Crayons & Paste

This poem gave me quite a giggle when it appeared over on Facebook in response to one of my more puckish status updates...

Scott Perkins was raised on a steady diet
Of crayons and library paste;
It never succeeded in making him quiet,
But did teach him never to waste.
If ever you're halfway tempted to try it
You just might acquire the taste:
You'll slaver for colour wherever you spy it
And drool at the smell of the paste.

-Gereg Jones Muller

Thoughts on Writing Conferences :: PNWA Wrapup

• Do not expect to hand anything to agents and editors.  You will be emailing them and reminding them that they met you at _____ conference.
  
• Be memorable... but not for the wrong reasons.  A little eccentricity is one thing, but too much can hurt you. 
  
• Know the markets.  Know where you fit.  If you don't know, there's nothing wrong with asking and nowhere better to find people who can tell you.
  
• Do not miss a chance at "facetime" with an editor or agent.  My appointment with the agent was about 10 minutes longer than it was scheduled because someone else didn't show.  I appreciate the extra time, but why would you do this?  Standing up an agent is just bad business, and the opportunity to sit down across from a publishing professional isn't something you should sneeze at.  Thanks for the extra time, but you seriously need to re-think your priorities (whoever you are).
  
• Even agents who say that they don't rep your genre or style of work are worth talking to. Their opinion of your work or your pitch can be invaluable to your efforts to get noticed by the people who do want the stuff you have to sell.  Almost every agent I talk to has at least one story about a submission that was good but not their thing, so they passed it along to someone who did want whatever it was.
  
• Be good enough to pass along.
  
• Know what your story is about.  This is not a plot question, it's thematic and YOU WILL BE ASKED (over and over and over again).  If all else fails, imagine what the back of the book will say.
  
• Talk about the writing.  With the agents and editors and with your peers.  It's the thing that binds all of us together.
  
• Be enthusiastic.  It will come across even if you are nervous and scared.
  
• An agent said to me "That's an ambitious story, I'm curious to see if you pulled it off.  Send it to me."  That is my goal.  I can't count the number of books I've purchased because I said the same thing after reading the back cover.
  
• Do not lie.
  
• Be ambitious.  There's nothing wrong with that.  If someone asks if you're a good writer, say yes.  Or if you're feeling spunky, say "No, I'm a great writer."  However, do NOT say that you wrote the next Harry Potter, Twilight, Davinci Code, or whatever.  The agents are sick of hearing it.  Tell them why your work stands on its own.
  
• Admit if your project isn't done.
  
• Carry samples of your writing.  Carry the best you have.  Be prepared for no one to ask you for it.  You have it with you because you don't want to not have it.
  
• Talk to people, shake hands, pass out business cards to other writers.  Every time you meet someone, they're a possible contact.  It's called networking, but it's also called "Making friends with people who love the same things you do."
  
• Most of the people in this industry are incredibly nice, helpful and kind.  Really.  It's amazing.  So if someone you meet is an asshole, move on.  You don't want to work with them anyway.
  
• Remember that most of what you will be told about marketing (especially social networking, blogs, etcetera) is based on what worked for the last guy.  No one really knows what will work for the next guy.
  
• Innovate.  One great reason to listen to people talk about what they've done is to look for what's being missed.
  
• I heard three agents on an agents panel ask for Steampunk stories.  No one at the tables near me knew what that was.  Read about your industry and keep up with the trends if only so you can know why you're not following them.
  
• Talk to the presenters.  Approach them for reasons other than getting autographs.  Come up with questions, engage them in conversation, buy them a drink or a coffee if you run into them in drinking/coffee circumstances.  They were asked to present to your conference because they have something to say and odds are they have more to say than there was time for in your sessions.
  
• Take an improvisational acting class.  There's no better preparation for what you'll be doing at these conferences and future book signings.  The days of reclusive iconoclasts are over.  You must be able to engage.
  
• The old adage stands "Be you, everyone else is taken".
  
• Volunteer.  Help out.  Offer to pass out handouts in the sessions.
  
• Pay attention, take notes, ask questions.
  
• DO NOT approach agents in spaces where they have a reasonable expectation of privacy.  Elevators are fine, bathroom stalls are not.

The Triumph of the E-book?

(click to view larger or follow the link below)
Love the XKCD: http://xkcd.com/750/

Free

This morning my wife called me into the room to hear this story on NPR.  A press giving away their new books in return for a charity donation.  Publicity for their authors and their causes... an interesting idea.  Wonder if they'll still exist three years from now...

