THERE IS NO HOPE

You've heard them deep down in your hidden self:

Those words you fear to say aloud ...

There is no hope.

Sometimes it feels as if there isn't any hope, doesn't it?

Lara Schiffbauer today has written a fascinating, thought-provoking post:
http://motivationforcreation.blogspot.com/


Wendy Tyler Ryan once had an intriguing post http://waitingforpublication.blogspot.com/2010/11/i-dont-think-they-know.html

Donna Hole had another one some time back (and no, not just because she mentioned me ... well, maybe a little.)http://donnahole.blogspot.com/2010/11/nano-day-2-browsing-blog-roll.html 

There is no hope ... if you would succeed.  There is only doing.  And we must do to the best of our ability, refusing to give up when all seems lost.

Still, it does seem as if the publishing industry doesn't have any room for readers or writers interested in what the over-thirty's dream, yearn, or struggle for.

Take Edward the sparkly 200 year old vampire. What does he see in a shallow, angst-filled, self-absorbed teenager? Isn't he really just a young looking pedophile?

Maxwell Perkins, editor of Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, would have tossed Stephanie Meyers' work in the reject pile with a disgusted sigh.

But it is a different market:

A youth-oriented, visual, me-generation market.

Everyone get up, look up at the night with its fading moon, and say it:

 CRAP!

All right, now that we have it out of our systems, what can we do?

And no, there are no sure keys to success.  If there were, I would have no time to write this blog, being too busy writing best-sellers! :-)

Of course there is a sure path to failure: give up.

Yet, there are several approaches that may work:

1.) We use both a young protagonist and a mature mentor.

Think AUNTIE MAME, THE SWORD IN THE STONE, the first STAR WARS.

I chose this route with my THE LEGEND OF VICTOR STANDISH.

2.) Focus on an older protagonist with a youngster needing protection.

 Think THE ROAD, the new movie THE WARRIOR'S WAY, LONE WOLF AND CUB, and the Tom Hanks' movie, THE ROAD TO PERDITION.

3.) Use an intelligent adult for your protagonist and place him/her in a situation that chills the blood or staggers the imagination.

As in these two set-ups :

A) Your MC goes into a confessional, only to hear the priest babble about becoming Other, then the priest shoots himself.

Your MC throws the door of the confessional open only to see the priest is half-circuitry, melded into the very metal of the small room. One by one, all those your MC knows become Other in some strange way or other.

B) You wake up one morning, go to work, only to find your co-workers have faded like a photo left out too long in the sun. