Help Houston Fire Station 6 with Your Vote!

I owe my husband big time, not only in real life but in the writing department. He supports my career with gusto, has taken me seriously from Day One, and is my go-to guy for research involving emergency services. Recently, his Houston Fire Station entered Gallery Furniture's Create Your Own Commercial contest to win $25K worth of merchandise to replace their ancient, mangy furnishings.

I think their commercial came out great, but it needs votes to have a shot at winning (requires a quick & simple registration). If you can spare a few minutes to help out, please follow this link and cast your vote

Or you can simply visit Gallery Furniture and click on the video contest link, then find the entry for Station 6. Should be halfway down the "most recent" lists.

Most folks don't realize it, but the firefighters, who work 24-hour shifts in many places (Houston included), supply their own televisions, pots and pans, food items, bedding, newspapers, and telephones. And the guys would be very appreciative if
any of you could take a few minutes of your time to help.

Thanks bunches!

When the Dogs Do Bark

Over the last few days, we've gotten into some wonderful off-blog discussions regarding Joni Rodgers' insightful post: "Consider the Source: Rise of the Cleverati," about those snarkier-than-thou amateur reviewers out to wow all of cyberspace with their evisceration of this book or that.

Since criticism and rejection come with the territory, authors do their best to shrug off the naysayers and those folks who seem to expend an inordinate percentage of their time on this planet posting rabid, one-star reviews on Amazon. From time to time, however, the harpies' talons punch straight through an author's protective armor. They can wound, and in some sad cases, kill an author's desire to continue writing.

Author Sue-Ellen Welfonder shared some valuable wisdom in the form of a Saracen proverb she uses whenever she needs to give herself a reality check. I thought it was so on-target, I asked for her permission to share it with BtO's readers. So here ya go:

"The dogs may bark, but the caravan moves on..."

As you journey through the writers' life, keep telling yourself that you are the caravan. Keep your gaze set on your goal, which is delivering the stories only you can tell to those readers who will love them. Remind yourself that no book, indeed, nothing any human being can create, will appeal to every other person on the planet.

It's enough to please your readers and not the whole darned world.

Breaking Bad: the constant chemistry of change

It’s pretty rare to stumble on a TV show that actually makes it worthwhile to set aside your book for an hour, but I have recently become addicted to AMC’s original series Breaking Bad in which Bryan Cranston plays Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher who goes into business with a former student cooking crystal meth.

In the first episode, we meet the remarkably unremarkable Mr. White, who works a second job at a car wash in order to support his pregnant wife and severely handicapped teenage son. When White is diagnosed with lung cancer and handed the darkest possible prognosis, his story shifts from sleepy to searing. What I love about this series is how the action – and there’s a whole lot of that – is all about the transformation of this character. It’s all about chemical reaction, about the subtle and explosive changes that occur when one basic element meets another.

The high concept is fantastically well-executed with brass-knuckle writing, inspired acting, and smartass-on production values. As often as we see cancer milked for sappy emotion and cheap sympathy on television and in the movies, this is the first time I’ve seen anyone capture the unpretty truth that cancer can be – and certainly was for me – an electrifying experience capable of galvanizing and focusing the survivor, utterly shifting both priorities and paradigms for whatever amount of time he/she survives.

Breaking Bad is a great lesson for writers, because it so graphically distills the one thing that makes a character true, a journey compelling, and a story impossible to tear away from: Change. The idea is beautifully summed up in the first ep. As Mr. White performs the usual chemistry teacher parlor tricks, struggling to pique the interest of his hypnagogic students, he tells them, “Chemistry is – well, technically, it’s the study of matter, but I prefer to see it as the study of change…Electrons change their energy levels, molecules change their bonds, elements – they combine and change into compounds. And that’s all of life, right? It’s the constant. It’s the cycle. Solution and dissolution over and over and over. It is growth. Then decay. Then transformation.”

Breaking Bad has been airing on Sunday nights at nine, but production was derailed by the writers strike, and I'm not sure what the future of the show is. (I've done my part, emailing AMC, producers, etc.) Watch this snippet below or click here to view Ep #1 online.

Dreamer vs. Writer vs. Author

I'll confess, it always bugs me when somebody comes up to me at a signing or a speaking venue and whips out that hoary line: "I've got this story in my head. I know it'd be a really great book, and if I get the time someday, I'm going to write it." The subtext is generally something to the effect of: "I'll be on Oprah with my first try, have People pounding at my door, and won't give a working hack like yourself the time of day."

These folks are the dreamers, of the same ilk as, well, me, when I fantasize about playing backup to Bruce Springsteen (I was born and raised a Jersey girl; this dream comes with the territory) in spite of the fact that I have no musical talent whatsoever. The dream is really vivid (including tanned and beefy lifeguard groupies eager to offer up a standing O!), but I haven't put the time in, don't intend to put the time in, and lack the genius for going beyond the printed note.

