Getting reviews...

Wow. In my search to try and figure out how to better market my books -- specifically, The Vanishing of Owen Taylor -- I checked out some organizations that do reviews. Which you pay for. A LOT for. Each one.

Kirkus, which I'd already heard of, charges $425 for one review. You get it in 7-9 weeks. If you want it faster, there's a surcharge...and you get it in 5-7 weeks. You can post it to Amazon, B&N, and a host of other sites as well as on theirs.

Blue Ink charges nearly $400, as does Net Galley. Same lead time. You can get reviews for cheaper, maybe, through Independent Book Publishers Association; you just have to be a member ($200 per year) and they are unclear as to whether or not you can post those reviews to any other site...but I haven't dug all that deep into them, yet.

I do have one review of OT, and it's a positive one -- on GoodReads. One of the three people I sent a freebie to did it. Nothing massive, but it's there. I'm glad for that much.

It's funny -- How To Rape A Straight Guy has literally dozens of reviews between GoodReads and Amazon, most being positive but some being extremely negative...and just about all shocked at how they felt about Curt (the protagonist) at the end. It'd be funny if my first book turns out to have been my best book. It's still my best-seller...closing in on 3000 copies sold, though I'm guessing at the numbers sold by Nazca Plains based on the money they owed me and the royalties specified in the contract.

Right now, I'm trying to decide how I'm going to tell the book form of The Alice 65. All my narrative works have been first person, so far...so I'm tempted to do third, this time. I like the idea of the omniscient POV. BUT...Adam has a good clear voice and wants to tell his own story. Same for Casey...though not quite as adamant. I could do like the book version of Laura (which was told by 4 different people)...or what I did with Bobby Carapisi -- alternate between them. I wish I could figure out some way of having a first person tell it in third person, like in The Lyons' Den.

I guess I'll decide that on Tuesday, when I begin.

Rough week

Ending with a trip to the dentist, tomorrow, for a cleaning. And a trip to Chicago on Monday. And a drive to New Jersey the following Monday. And then Hong Kong...and me without a brain, right now.

But none of that matters as much as what's happened the last couple days. Working on A65. I don't want it to be a script. I detest having to cut to keep the flow of the movie going. Resent it. I think it's already become a book in my head, and I'm unwilling to do the adaptation into a screenplay. If that makes any sense.

Hell, does anything I write make sense?

Busy month ahead...

So I voted Absentee. I'll be at a packing job in Connecticut on the 8th. I'm also doing a day trip to Chicago and that hop over to Hong Kong for a week. Then after Thanksgiving is a possible job in Berkeley, again, not to mention a tantalizing one in Maine, up near St. Johns, New Brunswick. It'll be fun.

Of course, this is happening as I'm planning to do National Novel Writing Month, again, but I think reworking A65 into a book will be relatively easy, compared to OT...or not. I'm trying to make it funnier and more character oriented while still maintaining a semblance of reality about it...so I may be making it harder. I won't know until I get into it and start pounding my head against the wall.

But the challenge is just to hit 50,000 words to reach your goal. I used to say win, and they do call you a winner if you make it, but reality is you don't get anything from it except the push to get your next book done. Only I have 5 that aren't completed, yet. First drafts, barely, not revisited. I ought to sit this one out...but I like Adam and Casey and want their stories told, so...away we go.

My excuse for not concentrating on P/S is simple -- I do not want to churn out a non-stop downer of a book like Angela's Ashes. I know it won the Pulitzer and it's a testament to the human spirit and all that, but God it was a depressing read. I didn't see the movie; couldn't handle that, too.

So I'm using A65 to work on my humor. Find ways to make P/S...well, not so much uplifting as honest about how kids can be, even in poverty. Like Hope and Glory did with kids in London during the Blitz and Empire of the Sun did with a boy separated from his parents and put in a Japanese prison camp. Kids cope, usually a lot better than the adults, do.

But Brendan doesn't want to merely cope. He's got friends and family and a profession he enjoys and a girl he wants to marry. All he asks is to be left alone to follow his life. Nothing grand or brilliant, but a life where he can be happy.

