Andromeda: Judging Covers

Yesterday, I received my first Australia edition copies in the mail. It's always exciting to see the paper, the font size, the inside design. In this case, there's the additional factor that my Australia publisher, Murdoch Books, decided to change both the cover and the title, from The Detour to The Art Lover. (Yes, I'm aware there is another novel with that name, but there's another novel called The Detour as well! With millions of books in print, I can't imagine any title is unique these days.)

I'm interested to see how readers will interpret the novel differently, according to those expectations created by the cover. It's more romantic, certainly. Will readers mind that the romance doesn't really get going until the last third of the book? Will the knowledge that love is ultimately on the agenda help them understand the book better? Will they read my character a little differently? Will more women--who buy more books than men overall--be receptive to this less political, more personal cover, which looks to me more like a movie poster? I'm open to all approaches. I just want people to buy the book!

I've been meaning to blog about covers for a few months, since taking part in a book discussion in which two readers (who are also would-be authors) spent a good while analyzing the cover of a book, and making assumptions about what the author intended by the cover, looking for clues that would influence their reading of the inside text. In my experience, the author has little to say about a cover--even less so in the case when the book is translated (as this book was), and the secondary publisher and the author live thousands of miles apart.

Oh sure, there's the occasional anecdote about an author scribbling a cover idea, passing it onto an editor, and voila, some later cover resembles that initial inspired rendering. In my experience, whenever I've praised one cover, that's nearly always the one the design team throws out. I've become resigned to a lack of agency and authority in this issue. Would I ever demand more involvement? Probably not. Authors really don't have the inside scoop on why some covers will work better than others. Book buyers exercise a lot of power in this area. Imagine a big buyer knows that three books are coming out with similar designs--or even just with the same colors-- six months hence. I've had book buyers and/or distributors nix a particular design, for reasons that don't usually filter down to me. (I'm supposed to be writing, anyway. Not worrying about this stuff. Of course, I do occasionally worry.)

Designers may realize, more than an author, that some trendy cover approach is fast becoming passe. Marketers may realize that women, men, young or old have been turning their noses down at some particular element of design. In the case of my first novel, The Spanish Bow, I know the publisher ran through many, many options before they even let me see the one they were considering. I happened to love it. But later, when a paperback version came out, I actually loved that one more.

In the case of my second novel, The Detour, I saw an early design (the first? who knows?) that was very old-fashioned and colorless, verging on bleak. There goes my sales, I thought. Later, a new version appeared -- the sunflowers cover. Because sunflowers are mentioned several times in The Detour, and this picture reminded me of Italy, and I wanted readers to think of Italy, I thought it was great, and told my editor so. Later, friends told me the cover made them think of Kansas. Kansas, oh no!

The sunflowers cover went into the main catalog, which booksellers saw even before I did. (Meanwhile, the title was also being reconsidered; once again, a distributor had a lot to say about it.) The cover showed up on Amazon. That, I thought, was the end. If I had no pull before, I certainly had no pull now.

But then later, my editor let me in on a secret: they were maybe redesigning again, at the very last minute. That made me even more nervous (though I did applaud them for going the extra mile). What if bookstore buyers saw one cover and then another cover and thought they were different books and got so confused they gave up? Why was this so hard?

My editor emailed me: "What do you call a horse designed by a committee? An elephant." The committee thing again: editors and marketers and publicists and bookbuyers and book distributors.

They came up with a new cover. It was the closest thing I'd seen to what I'd originally imagined: a bit of the Discus Thrower image, a sense that this is a historical novel, the clock tower symbolizing time running out (which it is). Please, I begged my editor, let this new one be the cover. Fickle me. Now I couldn't stand those sunflowers.

End of story, for now. Until the paperback, maybe. Once again, it won't really be up to me, and that's probably for the best.

Do you judge a book by its cover? With ebooks taking over, do covers matter as much anymore? Have you noticed any interesting trends? Do you have an all-time favorite or most-despised book cover?

Maia Nolan-Partnow: Getting Back on the Horse

Welcome to our March featured writer, Maia Nolan-Partnow.

My name is Maia, and I’ve fallen off the fiction wagon.

I finished my MFA in fiction in 2008, when it seemed like the universe was in the process of aligning itself in a way that would ensure my success as a writer. In the year that followed, I co-wrote a play that was produced by Perseverance Theatre and presented on the mainstage at the Last Frontier Theatre Conference. I won a Rasmuson Foundation Individual Artist Award and started building a steady freelance business. I was offered, and accepted, a full-time job as an editor at an exciting news startup. I hate to turn to a cliché so early in the post, but the sky was pretty much the limit.

So you'd think I'd be spending my month as guest writer talking about how to successfully complete a novel while balancing work and life, right? Right?

Wrong. Almost four years after defending my novel-in-progress thesis, that novel is still very much in progress. I’ve written a lot over the last four years, but it’s been short-term writing – columns and articles and blog posts. My novel, meanwhile, languishes unfinished in notebooks and Word documents.

Turns out, being a writer is hard when you don't have a thesis advisor leaning over your shoulder, making sure you meet your deadlines. (Thanks, Jo-Ann.) Especially when there are so many other things competing for your attention. (In the course of "writing" this post, for example, I got sidetracked by my closet, in which everything is now clean and freshly pressed, with my next seven work outfits put together on hangers. Including stockings and jewelry.) And when you're in a job that, while fulfilling, consumes all your free time and creative energy, and you're planning a wedding, and trying to make time for your family, and...

...yeah, see what I did there? I made excuses. I realized recently that I've been doing a lot of that – even though most of the things I was excusing are no longer relevant. I made a career change nearly a year ago, and now I have a job that's creatively satisfying without being draining. The wedding has been planned and over for eight months. I get home between 5:30 and 6 p.m. every night, I do a lot of Crock Pot cooking, and I don't have kids. One thing is clear: At this point, the only thing standing between me and writing is... well, me. Oh, and my crippling fear of failure.

Readers who are familiar with my work will know this is the point in my writing at which I usually make a pop culture reference. I'm willing to bet I'm the only person who reads 49 Writers and watches the ABC Family show "Make It or Break It," but I'll go for it anyway. For those of you who haven’t been watching mediocre cable TV aimed at tweens instead of working on your novels in progress: "Make It or Break It" is about elite gymnasts training for the Olympics. At the end of the first season, the most promising gymnast, Payson, suffers a devastating fall in competition and breaks her back, effectively ending her career. The next season, after undergoing a risky experimental procedure, she's cleared to start training again -- but she doesn't tell her coaches, pretending instead that she's still grounded. Why? She's too scared to get back on the horse (well, it's actually the bars that freak her out, but you get the point). The idea of falling again -- or not being able to do what she used to be able to do -- terrifies her.

I suppose that's not the greatest analogy in the world considering I didn’t fall off a gymnastic apparatus and break all ten of my typing fingers, but despite the fact that I didn't suffer a debilitating injury, I'm feeling a bit like Payson. It's scary, trying to get my writing mojo back. It's a great feeling to be full of promise. It's terrifying to think about having to deliver on that promise. What if I can't finish my novel? What if I can and it's terrible? What if it's not terrible and I never find a publisher? What if I finish it and find a publisher and it's a massive failure?

These are all questions I'll never have to answer if I don't try. Of course, I’ll never get to find out if I can live up to all that potential, either. And as afraid of failure as I am, I’ve decided I’m more afraid of failing to try.

