Authors Electric

You may be in either camp or be a hybrid, as I am. In the course, though, of writing a novel we may all come to the same block: we know where to go  and exactly what to do there...but we can't seem to figure out how to get there smoothly and efficiently. I found myself on a roll with my WIP when the ending of the seventh chapter threw me for a loop. Consider: Chapter 7 ends with two of the three main characters--let's call them A and B--engaged in risky business in a small Arizona town. They've arranged for C to follow them days later on a different pretext, apparently looking for work. But, unknown to them, something has happened in Tucson. Chapter 8. Change of POV. Cut to character C, left behind in Tucson. Because of what's happened, he chooses to leave a day early though he can't reach A and B by phone. The challenge: getting him on the road and to his destination, while filling readers in on the Tucson tragedy. Road trip? Flashbacks? I tried a dozen different t...

 I could give you a dozen excuses for my plunge to the bowels of the pits in filing organization. And a few of those alibis might seem understandable. In the move from Seattle to Tucson, I'd left behind my filing cabinets and hadn't been careful enough in boxing personal papers. In Tucson, with a bad knee and limited public transportation, shopping for office replacements had proved to be beyond me. My work schedule and medical appointments got the best of my time management. Etc,  But screw excuses. I ended up with papers stuffed pell-mell in bags and boxes. And I couldn't find a thing. Furthermore, my new WIP demanded extreme organizational skills-- and I was starting to feel like an imposter.  I recalled an old strategy that I called Transfer of Funds-- depositing confidence and power from past accomplishments to areas if weakness. Could it work again for me with the mess that I found myself in?  To start, I bought a dozen cardboard bankers boxes, two dozen hangin...

  Books don't come more suspenseful than this red-blooded actioner. And not since Virgil has an author committed to writing daily only a couple of lines. Moreover, not even Virgil wrote a book with no words-- only numbers. More Reb MacRathian nonsense? Only if you don't believe in the amazing maze comprised of our writing, our lives, and our health. This new book resulted from a recent annual wellness exam in which my grades were mostly good-- except for my blood pressure. In the mid-170s, it was alarmingly high. The doctor showed me the following chart: His immediate goal was to get my BP down to 130, which would still leave me in danger as you can see from the chart. Ultimately, we must reach the green zone:  "Less than 120." For God's sake! How the hell was I to live to write the great books I might still have within me? I'd already abandoned alcohol, cigarettes, coffee, red meat, white bread; and I'd greatly reduced my intake  dairy, sugar, and sodium....

a   Sooner or later, most of us come to the crosshairs of Time: We've fallen short of our deadlines and dreams of fame, success, wealth, acclaim, true love, and six-pack abs. Now, in our fifties or later, the pressure's on to Beat the Clock: write more books, attend more cons, hustle online for more hours each day, grovel still more shameles8sly for that promotion at work/that award... What else are you to do with younger rivals nipping at your heels and older pros passing on the shit they've had dumped on their heads while your timelines grows shorter and shorter?     All these glum thoughts plagued me five months after moving to Tucson, where I'd planned to soar, reborn from the ashes I'd left behind me in Seattle. Instead, I found myself in the crosshairs, hobbled by a knee injury, unable to get around the town as well as I'd hoped, trapped in a job that was wrong in most ways, and drifting further by the day from the drudgery of transcribing my drafted Work ...

Sooner or later we all need to learn how to STUFF IT properly. Stuff a package or a query or an email, on which your world depends, with not just words but little touches of your exceptional soul.  Above you see the stuffing used to get my little book into the hands I need to reach.  1) A pack of 9 colorful rolls of  masking tape. 2) One of many 6x9" envelopes. 3) One sheet of envelope seals  4) Front and back sides of the card accompanying each package 5) One gift bag containing two copies of the book 6) Two promotional post cards inserted in each book Now let's break the stuffing down into stages. I. Artfully stuffing the gift bag . Bag quality was critical. And the size had to be right for two copies of my 55-page book while promising a worthy gift. Inside each book I'd enclose two soft-sell promotional post cards. 2. Artfully sealing the gift bag. Now for the masking tape. The gift bag had perfect side fitting, but I was left with a flap to fold over and this tor...

  Oh, They have a long list of reasons why the book that's your baby belongs in the casket they've already made. It's too short/long/purple/plain/commercial/literary/off-the-wall/common...or to put it simply: I've spent the past year on a project that had Too-Too all over it before I'd even started. And yet I continued with some trepidation. But, as I continued, I grew more defiant. I also grew more confident that there was a market for my project: seven radical renditions of poems by one lesser-known Roman poet--'inspired-by covers ' instead of conventional translations. I envisioned a book totaling maybe 50 pages, including commentaries that I hoped would be half of the fun. Since nothing like this book exists, it might have a fighting chance if I remembered E. Lynne Harris.   Harris was a bisexual black author who self-published this first book in 1991. Like other authors in those pre-Web days, Harris drove around in a car loaded with copies. But unlike o...