If only the bastards would let him.

A pat on the back...

I'm rather proud of myself, right now. I went down to get my Saturday mail, today, and in it was a weird letter from my insurance company telling me they were charging me triple what I was charged, last month, and didn't explain why. It's set to be debited from my checking account on the 1st. And, of course, I can't call their customer service on a Sunday (I have to wait till after work, tomorrow, because I do not like sharing my personal life there) and it may be too late to stop the automatic charge.

This sort of thing throws me to the ground, usually. But today I shrugged it off, figured I'd call about it, tomorrow, and worked on The Alice 65. Reading my notes from the comedy class had given me some ideas, so I red-penned them into a printout of the script. All of them. Didn't let myself freak out, at all, when normally I'd crash into "WTF, how can I deal with this?"

Tomorrow, once I'm done with my phone call, I'll begin inputting the changes. They're not really big alterations...just ways of making Adam and Casey more interesting, emphasizing the humor better, intensifying the emotional moments...and clarifying a couple of story points I don't think I did very well but noticed as I was working. The one big change is, I added a dance sequence to the party, where Adam reveals his mother made him take ballroom dancing as a way to get him to exercise until he got interested in football...uh, soccer. So he can waltz, tango, cha-cha, and paso doble...just like on Dancing With the Stars...all super-mod and everything.

Takes Casey by surprise. The only reason the dancing happened was because she saw Lando and his new squeeze, Veronica, arriving to the party and she wanted him to think she really is with Adam when she's just been using him. But she's finding that he's not as much of a dork as she expected...and that she likes him. It's after this point they start revealing their secret lives to each other.

Ah, love, romance...who knew within minutes a love-sick panther would come between them?

Reworking and preparing...

A couple years back I took a comedy writing class where the scenes I wrote wound up developing into The Alice 65. I reread my notes and printouts from that time, today, to see if they could help me find a way to bring more humor to my work. Make some bits funny, even if the rest was dramatic or tragic or action-packed...and what it's done is give me ideas on bettering A65 when I do the book.

Some of them are humorous, but most are ways to deepen the characters, oddly enough. I mean, I know I'm never going to be the kind of writer who can put out a script or story like Something About Mary or Dumb and Dumber or Talladega Nights. The closest I've come is The Lyons' Den, which is another writer's tale taken to a farcical, almost absurdist, level...and The Lavender Curse, about a tough cop having his mind switched with his unloved mother-in-law's just before he's set to make a big arrest and she's to appear in a beauty pageant...which I thought was funny but apparently no one else did. And for which I no longer own the rights so can do nothing about.

I do have some funny bits in The Cowboy King of Texas...but that's really more of a dramatic-romance than a romantic-comedy-western. And is based on John Millington Synge's The Playboy of the Western World; I just Americanized it.

That story is satirical from its inception -- a man who killed his father is elevated into heroic status by an isolated town, but when the dead man turns up alive, the town turns on the hero. My favorite bit is in the third act, when the father slips into town and no one knows who he is except one woman who's helping the hero hide the truth. As they're talking, people are beginning to link father with son, so she tries to make out like the father's gone crazy from drink...and winds up making people think she's the crazy one. And that setup's from the play.

Horace Walpole once said -- The world is a comedy to those that think; a tragedy to those that feel. I guess I do too much of the latter and not enough of the former to figure out how to switch sides.

Sharing words of wisdom offered by way of a friend...

My kick-ass cinematographer buddy, Brad Rushing, sent me these tidbits by Mark Twain in anticipation of National novel Writing Month, starting the first:

1) “A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.”

2) “There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn’t because the book is not there and worth being written — it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and if you fail to find that form the story will not tell itself.”

3) “A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results. So he goes to work. To write a novel? No–that is a thought which comes later; in the beginning he is only proposing to tell a little tale, a very little tale, a six-page tale. But as it is a tale which he is not acquainted with, and can only find out what it is by listening as it goes along telling itself, it is more than apt to go on and on and on till it spreads itself into a book. I know about this, because it has happened to me so many times.”

4) “Don’t say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.”

5) “I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English – it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them – then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.”