That’s why I’m getting back on the wagon. Maybe I have to treat writing like going to the gym or getting up for work the morning after a late night out – the idea of getting started seems overwhelming, but I know once I get rolling, I’m going to be glad I did it. Even Payson manages to overcome her fear and get back to being one of the world’s best gymnasts. And maybe that’s fiction… but hey, so is what I do.

Also, I probably need to stop watching so much ABC Family. I don’t think it’s doing anything for my productivity.

Maia Nolan-Partnow is an Anchorage journalist and blogger and a former editor of AlaskaDispatch.com who now works in advertising. She has a Master of Fine Arts degree in fiction from the University of Alaska Anchorage. You can find her online at MaiaNolan.com and follow her on Twitter at @myster.

Deb: Marks of Distinction

A good style should show no signs of effort.  What is written should seem a happy accident.  ~W. Somerset Maugham

They’re tiny and seemingly inconsequential, so the decision appears easy enough: to use or forego quotation marks in literary fiction.

I was sold on dumping the little guys after David Vann, one of my literary heroes, explained why he doesn’t use them. None of the writers he loves use quotation marks to frame dialogue, he said, and in the hands of a skilled writer, dialogue is perfectly understandable without them.

I went straight home and began drafting a story.  As the story grew into a novel, I shared excerpts with a handful of readers. Their comments encouraged me – they liked the characters, wanted to read more. But though I’d told them this project was literary fiction, one still dared to complain about the lack of quotation marks around dialogue, saying it made her work too hard.

I wavered. I didn’t want readers put off. But if I tossed the little buggers back in, would my manuscript be perceived as less than literary? That worry is ubiquitous among writers. There’s something about not being taken seriously – an issue for nearly every one of us, on some level – that makes us long to be literary. Respect, distinction, snootiness, peer pressure – these forces all play into the seemingly simple question of whether to mark dialogue with quotation marks.

“Some rogue must have issued a memo,” writes Lionel Shriver in a Wall Street Journal piece titled “Missing the Mark.” "Psst! Cool writers don't use quotes in dialogue anymore."

In following Vann’s example, was I only trying to be as cool as the guy I look up to?

I had to admit that I’d had to reword and rework a few spots in my novel to ensure clarity without relying on quotation marks. But I did like how the prose looked on the page – clean and uncluttered, hinting of poetry and drama and fine literature. In a word, cool.

Nonetheless, I chucked my initial impulse and went back to quotation marks. I felt vindicated when a portion of my work-in-progress took top honors in a literary fiction contest. The judge said nothing about the quotation marks being an unliterary nuisance, and I must admit that I got especially excited when she characterized my project as literary, but with book club appeal. Readership might in fact trump cool.

Now I’m gearing up for another round of revisions on the project. I thought I’d settled the quotation mark question, but then I read Eowyn Ivey’s lovely first novel The Snow Child, which eschews quotation marks. For a different project, I revisited Howard Blum’s The Floor of Heaven, the first full-length nonfiction historical narrative I’ve read that left dialogue unpunctuated. Blum explains in an afterword that he left out the marks where the dialogue is invented.

More waffling. I began to feel out of touch as I do whenever I catch a report on who’s up for the Grammys or which TV shows everyone’s talking about around their water coolers. Hadn’t I until recently still been double-spacing after every end mark? Wasn’t I still clinging to the Oxford comma to the chagrin of some of my hipper friends?

“If you write properly, you shouldn’t have to punctuate,” Cormac McCarthy told Oprah Winfrey (How had I missed that those two conversed? Another pop culture faux pas.) This sounds a lot like what Vann said – not surprising, since McCarthy is one of Vann’s literary heroes. None of us wants to be lumped with the bunch who don’t write properly.

“What effect is this quote-free format meant to achieve?” Shriver asks. “Ideally, a minimalism that lends text a subtlety and sophistication.” But does dropping quotation marks really elevate ordinary speech to elegance, as critic John Freeman suggests? Or does it make everyone sound like they’re muttering, as author Laura Lippman complains?

Shriver points out a problem with lines like this one, from Susanne Moore’s The Big Girls:

Just what is it that you're not getting? he shouted. Your son has been molested.

The over-arching effect is a quietness, Shriver says, “an insidious solipsism” in which “the only character who really gets to talk is the writer.”

Another justification for omitting quotation marks has to do with making readers work. Isn’t that what literature is supposed to do? Not categorically. Mining for subtext is pleasant and rewarding, but trying to determine who’s speaking when quotation marks would easily mitigate the confusion seems like work for work’s sake.

In her Salon piece “All I Want for Christmas is Quotation Marks,” Laura Miller writes,

“There’s difficult and then there’s difficult; minor yet pointless inconvenience introduced into a work of fiction for no perceptible purpose other than to shore up an author’s wobbly sense of his or her own status risks conveying not confidence but insecurity. More to the point, what writer of serious fiction today can possibly afford to put readers off for the sake of a little highbrow preening?”

What writer indeed? I circled back to my literary hero and studied a few works by his literary heroes. Vladimir Nabokov, William Faulkner, Annie Proulx, Marilynn Robinson, James Baldwin, Grace Paley. All, in at least some of their work, enclose dialogue in quotation marks. Cormac McCarthy was the lone exception.

To Vann’s literary favorites, I added my own  - Alice Munro, Jayne Anne Phillips, Elizabeth Strout. All punctuate dialogue in the conventional manner.

In the end, what matters is the effect demanded by the narrative. Those books by Blum and Ivey share an atmospheric dreaminess, a blurred sense of what’s real and what isn’t. A less traditional look on the page, a little fuzziness about who’s saying what – that’s all to good effect, with the added bonus of pleasing readers who consider themselves literary.

Because my novel demands neither a highly interior effect nor a blurred sense of reality, I’ll likely leave my pages cluttered with “those weird little marks,” as McCarthy calls them. To the extent that literary equates to good and true, I covet the label. To the extent that it presumes difficult and unapproachable prose, not so much. As for cool – well, I gave that up a few years back.

Try This: From a page or two heavy with dialogue, remove the quotation marks. Consider how it looks on the page and whether you have to rewrite to make clear who’s speaking. If you like the effect (for reasons other than coolness), the shape of the piece may point you in new ways to think about the piece. Explore ways in which you might allow it to become more interior, or more surreal – but only if it feels like those effects are integral to the story.

Check This Out: The definitive source on conventions for (ahem) literary work is of course TheChicago Manual of Style. The latest edition – number sixteen – came out in 2010. They’re not kidding when they subtitle this hefty volume The Essential Guide for Writers, Editor, and Publishers. Everyone who’s in this for keep should own a copy. Of note: the option of foregoing quotation marks around dialogue has yet to earn a mention.

Linda: A Writing Life

Prior to attending the AWP conference, I spent hours poring over the schedule of events, weighing the relative merits of each panel, and wondering if I could sprint from one session at the Palmer House Hilton to another at the Hilton Chicago in the space of 15 minutes.  When I left for Chicago I carried with me a printed calendar detailing my every move over the next three days. If only I approached my writing life with that same military precision.

Happy for me then, that the first panel I attended was called “A Writing Life: After the Workshop.” I wanted to know how to lead a writing life “After the MFA,” since my old routine had not yet been replaced by a new one in the transition from one job to the next, and I had embarked on no new writing projects. It was time to start acting like a writer.

I learned immediately that the panel, five dynamic young members of the Writing Life Collective, divided their writing lives into four components: Creative, Editorial, Administrative, and Marketing. I also learned that I scored only so-so when it came to performing in each of these areas.

