Writing from Montana, the Last Best Place

Craig Lancaster: Building Edward Stanton

noreply@blogger.com (Carolb-MT) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:28:00 +0000

It's a very great pleasure to feature Craig Lancaster today! Craig is an up-and-coming young writer with a delightful, moving, and encouraging novel titled 600 Hours of a Life, just out from Riverbend Publishers in Helena, MT. Craig and his wife, Angie, live in Billings.

In his guest blog, Craig tells how he built the character of Edward, the protagonist of the novel. Here's Craig!

For any writer who attempts to breathe life into fictional characters, two questions are inevitable, and they often come in succession:
1. Where did you get the idea for your character?
2. Is the character you?

For purposes of discussing Edward Stanton, the protagonist of my debut novel, 600 Hours of Edward, I’ll deal with the second question first, by way of comparison points.

Edward is 39 years old. I was 38 when I wrote the book.

Edward lives in Billings, Montana. So do I.

Edward is enchanted by the following things:

the ’60s cop show Dragnet,
rock ’n’ roll performers R.E.M. and Matthew Sweet,
and the Dallas Cowboys.

I can recite whole sections of Dragnet scripts, own every R.E.M. and Matthew Sweet album and have sacrificed more Sundays than I care to count genuflecting at the Cowboys.

Edward is 6-foot-4 and about 280 pounds. I am in the neighborhood of both of those numbers – in the case of the weight, only if it’s a very large neighborhood.

And yet, for all of those similarities, Edward is not me. He’s more afflicted than I am (he has obsessive-compulsive disorder and Asperger syndrome). He’s not as jaded. He trusts only what he can see and verify, while I tether myself to hunches. And, at his core, Edward is sweeter than I could ever be.

He isn’t me.

But for 25 magical days last November, as I furiously drafted his story, I became Edward.

Edward’s story spills onto the page in a first-person, present-tense point of view. My decision to approach the story in that way was grounded in practicality: I wanted his story of transformative change to happen on the ground, in the moment, as he saw it. The immediate side benefit of that approach was that I slipped into Edward’s head almost from the get-go. His flat, non-ironic tone found its way from my imagination to my fingers on the keyboard. Rarely has writing been so effortless for me, and that was true all the way through the first draft. I never lost my footing, and I never lost the threads of the story, even as my imagination of them changed dramatically. I ascribe that entirely to being overtaken by a character who rang true in my head and in my heart. I have no other way to account for it.

Casting Edward as an obsessive-compulsive Aspergian was another calculated move. In the earliest conception of the story, I wanted a main character who lived his life in patterns. Among other predictable behavior, Edward ends most of the 25 days of the story by watching an episode of Dragnet (in sequential order) and then writing an unsent letter of complaint to whoever is addling him (that the letters are never sent is the idea of his therapist, Dr. Buckley, which is all the better to keep him out of trouble). By structuring the story in such a way, I figured that I could build a dramatic arc into the infrastructure of Edward’s compulsions. This worked out better than I could have ever hoped. But some stroke of luck, many of the morals of the Dragnet episodes proved applicable to the corresponding junctures of Edward’s story. That this was so can be chalked up only as a happy accident.

Edward came with two primary challenges in the drafting and revising stages.
First, it would have been all too easy to make him a butt of a book-long joke, given his condition. That was unacceptable to me, and I suspect that it would have been unacceptable to readers. People who have read the book have generously complimented the comedy that pervades the story, but not once has anyone accused me of creating that fun at Edward’s expense. In retrospect, that was a niftier trick than perhaps I gave myself credit for achieving.

Second, his delivery is so flat that I became intimate with the maxim “kill your darlings.” Each time I took a whack at the manuscript, I would hammer into submission the occasional florid phrase where Edward’s sensibility had fallen away and mine had taken over. I deleted several sentences that, in the drafting stage, had filled me with pride. While it hurt to see them go, it was the right choice. Edward’s believability lies, in part, in his consistency.

To illustrate this, I offer up the following section of the story. It’s fairly late in the book, and I needed Edward to plumb an emotional depth that he had never experienced, but in his own words:

I find myself wishing that I had taken pictures of that snowy day in front my house, when Kyle was riding his Blue Blaster and Donna and I were throwing snowballs. Photographs, it seems to me, are both moments in time and bits of memory. I have the memory of that day with Donna and Kyle, but I also know that the camera that created the memory is imprecise. If I’d had a real camera, instead of just a memory, I could have caught the moments so that they would never escape me. If Donna has decided that she no longer wants to be my friend, I’ll have to desperately hold on to those memories so that they never get away, because I won’t have the chance to replace them.

When my 25 days of being Edward Stanton came to an end, I brimmed with something approaching melancholy. Fortunately, it didn’t last. These days, I get to revisit him every so often, be it through a venue like this one or when someone reads his story and is kind enough to share what it meant. I treasure those moments, just as I treasure him. On my horizon, I hope, are dozens of characters waiting to be discovered and explored. And yet I’d be surprised if I come to like any of them more than I like Edward.

I hope you like him, too.

on Amazon.com.

Craig's Web site: craiglancaster.net

Craig's blog: A Mind Adrift in the West

Love or Money?

noreply@blogger.com (Carolb-MT) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 20:13:00 +0000

For writers, that's often the question. I knew a writer once who said she didn't write for the market, and as one might expect, none of her six novels was ever published. I hope she stuck with it and eventually had the success she was looking for, however she defined success.

Samuel Johnson (1709 - 1784), who wrote the first dictionary of the English language (1755), famously wrote that "none but a fool writes for aught but money." One way or another, Dr. Johnson, who emphatically did write for money, has been a towering figure in the English-language literary scene for the last 250 years because James Boswell's biography, Life of Johnson, still a classic of biographies, made him famous.

Myself, I write for love and money. Both. While I'm writing a novel, I'm in love. I leave it as regretfully as I'd leave a lover, and come back to it with the same joy a reunion with that lover would bring. I wrote God's Thunderbolt: The Vigilantes of Montana with all the emotions of being in love: joy, frustration, despair, fear, and happiness.

What do I love about writing? I love the characters. Martha's desire for a better life, Jacob's exultation in freedom from Cossack pogroms against Jews in Eastern Europe, Tabby and Albert Rose's wary adjustment to life after slavery, Dotty's enjoyment of "pretties," and Timothy's gradual understanding that Dan won't exploit him. And I love Dan Stark. He's a kind of amalgam of all the good men I've known, especially father and husband. I can't say I love Tobias Fitch, but I love finding the well springs of his greed.

Along with all this, I love the writing itself. It's like turning a kaleidoscope to bring the inner pattern into focus. Draft after draft, turn after turn, and then -- it's there! Sentence rhythms and structures, metaphors, actions, dialogue: everything works together. There's no high like it that I can imagine.

Once the book is done, it's like dropping off a cliff. I'm lost, bereft, as if a lover had left me. Until the next one. Then I can fall in love again, as I have with the current WIP, Gold Under Ice.

With the book in my hands, everything changes. It's "Bring me the money, baby." A curious objectivity sets in, because the love of the last couple of years (seven in the case of God's Thunderbolt) has become a product. I tell it to get out there and make us some money. If you will, the fickles artist leaves her lover to the businesswoman.

I don't write for love or money. I write for love, and go after money later.

I've been lucky with the first book, in that people like it. After all, that's the point, isn't it? To write something that people like to read.

Distribution: A Gordian Knot Still Tied

noreply@blogger.com (Carolb-MT) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 23:03:00 +0000

Last week I began what I envisioned as a series about distribution for self-publishers, but now, frankly, I'm not sure I'll have much to say about it.

Self-publishers have plenty of opportunities for widespread distribution, but none of them is very satisfactory. Or so I think. Maybe something will happen to change my opinion, but right now I'm still waiting for an enterprising distributor to slice through that knot.

The reason I'm looking for widescale distribution is to get into brick-and-mortar bookstores. God's Thunderbolt: The Vigilantes of Montana, my Spur-award-winning literary Western, is already doing well on Amazon.

Let's be clear. I'm talking about the bound book, not ebooks, audio books, or podcast books. For paper-based books, publishers (self- or traditional) have limited avenues available. They can produce books in quantity and store them somewhere in fulfillment centers or they can produce books as POD (print on demand). The two major distributors, Ingram and Baker & Taylor, distribute both forms of books. B&T is a relative newcomer in producing POD books; they announced their TextStream system last week. Ingram's wholly-owned subsidiary, Lightning Source, Inc. (LSI) has been printing POD books for some time. Both companies are rather less than the best solution for independent publishers and authors, because they require that the POD book, for mass distribution, be produced through their systems.

