The Weekend Writer: A Writers' Dojang

Tandon, Howley, Sherlock DiLorenzo

On Wednesday I wrote about this year's Tassy Walden Award winners. What I didn't mention is that three of this year's honorees, Nancy Tandon, Holly Howley, and Heather Sherlock DiLorenzo, come from the same writers' group. These three writers made up thirteen percent of the Tassy winners over all. However, some of those winners were illustrators. These three women made up twenty percent of the winning writers.

In past years, the group had three other members who placed well. And I believe there are two members who were Tassy winners prior to joining the group. One of them went on to be successfully published. Oh, and another member competed against published writers for a spot with The Great CT Caper and won one.

2015 Tassy Honorees

I've written about writers' groups for The Weekend Writer Project before. As I said then, "there are writers' groups, and there are writers' groups." How to explain so much achievement from this one group? Well, I happened to join it last October and have a little knowledge of what goes down there. You know how I love martial arts analogies? Yeah. I feel one coming on.

Training

These people train. They attend NESCBWI workshops and retreats. They read in their genre. They keep up on what is being published in their field. Referring back to Marlo Garnsworthy's recent blog post, they don't assume that they should "automatically know how to write a publishable story." 

Maintaining the Mind of a Beginner

In a martial arts training hall, people of all ranks train together. If the instructor is introducing a yellow belt-level skill, the black belts in the room work on it, too, because there's always the possibility that they missed something when they learned it, there's always the possibility they can improve that skill. They cannot allow themselves to be blinded by the belief that they already know this stuff. They have to maintain the mind of a beginner. (Humility is also a good thing on a very practical level.)

That's how the people in this writing group conduct themselves, also. If they attend a program, they consider how the content can improve their work. If they get feedback on a submission, they don't walk away believing the agent/editor just doesn't get it. Within workshop meetings, they try not to respond to critiques from other members. The point is to listen to what others have to say and assess it.   

Collaboration

In the taekwondo school I attended, people of equal rank usually trained together, trying to share knowledge, the idea being that what one student missed last week, another will have picked up on. They were trying to learn from one another. Even in the tai chi school I attend now, where there is no belt system, students who are just learning a form are positioned within the group of more experienced students during practice, so the newbies can model their movements on the people who already know the form.

The people in this writing group do something similar. "How about this for the first chapter title?" "You might be able to eliminate that first page." One writer might be able to pick up on something another writer has missed.

Getting Up Off the Mat 

Getting knocked down isn't that big an issue in martial arts training. Getting up again is.

The people in this workshop submit their work. If the work comes back, they train some more and submit again. You cannot stay down and move forward, too.

Don't Care For Martial Arts Metaphors?

In the event that you don't love martial arts metaphors the way I do, you can phrase the reasons for this writers' group's success another way: These people study. They keep an open mind about their work. They work together. They persevere.

If you're at the point of looking for a writers' group, this is the kind of group you hope to find.

What Did You Do This Week, Gail? May 29th Edition

Goal 1 Mummy Book. I didn't get as far on this as I would have liked, but I am past revising early chapters and moving on to new material. I'm at what I consider to be the mid-point of the book. I expect to be able to get a little work done this weekend.

Goal 5 Community Building/Goal 6 Marketing STP&S/Gail. I did a lot of community building this week, which I'm also going to call marketing, since community building keeps a person's name in circulation. Plus, I really hate to think I spent so much time on one goal.

• I completed  the CCLC
• I promoted CCLC and mailed out the newsletter edition
• I did a post on the Tassy Walden Award that involved some actual contact with other people in the writing community
• I pretty much completed the two workshop proposals I'm planning to submit next week

With June's CCLC behind me, as well as the Tassy Walden and the workshop proposals, I hope next week will see a shift to more production.

June Connecticut Children's Literature Calendar

This month's big news is Judy Blume's two appearances in the state to publicize her new adult book. We have three interesting group events as well.

Friday, June 5, David Levithan, Adam Silvera, and Bill Konigsberg, R. J. Julia Booksellers, Madison 7:00 PM Openly YA Tour
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Saturday, June 6, Janice Petrie, Barnes & Noble, North Haven 11:30 AM 

Sunday, June 7, Great Connecticut Caper conclusion with author meet & greets, Gillette Castle, Haddam 2 to 4 PM  Note at the link that this is a free event.

June 23 Judy Blume, Greenwich Library, Greenwich 7:00 to 9:00 PM  This event supports Blume's most recent book, which is for adults. Advance registration is required, and there is a specific seating time.

Friday, June 26, Judy Blume, First Congregational Church (R.J. Julia event), Madison 7:00 PM. This event supports Blume's most recent book, which is for adults. It is a ticketed event.

