HOW TO BE AN AUTHOR

Roger Zelazny, ghost here.

You scoff.  Be my guest ...

it makes it so much easier for us.

There is more to reality than you are capable of comprehending ...

after all, you are but flesh.

In like manner, there is more to becoming an Author than being a mere Writer.

 You and the rest of mankind, are quite sure what is possible and what is impossible.

In the daylight.

 When the night descends, the stride of your thoughts is not quite so confident.

Not so Roland.

He is much like an animal. I do not mean that as an insult.

He takes what comes at face value, not forcing it to fit into any preconceived notions Man teaches as Science.

He deals with what comes without protesting that it cannot be, only seeing what is and adapting.

Perhaps that is why we ghosts are drawn to him. In him is that quality that Stubbs expressed in MOBY DICK:

“I know not what all may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing.”

Not that he is overly optimistic about the world around him.

 

Despite being part Lakota Sioux, he still reads the Bible by his bedside. He often quotes:

“They sleep not, except that they have done mischief;
And their sleep is taken away unless they cause
Some to fall.

For they eat the bread of wickedness
And drink the wine of violence.”

That is Proverbs 4:16-17 for those of you interested in such things.

In life I was not.

I thought the love of God was like the light burning from the stars:

cold and distant.

Now, that I am a ghost …. but no.

There are secrets the dead may not share with the living.

But the secrets on how to write well … they I can share with you.

Oh, you are wondering who Roger Zelazny is.

Don’t be embarrassed. In life I wondered the same thing.

Once the name, Roger Zelazny, drew crowds.

I made somewhat of a splash in Science Fiction in the sixties,

 

endured and evolved in the seventies and eighties.

 

 I went the way of all flesh mid-way through the nineties in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

And Roland mourned me as a distant older brother gone over the crest of the hill before him, leaving him cold and alone.

Oh, and I inspired him to take up the pen and follow my steps into weaving tales in the genre I call Science Fantasy.

That I sparked the idea in him to be a writer drew me to him.

It was his gentle, quiet, amused nature that has made me stay.

 

  He looks on all the awkwardness of life with a sly smile that says, “You expected water to run uphill?”

Another more important question:

What makes one tale live, vibrant and riveting, and another merely flat, lifeless words on paper?

Not that any of us have a sure idea, although the ghost of Hemingway is glaring at me.

 

But we had a close enough glimpse of the answer to make a living at what we loved to do:

 Write.

What is the answer?

A joyous cry: “Come see what I found!”

If you can bring anew the childlike sense of wonder and awe to your readers that the poisons of living have drained from them,

 

 you will have a loyal following that will not quit.

What words will do that?

Certainly not the same sing-song repeat and rinse of someone else’s bestseller.

The words must tilt the reader’s expectations on its ear. Did you notice I said reader?

Not readers.

You are talking to only one at the campfire of their imagination and curiosity. If you think of your audience as readers, you will talk AT them not TO them.

The author/reader relationship is intimate: friend to friend. “Look at this, man!”

One friend sharing with another something fantastic and wondrous:

The meaning of life in the skating sparks of the sun along the uneven facets of a piece of rock candy …

or striking fire down the razored spirals of a unicorn’s tusk.

If you are drawn to write, you do not need to be told the basics. You already have absorbed them from the masters:

Stirring plots, memorable characters, and absorbing ideas.

You must tap the humanity of the situations, of the people struggling against the tide of events.

Remember this is the Microwave Culture.

Your prose must be lean and spare, yet sing with the poetry of mystery and suspense. How do you do that?

Mind your surroundings.

Nothing is ever wasted to a real writer. Circumstances suggest. Events coalesce.

 

The story will begin to flow like a shadow along the floor of your unconscious.

Once you have seen their shapes, the stories will exist as ghosts for you until you have pinned them to the paper.

 

Perhaps that is why there are so many ghosts of writers in the Shadowlands.