"The Kindle, the iPad and e-books are all part of a revolution that's shaking up the publishing business. The big question is how to ensure the book industry can remain profitable?  There's at least one publisher, however, that doesn't care about profits. For the past two years, the Concord Free Press, has been publishing books and giving them away for free..."

via National Public Radio

Agents Provocateur :: PNWA Conference

Another PNWA conference has passed into history and people I adore but only see once a year are homeward bound once more.  Safe journeys to all of you.

I haven't heard any numbers with regard to headcount and the like, but the statistic for the conference that would most interest me is the Gallons of Coffee Consumed (GCC).  You get a thousand or so mostly introverted people in one place and social lubricants rise from luxury to necessity.  Every time we are told that the current publishing world requires authors to be as adept with marketing and self-promotion as they are with crafting stories and you can hear a thousand introverts die a little inside.

Don't get me started on guessing the probable bar bills.

The dream scenario at one of these conferences is to get on an elevator with an agent or editor and have that precious moment of silence in which to pitch your idea or finished novel (preferably the latter).  We have sessions to teach budding writers how to do this.  The agents and editors know this and I'm sure the additional exercise some of them get from taking the stairs is welcome in what seems to be a largely sedentary job profile.

Nine out of ten elevator trips I took this year had either an agent or an editor in the car.  And not once was it an agent or editor that was buying what I came there to sell.  Fate can be a real jerk sometimes, but it gave me a chance to observe my fellow writers.  On every one of those elevators, I was accompanied by other writers who stood silent, casting sidelong glances at these people who had the power to grant them their hearts' desire (publication).

Wasted opportunities abounded and I hated to watch it. The past month or so, my weekly supper club commented that when I wasn't there (due to a hospital stay) the conversations tended to die with greater frequency.  Talking is something I'm good at and I'm more thankful than ever that I spent some time in sales, forced by economic necessity to transform from my default position of shyness to a more boisterous mindset.

I spent a great deal of those elevator rides breaking the ice with those agents and editors and writers, cracking jokes and trying to provoke these shrinking violets into some sort of action or interaction.  My results were mixed, but at least I tried.

 Anyway, during the conference I kept two notepads going.  On one of them, I was taking notes on whatever the speakers were talking about and on the other, I was jotting down thoughts, ideas and random tidbits that occurred to me for stories and blog posts, including "EVERYTHING THE INTERNET TELLS YOU ABOUT WRITING CONFERENCES IS WRONG!"  And yes, I wrote it in all caps just like that, so look forward to that post.

In the meantime, I have query letters and a synopsis to write, so I'll wish you well.

Write

Some thoughts inspired by handing my nephew his first Moleskine.
 
---

Write.

Whether or not you want to be a "writer" you must write.  Inscribed on metal, incised on clay tablets, ink on paper, you must write.  Your life is an historic moment, a unique part of the vast tapestry and your story will be lost if you do not write it down.

To refuse to write is to choose to be forgotten.
 

Write.

Because your thoughts are important and anyone who tells you they are not is an idiot and/or someone trying to make a living by telling you that their thoughts are important.  

They are not. 

A careful study of history will astound you not because we know so much, but that we surmise so much from so little.

More has been forgotten than we will ever know.

Entire lives have been sucked into the void of time because those who lived them did not record them.  And even in a world where it seems that less and less goes unrecorded I think it’s actually getting worse rather than better.

Virtually nothing that you see here will still exist 100 years from now.  This blog, these web pages, all of these digital dots on digital screens will cease to be.  They will eventually blink out of existence, as obsolete as Geocities, recorded - if at all - in formats that are as inscrutable to future generations as cuneiform is to modern eyes and 5-inch floppies are to modern laptops.

Ironically, the Library of Congress has been given the Twitter archives, so if anything survives; it will not be the substance, but the soundbyte.

Write.

I am part of the leading edge of the original digital generation.  We were the first kids who grew up with video games and personal computers, the transformative generation that watched records give way to CD’s give way to MP3’s.  And I’m told that means that mine is the last generation whose primary schooling included computers and penmanship.  Permanence is passé, proving Douglas Adams’ assertion that human beings are unique in both our ability to learn from our past and our unwillingness to do so.

The handwritten notes I am transcribing into this blog have a greater chance of survival than the post they are becoming.  Not because they are beautiful, but because they are physical, tangible, permanent.

I hold the love letters written between my grandfather and grandmother during his time in the Pacific Theater of World War II.  He wasn't a writer or a poet, he was a dairy farmer.  His words are simple, small and heartfelt.  His penmanship is astonishing.