So how do you stay productive and inspired after the workshop/conference/MFA? First, you must carve out the time for your creative work. When there are only so many hours, know what time of day you are most productive. Use a time-tracking journal to analyze the highs and lows of your day (see an example in the panel presentation). A writer on a later panel I attended (“Setting Limits: Balancing Paid Writing & Creative Writing”), who is also a parent, would go into work early to write there. Another writer on that panel tricked herself into doing creative work with a 15-minute rule to dedicate that amount of time to writing every day, until it became a habit.

Then you need to keep honing your craft. Take a class, attend a conference, find or form a writing group of people who are after what you’re after. Schedule writing time into your weekly planner – or “put the big rocks in first,” as Stephen Covey directs us. Let everything else fit around that.

Check out Evernote, a phone app that capture ideas and things of interest in the moment, before they’re lost to you (so like me you don’t waste precious time trying to remember them).

When it comes to editing, we need to understand that “editing is a profession that needs a process and schedule to revise, polish, and submit.” One panelist writes in the early morning, goes to work, and edits in the evening. My biggest challenge is finishing the first draft and restraining my internal editor, who wants to keep picking away at every word written. It’s hardly surprising that my beginnings are polished whereas my endings are weak or non-existent. We should read everything three times: for clarity, mechanics, and punctuation.

Get yourself not one but several stylebooks (preferably the online versions) and familiarize yourself with proofreading marks. As Daniel Prazer commented, “You need to know the rules before you can break them!” Establish a professional email address, set up a Dropbox account, and handle your billing through PayPal.

To stay on top of the administrative side of living a writing life, you need diligence and an organized mind. How else to keep track of submissions, requirements, and deadlines? Set up spreadsheets to track your writing and submissions (see examples here). Use them. This is the first thing I did after returning home, having gathered up armfuls of literary journals from the bookfair, along with contest announcements and flyers detailing submission deadlines.

If you consider yourself “old school” and would rather cross a task off a paper list than set up automated time-tracking on your phone, write your to-do list on a dry erase board and place it where you can always see it. Post inspirational sayings in your writing area.

Marketing is one aspect of being a writer that forces most of us out of our comfort zone. Like it or not once you’re published, you’re a product, and promotion of your writing becomes paramount. Hone and practice your pitch – not just about what you’ve done, but what you’re doing next. At this point all five panelists delivered in turn a snappy, concise statement of what they were up to. Even writers need an elevator pitch – and I heard in several different sessions that writers need to be entrepreneurial. This is my weakest point, a fact that was driven home to me again in the final session, when Mimi Schwartz came and sat next to me. When I told her that Writing True had been helpful in writing my thesis, she of course asked me what the thesis was about. Yet again, I mumbled and stumbled my way through a vague and awkward description of my work. She likely won’t remember our exchange, but I have vowed never to let myself down in that way again.

Set up a free blog (Wordpress is easy to use) and create your own website. Use tools such as HootSuite, an online dashboard for brand management. Apply the 15-minute rule to learning a new technology so it doesn’t feel quite so overwhelming.

Don’t work in a vacuum or you’ll stay in a vacuum – get out there! Read and perform. Network. You never know what connections might lead to new opportunities. Find your people. Develop relationships with trusted editors.

It all comes down to finding the system that works for you – there’s no one formula. The important take-aways for me were to make yourself and your work visible and to foster your own community. This is where 49 Writers can help. Not only do we provide writers with opportunities to hone their craft in our workshops, but the people attending them are making connections with each other and creating a real community of writers. We love to hear about and promote your successes too – let us know if you have published a piece of creative writing or a book, if your work has received special recognition, if you are giving a reading in the community.  We are happy to mention your success in our news roundup or to invite you to contribute as a guest blogger. However you approach it, make a commitment to leading a writing life.

Ela: 49 Writers Weekly Round-up

Mingling with more than 9,500 other writers at the sold-out Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Conference on Chicago's Lakeshore Drive is an experience to remember (not to mention bouncing from table to table at the enormous bookfair like a kid in a candy store, discovering quirky literary journals you never even knew existed).

Despite the overwhelming size and scope of the event, somehow it was hard not to keep bumping into Alaskans - including several Alaskans who held book-signings during the exhausting but energizing three days of literary fare. Debby Dahl Edwardson, featured in Andromeda's blog this week, was there to promote her hard-to-find-in-Alaska book, My Name is Not Easy. Melinda Moustakis, one of our past instructors, signed copies of Bear Down, Bear North, her collection of Alaska short stories. Nicole Stellon O'Donnell from Fairbanks was there for the debut of Steam Laundry, her "novel in poems." John Morgan, a recent guest blogger, signed copies of his new collection of essays, Forms of Feeling: Poetry in Our Lives. University of Alaska Press launched its new Alaska Literary Series, including The Cormorant Hunter's Wife by poet Joan Kane.

Our own Peggy Shumaker, Alaska State Writer Laureate, presented on a panel entitled "Poet & Polis: Four State laureates Speak about their Public Role." David Stevenson, director of the UAA Creative Writing & Literary Arts program, participated in off-site reading. And that's not all...but alas it's impossible to be in several places at once. Suffice it to say the experience was both energizing and exhausting, and that we can't wait to for next year's conference in Boston. More on AWP to follow. Meanwhile, you can check out the excellent AWP blog posts at the Brevity blog. The conference was not without controversy - go to the Brevity blog for Ned Stuckey-French's "Dear John" letter to John D'Agata, which he read at one of the final panels, "The Lyric Essay: A Collapse of Forms or a Form of Collapse?" Is it character assassination, as one audience member charged, or a reasoned response to messing with the facts in creative nonfiction? Join the debate.

49 Writers' recent Crosscurrents event featuring Eowyn Ivey and Andromeda Romano-Lax will air on "Addressing Alaskans" on KSKA, Anchorage 91.1 FM, on Thursday, March 22, 2pm and 7pm.

Today, Friday March 9, and tomorrow, Saturday March 10, 8am start,  the Department of English graduate students of UAA present the 17th Annual Pacific Rim Conference on Literature and Rhetoric, dedicated to examining the implications of multimodality for the way we think, read, write and learn. Guest speakers are Dr. Brian Greenspan and Dr. Cheryl Ball. Administration Building, off Alumni Drive, Anchorage.

Tonight, Friday March 9, 7pm, the Midnight Sun Visiting Writer Series will feature poet and writer Sarah Gorham. Wood Center Ballroom, UAF.

Tomorrow, Saturday March 10, 10am, the Writers' Critique Group will meet at Title Wave Books. Open to any type of writing or genre; all levels welcome. Call Mary at (907) 569 5075 for more information.

Tomorrow, Saturday March 10, 7pm, Fairbanks Arts Association's Literary Reading Series will feature the winners of the 18th Annual Statewide Poetry Contest, including Finn Mackinaw, Canon Cogan, Mei Flory, Chaya Pike, Simon Langham, Shelly Jackson, Ela Harrison Gordon, and Monica Devine. 

Next Friday, March 16, 6.30pm, William Kamkwamba will speak at the Wilda Marston Theatre, Loussac Library, 3600 Denali St, Anchorage. Kamkwamba's story is told in The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, learned to build a windmill to provide power for lights and a water pump from a library book in his Malawi village.

Presenters sought by April 6 for Oct.  5-7 "Writers on the Sound" in Edmonds WA (200 max participants.) There is an honorarium (2011: $134 for 75-minute, $161 for 90-minute workshops), and a stipend is available to those traveling more than 100 miles. Please submit a current resume, including other courses/lectures you have given and where; 2 or 3 references; and a description of one or more classes you would like to teach (75 or 90 Min). The flyer for this Call for Presenters is at this link. If you are interested in presenting at the event, please send email to wots@ci.edmonds.wa.us or write to WOTS Presenters, 700 Main St, Edmonds, WA 98020, or call 425 771 0228. Possibility of accommodation for one in private home. 