We made our living from ghosts, so reciprocity demands its due.

Sometimes you will have to post a Help Wanted Ad in your unconscious to apply for positions in the story and events that have called out to you.

Do not worry. Within the hour, your unconscious mind will have them lining up for you to consider.

Read your work aloud.

Hear the clumsy prose misstep that jars your ears? A sentence is too long? Make them two. A word unneeded? Remove it.

 

 Sand your prose as a sculptor would his carving.

Give your characters life by giving them a new take on what it means to be human, to be fully alive.

 

Most people you pass on the streets are sleepwalking from long years of debt and unfulfilled passion.

Give them hope that there is more out there, that each corner could reveal the start of an adventure that might shorten their lives but awaken their souls.

Do that and you will become more than a writer. You will become an author.
***

HOW TO GET YOUR eBOOK TO GO VIRAL

Go to Vesper's fun blog:
http://chickwithaquill.blogspot.com/


for a fun, detailed review of LUCIFER'S ORPHAN

BUT NOW:

Have you been curious 

about Meilori?

Who she is?

What she is?

How does she deals with those around her?

See for yourself

in 

{Only 99 cents}

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FPFOJNO

Three days go my visitor tally shot up to 900 daily.  Two days ago 1100 visited my blog.  Today 1300 visited.

SO HOW DO YOU GET YOUR eBOOK TO GO VIRAL?

It is beyond social media.  

You can’t tweet or Facebook yourself into viral status. Your publisher can’t even make it happen. 

 It rarely happens to the common A-list author names – 

 they became A-listers after their viral debut – it’s usually something fresh, from a fresh face.

 The criteria for putting your book into a position to go viral is almost exactly that associated with getting published in the first place.  

The book has to work.  Really, really well.
 
That said, viral books tend to do a couple of specific things really well: 

1.) They are often “high concept” (rather than character-driven, even though they introduce great characters),

with exceptional execution across all the story basics.

2.)  They also deliver something else, almost without exception: they seize the inherent compelling power of underlying story physics in way that exceeds the competition.

These two realms of story – 
compelling concept, 
with exceptionally strong underlying essences, is what gets you into the viral game.

YAWN! Right?  Isn't that what everyone does?




Not really. 

They don’t address these as goals.  

 Some authors just write their story, write it well, let it evolve organically, and hope somebody out there gets it.  

This may get them published, but it doesn’t usually get them on Oprah Winfrey.

 The viral book is driven by hero empathy, 

while delivering a vicarious ride.

  It isn’t the plot, and it isn’t character.  

No, this is about the reader.

 It’s about the reader transporting themselves into this world… going on this ride… feeling it… wanting to be the hero… 

wishing it was them… 

the reader completely engaging in this journey 

on a personal level.

More of this in other posts ...

REMEMBER:

You can still get FREE:

Thank all of you for making this #6!

• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,975 Free in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Free in Kindle Store)
  • #6 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Education & Reference > Writing, Research & Publishing Guides > Writing Skills

LEARN TO WRITE BETTER AND LAUGH ALONG THE WAY!

 {Hit your cursor on the cover to be taken to the Amazon book page}

HOW HAVE I INCREASED MY VISITORS?

I do not know for sure but lately I have:

1.)  GIVEN 2 FREE BOOKS AWAY EACH WEEK

2.)  DONE EVERY FEW DAYS A DIFFERENT INTRO FOR MY SHORT STORY IN WENDY'S ANTHOLOGY.

3.)  WEEKLY DID A POST TO BUILD UP INTEREST IN SIV MARIA'S EXCELLENT SECRETS OF THE ASH TREE (not just one on the day everyone else did).

4.) PARTICIPATED IN TWO HALLOWEEN BLOGHOPS, INCLUDING A 3RD: MY OWN

5.) OFFERED FAIRLY NEAT PRIZES IN SEVERAL CONTESTS OF MY OWN.

