lynnemurray

I keep forgetting the tags. The ones for this entry refer to the post at the link below. A few words I wrote on Body Impolitic about Predatory Healthcare, I was originally going to use the title in the subject line above, but then I thought better of it....diplomacy so seldom visits my brain that I indulged the milder title. Then I started to miss the sharper one, so I put it here....LOL!
laurietobyedison.com/discuss/

I am SO proud of my publisher, Peggy Elam of Pearlsong Press, for this great TV interview!
Psychologist says "Fat is Not Always Unhealthy!" Film at --
well, film here:
<<http://www.wztv. com/newsroom/ top_stories/ wztv_vid_ 1916.shtml>>.
It seemed like the interviewer really "got it," which isn't always the case.
And to make this a very inspiring week, the amazing Marilyn Wann and equally great Linda Bacon in the New York Times!

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/health/policy/08fat.html

..to find the secrets of promoting my novel....

 

My new novel Bride of the Living Dead now has a publication date from Pearlsong Press (June 2010). Soon it will have a cover (watch this space). I'm starting to gather ideas about how to get the word out when the time gets nearer. So yesterday I spent over an hour on a teleconference offered as a free taste by a book promotion guru who offers his services--which I could never afford. I did get one "new" idea, which I will share at the end of this rant, feel free to scroll down if you can't wait

  

The word "fiction" was not mentioned. I've looked over so many book promotion sources over the years that I'm used to hearing 99% nonfiction ideas, and 1% fiction ideas. If I can learn one useful thing, I'll check it out. This was 100% nonfiction book promo ideas, aimed at people who may have written a nonfiction book, many of whom were in the contemplation stage of book writing. The guru, it turned out, offered hand-holding through that process. But mostly he suggested becoming known as an expert, doing a lot of speaking engagements, radio interviews, TV interviews if possible. He cited clients who now have their own radio shows or advice columns on their chosen subject.

 

I mean no disrespect to anyone who does this. It could be a great thing depending on what kind help the author is offering the world.

 

And yet, here's my new word: EntreprenAuthor.

 

I may have seen a word like AuthorPreneur. But I think "Entreprenauthor" gives a better idea of the priorities involved.

The phone call I sat through, waiting in vain for the word "fiction," was aimed at someone who has written or wants to write a book, let's call it: Chicken Soup for the Vegan Soul (sorry, I've wanted to use that joke for so long) and yearns mightily to explain it to Oprah and the world. Some people write some very inspiring books and live the life of promoting them.

The promotional advice was okay, but it sure would get in the way of writing the next book, which is what novelists do. 

 

Fiction takes you to a different world. That makes it a harder sell. The book IS the most important thing, even for genius promoters like Janet Evanovich, whose books I adore. I read all of Evanovich's books even though she does make me a little nervous when she refers to her books as "product."

 

Unlike a nonfiction author, or (urk!) entreprenauthor, a novelist is seldom likely to become an expert on a given topic. It's not impossible, but I'm not pursuing it as a goal. One thing I got out of the teleconference yesterday was that the PR guru was clearly describing writing a book as a means to an end. The end was profit, self-promotion, sale of products that may or may not be the book.

For me the book just published and the book I'm writing, and the one planned after that are what I live to do.

 

A novelist tells you a story, takes you on a journey, makes you laugh or cry or just takes you "away" for awhile to another world. That's what I have to sell.

 

Okay, the secret I promised you was probably worth an hour of my time sitting, listening, checking my email and taking the odd note. Here it is: 

Use a "tailored hook" in all your PR materials, press releases and other media queries. Know who the target audience is and talk to them in terms that make sense to them and what they want. Examine the publication or other media target (i.e,, in the case of a radio talk show, listen to it, etc.) and offer information about your book in a form that fits their needs. For example, a reporter wants an eye-catching headline and good story, a talk show host wants hot discussion topics that will keep people listening, and a potential reader wants to know that the book will entertain.

 

I'll let you know what I come up with!

Just spent the last week or so letting myself heal up from way too much keyboarding in way too short a time followed by a kitty-litter-schlepping reinjury, but I do have a Body Impolitic post laurietobyedison.com/discuss/ on how my big cat is doing 3 years after a fat phobic vet tried to get me to put into diet hell...

One of my favorite and also least favorite things about novel writing is when the characters stand up in the middle of the novel and start making demands on the author. Sometimes you have to go back and change things, but that's part of the process too.

"No, I don't want to be called Sarah, my name is Trinity." 

"'Your parents probably wouldn't have named you that, but I can see how the name 'Sarah' might carry some unwanted baggage after the recent vice-presidential candidate unpleasantness.  How about if you started out as Teresa and changed it after that fateful hiking trip along the coast?" 

"Okay, I can live with that."

My writing brain usually kicks into high gear toward the end of the book when all the dominoes I've managed to set up start falling on their way to an ending. The book I'm working on now has had such a long and tortured history, interrupted by lots of real life drama, that I think the characters are getting impatient and are not about to let me turn back to S.O.B. (Some Other Book) until their story gets told.

