basis for the blog, content, post numbers, etc.? Where do you hope or expect this blog to go in the future?
A: I am such a goal-oriented person that this sounds strange, but true: I have no goals for the blog or future plans for it – it’s my sidebar of fun, that’s it.

Q: What challenges have you faced with blogging, your readers, etc.? How have you worked through those challenges?
A: The only challenge I sometimes face is finding time to write frequently in my blog. When that happens, I remind myself that I’m writing for fun, and I will write again when I have more time.

Q: Do you do any other writing professionally? Do you have any plans for your writing in the future? A: I’m writing a book right now – a true story about an amazing man’s incredible journey. The book is not about wine, but there is a wine connection: A winery owner in Napa Valley introduced me to this man so I could write his story of inspiration. I used to be a national news journalist, and I have written chapters of books about social media measurement, PR analytics, and technology, but I have never written an entire book before. What an experience! I also have written about wine in a bi-weekly column, Wine O’clock Wednesdays, for Seattleite Magazine.

Q: What are you doing when you’re not blogging?
A: I am working at the PR agency, writing the book, wine tasting or attending wine events, reading on my Kindle, iPad or Android phone or, most often, simply hanging out with my husband and our three Cavalier King Charles pups.

Writing The Book of Your Career [Guest Post]

2011-08-31T11:55:00.000-07:00

Photo courtesy of Brayden Hirsch

Brayden Hirsch is a teenage author from the Pacific Northwest. His first book, Shadow Catalyst, is releasing from Steward House Publishers and his second is well on its way. For more on Brayden and his writing, check out www.braydenhirsch.com.

by Brayden Hirsch

Someone once told me that bad writing is like good baking—you stick to the recipe. As an avid cookie monster, I caught onto the meaning immediately. Bakers ruin the batch if they add a little extra butter here, or try something new with cocoa there, but as writers, we’re called to be constantly creative, experimenting with new things, never doing the same thing twice.

At first, I agreed.

Then I actually started thinking about it—of course, a risk-taking writer is a good one, but look at every major successful one out there. Stephen King, Dan Brown, John Grisham, Agatha Christie. Their writing careers depended on them doing the same thing, and doing it over and over again. Steve Berry admitted it, at the recent Pacific Northwest Writers Conference, saying that writing within your brand means doing “the same thing, but differently.”

Every single time.

It’s as if these professional entertainers all have a single book that every other one they write simply mirrors. One book, that’s all, that captures their message to the world, their style, their basic plot and character arcs. For Stephen King, it was probably Carrie, for John Grisham it was The Firm. It doesn’t have to be the first book you write—Dan Brown wrote The Da Vinci Code years after Angels and Demons, which is a far better book, in my opinion, yet Da Vinci created controversy, and that’s what Dan Brown’s sales rely on.

Is it a bad thing, writing this one novel—for our purposes, let’s call it the book—that will shape all the others? Not at all. People complain about formula writers all the time, and yet they keep going back for more. Formulas—good ones—are what sell.

All you have to do is write the book. It can’t be Stephen King’s, it can’t be J.K. Rowling’s or Nora Roberts’. It has to be yours.

Here’s a few things to think about:

Message. Writers are a bit like politicians, this way. Even novelists. You have to stick to your message—and before you can, you have to have one. You don’t have to be Mr. Brown, with controversy oozing from every page. But you have to ask yourself, what is your message? Some call it the intentional arc of your story. Even the cheapest writers had messages, those who wrote simply to make a buck. Look at John D. Macdonald’s Cape Fear, or The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler. Every story has a soul. Note: Don’t give them a sermon. Novelists are planters of ideas, not preachers. We can plant an idea, then we watch it grow in our readers. Anyone ever seen "Inception"?
Style/Voice. Every time you open a Chandler novel, you can expect the same dry humor of cynical private eye Philip Marlowe. Chandler wrote with a voice that no one else had. You watch a Hitchcock film, you know what you’re going to get. You know that when you open a Harry Potter novel you’re going to get a story of a boy wizard getting into trouble and all the while saving the world. Readers like to know what to expect. Establish a clear style when you set out to write the book. Note: This isn’t about brand or genre. Brand is who you are, not what you write. Genre, on the other hand, is what you write, but many successful writers from John Grisham to Agatha Christie have strayed from their genre and written in another one just as successfully, while maintaining a certain style. A legal thriller writer I know recently published an urban fantasy novel—or, more accurately, a zombie legal thriller—and while it’s crazy and weird (and, I must say, awfully good), it bears enormous resemblance to his other, shall we say “normal” work, which was written for a different audience. Your style is your style, no matter who you are or what you’re writing.
The Thing About Last Pages. There is nothing in the world of writing so difficult as writing a last page—I mean a good one. You must satisfy reads, leave them craving more, and at the same time, guarantee that the style, voice, and message of the novel they just finished will be the same, but different, in the books to come. Don’t ask me for practical advice—there is none. All I can say is read. Read books with great endings. The Green Mile is one of them, so is Chandler’s The Long Goodbye and The Sea Wolf by Jack London.

One more thing to think about, when setting out to write the book: don’t worry. Don’t obsess over writing the book, just learn the craft and write the best book you can. If you get published along the way, great. My first book, Shadow Catalyst, will release in a little less than a month. It was fun to write, and it’s received great reviews so far, but is it the book? I don’t know. I don’t think so. It’s fun. It’s creepy. I have no doubt it will sell fairly well.

At the same time, I have no doubt I can do better. I am constantly learning. I’m a far better writer than I was yesterday, let alone months ago when I wrote Shadow Catalyst. I keep learning, and when I write, I write the best I can.

That’s all you can ever do. Write the best book you can.

Seattle Author: Beyond the Obvious

2011-08-30T12:09:00.000-07:00

I'm back! After about a month of getting settled at my new job (it's going great), then lining up a couple of author features to make sure things get regular again, we're off with a Q&A I was privileged to have with local author Janey Bennett. She lives part of the time in Bellingham, WA and the other part she lives in British Columbia, and she is the author of The Pale Surface of Things and Eeva Dreams of Falling (available on Kindle).

Janey Bennett, photo by Elias Baumgarten.

Q: Growing up, did you ever dream of writing novels, or was writing ever a hope or expectation for you?
A: Growing up, I dreamed of being a lot of active things: cowgirl, ballerina, flamenco dancer, anything that required doing something. The idea of gluing myself to a chair and writing was not one of my dreams. That said, I grew up in a house of books, so I read a lot and we talked about what I read. I loved theatre, especially theatre of ideas, so I guess a life of ideas was also a dream of mine, and that practice, of exploring ideas, underlies all good writing.

Q: What inspired "The Pale Surface of Things"?
A: The Pale Surface of Things is essentially the story of a young man of one culture thrown by circumstances into a completely other culture. Both the young man and the village of the "other" culture are changed by the encounter, but when I started writing it, I wasn't sure who would change or how. I wrote it to learn what would happen.