6.) PUT OUT A NEW BOOK AT 99 CENTS.

7.) WROTE POSTS CENTERING ON ISSUES AUTHORS AND GENERAL READERS WOULD BE DRAWN TO.

My increased traffic might be due to some of those or none of those.  Unlike Ratatoskr, I admit I am mostly clueless!

Here is a trailer for a movie that went viral.  See how it drew in the audience:

WHAT ALONE CAN MAKE GOOD WRITING

http://www.amazon.com/GHOST-WRITERS-THE-SKY-ebook/dp/B006Z1MAP6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1380340576&sr=8-1&keywords=ghost+writers+in+the+sky+roland+yeomans

I am William Faulkner. I am dead. Yet I did not die.

I, like so many who did not believe in an afterlife,

live here in the jazz club, Meilori’s.

Meilori’s:

the center, the focus, the hub; sitting looming in the center of the French Quarter’s circumference like a single cloud in its ring of horizon,

laying its vast shadow to the uttermost rim of horizon; musing, brooding, symbolic and imponderable, tall as clouds, solid as rock,

dominating all: protector of the weak, judge and curb of the passions and lusts, repository and guardian of the aspirations and hopes of the helpless.

Here, I find myself standing outside the window of the storefront of humanity, still observing as a writer but unable to reach out and touch with fingers of new prose.

Except through Roland’s kindness.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained that by now we can almost bear it. Of course there are still problems of the spirit. Yet one question looms above all:

When will I be blown up?

By terrorist plot,

by Nature’s increasingly hostile hand,

or by the cruel strangulation of mishandled economics.

Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing

because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat of wresting something from nothing.

You must learn them again.

You must teach yourself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.

And teaching yourself that,

forget it forever,

leaving no room in your writing for anything but the old truths of the heart,

the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.

Until you do so, you labor under a curse.

You write not of love but of lust,

of defeats in which no one loses anything of value,

of victories without hope and,

worst of all, without pity or compassion. Your griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars.

You write not of the heart but of the sex glands.

I remember that night in Meilori’s when McCord and I talked.

How words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly living goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other.

That sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they have forgotten the words.

Forgotten the words by being too busy living them.

So write those words in your prose.

Write them so that others may prove their truth by living them,

And in so doing, forgetting them as they forget they are breathing.

{To read more from Faulkner, Twain, Hemingway, Hitchcock, even Bruce Lee on writing : http://www.amazon.com/GHOST-WRITERS-SKY-ebook/dp/B006Z1MAP6/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1328048229&sr=1-1 }

***

BE MORE THAN A WRITER_GHOST OF ROGER ZELAZNY

Be sure and enter Roland's TRICK OR TREAT GHOST OF A CHANCE CONTEST, will you?

Lovecraft has been whispering something about visiting you in your dreams.

Ah, we ghosts do care for Roland. But more of that later.

Did not Leonora Roy do a marvelous image for him?

The ghost of Hemingway is presently keeping him company on one of Roland's blood runs.

Hemingway is reminded of his own days driving an ambulance in WWI when he accompanies Roland.

So it is left up to me to talk to you mortal writers.

Most of you are scoffing that the ghost of Roger Zelazny is currently typing his thoughts to you. Impossible you say.

You, and the rest of mankind, are quite sure what is possible and what is impossible.

In the daylight.

When the night descends, the stride of your thoughts is not quite so confident.

Not so Roland.

He is much like an animal. I do not mean that as an insult.

He takes what comes at face value, not forcing it to fit into any preconceived notions Man teaches as Science.

He deals with what comes without protesting that it cannot be, only seeing what is and adapting.

Perhaps that is why we ghosts are drawn to him. In him is that quality that Stubbs expressed in MOBY DICK :

“I know not what all may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing.”

Not that he is overly optimistic about the world around him. For being part Lakota Sioux, he still reads the Bible by his bedside. He often quotes :

“They sleep not, except that they have done mischief;
And their sleep is taken away unless they cause
Some to fall.

