LIBRARY IN A BOX

Well, not exactly a box, more like a miniature house on a post.

Jean Chapman Snow, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, reported about a new phenomenon in her neighborhood, a free library with a sign reading, “Little Free Library, Charter 4775.” In smaller letters, it read, “Take a book. Return a book.”

As you may deduce from the charter number, there are many such libraries around the country. Started by Todd Bol in Wisconsin in 2009, these doll-house sized structures are in residential neighborhoods in forty-five states and at least five other countries. Most are wooden sided, with a front that's open, or a glass door to keep out rain. With two shelves inside, they might hold between twenty and thirty books. And, of course, it has a website (littlefreelibrary.org.)

In 2001, a similar book-sharing idea (bookcrossing.com) was launched and is now in 132 countries with 10 million books. The system is different, however. You register a book, get a tracking number and then leave it in a public place. Whoever finds the book is invited to use the tracking number and website to show where it is, then set it free again.

As a lover of books and libraries, this appeals to me, and so, since I can’t build my own library-house, I might try Book Crossing. Although I have a perfectly good library where I live, and many in nearby cities, this is another way of sharing the books you’ve read but no longer want to keep. My own living room bookshelves are filled to overflowing, and I still buy more.

The only thing I seem to have more of is a bunch of stories in my head that I want to put down on paper. Like all other authorrs, I assume, I decided to become a writer because I loved to read. Libraries, whatever form they take, are often the places we indulged our fantasies, beginning as young as six. At several times that age now, I still love books and libraries and always will.

THE "R" WORD

The cover article in the September issue of the Mensa Bulletin was titled, “The R (regret) Word,” and inside were snippets from stories sent in by members of things they regretted.

One said she regretted not taking Chemistry in school. A man said, “I should have had four children instead of two.” (No comment from his wife.) Another reported his 90-something grandfather regretted he never went bowling.

Here are some others:
* Not learning to play guitar.
* Not learning the bagpipes in junior high band.
* Not going to veterinarian school.
* Not taking the Mensa test sooner.
* Not studying dance.
* My mother not seeing me on Jeopardy.

However, by far the most regrets had to do with family.
* Growing up without a father.
* Not being closer to family.
* Not having more talks with my father.
* Not asking enough questions of parents and grandparents.

Although there are variation of this, I think the earliest came from a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier. “For all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: it might have been.”

Like so many others, I wish I knew more about my family. What was it like for my grandfather to leave England and start a new life in the U.S.? When and where did my mother and father--who came from different cultures--meet? It’s too late to get those answers, but I’m resolved not to have regrets about writing.

Sure, I already regret I didn’t start sooner, although I wrote stories while in grade school. But then I took time off to marry and raise four children. I wouldn’t give up one of them, and fortunately they understand why I spend so many hours at home in front of the computer now, writing books.

What about you, my friends? Will you some day regret you didn’t write more, that perhaps the Great American Novel never got put on paper? Don’t let it happen. Write right now!

SHORT IS THE NEW LONG

When I began writing (long enough ago that some of you reading this might not have been born), I was told that writers should begin their career by writing short stories before longer works like novels. In those days, there were markets for short stories, so that’s what I did.

Women’s magazines carried at least one short story (usually romantic) per issue along with the required non-fiction about home decorating, fashion and cooking. But then that market dried up, and only “confession” magazines took stories. Those were supposedly “real” stories and carried no author names. One of my friends wrote literally hundreds of them, which replaced her income when she quit her job to write full time. Thanks to her encouragement, I wrote such a story and it sold immediately. It was, in fact, the first money I earned from writing and the day I was sent a check for it, my husband and I went out to dinner to celebrate.

I never sold another “confession,” and I stopped writing them. Even my prolific friend stopped submitting them. Why? Because the magazines paid the same amount to writers that they’d paid twenty or thirty years earlier. This despite the fact their advertisers paid vastly higher amounts every year. As usual, writers got the dirty end of the stick.

However, I did write lots of other stories--romance, mystery, even science fiction--hoping magazines which paid better might buy one. Alas, those didn’t sell either. However, I had a computer by then and I not only switched to writing romance novels (which, in my opinion, is where the short stories evolved when women’s magazines stopped publishing them) but saved my old stories in my computer files. And now I’m glad.

Thanks to either shorter attention spans by readers, or longer waiting times in doctor’s offices, reading short works on an e-reader, tablet or even a smart phone is suddenly popular.

I’ve sold eleven novels and four non-fiction books, but today I pulled out an old story and spent an hour updating it because I have a long list of places to send it. The world has turned again, and I’m prepared. Are you, my fellow writers?

DO YOU HAVE SURVIVORSHIP BIAS?

Many newspapers and blogs picked up and reported the statistics in Forbes’ business magazine about the highest paid authors of the year. Even if you didn’t read the article, as a writer you probably already knew who the top people were and how many millions of dollars they earned.