If a self-publisher wants to use either distributor, that author must furnish what used to be known as "camera-ready" copy. "Throw and go" might be another term for it. This means the author must furnish the PDF file that LSI or TextStream can print, bind, and ship. For me, at any rate, this is a significant problem. Huge, even. I sent for B&T's instructions on creating the PDF file. (PDF stands for Portable Document Format, and it's produced by software from Adobe, Inc., the company that makes Photoshop and Illustrator and a host of software for building Web sites.)

There are two primary problems with making the PDFs. For one thing, you can't just write your book in Word, click a button, and have Word convert it to the sort of PDF file acceptable to LSI or TextStream. For one thing, the documents have to be formatted with running headers and footers and margins and chapter headings (if you use chapter breaks) -- everything just the way a book is done. Second, TextStream, at any rate, does not accept TrueType fonts, the fonts that come pre-packaged with your word processing software. These fonts have coding that enables them not only to be printed on paper, but on the Web as well. TextStream doesn't accept that coding.

The fonts also have to be embedded into the file. I haven't a clue how that's done.

Third, the author would have to purchase special software. Adobe Acrobat Distiller is not acceptable because it apparently does not produce high enough resolution to be print-worthy. LSI, last I checked, will accept 300 DPI* (dots per inch), the same resolution that magazines use to print photographs. TextStream (read Baker and Taylor) wants 600 DPI* resolution.

The software can be purchased from Adobe, Inc., but it's expensive. So is the learning curve. A self-published author told me she spent a full year, maybe rather more, learning how to do it.

Perhaps eventually the time and investment in the software would yield a satisfactory return on the investment, but at this point it's not an experiment I'm likely to make. I'll keep looking into other avenues for widescale distribution.

Don't forget: November 5, Craig Lancaster, author of 600 Hours of Edward, just out from Riverbend Publishing of Helena, MT, will be here to tell us how he built the character of Edward, a man afflicted with obsessive-compulsive disorder and Asperger syndrome. It's sure to be interesting and delightful, just like Craig himself! Besides, I loved the book.

*DPI: Ink is put on paper in tiny dots. If you look at a photo in a magazine or newspaper with a strong enough magnifying glass, you'll see the image disintegrate into its dots. 72 DPI or PPI (pixels per inch) is the common resolution for images that you see on a computer screen. Paper needs at least 300 DPI.

Distribution: The Self-Publisher's Gordian Knot

noreply@blogger.com (Carolb-MT) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 18:22:00 +0000

You did it! You wrote and published your own book. Along the way you mastered the sometimes arcane terminology of the publishing process, but now you're baffled. How do you get the book into the hands of readers?

Distribution.

Some of you might say, "No problem. I'll put it on Amazon." That works, but putting a book on Amazon, even if sales do well there, not in the Sarah Palin category or Dan Brown's, but OK for a new author without fame and hype to back up the book, is only part of the story. Only one strand of the Gordian Knot called distribution.

Another vital strand is called "brick and mortar." That includes bookstores, both chains and independents, and non-bookstore outlets such as gift shops, feed stores, grocery stores, and Costco. People who visit those places may or may not buy your book, or mine, from Amazon.

Salespeople say, "Look for customers always and all ways." A writer can, of course, choose to promote a book online through a variety of social marketing media. But that may drive sales to the local stores, as well as to Amazon. This is too small a sample to be any sort of trend, but during the summer two men with whom I've become acquainted over the Internet e-mailed me that they had bought God's Thunderbolt: The Vigilantes of Montana. One bought it at his local Borders store; the other ordered it from Amazon.

Both are, obviously, Internet-savvy. Yet one went to a store and the other went online.

I've been contemplating the distribution problem -- for it is a problem to many self-publishers. I want out of the distribution loop. I don't want to manage inventory, or track it, even if it's only 50 - 60 books at a time. I don't want to sell on consignment to bookstores and wait sometimes 90+ days to get paid.

So how do writers get our work into the hands of readers? You can put it on Amazon and other online booksellers, all of whom tell you how and how much it'll cost. I'm not sure many of the online booksellers are very effective, but my novel is only on Amazon, alibris.com, and abebooks.com. Amazon has done well by me, but I went through Booksurge, one of its wholly owned subsidiaries. That made selling the book on Amazon much easier.

This blog begins a series on distribution methods. I am satisfied with the route I chose, but my solution would not satisfy everyone, and it leaves out the brick and mortar stores.

To start with, I'll share what I know about a limited segment of online distribution. My own Web site, www.swanrange.com, does not have a shopping cart. Instead, it links to Amazon for those who visit the site and want to buy the book. Each of these Web sites has information to tell you how to you can sell your book their site.

Amazon: At the bottom of the main book page are lists of links. In the list headed Make Money With Us, is a link, See All... Clicking on this link will lead you to a page that has information about how to use its distribution services. You can use either BookSurge or CreateSpace, but it provides only the link to the CreateSpace Web site. BookSurge is www.booksurge.com. If your book is already published, click on the label Amazon Advantage. You will find information on this page for converting your text files to Kindle, as well.

Alibris.com has an Alibris Affiliate program about which I've sent for information. In the meantime, you can visit the Web site to learn more. Near the top right corner of the home page, click on the tab Sell on Alibris. You'll find some information there, but for something more in depth, you'll probably have to send them an email.

Abebooks.com is another well respected online bookseller. To find out more, go to the Web site, and in the red bar across the top of the home page, you'll find the link Sell Books. Click on the link, and you'll find three choices from which to choose. If you want the widest online distribution, Become a Professional Bookseller may be right for you. The other two choices involve Abebooks's "buy back" program in which you sell used text books and other books direct to Abebooks and they sell them on. Beyond that, I know practically nothing about their programs, except that one or two self-published friends have used Abebooks and tell me they're happy.

I hope this can help you get started -- before you publish your book -- thinking about distribution. After all, you may have begun by thinking of your book(s) as a labor of love, but once it's in covers, it's a business.

Reviewing Self-Published Books

noreply@blogger.com (Carolb-MT) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 17:03:00 +0000

FLASH!! Craig Lancaster, author of 600 Hours of Edward, soon to be released by Riverbend Press, will be a guest on this blog Nov. 5. He will discuss how he built the character of Edward, a man afflicted with obsessive-compulsive disorder. (I favorably reviewed this novel on Self-Publishing Review under its self-published title, 600 Hours of a Life.)

People often disagree on whether a book is well done or not. Some people think literary fiction is the only kind worth reading. Other people dislike anything that is not written in their favorite genre. Still others consider literary fiction to be dull, depressing, and not worth the tree that was cut down to make the paper. They are entitled to their own opinion.

Over on Self-Publishing Review, another reviewer and I come at this from two different perspectives. I’m a novelist as well as a reader. An odd thing happened when I changed over from reader to novelist-as-reader. I lost the ability to read purely for pleasure. I read all novels critically, not simply for enjoyment. I’m always alert for the poorly cast sentence, the major and minor errors in usage, the misused idiom, the poorly placed modifier, the flat characterization, the illogical plot step. At times I’ll find writing that moves like clotting blood because it’s so dependent on prepositional phrases to carry the meaning rather than on the kernel that I discussed in previous posts. Some novels I absolutely love, but my critical mind has to admit that they might not be very good books. If I were to review a book that’s not so good but I like it anyway, I’d still be duty bound to state what its flaws are. I have hated some novels that won the Pulitzer Prize, and I think the Nobel Prize is politically motivated and not a reliable judge of good literature. However, I could be wrong. The Nobel judges look at literature worldwide, and admittedly my knothole is much smaller. I thought the female characters in Lonesome Done were flat, but it got the Pulitzer and has much to recommend it.

My liking a novel does not mean I think it’s necessarily the best book ever, still less that it has no flaws. I like some books because the characters are interesting as well as sympathetic, because the story takes me into the world of that novel, because the writing sings, or because the setting is fascinating. Or all of the above. I thoroughly enjoy Robert B. Parker’s minimalist style and I love James Lee Burke’s stylistic opulence. Reading the two of them at the same time is great fun and somewhat mind-bending because they’re so different. In terms of truly great books, the novels of E L Doctorow stand first for me, although most of them are not especially accessible. My all-time favorite of his is The March, but his latest, Homer & Langley, while gorgeously written, won’t be ending up on my shelf. The first paragraph contains a sentence so long and beautiful that only a master of the English language could have written it with the control he demonstrates, but the novel is about two handicapped brothers’ slow decline toward death. Not for me. I prefer stories that are more upbeat.

When I review a book, I read it in context of all the English and American literature that I’ve read in more than 60 years, coupled with a PhD in English Lit. I also read with a mission regarding self-published fiction in general.

I hope every time I open a self-published novel to find a book that can help dispel the prejudice against self-published novels. So far, out of 20+ by other self-published writers I’ve found three: Craig Lancaster’s 600 Hours of a Life; Francis Hamit's The Shenandoah Spy, about a young woman during the Civil War who became a spy for the Confederacy; and Celia Hayes's The Gathering, book 1 of her Adelsverein Trilogy. The Gathering is about German immigrants struggling to settle the Fredericksburg area of Texas.(I haven't read the other two in the trilogy.)

