I just returned from vacation in Ireland—of which I have many thoughts. Before I get to that, two bits of news first:
I’m offering
an intermediate fiction workshop that will begin on Saturday, September 9 at Wordspace
in Los Feliz. “Intermediate” means not
absolute beginner. I’m looking to work
with people who are already writing--perhaps working on a project such as a new
short story or novel. You don’t have to
have a project going in, but you need to have written fiction. The workshop will meet for eight
Saturdays. You will be turning writing
in every week, which I’ll post weekly for class members to read and critique. Your writing only has to be a few pages each
week, but this is a workshop where you’ll be writing often, including in-class
exercises. We’ll also be reading from
Robert McKee’s Story, which we’ll discuss in part of each week’s
class. Most of my students who have
read and discussed it have found Story a godsend. To sign up, or for more information on the
class, click here.
My family and
I left for Ireland the day after Entertainment Weekly was on the stands,
mentioning and showing my book.
(“Psst. Hey, buddy. Over here at the newsstand. Wanna see somethin’ special? Open me up.”) If you didn’t see the blurb, you can see the online version, sans
the book covers, here.
You can also
read the outcome of the publicity at here.
Three of the five authors mentioned found
agents (I have a great one already in the person of Jim McCarthy) and one
author may have a movie deal. I had no
idea Entertainment Weekly was so influential with book readers.
The sales rank
of my book jumped tremendously at Amazon.com.
The book had been about to straddle the border of millionth ranked (i.e.
no one buying it) and then sales zoomed up for several days. The rank has dipped somewhat, but it’s
holding it’s own for now. Perhaps I hit
fusion.
The jump in
sales, too, was helped by Wendi Kaufman’s mention of the book at her website,
The Happy Booker. Click here to see
what she said. It’s a fun and eclectic literary site.
For those of
you who are contemplating publishing someday, perhaps you can see by this
newsletter that publicity is a combination of writing to people and sending out
review books--with unknown forces sometimes coming together. I’ve been aided by The Frugal Book
Promoter: How to Do What Your Publisher Won’t by Carolyn
Howard-Johnson. (Click
here to see it on Amazon.)
I find it odd
that many people I know resist vacation and, if they take one, don’t go very
far. For some people, staying home and
viewing a whole season of 24 on DVD is a vacation. The spirit has many paths.
Ann, Ellen and
I went to Ireland. Ann’s mother was
fully Irish, a Doyle, and my family can trace itself back to the O’Briens. (If you go back that many generations, most
of Earth can probably go back to the O’Briens.
Random fact: the engine room scenes on the movie Titanic were
shot on the Jeremiah O’Brien, a Liberty ship named after an ancestor.)
Flying to Europe,
you see the day zip by like you’re Rod Young in The Time Machine. The sun plops into the ocean like a
Fizzy and then springs up as a whole new candy before you land. For us, the plane swooped around Shannon,
and green hills like kittens lay surrounded by a sea. Sunlight twinkled off the water and farmhouse windows. Twas the Green Isle.
As we were
pooped out the Jetway and into the terminal at what was midnight to our bodies,
we faced eight a.m. People were
starting their day, but we could barely walk, let alone think. After passport control and getting our bags,
all we wanted were beds. We had to eek
our way to our Bed-and-Breakfast, the first of our all-B&B tour.
To make it
more challenging, we rented a car. In
Ireland, that means driving on the left.
I went up to the Avis counter, and after presenting a myself and a
driver’s license, I was asked to sign here, here, and here. Who knows what I was signing. I couldn’t think. I was handed the keys.
“Isn’t there
some sort of test for driving on the left—or a practice course?” I asked.
“Just stay on
the left,” the young woman with the pretty accent said. “When you turn, think twice. Be careful when you turn right because you
may be turning in front of someone. The
roundabouts, go to the left.”
I just
nodded. Ann could help me figure it
out.
A shuttle van
drove us to our car, a sporty Astra made by Opel. (You can see it and read about it in Danish
here. It was a stick shift, with the steering
wheel on the right side and the stick on the left. Hey. Pile on the
challenges. I used to drive a manual
transmission, so I could do it, I reasoned.
I wouldn’t have to upgrade to the ludicrously priced automatic
transmission that would suck up the Irish $5-a-gallon gas.
I started the
car, and put it in first gear. My
driving must have looked like a training film for Driver’s Ed. The car jerk, jerk, jerked out of the lot
while Ann kept intoning, “Left, left, left.”
In two blocks, we met our first roundabout. Rather than have a stop sign, I was supposed to just look right,
make sure no one’s there (“There’s someone there!”) and merge calmly, driving
clockwise. Why go straight when you can
go in a circle?
I did it. A few kilometers down the road, driving at
100 kph (yes, fun with math; a mile is 1.6 kilometers), I saw an exit sign for
Bunratty Castle. Our beds would not be
ready until noon, so we had four hours to fill. Why not with a castle?
Ann and Ellen liked the idea.
All Ellen had
for reference was Cinderella’s Castle at Disneyland. This one, I learned, had been lorded over by the O’Briens since
1425. Ah, we were home.
At Bunratty,
Ellen, age seven, loved the ultra-narrow staircases that she ran up and
down. I didn’t explain to her they were
narrow because if the castle were invaded, only one invader at a time could go
up the stairs, and defenders had the advantage of sword fighting downwards,
coming from above. Everything about the
castle, in fact, was designed for death-to-invaders. First there was the moat to surmount. Guards on the roof could pick off people. If invaders nonetheless made it over the
water and through the thick wooden door, above the entrance door were holes for
the defenders to shoot arrows through.
The windows in most of the castle were narrow slits, perfect for
shooting arrows out of, too. Then there
were the tiny stairs. The castle worked
as designed for centuries.