My first visit to Crete was in the early 1990s, and I went from Finland, where I was working at the time, on what we called a Sunburn Tour. Many Finns travel to sunny places in order to get the brightest sunburn possible to take home. It was a cheap package trip that put us in a hotel on a beach near other tourist hotels but far from the cities and museums. I traveled with a friend who didn’t care about getting a sunburn, so we took local busses in all directions around Crete. The cities were lovely but the busses were fascinating. They were used by working people and were an introduction to the other level of life on Crete. We’d meet flocks of sheep or goats on the roadways and the bus would wait. Trucks carried rocks or goats or crops. Villages were each different, and each was interesting.

Most tourists see the holiday-Crete of hotel, restaurant, taverna, shop, beach. We saw old men and women, tired after lifetimes of hard work on that difficult land, sitting on the bus, or on a bench in the sun, going about their daily lives. The coexistence and non-contact of those two worlds on Crete caught my imagination.

Q: When and why did you decide to write a novel about the present-day consequences of events in Crete during World War II?
A: I didn't. I started writing about present day Douglas (my protagonist) and the present day village. The ghosts of WWII kept coming up on their own, and the priest's grandfather's story was a complete surprise to me. Much of the villagers' story emerged from the research I'd done, but not directly. In hindsight, it came as a predictable outcome to my writing about the village. The way the rural Cretan communities rallied to resist the German invaders in WWII is an extraordinary story of a people made strong by the challenges of their surroundings and the strengths they had to develop to survive, pushed even harder by awful circumstances of war. And the effects of war are passed down to the following generations. I wrote about this also in a short story, Eeva Dreams of Falling, set in Finland and Sweden, where a woman who has blocked her memories of childhood trauma during WWII is forced to deal with them because their effect is hurting her grown daughter. Over generations, we may lose into secrecy the details of the shaming, but the feelings remain and are a legacy to our children. This idea has come to interest me a lot.

Q: Did your background as a journalism writer and then as a proofreader for CTB/McGraw-Hill and Brooks-Cole Publishing add anything to your experience writing a novel? Did it help you?
A: A writer deals in words. The more experience one has in handling words, polishing them, tailoring them, exploring their meanings and uses, and especially, reading, the more it comes up in the subsequent writing. Nothing is wasted for a writer: no life-experience, no writing or editing experience, no term paper, no penmanship class, nothing. It all feeds the mind that writes.

In terms of my journalism work, yes, writing to a deadline is a useful skill. Writing specific word-counts is, too. Learning that I could find a story in a subject that had no connection to my previous experience meant that I could apply that skill to any subject I wanted to write. It opened possibilities for writing more stories.

Editing also helped, but it is a very different experience from writing. It’s really important to send the editor part of your brain away while you are generating a story. It can come back and fix things afterwards, but if you edit as you write, you will probably stifle the writing. I am in awe of Jane Austen, sitting at a small writing table with paper and a quill pen. I delete pieces of every sentence, add words, move them, polish often. I can’t imagine writing with a feather and having the result be her splendid novels.

Q: How did your studies and experience in architectural history influence and enhance the creative process for "The Pale Surface of Things"?
A: My thesis advisor in architectural history was Reyner Banham, who was one of the best writers on architecture theory and history who ever lived. He was curious about how things worked and why they were the shape or form they were. He once said, and I agree, that the more one learns about the periphery of a subject, the deeper one’s understanding of the center. As I wrote about architecture in Finland, I found myself writing about the times that produced those buildings, the culture that valued what the buildings expressed, and the life they supported. I was writing a form of sociology as I looked at the buildings in their context. That certainly helped in writing The Pale Surface of Things.

Q: How did you get "The Pale Surface of Things" published? What struggles and successes did you experience with the publishing process for the book, as your first novel?
A: I sent out more than 100 queries or submissions. I was turned down by those agents who bothered to write a response. Others just never answered. I tried everything I could think of, gave up and put the book in a drawer, and then … I attended a Canadian conference on troubled adolescents, research for my next novel, and sitting in front of me was a young man with a publishing company. He asked to see what I was writing about adolescents, and I said it wasn’t ready but I had The Pale Surface of Things in a drawer. He read it, liked it, and published it. Shortly after that, he was accepted to graduate school, moved to Winnipeg, and closed the publishing house … at least for a while. I would never have had the nerve to self publish. In 2007, it was still an unusual move. But because of his return to school, I did end up self-promoting. I had help in the U.S. from Sharon Castlen, a book marketer who did not usually manage fiction. She and I campaigned to advance the book. It won seven book-industry awards. I traveled across Canada and down the West Coast. I even handed a copy to Tom Hanks, hoping he’d make the next "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" out of it. I spent more than a year campaigning the book. I stopped writing.

Q: Being new to the process of writing a novel, what challenges in writing did you experience along your journey writing "The Pale Surface of Things"?
A: I overwrote everything. I knew I wouldn’t use all the material I wrote, but the only way I could be sure I had really captured the meanings and character nuances of each scene was to write back stories for every situation for every character, and research papers on aspects of the village/mountain meadow (transhumance) society. I spent seven years writing it pretty much full time. I was recovering from surgery with lots of time to hold a laptop on my lap and write. So I wrote. Then I needed some guidance in knowing what to leave out. I had that help from the great writing teacher, Carol Bly.

Q: In your opinion, what steps must writers take for successful character development?
A: I’m going to assume you mean for developing the characters they are writing. (Their own character development is something I have no advice for.) Here’s my advice: Listen to people around you. Ask yourself why they behave as they do. Watch and listen, but not to actors who are only presenting their conscious version of a character. Movies will teach you plot and structure, but they will not teach you character. Tolstoy may well teach you character. Most fiction won’t. Observe. Make friends with a psychotherapist and ask about behaviors you don’t understand. Take classes in human behavior. Write character sketches for the people on your bus, in your coffee shop, in your class. Invent a past for them. Practice observing.

Q: What was your favorite part of the creative process for writing this book? Research? Travel? Writing about characters and/or places? Writing and planning the story? Why was that so special for you?
A: I loved those times when a character took over and generated the story for me. I knew then that things were on track, at least for that character’s story. Sometimes those tracks led away from where the spine of the novel needed to go. Then I had to think whether I could afford the detour or whether that just went into the file marked EXTRA. And if it did, there was likely still a phrase or a moment somewhere else in another scene that came from that information about that character. I overwrite a lot. I wrote probably four times as many pages as I ended up using, but it all enriched the story.

Research is a lovely process, especially in this age of internet resources and great used book searches. Research can lead to whole avenues of attitude, of life-patterns that are beyond the writer’s experience, opening up ways of fleshing out characters whose lives are nothing like the writer’s. One of the blessings of The Pale Surface of Things is the huge amount published on Crete, from the Minoan period through the various periods of foreign rule to World War II, of sociology of traditional villages to memoirs of foreigners moving there, to travel guides. All of them had information for me.

Q: You're currently working on another novel, can you give us any insight into the general storyline of that book? When can we look for it on the shelves of bookstores?
A: It’s the story of a troubled adolescent. It has an ending I’m quite pleased with, but its beginning and middle don’t work. I’m circling around it, trying different ideas to jump into the story at another point, with or without flashbacks. Until I’m happy with it, it’ll sit on my desk. Who knows, I may even step around it and do the next novel set on Crete, which will involve restoring ancient Greek Orthodox icons, and saving a village from ruin.

Q: If you could go back to pre-Pale Surface-Janey and tell yourself something you wish you'd known before you started, what would it be?
A: I wish I’d known how much time promotion and marketing would take, and also how much fun it would be … at least much of the time. That was the journey I never expected.