Why was Craig Lancaster's book picked up by a publisher but not the other two? Perhaps it's fashion. Lancaster's novel has a contemporary setting, but Hamit's and Hayes's novels are historical fiction. An agent who rejected my novel, God's Thunderbolt: The Vigilantes of Montana, said, "Period pieces aren't selling now."

People judge a self-published book against everything else they’ve read when they look for a good read. Watch people in bookstores. They look at the title, then the front cover, then read the back cover, then open the book and read the first paragraph, maybe a page or two. Every step of that process is a judgment call that leads up to the final question: buy or not buy? All the time they’re weighing the book against what else they like to read. Occasionally, a self-published book is picked up by the stores and has to meet those same readers’ standards. It has to compete with all the other books in the store for the readers’ limited discretionary spending.

Writers, hang out at your local Borders or Barnes & Noble, grab a coffee, and watch people decide what to buy to read. Watch them with your book. It’s not easy, but it's a good reminder. Readers are truly ruthless. They are the ultimate critics. They’re the ones who judge all books.

Editing

noreply@blogger.com (Carolb-MT) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 21:25:00 +0000

I am one of several book reviewers at Self-Publishing Review, Henry Baum's e-zine devoted to self-publishing. Currently, another reviewer and I are engaged in a dialogue about different approaches to reviewing books.

Steve Reynolds (the other reviewer) made a good point in our current dialogue about writers needing editors. I could not have lived without the editors in my former life as a technical writer for an aerospace company. They took my fairly raw material and not only formatted it into clear manuals with different levels of heads and subheads, an index and a TOC, they also on occasion questioned my usage, grammar, punctuation, spelling — and the facts. They’d question me, I’d go back to the system or to the engineer and double-, sometimes triple-check. Together, we did good work in an arena that demanded absolute accuracy.

But sometimes the editing isn’t so good, and I’m seeing some pretty awful editing in some of the books I’ve read in the last couple of months — not only in the self-published books, but in traditionally published ones, too.

Homonyms — words that sound alike but mean something completely different — are something that often escape the editorial eye in self-pubbed books, and I have taken to task more than one writer who didn’t seem to know the difference between write-right-rite, or cite-site-sight, or grizzly-grisly-gristly. Sea-see-si I haven’t seen yet, but I expect to. And yes, I’ve done it myself, embarrassingly enough (site-cite). It’s the accumulation of homonyms that mounts up to critical mass in a book and lowers its quality. Just as with other errors.

But now I’m starting to notice poorer quality among books that are edited. So I wonder sometimes if writers depend too much on editors who don’t have the knowledge or the hyper-critical eye to support their knowledge.

Living in bear country as I do, one of my favorite errors is: “grizzly remains,” when the writer means “grisly remains.” Maybe it’s time to find a completely different phrase to describe rotted cadavers, because I’ve seen it four times in different books during the last 6 months.

If it occurs only once in an entire book, it’s a slip. If it occurs more than that, I suspect the writer and/or editor just doesn’t know and should take the time to learn the tools before issuing a book.

It doesn’t only happen in self-published books, though. Just 2 days ago I started a gritty mystery by a Scottish author, published by St. Martin’s press. In the first 10 pages someone discovers the aged corpse of a small child, and soon the detective is looking at — you guessed it — “grizzly remains.”

The moral? Writers should be aware that skill varies widely among editors. Ask for credentials, samples of work, references. You’re hiring them and your potential career depends on getting the best you can.

On another note: I traveled to Helena, Montana's state capital, last weekend for the Helena BookFest. From my perspective, it was hugely successful. I sold a bunch of books, talked to people interested in Montana's history and in the Vigilantes in particular. Most of all, I made new friends and met an online friend who was a great delight to meet in person. Craig Lancaster is a great guy, and his self-published book, 600 Hours of a Life, has been picked up by Riverbend Press in Helena and is due out shortly under the title, 600 Hours of Edward.

I recommend you read it. It's a fine book by a fine man.

Passing the Buck -- The Passive Sentence form

noreply@blogger.com (Carolb-MT) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 22:59:00 +0000

Being no grammar expert, I've been hesitant whether to include the Passive in this series, but Gus, switching his tail and stamping one hind hoof, said, "Oh, go ahead." After all, the Passive is a sentence pattern as well as what grammarians call a "voice."

All the other sentence patterns I've written about belong in the active voice. They describe someone doing something, or simply existing. (Why existing is considered active, I don't know, but that's how it is.)

But the Passive has its very own sentence pattern: OV, usually without a Subject (S). When I worked for a major corporation, I enjoyed -- with more than a dash of irritation -- how no one ever decided anything. Countless memos read, "The decision was made to...." Good decision or poor one, no one has to take responsibility for it. That is what makes the Passive such a great buck passer.

If that passive sentence were written in active voice, someone would have to take responsibility. "The CEO decided to suspend all bonuses until after the current crisis." The CEO has taken responsibility for that decision. Those who expected bonuses won't be happy, and they may complain bitterly, but they know whom to complain to.

Sometimes the writer doesn't know who's responsible for an action. "The explosion was detonated by person or persons unknown." Or perhaps no one is responsible: "The explosion was not caused by a known substance." Or, "It is not known what caused the explosion."

To summarize, the five primary sentence patterns in English are: SV, SVO, SVOC, XVS, and OV (the Passive). These patterns contain the kernel of meaning in an English sentence.

To strengthen your writing, check the patterns in your sentences and see which words fall into the patterns. You may be surprised, first to find what you're actually saying, and second to strengthen them so easily by putting the meaning into the kernels.

Expletives undeleted -- XVS

noreply@blogger.com (Carolb-MT) — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 23:09:00 +0000

Gus is off grazing, his favorite sport, and his own expletives are undeleted. Sometimes I'm happy I don't speak equine, when he puts his back up and bugles at full volume I'm sure I hear echoes from the Swan mountains 15 miles away. It's rather like when I used to give my Siamese cat a flea bath and endure her swearing at me in feline Siamese.

XVS is the fourth sentence pattern, and as you might guess, it stands for eXpletive-verb-subject. This type of sentence generally starts with "this," "there," "that." As in "This is a really useful idea." "There are some beautiful horses grazing in that field." "That is the worst pun I've ever heard."

The verb involved in the XVS pattern is a linking verb, one of the forms of the verb "to be." The to be verb doesn't do anything; that's my beef about it. It just sits there in the sentence, connecting the subject in the SVC pattern with the complement. He is tall. Well, gosh darn. Isn't that thrilling?

The last question is itself a form of SVC flipped back to front, which makes it a question. Instead of "that is thrilling" I wrote "Isn't that thrilling?" Turning it into a question makes it marginally better because a writer can use sarcasm in it.

But in writing, verbs that just sit there weaken the piece. When I'm writing something, whether it's a blog or something for my Web site, or an email, or the sequel to my (pardon the plug) award-winning novel, I look for two primary flaws to fix in the drafts. First, I look for limp verbs, and the first ones I search out are forms of "to be." Second, I look for prepositional phrases. If I have strung out a series of prepositional phrases, I'll see how to put what I want to say into verbs.

Granted, that cuts down my word count for the day. (Edited: Granted, that cuts the day's word count.)But one good verb does wonders for a sentence. (Edited: One good verb works magic on a sentence.) Sometimes I go for the metaphor instead of the verb.

There's a story about Truman Capote, author of Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood. He supposedly worked all day and wrote one word. Someone gasped, "Only one word?" Capote replied, "Ah, but it was the right word."

I'd lay odds he found the right verb.

In Midstream -- SV, SVO, SVOC

noreply@blogger.com (Carolb-MT) — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 22:33:00 +0000

Gus has been feeling left out lately, so I thought I'd let him practice what he's learned in the last three posts on the Subject-Verb (SV), Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) and Subject-Verb-Object-Complement (SVOC)sentence patterns. Here's Gus's story. My only requirement is that he use all three patterns. I didn't say he had to use rhetorical devices, flourishes, or anything else. It may sound a little odd, because he's translating from equine to English. But my command of equine is fairly basic, as well. He says my pronunciation is off. Something to do with the size of my nose.

Gus's story: My Best Friend, Storm

My friend, Storm, has a new fly mask. It covers his nose and his eyes, and even his ears so flies don't crawl down into them. Storm's new black fly mask looks handsome with his sorrel (light brown) coat. I have a fly mask, too, but I don't like it. I don't have fly problems like Storm does. Storm never had a fly mask before. Storm's previous owner abandoned him, and Storm went lame. Until someone found the man, Storm could not be sold, and no one had the legal right to have his lame leg treated. Then the owner of his boarding stable filed an aegister lien, and acquired title to him, and some kind people bought Storm. They fixed his leg right, and they bring him carrots, and he's a happy horse again.