Radical Arts for Women (RAW) sponsors a short story contest open to all women living in Alaska.  The contest is named for Nicole Blizzard, a local lesbian writer and editor who passed away in December 2009, the author of Love and Other Mishaps: An Accidental Anthology and editor of the local LGBT literary journal "Naked Ptarmigan."

Guidelines:

-Email the short story to info@radicalartsforwomen.org by 5pm, April 1 as a Word or .rtf document.

-Include in body of email the author's name, address, phone number, email, story title, and word count.

-The short story must be 250-5,000 words and contain some lesbian content. Do not put the author's name on the story; include the author's name in the body of the email with the story title. Erotica is acceptable. Unpublished submissions only.

-The author must be a woman living in AK as of February 2012.

--Winner receives $500 and the winning short story will appear on www.radicalartsforwomen.org Second place receives $300 and third place $100; honorable mentions at the judges' discretion.

-Radical Arts for Women may publish winning entries (including honorable mentions) in a printed and electronic book collection. Submission to the contest gives Radical Arts for Women First North American Serial rights and electronic rights for this publication. Authors retain all other rights. If you do not wish your story to be included in the publication, let them know in your submission email.

-Winners to be announced at Celebration of Change, April 21 2012 and posted on radicalartsforwomen.org

F Magazine's Second Annual Statewide Writing Competition is underway. Digital deadline May 15, 2012; postal deadline May 1, 2012. Open to all poets and writers, published or not, residing anywhere in Alaska. Full details on their website.

Registration is filling fast for this year's Kachemak Bay Writers' Conference, to be held June 8-12 at Lands' End Resort in Homer, featuring keynote speaker Barry Lopez. Full details on the website.

Ann Dixon's essay, "From Touchstones to Touchscreens: the Evolution of a Book Lover" has been published and can be read in the current edition (March/April) of "The Horn Book," the premier publication dealing with Children's Lit. in the US, as part of a special issue on digital media and children's publishing.

Local author Bill Streever's review of "Londoners" by Craig Taylor appears in last Sunday's edition of the San Francisco Chronicle. Read it online here. 

Congratulations to Fairbanks writer Sue Ann Bowling. Her book Tourist Trap won both first place in Science Fiction and best fiction book of the year in the Reader Views awards. Click here for the full list

Andromeda/Your Turn: Writer in the middle -- Amazon, B&N, and NBA nominee Debby Dahl Edwardson

Imagine: You write a book. It receives an exceptional top honor. And still, you can't find it in bookstores across the nation.

This is the problem plaguing Barrow writer Debby Dahl Edwardson, whose YA book, My Name Is Not Easy, was a National Book Award nominee. Perhaps you already read the details in the March 3 Anchorage Daily News article: Edwardson's small publisher, Marshall Cavendish, with whom she has had good relations, was bought out by Amazon, the industry giant whose power is worrying bookstores and publishers both. Barnes & Noble responded by no longer stocking that publisher's books.

If you were like me (an apologetic but usually highly satisfied Amazon customer, who has ordered from them four times just in the last two weeks, but only because my local indie didn't have those books in stock), and you assumed that Amazon -- or maybe even her publisher -- was probably the bad guy in this particular fight, consider this from Edwardson's blog (worth reading in its entirety, but I'll quote just a piece):

Now, here’s my personal experience. I spend ten years writing a book, a book of my soul, one I was driven to write. Some people tell me it’s a good book, maybe even an important book, but I don’t really care for any of that. I'm writing it because I have to, because I'm a writer and that’s what writers do—we write the stories that speak to our souls, looking only at where we have succeeded and where we have failed, determined to do better this time and even better next time. Happily, in my case, my book is published and a small group of other writers sees fit to name it a finalist for one of the top awards in the industry. Suddenly lots of people want my book. My small publisher, who has never had a National Book Award finalist, goes into a frenzy trying to get the book reprinted and into bookstores. I’m patient with them. They get a reprint done fast and the book is out there. Or so I think. Then I start getting reports from friends all over the country: no one can find my book. In NYC, not one Barnes and Noble carries it. Ditto in LA and Boston. Two weeks ago, my husband, who is president of the Inupiat Community of the Arctic Slope, had ten minutes with President Obama. I didn't have a copy of the book to send with him so he decided to pick one up in DC. The book, after all, is his story. He went to five bookstores there and nobody had it. He finally found a copy at a used bookstore. Yes, President Obama got a used copy of my book.

...

She goes on to explain that people are threatening to boycott Amazon, but she is herself a satsified Amazon customer (especially living so far off the road system and needing to frequently order books by mail) and is glad that at least at the online giant, you can count on finding most books.

People can go ahead and say what they please about Amazon but at least they’re not killing our books by not selling them. Amazon is very democratic this way: they sell everything. Yes, the move into publishing is a game changer. But then again, maybe the game needed changing.

Again, it's a really good post, and you should visit her blog directly. She also has an apologetic reply letter from the local Barnes & Noble. Still, Edwardson is stuck.

I want to keep this short because I want to hear from you: Where do you stand on the issue? What problems have you had with finding books you've written or want to read, whether in chains, in indie shops, or online?

My own experience with my own latest book: I've been told it will be stocked in certain stores, only to find it's not stocked there. A friend who just brought over eight gift copies to have me sign had to buy them--where else?--Amazon. Other friends have told me they bought the ebook. (Good for them! But I get a much smaller cut.) If Amazon didn't exist, would there still be a friendly neighborhood Borders, a store that tended to stock my titles well? If Amazon didn't exist, would Borders have gone under, and my own local friends wouldn't be able to find my own recently published book at all?

Tell us what you think!

And if you do read Debby's book, make sure you post a review online, at Amazon, Goodreads, or on your own blog. That kind of word of mouth really does matter in this increasingly social-media-driven world.

Andromeda: Forgiveness, and salvaging the day

It's about 11 am, and I already have several things to forgive myself for.

I intended to get cracking on a novel revision by 9 am. (First draft completed on Dec 31, and two months later, I still haven't finished even the first round of editing I intend to do before letting the project sit again for a few months, pending solicited critiques and further, deeper revisions.) Instead, I read email, including a request for some Alaska photos to accompany an article I wrote for another website. What should that take, 5 minutes?

Nearly an hour later, I've finally found a handful that might do. Digging into the old online folders, I found myself looking at images that have nothing to do with work-- hiking photos like the one above (will summer ever come again? so beautiful!), pictures of my kids when they were younger (look at those sweet, un-self-conscious, pre-adolescent smiles--how I miss those days), and at myself just two and three years ago. (There are those jeans I can't fit into at all now, despite endless trips to the gym and several diets. What the hell happened? To make things worse, I recently injured my hip and have had to stop running and skiing, my favorite stress-relief activities. Argh!)

Yes, I actually leave my desk to go weigh myself. The number on the scale does nothing to cheer me.

And so on, down into a spiral of distraction, started by a genuine work request, but ending in sweet contemplations of times past and sorrowful self-recriminations about times present.

Never mind, the twenty minutes spent washing some pots and pans that could have waited, because I really wanted to listen to a little more political coverage on NPR.

There's lots on the agenda today: freelance work already paid for but not wrapped up, new work in the pipeline, emails, a reading assignment, teaching prep, all the typical errands, and --oh yes-- even a little bit of creative work, if I haven't blown it. Have I already blown it? I get so mad at myself, sometimes!