For they eat the bread of wickedness
And drink the wine of violence.”

That is Proverbs 4:16-17 for those of you interested in such things.
In life I was not.

I thought the love of God was like the light burning from the stars :

cold and distant.

Now, that I am a ghost …

but no.

There are some secrets the dead may not share with the living.

But the secrets on how to write well … they I can share with you.

Oh, you are wondering who I am.

Don’t be embarrassed. In life I wondered the same thing.

As I wrote earlier: I am Roger Zelazny.

I made somewhat of a splash in Science Fiction in the sixties, endured and evolved in the seventies and eighties. I went the way of all flesh mid-way through the nineties in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

And Roland mourned me as a distant older brother gone over the crest of the hill before him, leaving him cold and alone.

Oh, and I inspired him to take up the pen and follow my steps into weaving tales in the genre I call Science Fantasy.

That I sparked the idea in him to be a writer drew me to him.

It was his gentle, quiet, amused nature that has made me stay. He looks on all the awkwardness of life with a sly smile that says, “You expected water to run uphill?”

But now I have an important question for you reading:

What makes one tale live, vibrant and riveting, and another merely flat, lifeless words on paper?

Not that any of us have a sure idea, although Hemingway would glare at me for writing that. But we had a close enough glimpse of the answer to make a living at what we loved to do:

Write.

What is the answer?

A joyous cry: “Come see what I found!”

If you can bring anew the childlike sense of wonder and awe to your readers that the poisons of living have drained from them, you will have a loyal following that will not quit.

What words will do that?

Certainly not the same sing-song repeat and rinse of someone else’s bestseller.
The words must tilt the reader’s expectations on its ear. Did you notice I said reader?

Not readers.

You are talking to only one at the campfire of their imagination and curiosity. If you think of your audience as readers, you will talk AT them not TO them.

The author/reader relationship is intimate : friend to friend. “Look at this, man!”

One friend sharing with another something fantastic and wondrous :

The meaning of life in the skating sparks of the sun along the uneven facets of a piece of rock candy …

or striking fire down the razored spirals of a unicorn’s tusk.

If you are drawn to write, you do not need to be told the basics. You already have absorbed them from the masters :

Stirring plots, memorable characters, and absorbing ideas.

You must tap the humanity of the situations, of the people struggling against the tide of events.

Remember this is the Microwave Culture.

Your prose must be lean and spare, yet sing with the poetry of mystery and suspense. How do you do that?

Mind your surroundings.

Nothing is ever wasted to a real writer. Circumstances suggest. Events coalesce. The story will begin to flow like a shadow along the floor of your unconscious.

Once you have seen their shapes, the stories will exist as ghosts for you until you have pinned them to the paper. Perhaps that is why there are so many ghosts of writers in the Shadowlands.

We made our living from ghosts, so reciprocity demands its due.

Sometimes you will have to post a Help Wanted Ad in your unconscious to apply for positions in the story and events that have called out to you.

Do not worry. Within the hour, your unconscious mind will have them lining up for you to consider.

Read your work aloud.

Hear the clumsy prose misstep that jars your ears? A sentence is too long? Make them two. A word unneeded? Remove it. Sand your prose as a sculptor would his carving.

Give your characters life by giving them a new take on what it means to be human, to be fully alive. Most people you pass on the streets are sleepwalking from long years of debt and unfulfilled passion.

Give them hope that there is more out there, that each corner could reveal the start of an adventure that might shorten their lives but awaken their souls.

Do that and you will become more than a writer. You will become an author.

Want to read more on how to be an author? Buy GHOST WRITERS IN THE SKY:

http://www.amazon.com/GHOST-WRITERS-THE-SKY-ebook/dp/B006Z1MAP6

I have several chapters in it as does the ghost of Hemingway, Twain, Faulkner, even Bruce Lee and Groucho Marx!
***

TO THOSE NEVER TO BE PUBLISHED_ghost of EMILY DICKINSON

*

{"Publication - is the auction of the Mind of Man."
~Emily Dickinson.}

That fabulous scamp of a gentlemen, Samuel Clemens, asked me to write in this "computer newspaper," as he calls it.