The fun part is that the characters get realer to me with every encounter. The not-so-fun part is that they can, and do, interrupt my sleep. That's okay when I'm in the home stretch on a book. It goes with the territory (I actually typed "terri-gory" for fans of Freudian slips, not that the ends of my books are invariably blood-soaked--sometimes yes, and sometimes no). This book has long enough to go till it's done that even writing at top speed (for me, which ain't that fast) I need to be getting some sleep to not get very frayed indeed.

I keep pen and paper by my bed of course, for those things that pop into dreams that need to be written down. I have to draw some boundaries or the characters would have me leaping out of bed at 3 a,m. to turn on my computer just because they decided they wanted to have sex right then or something.

I've also evolved a mantra, or maybe it's a self-hypnotic command for when my brain gets an alligator grip on an idea and won't let go and let me sleep.  I tell my brain, "Mark it, and strike it."  That was the title of Steve Allen's autobiography that I read as a teenager. It comes from the television world where sets had to be set up, torn down, and set back up again. So you mark where something is supposed to be on a given set for a given scene. Then you can "strike" the set, i.e. take it down. Because you've marked it, you'll know where to set it up again later.  I have no idea if that process still exists in television or if it was a live television thing. (I also have no particular interest in looking it up, it existed when Allen wrote that autobiography, and it's useful to me now, that's all I need to know.)

It's a bit odd but it works for me.

http://laurietobyedison.com/discuss/?p=1723#comments
I'm glad to see some comments are there already that add more info!

Just when I was about to start virtuously sorting through my clutter, I found a writing task to complete instead--saved by creative procrastination. I had meant to write a post for the Body Impolitic blog on the topic of fat friendly fiction for children and young adults.  IS there even any?  (I'll put up a link to the blog with my conclusions once it is up--a few days or several days from now).

I've found that if I park an idea like that in my brain, I'll suddenly start writing about it.  That's what happened this morning.  One of the things I both love and find irritating about writing, is that when my writing brain gets going, it can interfere with my sleep.  This is can make for many sleepless night toward the end of a novel when it's like those big structures made out of dominoes and all the dominoes start falling in sequence--no stopping them.  This is more along the lines of something I wanted to do, but wasn't sure how.  So now I'm doing it.

You would think I would get used to it.  Every time I run into manuscript problems like all the loose ends I had to tie up last week, I resolve them and find it a little surprising that it can be done more simply than expected.. For some reason this reminds me of the first line edit I went through on my first published novel. The line editor was an extremely detailed person, and she was used to dealing with freewheeling, disorganized authors, so she tried to impose order wherever she went. This was an excellent thing for the book, but during the course of the edit she wrote me a note along the lines of--"BIG PROBLEM, we're missing a day."  I think I had the character doing something on a Saturday night and getting up to go to work the next day." 

The solution was pretty simple. I wrote a sentence along the lines of, "What happened on Saturday night haunted her all day Sunday, and she was still thinking about it Monday morning when she got up to go to work."

What startled me was how a little sequence in the book could seem like such a big a problem.  Unlike in real life, in fiction, you really can go back and forth and take things out, or put new things in.  Of course, there's no insurance that the narrative will work better in the new form, but you hope the changes you've made will pull readers along to find out how the story turns out.

I've braided up my manuscript's loose ends, polished its face and sent it out to meet its fate. I'll let you know how that story turns out when something interesting happens.

Now I'm back to my next book in progress, looking under every pile of paper to find a chapter that got lost in my latest computer blow up. Yes, I did not back up that chapter.  Obviously I thought I had, but no.  I had a vague notion that I'd printed out a copy, but perhaps not. This is one of those times when the Forces of Clutter laugh at my hopeless search.  I'll probably cut my losses and recreate the chapter. 

We all have our own ways to tap into what works creatively.  Today I keep thinking of Raymond Chandler's suggestion:  when in doubt have a guy with a gun step into the room. Of course, I've also heard that even Chandler himself didn't understand all the ins and outs of his plots. Alcohol may have had something to do with that, or it might have been the guy with the gun syndrome. Sometimes those armed intruders arrive trailing loose ends.

For myself it seems that every time I see a manuscript problem and come up with a "clever" solution like a few days ago when I found a way to reframe my current book edit (I was so happy--LOL!) I soon discover all the changes that need to be made to accommodate the clever solution.

So here I go, picking up and dealing with loose ends, hoping none of them will turn into giant snakes and back me into another corner. 

No worries, if I end up in a corner, it's not an unfamiliar place. I'll write my way out. I probably won't need to call the guy with the gun, but I do have his number just in case.

Now to pick up those loose ends....

Here's the link to my Body Impolitic post - The Challenge of Writing Fat Friendly Fiction laurietobyedison.com/discuss/
My late husband, who did a lot of parachuting in his youth, used to call a quick visit a "hop and pop"...the landing in LiveJournal Land is much easier on the knees!