You've gotta give it to the ancient Greeks. They pulled a sweetheart of a trick thousands of years ago, so sweet we still remember it. In fact, we have a phrase for it: Beware of Greeks bearing gifts . Gifts like a giant wooden horse given to a city...and rolled in with armed troops inside it. Troy fell because of that but the horse will live forever along with our awe of Greek cunning. What might happen, you might wonder, if the gift could be reversed--and a well-meant, beautifully wrapped gift arrived...and was received as bearing grease ? Grease in the sense that the gift is seen as smeared with ambition, deceit, and base pride. This actually happens too often. Because of the volume of spam and links meant to hack us not give us a thing, we've all grown jaded and suspicious. And few things set our teeth on edge like a slick trick from a half-witted writer. It could be someone you've just befriended on Facebook. Within minutes, you receive a gushing, greasy email: Dear Fr...

  Doody goes by many names: kaka, poo, poop, dog do or shite, to give just a few of the faves. And one thing we all have in common is that we come to fear it throughout our lives in different ways. When you’re trying to write a first novel, you’d damned well better fear going out to market it with doody all over your shoes: typos, grammos, hackneyed phrasing, slothful pacing, etc. Then, when it’s time to pitch the book, be sure: it’s frighteningly easy to send off a query that’s reeking of poop. But even later on, when we're somewhat established, we may feel threatened by the stink of many names. One day when we hear Duty call with what may be our big break we know we're right to tremble though we pray there's a chance that we'll end up with this:   Enough of generalities. Here’s my true scary story.    For over thirty years, I’ve had a thing for the ancient Roman and Greek classics. As I wrote in last month’s blog, I grew more and more intrigued by the study...

We called them trots--or sometimes cribs: word-for-word translations we used in the study of Latin. And in a moment I'll tell you why you should give a rat's arse about that. Without a trot, who could survive the horror of translating Cicero, Caesar, Horace, and the other Dead White Dudes who made our days such nightmares?   The two most basic trots were from the Loeb Classical Library and Cambridge University Press. Loeb as shown below shows the original text on the left and a more or less literal rendition on the right. The Cambridge text beside it sheds detailed light on lines and even single words.    We could survive a course in Latin where all that really mattered were grammar and literal meaning. But to have a prayer of understanding the deepest meaning of any classic needed help from Cambridge and other first-rate trots. Which we had no time for then, no more than our instructors.     Okay okay already! What's trotting got to do with you in 2021?...

You should always wear your wee red briefs for any up-front Big Reveal. And I say the briefer the better. Keep my Reveal in hand--er, mind--as I approach the climax of my years-long affair with AE: It's time for me to say goodbye. In brief, hear are a handful of lessons I've learned and memories I'll treasure. --AE affords its members a rare sense of community. Most of us begin with no sense of our audience; many writers never acquire that sense. Even once we've published, it may be years between books and the loneliness of our profession may seem at times to be too much to bear. Here, once a month, we address writers we've gotten to know. Kindred souls with war stories to share. --The blog can be a great testing ground. Which of our monthly posts strike a chord...and which fail, like my last post, to attract a single comment--or raise the hackles of colleagues, like my Jack the Ripper post. This chance to test the impact of our words can be immensely...

Hey, no kidding. Listen up! My own Great White was out there-- online invisibility-- waiting to devour my next book like the twelve before. But I'd grown extra-protective, you see; the new book was so different from all of rest. And I'd pledged my life to save it-- when the Great White finally surfaced after showing its dorsal for years. And it surfaced more than once. First, my cover artist declined to work on the new book, citing her 'moral objections'. The title included the last name of an actor she didn't approve of. Neither did I but the actor, who doesn't appear in the book, sells a giant stick that does. Next, I learned that I'd been dropped from an April radio interview that would have helped market the book. And the path to blurbs for life support was paved in equal parts with Yays, Nays and silent snubs. I'd started to wonder if I should jump ship. But then I heard Chief Brody's cry, followed by the captain's roar to start ge...

It's never easy, putting an old love to pasture in order to romp with a new one. In fact, it's often ill-advised and sure to bring on a hailstorm of disapproval and contempt. We may be left with nothing when the new love walks or we wish that s/he would. I knew all this. But, even so, when the Muse whistled to me 'Time to change!' I said so long to my old love: I'd used Moleskine notebooks for many years, in love with their various  thoses :  those durable, finely bound covers...those handy back-end pouches...those premium quality pages... I loved way the Moleskines fit in my coat pocket. And I loved the sense of belonging to a club of writers and artists who'd all been Moleskine lovers. In the course of writing a novel, I'd use one notebook for research and notes, then others for various parts of draft 1. I had no way of knowing my love would ever end. And yet it did on 12/23 when I read Lev Butts' AE blog on last-minute Christmas gift ide...