Much better than the dreamers are the writers, who not only have the dream but work their butts off to achieve it. They know what it is to lose themselves for hours in a story, for weeks or months or years on end. They read the craft books, subscribe to Writer's Digest, attend the classes when they can. Some of them will go on to become authors, but others, sadly, won't. Maybe they can't bring themselves to put the dream first. Maybe they can't bring themselves to risk rejection, or they let a few rejections or some creative writing teacher or contest judge's criticism crush them. Maybe they can't take the snidely "helpful" comments of their spouses or their friends or relatives. Not everybody has the strength and constitution to able to continually pick herself back up after smacking her head against the brick wall. And, sadly, some of those who work hard and accept the risk won't become authors because they simply lack the spark, or enough true spark, to coax into a flame.

And then there are the authors. These folks are the ones who work long and hard, who educate themselves the craft and the market and the business, who persevere in spite of all discouragement, and who have enough native talent to pull together the whole package. They gut out the long, tough process and hone their skills until they finally, finally (oh, blessed day!) find a publisher eager to pay them (sorry, but if you're paying the publisher, it is definitely not the same thing) for the privilege of turning the fruit of their dreams and hard work into a book.

So how do you know if you'll be a member of the last group? You don't - you can't = for sure, though there's a stubborn little corner of yourself that feels it, that believes it, that absolutely will not take no (even hell, no!) for an answer. If you've got that much on your side, at least you stand a chance.

And a chance is all the guarantee you're going to get.

Saturday morning cartoon: Triplets of Belleville

Researching French animation and stumbled upon this tres freaky bon bon.

So This Gets Easier... When???

Back before I published my first novel, I remember thinking that once I got the call, I'd have it all together. Be able to look in the mirror each morning and think, "Here I stand, a published author. I must know what I'm doing."

Instead, I celebrated for about two days and then worried about becoming a one-book wonder. But I was already working on a second book, another historical romance, and my agent prompted me to whip up a synopsis of the half-completed book and submit it with the first three chapters. Sure enough, my then-publisher bought the thing.

So then I started freaking about having to complete (with major alterations) an already-sold manuscript on a deadline. I somehow managed and for a while got caught up in building a website, promoting the first book, and yep, starting another proposal for a historical romance.

That was about the time I lost my first editor, so then I began freaking about pleasing the new one. And then another new one. And yes, friends, one more new one, as book after book became each new editor's red-headed stepchild.

Never a good thing. But seven books later, after a period of great angst, I ended up happily employed by another publisher and writing in a genre I adore. Things have gone pretty well there on the whole. Awards and nice reviews, an editor who's been a constant (thank God) and loves my work.

So this is the part where it gets easier, right? This is the place where I get to relax because after 14 sales, I surely must know what I'm doing.

Uh, no, darn it. Because each book has to be the very best that I can write, has to outshine all the others. Because the writing of most of them is damned hard, and it never gets one whit easier. Because even after all this time, I lose perspective on my own work and can't afford to get too cocky to accept and learn and grow from revisions.

Because no writer I've ever known, from the dewy-eyed first-timers to the New York Times bestseller, has been heard to lean back and sigh deeply and tell the world, "Now, I've really made it."

To do such a thing would surely be to tempt the writing gods to rain down havoc.

So if you're looking for that plush career you've imagined (I blame Barbara Cartland, pictured), the one where you get to work in your peignoir popping bonbons without a worry in your head, dream on. If you're looking to live with self-doubt, hard work, and no guarantees, you've come to exactly the right place.

A place a lot of us still think is worth it, nonetheless.

I need to write a memoir about the good old days when "memoir" meant...well...memoir.

Yarg! Not again. Last week, it was Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years by Misha Defonseca. (Not!) Just when we were beginning to forget about James Frey, who single-handedly smashed the credibility of memoirists into A Million Little Pieces. Now there's this from Motoko Rich's article in the NY Times yesterday:

In “Love and Consequences,” a critically acclaimed memoir published last week, Margaret B. Jones wrote about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods.

The problem is that none of it is true.

Margaret B. Jones is a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, who is all white and grew up in the well-to-do Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley, with her biological family. She graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in the North Hollywood neighborhood. She has never lived with a foster family, nor did she run drugs for any gang members. Nor did she graduate from the University of Oregon, as she had claimed.

Riverhead Books, the unit of Penguin Group USA that published “Love and Consequences,” is recalling all copies of the book and has canceled Ms. Seltzer’s book tour, which was scheduled to start on Monday in Eugene, Ore., where she currently lives.

In a sometimes tearful, often contrite telephone interview from her home on Monday, Ms. Seltzer, 33, who is known as Peggy, admitted that the personal story she told in the book was entirely fabricated.