The dear somehow knew this date was important to me.

“Success is counted sweetest” was published anonymously in an anthology titled A Masque of Poets on this day in 1878,

the last of the handful of my poems published in my lifetime.

Though I remained firm in my decision that “My Barefoot-Rank is better,” this poem does reflect my continued mixed feelings about publishing:

Success is counted sweetest

By those who ne'er succeed.

To comprehend a nectar Requires sorest need.

Not one of all the purple host

Who took the flag to-day

Can tell the definition, So clear, of victory!

As he, defeated, dying,

On whose forbidden ear

The distant strains of triumph

Burst agonized and clear!

**
I wonder, struggling souls, what would it mean to you if you were never published?

To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie -
True Poems flee.

***
How long would you continue to write should publication elude you? Are the words burning within you to find life on the page?

For me, I never stopped writing :

HOPE is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chilliest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

Will you stop writing if the years pass, leaving you unpublished? Why? And if you would continue, why? This tender spirit would like to know.

Just walk out into the sable night, look up into the listening stars, and whisper your answer to the wayfaring winds. I am a ghost. I shall hear.

{THE LAST SHAMAN is #15 on Amazon's Best Selling Native American Fantasy list.}

*{Daguerreotype of the poet Emily Dickinson, taken circa 1848. (Original version.)

From the Todd-Bingham Picture Collection and Family Papers, Yale University Manuscripts & Archives Digital Images Database,

Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

This image (or other media file) is in the public domain because its copyright has expired.

This applies to Australia, the European Union and those countries with a copyright term of life of the author plus 70 years.}

***

NOW AT #4! Only 4 more days to get it FREE

ONLY 4 DAYS LEFT TO GET YOUR FREE GIFT!

GHOST WRITERS IN THE SKY IS NOW AT

#4 OF AMAZON'S TOP 100 BEST SELLING WRITING SKILLS BOOKS!!!

http://www.amazon.com/GHOST-WRITERS-SKY-ebook/dp/B006Z1MAP6


There are things only the dead know, views only the dead see.

Victor Standish, impudent pup that he is,

asked me to write of them here anyway.

At least in how they shape the art of writing.

What do I know of writing you ask? Each of us is the author of our lives, though many insist upon making them boring, repetitive.

The way of the writer is the way of water :

Most of you restrict yourselves, limit your vision. Be instead water.

You put water in a cup, it becomes the cup;

You put water into a bottle it becomes the bottle;

You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot.

Sometimes it is still like the hush before dawn. Sometimes it is wild like the heart betrayed. But it is always alive to the world around it.

Be water, my friend.

Do not think, feel....it is like pointing your finger towards the moon. Do not concentrate on the finger or you will miss the stars!

The ghost of Thoreau tells me only that day dawns to which we are awake. Water is always awake. But are you?

A child is acutely aware of his expanding world, for it is new, ever-growing, ever fascinating. The way of the writer is to stay that child.

Most of the living become calloused by their flow of experiences, falling into the sleep of habit.

They wrap their personal problems about their eyes so that they walk blindly through all their days, listening only to the soundtrack of their sorrows.

They put on layer upon layer of habits, clothing themselves in restriction until the water of their souls become stagnant like a swamp.

You living become so insulated in this manner that only the knife of tragedy or great joy can stab through to you.

Most of you have stopped being aware sometime in high school. Have you not noticed men whose fashion sense halted in their mid-twenties?

Since most of you are not laying up new stores of awareness and observations each day, you must go back to the same stale, old ones when you were still awake.

No wonder that so many authors write and re-write the sensations of their early years or childhood. Have you not known an author who seems to be able to tell only one story?