Q: What advice can you share with writers who have yet to complete or publish their own novels?
A: Even though I am a professional proofreader (I am a member of the Northwest Independent Editors’ Guild) I hired not one but two proofreaders to review my manuscript before I ever sent it out. And my publisher had it proofread again before it went to print, and there are still five tiny errors! So my advice is: After you get the story, and you polish your language, and you’re ready to go, hire a professional proofreader. (Friends mean well, but do you know if they can spell?) Be careful before you send anything out. A sloppy manuscript, or even one that is a little careless, will hurt your chances of acceptance.

A Brief Intermission

2011-07-25T16:12:00.000-07:00

Hello All!

I mentioned about a week ago that I had gotten a new job, which is still going great, by the way. I will be taking a short (1 month, maximum) hiatus from the blog, or at least regular posting while I get settled here. It's also a startup, so I'm working long days at a job that's creatively-stimulating, but exhausting (all in a good way).

I have a couple of blogger Q&A's to write your way, but another reason for this hiatus is that I haven't had the chance to contact and schedule interviews with authors for the primary part of the blog - the author features. I'll be back up and writing regular again soon - stay tuned!

Norelle

The Elements of a Book Proposal

2011-07-21T12:15:00.000-07:00

[by Meg Schneider and Barbara Doyen for PRWeb.com] This site also has a lot of helpful details about putting together and writing your book proposal.

Whether you're writing fiction or nonfiction, every proposal package must include a cover letter, an author's bio, and a SASE (self-addressed stamped envelope). You also might want to include a copy of your original query in your proposal package. It helps to remind the agent or editor why she was interested in your material and saves her the trouble of searching for your original query. Put the query right behind the cover letter.

Cover Letter
The cover letter is a short business letter. Your goal is to remind the agent or editor that he requested your proposal and (very briefly) what your book is about. If there are any new developments pertaining to your book's topic, include that information in your cover letter as well. Close by thanking the agent or editor for his time and interest and say you look forward to hearing from him.

Make sure all your contact information is on your cover letter, including your area code and zip code. If you choose to create your own letterhead, select a style and font that is clean and easily readable. Agents and editors who want to contact you don't want to break out the magnifying glass to decipher your telephone number. Never handwrite your cover letter.

About the Author
Agents and editors want to know about your qualifications to write your book, so every proposal must include a short narrative about you. (A sample author's bio is included in Appendix B.) Written in the third person, your bio includes your published credits, your expertise on your book's topic, and any awards you have won that relate to your writing or your book topic. Your education and work experience should be included only if they are related to your book topic, or if they give you a platform for promoting your book.

If your book is a collaboration with another author, write an “About the Author” bio for each of you. For nonfiction, if one of you is the expert on the topic and the other is the writer, put the expert's bio first. For fiction, put the authors' bios in the order you want your credit to appear on the book. If you want the credit to read “Jane Smith and Robert Brown,” put Jane Smith's bio first.

If you have published credits, put them in the first paragraph; this is the first thing most agents and editors will look for. List book credits first, then magazine and large-circulation newspaper credits. List well-known publications by name. If you don't have credits with big-name periodicals, you can say your “work has been published in several regional and local magazines and newspapers.”

If you don't have any published credits to include, do not call attention to that in your bio. Instead, find a way to incorporate your other life experience and accomplishments into a positive reflection of your writing ability.

SASE
Most proposals should fit in a 9 × 12 or 10 × 14 mailer. For your SASE, include the same-sized mailer, with postage affixed, the agent's or editor's name and address in the upper left corner, and your name and address in the center. This is important — and too often forgotten by writers — because some agents and editors separate SASEs from proposal pages. Fold your return mailer in half and place it directly underneath your cover letter.

Some writers prefer to send their proposals via a shipping service like UPS or FedEx because they can track deliveries easily, although the U.S. Postal Service now offers tracking services without requiring the recipient to sign for your package. If you use a service other than the regular mail, don't expect the agent or editor to return your proposal the same way. It's just far too cumbersome, what with special labels and account numbers and finding a drop box or calling for pick-up service. It's easier on everyone if you just include a regular, stamped mailer for returns, no matter which shipping method you use.

Notes from a Literary Agent

2011-07-20T11:57:00.000-07:00

I'm reposting this from the Y/A Fantasy Guide because it seemed to be a really useful Q&A. She's in the UK, but I think her ideas translate well. Enjoy!

Sally Anne has a BA in English and Sociology from Trinity College, Dublin, and an MPhil in American Literature from Cambridge University. She is currently building her list and looking for talented writers of literary and commercial fiction. She is also passionate about exciting and original writing for children and young adults, and is interested in memoirs, quirky gift books and food writing.

Sally Anne Sweeney, photo from the YA Fantasy Guide.

The Interview

1. What is the best part of being a literary agent?

For me, it's the thrill of finding and working with talented authors, and seeing a project through from typescript to finished book. I also love the variety of my job and how every day is different.

2. How would you summarize your personal agent-ing philosophy? What do you expect from an agent-author relationship?

I have been growing my client list for two and a half years now and I work very closely with all of my authors, guiding them through each stage of the publishing process. I'm very hands-on editorially, often going through several rounds of revisions with authors before submitting to publishers.

Good communication is crucial in getting the most out of the agent-author relationship; it's important to establish early on how you would like to work together. Trust and honesty are also very important.

3. What's something coming out now/soon that you've represented and are excited about?

I'm really looking forward to the mass market publication of SIN TROPEZ by Aita Ighodaro, which is out in July and a deliciously enjoyable beach read. I'm also excited about THE STORY OF US by Felicity Everett, which was published recently and has been really well reviewed, and I'm already looking forward to Nelle Davy's literary debut THE LEGACY OF EDEN which comes out next February.

4. What are the primary mistakes you see writers make in query process?

I think the main mistake authors make is sending their typescript out too early. Very rarely is a first draft perfect, and I'd advise not beginning to query until you can't see how you can continue to improve your typescript. It also helps if authors have researched the agent they are submitting to; most agents have profiles on agency websites so there shouldn't be any excuse for sending projects to agents in genres they don't handle. Most importantly, as agents have limited time to read unsolicited submissions, you need to grab their attention and often less is more when it comes to query letters.

5. With fiction partials, what makes you stop reading and start skimming-or stop reading altogether?

From the opening page, the voice will either hook me in or leave me cold. After that, I'm put off by clunky dialogue. In young adult or children's writing, I'd stop reading anything that talked down to the reader.

6. Your agency profile says that you're interested in young adult, what specific sub-genres do you lean toward?

I love reading young adult fiction and don't really lean towards any particular sub-genre; my tastes range from literary novels such as those by Meg Rosoff and Rebecca Stead, to the very commercial - I devoured the Twilight , The Luxe and Pretty Little Liars series. I'm also looking to find a really great young adult horror or mystery. I was a huge fan of Nancy Drew and Goosebumps when growing up.

7. You said that your interest in fantasy is very limited. Is there any sub-genre of fantasy that you would consider?

I'm not drawn to epic fantasy, particularly when it comes to adult fiction, but I could certainly be convinced otherwise by brilliant writing. First and foremost, I'm looking for brilliant characters, a compelling voice, and a world I don't want to leave, so I am open to any novel that can offer that!

