What did we do before the internet?

If you’ve seen less of me online the latley, that’s because the internet stopped working at my place for a few days. It’s back now and I am scrambling to keep up with everything I missed and fell behind on. I feel like I am just about caught up, but it makes me wonder what we did before the internet.

I’m thinking the life of a pre-internet writer pretty much consisted of sitting at a desk and writing. If they needed to look something up there was probably a dictionary close at hand. Something requiring more research might have involved a short note and a trip to the library at some point.

Modern writers have a wealth of information at their fingertips. Unfortunately, all that information can be a bit distracting. When I need to look something up, I just pop open my web browser (Who am I kidding? It’s probably already opened.) it can be anything from a complex research question to a very basic spelling question. Even though I have a dictionary within reach, it’s still easier to go to Google and let the search engine correct me on my misspelling.

Of course, once I have my answer all I need to do is head back over to the old work in progress, but usually I don’t. I remind myself that’s it’s been awhile since I’m visited those great lands of timesuck known as Twitter and Facebook. Also, I should check my email. I then waste three and half minutes watching the funny video someone sent me. Then I remember to read that blog I like, but there’s a link to another blog, and another. I discover a blog I’ve never read before and am instantly hooked, and oh look she’s soliciting captions or inspired stories for a funny photo so I have to use some of that creativity I should be using on the WIP.

By the time I get back to work, my stomach’s telling me it’s time to take a meal break. The illusion is that computers let us write so much faster than having to write things out by longhand or fighting with a typewriter, but I have a feeling that only computers without web access really let us work faster.

Well, now that I’ve caught up from my internet hiatus, it’s time to get back to work. Well, just as soon as I figure out how to fix my busted iPod. I should probably look that up on Google.

Three authors, three different stories of publication

This past Saturday, I had a chance to attend the first ever Monroe County Book Expo hosted by the Eastern Monroe Public Library in Stroudsburg, PA. It was a fun opportunity to meet some local authors and to catch up with some I already know. I also had the opportunity to sit on a panel with two other authors.

One of the things I found interesting about my fellow panelists, is that each of them had a different story of publication, and that along with me none of us has had what might be considered the “traditional” story of publication. I don’t know if there is any one traditional publication story, but in writing circles the the most traditional publication story is that after completing and polishing a manuscript one goes looking for an agent. With luck, an agent represents you, sells your book to a big publishing house, and with a whole lot more luck you make gobs of money, quit your day job and spend your days crafting your next bestseller. Okay, so the ending part might not be too traditional. But for the most part the find an agent who in turn finds you a publisher story is pretty standard.

Gloria Mallette kept writing novels and filing them away, until her husband convinced her she had to do something about them. So, she published them herself, creating her own publishing company to self publish her book. More than just a writer she made herself into a savvy business woman and it paid off. She began to sell a lot of copies of her book and the big guys took notice. She found herself with a contract from a big publishing house and her first book was heavily promoted with a first class book tour, but as she continued to publish books with the big publishing house, she became disillusioned when the publisher chose to do little to promote her work. Eventually she decided to return to self publishing because she already knew she could be successful at it.

Jeff Widmer is a writer for hire.  He is the author of The Spirit of Swiftwater, which he wrote for a corporate customer and which was initially privately published, but later was published by a university press. Freelance writing and ghostwriting have helped Jeff to carve out a successful writing career.

And me? I bypassed the agent route and the big publishers, and submitted my manuscript directly to a small publisher. The Subrosa Semesters was picked out of a slush pile and is now well on its way to publication.

If you’re a writer, and you’ve had trouble going about things the traditional way, or if you just prefer to do things your own way, it’s good to keep in mind that there’s more than one way to become a published author.

It’s okay to write in anger

One of my mother’s favorite authors, Dorothea Benton Frank was in town this evening for a book signing, so I accompanied Mom on a trip down to the Clinton Book Shop.