No matter the heroine’s name, the snowflakes will still melt on her fluttering eyelashes. The hero will always be strong, silent, misunderstood.

Ah, but the truth is that all of us remember strongly the things we saw through the clear, warm light of childhood. And when we want to bring a scene to life, we return to those sensations that sing to us of life, of being aware.

But if we endlessly return to that same pool, soon our writing grows stale, repetitive, and lifeless.

The ghost of Henry James just strolled by, saying, “Tell them to be one of the people upon whom nothing is lost.”

You cannot do that overnight.

No. Take ten minutes of each day to practice the innocence of the eye,

to ask how a child would see what is around you. Do this in different locales, never the same.

Taste the breeze. Listen to the robin in the tree to your left. Watch the stroll of the ambling dog outside your window, studying where he stops, watching his eyes, looking at his wrinkling nose and shifting ears.

Turn yourself into a stranger in your own life.

What colors are the things around you? Why would someone paint his house moldy green? What colors are the cars that pass you? Did the persons want that color? Why?

Close your eyes. What are the smells? What are the sounds? What could a blind person tell about the world you perceive this way?

Truth has no path. Truth is living and, therefore, changing. Awareness is without choice, without demand, without anxiety.

In that state of mind, there is perception. To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person.

Awareness has no frontier; it is giving of your whole being, without exclusion.

Be awake, my friend. Be a child. Be a writer.
***
SHOULD GHOST RECEIVE 10 REVIEWS (whenever that happens) I WILL DRAW FROM THOSE 10 NAMES FOR A ROBERT DOWNEY, JR. AUTOGRAPH!! How cool is that?)
***

FREE GIFT to usher in March! Laughs included!

WORTH TWICE THE PRICE!

http://www.amazon.com/GHOST-WRITERS-SKY-ebook/dp/B006Z1MAP6

Ah, wait ... I'm giving this away for FREE!?

{for the next 5 days!}

Have you enjoyed the antics of Mark Twain's ghost these past two days?

Well, he's back along with some of his bickering ghostly companions :

Ernest Hemingway. H P Lovecraft. William Faulkner. Raymond Chandler. Bruce Lee.

Bruce Lee? What does he know about how to write? Plenty.

And that's the line I'm sticking with. Have you seen this guy fight?

These and other ghosts like Winston Churchill, Robert E. Howard, Will Rogers, Alfred Hitchcock ...

and many others (the lovely spirit, Marlene Dietrich, included)

will show you ways to improve your writing that worked for them.

C'mon. Download it. It's worth every penny. Mark Twain just muttered I'm overworking that line!

The book is funny. Mark Twain says so.

Would he lie? Ah, don't answer that. It would just depress him, Roland
***

WHAT ALONE CAN MAKE GOOD WRITING_Insecure Writer's post

I am William Faulkner. I am dead. Yet I did not die.

I, like so many who did not believe in an afterlife,

live here in the jazz club, Meilori’s.

Meilori’s :

the center, the focus, the hub; sitting looming in the center of the French Quarter’s circumference like a single cloud in its ring of horizon,

laying its vast shadow to the uttermost rim of horizon; musing, brooding, symbolic and imponderable, tall as clouds, solid as rock,

dominating all: protector of the weak, judge and curb of the passions and lusts, repository and guardian of the aspirations and hopes of the helpless.

Here, I find myself standing outside the window of the storefront of humanity, still observing as a writer but unable to reach out and touch with fingers of new prose.

Except through Roland’s kindness.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained that by now we can almost bear it. Of course there are still problems of the spirit. Yet one question looms above all:

When will I be blown up?

By terrorist plot,

by Nature’s increasingly hostile hand,

or by the cruel strangulation of mishandled economics.

Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing

because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat of wresting something from nothing.

You must learn them again.

You must teach yourself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.

And teaching yourself that,

forget it forever,

leaving no room in your writing for anything but the old truths of the heart,

the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.