8. Will you be at any upcoming writers conferences where people can meet/pitch you?

I will be at the Matera Women's Fiction Festival in Italy this September.

9. What's the best way to contact you?

Submission guidelines are on our website. We prefer submissions by post if possible, but authors living outside the UK are welcome to email .

10.Best piece(s) of advice we haven't discussed?

Read as much as you can in the genre you are writing in, and keep trying!

Seattle Author: The Demons in Historical Fiction

2011-07-19T12:16:00.000-07:00

Maria Headley, photo by Kyle Cassidy.

For all the dark and forbidden aspects of her stories, author and playwright Maria Dahvana Headley is as engaging and friendly as they come when you meet her in person. She spent her early years writing plays, but "I was always writing fiction," she declares. Her varied experiences as an assistant to a New York socialite, a year of saying yes to any and all dates of a romantic nature, and working in Seattle's maritime business have provided her with a multitude of vignettes and short stories, if not material for use in a full story of their own.

Actually, that's how she sold The Year of Yes, a memoir of her year saying yes to anyone who asked her out on a date in hopes of finding a different kind of (and hopefully lasting) romance - and she did! "I was working on a book of short stories at the time, and I told an editor about it. I could tell he was bored and so I started telling him stories from that year to make him laugh," Headley says. "He immediately got interested and said 'I'd buy that'. I ended up selling it about two months later." Since her early days as a playwright, Maria says she has "been very fortunate. I've been writing professionally for about 15 years, and I've been very lucky."

Luck has nothing to do with work, but she's definitely not short on hours of labor. While writing Queen of Kings, a dark 'monster' novel about Cleopatra and an ancient goddess, "I usually worked 10-hour days, writing as much as I could. A couple of times I wrote up to 12,000 words in one day!" she said. "I discovered a lot about myself through those sections that I wrote at breakneck pace: those sections I ended up keeping, whereas the ones I worked slowly over, I had to re-write." (Check out a Q&A between Maria and Téa Obreht).

Queen of Kings had a number of other things that happened with the story that didn't go according to plan. "I started with another character. I wasn't planning to write about Cleopatra or a monster novel, but that's what I ended up writing!" she laughs. "I totally jumped genres." Research was a key part of Maria's process for writing the book, using classical writings from Plutarch and others to construct the 'factual' parts of the story. "I did the research and wrote the first draft for Queen of Kings in about five months, and once I established what would happen, the rest came pretty fast," she said.

Research for the book, although rich with classical history, is also full of myth and legend. For Headley, "That's the supremely wonderful thing with fiction - one of the best things about the book is that I was able to use what happened in history and fill it all in with 'maybe ...' and 'what if?' I got to imagine myself in the heads of all of these people, getting a new take on what may have happened," she said.

Darkness has been an issue that Maria's readers have experienced in different ways. Obviously, Queen of Kings is a very dark work, but even with The Year of Yes Headley had complaints. "It was mostly light, but there were dark places. I got a lot of complaints for that, but some parts of life are dark. I really love that about Cleopatra in Queen of Kings, because there is such a struggle with the dark and she's the hero but also the villain," Maria said. "The choice she makes in the beginning has epic consequences, and we all have our demons, trying to do the right thing but it's a struggle."

Queen of Kings is the first in a trilogy - the second book, which Maria is currently working on, jumps over a thousand years. "It really deals with the thought of what it's like to be this (a vampire-goddess who brings chaos wherever she goes) for so long - what is the wear and tear on your soul?" Headley says. "I never thought it would be so much fun to write monster books, and then I kind of fell into it!" she laughs.

"My advice to new writers has always been to sit down and write. It's not an easy career, and you have to be forceful with yourself," Maria said. "Like with the early days for Queen of Kings; because my deadline was so tight, I had to go crazy, and I just went there. It wasn't about the market, it was about 'trusting your crazy'."

Roeing Oaks: A Book Review

2011-07-18T12:19:00.000-07:00

Set in late 19th century England, Kristina Emmons explores the shocking practice of the sale of wives in her debut novel, Roeing Oaks. Sixteen-year-old Kate lives with her mother as keepers of a small estate where they have lived for all of Kate’s life. When Kate’s mother receives the news of the death of her father, she is forced to tell Kate the horrible events that preceded her birth: Kate’s mother, Lady Victoria Percy, was married to a gentleman (Lord Alistair Percy) who sold her shortly after learning of her pregnancy. She was sold to Earnest Thurgood, a kind but poor foreman who cared for Victoria and Kate until his death. Her maternal grandmother and most others still believe the lies that Lord Percy had spread regarding the disappearance of his wife. The book follows Kate’s journey through family intrigue while she seeks to clear her mother’s name, discover the truth, and her relationship with a mysterious nobleman who seems to have more to his nature than a title: Mr. Roeing.

Roeing Oaks tells a tale of prejudice, deception, secrets, and the pursuit of justice. I've rated it based on my book review policy:

Plot: The storyline was fascinating for me, primarily because I have never heard of the practice of selling one’s wife. The book flows considerably well for a first novel, although I did experience a couple of moments of confusion. Star Awarded.
Characters: The character of Mr. Roeing is definitely interesting, and I look forward to learning more about him in Emmons’ impending sequel. I felt like Kate could have been more emotional - her mood doesn’t grab me as a reader at times, because at parts through the book I found it difficult to relate to or understand what she was really feeling, or why certain emotions came out of an event. Half-Star Awarded.
Setting: Setting in Roeing Oaks isn’t described to the extent that I would like to read. There are certain times when Emmons describes scenes that I can feel or taste, but those times are rare. I feel like the setting could be more deeply described throughout the book. No Star Awarded.
Originality: I consider myself pretty widely-read (although of course, I have a long way to go), and because I had never heard of the practice of wife-selling, this part of the review definitely receives a star. Emmons explains the practice and really shocks the reader with the details, and although I would have liked to read in more detail about Lady Percy’s feelings in that moment and the ones that followed, that’s another part of the review. Star Awarded.
Style: This may simply be my editor’s eye for this kind of thing, but I noticed a few spelling errors and times when the wrong word was used in a sentence. The errors were not grossly spread throughout though, and I feel it was an understandable amount. Half-Star Awarded.

Roeing Oaks receives a total of three Stars. I do want to recommend this book as a very interesting piece of a history that is not widely written, and the topic is very interesting. I look forward to reading Kristina’s sequel, and learning more about Kate, Mr. Roeing, and the family.

My Apologies...

2011-07-14T18:44:00.001-07:00

I want to explain why my posts were near non-existent this week: I got a new job (100% writing-focused, managing content and editorial for a start-up home decor company), which started on Monday, and it's taken all week to get acclimated to my new schedule and tasks. That, and with the changes, I haven't had the energy or inspiration to write even more once I get home from writing all day!

I promise next week will be more eventful on SeattleWrote!

Seattle Author: From Imagination to the Printed Page

2011-07-12T12:07:00.000-07:00

After announcing to her grandfather at the age of nine that she wanted to be an author, Martha Brockenbrough began a literary journey that has spanned the random and ridiculous to the serious and newsworthy. "I first remember telling stories when I wanted to get out of trouble - I had an imaginary skapegoat named Jeda, and she was really, really bad," Brockenbrough laughs. "It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do!"

