New Gail Gauthier Interview

The Bibliophilic Book Blog has just posted an Interview with Gail Gauthier, author of Saving the Planet & Stuff. Notice the framed picture at the top of the blog? Our blog host's name is Star. Many thanks to her for featuring me today.

Time Management Tuesday: Another Year, Another May Days Set-Aside Time

Last year, I took part in The May Days, a Facebook group in which members encouraged each other to write two pages a day. On May 8th, 2012, I explained why writers might actually need a push to get them writing--a lot of the work writers do isn't actually writing. After I finished my month, I decided I liked what I called this set-aside time for specific projects, or binge writing.

What I liked about The May Days was the way it appealed to my own joy in obsessing on a project or topic. I don't have the endurance to obsess indefinitely, but a set-aside time--Oh, I'm there. Seriously, I once did one of those week-with-no-TV things. I made two kids do it with me. I love this stuff.

Since last May, though, I've been reading The Willpower Instinct  by Kelly McConigal. She talks about willpower (and lack thereof) spreading through groups. I'll do more on that next week  In the meantime, I will just say that there appears to be some support for group writing initiatives like The May Days helping writers stay disciplined.

Well, tomorrow is May 1st, and our group is starting another May Days project or binge. Last year I didn't even hear about this until the day before, so I had done no preparation at all. This year as part of my New Year's planning I actually had a May Days goal and objectives:

"Goal 6. Work on an outline for "mummy book" during May Days (I wasn't prepared for May Days last year. I hope to be this year.)

Objectives:

1. Finish reading Wired for Story because I think we organic writers often don't know what our story is prior to writing, which makes plotting difficult.
2. At least skim The Plot Whisperer for same reason
3. Go over old research for this project and continue with more."

I did finish Wired for Story, though I've only read a few pages of The Plot Whisperer. (This is not a comment on the quality of the book. I just haven't been able to get to it.) I didn't go over the old research I've collected over the years that I've been thinking about this book. What I did do:

1. Visit UVM's Fleming Museum, because right now a college museum figures into the setting/story
2. Read half of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking for character development research
3. Register for a 3-hour plot workshop this Sunday at the New England Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators Conference
4. Realize I can use the find-the-story posts from OC's Weekend Writer series to help with early find-the-story work
5. Make a few journal notes over the past year for this project

While it can be argued that I am better prepared for May Days this year than last, I am still not in great shape. For one thing, I'm going to have a lot of trouble writing on May 2 through 4 because of family and conference commitments. That's really early on in the project to be veering from the program. The plotting workshop on May 5 seems like a great idea, particularly since it comes early in the set-aside period. However, the workshop description asks participants to bring a work-in-progress to which they can apply the information we'll be taking in. I am going to be scrambling the rest of today and in whatever time I can find tomorrow to scratch up enough material to be able to say I have a work-in-progress.

Hey, a work-in-progress is in the eye of the beholder, n'est-ce pas?

Stay tuned to learn what Gail has to show for her May Days experience at the end of the month.

Who Can Get You Into A Bookstore?

Last week I briefly mentioned a blog post I'd read called Eisler on Digital Denial. Author Barry Eisler wrote about his contention that the one major benefit traditional publishers can offer writers is distribution to "real" stores. Some folks disagreed with him. Tweeting was involved. It was all quite exciting.

While eating lunch just now, I stumbled upon Self-Publishing is for Control Freaks at the Forbes website. It appears to have been published a couple of days after Eisler's post at A Newbie's Guide to Publishing. The article is about a report on what authors look for when deciding whether to self-publish or seek out a traditional publisher. It concludes with this: "However, according to the report, distribution is far and away the most important factor and that should be comforting to publishers because, at this point, established publishers are the only reliable path into bricks-and-mortar bookstores, where a large proportion of sales are still made."

Only four comments follow the Forbes article. Eisler's article at A Newbie's Guide to Publishing got 185. Not that it's a competition, but either one readership found the concept waaaay more interesting than the other, or one site has more readership to begin with. Or something.

Weekend Links

The Greenhouse Literary Agency is offering the Greenhouse Funny Prize, with a U.S./Canadian winner and a UK winner. The prize is representation, and the deadline is July 29th.

The most recent Poets & Writers includes Digital Digest: Algorithms for What to Read Next. The subject is the reliability of on-line reviews. The juicy bit: "Estimates about the proportion of phony reviews to the overall total run as high as 30 percent, with Gartner research predicting that paid endorsements (deemed illegal by the Federal Trade Commission unless disclosed) will account for 10 to 15 percent of product feedback by 2014." At lunch today I told a family member about that 30 percent estimate, and he said, "That's all?" He would have thought the percentage of fakes would be higher.