On the Way to the Chorus -- SVOC

noreply@blogger.com (Carolb-MT) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 17:45:00 +0000

How it came to be that I last wrote in this blog two weeks ago, I don't know. But I've promised a five-part series on writing effective sentences, so here's the third sentence pattern: the SVOC.

The purpose of writing about sentence patterns is not to bore you, but to let you sing. English has a music to it, that far too few writers hear and far fewer write. I think the English language is alto or tenor, German is baritone verging on bass, French is soprano, and Italian is coloratura, while Spanish is alto. Russian sings bass, as does Japanese, and Chinese is a multi-part chorus with all its tones that have different meanings.

Knowing about the sentence patterns helps a writer to put the meaning into the part that does the heavy lifting. The rhythm sets the beat. With sound and beat, writing rocks 'n' rolls. Or becomes an aria, a symphony, a cantata. On the way to that kind of writing, come the very mundane grammatical suggestions. Pay attention to what your sentences contain in their kernels of meaning, aka the sentence pattern, and you'll be on your way to writing that sings.

So what the heck is an SVOC pattern, anyway? It is Subject-Verb-Object-Complement. As in the sentence, We painted the town red. Or should that be "We painted the barn red"? They're both SVOC sentences, but with entirely different meanings, thanks to one change in the object.

In the first three English patterns, the subject comes first, then the verb, and then the object. The subject is the do-er, the verb is what is done, and the object is that which is done to. In this pattern, "red" is the color we paint the barn, or the town. It's the "complement," because it completes the object, and the idea in the sentence.

Writers who read this are now empowered with three instruments to help their writing start singing. Subject-Verb (SV), Subject-Verb-Object (SVO), and Subject-Verb-Object-Complement (SVOC). Just for fun, test your writing by taking a close look at what you've written. Where does the meaning lie? What do you want to say with sentence? If the meaning you want to convey is expressed by the kernel of meaning (SV, SVO, SVOC), you have a strong sentence. If you have buried the meaning somewhere in the modifiers, the sentence will be stronger if you recast it with the meaning in the kernel.

Coming up: the SVC, XVC, and passive voice. The weaklings of English sentence structure.

Tools of the Trade: The SVC Sentence

noreply@blogger.com (Carolb-MT) — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 21:03:00 +0000

The SVO sentence is a very common one. The SVC sentence is common, too.

See what I mean? I just wrote two SVC sentences in a row, and did you notice the similarity between the two? Each joins two nouns with "is."

SVC stands for Subject-Verb-Complement. That's complement with an "e." We're not saying something nice about the sentence; if we did that, we'd call it a compliment. The word complement comes from the same root as "complete," as in this less-than-sterling example: She has a full complement of brains. Or this one: The soldier has a full complement of ammunition. Those two sentences are SVO sentences that you can break down to "soldier has ... complement" and "she has complement...."

Gus lifted his head from his grazing long enough to say, "Those are two of the worst English sentences ever written." He was so embarrassed when I read them to him that he refused to let me post his picture. For such a vain equine, that means extremely embarrassed. His white blaze almost turned pink.

But Gus is right. Those two SVO sentences are weak because they don't say much of anything.

The SVC sentence just says that something is something. "Is" and other variants or forms of the "to be" verb are considered weak because they don't do anything. They are considered auxiliary verbs, the kind of verbs that need something else to complete themselves or to complete the subject. George is .... Ok, George is what? Fat? Thin? Red-faced? Running? A horseman? Any of these can complete the sentence about George. The sentence about George needs one of them or something else to complete it. Sure, we can write, George is. That's the same as writing, George exists. And in a way that's meaningless, too. Everyone is, in the sense that everyone exists -- except if they're dead. Then we write, George is dead. Poor George.

OK, so Gus is right. George is dead. He was embarrassed. This entire blog post is full of weak SVC sentences, all to demonstrate one thing about them. SVC sentences are weak because the kernel of meaning doesn't say much.

Kernel of meaning. That's the heart of a sentence, and everything else may be fluff. Take the sentence I just wrote. Please.* Rewrite it for me. The kernels of meaning in that compound SVC sentence (two kernels of meaning because I wrote a compound sentence) are "That is ... heart..." and "everything ... is fluff." I've put the meat of the sentence in the modifier in the first clause, the bit before the "and."

The two SVO sentences that Gus complained about are weak because their subjects have complements, and that tells us nothing. They need the prepositional phrases in order for us to know what the complements are: "of brains" and "of ammunition." Without those two prepositional phrases, we'd have meaninglessness. As it is, we have near meaninglessness. The reader must scramble the sentences to remove the "of ..." phrases and get the sense. "She has brains." "Soldier has ammunition." That is what I've written in those two sentences. Simple, third-grade setnences that could be mistaken for grown-up complex sentences just because I tossed a few extra words around a form of the verb "to be." Politicians do that a lot. It's called obfuscation, or obscuring meaning with extra words.

If there's one principle of good writing it's this: strong sentences carry meaning in their kernels. (Sorry, but I needed modifiers to accomplish the purpose of that sentence.) Another way of saying it is this: Strong sentences carry nuggets of meaning. I'm coming to hate prepositional phrases, and I'll explain why in another blog. For now, just remember that the SVC sentence is among the weakest of English sentence forms because they depend on a form of to be verb to link two nouns or a noun and an adjective together.

Just for fun, when you read, look for the kernel of meaning to discover what the writer says. You may be surprised, and sometimes the writer would be surprised, too.

Next time, the SVOC sentence.

*This is a paraphrase of a very old joke from pre-PC comedy: Take my wife. Please.

Tools of the Trade: How the SVO Sentence Works

noreply@blogger.com (Carolb-MT) — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 16:51:00 +0000

Today I'm beginning a new series called Tools of the Trade. It'll be a little crankier than my other posts because I feel strongly about this. So does Gus. Neither of us can understand how some people can call themselves writers when they won't learn to use the tools of the trade.

It's like someone once said to me, "I don't need lessons to ride a horse." Only, as Gus put it, no one ever asks the horse how it feels to have someone yanking at his teeth or pulling his vertebrae out because they knew how to ride a horse before ever they got on one. When he came to me, he was terrified of being saddled because his back was out so badly. Horses have only their behavior to communicate with, and Gus's behavior was close to outlawry in horses. He bit, he kicked, he bucked. A good equine chiropractor and horse trainer began solving all those problems, and I completed the solution. It took years, but he has been worth it.

Merely speaking English does not make us writers, any more than singing off key qualifies us for the Metropolitan Opera.

If I set myself up as a carpenter, people would soon notice that I haven't the faintest idea how to handle a saw, and that I'm as likely to hammer my thumb as the nail. Yet people can call themselves writers when they do not know how the English language works.

So I've decided to spend the next five blogs explaining how a sentence works. There are 5 basic sentence patterns, and if I explain them, maybe someone will be a better writer for it. Admittedly there's nothing sexy about the forms of a sentence, just as there's nothing sexy about sitting on a horse going round and round on a longe line. But knowing how a sentence works makes a better writer, just as longe line lessons make a better rider.

The most common English sentence is the Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) sentence. I drink coffee. I ride my horse. The horse kicked the wall. The horse did not, thank goodness, kick me. A flood of impressions hit him at once. (I didn't say the examples would be great writing. Yet.)

The subject is the actor, the verb is the action, and the object is the thing or person acted on.

In each of these sentences, the subject is the first noun or pronoun in the sentence: I, horse, and flood. The verbs are these: drink, ride, kick, did kick, and hit. The objects are: coffee, horse, wall, me, and him.

Not such interesting sentences, are they? But each is a perfectly decent example, except for the last one. Look at it again: A flood of impressions hit him at once. This is a very weak sentence because its meaning does not lie in the SVO pattern. It doesn't say what it intends to say. It actually says, A flood hit him. Hurricane Katrina, perhaps, or the Mississippi gone over its banks.

Not quite what someone might want to convey, is it? Perhaps a writer wants to communicate the character's sense of confusion. The flood is a metaphor for the confusion, but when a metaphor is used in a straightforward SVO sentence, the result can be unintentional confusion for the reader. The human brain is a wonderful organ, and can sort out what a sentence should convey, but the trouble of sorting out a writer's meaning should not be left to the reader. It's our job to do that.

We owe it to our readers to write well. They spend their hard-earned cash to buy our books because they expect pleasure and learning from the experience. They expect to escape their problem-laden lives, or they expect that our writing will help them solve some of their problems.

But when we write poorly constructed sentences, we're not doing them a service. And if we're so arrogant that we feel we don't need to learn even the basics of our craft, we're cheating them, defrauding them.

Our readers deserve the best we can give them. We owe them that. And ultimately, we owe it to ourselves to do our best work. With anything less, we're defrauding ourselves, too.