Martha Brockenbrough, photo by Emerald England.

From being a reporter, editor, high school teacher (where she taught a newspaper class, a first amendment class, and was the yearbook adviser), Martha exudes a satisfaction that I find inspirational among the ranks of writers. "A stunning number of my students have gone on to be authors, and I really think that it benefits students to have teachers who actually do the work and write," she said. Martha took on a 'real job' in the late 90's to work for Microsoft (MSN.com) on a then-shocking platform called a weblog. Her writing endeavors later extended to the Society for Children's Book Writers and Illustrators in 2004 as a blogger and contributor, and currently contributes to multiple publications. "It's been a very 'catch as catch can' career," Brockenbrough says. "Whatever I'm interested in, I kind of get to do ... Lately, though, I've been trying not to do as much of that stuff, because I need to be more focused on writing children's books, but I'm never going to say no to something that seems like fun!"

In 2002, It Could Happen to You: a Diary of Pregnancy and Beyond was published. The book stemmed from Martha's 'Mommy Chronicles' blog for MSN.com, and although she had a children's book written ("A really hilarious book about urination - kind of a Shakespeare mashup," she says), it had no success. Many rejections later, It Could Happen to You became a book. Martha is candid about her first experience as a published author: "I didn't know what I was doing - I was like, 'Oh, I'll repackage my blog, and it'll be a book!' I mean, I love it, and I am really glad I have it, but it's kind of disappointing when blogs become books. Especially when you can do more than that," she said.

The experience was hardly a negative one, says Martha. "It was exciting, fun, and I’m proud of it. The best part is that I am still in touch with my readers. It's a kind of magic: you can take something that's just your experience, and share it with others," Brockenbrough says. "Almost 9 years after publication of that [book], I know so much more about parenting and being a person, I wish I could expand on [the book]. But the whole experience was a dream come true. I made lasting relationships with readers - even today, I hear from them. And that makes me feel like every minute was well spent."

Brockenbrough is the founder of National Grammar Day and the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar (SPOGG), and I just had to ask about her love for grammar (She also wrote Things That Make Us [Sic]: The Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar Takes on Madison Avenue, Hollywood, the White House, and the World, published in 2008). Surprising for me, it was her students from her high school teaching days. "Some students back then needed assistance, but I didn’t want to be that teacher, so I started the grammar society as a fun way of teaching people not to dangle their participles, etc." she said. "It started to take off from there, and then it was mentioned in the New York Times, and then I got letters from the correspondence director for the Queen of England, and a letter from George W. Bush - finally, Grammar Girl joined for the National Grammar Day, and it's always nice when someone teams up with you for your made up holiday." Overall, Martha says, "The more you know about language, the better a writer you can be."

A well-written story is what takes the cake for Martha Brockenbrough. "I love well-written stories, it’s the thing that made me want to be an author when I was a kid - and you don't have to be a genius to do well," she says. "My slow-publishing path is an indication to the fact that I am not a genius, but it gets me up every morning at 4:30." Good writing is also a challenge, and one of Brockenbrough's biggest struggles. "One of the hardest things to deal with is thinking you're a good writer. It's such a small part of it - there is so much that goes into writing a good book - particularly a good work of fiction," Martha said. Capturing the audience is another struggle. "With a picture book, you're dealing with so many different things for your audience. It's all about how to capture the audience by the characters, and it's really an alchemy of turning something into a glistening story - that’s an art."

Martha has two children's books coming out in the next year or so, The Dinosaur Tooth Fairy and 10 Commandments for the Dead. (Read about them here). With the latter, she really worked with the question that so many fiction authors deal with: what if? "I used to talk about 'when my life would begin' - the idea that your life hasn't started yet just because you're young - well, it isn't true. In 10 Commandments, the characters have this mentality, and then they realize that they're dead, but they still have things they want to do, so the 'what if?' is how would they grow and change together," she said.

Writing may be recognized as one of the loneliest occupations out there, and although Martha feels the pangs of being alone, she has quite the network. "Writing is hard, it's lonely. But the friendships, manuscript exchanges, and all of that is really encouraging," she said. Her husband is working on his first Young Adult novel, and her two young daughters are both trying their hand at the craft. As lonely as the occupation is, it's also special and unique according to Brockenbrough: "It’s an individual thing - you’re telling the story only you can tell, in the way only you can tell it."

Being a jack of all trades with her writing, Martha definitely has some experience to share with aspiring writers: "Read and read and read and read. Get to know the books that are out there, do your best to understand why those books work, and you know they work because they were published!" she says. "Figure out how you can be good at what you love to read. Write as much as you can. If I write every day, I'm able to write more, and more easily. Don't waste your time taking it too seriously, if you’re spending more time thinking about being a writer, that causes more stress and you won't actually write." Being determined is a huge part of what it takes to succeed in the craft of writing, according to Martha Brockenbrough. "You must persist. Know that it takes some people a really long time, so make it as much fun as you possibly can while you're working. The amount of money you’re going to make whether you succeed or you don't is pretty much the same, so you might as well enjoy it!"

For Freelance Writers Only: 8 Must-Have Skills

2011-07-07T11:53:00.000-07:00

For a profitable freelance writing career that will allow you to quit your boring day job to move forward with your writing, the following eight skills are necessary.

Photo from here.

You've got to have ...

1. Money Savvy-ness. Freelance writers must manage their money well. You need to know how to pay the least amount of taxes, be both aggressive and realistic about your writing rates, and be a hard-nosed collection agent when it is needed. Know your worth and act on it.

2. The Ability to be Picky. Do not accept every assignment, and don't accept grunt work. Do not take on work that will drain the life out of you and leave you with very few hours to market yourself, do your writing and look for better work. If you find yourself jumping on every assignment, perhaps you've started freelancing at the wrong time in your life. Pouring hours into low level jobs will not advance your freelance writing career. Instead, it will burn you out early, and send you straight back to your old boring office job to pay your bills.

3. Consistency. Keep a consistent schedule, and don't cycle depending on your financial needs. Some freelancers will work themselves into a sweat when there are bills to be paid, and then cycle down when the money is rolling in. This cycle prepares you only for a lot of stress and ultimately, burn out and failure. One thing to note: professional businesses have set hours in which their clients can contact them. You are a professional business, aren't you?

4. A Professional Image. Freelance writers who want to be taken seriously establish a brand that gives their customers confidence and projects a sharp image. They network that image, and make themselves known.

5. The Ability to Think in Terms of Multiple Returns. Successful writers keep payment in mind, yes, but there are more and different returns to be had in assignments. For example, keep in mind potential for future work, potential recommendations, and the likelihood of references. Professional writers know which assignments pay dividends in recommendations and references, and go after those assignments first.

6. Insider's Knowledge. Successful freelance writers have insider's knowledge about the business. They keep their ears open in freelance writing communities, read their colleagues' blogs, and go to conferences and training events to network and meet potential clients. They learn what rates are being charged, what companies and editors to go after (or avoid), what magazines are going bankrupt, what is working for their competitors, and what simply isn't.

