Authors Electric

Karen Kao’s column this month spoke to me and made me think that somehow we’d made a secret pact at the beginning of this year. You see, I vowed New Year’s Day 2019 to achieve a goal of 100 rejections. To date I have received 12 rejections. Like Karen, I’ve also taken a scattershot approach, submitting entries based on what publications wanted. Thousands of publications exist. They all need content. Without a direction for myself, they became my writing compass. That seemed the easiest thing to do. I had no idea what I was doing, had no map marking a destination, nor plans as to what sort of career goals I had as a writer. Being 54 also heightens the lack of direction I feel as I probably less time ahead of me than behind me. But writing so much these last three months has clarified a lot for me. I now know both the direction and the destinations for my writing. I want to publish a work of nonfiction (I’m calling it a creative memoir) with a small, well-regarded publishin...

I continue to write about my father's family through my grandfather's large photographic archive. Repeated tagging, reviewing and sharing of these photos has allowed me to see our family patterns in surprising ways, like how my grandparents used their money to purchase automobiles and travel and snap pictures. They were devoted to one American car brand. Cars and photography seem to go well together in the United States. We traverse the country by auto, get out at some known or unexpected vista and take a photo or ten. Our family was no different. My grandparents and father, then later my grandparents with my aunts and me, drove all over Colorado and New Mexico, Mexico, Texas and Michigan. All motoring was done in Oldsmobiles. Three different Oldsmobile 88s moved them through their lives for more than 30 years.⠀⠀ The first instance of their Oldsmobile devotion can be found in the photo below. My father and grandmother prepare to go skiing and have loaded their skis on t...

Erle Stanley Gardner Erle Stanley Gardner, originator of the 20 th century America’s favorite lawyer Perry Mason, wrote like a fiend on speed. His output as a writer boggles the mind. Every year he aimed to write 1.2 million words. You read that correctly. 1,200,000 words, which breaks down to 100,000 words a month or about 3,300 words a day. He wrote those 3,300 words in addition to working as part of an active legal practice in Southern California. Gardner also devoted thousands of hours to "The Court of Last Resort.”  He and other lawyers , forensic experts and investigators used their experience and expertise to free men they believed had been wrongfully convicted because of poor legal representation, abuse, misinterpretation of forensic evidence, or careless or malicious actions of police or prosectors. Gardner died in 1970, and at that time was the most published author in America during the 20 th century. He wrote fiction under seven different pseudonyms plus h...

I’m working on a novel and mostly working on understanding what the heck I’ve gotten myself into. Long a nonfiction author, I had believed the shift no more challenging than moving from an essay to a book.  Fiction requirements like plot points, story arcs and character development do exist in nonfiction, I knew, so hard could it be, really? (I will wait for all the fiction writers to wipe the tears from their eyes.) Having written screenplays in the past I understand plotting fairly well and loving mysteries and thrillers as I do makes plotting easier, for me at least. The biggest bugaboo has been character development.  The best thrillers possess great character arcs, too. "Silence of the Lambs" ranks as one of my personal favorites and combes both a great plot and a great character arc.  But again and again character development and character change has left me scratching my head. I’ve written outline upon outline, character sketches, mini-draft...

The words read flatly and stunk out loud. A kind of slow-moving gloom descended over me. What had happened to this essay? I worked on it for weeks and rewrote it twice. Another reading out loud confirmed my initial review: the words were dead on the page. The culprit eluded me. Rereading no longer worked. I had read it so often the words no longer meant nothing and decided to put it aside and reread Joan Didion's The White Album . Her nonfiction work in general and the titular essay of the book in particular changed how American authors write nonfiction essays.  "We tell ourselves stories to live," begins the essay and meanders through Didion's observations of the late 1960s California.  A news story about a woman who deserted her five-year-old daughter on the median of a Los Angeles freeway is juxtaposed with excerpts from her own psychiatric evaluation. The Summer of Love and the 1960s were for her a complete failure.  She had charted the beginnings of this f...

The manuscript, a second volume of my ongoing memoir series, was done and sent to my beta readers. I felt so proud, constructing essays using some of the tools I learned in Julie Otsuka’s Buddha in the Attic and a few essays I studied in the journal A   Public Space . “I like what you’ve written,” one beta reader wrote in an email. “My question is,” she continued. “Who are you writing for?” Her question floored me. I had countless bylines, varieties of writing experience, two completed screenplays and one completed novel and more than a passing understanding of how the English language works. Not once did a beta reader ask me who I was writing for. The second volume seemed no different. I was writing for my readers. Like me, I thought the tired cliches used to describe transsexual experiences like mine bored them. Like me, I thought they wanted a complex narrative about being born female then transitioning to male, and well before the internet, too. Like me...