Here's some wisdom from Eric Maisel, author of Coaching the Artist Within, an inspirational book I discovered last month. "Every day is a day to restore hope. ... Your self-coaching persona must get in the first word each morning: 'I have hope for this day.' "

Well, I had hope for this day. But no (my newly employed self-coach says): forgive and get over it.

Does this seem like too petty a context for using the word "forgiveness"?

My recently published novel, The Detour, takes place in 1938 Germany and Italy, and includes mention of Dachau concentration camp. Online and in interviews, I've already got into some thorny discussions and debates about the Holocaust, political guilt, complicity, and forgiveness -- on the big scale.

My new novel project, tentatively titled "Annie and The Wolves," is about sexual abuse and revenge -- or rather, the impossibility of revenge. That too, encompasses some sensitive discussions about forgiveness. (My two main characters are more interested in shootin' than forgivin'.)

For most of my life, I've tended to think about forgiveness at that level. Lingering trauma. Potentially unforgivable actions.

This year, with two teens in the house--including one itching to leave the nest--I started thinking more about smaller examples of forgiveness. Trying to forgive them for their everyday, normal teen transgressions (lack of gratitude, basic adolescent self-absorption) wasn't getting me anywhere. Then I started thinking about forgiving myself. I'm not a perfect parent, it should go without saying (though my kids seem to think it is worth saying). I can be too sensitive and, on a daily basis, I feel my patience dwindling. I had gotten to a point where I was actually less aggravated at my own kids than at myself, for not responding to them in the way I know a parent should: with an almost oblivious sense of serene, compassionate authority. Forgiving them wasn't really the point at all. It was more about forgiving myself, so I could start each new day with a clean slate, and try to be a better parent. Again.

Eric Maisel's book took this subject a step further, into a realm I hadn't considered before: the role of forgiveness in a creative life. On a daily basis.

Maisel writes: "Every day you will need to reflect on your life and chart your course. Every day you will have to renew the pact you made with yourself to act as if you matter. Every day you will need to forgive yourself and others to release your pent-up pain and disappointment. Every day you will need to surrender to the facts of existence while doing your damnedest to realize your dreams."

My self-forgiveness list isn't just about wasting a few hours here or there, mind you. It's also about forgiving myself for not being a better writer, period. For having taken too long to get to this place. For not doing what it takes. For worrying too much. For envying the success of others. For not appreciating my own success. For letting the errors and the typos and the cliches creep in. For publishing too soon. For not publishing soon enough. For failing to listen. For talking too fast. For taking too long to mail that thank-you letter or respond to that reader. For not taking enough risks. For taking so many risks I've at times imperiled my health and my basic security. For caring too much about security. For being afraid.

Last night, I happened to read a wonderful essay by Jonathan Franzen called "Scavenging," in his collection, How to Be Alone. Written in 1996, five years before Franzen's fame for The Corrections, it captures the despondent voice of a gutsy but exhausted young writer living on a "four-figure income" and at the end of his rope, fed up with his graduate students ("who can't distinguish between 'lie' and 'lay' and have never read Jane Austen"), older readers ("distracted and demoralized"), younger readers ("bred on television"), society at large (hooked on Prozac) and many other overlapping categories of people. Really, of course, Franzen was mostly fed up with himself. He was depressed. He was struggling as a writer. He had things to say but at that time, he was not the Writer he wanted to be, not the kind of person whose commentary would be read and heard (and certainly not the Writer who would later win the National Book Award and end up on the cover of Time Magazine).

At his lowest point, Franzen writes, "I gave up. Just gave up. No matter what it cost me, I didn't want to be unhappy anymore. And so I stopped trying to be a writer-with-a-capital-W. Just to desire to get up in the morning was all I asked."

Which is not to say he gave up writing: a best guess, based on other timeline clues in the essay, is that his second novel, Strong Motion, had been out for maybe a year. Though his personal life was a wreck, he was just beginning The Corrections, a novel in which he would depart from his original post-modern style and write something more grounded in realism, and also closer to his heart. In the mid-90s, Franzen began to see writing as a salvage operation. After hitting bottom, he was ready to accept fiction as refuge, rather than as a way to make grand social change (or to find success on a grand scale).

At the end of his "Salvage" essay, Franzen is rescuing a chair from a garbage heap, watched by a student who asks, "This is what my life will be like if I write fiction?" Franzen isn't just rescuing broken furniture, of course. He is rescuing himself, ready at least to take things day by day, to move on. Franzen writes, "After years of depression, I didn't care how forgiving of myself I sounded." And also: "I prefer to live among the scavenged and the reborn."

Sieze the day. I always liked the sound of that. But perhaps, borrowing from Franzen's essay title, Salvage the day is more fitting for most of us, most of the time. We have much to regret from our past-- serious things and silly things. We may have something to regret just in the last few hours. I know I do.

Look at that -- almost lunchtime. But lunch can wait. Still some time to copyedit 30 or 40 pages, and to do some tough revision on at least one scene before turning to all those other less-creative tasks that must get done.

Deb: Where Characters Come From

The part of a writer that is available for public viewing is what's on the page. This is the truest version of themselves. Malcolm Gladwell

Because I taught high school for many years, I sometimes quip that I enjoy writing because my characters, unlike my students, do as I tell them. Except when they don’t, which is often.

Writers are more parent than puppeteer, struck with wonder (and occasionally, with horror) at the capacities of those we’ve brought into the world. And as with the question of where babies come from, it’s both easy and hard to talk about where characters originate. Characters come from a writer’s imagination, of course, but the curious mix of discovery and planning and circumstance that yields a true and compelling character is tough to pin down.

Emerging writers often ask whether they should create dossiers on their characters, lists of details that define them, before they start writing. Implied is the broader question of whether characters are born out of inductive or deductive thinking – that is, whether characters are built or whether they unfold.

Tom Rachman’s novel The Imperfectionists is a wonderful study in the adept birthing of characters. From the first page, Rachman earns the reader’s trust with details carefully selected and ordered: Lloyd presses against his own front door, wearing white underwear and black socks, toes curled against the chilled air that rushes under the door, his breath whistling in and out of his nostrils as he listens intently, hearing first silence and then voices, a man and woman across the hallway. As the woman approaches his door, Lloyd hustles to the window and positions himself nonchalantly, looking out over the courtyard. The woman is his young wife; she has her older husband’s permission to do as she pleases with the man across the hall.

A washed-up freelancer so desperate for a paycheck that he dines on chickpeas straight from the can, Lloyd’s life is a series of failed relationships, including those with his adult children, one of which forms the crux of this first chapter. For the rest of the book, which is as much a series of linked short stories as it is a novel, Lloyd is mentioned only in passing. Yet at the end, the reader still cares deeply about him.

In a conversation with Malcolm Gladwell, Rachman discusses where his characters came from. “Several are tricky types,” he says, “the sorts who, had I met them in a newsroom, might have prompted me to run. But on the page, I had fondness for them. It’s writing that did this. To form these characters, I tried to conceive of their motives, resentments, disappointments; I watched them gazing unhappily into the mirror, or wincing at office slights.”

The process he describes is both inductive and deductive. Lloyd is at his most fundamental level a despicable journalist: he fabricates a story, and he exploits his son in order to do so. That’s induction – a premise. But to conceive of Lloyd’s motives, resentments, and disappointments, Rachman listens as Lloyd listens and watches as Lloyd watches. He gathers facts about Lloyd, discovers who Lloyd really is. That’s deduction, and what it yields, perhaps unexpectedly but not tangentially, is compassion.