It takes years, sometimes, to learn how to write as well as we might be capable of. But as with gentling Gus and earning his trust, it's very well worth the effort.

Literary Snobberies, or some fiction don't get no respect

noreply@blogger.com (Carolb-MT) — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 20:19:00 +0000

An online writing teacher developed a list of all the literary genres recognized by publishers and distributed it to her class. One of her students told me that Westerns are not on the list. At all. Nowhere. Not even the "literary Western," which is the genre for my novel, God's Thunderbolt: The Vigilantes of Montana.

So far as this teacher is concerned, Westerns, by implication, don't exist. He/she isn't the only one. As I look for an agent or entertainment attorney to take this award-winning novel to film, the great majority of the ones I've found so far say, "No Westerns."

At least they admit there is such a genre, but with that blanket prohibition, those of us who write good fiction set in the 19th century West of the Mississippi River are dismissed out of hand. Yet Westerns continue to sell, and even if they're not the Next Big Thing, they have a sizeable following. I'm building such a following myself, among both men and women.

Agents and publishers don't want to handle them because they don't sell in numbers large enough to be a good ROI (Return On Investment) for the effort to produce and market them, or so it would appear. I can understand that. It's a business decision that any self-publisher should be able to understand. It's expensive to publish a book the old-fashioned way, with all the warehousing and distribution nationwide. That's another topic, though.

What I do not like is that a teacher should leave the category off the list entirely. But that, perhaps, is merely a symptom of a larger problem: Literary snobbery. And Lord knows, that's not a new problem. Literary snobs have ruled the reading public probably since there were writers.

The great English poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850) changed the entire poetic landscape of his day. Prior to his appearance, the published poets wrote in certain styles that were applauded by the literati of that time, and they mostly confined their poems to pastoral or historical subjects. Along came Wordsworth with his friend Samuel T. Coleridge, and they wrote about things around them and inside them. They wrote deeply personal poems that expressed how they felt about life. Wordsworth wrote an epic poem about -- Wordsworth. The Prelude is an autobiography in poetry, and was not published until after he died. He said of it that it was "unheard of that a man should talk so much about himself."

Since Wordsworth and Coleridge, English & American literature has written about people's emotions, and the best writing of no matter which genre appeals to our feelings. For much of his career, though, he and his family suffered the sort of poverty that doesn't provide enough to eat, or a decent place to live, until a friend got him a job as a (sort of) postmaster. By the last 20 years of his life, he was recognized as a giant of literature, but his first 30 years as a writer were tough. Most people would have given up, I suspect, but Wordsworth soldiered on. He wrote to a friend that some writers have to create the taste by which they are to be appreciated.

I suspect that may be true for some of us now. Not just writers of literary Westerns or any other sort of Western, but of genre fiction in general.

I hold a PhD in English Literature, which means if nothing else, I've read lots and lots of books, and I have read some of the best writing ever in genre fiction, in thrillers, and mysteries, and -- yes -- in Westerns. And it's more than time for the literati to get down off their high horses and recognize that some brilliant writing can be found where they don't bother to look.

Words, words, words

noreply@blogger.com (Carolb-MT) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 21:33:00 +0000

Remember Eliza Doolittle's complaint in "My Fair Lady"? "Words, words, words!" she sang. "All you ever do is words, words, words!"

Sometimes writers can feel that way, too, especially when we're on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn besides having our own blogs. I've been wanting to write something cool here, something imaginative, something readers don't find lame, and my brain has been like dry oatmeal all week.

Write about not writing? Give me a break.

Write about writing? Oh, dear. Gus might want to write about writing, but this week I wanted to go skiing instead, only there's no new snow in Montana. Might not be any until October. Although sometimes we get snow in August, it's been known to happen, but not now, not here.

Worry, that's what. I had a good, old-fashioned case of writers block, not that I couldn't think of anything to write but that anything I wrote would be about as much fun for you or me as aforementioned dry oatmeal to eat. But now my main source of worry is gone. My sister's surgery for cancer yesterday has turned out surprisingly well, she can begin to get on with the rest of her life, and I'm free of the corroding worry of the last 6 - 7 months.

So what do I celebrate with? Words, words, words. It should be, "Drink, drink, drink," from the drinking song in the Student Prince. (My brain is running to old musicals just now. ) But I don't, so it won't; instead, I'll flirt.

The new novel, Gold Under Ice, set in 1864, takes the protagonist Dan Stark from the gold fields of Alder Gulch (a real place in SW Montana) to New York City (also a real place). An old girl friend flirts with him, but I don't know yet what her flirting leads to, considering she and Dan are both married. At least she is, and he is, sort of. I just know she can flirt, because the OED says so.

If you don't know the Oxford English Dictionary, you're missing one of the most fun writers' tools in the universe. It's huge, because the OED is a historical dictionary. It'll tell you everything you ever wanted to know about words. Pick a word and look it up. Like "flirt," for example. I got lost reading all the definitions since the word came into the language about 650 years ago, and found out that it's a pretty old word. Not as old as "boat," which was part of the original English, but borrowed from the Dutch along with lots of other seafaring words. The original Beowulf was written in Old English, that dates, if I remember correctly, from the 900's, or so. Back in the arc of time, I read Beowulf in that Old English, and taught it on the collge level. Still remember the first word: "Hwaet, god Konig." (Not sure about Konig, but the "Hwaet" became our modern "what," and "god" became "good," and "Konig" became "King." Very roughly translated, Beowulf opens with "What! Good King!" because it was addressed to the king, as many entertainments were.

It only took a millennium for that story to be turned into a movie.

From the OED I learned that Harriet can flirt with Dan, so I don't have to find a word that communicates "flirting" to a modern audience but is a term that a Civil War era person would use.

That's a difficulty with writing historical fiction. A fellow writer a few years back saved me from writing "crime wave," because, she said, that phrase didn't come into the language until the 1920's, so it would be entirely inappropriate for a mid-nineteenth century person to use.

Using the wrong word, a word that would not have been known then or would not have been used in that way, is called an anachronism. Some of you reading my novel(s) might not know or care, but I'd know.

I might commit an anachronism, but it'll be accidental, and when I'm in doubt I'll look it up in the OED.

Because you can trust that if something is in one of my novels (God's Thunderbolt: The Vigilantes of Montana as well as the ones I haven't finished or even written yet), it was true in the history, or could have been true. If not, it won't be for lack of trying.

The Heart of Robert the Bruce

noreply@blogger.com (Carolb-MT) — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 17:20:00 +0000

Book signings can be worth the time and effort to get there. Or not. Depending on how far a writer has to go to peddle a book, a signing can be -- and often is -- a big fat waste of time. If you think only in terms of copies sold, that is. I recently opted not to make a 700-mile round trip because I couldn't make the numbers work. To break even with expenses, I'd have had to sell 32 books. I wasn't confident of being able to do that, so I decided not to go because the trip would have meant 3 days at $150 per day. I still wonder if I made the right decision.

Last night I drove to Whitefish (15 miles) to the Whitefish Farmers Market where I sold 2 books. Count 'em -- 2. Not a super return for two hours of smiling and chatting and waiting for someone to stop by. But I enjoy the company of the writer who volunteers time to the Whitefish Library table. He didn't get much business, either.

I'd been thinking of packing up and going home early when a couple stopped by to ask about the book. From their accents, they weren't from Montana -- or even the US. They were from Scotland, and I think my last name (Buchanan) piqued their interest. Buchanan is one of the oldest and largest Scottish clans. One of my husband's ancestors was a treasurer to Robert the Bruce. The couple exchanged glances, and the man said, "I'm an Anglican priest, and I recently interred the heart of Robert the Bruce."

He had my attention. As best I recall it, with advance apologies if I get some of the details wrong, here's the story.

Robert the Bruce (1274 - 1329) , King of Scotland, died on a Crusade in Palestine. He asked for his heart to be buried in Scotland, and his wish was carried out. But centuries passed and more than 700 years later, people began to wonder if it were really Robert's heart buried in the grave. So they disinterred that which was buried there and did DNA testing on it.

(By this time, I was wondering how on earth they could get the second sample to compare and be sure it was King Robert's heart.)

Forestalling my silly question, the Anglican gentleman told me that the best they could do was to determine that the heart was indeed from the 14th century. Mission accomplished.

Having dug up King Robert's heart, they couldn't simply plop it back into the ground. It had to be reinterred with all due ceremony proper to a king's burial. So the Anglican priest, a Catholic priest, and a Prestbyterian minister (representing all primary phases of Scottish Christianity) participated in the ecumenical reinterment of the heart of Robert the Bruce, King of Scotland.

Sometimes a book signing is worth doing even if I don't sell lots of books. I'm happy I stayed long enough to hear this story.