Until you do so, you labor under a curse.

You write not of love but of lust,

of defeats in which no one loses anything of value,

of victories without hope and,

worst of all, without pity or compassion. Your griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars.

You write not of the heart but of the sex glands.

I remember that night in Meilori’s when McCord and I talked.

How words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly living goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other.

That sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they have forgotten the words.

Forgotten the words by being too busy living them.

So write those words in your prose.

Write them so that others may prove their truth by living them,

And in so doing, forgetting them as they forget they are breathing.

{To read more from Faulkner, Twain, Hemingway, Hitchcock, even Bruce Lee on writing : http://www.amazon.com/GHOST-WRITERS-SKY-ebook/dp/B006Z1MAP6/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1328048229&sr=1-1 }

***

GHOST WRITERS IN THE SKY

The majority of writing manuals get it all wrong.

Writing well is not a matter of inserting bits of prose into some magic equation.

Most creative writing texts are for most people wastes of time.

Why?

They focus only on the surface techniques of writing, not the root problems of the writer :

the heart, the mind, the soul of the one doing the writing.

The writer cannot seem to get started. Once started, she/he gets lost or loses heart. She writes well sometimes, badly most of the time.

So the root problems are matters of confidence, self-respect, and freedom.

The writer’s muse rattles impotently the bars cemented in her unconscious mind.

And what do all creative writing texts proclaim in their first chapter? Genius cannot be taught. Really? Everybody has a reservoir of it, mostly untapped due to being taught it does not exist at all.

Every nightmare (and even dogs have them) shows the secret reserve of imaginative power contained within the human mind.

The writer needs to know what habits of thought and action impede progress, what unnoticed aspects of living undermine writing well.

There are keys to unlocking the potential within every struggling writer. Those keys were held by the famous writers of the past who managed to write bestsellers in the most challenging circumstances.

Come. The ghosts of those masters are standing upon the last edge of reality. Listen to their fading voices. They wait with the last vestiges of their souls to teach you.

Now, before it is too late. Read GHOST WRITERS IN THE SKY.
***

TO THOSE OF US NEVER TO BE PUBLISHED_EMILY DICKINSON, GHOST, HERE

{"Publication - is the auction of the Mind of Man."
~Emily Dickinson.}

That fabulous scamp of a gentlemen, Samuel Clemens, asked me to write in this "computer newspaper," as he calls it.

The dear somehow knew this date was important to me.

“Success is counted sweetest” was published anonymously in an anthology titled A Masque of Poets on this day in 1878,

the last of the handful of my poems published in my lifetime.

Though I remained firm in my decision that “My Barefoot-Rank is better,” this poem does reflect my continued mixed feelings about publishing:

Success is counted sweetest By those who ne'er succeed. To comprehend a nectar Requires sorest need.

Not one of all the purple host Who took the flag to-day Can tell the definition, So clear, of victory!

As he, defeated, dying,On whose forbidden earThe distant strains of triumphBurst agonized and clear!
**
I wonder, struggling souls, what would it mean to you if you were never published?

To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie -
True Poems flee.***
How long would you continue to write should publication elude you? Are the words burning within you to find life on the page?

For me, I never stopped writing :

HOPE is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chilliest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

Will you stop writing if the years pass, leaving you unpublished? Why? And if you would continue, why? This tender spirit would like to know.

Just walk out into the sable night, look up into the listening stars, and whisper your answer to the wayfaring winds. I am a ghost. I shall hear.
***

SILENTLY WE KNELL IN THE MOUTH OF DEATH

You, and the rest of mankind, are quite sure what is possible and what is impossible.

In the daylight.

When the night descends, the stride of your thoughts is not quite so confident.

Not so Roland.

He is much like an animal. I do not mean that as an insult.

He takes what comes at face value, not forcing it to fit into any preconceived notions Man teaches as Science.