6) “The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say.”

7) “Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.”

8) “My books are water; those of the great geniuses is wine. Everybody drinks water.”

9) “Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”

Oh, and one little tidbit -- Killing Moon is a semi-finalist in the 13Horror screenplay competition.

Dude, the 'tude may be rude but it's been imbued with thoughts to be chewed, since it means I'm not booed and my writing's the food that enhances my mood...except when I'm screwed by characters crude...but still there's no feud for as one is clued into the soft blued lights that shine on the shrewd who are then well-wooed to be lovingly nude...with their thoughts neatly queued.

Damn the torpedoes...full speed ahead!

I took the leap and made a Kindle edition of The Vanishing of Owen Taylor. It's up on their page and I've begun to spread the word. I have to do everything I can to help the book; it hasn't been selling very well. I'm hoping this will assist, since Amazon has a near chokehold on e-book sales.

I'm also researching ways to market the book. Taking an hour a day to work on it. So far, I already do most of what they say to do -- have a website, blog, network -- but I'm falling flat on getting people to review it. Haven't got a one, yet, despite giveaways and queries and all the attendant nonsense. But I'm still working at it.

I'm doing this to learn how to better work the marketing on my next book...which will probably be a paperback of The Alice 65. Next month is National novel Writing Month, and I'm taking the challenge to make A65 into a novel. Dig more into Adam and Casey and Lando and the like. There's a lot to them.

Something else this is doing is helping me see more clearly into what is needed for Place of Safety...to my surprise. I have a good idea of the plotline, but it needs more to make it both meaningful and interesting. Brendan's wish to just live his life is great; it's just not a novel's worth of storytelling. At least, not this long of a novel. He's not exactly Candide...though that's a good place to start.

Another thing is, all of my contacts, now, are in the rare and antiquarian book business. Not really into the new book world, anymore, so they can't help much...though A65 is set in the antiquarian book world. Maybe I could send copies out to the dealers I know. And Book Soup does offer my books. Maybe I should contact them about a book signing when I'm going to be in town, next time.

I wonder how much advance notice they need?

Dear God...this is a hit?

The problem with watching TV these days is it hurts you. Not in ways you can see or even imagine, but it still sucks the smarts out of you and makes a mockery of intelligence and reality. Which is why I don't watch it. Except for the last few Sunday nights.

I'm watching Quantico...one of those pretty people make pretty heroes up against impossible odds kind of shows. I'm doing it because Russell Tovey is in it and we're tweeting. And...thank the gods...he's damned good in it. The camera loves him when he's moving and acting and doing his thing. He gives his line readings a lovely spin and has more chemistry with the lead female than the nominal male lead does. So that part is not a waste.

But the writing...OMG...it's an embarrassment. The show has a hostage situation where something like 1600 people are being held in a high-rise in downtown NYC and the terrorist-kidnappers have people patrolling all over the place, but the lead female gets to scurry about without being seen...and gets an extra set of bad-guy clothes...and yet for some reason the lead male winds up attacking her as a way to get someone's hood off without realizing who she is until he does realize and it just goes on and on.

I have yet to see one original concept in it after 3 episodes. And these supposedly super-smart people keep doing stupid things to forward the story -- like blundering questions while trying to find out something about someone else. And the CIA has a father and daughter working together to train them? There's even a body falling from the sky scene straight out of Die Hard.

I justified taking time out to watch it by doing some sewing.

More info for Place of Safety

I got a couple of maps of Derry, today. One's from 1905 so only vaguely useful; the other is from sometime in the early 50s, when the Creggan Housing Estate was being plotted out. It shows the streets of the Bogside as they were before redevelopment destroyed them...each named. This was worth the money, no question.

Unfortunately, other questions are ramming me, at the moment, so I'm not able to focus. I've been getting hints that I may be out of a job, soon, and I am not at all in a place where I can handle it. It may just be my own sense of inadequacy and paranoia eating at me -- I've never been comfortable in Caladex's office; I have to do things in there that are the opposite of how I normally work. Keep secrets. Not help people as much as I'd like. Follow specific steps in minute detail to get things done. I understand why all of this is necessary; it's just not intuitive to me.