By the way, they did buy the book. Turns out today they travel to Virginia City, Montana, scene of the events in God's Thunderbolt: The Vigilantes of Montana.

A Fool's Grail

noreply@blogger.com (Carolb-MT) — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 18:48:00 +0000

Tweeted my way into a small controversy today. Easy to do when you've only 140 characters to work with. I wrote that writing for money, with apologies to Samuel Johnson, is a fool's grail. Dr. Johnson, the writer of the first English dictionary, is famously supposed to have said, "None but a fool writes for aught for money."

Since he said that, generations of writers have weighed in on the side of writing for love or writing for money: which is better?

Eating is good. I do it myself, especially (as you know) chocolate. To eat requires money, which in turn requires that most people work. Lots of people write and are well paid for it: Journalists (online and elsewhere), bloggers, nonfiction and fiction writers of all sorts in all genres and on several different media. RR Bowker estimated more than 400,000 new titles were published in 2008, between the self-published (like me) and the traditionally published.

Then there are the writers employed by entities, by nonprofit and for-profit businesses and corporations -- the business writers and technical writers. They account for another, often overlooked, portion of those write for money.

Having been a writer nearly all my life, and having gotten paid for writing since I was a teenager, I do not denigrate those who write for money. I have written for newspapers and magazines, I've written manuals for the aerospace industry, I've written and sold 3 nonfiction books on different aspects of horticulture, and God's Thunderbolt went into the black after six weeks. In its first year, it has earned as much as an advance for one of the other books.

Yet though I should have qualified this statement better the first time, I still say that writing for money is a fool's grail when writers have unrealistic expectations that arise from too great a belief in their own talent.

Even for talented writers, unrealistic expectations of the millions to be earned by a best seller can lead to enormous disappointment, especially for new writers.

Sometimes lightning strikes. J. K. Rowling was living in poverty when she wrote the first Harry Potter novel. Hooray for Ms. Rowling!

But for most writers to decide to write with the expectation that they can make millions, thousands, or anything with their book is to follow the fool's grail.

Writing is hard work. If you're willing to work hard for decent pay, find a job as a roofer. Or a hard rock miner. That's about the hardest work I know. But it pays better than many writing jobs, especially novel writing.

Riding a Novel

noreply@blogger.com (Carolb-MT) — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 16:38:00 +0000

I'm riding a novel.

Called Gold Under Ice, it's the sequel to God's Thunderbolt: The Vigilantes of Montana, and takes place in 1864 partly in Montana, and partly in New York City. The title came to me as the characters wait for the ice to melt on Alder Creek so they can dig the gold. Montana and New York don't have much in common except that gold dug in Montana ends up being traded in the Gold Room in New York. In both places some people would do anything to get it, as Dan Stark (the Vigilante from God's Thunderbolt) discovers. Dan returns to New York with his gold to pay off his father's creditors, but if he pays them in gold, he won't have enough to assure his family's independence, so he announces he will pay them in greenbacks at a time when a greenback dollar was worth less than 40 cents to a gold dollar. The creditors are furious, but because greenbacks are legal tender, there's nothing they can do about it. Or so Dan thinks.

You may think I'm writing a novel, and you'd be right. But it feels a lot like riding Gus.

The first draft is always the hardest to get up on. Gus is a tall horse, 16.2 hh, or 5'6" at the withers. I can use a 3-step mounting block for him, but there's no mounting block for the first draft of a novel.

Mounting up is always the least of it. Once I'm on his back, life is good -- mostly. There's no place I'd rather be, especially on a warm summer day when the air smells of hay drying, the sun shines on my shoulders, and Gus has settled into his rhythm. But then, he'll spot a horse-eating stump, a rock about to pounce, or an attacking plastic bag, and he'll shy fifteen feet to the side. So far, I've gone along.

The novel's prone to jump sideways, too. I'll be writing along, the words falling as steady as the clop of Gus's hooves, and a character will take the bit in his/her mouth and carry the story off to a place where I had not planned it would go. When that happens, there's only one thing I can do.

I stand up from the computer, refill my coffee cup, and start cleaning the bathroom or pacing from one end of the house to the other while I think what this means. If I try to rein the story over to the trail I've laid out for it, it may go partway, but then it'll balk and turn back. Pretty soon we're in a wrestling match, and like Gus, it'll buck and try to get me off its back.

Gus doesn't like being ridden on a tight rein, either. Dressage teaches maintaining contact, with a straight line from my elbow to the bit and Gus's head on the vertical. Only one problem with that. He hates it. He does not like to be ridden on a restricting rein, so I've learned to feel his mouth but leave the reins looser. Steering Gus is more a matter of subtle weight shifts, anyway.

The same holds for riding a novel. I ride it with a looser rein, and allow it to take its own course some, like riding a shadowed mountain trail.

Riding a novel is a lot about trusting it, as I trust the horse, to carry me to the end. A looser rein lets the characters find their own right path to a degree, solve their problems, and confront their fears. If I control the novel too tightly, the characters will act like puppets without true feeling. Riding with a relaxed rein is by far the better way to ride, for both horse and story.

The Love Factor

noreply@blogger.com (Carolb-MT) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 16:44:00 +0000

Anne Hawkins writes in the mystery writers' blog, The Kill Zone, that agents turn down good books if they don't "love" them.

People have told me that they "love" God's Thunderbolt: The Vigilantes of Montana. Even one of the Spur judges told me that, and another said he was sad when it ended because he didn't want to stop reading it. It's the ultimate compliment.

Yet when I entered it in the first ABNA contest co-sponsored by Amazon and Penguin, it didn't make the first cut. When I sent it to agents and publishers who had asked for it, after six months, they had not replied. Turns out they had not even opened the package.

A writer told me she'd had seven mystery novels turned down because the editors didn't "love" them. By the time I met her, she had given up and was trying to break into freelance journalism. Sad. They are probably good novels, and might have found a readership somewhere among people who did love them. We'll never know.

Without the "love factor," they are going nowhere.

These two examples, and countless others you might know of, exemplify one of the problems with traditional publishing. Our books have to find the right lover, but no one loves everything they read. I review books for Self-Publishing Review, but I've asked the editor not to suggest anything in sci fi because I can't suspend my disbelief in the matter of aliens and six-headed critters who have human-like feelings. Nor do I review horror. I can't handle the genre. For me to review books in either of these genres wouldn't be fair to the authors.

Finding an agent or a publisher depends on having a total stranger -- the right total stranger -- fall in love with your book.

It's a lot easier to find someone to fall in love with you, and while some people get lucky that way early, some people wait a lot longer.

But now I know how to write my second novel. And all of you know how to write your novels, too. Just write to include the love factor. As I conceive of it, the love factor has nothing to do with romance or sex scenes, but with passionate (deeply felt) emotions that resonate through the book.

How an author conveys those emotions to the reader -- be it editor or agent or book buyer -- is so individual and so personal, that no one can tell us writers how to do it. I think, though, that in order for someone else to love the book, we have to love it first. Love the characters, love the story, be on fire to write this book. Now. When a new insight comes into your mind about a character's experience, it sends a tingle down your spine, or a shiver among the hairs on the back of your neck.

In my new novel, Gold Under Ice, the Vigilante Dan Stark, having gone home from Montana to New York City with his gold to pay his father's creditors and thereby redeem the family honor, stands at an abyss of moral choice: to throw the last of his gold into options trading, or not. What will he do? I don't know yet, but if I can write it right, the readers will be praying he makes the right choice -- whatever that will be.

It's worrying about the character's choice as he makes it, that sort of "Oh, no, what's he going to do?" feeling, that keeps readers up long after bedtime so they go bleary-eyed to the office the next morning, or be so absorbed they miss a stop on their commuter trains.

And the feeling starts with the writer. We feel the choice, stare down the pathways of consequence, and choose. Then write what it feels like to be in that choice, suffering the consequences or enjoying the payoff.

How that's done, I can't say. One thing I do know, though. If I don't feel it first, if my heartrate doesn't pick up while I'm writing, I can't convey it to the reader. The love begins with me. It's my passion that goes into the book. The love factor is my love for what I'm writing.

Writing is sharing the love.

Another Man's Moccasins

noreply@blogger.com (Carolb-MT) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 20:15:00 +0000

One of the joys of attending the Western Writers of America convention last month was meeting some writers whose works I've admired for some time. One of these people is Craig Johnson. Sam Morton, whose fine novel Where the Rivers Run North occupies a permanent place on my bookshelves -- except when I take it down to read it again -- first brought Johnson to my attention with his first novel A Dish Served Cold. Since then, I've bought, read, enjoyed, and kept every novel he's written. Johnson won the Spur for Best Western Novel under 90,000 words for Another Man's Moccasins.