Dorothea had lots of fun writing stories to share including some horror stories from her first book tour including an ill-fated trip to a Georgia Barnes & Noble where the event manager had quit and no one knew about her arrival and she ended up talking to an audience of two who turned out to just be there for the air conditioning. But my favorite part of her talk was her answer to the question of what got her started writing. She told the audience that it was a fight with her husband that made her decide to start writing.

She was mad at her husband for not buying her family home when they had the opportunity to do so, and she was looking for a career that she could take on while also raising her kids. So, she channeled that anger and set her mind to writing. The happy ending is that she has gone on to have a successful writing career and is still happily married to her husband.

There’s a lot of things it’s not advisable to do in anger, but writing, thankfully, is not one of them – well, as long as what you are writing is a work of fiction, and not, say, an email to your boss! So, the next time you get really angry, maybe you should sit down and write a story. Hey, it worked for Dorothea Benton Frank.

I’m not here today

Hey, there. I’m not here today, but you can read a guest blog post about a book I haven’t written over at Jeff Widmer’s Crossroads blog.

Oh, and don’t forget to stop back here tomorrow to read Jeff’s great post on book promotion.

What do writers do all day?

I’m not here today. I am over at the Elevensies sharing the fascinating true story of a day in the writing life.

Rejection

If there’s one thing that all writers have in common, it’s rejection. At some point or another (and more than likely at a lot of points) every writer gets a letter an email (or perhaps hears no response at all) to let them know that their submitted work, their precious darling child, will not be published, at least not this time around. Thankfully, the other thing that all writers have in common is persistence and a bit of masochism. We continue to try, try and try again.

Jon Friedman has made something of a career out of rejection organizing the Rejection Show and now editing the anthology Rejected which collects both rejected works as well as stories of rejection from a variety of creative types. Many of the writers represented are comedy writers and comedians, who have a knack for taking pain (and rejection is painful) and turning it into comedy gold.

I dare you not to laugh out loud while reading Adrianne Frost’s story “The Nature of My Universe As It Relates to Kevin Spacey” as she details her elaborate plot to meet and then wow the famous actor. I remain baffled that David Wain’s “Cheese Factory” sketch never made it onto The Slate.

This is a fun collection. Read it after receiving a rejection letter and I guarantee you will feel better.

Still need more relief from your rejection pain? Why not tell someone about it? Jon is collecting stories of rejection at his website rejectionshow.com.

Deadlines

Last night I was reminded of one of my favorite writing quotes. The late great Douglas Adams once said, “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”

What brought the quote to mind was an email in my inbox about a screenwriting competition. I went over to their website to see more about the competition, and I must admit the first thing I looked at was the deadline. Like many screenwriting contests out there, there were actually a series of deadlines. The earlier one enters, the less one has to pay as an entry fee. It struck me that those who organize competitions may do this very deliberately because they know that writers are master procrastinators and will end up paying more money out of their meager budgets as one deadline after another whooshes on by.

And yes, at the time that I was looking up screenwriting competitions last night I had a deadline looming on the news story for the local paper that I needed to get submitted before I turned in for bed. Is there a writer out there who isn’t also a master of procrastination?

The lure of a fresh pad of paper

I do most of my writing directly on the computer because it’s a lot faster than trying to write stuff out by hand, and when I’m a few thousand words into something and suddenly decide that the beginning is all wrong, it makes it that much easier to go back and fix things. Still, I do love paper and find it very hard to resist a brand new fresh pad of paper or a notebook. It’s like those blank lines are just waiting for me to fill them up with brilliant ideas.

For me, computers don’t lend themselves to outlines, for that only a good old fashioned pen and paper will do. With that in mind I sat down last night with a crisp new pad of paper and some ideas dancing through my head that I wanted to jot down as a very rough outline. I didn’t get too far before I was fighting off sleep and writing things that turned out to be gibberish. I felt like I was back in my overheated Spanish II classroom all over again trying to keep my eyes open while Senora prattled on in a language I couldn’t understand. Just like in Spanish II, I succumbed to sleep and I’ll have to take another stab at that outline on my now not quite clean pad of paper.