Blog anniversaries: A Chair, a Fireplace and a Tea Cozy is eight and Teaching Authors is four.

I like the idea of a slow writing movement, which I stumbled upon at the American Society of Journalists and Authors. So I googled the term and  found slow writing movement pieces at Rock Your Writing, Another Word, and a few other spots. I suspect it's a movement that will be, uh, slow moving.

Another World Book Night recap at The Book Wheel. Be sure to check out the comments and note the number of givers who ran into people worried they were peddling religious tracts.

Tanita Davis reviews Etiquette and Espionage by Gail Carriger at Finding Wonderland.

The Emerging Writers Network will be observing Short Story Month in May. This is a neat idea, and if only I'd known about it much, much earlier, I would have planned my May differently.

Carnival Of The Indies

I'm part of this month's Self-Publishing: Carnival of the Indies at The Book Designer. I'm under Marketing and Selling Your Books. I mention the sub-category because this is a big carnival.

The Weekend Writer: Be Careful When Writing Descriptions

I am reading a tedious book and want to vent. So we're going to take a break from hunting for our stories, so I can use this teachable moment to warn new writers about the risks involved with writing description. Description, you see, is part of what is making the book I'm reading tedious.

I suspect that there is a school of thought that argues that descriptions in books should be "evocative," causing readers to feel something, and that descriptions should be beautiful in and of themselves. They should be beautiful for beautiful's sake. However, what they really ought to do is support your story, once you know what your story is. Readers shouldn't notice descriptions. Not everyone can write description well enough to be evocative and make a reader shed a tear over great-aunt Bet's bracelet that was given to her by the only guy she ever loved before he went off to war and never came back because he deserted, went over to the other side, assumed another identity, married, and lived happily ever after without her. And those who can write well enough to make a reader shed a tear over a description of a bracelet in its box under the stack of crap Aunt Bet has been hoarding, shouldn't do so if it means stopping the forward movement of the story and making readers literally wait to get through all this verbiage before they get going again.

I can recall reading a well-known novel set in France that shall remain nameless. A character is going down a street in Paris, and we all had to stop while the author described a building. Then a while later, we all stopped while he described another. And, you guessed it, we made another stop and waited for him to do another description. I know he was trying to create atmosphere and prove that he'd been to Paris. But those individual buildings, and particularly their appearance, really didn't have anything to do with the story.  I became impatient and started skimming.

What I'm talking about here hits two of Elmore Leonard's ten rules of writing: "9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things" and "10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip."  Readers tend to skip detailed description of places and things.

Okay, I am now going to give a couple of suggestions to help new writers avoid taking readers on lengthy, detailed tours of parking lots and offices.

1. When you're describing a place, try to show a character moving through it or interacting with it instead of doing a straight narrative description. If a character is involved in some way with this place, there's a greater chance that the place has some significance to the story.

2. I think these long, drawn out descriptions of places occur more frequently in books written in the third person. If you're writing in the third person, as a first draft of a description try writing it from a first-person point of view. You might get a more natural sounding description that way, since a speaker describing something is less likely to go on and on about it than omniscient narrators seem to. When you switch back to the third person, leave out everything the first-person narrator didn't say.

There. I'm feeling better about that book I'm determined to get through.

May Connecticut Children's Literature Calendar

This May is not a busy month in Connecticut as far as children's/YA author appearances are concerned. Is this due to a seasonal variation related to the school year winding down? Are authors focusing on next weekend's sold-out NESCBWI Conference?

At any rate, here's what I have for you:

Mon., May 6, Alex Morgan,  R.J. Julia Booksellers, Madison, 4:00 PM

Tues., May 14, Sara Zarr, R.J. Julia Booksellers, Madison, 6:00 PM

Wed., May 15, Paul Ferrante, Westport Public Library, Westport, 7:30 PM

Thurs., May 23, Jane O'Connor R.J. Julia Booksellers, Madison, 4:00 PM

Wed., May 29, Gregory Galloway,  Westport Public Library, Westport, 7:30 PM

Fri., May 31, Lincoln Peirce, R. J. Julia Booksellers, Madison, 4:00 PM

Yeah, It's The Wild West Out There

I'm still recovering from a day of illness and hoped to stretch out with a couple of different kinds of research, which is like resting but different. But then I became glued to my desktop reading Eisler on Digital Denial at A Newbie's Guide to Publishing. And I scanned all the comments as well, which is where I read M.J. Rose's line, "It's the wild west out there."

That makes the exhaustion I've been feeling over publishing and marketing and everything I'm doing other than writing seem at least a little more interesting and exciting. A little pep me up.