7. Ruthlessness. You should keep an attorney in your pocket, and know when to go after non-payers. Watch for plagiarizers, because that's money straight out of their pockets. Know that your clients are clients, not friends, and don't put up with creeping projects or freebie "extras." Play hardball when you want a particular client - even if one of your colleagues is also competing for the same client.

8. Organization Skills. Professional writers know that organization helps with all of the above. Those who track clients have a ready-to-go marketing list. Those who track hours know exactly what to charge for any kind of project. Those who track expenses never over-pay on their taxes. Disorganization costs money and time and is a sign of an amateur.

Quiz Yourself: Which Word is Right?

2011-07-06T12:42:00.000-07:00

Spell check can't help you here! Should you write 'affect' or 'effect'? 'Accede' or 'exceed'? Take this quiz to test your word selection prowess!

Seattle Author: Always a Storyteller

2011-07-05T12:06:00.000-07:00

Photo courtesy of Linda Beed.

Despite a history of telling stories, Seattle author Linda Beed studied theology instead of English or Creative Writing. "The way I write is very different from most people - it’s something I do well, something I enjoy - it never takes precedence over family priorities," says Linda.

Her first book was initiated in a slightly unconventional way. "One day saw a short story contest, and I started working on and idea," she said. "As I was writing, I thought to myself, 'ooh, this could be a book'. I talked myself out of it, but my sister said, 'you really need to finish this, so I can know how it ends'!" Thus began Business Unusual, Linda Beed’s first novel in an expected trilogy.

After Business Unusual was published in 2007, Linda Beed was officially an author. Since then, "I cannot imagine a day when I would not write something read something, it just opened up a door," says Beed. "Growing up, I spied on people to tell on them. It’s part of me - I just need to know. With writing, I love the process. I love to know how these things came about, and answering the 'what if?' - how do you apply that question and make that story uniquely yours?"

Answering the question of 'what if?' is something that Linda is doing continuously with her writing. "Fiction is not just fantasy, it’s expounding on possibility. No reader should exit a book the way they entered, they should learn something, whether that’s how to laugh more or something else," Linda says. "My passion for the business of writing equals and sometimes surpasses my passion for writing itself. Everybody doesn’t want to read a thriller, romance, etc. The world is full of eclectic readers and writers, and your book could be that one. I was tired of reading the same book, so I wanted to do something different."

The characters in the Covenant Series (Business Unusual is the first) are certainly unique to Linda’s goals. "I don’t like weak women, and with Business Unusual, I wanted to show a development - a process of the growth of a relationship. It was also important to me to show healthy relationships, and how you grow a healthy relationship," Beed said. "A lot of people were angry with me, because I don’t end the book as a fairy tale, I end it with something that is feasible, but that is what works. By the end of the story, he [Hayes, the leading male character] doesn’t get what he goes after, because he’s not ready."

Making people angry because you don’t end the story in the way they would expect is one thing, but for Linda Beed, it’s also become a major challenge because of the narrow points of view out there, she says. So she makes connections to delve into the diverse writers’ communities in the area. "Being an author, the way your work gets exposure is getting the opportunity to be a speaker, speaking with authors, getting feedback, etc." says Beed.

As part of her efforts to be a member of a community of writers, Linda directs the 'Write Plan', a three-day conference of workshops, elements of writing instruction, fiction- and nonfiction-writing tips, how to set up your writing business based on your vision, and how to make the most informed decisions for publishing. Beed strongly desires to educate writers in the Seattle area, but she also has a particular interest in encouraging black writers. "There are so many, but where are they? My desire is to give black writers in the Pacific Northwest an outlet, create that place where they can come out and share their work," she says.

Through the Fire is Beed’s second novel in the Covenant Series, and it’s due to release late this summer. "With this book, I’ve changed the roles between Bernadette and Hayes - where Hayes is learning that to become the person he was always meant to be, rather than the person he was wanting other people to believe he was," Linda said. "While writing it, I really learned how not to be in a hurry, how to be my authentic self. With Business Unusual, I was really concerned - more than I should have been - with what the editors would say if I were in a real publishing house. Through the Fire is more my own voice, because I didn’t write the story to fit a certain criteria, but I wrote from my heart, and that’s what a writer should be free to do."

Linda Beed’s advice for writers is twofold: "First, you need to have the passion for it, because it’s not for the faint of heart. And second, you have to know the industry. Define what it is that you want your writing career to look like, learn that industry - whether it be historical fiction, memoir, nonfiction - and grow your plant," she said.

The Author-Editor Relationship

2011-06-30T12:29:00.000-07:00

The jury is mostly out for the authors I've met with over the months, on whether they love working with an editor or hate it. A lot of authors really appreciate their relationship with their editor, and some recognize why it is necessary, but don't like the process at all. Apparently, Jane Austen had an interesting relationship with her editor, William Gifford. But it goes both ways in that situation; Gifford helped Austen's grammar and prose to become fluid and beautiful, but Austen's later books lost the unique voice that was hers because of the changes.

So how does the process and relationship look between an author and editor? Leonard G. and Carolyn Stanford Goss have a helpful look at the relationship. Here are their three points:

1. During the editorial process, editors work with authors to produce books that are as excellent as they can be, in terms of both content and quality. Editing is usually done on screen - sometimes only for house style, sometimes in a more comprehensive way, depending on the specific needs of a given manuscript.

2. As editors edit an assigned book, they typically correct misspellings, punctuation errors, and incorrect word usage, and generally conform the book to house style. The editor also identifies and, in cooperation with the author, clarifies unclear writing, theological or historical inaccuracies, and potentially offensive material.

3. Some see the editor as a supercritical, academic-monastic individual who cackles as he edits a manuscript so heavily that writers can't recognize their own work. Others idealize the editor as a knight in shining armor who will rescue a manuscript (or an author) from obscurity, make the work great, and bring huge success! The truth is somewhere in between.

At the end of the day, the relationship, like any relationship, is all about trust. "The editor respects the writer's point of view, the purpose for the book, the style, and so on, and thus doesn't make the book the editor's rather than the writer's. On the other hand, the writer trusts the editor to tell him what the book is really like and what its strengths and weaknesses are," write the Goss'. "The editor helps a writer focus on a reading audience, on the purpose for writing the book, and on whether the story line, tone, writing flow and style, content, and vocabulary effectively reach intended readers. The editor helps the author remember that quality is just as important as content."

Writing According to Margaret Atwood

2011-06-29T12:08:00.000-07:00

"There’s one characteristic that sets writing apart from most of the other arts – its apparent democracy, by which I mean its availability to almost everyone as a medium of expression." ~ Margaret Atwood, from Negotiating With the Dead: A Writer on Writing.

Margaret Atwood, photo from the guardian.co.uk.

My education was primarily focused on journalism, but since I've always loved to read and I've always had the goal to write a book of my own one day, I've expanded my understanding of the more fictional and lengthy pieces of writing. I love Atwood's quote, because it encapsulates both the journalism and the wider literacy of the craft. In Negotiating With the Dead, Atwood goes on to write, "As for writing, most people secretly believe they themselves have a book in them, which they would write if they could only find the time. And there’s some truth to this notion. A lot of people do have a book in them – that is, they have had an experience that other people might want to read about. But this is not the same thing as 'being a writer'."