Tuesday, June 30 Katie Carroll, Steven Parlato, Cindy Rodriguez, Anissa Zucker, Avon Free Public Library Avon 7:00 PM Local Author Festival, YA/Teen Night Avon

The Environmental Book Club

I felt that at some point I needed to try a Carl Hiaasen novel for this book club, because he has a green rep. So I snatched up Scat when I saw it at a library.

Scat is about two students who become involved in the give and take between an oil company trying to steal oil in a Florida swamp and what might be described as an eco-terrorist trying to save endangered panthers living there. The book follows the big, bad company vs. small-time good guys formula that we've seen in another environmental book for young readers, Operation Redwood. This formula turns up in a lot of movies and TV shows relating to the environment, too. We could call them David and Goliath stories.

My question: Will I ever be able to find an environmental story for kids that doesn't follow either this pattern or the dystopian future brought about by human-made environmental disaster convention?  Stay tuned.

Scat's structure is significant because it involves point of view switches, a lot of them. The most interesting character, for me, was not either of the two kids who are the leads. I wish the book had been about Duane Scrod, Jr., who has been held back in biology for two years. He is not your traditional children's book/YA protagonist, and, as I said, he's not the protagonist here. Duane, known as Smoke, becomes interested in environmental science, because he recognizes that if the Black Vine Swamp changes, there won't be a place for people like him, people who are part of that environment.

Most of the characters in Scat experience the Black Vine Swamp from a distance. For the main characters, it appears to be just a school field trip destination. Smoke is what I'm looking for in eco-fiction, someone who is immersed in an environment. Could someone like him be the jumping off point for an environmental book?

Connecticut's 2015 Tassy Walden Award For Children's Writers

The Award

Connecticut's Shoreline Arts Alliance in Guilford sponsors the Tassy Walden Award for New Voices in Children's Literature. This is a program for unpublished Connecticut writers and illustrators, and awards are given in five categories. Entries are judged on the basis of literary or artistic quality, and the organizers are quite clear at the website that didactic and popular content are not considered. (Didactic material frequently raises its preachy head in children's literature.) The Tassy Walden people even run informational workshops for writers interested in submitting.

Leslie Bulion and Lorraine Jay

The Tassy, as you sometimes hear it called hereabouts, began fifteen years ago. Two of the founders were Leslie Bulion and Lorraine Jay.  There are cash prizes for the top winners, but what really makes this a significant award in this state is that a number of winners have gone on to be traditionally published. Among them are A.C.E. Bauer,  Leslie Bulion, Stacy DeKeyser, Frank Dormer, Deborah Freedman, Lynda Mullaly Hunt, Martha Seif Simpson, and Jane Sutcliffe.

And The Winners Are 

 

 The 2015 Tassy Walden Awards winners, finalists, and honor mention designees were announced a few weeks ago. Last night a reception was held for them at the James Blackstone Memorial Library (pictured above) in Branford. Attendee and finalist Nancy Tandon provided Original Content with photographs of the event.

Winners

To the left are the winners:

Edward Tucchio - Illustrated Picture Book

Janet Croog - Illustrated Portfolio

Kelly Hill - Young Adult Novel

Jeanne Zulick - Middle Grade Novel

There was no winner in the Picture Book Text category this year, but there were four finalists: Erika Bajrami, Charlene Haukom, Cherish Ann Lisee,Wi and Linda Zajac.

Other finalists and honorable mention authors:

All honorees

Illustrated Picture Book: Carolyn Bull and Gabriella Svenningsen

Illustrator's Portfolio: Diane Holtzworth, Dominique Monroe, and Virginia Zimmerman

Young Adult Novel: Holly Howley, Karen Lindeborg, Christine Dokko, and Karen Fortunati

Middle Grade Novel: Jacquelin Devlin, Heather Sherlock DiLorenzo, Meira Rosenberg, Nancy Tandon, and Rudy Vene

New Voices

Remember, this is an award for unpublished authors. Good luck to everyone going forth with your careers.

Time Management Tuesday: Shadow Work

According to Daniel J. Levitin in The Organized Mind, shadow work "represents a kind of parallel, shadow economy in which a lot of the service we expect from companies has been transferred to the customer. Each of us is doing the work of others and not getting paid for it." He gives as examples scanning and bagging our own groceries, keeping track of our banking on-line, and pumping our own gas.

Shadow Work Is Technology Driven

Technology makes a lot of shadow work possible. We're making our own hotel reservations on-line instead of calling the site and asking an employee to do it for us because on-line exists. We're researching and making purchases at home instead of getting assistance from store employees, because so many stores have a web presence. A great deal has been made of the fact that many of us don't browse for books in bookstores because we're ordering books from Amazon. Amazon is an example of a completely technology driven company. There would be no Amazon without the Internet.

Shadow Work's Big Impact On Writers

Book marketing is writers' shadow work. In decades past book marketing was definitely part of publishers' jobs. Publication parties and book signings were connected with big-name writers and publishers were usually involved. While publishers are still printing and distributing galleys to reviewers, including new publications in their catalogs, and sending out sales people to promote books, writers of all different levels are running and funding their own real-world marketing events. They are also often publicizing them through Internet connections, the technology-driven aspect of this situation.