The protagonist in all five of Johnson's Western mystery novels is Sheriff Walter Longmire, who lives in Wyoming, a neighbor state to the south of Montana. The sheriff is a multi-dimensional character who doesn't take himself too seriously. Oddly enough, neither does Johnson, who has a delightfully self-deprecating sense of humor, and it's this underlying humor that saves his novels from being too dark. Because truly horrid crimes happen in the books, and Johnson's humor never veers into the wrong track. Longmire reserves his humorous attitude for himself and is totally serious in his determination to get the bad guys and in his sympathy for victims of all sorts of crimes. Not just the kind people go to jail for.

Another man's moccasins. It's a great title and to me a phrase that encapsulates the greatest benefit of reading fiction. When we read a novel or short story we get inside another person's skin. We find out what it's like to be someone else. We walk a mile, or a few hundred pages, in another person's shoes. Another man's moccasins.

Fiction does a lot for us. It creates another world to escape to. Sometimes, as in science fiction, that world is completely other than the world we're used to, although it has a few similarities that we can seize hold of. Sometimes, the story shows us to ourselves -- for better or for ill.

Books like Johnson's and my own God's Thunderbolt begin with a world seriously out of kilter and by the end of the novels, that world is put to rights again. That's rather out of fashion now among the literati, but giving people hope that things can be better is one of the greater services fiction performs for readers. Trying to live without hope can lead to serious mental illnesses of which depression is only one.

Johnson's books are peopled by others with whom Sheriff Longmire has great sympathy, but he has no tolerance whatever for evil.

And that's something else fiction can offer us -- a clear picture of evil so that when we meet it we'll know it, and it won't defeat us.

The benefits of fiction are great. We walk in someone else's moccasins and learn how others live and think and be who they are, and we learn from that experience some sympathy with others we encounter. Except for evil.

Spur that Jingles

noreply@blogger.com (Carolb-MT) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 17:14:00 +0000

"I've got spurs that jingle, jangle, jingle..." goes the old cowboy song. I've been humming it because I have one now. Not just any spur, but The Spur. As in literary award for best first novel: God's Thunderbolt: The Vigilantes of Montana. Courtesy of the Western Writers of America, which has been awarding Spurs since 1953. In a previous blog I wrote that the Spur is one of two awards open to traditionally published and self-published books alike. I'm grateful that I qualified, and even more thankful that I won.

I joined some pretty august company: Craig Johnson, whose Another Man's Moccasins won a Spur for the best short novel (under 90,000 words); and Thomas Cobb, whose Shavetail won the Spur for best long novel (over 90,000 words). Johnson's series about Sheriff Walter Longmire of Wyoming has been one of my favorites ever since his first novel (A Dish Served Cold), and Cobb's previous novel (Crazy Heart) is being filmed and stars Jeff Bridges. Both of them in their separate ways are highly individual and fascinating writers.

Both are published by traditional publishers. God's Thunderbolt is not. As you all know, it's self-published.

There are lots of reasons for self-publishing, and I have all of them. First, being the age I am (none of your business), I could be long gone before some publishers or agents saw fit to reply to my queries. That's how inundated they are, and short staffed.

Second, I'm not gifted with endless patience, except for my fiction writing.

Third, I knew I was not writing the Next Big Thing. No attacks on the Catholic Church or any other church, no witches or goblins or cute warlocks in horn rims, no shapeless monsters looming from anyone's nightmares, no devils incarnate, no journeys to the farthest galaxy or from that galaxy to consume earth, no mainframe computers running amok and generating baby supercomputers smarter than humans. That being so, I had a hunch most publishers and agents might not be interested.

I was right. But along the way to being somewhat disappointed, I learned about the Long Tail in book marketing, that Amazon has mastered. According to Wikipedia, "The Long Tail as a proper noun was first coined by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article to describe the niche strategy of businesses, such as Amazon.com or Netflix, that sell a large number of unique items, each in relatively small quantities."

If Amazon can make pots of money selling to multiple niches, I figured I could make some money selling to one niche. Defining my niche meant defining my audience. Selling to that niche meant leveraging the power of the Internet, among other strategies. It would work, I thought, if the book were good enough that people liked it. So it has proved.

Even the Spur judges thought so. At the convention, I received these comments: "You have written a great book," said one judge. And another, "I was sad when I finished it. I didn't want it to end."

The night before the Spur banquet, a friend took me out for a rewarding dessert. To say I was delighted is an understatement as you can see from the photo she also took. Surprisingly enough, I ate that monster chocolate sundae, with the chocolate chip cooky and the extra puddles of whipped cream and chocolate fudge, and still slid into my jeans when I got home!

Seven Islands

noreply@blogger.com (Carolb-MT) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:40:00 +0000

A while back, one of the older horses in Gus's little herd got kicked so hard in the leg that it broke. The old guy stood in one spot, on three legs, while all the other horses grouped around him in silent sympathy until the owner of the boarding stable discovered them, found the problem, and called the owner and then the vet. The vet put the old horse down while the owner wept. The other horses stood off a bit in a group until the old guy died, then wandered off. After the owner left, the stable owner drove his backhoe into the field and dug a big hole in a far corner, scooped up the old guy's corpse and put him in it, then covered up the hole. The next year they planted a tree over the grave. (Burying a horse on your own property is legal in Montana.)

I could tell the horses were sad because their number was diminished by one. They drooped, and there was a look in their eyes.

This afternoon, I'll participate in the human version of that. A high school classmate (1958) was killed in a car accident on Monday. Those of us who live here will gather at the church before the funeral and go in together, and sit together. She and I and several others were confirmed in this same church, in 1953. There have been other funerals here, for other classmates, and each time we sit together, conscious each time that our numbers are diminished by one.

Not all of us live here, of course, and not all of us are in touch with our classmates, but here we are. Again. One less.

That will happen more often, as one classmate emailed me, as we become more geriatric. It's inevitable. But we have good memories over many years, so we must console ourselves with those and for some of us, with our faith.

One of the best consolations is the knowledge that we make up something larger than ourselves. A community. The class of 1958. We are not alone, or if we are, we don't have to be.

Great writers have argued about this for hundreds of years. Matthew Arnold (1822-1866) wrote a poem called "To Marguerite".

YES: In the sea of life enisled,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone.
The islands feel the enclasping flow,
And then their endless bounds they know.

Centuries earlier, John Donne (1572 - 1631) wrote the contrary view in his "Meditation XVII":

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. Therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Ernest Hemingway, of course, took the title of his novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, from Donne's work. This novel has been called one of the great war novels of the 20th century, and reading the novel I hear echoes of Donne. "Any man's death diminishes me."

So now, as I wait for the funeral of my classmate. We all feel diminished by her death, as we did at the passing of our other classmates. But at the same time we are still a community, we and our spouses, and our children and grandchildren, on down the generations. Perhaps the poet William Wordsworth summed it up best for me in his simple little poem, "We Are Seven." In that poem, the narrator tries to argue with a child about the size of her family. The child insists, "We are seven," while the narrator argues that they can't be seven because one child lies buried in the churchyard. With supreme adult logic he tells her that seven minus one equals six.

She is not convinced. One sibling might have died, but her family still numbers seven.

I agree. The class of 1958 may be diminished by one more, but our community remains intact.

Thank You

noreply@blogger.com (Carolb-MT) — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 18:03:00 +0000

God's Thunderbolt: The Vigilantes of Montana won the Spur Award for Best First Novel from the Western Writers of America. Tomorrow I fly to Oklahoma City to accept the award at the WWA Convention. I've known about this since the end of March, so you'd think I'd have gotten used to it by now. However, I still have that "Who me?" feeling.

So right off the top, thank you to the Western Writers of America for -- as I wrote in the previous post -- levelling the playing field (yes, I know it's a cliche, but heck). This organization allows self-published books to compete on the same basis with books published by major publishers. I'm honored by the group's accolade.

Even more importantly, thank you to the people who have read God's Thunderbolt. Thank you to those who read it and took the time to tell me you liked it, or loved it. Thank you to Marilyn K, who said she got so cold reading the blizzard scene that she had to get a blanket. Thank you to Bill, who liked it so much he took it to his men's prayer breakfast. Thank you to the people who complained they couldn't get their house cleaned, because they couldn't put it down.

Thank you to Leo in Hot Springs who borrowed it from a friend, then passed it to another friend, who donated it to the library when he was done. Thank you all who liked it enough to share it with your friends.

Thank you to Jan who told all our classmates about it, and all those who spread the word.

Thank you to those who have bought it for birthday, Christmas, graduation, Mother's Day and Father's Day gifts and couldn't resist reading it first. Thank you for bringing it by the office so I can sign it for you.

Thank you to the rural communities like Ronan and Hot Springs where book lovers gathered to hear me talk about it. You were all worth the drives -- even at today's gas prices!

Thank you to all those I don't know about, and those I haven't named. Forgive me if you feel left out, but there's a limit as to how many words a computer will hold.