Check out more clips from Negotiating With the Dead on Margaret Atwood's website, or here on the blog of Quips and Tips for Successful Writers.

Seattle Author: Writing Through the Ups and the Downs

2011-06-28T12:06:00.000-07:00

M.J. Beaufrand, photo from website.

Previous Microsoft testing engineer Mary Jane Beaufrand decided in 1998 that the stress of her job wasn't worth the struggle, and that it was time to throw herself into a writing career. "I'm doing it because I love it," she says.

M.J. had wanted to be a writer since she was young, and she finally had the opportunity and the time to make that dream a reality. She started with ideas for adult books, but "When I started writing, my books kind of had a mythological feel to them and someone in my writer's group said I was a children's author in disguise," Beaufrand said.

After joining the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI), M.J. began sending agents the 30 pages she had completed for her first novel. "I did what you're not supposed to do! When one of the agents responded and asked for the rest of the book, and I didn't have them, I told him I was going on a family vacation but I'd send it to him when I got back. I finished it in a month," she laughs.

Thus came Primavera, Beaufrand's first young adult novel, about the youngest daughter of the Pazzi family - the enemy of the powerful Medici family during the Italian Renaissance. The young Flora Pazzi deals with family ties, betrayal, plots, secrets, death, and love in Beaufrand's coming-of-age tale. Flora's friend in the story, Emilio, was inspired by M.J.'s friend of the same name, who died in a mountaineering accident. Similarly, Beaufrand's second book The River, is a tribute to friends of hers who were casualties of crystal methamphetamine. "I'm drawn to dark things," M.J. says.

Challenges are part of any writer's career, but M.J. seems to work well under pressure. "After I sent my editor a draft of The River, my editor wanted a bunch of changes within two weeks. Halfway through making those changes, my hard drive fried itself, and I had lost all that work! The stress level during that time was like the Microsoft days," Beaufrand says of the time. "My doctor asked if I had thought of taking prescription drugs - I think it's ironic that I was on drugs to finish that book!" Not surprisingly, "facing the blank page is always difficult for me. The first draft is also tough. I'm working on a book now, where it took me two months just to get through the first chapter," she said. "You write as far as your headlights take you in the dark."

"There's a shift that comes when you become a parent," M.J. says of her experience writing for young adults. "I had a miserable time in middle school, so I like helping these people through that time." She's currently working on the second draft of another novel, To Believe in David Bowie, about what she calls a "group of punks". In addition to her writing, Beaufrand teaches creative writing at Bellevue College, and would advise the pre-MFA, pre-published author M.J. Beaufrand (and other aspiring authors) to "Just show up at your desk everyday - the more you do it, the better you'll get, and don't be afraid to take criticism. It's a danger for beginners who just want praise and don't want to work. Finally, be persistent, but there is such a thing as not the right fit. When you get rejected, you have 24 hours to feel sorry for yourself, but then it's back to the desk to keep working!" she says.

SeattleWrote Book Review Policy

2011-06-23T11:44:00.000-07:00

I've had a few requests from local authors to review their books, and so my readers will be seeing more frequent posts on my thoughts about those books in the near future. I am happy to do book reviews, but I wanted to start by setting up a few parameters:

Books have to be written by a Seattle-area, or Washington author.
Be willing to mail me a copy of your book (although sometimes I will post reviews on books I've read without request from the author).
Nonfiction is not reviewed - my reasoning for this is that nonfiction is difficult for me to review with an opinion, since they are based on fact. An exception to this rule would be creative nonfiction, which I am happy to look at from the 5-star system.
All books will be reviewed based on my 5-star system (see below).

The SeattleWrote 5-Star book review system is made up of five parts to writing that are critical to the process of storytelling. The number of stars I list a book as receiving means that book achieved that number of the following five parts:

PLOT: Does the storyline flow? As a reader, am I drawn into the events and directions of the story?
CHARACTERS: Are the characters three-dimensional and interesting? Are they relate-able and realistic? Is the dialogue understandable and fluid within the scenes?
SETTING: Does the author describe the settings and locations in the book in such a way that the reader can 'see' it? Are the settings realistic and attainable to the reader's imagination?
ORIGINALITY: Is the idea, plot, story a new idea, or is it overdone? Does the author offer a fresh perspective on something that's been captured in story form before? Am I interested in the story, as the reader?
STYLE: (Boring, I know) Are the basics; spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc. kept in check, or are they distracting?

If you would like me to review your book, please send me an email - I'd love to take a look!

Téa Obreht Interviews Maria Dahvana Headley

2011-06-22T12:34:00.000-07:00

In writing an Amazon review for Headley's new book, Queen of Kings, I came across this Q&A between Téa Obreht and Maria Dahvana Headley - a fabulous Seattle author whom I'd love to feature on SeattleWrote soon.

Téa Obreht Q&A with Maria Dahvana Headley, about "Queen of Kings", for Amazon:

Introduction from Maria Dahvana Headley: I met Téa Obreht, author of The Tiger’s Wife, because I read an article she wrote for Harper’s Magazine about Eastern European vampire legends, and wrote her a love letter in response to it. I was deep into the revision of my own vampire book, Queen of Kings, when I read the article, and I was re-reading passages dealing with vampire legends much older than those she was writing about, but there was no competition, just admiration. The article was strange, strong, magical, and raucous, just like Téa herself. I wouldn’t say that our books are terribly similar, but I would say that we (and they) have similar preoccupations. An interest in monsters and beasts, and the strange relationships humans can have with same. A fascination with folklore and myth. A few months later, we met for a drink after a reading Tea did in Seattle, and we discovered that we also both have a dirty sense of humor, a tendency to laugh loud and long, and the kind of personality that attracts strangers to our table, usually bearing peculiar gifts. I’m honored to be interviewed by her.

Téa Obreht, photo by Beowulf Sheehan.

Maria Dahvana Headley, photo by John Ulman.

Téa Obreht: Tell me a little bit about Queen of Kings. How did it start? How long did it gestate? Has this subject matter always been something with which you always wanted to deal in writing?

Maria Dahvana Headley: I started writing Queen of Kings in September 2009, in what was essentially a fit of madness. I’d been working intensely for four years on another book, a novel based in my family history, and I could not seem get it right. Worse, it seemed to be driving me crazy. Michael Chabon has talked a lot about this, working on a “wreck” – and has recently, bravely, published an annotated version of part of his own wrecked novel, Fountain City. Suffice it to say that I completely relate. One day in the middle of another 800 page draft of my leaky, half-sinking, occasionally awesome novel, I was struck by a sudden idea for what is now the second book in this trilogy. It’d never occurred to me to write anything like this, but the book is full of things I’ve been interested in my entire life, mythology and classical history, gods, monsters… Everyone in my life was no doubt weary of my moaning about the other book, and so I got a lot of encouragement to start something new. Still, it was hard to put all that work on the back burner. I gnashed my teeth for a few days, and then started feverishly writing Queen of Kings, which I sold a few months later, literally as a first draft, and then rewrote extensively for another few months after that. It was a surprise, but a happy one. I had no idea what kind of book I was going to write, almost until the moment I finished it.

TO: Coming off the stunningly successful publication of your first book, The Year of Yes: A Memoir, you’re in a unique position with Queen of Kings-—both your books are, in some way, “firsts”. Why did you decide to make this leap from memoir into fiction, and what has surprised you about it? Did you find the writing process very different?