I'm sloppy. When I do a packing job, I know how to keep things in order and what needs to be done where. I showed that when I packed up a painting on glass and transported it 300 miles in the back of a minivan without it being damaged...or any of the other items with it. When I pack books for shipping by air or freight, they arrive in good condition...unless the freight company goes out of its way to damage them, which has happened, once.

Same for dealing with UK and European requirements for export licenses and customs paperwork. We're bringing dealers in for the Boston Book Fair, the end of the month, and even though others in the office had gone over this one dealer's packing list, I found a couple of issues that needed to be addressed...while I was still away from the office. We're working on getting them corrected, now.

But when it comes to all the details of setting up the shipping and schedules and handling the vendors we use, I'm crap. I assume they will do their jobs, but half the time they don't. Even FedEx and UPS have reached the point where you have to monitor them, nonstop, and I feel that's intrusive. Which is stupid, but real.

And it's telling. By this point, I should know everything I need to know...and I don't. I'm still hesitant about how best to fill in a master airway bill of lading when it's coming to the US but not going the normal route and is without a sub-airway (known as a house bill) and it makes me feel very inadequate. And working out the best, cheapest routing is still beyond me.

So while I wouldn't mind leaving the job, I would mind not having the salary. And that's the rub. I'm broke beyond measure; in debt up to my eyeballs. If I lose the income, I'm bankrupt...at best. So I'm now spending my time trying to figure out my next move.

And coming up zeroes.

Been to the valley, now climbing the montaintop...

This was the view from where I had lunch, on Wednesday. Just sitting on a porch in a rocking chair and gazing across those hills did more to clear my mind of its clutter than anything else I'd tried, the previous week. Not even taking a ferry from Seattle to Bainbridge Island and back in the brisk, sharp rain worked.

It also made me receptive to the following comment by Hope Clark, in her newsletter, Funds for Writers:

SO-CALLED WRITING REQUIREMENTS

A remarkable part of this profession we've chosen is that there are no age restrictions. We can be young, fresh out of school, and thanks to our wide-open, untethered, rose-colored glasses view of life, we can create a remarkable tale because we've never been told that sort of tale won't sell. We can be retired, a wealth of knowledge collected from life experiences, and choose to mold those moments and thoughts into stories before our time is done. And we can be anything in between.

Bram Stoker was 50 when he published Dracula.
Laura Ingalls Wilder was 64 when she wrote her first Little House book.
Frank McCourt was 66 and waited until he'd retired from teaching to write his first book, Angela's Ashes.
Raymond Chandler was 51 when he published the first Philip Marlowe mystery noir.

On the other side...

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein at age 19.
Alec Greven published How to Talk to Girls at age 9.
Helen Keller wrote her autobiography at age 22.
Christopher Paolini published Eragon at age 18.

The moment you tell yourself you are too young or too old, you are simply throwing up obstacles in front of yourself, because age doesn't matter to anyone else. Writing is about pure word mastery . . . at any point in your life.

Likewise, education is not a requirement. You may earn an MFA in creative writing or start in high school. What matters most is your motivation. My degree was in agronomy (agricultural plant science), yet I've published six mystery novels.

Amanda Hocking was a millionaire with her fantasy works by the age of 25 after only two semesters of community college. Jonathan Franzen isn't a fan of authors getting an MFA, but Alexander Chee is. Junot Diaz has an MFA and still doesn't think anyone needs it. Read more in this piece, 27 Writers on Whether or Not to Get Your MFA - http://flavorwire.com/476264/27-writers-on-whether-or-not-to-get-your-mfa

Then there are the high school dropouts: Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird), Augusten Burroughs (Running with Scissors), Jack Kerouac, William Faulkner, and Jack London.

When you set conditions on being a writer, you're fooling only yourself. The biggest requirement is an intensity to write, and a fire in your belly to be better, and better, until you can write no more.

I was starting to feel old and weary and down because of a whole host of issues...but the last few days have turned my self-denigration around and rekindled the fire within. I got lots of shit to say, and I'm gonna say it.

Watch me burn.