My grandparents stood in my mind like unassailable giants.  They had survived depressions and wars and come out of it like an indomitable force of nature.  I never fully grasped their humanity until I read the words between a frightened Army sergeant and his bride on the eve of the invasion of the Philippines.  Intellectually, of course, I knew that my grandparents were human beings.  They faced the same doubts and fears (and then some) as I do.  Their world was different and the same.  That soldier felt in 1944 the same deep love for his wife that I do for mine today.

Will my grandchildren get the same effect reading my emails and Facebook statuses and Tweets?  I’d wager that they wouldn’t and that they won’t even get the chance.  But they will know all about my grandpa and grandma if they choose to read them.

Write.

Cut & paste with real scissors and real paste.  Write with ink.  Never erase.  The eraser and the delete key are the enemies of history.  Cross things out, draw arrows to show your reader that this should’ve been up there.

Neatness counts in schoolwork and business correspondence.  In life, it’s the messy bits that count.  So scribble thoughts in the margins of books.  Underline things you like, cross out things you don’t.  Doodle in the margins.

Think about your handwriting, but remember that even the messiest scrawl carries greater beauty than even the best font can hope for.

Write in the vernacular.  Use the words you know and say them the way you want to say them.  Do not use the dictionary, do not look up words, banish the thesaurus from your shelf.  Keep your grammar simple.  Talk about the weather and local events.  Print photographs and date them and record who is in them on the back in indelible ink.

Write.

Because societies are created by intellectuals, cultures are created by people.  And both are forgotten if the people don’t care enough to record them.

"I think we've had enough 'in sickness', can we get some 'in health' sometime soon?" 
-My Wife 

All I know is I either need to stop making confident predictions of health and/or productivity or learn how to make money as an anti-psychic.

I get to go home tonight, though and I kept my promise to blog today, so that's something anyway.

Dan Brown meets Kurt Vonnegut

This "I Write Like" meme is bouncing around among my friends.  I'm not sure how much stock I put in it, but it's interesting nonetheless.  Apparently in blog & novel writing I'm a Dan Brown and in short stories I'm a Vonnegut?
 

Two Most Blog Posts & Section of My Latest Novel:

I write like
Dan Brown

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

My short stories:

I write like
Kurt Vonnegut

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Things fall apart and the summer cannot hold...

(Apologies to Yeats.)

I've spent thirty-odd years trying to find a cohesive plan for the summer months.  Preferably one that survives through the end of June.  My father engendered in me a lifelong desire for stability: a lawn to mow and sweet tea to drink.  I've spent most of my life wondering how he managed to pull that off, and only slowly realizing that it probably wasn't as easy as he made it look... or at least as easy as I remember it looking.

Memory is a tricky thing and kids really don't pay attention anyway, so childhood memories of our parents are particularly unreliable.  That's not dad's hammock, by the way.  Dad didn't do hammocks.  That's my hammock, and a woefully underutilized lawn tool it is too. 

Anyway, this summer has been a study in plans collapsing at first contact with the 'enemy'.  And the enemy (as always) is time.

While two extended dance sessions with the American healthcare system have given me unprecedented amounts of writing time, I funneled that time into several more short stories than I would normally have produced and the early completion of my current WIP.
I feel like I've spent the last two months disappointing people, pulling out of commitments as more and more of my summer plans unraveled.  I even had to pull out of a play I was really looking forward to being in.

Last year, I posted here 45 times in April and 37 times in May, in spite of extensive traveling.  This year, I didn't go anywhere and posted 12 times in April and 9 times in May.  Of course, this time last year, I wasn't on Twitter yet, and much though I hate to admit it, 140-character brainfarts have been easier to shoehorn into my schedule than the longform blog posts you may have come to expect from me.


My apologies to my loyal readers. 

Everyone is healthy and the plans for the rest of the summer are tentatively back on track (resists urge to knock on wood).  And, as I said, the first draft of my novel is done and I have a backlog of short stories to mail out.


Going forward I am committing to updating this blog at least three times a week.

At the moment, it seems logical to make it Monday, Wednesday & Friday. Please expect new material on those days, or follow me on twitter for shorter thoughts and notices of blog updates.  As always, interstitial material will happen as it occurs to me.

Note: This will mean that there are more 'slice-of-life' posts among the extended thoughts on the writing process, but that's what this blog was originally intended to be anyway, so I hope that won't lose any of you.   There will also be more snippets of my current WIP as a bonus.