The revision process reminds me why one is encouraged to keep a lie simple.  Something about telling a made-up story demands elaboration. I won't get into discussing lying in daily life, but when telling a story on purpose--aka writing fiction, not perpetrating fraud--the details pop into sharper focus.  Each time I revisit a book to revise it, the "world of the book" reveals more. It's a more formalized and elaborate version of the stories I used to tell myself in my head at school. I don't remember any of those stories, but then again I don't remember much about school either and that was probably the trade off. I didn't enjoy school much, and when I'm in a group I tend to slip off to the fringe mentally if not physically. And I have been part of many groups in my life, it just doesn't come naturally.

I think one of the few times I can remember being in a large group of people and feeling truly among like-minded souls was when I listened to George Chesboro give the keynote speech at Bouchercon '94 and he said, in essence (I'm not going to go look up the quote), "Writers are not the best and brightest in the class. Those kids become doctors and lawyers. Most writers are the kid in the back row looking out the window daydreaming."  He also said that the best indicator for success as a writer was not writing talent, but the ability to persist in the face of rejection and no reward whatsoever for....essentially as long as it takes to learn the craft and find a market for ones work.

Guilty on all counts. The pay off is getting to visit other places in your mind, to be other people, and sometimes to tell a story that wraps readers or listeners up so tightly that they can come with you to that other place, and be that other person. I'm a little inspired by the idea of "being another person" which comes from a quote I came across by Joseph Hanson--more of it will be in a Body Impolitic blog I wrote that will be posted soon...I'll post a link.  But that is exactly what it is that we get and need from reading and writing novels.

Sometimes when I confront problems with a manuscript an idea arrives overnight and I wake up seeing how I can reframe the whole book, and possibly the books that will follow it, very simply. I can't say more, except that the way the book is changed, means that I can get rid of an annoying comma in the book's title. I'm a fan of keeping titles as simple as possible, but the comma kept worming its insistent head into the title. It was one of those situations where the comma clarifies the meaning--e.g.:   'You changed, George." where George is someone who is not the same at all versus "You've changed George." where George is now wearing a fresh diaper.

I'm not a fan of punctuation in titles unless it's essential, or best of all witty.  Example: Marilyn Wann's wonderful book, Fat!So? The exclamation point and question mark make the title. Now I'm feeling foolish because I can't tell you what my title was, what the new one is and why the framing device changed it.

Oh, shoot!  Am I being suspenseful (unlikely, it will be months before I can offer more info). So am I just being obscure again?  Sigh.  My only consolation is that maybe by the time someone actually reads this stuff I'll have something more concrete to say.

Nonetheless I'm feeling pretty good because my writing is going well.

I've been taking some time to write about a literary form that only sometimes exists--and then glimmers out of sight again. I'll blame Pearlsong Press for getting me started contemplating fat friendly fiction. We talked about it in a conference call July 8th. That conversation set me to thinking about how fiction tries to jam fat characters into a limited few roles--the ultimate round pegs in square holes phenomenon. I will blog about it for Body Impolitic and share the link when it's available. Oddly, the fact that fat heroes and heroines are so rarely sighted, doesn't get in the way of talking about them--it's a start.  

My older computer (2005) had a meltdown yesterday. My friend, Annie, suggests it may be an attack by the Silicon Liberation Front, but I haven't received any ransom demands.  The meltdown may be permanent or maybe just the older computer just needs a small vacation--it's done that before. I do have a backup, slightly younger (2007) notebook, and my essential files are backed up.

On the negative side, some of the software from the older machine will have to be installed on the notebook. I can go on, but it takes time to shift gears. On a scale of 1 to cat poop, I'd say this is around a 5. Four would be Emily putting one of her toys and also some kleenex in each of the cat water bowls--which also happened today.

On the positive side, it forcibly decluttered my computer environment. The real challenge with this notebook is setting it up so I don't twist round while I use it and hurt myself. Must change water in cat bowls and remove Emily's gifts. Then to work.

When I gathered together the different segments of the vampire manuscript I'm editing, somehow they had found different landing places. In the process, I dug up a couple of boxes of papers that I think of as fossilized efforts to get organized.  Most disorganized people I know have similar geological layers of now extinct attempts to get organized.  The new files. The boxes where I put stuff to shove in the backroom when I had a houseguest. The box shoved behind the table in front of the bookcase

The kind of thing that would give a truly organized person even more of a a panic attack--and I know a few naturally organized people, so I can testify--is that the only time I feel a deep need to deal with the clutter is when I should be writing. 

On a more positive note I can become amazingly productive by promising myself I will attack the clutter AFTER I finish the current project. That's my plan for now.

Editing the ms. of vampire novel set in San Francisco. I carry a manuscript around with me when when I edit, like a teddy bear--or like Emily, who resembles the cat in the user pic does with a toy. So I'm dragging a vampire novel around now. Unlike Emily with her toys, I will not drop it in the water bowl.  When I've scribbled all over the print out, the next phase begins...