Characters may begin as types – in Lloyd’s case, the despicable journalist – but our fondness for them grows when we turn them loose on the page. An author’s observation of his characters, Rachman says, “stirs compassion that, in real life, is so often obscured by our own motives.” The observational process sounds almost scientific, but compassion as its ultimate end distinguishes the writer’s work from the scientist’s, which by its nature requires a dispassionate approach.

The question of how much of an author herself wriggles into a character can be considered from a similar vantage point. “You separate off a potential in yourself—perhaps even just an emotion – and place it in the petri dish of this other character,” Rathman says, “and watch what becomes of it. That’s why these characters feel like parts of me, though they’re not in any recognizable sense me.”

Try This: Read Paris Review interviews with a few of your favorite authors, then create your own “Paris Review” interview with one of your characters. Begin with a paragraph or two to set the scene for your interview: time, place, season, and weather as well as how the character looks and how she is dressed. Open with easy questions for your character, then segue into more challenging ones, such as “What’s your definition of love?” and “What secrets are you keeping from your creator?” Reportedly when author Allen Gurganous did this exercise with one of his characters from The Oldest Confederate WidowTells All, he ended up with 100 pages and a fresh voice for his character.

Check This Out: To sum up all that Tom Rachman does right with character would take far more than a blog post. Better to read The Imperfectionists for yourself, a novel that makes the question of character versus plot seem utterly irrelevant. 

Deb crossposts at www.selfmadewriter.com.

Your Words or Your Life: A Guest Post by Kris Farmen

My editor and I are currently in the final stages of revising my new book, which means it’s time to get down to the nitty-gritty:  Time to draft the back cover copy, solicit the blurbs, and—most dreaded of all—to write my author bio.

By this stage of the game, I’ve read through the manuscript more than a half-dozen times, and frankly, I’m getting a bit weary of it. This is less a reflection on the quality of the story than a simple function of repetition. You can only read a story, any story, so many times in the space of a year without it getting tiresome. This is the nature of pursuing perfection, and I start to get a little sick of my own company during the process, which doesn’t make it any easier to sum up my life as an artist in thirty words. Writing a 100,000-word novel is cake. Bios are excruciating.

Describing yourself doesn’t come easy when you’ve been raised in a thoroughly blue collar environment where it’s drilled into your head from childhood to eat your Brussels sprouts, not complain, and never consider yourself to be particularly special. The question, at base, is what to say about yourself that doesn’t come across as trite and arrogant. We might also add cute and pretentious to that list. So the tortured artist stares at the blank page and ponders the meaning of his life, or at least where he’s going to find the money to pay his car insurance. There is also the dilemma of how to make himself sound interesting to the bookstore browser or Amazon shopper.

With my first book, I came to this moment with long-held dreams of finally being a published author. This was something to be savored. Or so I thought. I ended up staring at the aforementioned blank page for nearly an hour. I’m rarely at a loss for words when there’s a pen in my hand, but this was possibly the toughest writing assignment of my life. In the end, I scribbled a few lines of doggerel and sent it off, not having the energy to agonize over it any more. It was a bit too long, and maybe a little cute and pretentious into the bargain.

“An author should have no other biography than his books,” said B. Traven, author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. And he’s right. If you’re a writer, it’s the writing that matters, the story, the words between the covers. Everything else is ultimately just a marketing ploy. At the end of the day, your work as an artist is the catalog of your life, not the small paragraph on the back jacket flap. It’s like Bob Marley used to say when he got pissed-off at interviewers: If you’re not listening to my songs, then what else can I tell you?

Traven’s own biography in my copy of Treasure reads, “Very little is known about B. Traven. He died in Mexico in 1968.” Or something to that effect. I’m in Anchorage at the moment, and my copy of the book is in Anchor Point, so looking it up is problematic. Actually, now that I think about it, I may be confusing the exact wording with A.C. Weisbecker’s bio in Cosmic Banditos: “Very little is known about A.C. Weisbecker, and A.C. Weisbecker wants to keep it that way.”    

I love both these bios, though it’s worth saying that this sort of tight-lipped attitude has the potential to devolve into its own peculiar brand of artistic vanity. Look at me!  I’m mysterious and reclusive! That sort of thing. The reading public quite naturally wants to know who you are, and an author should be eternally grateful for that. Even Cormac McCarthy finally had to submit to an Oprah interview.

Still, I’ve come around to the less-is-more school of thought with author bios. Two or three lines, maybe four at the very most, and keep the subjunctive clauses to a minimum. Mention your previous book, and tell the folks where you live. If you’ve won the PEN/Faulkner award, then say so. Beyond that, it’s the writing that’s important, not you.

Kris Farmen is the author of the novel The Devil’s Share, as well as numerous essays and magazine stories. His new novel, Turn Again, will be released this coming spring. He lives on the Kenai Peninsula, and has not won the PEN/Faulkner Award.

Ela: 49 Writers Weekly Round-up

Mark your calendars now! Thanks to partnerships with Epicenter Press and Wrangell Mountains Center, we have been able to arrange for two additional Readings & Crafts Talks and an August Synergies event. On Tuesday, April 24, from 7-8:30 pm, Mary Albanese will talk about writing her memoir, Midnight Sun Arctic Moon, at Great Harvest Bread Company. In August, both poet Dan Beachy-Quick and visiting writer Justin Torres, who will be in Alaska to conduct writing workshops for Wrangell Mountains Center, will make a stop in Anchorage to participate in 49 Writers events. On Friday, August 3, 7-8:30 pm, Justin will give a reading and craft talk, and on Friday, August 10, 7-8:30 pm, Dan will participate in a Synergies event at the Anchorage Museum. 

If you missed the recent Crosscurrents event with Andromeda-Romano Lax and Eowyn Ivey, the podcast is now available on the 49 Writers website under Resources. Thanks again to Jeff Oliver for recording. Coming up Tuesday, March 6, 7pm, 49 Writers Reading and Craft Series presents poet Joan Kane with "In Other Words: Poetry in Translation. She will talk about the function of translation work in generating new poems and revisiting bodies of writing. Metro Books, 530 E. Benson Blvd No.9, Anchorage.

Registration opens soon. Details of our popular Tutka Bay Writers Retreat are coming. This year, the retreat will last two days and take place from Friday, September 7 through Sunday, September 9.

There is still time to sign up for the last classes of our spring season. Starting on Wednesday, March 7, 6:30-9:00 pm, Kelsea Habecker (author of Hollow Out, New Rivers Press), will be teaching a four-week workshop for intermediate writers, “Pursuing Poetry.” The season ends with a bang with not one but two workshops from the inimitable Steve Almond, who describes himself as “the author of a bunch of books and two children. The children, at least, are cute.” On Saturday, April 7, 10am to 12:30 pm, Steve will teach a workshop on “Obsessive Writing.” In the afternoon of the same day, join him for a second session, 2-4:30 pm, entitled “Funny is the New Deep.”

We’re at the AWP conference in Chicago this week, so look for news on this next Friday.

Alaska Literary Series will be at AWP March 1-3, table F18. Amber Flora Thomas will be signing copies of her book The Rabbits Could Sing from 1-2pm. Joan Kane will be signing copies of The Cormorant Hunter's Wife from 2-3pm. There will also be copies of Marjorie Kowalski Cole's City Beneath the Snow.

Today, Friday March 2, 7pm, the Alaska Quarterly Review First Friday series features Jeff Silverman reading selections from the Fall 2011 edition of the Alaska Quarterly Review, and musical guest Flat Baroque: an ensemble including recorders, krumhorns, violin, guitar, harpsichord, percussion and vocals. For more information, visit their website uaa.alaska.edu/aqr Jitters Cafe, 111401 Old Glenn Highway, Eagle River.