E. L. James, $95 million, James Patterson, $91 million, Suzanne Collins, $55 million, Danielle Steele, $26 million, Janet Evanovich, $24 million, Nora Roberts, $23 million, Dan Brown, $22 million, Stephen King, $20 million, John Grisham, $18 million, J. K. Rowling, $13 million, George R.R. Martin, $12 million.

Those weren’t all. The article my friend sent me listed sixteen million-dollar authors. I’m going to assume she didn’t mean to imply I should throw myself under a Waste Management truck because my 2013 writing income didn’t come close. Close? Those numbers and mine aren’t even in the same galaxy.

And yet... I’m in the black. The income from my obsession (no, I meant occupation) hasn’t affected our family budget and I may yet be in the rarefied atmosphere of having to pay income tax on it.

And the reason I’m not unhappy (okay a tad jealous) is what I told my friend. That’s sixteen people out of how many million writers? (Amazon doesn’t share its figures with me.) A few people make a lot of money and almost everyone else little or none. But that just means publishing is like every other endeavor. Tom Hanks makes millions per picture, but thousands of other actors wait tables to live. Same with sports and music, for which I won’t bother you with statistics.

Three other recent articles offer perspective, posted in the popular blog, The Passive Voice. One from the New York Times was titled, “Long Odds for Authors Newly Published,” to which one can only respond, “Duh!” and another, “It’s Just Books,” by Lara Schiffbauer. She reminds us that “for every lucky, hard-working, talented writer who found success, there are many who didn’t have the stars align in the same way. Whether I sell a zillion copies or two, it won’t change the important things in my life. I’m still a wife, a mother, a daughter, an aunt, a friend. I’ll still write. It’s just books.”

Finally, “Writing Excuses: Survivorship Bias.” The podcast from which it was taken revealed “Survivorship Bias is the skewing of the data when you seek to emulate successes without considering failures in the same space.” Writers who are jumping into self-publishing study those making money there and listen to what they say as if it’s a formula for their own success. Yet, if you talked to people who won the lottery would you think playing the lottery is the only way to get rich?

If failures become invisible, you’ll be pulled toward the successes. Survivorship bias pulls you toward the superstars in everything. As Mark Coker of Smashwords has said, “We cannot promise you your book will sell well even if you follow all the tips. In fact, most books, whether traditionally published or self-published don’t sell well.”

So I am content to be a little fish in a big pond. I write because I want to and it’s part of who I am. But I’m also a wife, a mother, daughter, aunt and friend. That’s my life. The other is just books.

Tags:
Forbes
The Passive Voice
New York Times
Lara Schiffbauer



Mark Coker

ARE EDITORS REAL PEOPLE?

This will be another short post (Do I hear someone say, “Good”?) Because this week I’m swamped with writing work I must finish.

1. Polish the woman-in-jeopardy mystery my friend and I wrote together a long time ago. It’s been sold twice (contracts from MWA approved publishers) and had to be cancelled, and now we’re trying again.

2. Put a backlist romance novel on Amazon all by myself. (Well, hubby helps since I am tech-illiterate.) At the last minute I decided to change the cover picture so am waiting for the artist to do that for me. After that comes the hard part, promotion.

3. The editor of a major publisher (not the Big-5 but I never send to them) has asked to see the entire manuscript of the first book in my cozy mystery series. I never send a book out without reading it from the top to be sure there are no typos or other problems, so I’m doing that right now.

TWO DIFFERING EDITORS

I was amazed recently to find that copy editors can be so different. I’ve heard that, as a cost-cutting measure, publishers - even major ones - are out-sourcing, or eliminating those jobs. That would explain why the same book went to two different places and was copy-edited with vastly different results.

The first editor, although overlooking two typos I found later, made no changes except to take out the asterisks I had placed in the text to separate scenes within chapters. As you know, those separations are made when there is an important change from one scene to the next, for example, time or day, location or setting, or viewpoint. Mine were viewpoint and time changes, and, if the book had been published that way, imagine the confusion of the reader when she was transferred to another world in one paragraph.

The second editor, reading the identical book a couple of months later, wrote comments and changes on 325 of the 350 pages of the novel. This person professed to know everything about movie and television production, law enforcement, police procedures, child custody, judges, restaurant operations, medicine and hospitals, even fashion and food.

Yes, that’s the book I mentioned in the beginning of this post. My co-author and I were so confused, we pulled the book and are querying another publisher. Oh well. Maybe next time.

ELMORE LEONARD

The legendary Elmore Leonard passed away yesterday, and I am not the only person, or even author, who will write about it. My two cents is that I’d read several of his books before I actually met him at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference in 1991. He signed a copy of his novel GET SHORTY for me, and it lives in a special place in a cabinet, not on the bookshelves in my living room, bedroom, guest room, office and kitchen. (I keep lots of books.)