Has the internet killed the slush pile?

If you are writer, you are probably aware of the fact that many publishers will not even look at manuscripts submitted by unagented writers, and getting an agent can be a real challenge. My Wall Street Journal reading father, is always helpfully passing on articles he finds interesting, and the latest was this article on the death of the slush pile which appeared in yesterday’s paper.

Among other things, it makes the case that the internet, which was supposed to level the playing field, may have actually made it even more difficult for new writers to get published, because the internet itself is like one big, overwhelming slush pile.

That said, I know for a fact that the slush pile has not been killed off completely. There are still some publishers out there who accept manuscripts from unagented writers. I submitted my own manuscript for The Balderdash Semesters directly to Flux, a small publisher specializing in YA fiction who still accepts manuscripts directly from authors. Digging through that pile of slush, editor Brian Farrey found my manuscript and decided that it was worthy of publication.

So, take that Wall Street Journal article and any other advice that warns you that it’s next to impossible for a new writer to get published, with a grain of salt.

Group Blog: Charting Your Journey

Today’s group blog topic, hosted by Stephanie Faris at Steph in the City is plans, specifically the plans for our literary careers. You can participate in this group blog by clicking here.

At first I was stymied by what to write about. Plans? What are those? I’m more a go with the flow sort of person. Then I read Stephanie’s story, and I realized that I too have tried out a few different plans before knowing just where I wanted to go, and believe it or not they all started when I was about ten years old.

That summer, I was going with my family on vacation to North Carolina. We had rented a condo there with a couple of other families, and were spending a week in the outer banks.

I had a plan. I was going to write a novel about that week, and it was going to be the greatest novel anyone had ever written ever. It was going to be called North Carolina (how’s that for brilliant?) and it was not going to be some silly kid’s book. No, it was going to be an adult novel (never mind that I didn’t read adult novels at the time) that was going to be a big fat 500 page book of pure literary awesomeness. In fact, it was going to be so good that Nancy Reagan herself was going to come to my town and give me an award.

What can I say? I was a strange kid.

Anyway, the reason you’ve never heard of the brilliant novel North Carolina before now is because I never wrote it. In the end that week-long vacation became nothing more than a few sentences in my cheesy little diary.

Fast forward to college, when I got into science fiction in a big time way. I was an English major so I read a lot of books, and I’m one of those people when asked to list her favorite book asks if she can pick her top 50 instead, but if there’s a genre for which I will always have a particular fondness, it is science fiction. So, when I took creative writing classes and found myself working on a novel, it was, of course science fiction. My professor asked that we pick a book whose style we liked and which we felt closely mirrored where we wanted to go with our novel. My choice was The Space Merchants by Frederick Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth

Unlike North Carolina, some of you may have actually heard of The Space Merchants, though probably not many. It’s not exactly Catcher in the Rye. Anyway, The Space Merchants can in no way be accountable for the complete mess of a novel that I finally completed and turned in as my honors project. The funny thing is that I’ve been thinking about this novel, and its basic premise and realize that it might work really well as a young adult novel, but with completely different characters and a b-story that actually makes sense, well, for that matter, an a-story that actually makes sense.

I didn’t stop writing when I got out of school, but I’ve never been good about focusing on things so I jumped around between a bunch of different projects, including doing some work on something called The Balderdash Semesters, which did after years and years of off and on work turn into something suitable for publication, and so suddenly I realized I’m a YA author.

With that realization, my own diabolical plan was born. I am going to write some awesome young adult novels. They are going to be the kind of books I would want to read, and maybe that will bring success in the form of financial gain, and maybe not, but either way I’ll be doing what I love, and that’s pretty cool.