Today, Friday March 2, 7pm, the winners of the Kenai Peninsula Writers' Contest will read their winning entry at Bunnell St. Gallery, old town Homer. To be followed by a benefit concert for Homer Council on the Arts with Alaskan singer-songwriter Robin Hopper.

On Saturday, March 3, 10am, a writers' critique group will meet at Title Wave Books, Northern Lights Mall, Anchorage. Open to any type of writing or genre, and all levels. For more information, call Mary at (907) 569 5075.

On Monday, March 5, 5-7pm, Author and CWLA MFA Faculty member Carolyn Turgeon presents The Next Full Moon, her first children's book. UAA Campus Bookstore. 

On Tuesday March 6, 12-2pm, Dr Christopher Clark presents "Whales and Acoustics in the Marine Environment. Dr Clark is director of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. This event  is sponsored with Alaska's Big Village Network. UAA Campus Bookstore.

Also on Tuesday, March 6, 5-7pm at the UAA Campus Bookstore, Ahmed Elramsisy presents "Egypt and its Changing Society."

Next Friday and Saturday, March 9-10, starting 8am, the 17th Annual Pacific Rim Conference on Literature and Rhetoric will take place at UAA. Organized by Department of English graduate students, the conference welcomes Dr Brian Greenspan and Dr Cheryl Ball. The conference is dedicated to examining the implications of multimodality for the way we think, learn, read, and write.

Next Friday, March 9, 7pm, the Midnight Sun Visiting Writer Series presents Sarah Gorham, who will read poets and essays. Wood Center Ballroom, UAF Campus.

Next Saturday, March 10, 7pm, the Literary Reading Series presents the Fairbanks Arts Association's Eighteenth Annual Statewide Poetry Contest Winners in the Bear Gallery. Featuring poets Finn Mackinaw, Canon Cogan, Mei Flory, Elizabeth Alexander, Chaya Pike, Simon Langham, Shelly Jackson, Ela Harrison Gordon and Monica Devine. Alaska Centennial Center for the Arts, 2300 Airport Way, Fairbanks. Free and open to all.

Organization is underway for the "Writers on the Sound" event in October. If you are interested in presenting at the event, please send email to wots@ci.edmonds.wa.us or write to WOTS Presenters, 700 Main St, Edmonds, WA 98020, or call 425 771 0228.

Teri Sloat: Coming Back to the Place I Love...Alaska

I asked if I could write one more blog to share my excitement and the other part of my career that often merges into storytelling. I will be having a show at Stephan Fine Arts in Anchorage tomorrow (Friday, March 2). It is my third show there, and will be a combination of my folk art and Alaskan landscapes. But the part I am most excited about is that the connection I feel to the life we lived in the villages and to my current trips to Alaska, whether working with elders on their storytelling or on writing projects as a consultant or just traveling down the highway through Kenai on the way to Homer.

Finally, after thirty years, I have started looking at some of our old photos, pretending that I am standing in my old tracks and painting. The old photos have lost color, so I put on the same headset I have when standing outdoors here in California...I enhance colors, I edit out everything that is not part of the story and paint my feeling of the place.

I keep the picture below in my studio. It sits in front of me to remind me of the grandeur of Alaska. It reminds me that Alaska offers a feeling of distance, of thin air that might allow you to see a destination far away. Even if you have no idea of how you are going to get there, there is still a feeling that there is a path for you to take. It is what keeps some people sane and drives others to live to the edge.

When I come back to Alaska I am often surrounded with people who are comfortable out of the mainstream, and honor who they are. People who have had to step outside of their comfort zone to share their gifts with others. As writers, artists, musicians, and individuals, we have to find a way to honor who we really are, the view we have from our own piece of land, while balancing all of that with family, unknown new directions with no beaten path. We must pursue our careers regardless of income, supplementing when we need to, but going back to our passions as soon as possible. My husband is a wonderful example of that...he is an amazing general contractor, but saves time for hunting, gardening, meat-making and cooking, and saves time for gathering with friends to tell stories...these are the people I want to be with...those who have seen something in the distance that connects with their past, and are willing to forge a path, or to brush out an overgrown path on which to take their trips, to get to their next summit or camp. And those are the people who have stories to share, whether they are about the physical, emotional or spiritual world.

I go back to places of distance, like Alaska, as often as possible, to feel small enough to travel through the open space of my own ideas with a knowledge that I am headed through a beautiful landscape on my journey. And often, when I’m sitting in a small plane, staring out the window, driving down the Kenai, if I pay attention, my subconscious is telling me a story, creating an image for me to re-create. Distance and white noise always help me tune in to who I am and Alaska continues to provide a canvas for new paintings and stories.
Teri Sloat has been writing and illustrating children’s books for almost twenty years, with over twenty trade books published with Dutton, Orchard, DK Ink, Holt, Putnam and Alaska Northwest Books. She has also worked as a freelancer in illustration and educational publishing and enjoyed a visiting professorship with Hollins University, teaching MFA students in Children’s Book Writing and Art. Her books have been awarded by the American Booksellers Association, the New York Times, the American Library Association, the Children’s Book Center, Sesame Street, and State Reading Associations. She lives with her husband, Bob, a very small farm in Sebastopol, CA. For more info go to www.terisloat.com and www.terisloat.blogspot.com

Teri Sloat: Life is Simply Complicated

Now I’m having a big problem with my present day career;
My ship, she has a rudder, but I don’t know where to steer.
Am I country, pop, or rock n’roll?
I know they are related.
I’ll just let you be the judge,
It’s simply complicated.
Life is complicated with its if’s and and’s and but’s.
It’s alright to be crazy....just don’t let it drive you nuts!

Andromeda sent me some questions after my second blog that hit close to home, so this will be less philosophy and more about combining parts of my career that call for different venues and schedules. Like the song above, my ship often heads in different directions, and I find myself “going with the flow” instead of steering against the current. It often leads to complications but always to good surprises and an interesting trip. The result is often a mixture of unexpected finishes and many projects that “drift.”

Q. Since you both write and do art, how do certain projects unfold? Have you done both things in most of your books?

A. I have given a talk several times at conferences called, WHICH COMES FIRST, THE PICTURE OR THE WORD? For the first fifteen years of my commercial writing career all the projects I worked on were headed for a book...that was my dream, and we were raising kids and putting them through college, so I had to keep my rudder headed straight to sales and marketing. If I found I had an idea that didn’t fit into a picture book, I put it away. If I had a piece of art that told a story, but did not seem headed for book form, I put it away.

But when our last daughter headed for college, I had time to take art lessons and found that I had the same passion for plein air painting and folk art that I had for writing and illustration. My worlds often split as I started having shows and took time away from my writing just to develop my art. But once in a while they came together...a picture like FEEDING TIME is now slowly working its way into a wordless book form. Only after having the picture with me for a while did I realize that the woman in the birdhouse had her own story.

The picture at the top of this post is from a set of large canvases I did for the Boston Children’s Hospital...no words yet, but a series of images of a pair of birds taking a vacation. On its questionable way to becoming a book, it has become an animated android app that you can watch on www.terisloat.blogspot.com. It is waiting for the second half of the story.