What did I learn from him? I can’t do better than quote Leonard, whose 10 RULES FOR WRITING will be touted a lot this week.

1. Never open a book with weather.
He qualified this by adding something like, unless you’re very good at it. I’ve never done it, so I suppose I felt I had nothing original to say weather-wise.

2. Avoid prologues.
I have only one published book (CHOICES, a mainstream novel) with a Prologue, and I considered it necessary at the time and still do. I started a few other books with prologues but soon decided they were unnecessary and eliminated them.

3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
I think we’re allowed to use “asked” if appropriate, but I once read a book that used “opined” and nearly gagged. These days I hardly use “said,” preferring to indicate who’s speaking by putting action in the same paragraph.

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said.”
My writers’ group used to play a game called “Tom Swifties,” in which we tried to come up with the worst combinations, like Leonard’s “he admonished gravely.” Or, “‘I’ve struck oil,’ said Tom crudely.” Thanks to my computer’s Search feature, I can find and remove any unnecessary words ending in “ly.”

5. Keep your exclamation points under control.
I admit I was guilty of using too many until Leonard advised no more than one per 100,000 words.

6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
I’ve seldom used the former and never the latter, and, thanks to Leonard, now I never will.

7. Use regional dialogue, patois, sparingly.
I guess I’ve always been too lazy to try to describe speech phonetically. Yet, I confess I’ve dropped a final “g” sometimes.

8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
Leonard allows it if you’re really good. Trying to bring my characters to life without much description is still a goal I aim for and, I hope, getting better at. In one of my books, I wrote, “His face was plain except he had more than his share of nose.”

9. Don’t go into detail describing places and things.
Another rule you can avoid if you’re really good at that. I try to find a few “telling details.”
In my latest novel, THE ITALIAN JOB, I wrote: “I knew that old hotel. The windows were French doors and led to outside balconies...but the balcony was two stories above the street, too far for jumping, even if I were an Olympic athlete instead of someone whose only exercise is changing the sheets on her bed... However, the next balcony being merely a foot away, I decided to swing over to it, enter the next room by way of that French door and return to the hotel hallway... The next room seemed dark and empty, and I reasoned that even if someone were staying there, chances were slim it would be another man bent on hanky-panky.”

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
In my opinion, he means big blocks of description or narration. Readers prefer dialogue and, fortunately, people tell me I write good dialogue, so I use a lot of it.

Finally, Elmore Leonard is supposed to have said, “If it sounds ‘writerly,’ I rewrite it.”
I take that to mean things like purple prose, too much description and similes and metaphors that sound like the writer was trying too hard to impress someone.

Tags:
Elmore Leonard
GET SHORTY
Santa Barbara Writers Conference
CHOICES by Phyll Ashworth

WRITING STYLE OUTDATED?

Last week, having finished reading a cozy mystery, I began a book some call a “classic.” Either the author, or that book, made the New York Times bestseller list, so I hoped to learn something useful. However, as for priorities, which Kristine Kathryn Rusch wrote about in her blog last week, having a book of mine become a bestseller on the NYT is not even on my list.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that almost everything I’ve learned in the thirty years I’ve been writing was ignored by that author. I won’t divulge the name, but it is a woman, and the book was first published in the early 1970s (forty years ago) by one of the Big Six (now Five) publishers. It’s apparently a backlist title reissued for the current market.

So what are the writing lessons that I’ve been learning since the 1990s that weren’t observed forty years ago?

Let’s start with Viewpoint. One could call this book omniscient, although there were times it seemed mostly in the viewpoint of one woman. However, it didn’t stay in her viewpoint. It head-hopped from time to time into her husband’s, her mother’s and her boss’s. Often within paragraphs.

Whether because of that problem or simply lack of character development, I had no interest in that person. I didn’t like or dislike her. I just didn’t know her enough to care. I had no emotional attachment. She was a mere paper doll, being pushed here and there, all “tell,” no “show.”

Backstory. Yes, there was lots of that and it was right in the first few chapters. I almost gave up reading then, but reminded myself this was supposed to be a great book and I should stick with it awhile longer to get to the good parts. Never happened. True, the character did some slightly interesting things: married and had children, got a good job, had an affair, got divorced. Not exactly Wonder Woman things, but maybe people liked to read about commonplace domestic life back then.

The setting of the novel was a period even earlier than the 1970s and the author managed to drop in every detail of the era, whether relevant or not. From who was president, to what went on in other countries at the time, to fashion, hairstyles, food, films and books. Her research was impressive. Did I care? No.
Dialogue: Very little, and that irrelevant or amateurish.

I’ll sum it up and give the reading experience a grade with points from one to ten. For Plot: five points (I’m being generous here.) Characterization: two points. Reader involvement: zero. Sometimes old novels should just be left to die in obscurity. Even as a mere $2.99 e-book.

Tags:
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
New York Times