Ironically, just last week, a Times review of Seltzer's book gushed:

Although some of the scenes she has recreated from her youth (which are told in colorful, streetwise argot) can feel self-consciously novelistic at times, Ms. Jones has done an amazing job of conjuring up her old neighborhood...

Ms. Jones’s portraits of her family and friends are so sympathetic and unsentimental, so raw and tender and tough-minded that it’s clear to the reader that whatever detachment she learned as a child did not impair her capacity for caring. Instead it heightened her powers of observation, enabling her to write with a novelist’s eye for the psychological detail and an anthropologist’s eye for social rituals and routines.

Snarg. The next sound you hear: a memoirist's nostrils flaring. Come on. I saw that cheesey photo of her with the bandana and just wanted to smack somebody. When the news broke yesterday that the memoir was fake, I was not a jot surprised.

Since my own memoir was released in 2001, I've seen the legal reviews get tougher to the tenth power. I honestly can't fathom how something like this happens in the chicken-Freyed memoir market. Whose responsibility is it to see that the truth is told? How do we differentiate between lies and the adjustments to detail that have to be made in order to avoid lawsuits and condense the story into a readable form? Can the memoir market survive any more bad press? Or is the word "memoir" becoming synonymous with "bullshit"? I think it's time we in the industry start talking some serious talk about it. Please, baby Jesus, let me be invited to participate in a few panel discussions. I'm storing up the choice words.

Consider the source (rise of the cleverati)

Colleen just sent me a link to a snarky review of her latest book, and it put me in mind of a formative experience from my youth:

Charged at the tender age of 16 with the task of writing a huge term paper on the use of humor in Great Expectations, I procrastinated until the weekend before it was due, begged my big sister Diana to tell me about the book, then plied my precocious writing abilities, cranking out forty pages of double-spaced BS. When the papers were handed back a few weeks later, I'd gotten an A, which didn't surprise me because I always got an A in English. My teacher proceeded with class, something about sonnets, I think, but during his lecture, he paused and thought for a moment. He walked over to my desk, took my paper, etched over the A with an emphatic red F and wrote below it, "You are such a clever writer! You almost had me believing you read this book."

I happened upon that paper in my archives several years ago, and by cracky, it was clever. It was funny. (A whole lot funnier than Great friggin' Expectations, which I did eventually read.) It was well written. I have no idea what tipped him off. And I'm not convinced that I deserved that F. After all, I'd written forty clever pages. That's worth something...right?

The realm of book reviews has gotten agonizingly clever. (The term "snarky" basically means "shitty and meanspirited, but clever, by cracky!") You still have legit reviewers writing for the big venues, but low rent reviews are mostly written by a group I just this morning dubbed "the cleverati" who are primarily interested in showcasing their own talent for bitch-slapping authors who have no venue to talk back. There are a handful of infamous blogs dedicated to the express purpose of trashing books. Why would someone dedicate time and energy to reading and reviewing books they've decided in advance to hate? Your guess is as good as mine. The blogs aren't widely read. They basically exist to provide a format for members of the cleverati to revel in their oh-so-sassy glow stick wit.

From my pinnacle of 16-year-old wisdom, cleverness was enough. Nowadays, I'm shooting for actual insight.

Oddly enough, the snarky reviewer of Colleen's book sullenly concluded that Colleen was being shortlisted as a favorite author. In fact, the reviewer had read Colleen's last book and hated it enough to rush out and buy this one. We laughed about it. But Colleen is a seasoned pro. A first time author comes away from that sort of thing feeling utterly gut-shot. All we battle-scarred Amazons can offer by way of comfort is a shake of the head, a roll of the eyes, and a heapin' helpin' of "consider the source".

If Elected, I Promise Not to Bore You...

Here in mighty Tejas, it's election day. A primary this time, but an especially crucial one. We're not used to counting for much in the presidential primaries. Way too often, the nominee's a done deal by the time we roust our slacker butts to the polls. But this year we've been bombarded with messages telling us that we're important. That our opinions really count...

So I thought I'd take the moment to remind every reader out there, that your vote counts as well. When you love an author's work or take a friend's recommendation and buy a book brand new, you're voting (with your wallet) to let that author keep on writing more books for you to enjoy. When you haunt the used bookstore or skip over to Ebay to picked up a pre-owned copy, you're voting for that author to have increasingly weak sales, which will eventually put him/her out of business.

Now, like a lot of people, you may not think your vote counts. You may leave it up to other people (people with lots of money!) to do the paying and the choosing. But if enough of them choose to click those "Buy Used" buttons (yargh!), download a pirated scanned copy (boo, hiss!), or purchase bags of moldering paperbacks at yard sales (cough! hack!), you have only yourself to blame when bookstores go belly up, reading choices grow more limited, and you're set upon at street corners by packs of starving authors while the Philistines grow fat.