After writing JACK AND THE BEANS TALK, which was for theater, I met a duck that I could picture walking on the stage and sounding like Seinfeld’s Kramer. I had been writing dialogues, monologues, etc, for the play and suddenly could hear a monologue...so the play was a time out, but the result was a book. Writing the play with its jazz and blues songs taught me to hear our written language a different way. I wanted to be the illustrator for I’M A DUCK! So I did both for the writing and the illustrator, backed the duck up from being an adult to hatching out and being totally in love with each phase of his life, from hatching to flying to meeting a girl to becoming a dad. (That was the primary teacher in me showing the life cycle of a duck, I’m sure.) The follow-up for the book, which for one brief second I thought might be a sequel, only turned out to be entertainment at conferences. When our kids were all out of the house, we experienced a little “empty-nest” syndrome. So I wrote I’M A DUCK WITH AN EMPTY NEST...sort of the duck’s version of teaching kids to drive and being left behind, then being forced to take a migration vacation with his wife, etc. It is not a book, just something fun to read and share...it’s that reality of packaging again.

Q. What percentage is just the art, and any just writing?

A. Well, this is easy. A picture book is a unique experience for the reader. While the words and images need to add to each other, both the writing and the art need to feel like they are from the same world. My goal is to have a book that transports the reader without interruption into a story. If I feel like I am not the right illustrator for a book...i.e. the FARMER BROWN books needed a looser, more comedic illustration than what I do...I ask that the publisher to find another illustrator, and they have been great about taking suggestions. So, out of twenty something books, about seven are illustrated by someone else, and I am the illustrator for two books by other authors, one of which is DANCE ON A SEALSKIN, by Barbara Winslow. And I am just writing....often for myself until I see what happens to the story. I still write to work out my own thoughts, started two novels that are not finished.

Q. Do you prefer to do both parts, or to work with another writer?

A. If this is like which part do I like the best or which is the easiest for me, the answer is that the writing is always easier. The art takes longer, feels like more of a gamble when it comes to books. I only illustrate for other writers if the subject hits close to home or is just plain fun.

So here is my current list of preferences:

First: art work that is done for pleasure...whether landscapes or folk art. I often ask why it bothers me to put so much time into a book before it sells when it doesn’t bother me to pour endless hours into gallery pieces that may not sell. Single pieces of art are relaxing...different than weaving images together for a story.

I love creating images that tell a folkloric story from my imagination

Second: Writing...and all the research you get to do over the simplest story.

Third: Illustration....because it is the hardest, and because I am terrible at organizing a storyboard and dummy...it is the only part of creating books I am not in love with. I actually love creating the final illustrations.

But the rewards are often reversed...a written and illustrated book is my biggest trophy and connects me to the most people. My folkloric art that is in galleries has a style that is labored over with acrylic and color pencil that takes days, which is the time I spend entertaining myself by making a story I can share on a wall, but not yet in a book.

Q. Is every story or collaboration different? Those of us who only write often puzzle about how to break into the children’s book business.

A. While every story and collaboration is different, there are a few things that help people break into the children’s book business.

Join SCBWI, read their newsletter and go to their regional meetings. Most agents and editors will not look at your manuscript unless you belong. It is where you learn the basics of the business, meet art directors, agents, editors, authors, etc., and often where authors new to the medium get permission to send manuscripts to closed houses.

Read and study endless piles of picture books or chapter books. Criticize them, admire them and look up their creators on the internet and learn their stories. The internet is a wealth of background on how books are made.

If you are an illustrator, take art lessons...a part I avoided way too long. Learn the basics of drawing in general, not just your subject matter, and learn to use a variety of mediums. Your job is to choose the right medium or to perfect a medium that lets us sink into a new world.

As for the Jimmy Buffet song, the part I have to remind myself of often, is that even when I’m not steering my ship, it is headed somewhere, and though I head into other genres, they are all related to storytelling and sharing what I see and feel.

Please share some of the journeys that you have been on, both the drifting and steering.

Thanks to Teri Sloat for being our February featured author. We'll have one more post from her tomorrow. Teri has a show coming up this Friday, March 2, at Stephan Fine Arts in Anchorage.

Deb: The Writer’s Dilemma

Do not hurry, do not rest.

~Goethe

Most of my writing life has been a waste of time. I mean this in the nicest possible way.

An efficiency expert would produce a dismal report on the ratio of a writer’s time expended against her productive output. If money is factored in, the report turns even more dismal. Of the words we write, few survive the revision process, and even fewer make it into print. But then no one said the creative work was efficient. 

Efficiency aside, a common complaint is having no time to write. Years ago, when my children were young and I was teaching fulltime and I couldn’t see how writing and publishing could ever be more than wishful thinking, a colleague wisely advised me to devote ten minutes a day to my dream. Everyone has ten minutes to scribble in a journal, write a line or two of poetry, map a character.

Be consistent with your ten minutes a day, and the effort will becomes its own reward. Soon you’ll find yourself carving out more time to write. Twenty or thirty minutes a day. An hour or two, while the children nap, as Alice Munro used to do. Or Sundays, all day. Plenty of respected writers work fulltime in jobs that have little or nothing to do with their craft, like Bill Streever in his demanding job at BP.

Annie Dillard advises a schedule, saying it “defends from chaos and whim.” What makes up that schedule may come as a bit of a surprise. As one example, Dillard offers American poet Wallace Stevens. Each day Stevens rose at six, read for two hours, and walked an hour to work, where he dictated poems to his secretary. At noon he walked rather than ate. No mention is made of how he spent his afternoons, but after his hour’s walk home and a meal, he would retire to his study and would be in bed by nine.

No sense wasting valuable time pining for a secretary to take our dictation and a study to which we might retire. The point is that Stevens spent a lot of his time not writing but reading, walking, reflecting. Meaningful activities, in the right proportions. It’s not so much how much time we have as how we use it.

Think in terms of these general categories: creation/revision, reflection, immersion, community, and – as a catch-all – money-stuff.  Some might separate creation and revision, but for me they’re inseparable components of the recursive process of discovery. Reflection - composting as Ursula LeGuin calls it – results from quiet, mindful activity like walking or knitting. Immersion includes reading and research, either purposeful or general.  Community involves time spent in the company of other writers, supporting our mutual efforts, in writers groups and organizations like 49 Writers. Money stuff is anything from querying for publication to freelancing to promotion and marketing – even pre-marketing, as in the current trend of encouraging aspiring writers to establish websites and blogs and social media presence.

Given your individual ambitions and interests and stage of development, you might look at your writing activities differently. That’s fine. Once you’ve identified the major components of your writing life, consider what proportion of your valuable time you’d ideally like to devote to each. Reality has to factor in also. I’d love to spend 75% of my time creating and revising and the rest on reflection and immersion, with a little left over for community, money be damned. But lacking the financial resources to hire out the promotion and marketing chores, I have to set aside a quarter of my working time for the money stuff.

The time you devote to each aspect of being a writer is up to you. Be flexible. Purposefulness and creativity are by no means mutually exclusive. Energy and momentum are part of the mix. If your day job demands creative energy, you may need to set aside weekends and vacations for the creative parts of your work. Regarding momentum, I aspire to David Vann’s self-imposed rule: when he’s working on a novel, he schedules nothing else in the mornings, and he works seven days a week till it’s done.

The writing life may be far from efficient, but for successful writers, neither is it haphazard.

Try This: For two weeks, keep a diary of your writing activities: creation, revision, reflection, immersion, community, money stuff. Then tally up the time spent in each area, and compare it against how you’d like to be spending your writing time. Factor in energy and momentum to come up with a schedule to help you become a happier and more productive writer.

Check This Out: Spare and surprising, Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life offers plenty to mull over during your reflective moments. It’s a slim, pithy book to reread whenever you need to regain perspective on the crazy lifestyle you’ve chosen.

Deb cross-posts at www.selfmadewriter.blogspot.com.