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Rain, by Avard FairbanksAs regular readers have deduced, my current WIP, The Wolf Tree, has been languishing, left untended due to a variety of life events. I should probably call it a “work-in-stasis” rather than a work-in-progress. Now it’s official: The Wolf Tree is on the back burner.

The reason: I received an email asking if I’d like to write a book.

As a self-identified author, I’ve received pitches like this before: a guy has a “great idea” for a book, and all I have to do is outline it, write it, edit it, market it, sell it, and then (of course) give him a cut of the profits as payment for the use of his great idea. Win-Win, right?

Wrong. (more…)

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Stack of BooksI was about halfway through Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Goldfinch, when I stumbled while reading the following:

Whenever he was gluing up a piece of furniture it was my job to set out all the right cramps, each at the right opening, while he lay out the pieces in precise mortise-to-tenon order—painstaking preparation for the actual gluing-and-cramping when we had to work frantically in the few minutes open to us before the glue set, Hobie’s hands sure as a surgeon’s, snatching up the right piece when I fumbled, my job mostly to hold the pieces together when he got the cramps on (not just the usual G-cramps and F-cramps but also an eccentric array of items he kept to hand for the purpose…

The reason I tripped over these lines is due entirely to the use of the word cramp. It popped me out of the story, puzzled me, and continued to nettle me through the ensuing days, enough so that it engendered this blog post.

The stages of my reaction were as follows: (more…)

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Le crayon rougeIt amazes me how, every time I read something I’ve written, I want to change it. When I finish it I think it’s great, then I put it down for a while, and when I pick it up again, I’m like…bleah…and I’ve got to make changes.

This has never been more true than with “The Book of Solomon,” my most recent short story, which I’ve recently ceased trying to sell to the “literary” markets.

Now, in my defense, this story is a major departure from my previous fiction, on many levels. It’s a genre I’ve not tried before (historical fiction), and it’s a style very unlike most of my other work. influenced heavily by authors like Gabriel Garcia Márquez and Alice Hoffman, I purposefully avoided dialogue, working toward a more internal narrative and fluid style. Also, I did not shy away from complex syntax; I wanted to let the narrative flow in the way my character might think rather than how a storyteller might speak. Lastly, there’s a flipping ton of chronological intrication, jumping around from present to past to deep past to near future to imagined future.

The result was a minefield. Every page carried dangers. (more…)

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Le crayon rougeDear me. How perspectives change.

A quick follow-up on my decision to pull from the market a story I’ve been shopping around.

When I started going over it, for no other reason than to reformat it for the web, I found that this story, one that I had edited and re-edited, sent to researchers for fact-checking, and passed to my Beta Readers for feedback, this story that, a year ago, I felt was suitable for publication, really needs another round of edits.

And it’s not just that I don’t like this phrase or I’d say that a little differently. There are errors of continuity, spotty problems with past perfect and past conditional verb tenses, and even (shudder!) a typo (only one, but still…yeesh!)

So, grasshopper, remember today’s lesson well:

It’s never as good as you think it is.

k

Pup Dog Speaks

 

 

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Le crayon rougeSixteen months ago, in September, 2014, I began shopping my latest story. It had been a long time since my last go-round marketing a short story, and while a lot had changed, a lot had stayed exactly the same. (more…)

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Write, You Fools!I’m not telling you anything new when I say that the publishing industry has changed a great deal in the last twenty years. However, throughout these decades of upheaval, there are two things I’ve observed that have remained pretty damned consistent:

  1. Writers worrying about how much effort they should put into marketing their books.
  2. Writers’ efforts at marketing their books doesn’t work.

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Miss me? Did you even notice I was gone? Hehe…Probably not.

Either way, it was an interesting holiday fortnight, writing-wise—a couple of rejections, a friend had his book series canceled, another friend’s newest got some great reviews, and one of my books is going out-of-print—but the one piece of writerly news that really sparked a discussion was a bit involving CBS, Paramount, and Star Trek.

You remember Star Trek, right? That other sci-fi mega-franchise. The one with good writing? The franchise that actually did break new ground?

Yeah. That one. Star Trek.

(more…)

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