I will be at the Pacific Northwest Writer's Conference again this year: July 22-25th. 
I'm really looking forward to Andre Dubus III's keynote address, as well as talks by Lisa Gardner, Elizabeth Lyon and the always entertaining CC Humphreys.  The PNWA conference is just huge, far larger than the space allotted for it, and I'm looking forward to their plans to move to a larger venue (next year, according to the rumor mill) but for the time being, I shall arrive early to grab a seat and enjoy bouncing through the halls with my fellow Pacific Northwest wordsmiths.

I hope to see you soon.

Scott

An Ode to Summer

(Click Image to Enlarge)

Russian Gun Control

Wow.  I must be the only blogger on the internet this week talking about Russians and gun control.

(Pause for uncomfortable laughter)

Spies and guns: the low-hanging fruit of the American blogger, and not at all what I'm going to talk about today.  The second amendment to the US constitution doesn't go where we're going and when you're writing, regardless of your nationality or politics, the one gun you must control belongs to a Russian guy named Chekhov.

"One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it." 
- Anton Chekhov

Put another way: don't create expectations and then fail to live up to them.

I tend to write very quickly.  In the throes of inspiration, I can throw eight thousand words on a page without stopping to eat as long as the waitress keeps refilling my mug.  In that kind of literary melee it's relatively easy to drop a thread or mention an object and then leave it dangling.  When I'm revising a manuscript (as I am now) the first thing I check for is gun problems.

The most common culprit of this is the tendency to put unnecessary detail into a scene.  It's amazingly easy to get so into your own head that you create a scene populated by minutiae that doesn't serve the plot.  I'm guilty of this myself and revising for me is often about going back and trying to decide which detail and how much will set the scene without drowning the scene.  The danger being that some little bit of detail that you thought was cool at the time will stand out for the reader and take them out of the scene.

There are obvious exceptions to Chekhov's rule.  A policeman (at least an American policeman) or soldier will be carrying a gun and you would have to spend valuable time explaining why he isn't.  Putting a gun in a scene where they're expected isn't violating Chekhov's rule.  Putting one in a drawing room or library and then failing to use it is.  Your audience is left waiting for Godot to walk in and shoot someone and they will resist when you try to pull them into a new scene without first resolving that gun on the table.

Of course, this isn't me telling you that you cannot lay false trails, float red herrings, or make the butler look guilty when it was really the cook.  All of those instances of false foreshadowing are paid-off when you reveal why the butler didn't do it as you must do in the course of revealing that the cook is lying fink.  The payoff is the important part.

Chekhov's "gun" doesn't have to be a firearm.  A character leaving bloody fingerprints on the pages of a book was a neat bit of realism for me because he cut himself in an earlier scene, but my beta readers spent the rest of the book wondering when his bloody fingerprints were going to become important. They weren't important, it was just me shooting my story in the foot with Chekhov's gun.

Any character, artifact or plot element that by its very nature, creates an expectation in the mind of the reader will destroy their suspension of disbelief if it doesn't pan out.

I began this post with a sort red herring about guns and Russians and then pivoted away from the current political hot-button issues to a discussion of dramatic elements.  No one got past the Chekov quote still expecting me to express an opinion about Russian espionage or the Second Amendment.  It might've been a little lame, but it wasn't Chekhov's gun.

Don't annoy your readers or they'll stop reading.  And if they stop reading... you might as well stop writing.  I hope you didn't stop reading. 

As a reward, here's a video I found that brilliantly satirizes the whole concept, and yet manages to effectively illustrate it at the same time (the mark of good satire, in my opinion).

A library with empty shelves

NPR: Stanford Ushers In the Age of Bookless Libraries

The perils of prophecy...

I've talked before about finding a way to write and a place to do it no matter what.  I've written on trains and airplanes, in many a waiting room, cafe, bookstore, library, pub, restaurant and classroom.  Anywhere with a writing implement and a moment of quiet solitude has been given the rhythm of my keyboard or pen... but I think that this week has been my first experience writing in a hospital bed.  With a morphine drip and one eye swollen shut.  

Yes, the universe has a funny funny sense of humor...

Well, I'm working on revisions to my latest manuscript, actually, and I think any writer will agree that... well... if there's a special ring of hell reserved for us, it will be comprised of stacks of lovingly-crafted manuscripts that are 20,000 lovingly-crafted words too long for their proposed market.

So, quite frankly, the morphine isn't helping one bit.

Don't worry about me, I'm getting amazing care from a very House-like doctor who looked me straight my swollen eye sockets and said "I find your case... interesting."  He said 'interesting' with an inflection I'm not sure I've ever heard in real life and as he then rattled off the list of tests and drugs he was going to try, I suddenly I knew that the man would get me better and that everything I thought was fake about television medicine was actually true.

Eye-opening.  At least I hope so.