Social media marketing is a big part of the book marketing writers do, and it exists because of technology. All the social media platforms writers use are on-line: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Goodreads, Pinterest, Instagram, and something that was probably created while we were sleeping last night. Formal social marketing did not exist before the Internet. It's an example of technology driven shadow work.

Where Does The Time Come From?

Book marketing shadow work is an example of computers making more work for people, simply because they create possibilities that didn't exist before. Writers have more work because of the marketing that has been transferred to them, but nothing has changed in terms of the number of hours in a day or days in a week. For most of us, the time for shadow work comes out of writing time. We cut down on production to market.

If I find anything in The Organized Mind on changing the number of hours in the day/days in a week. I'll let you know.
 

The Weekend Writer: Publishers

 The Top 20 Publishers for New Authors at Authors Publish is a list of publishers that authors are supposed to be able to submit to directly. Many of these I haven't heard of, so I can't comment on the quality of the list overall.

However, I have heard of Chronicle Books and Alloy Entertainment, which I understand to be a book packager rather than a traditional publisher. Bloomsbury Spark is connected to Bloomsbury, which is certainly well known. DAW is an imprint of Penguin Books, and Penguin Books is huge.

When you're ready to start submitting, checking these publishers out could be worth your time, especially if you don't have an agent.

What Did You Do This Week, Gail? May 22nd Edition

Last week when I did my weekly assessment, I realized I'd only worked on one goal, and it didn't seem as if I'd put that much time in on it. So when I did my planning for this week, I planned more.

Goal 1. Mummy Book Finally made some nonrevision progress on this puppy. Then went back and merged the first two chapters, cutting ten pages. So now I'm revising again.

Goal 5. Community Building 1. Started work on next month's Connecticut Children's Literature Calendar. 2. Began putting together workshop proposals to submit to a conference.

This proposal thing was interesting because the conference involved prefers that people submit proposals for two workshops. And wouldn't you know it, I had ideas for two workshops. However, the conference administrators require a detailed outline. While getting started on one of the workshops proposals, I realized it would take days of research to do the outline. It would be way too costly in terms of time, and I decided to drop it. Then yesterday morning, I was hit with a breakout experience in the shower. One outline idea after another came to me. It went on for most of the day. So I'll be submitting two proposals after all.

Goal 6. Marketing STP&S. Or marketing in general. I watched Planning Successful Social Media Campaigns and was overwhelmed.  

Sam Vimes Finds A Picture Book Flaw And Fixes It

I had a chance to read Where's My Cow? by the late, great Terry Pratchett this past weekend. I ordered this book, and it arrived encased in plastic. Since I purchased it as a gift, I didn't open it. So my first reading was a bit of a surprise.

I thought it was the book Sam Vimes, head of the nightwatch of Ankh-Morpork, runs home from work each evening to read to his son. What Where's My Cow? is really about is Sam Vimes reading Where's My Cow? to his son. It is more than I expected.

Sam Vimes may be my favorite Discworld character. He's essentially a cop, and I understand cop stories pretty much wherever they're set. Because he is a superior character, he recognizes an interesting point about animal picture books. And he fixes it.

A review by Steven H. Silver does a great job of describing Where's My Cow's artwork. I agree with Silver's conclusion that the book is probably best appreciated by Discworld followers.

Time Management Tuesday: Satisficing

When I was in college, back before every mother's child was supposed to be gifted across the board, I knew at least two people who let some of their course work go in order to focus the bulk of their time and energy on their major areas. They didn't fail anything, they just didn't worry about taking a B or B- for a class so long as it wasn't in engineering or nursing. They were not being shiftless and lazy, they were strategizing. They went on to successful careers, by the way.

According to Daniel J. Levitin in The Organized Mind, they were satisficing. Levitin says Herbert Simon came up with the term "to describe not getting the very best option but one that was good enough. For things that don't matter critically, we make a choice that satisfies us and is deemed sufficient."

How does that apply to writers? We have to manage our entire lives in order to make time to write. But we can't just blow off things, leave them totally undone. Remember the environmental disorder study last year that found that a disordered environment leads to self-regulatory failure? We definitely can't just ignore taking care of our homes, for instance, to make more time for writing because the environment we make for ourselves could lead to problems with staying on task. Instead, we have to find a level for what doesn't matter critically that is satisficing, good enough.

It's even true for professional work. Our work situation is always changing. When we have a contractual deadline, we have to focus on writing, but we can't just forget about marketing and other types of writing. They aren't critically important at that point, though. We satisfice. When a new book comes out, marketing does become critically important. We satisfice with the writing then.

We move among all the things we have to do, focusing our effort on some things and  spending only as much time as we have to on others.