My World Book Night Experience

Look at all this lovely World Book Night news at WBN's Facebook page. Sites where books were passed out. People involved. Al Roker doing his WBN thing. Why, Gail, you're probably thinking, what about your World Book Night experience? How did that go for ya'.

I spent the evening of World Book Night huddled on my couch, wearing the same pajamas I'd been wearing for twenty-four hours, and hoping I'd keep down the broth I'd had for dinner. World Book Night was kind of a bust for me.

However, my event went on without me. One family member delivered the books to the skilled nursing facility where I was supposed to do the distributing, and another family member took over the job of actually handing them out. She was the one who had recommended The Language of Flowers as my WBN choice, anyway, and she's a book club member. She is definitely World Book Night material.

Now, choosing to distribute books in a skilled nursing facility that offers both long-term and rehabilitative care was risky. A percentage of the population in any of these places suffers from some degree of cognitive loss of one sort or another in addition to their physical issues. So we're not just talking about people who are light or nonreaders because they've never had the opportunity to be exposed to good books or own any. But it's also a population that could benefit from being encouraged to read.

The recreation director got behind WBN in a big way, planning a flower arranging activity for the evening rec event, flowers being a big part of our book. Recreation in these places is hugely important, in my humble opinion. It is a form of therapy that offers residents an opportunity to interact socially and mentally, often just to move around, all of which are factors in maintaining cognitive abilities. However, residents have the option to take part or not, and only 3 showed up for the flower-arranging event and at the book station set up there.

However, my family member who was running this for me, remained steadfast and on task. She went up and down every hallway with our books, handing them out to various residents we knew and hitting the rehab-wing where there were short-term patients whom we wouldn't know. I believe she said she gave out a half a dozen books to staff, one of whom she believes feared she was being handed a religious tract.

It was probably not the best World Book Night experience we're going to hear about this year. (Certainly not for me, though I did get a very good night's sleep afterwards and am much better now.) But I am a great believer in ripple effects. I think it's possible that I may go into this place tomorrow and hear something about this book from people who received it. Or maybe it will be next week or the week after.

And if I do, that is what World Book Night is about, not whether I had a good time that evening or whether it went the way I thought it was going to or whether I went to an after party (I did get an invitation!) or whether someone else had to run the whole thing for me. So how my World Book Night went still remains to be seen.

OC's Earth Day Post: Cli-fi

I usually do an environmental post on Thursdays, but today is Earth Day, and, hey, I can adapt. So I'm getting all environmentalish with a climate fiction post on Monday this week.

Climate fiction? you say. Yeah, I just heard about it a couple of days ago, too. Climate fiction, according to NPR is a genre, well, an "emerging" one, anyway, in which writers "set their novels and short stories in worlds, not unlike our own, where the Earth's systems are noticeably off-kilter." That's how it differs from dystopian or apocalyptic novels in which a futuristic world is suffering because of (usually) human-made environmental disaster or just a human-made "oops." Climate fiction is set in a contemporary world.

This article at Grist  looks like a review of a couple of cli-fi novels, though one seems a little futuristic/apocalyptic.

I suspect that NPR's definition of cli-fi as being something separate from the dystopian/apocalyptic stuff isn't generally known. Here someone uses the term "cli-fi thriller" to describe the same book set 75 years in the future with climate disaster that Grist included in its review column.

Climate Change and Contemporary Fiction appears to be a blog that deals with this very subject.

I'm going to admit that though I have an interest in environmentalism, as a reader I find environmental/climate change disaster stories cliched. The first few were interesting, sure, but now they leave me with a feeling of, "Oh. I've read this. Several times." Or, "Of course. The tech people/scientists are the bad guys. Again." It's not that the problems aren't real or serious, but they've become formulaic as far as literature is concerned. I also wonder if there isn't a message quality to some of these books, a lesson that readers are supposed to be learning. There's sometimes a propaganda quality to some of these stories. This preaching issue is discussed in Few A-List Novelists Tackling Climate Change in Their Plots at Climate Central.

Novelists Try Climate Change Story Telling: A Critical Review of Two Recent Entries published at The Yale forum on Climate Change & The Media  ends with "Are there other ways that climate change can make for good reading? It’s a question more than a few hope to see answered in the affirmative. As Bill McKibben wrote in 2005, climate change still lacks resonance in American culture. “Where are the books? The poems? The plays? The goddamn operas?” he asked. “Compare it to, say, the horror of AIDS in the last two decades, which has produced a staggering outpouring of art that, in turn, has had real political effect.”"

I am not knowledgeable about AIDS literature, but I think the question being raised here is is climate change being used in literature other than in novels? Certainly a different form--poetry or opera, for instance--might help to break the formula of human-made disaster leading to woe.

Happy Earth Day.