Thank you to the test readers, Lynda, and Betsey, and Martin whose early reports were so encouraging. You were right, as it turns out.

Thank you to the bookstore owners and managers who have taken a chance on this unknown writer and the obscure book.

Thank you to the media people who helped publicize it. Your articles and reviews and interviews have gone far beyond merely announcing that someone wrote a pretty good book. I appreciate your excitement and the excellent work you did on my behalf. One reviewer called it a "literary Western." That label fits better than any other I've found yet.

Special thanks to Dick, for nearly 33 years together.

So long. I'll be back online next week, when I return from Oklahoma City, the WWA convention, and the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum.

Take care.

Is it Vanity?

noreply@blogger.com (Carolb-MT) — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 17:55:00 +0000

The terms vanity press and vanity publishing used to mean that books too poorly written to interest a "real" publisher would pay to have their own books printed and bound. The implication, of course, was that "real" publishers published "good" books and vanity publishers were by definition failures who couldn't write.

I asked Gus what he thought of that, and he chewed on the question along with a mouthful of grass. After wiping his lips on a white fetlock and leaving green streaks, he decided that vanity was as much a force as it ever was. "But," he nickered, "there are plenty of poorly written books between covers these days, no matter who published them." Then he bit off more grass and chewed on the question (and the grass) some more. "Poor writing doesn't come only from vanity publications."

"We call it self-publishing these days," I told him. "That has a lot fewer connotations of poor quality. Maybe."

"On the other hoof," he said, raising the left hind as a warning to anyone who might want to muscle in on his patch of grass, "maybe proportionately there aren't so many poorly written books in self-publishing. At least not a greater proportion than there are in 'real' publishing."

He has a good point, even for a horse. R R Bowker projects that in the US alone traditional publishers put out 275,232 books in 2008, and POD books totaled 285,394. That's a total of 560,626 books altogether!

Bowker did not report how many POD books were fiction, but traditional publishers together published 47,541 fiction titles in 2008. That's a drop of 11% from 2007. (See the complete article on RR Bowker online.) The article doesn't say, either, how many traditional publishers were using POD technology, but there is some migration from the traditional publishing model to POD.

With all those titles rolling off the presses, no matter which printing technologies were used, we can't say that self-published books are automatically worse than traditionally published books. There are simply too many books to make that generalization logical. People might gesture toward awards, most of which are won by traditionally published books. However, many awards are closed to self-published books. It is not logical, Gus tells me, to assume that no book worth a Pulitzer or a Nobel was self-published because those awards are not open to self-published books.

The National Book Awards are open to self-published books, provided the publisher also publishes books by other people, and the publisher may be asked to provide a catalog to prove it. But books published through "self-publishing services are not eligible."

If a self-published book cannot compete on the same basis as a traditionally published book, how can anyone say that self-published books are by definition not good? One cannot say that these premier awards could never be awarded to authors of self-published books on the basis of inferior quality because they are not good, when in fact the entire category is excluded.

Some book awards, such as the Spur (awarded by the Western Writers of America) and the Edgar (awarded by the Mystery Writers of America) are open to both self-published and traditionally published work. The Nebula (awarded by the Sci Fi Writers of America) is open only to books who not nominated by authors, publishers, or anyone else with a monetary interest in the work. Both the Spur and the Edgar are awarded to nonmembers as well as members of the organizations. In my view, both these organizations have leveled the playing field.

"Of course," said Gus (acting as devil's advocate), "you think so because you won the Spur for Best First Novel." Perhaps. At least I admit the possibility.

However, as things presently stand, the attitude that self-published books aren't as good as traditionally published books can't be tested. Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry, won a Spur and then went on to win the Pulitzer. God's Thunderbolt: The Vigilantes of Montana, which won the Spur Gus mentioned, is not eligible for a Pulitzer because it's self-published.

And I'd suggest that until major book awards are open to any book, self-published or traditionally published, and both types of books are entered, we can't adequately test the prejudice in favor of traditionally published books. Until then, we can assume that authors do not necessarily choose to self-publish their books because of vanity.

Gus's Lists

noreply@blogger.com (Carolb-MT) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 20:29:00 +0000

Gus and I were talking about books on writing. He admits to not reading words very well -- something about mashing the book with his hoof when he tries to keep his place -- at least not as well as he reads body language. (He can tell what sort of mood I'm in almost before I'm out of the car.)

Anyway, he mentioned that some writers might want to know what books on writing have been most useful and helpful to me. I had to agree with him. So I've listed a few of the best ones, and I'll add more from time to time.

The 3 A.M. Epiphany by Brian Kiteley never fails to inspire my brain to think in new directions. It's a book of writing exercises from the other side of the brain than the side that normally works on my sentences. I have found that after I work on an exercise for a few minutes, I want to leap up and write the novel. Sometimes an exercise inspires me to expand a character's scope or change his approach to another character. One exercise challenged me to put two characters in a room together naked and have them relate without sexual overtones. Try it. It's surprisingly difficult -- or it was for me at least. That exercise was revealing in more ways than one. I tried it with two men, two women, and one of each in several separate attempts. None of them was satisfactory enough to be incorporated into a draft of Gold Under Ice.

Both The Making of a Story by Alice LaPlante and Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway could well be a personal MFA in a book. Each book covers the entire spectrum of fiction writing, and each book is comprehensive. But Burroway's textbook on writing fiction is very expensive and inspires strong feelings both for and against. People who object to it do so on the grounds that the price does not seem justified by the content. People who love it think that the content warrants the price. I confess to having bought both the third edition and the sixth edition, but the seventh edition does not appear to me to contain enough new material to spend an extra twenty dollars.

I can't tell you which book I prefer because I have learned a great deal and enjoyed both of them. But while writing teachers seem to regard Burroway's book more highly than LaPlante's, in my mind they are similar in their contents though not so much in the way they carry out their intentions. LaPlante's style is more accessible, and her book is much less expensive. I'd advise reading the customer reviews on Amazon before you buy either one and then do what you think is best.

Steering the Craft by Ursula LeGuin surprised me. It is one of the best books on writing style that I have ever read, and when I bought it I didn't think it would be a strong competitor for Strunk & White's Elements of Style, which I have owned since college. It is excellent for someone who wants to improve the way he or she writes, who wants to understand how to mine the riches of the English language. It's for people who want to be writers and not merely put out some print-covered pages between covers. If you love our common language, you'll learn and improve from this book.

No one who loves the English language can overlook the fact that we all need editing. If we can't afford an editor, we have to try to do it ourselves. Because the publishing houses have cut back on editing in an effort to save money, editing becomes the author's responsibility. I have found Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King one of the more useful and helpful books on my fiction writing bookshelf. After weeks of concentrating on dialogue, characterization, creating conflict, and writing telling scenes that build the book, going back over the draft with Self-Editing is like putting in a separate set of eyes. Revision comes then from an fresh perspective, and invariably I find a deeper of who the characters are and what the story is about.

"Good," whickers Gus. "Maybe someday you'll win a Spur for your other boot."

"Don't be silly," I tell him. "I'm so inspired now I think I'll put you back in the pasture and go read one of those."

"As long as you leave me a carrot," he says, "I don't mind being left to graze instead of work."

I'm in Love...

noreply@blogger.com (Carolb-MT) — Wed, 27 May 2009 21:59:00 +0000

For the last several mornings I've awakened with a strange joy. Instead of lounging there while the radio plays some schlock electronic pop noise, I actually get right out of bed and get ready for my morning commute -- all the way into the writing room via the kitchen for coffee and breakfast. Not even the morning newscast that my husband watches can break the joy, because I'm in love. Again. Nothing to worry the man about, though.

With the new novel, Gold Under Ice.

Love strikes at odd times while writing a novel. For me, it seems to hit about two-thirds of the way through the first/second draft. (I'm not sure how many drafts I write; they aren't clearly drafts one or two. Some scenes require more rewriting than others.) With God's Thunderbolt: The Vigilantes of Montana, love struck in April of 2007, and I finished the book in August.

With Gold Under Ice, love struck about May 19, but I know I won't be done by August or September. At least, I hope not, because I don't want to leave this book for a long time to come. I'm hoping to spend about another year at it and maybe sometime while I'm writing it, I'll discover something new to fall in love with. A new character, a new development for one of the characters in this book or in God's Thunderbolt, because many of the same characters are in both books. That's only fair, Gold Under Ice being the sequel to God's Thunderbolt.

In the aftermath of the Vigilante actions, the gold lies under the ice of Alder Creek. But then the ice breaks.

Because I fall in love with characters. Those strange human-like figments of a writer's imagination who make the stories are what I love about writing fiction. They face moral dilemmas and do their best when faced with the times that try their souls.

That's the best part about writing fiction, for me, anyway. To watch their struggles and cheer them on and hope they can work things out for the best in this less than perfect world.

Does that sound familiar to anyone?