Now for the record, I have nothing against friends or family members sharing a book they've enjoyed, and I think libraries rock! (Note to library book buyers: The path to hell is not lined with mass market paperback genre novels. Not even those with "romance" printed on the spines.) I'm not even against trying out a new-to-you author you never would have tried otherwise at a library book sale or a used book store. But I'm all for supporting those authors I enjoy by purchasing their next books new. And if I really want to show the love, I try to do it in the book's first week of release, when my hard-earned bucks count the most.

So when it comes to authors you enjoy, don't forget: vote early and vote often! Really often, if you're voting for the authors of this blog.

Joni adds a PS to Colleen's post below

I've had this posted above my desk for about six years:


Great post, Colleen.

It's the Story, Stupid

Back in the day, when Bill Clinton was first running for Prez, his campaign staffers kept their focus with the motto: "It's the economy, stupid." Writers would do well to do winnow down the locust-like swarm of important-stuff-to-keep-in-mind to a single mantra that keeps what's personally important in the forefront. Mine is "It's All About the Storytelling."

Craft is really important to me, as are (to a lesser extent) market-savvy, business sense, and intelligent networking. But every one of these can be trumped by story, and I can think of a number of gut-level, emotionally-engaging storytellers who have been hugely successful in spite of significant deficits in any or all of the other areas I've mentioned. Work by the story-rich but craft-poor tends to exasperate reviewers and confound fellow writers, but it connects with readers by the hundreds of thousands.

Rather than stick my nose up at these vastly-popular storytellers, I read their work when I can. I try to figure out what these authors have that really works. Often enough the answer is a story the excites the imagination. As much as I enjoy prettying up the story with rich landscaping and clever wordplay, if the story doesn't come first, this gets to be an exercise in self-gratification.

Because whether it's beautifully written or crudely told around the water cooler, it's story that connects the teller to the audience. And in the end, isn't that what this work is all about?

One man's trash: Stephen King on the real Carrie

I'm sitting here clearing my email as Gary mindlessly clicks. I love the man to pieces and want to be near him; sadly, the price for hanging out with him on Sunday morning is being willing to simultaneously watch 35 different TV programs in an endless parade of 4 second increments. But even Gary had to stop on the final scenes of Brian de Palma's hemoglobin-soaked rendition of Stephen King's Carrie.

I love the backstory on the book: King was unable to place his first three novels with a publisher, but had done some short stories. King says, "I got an idea for a story about this incident in a girls' shower room, and the girl would be telekinetic. The other girls would pelt her with sanitary napkins when she got her period. The period would release the right hormones and she would rain down destruction on them." But three pages into the story, King decided he hated it and threw it away. His wife Tabitha rescued the acorn of a manuscript and encouraged him to expand the idea to a novel. (The dedication reads "This is for Tabby, who got me into it - and then bailed me out of it.")

In a Twilight Zone Magazine interview, King told Charles L. Grant that the character was partly inspired by a girl he knew in school:

"She was a very peculiar girl who came from a very peculiar family. Her mother wasn't a religious nut like the mother in Carrie; she was a game nut, a sweepstakes nut who subscribed to magazines for people who entered contests . . . The girl had one change of clothes for the entire school year, and all the other kids made fun of her. I have a very clear memory of the day she came to school with a new outfit she'd bought herself. She was a plain-looking country girl, but she'd changed the black skirt and white blouse--which was all anybody had every seen her in--for a bright-colored checkered blouse with puffed sleeves and a skirt that was fashionable at the time. And everybody made worse fun of her because nobody wanted to see her change the mold."

(A dynamic that persists in the publishing industry for sure.)

King was in such sad financial straights, making less than $7K per year as a teacher, the phone in his trailer house had been shut off, so he got the news about his first book deal via a telegram from his editor at Doubleday: CARRIE OFFICIALLY A DOUBLEDAY BOOK. $2,500 ADVANCE AGAINST ROYALTIES. CONGRATS, KID - THE FUTURE LIES AHEAD, BILL. New American Library later bought the paperback rights for $400,000, which enabled King to quit his day job.

Saturday morning cartoon: Dada meets Disney

How much do we love Walt Disney for wanting to include the art of Salvador Dali in the massively ahead of its time box office turkey Fantasia? The lush but confusing piece hit the cutting room floor faster than you can say Cruella De Ville, but it found its way to the light of day a few years ago, and I saw it (fourteen or fifteen times in a row, but that's just me) at the Dali museum in Tampa. Danged if I know what it means, but it made me understand the dadaist methodology: Fling everything you have out into the universe -- thought, energy, light, love, sex, anger, disillusionment, Joe DiMaggio, pigs in boxes -- and sooner or later something will stick to the wall and be art.


More of Dali's freaky deaky presence in la cinema Americain:


Gadji berri bimba, baby.