MDH: It’s a departure, for sure. The Year of Yes is not only a memoir, it’s a comedic one. Queen of Kings isn’t funny at all. I think there’s one funny line in the book – or at least, only one that’s intentionally funny. I hope there aren’t more! I never considered myself a memoir writer for the long haul. I started as a playwright, and then wrote short stories for years. The Year of Yes was a kind of lovely fluke, and though it was a great experience, I think I’m actually happier writing fiction these days. That book felt like a collection of stories I might tell at a cocktail party, and this one feels like a story I might tell if I were Scheherazade working my way through 1001 nights. It’s a much bigger canvas. Though all stories, whether they’re fiction or nonfiction, are told through the storyteller’s filter, there’s something wonderful in getting to truly make things up. Even though Queen of Kings is a hybrid of historical fiction and dark fantasy, and contains a lot of factual material, I was still able to create monsters. It turns out that it’s a great deal of fun to invent monsters. I had no idea!

TO: Queen of Kings is delightful and surprising and difficult to encapsulate, negotiating a well-known and much-beloved historical episode with your own new and incredible mythology. Talk to me about genre-bending: what made you want to dust off the Cleopatra legend, and what kind of balance did you want to strike between historical accuracy and the world you wanted to work with as a writer? Did you feel intimidated at all by obligation or homage?

MDH: The thing that drew me to your work was actually a similar kind of genre-bending spirit: your novel The Tiger’s Wife is both literary fiction and stunning fantasy, filled with folklore, myth, and magic as well as history, and when I read it, I was floored. Queen of Kings has a equally wide range (though it’s a very different kind of story and book). Perhaps I just have a greedy spirit and want a book to contain everything all at once! I love the idea of monsters and witches, Gods and ghosts being part of a novel rooted in real events. In classical Rome and Egypt, a story like the one I invented for Queen of Kings wouldn’t have been at all beyond the pale. These were societies in which the gods wandered amongst the people, and in which magic and witchcraft were utterly believed in. It was only a small step, therefore, for me to find very natural places for my magical creations to mix with the story of Cleopatra, Antony, Augustus and the Roman Army. I researched the book with Plutarch, Suetonius, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and many more texts, and I was able to depict a lot of the history very faithfully – in part because the history itself is full of mysteries and inconsistencies. In many cases, I simply filled in the gaps. Of course, there are definitely places in the book wherein the history and I diverge radically – this, after all, is a book in which a woman sells her soul to a goddess, and becomes immortal. Sekhmet, the Egyptian chaos goddess featured in the book actually IS vampiric. She’s not called a vampire – that word didn’t exist in the ancient world – but she drinks blood. That’s really in the mythology, and it was a lot of fun to play with it in this story. Even novels that are straight historical fiction are works of fantasy in many regards. We imagine ourselves into the minds of people we don’t know, people who perhaps actually existed. No matter how accurate our research is, there are always unknowns in any kind of story. And even though lots of people have written terrific books about Cleopatra, this one is fundamentally different, so I managed to feel relatively calm about taking on her legend. Perhaps I should’ve felt a bit more stressed out! There’s certainly a lot of baggage associated with the most famous woman in history, but there are a lot of glorious unknowns, too.

TO: Here’s a question I often think about myself: what is it about the darkness in myth that draws us as readers and as human beings?

MDH: I love that question. I think that there’s something so compelling, in story terms, in the surprises often found in myth, the creatures appearing out of dark water, the monsters chasing and then falling in love with their prey, the tender (and sometimes not so tender) nearly-human desires in the hearts of beasts. Your book, particular the sections involving the tiger, and from the tiger’s perspective, is all about this notion, and you deal with it beautifully. With their fantastical elements, their metaphor and spectacle, myths have something interesting to say about both the complexity of love, and about the randomness of life. Many things in life do not, after all, follow a rational narrative. In myth, characters are often punished by the gods for things that they did not do. Sometimes life is the same way. Myths almost always have life and death stakes, and I think we crave stories like that. We are in lots of ways savage creatures who’ve been only superficially tamed. These days, love looks to us like hearts and flowers, but the classical version of love is often a great deal more brutal and complicated. The story of Hades and Persephone, for example, begins with a kidnapping, and ends with what in many accounts seems to be a loving marriage. I actually thought quite a bit about this as I was writing this book, given that a lot of the mythology I was reading and drawing from is incredibly bloody. There’s a character in Queen of Kings whose actions are based in part on those of Medea, for example, a woman who is most famous for brutally murdering her own children. (Fear not, that actually doesn’t happen in this book – I was more interested in Medea’s youth spells.) As well, the heroine of this book does a lot of things I’d never do myself. She kills a lot of people. I had to put myself into a mindset where I could imagine why she would, and empathize with her. Essentially, I spent a lot of writing days in the mind of a monster, hungering, desperate, and compelled, longing for lost loves, and vengeance.

TO: Reading Queen of Kings, I sensed a lot of gothic undertones, I’d love to know more about what inspires you as a writer. How do you experience literary influence? Are you drawn to the work of other writers by language, by theme, by their treatment of story? To what works did you return—or, perhaps, what works did you discover—while writing Queen of Kings?

MDH: I’m an obsessive reader, and I’m fortunate enough to be friends with many of the writers I most admire. Do they influence me? Of course. Everything I love influences me. Many of the writers I most adore create works that are stunning both on a sentence to sentence level and on a plotting level. I happen to like books in which BIG things happen. I love cliffhangers, and twists, mystery and surprise – and I especially love them when they are written by writers who care about language. Words, are, after all, a significant part of the ingredients to any magic spell, and for me, the best books are enchantments. To my eye, writers like Guy Gavriel Kay, Neil Gaiman, Rikki DuCornet, Peter Straub, Angela Carter, Kathryn Davis, China Mieville, and you (!) have been really successful in mixing together disparate ingredients and creating a new kind of storytelling. I also re-read George R.R. Martin’s fantastic Ice & Fire books right before I started writing this. He kills characters. Unapologetically. It’s very much what I was saying a moment ago about myth. Weirdly, though, one of the things that most inspired this book was a very ancient kind of storytelling. I started thinking about the oldest novels and epic poems, from Beowulf to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, to Apuleis’ The Golden Ass, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses – and they’re all fantasy twined together with history and realistic events. Those books inspired me as well. While I wrote, I wallowed in the wonders of Ovid and Virgil, the Sibylline Oracles, and in the Sir Thomas North translation of Lives of Noble Greeks and Romans (circa 1593, which Shakespeare used as source material for Antony & Cleopatra). Pure, if geeky, pleasure.

TO: And, of course, what’s next for you? Do you think you’ll stay with fiction, move back to memoir? Venture into something new?

MDH: Queen of Kings is the first book of a trilogy, and I have all three books mapped out in my head, (the second one is in progress) so I’m definitely going to be busy with fiction for a while!

About Téa Obreht:
Téa Obreht was born in Belgrade in the former Yugoslavia in 1985 and has lived in the United States since the age of twelve. She She has been named by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty and included in the National Book Foundation’s list of 5 Under 35. Obreht is the author of The Tiger's Wife.