He deals with what comes without protesting that it cannot be, only seeing what is and adapting.

Perhaps that is why we ghosts are drawn to him. In him is that quality that Stubbs expressed in MOBY DICK :

“I know not what all may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing.”

Not that he is overly optimistic about the world around him. For being part Lakota Sioux, he still reads the Bible by his bedside. He often quotes :

“They sleep not, except that they have done mischief;
And their sleep is taken away unless they cause
Some to fall.

For they eat the bread of wickedness
And drink the wine of violence.”

That is Proverbs 4:16-17 for those of you interested in such things.
In life I was not.

I thought the love of God was like the light burning from the stars :

cold and distant.

Now, that I am a ghost …. but no.

There are secrets the dead may not share with the living.

But the secrets on how to write well … they I can share with you.

Oh, you are wondering who I am.

Don’t be embarrassed. In life I wondered the same thing.

I am Roger Zelazny.

I made somewhat of a splash in Science Fiction in the sixties, endured and evolved in the seventies and eighties. I went the way of all flesh mid-way through the nineties in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

And Roland mourned me as a distant older brother gone over the crest of the hill before him, leaving him cold and alone.

Oh, and I inspired him to take up the pen and follow my steps into weaving tales in the genre I call Science Fantasy.

That I sparked the idea in him to be a writer drew me to him.

It was his gentle, quiet, amused nature that has made me stay. He looks on all the awkwardness of life with a sly smile that says, “You expected water to run uphill?”

Another more important question :

What makes one tale live, vibrant and riveting, and another merely flat, lifeless words on paper?

Not that any of us have a sure idea, although Hemingway is glaring at me. But we had a close enough glimpse of the answer to make a living at what we loved to do :

write.

What is the answer?

A joyous cry : “Come see what I found!”

If you can bring anew the childlike sense of wonder and awe to your readers that the poisons of living have drained from them, you will have a loyal following that will not quit.

What words will do that?

Certainly not the same sing-song repeat and rinse of someone else’s bestseller.
The words must tilt the reader’s expectations on its ear. Did you notice I said reader?

Not readers.

You are talking to only one at the campfire of their imagination and curiosity. If you think of your audience as readers, you will talk AT them not TO them.

The author/reader relationship is intimate : friend to friend. “Look at this, man!”

One friend sharing with another something fantastic and wondrous :

The meaning of life in the skating sparks of the sun along the uneven facets of a piece of rock candy …

or striking fire down the razored spirals of a unicorn’s tusk.

If you are drawn to write, you do not need to be told the basics. You already have absorbed them from the masters :

Stirring plots, memorable characters, and absorbing ideas.

You must tap the humanity of the situations, of the people struggling against the tide of events.

Remember this is the Microwave Culture.

Your prose must be lean and spare, yet sing with the poetry of mystery and suspense. How do you do that?

Mind your surroundings.

Nothing is ever wasted to a real writer. Circumstances suggest. Events coalesce. The story will begin to flow like a shadow along the floor of your unconscious.

Once you have seen their shapes, the stories will exist as ghosts for you until you have pinned them to the paper. Perhaps that is why there are so many ghosts of writers in the Shadowlands.

We made our living from ghosts, so reciprocity demands its due.

Sometimes you will have to post a Help Wanted Ad in your unconscious to apply for positions in the story and events that have called out to you.

Do not worry. Within the hour, your unconscious mind will have them lining up for you to consider.

Read your work aloud.

Hear the clumsy prose misstep that jars your ears? A sentence is too long? Make them two. A word unneeded? Remove it. Sand your prose as a sculptor would his carving.

Give your characters life by giving them a new take on what it means to be human, to be fully alive. Most people you pass on the streets are sleepwalking from long years of debt and unfulfilled passion.

Give them hope that there is more out there, that each corner could reveal the start of an adventure that might shorten their lives but awaken their souls.

Do that and you will become more than a writer. You will become an author.
***