I learned that
the lord of the manor, one generation of O’Brien or another, had a massive,
tall-backed chair in the banquet hall to prevent people from stabbing him in
the back while he ate. Such were the
times. Ellen asked an important
question: where were the toilets? They
were there—emptying into the moat.
Considering that people in those days changed their clothes only once or
twice a year, swimming a moat could be a fashion faux pas aromatically for a
while.
The folk park
surrounding the castle features houses from over the centuries from the
area. Ellen soon saw that people had
lived life simply, two rooms sometimes shared with the cows for added heat. “It smells like fish in here,” Ellen said in
one darkened home, a house of a fisherman.
Here we’d been
in the country less than a few hours, and already we were experiencing what I
love about travel: a peek into other people’s lives, times, and cultures,
contrasting ours, making us appreciate or question our own lives. Of course, without sleep, we were letting it
just wash over us. I loved watching
Ellen try to pet chickens (“bird flu?” I instantly wondered), and later pet a
donkey and baby goats, all a part of these homes.
For a while we
had the place nearly to ourselves, but soon busloads of tourists came. We ran into no Americans at Bunratty, and
very few on our whole trip. I don’t
know if it’s because Americans are worried about flying (brought to us later in
the week when the British foiled a suicide bombing conspiracy) or because
Americans don’t have the time for travel.
We may be a workaholic culture—to what end? A few B&B owners said Americans typically only spend one
night with them because they’re rushing off to see more—but they rarely “see”
the local people. We stayed two days at
most places (Limerick, Killarney, Waterford), and three days in Dublin. I found myself sitting in a few kitchens,
listening to an owner talk about her family (usually a big one), or the area,
or the funny things that happen when different cultures meet at the breakfast
table.
So much
happened on the trip that I’ll just say we were open to the winds of
opportunity. Rather than be a part of a
bus tour, which works like a traveling classroom where you see a lot but
interact very little with people, we pulled off places that looked of
interest—a castle here, a zoo there. We
talked with people when we ate, usually in pubs. Every day was an adventure.
On our last
full day there, back near Limerick, we thought we’d see one last castle in
nearby Adare. So many castles in
Ireland are in ruins not because of the elements but because of the rain of
cannon balls by Oliver Cromwell, starting in 1649 against the Royalists and the
“savage” Irish Catholic. Much of
Ireland’s history is about being conquered—by the Vikings, by the Normans, by
the English. Today, however, Ireland is
an economic powerhouse, the leading economy in Europe.
In Adare, the
castle, from 1202, is mostly rubble, but the Trinitarian Abbey (part of it from
1230) stands complete and is now a working Roman Catholic church. For the whole trip, we had bypassed art
museums, galleries, and churches—things for which Ellen did not have the
patience—and we focused instead on interactive sites, such as farms and
castles. A vacation can have many
paths.
In Adare, the
abbey, right off the sidewalk, drew us like a magnet. We tried the door, and it opened. The high vaulted ceilings, the
stained glass, the columns and capitals, the rows of empty pews down the nave
and other aisles drew us in. Ellen
instinctively knew to whisper and said, “Is it okay to pray?”
“Sure,” we
said, and she went into a row, kneeled, drew her small hands together, and
earnestly prayed. You never know what
kids might be thinking. I was going to
say that these days, with worries about being blown out of the sky while flying
home from Ireland, made people more mature earlier, but then I thought back to
when I was in second grade, learning how to “duck and cover” with the rest of
my class in the hallway. We had to use
our left hand, our non-writing hand, to go over our head. That’s because if our hand was melted off in
a nuclear flash, we still had our right hand to do our writing and math. It’s the important things that count.
Ellen looked
rested after her prayer. She
smiled. We’re all smiling from our
trip.
Anna
Louise Genoese is an editor who works at Tom Doherty Associates, publishers of
Tor, Forge, and Orb science fiction and fantasy books. Anna Louise has a blog, here, which shows
the day-to-day actions and thinking of an editor—and it’s not that different
from a literary agent. In particular, I
like what she said in an essay at the site.
To quote, “Now, in my experience--both before I started
working at Tor, and since--people who blame the industry for not publishing
them are kind of like people who blame their Scrabble tiles for making them
lose the game. Usually their writing (or Scrabble playing!) is just crappy… The
agents and editors I spoke with all told me exactly what I thought they would:
if a book is marketable, they'll take it on.”
Your opinion of marketable and their opinion,
however, may be two different things.
From my point of view, you have to write the best you can AND then
obsessively proofread and make your work look professional. Your query letter shouldn’t be that of a
used car salesman (“You can make a lot of money with my book,”) but something
that appeals to knowledge—the need to know.
Whole courses are given in this topic, but if you’re trying for an
agent, what are you doing to learn all that agents and editors know? Do your research.
One place for research is here, which gives
the opening lines to novels that stopped this reader instantly from
continuing.
It shows how crucial opening lines are. Think about it: when you’re in a bookstore,
and the title or cover looks interesting, what do you do? You probably read the opening lines. If it doesn’t grab you, you put it
down. Next time you’re in a bookstore,
watch people choosing books. Keep that
image when you’re polishing your own book.
Also, those of you looking for agents or
working on a query, go to agent Kristin Nelson’s site
here. Look at her ten pet peaves about queries as
well as some queries that work. Some of
her links, there, too, you might find useful.
Tommy Chong,
of Cheech and Chong fame, may not be the most heavy thinker, but he came to an
important discovery about writing while in prison, penning the book he’d always
meant to do. When he finished, he said,
“When
you get personal like that, it's very touchy, because you're baring your soul.
And it could be that you're baring your soul to ridicule. And it's a fine
line.” That’s a discovery I hope
students in all my classes find. Yes,
in your best writing, you’re virtually naked—but it’s the only way to get to
your best writing.
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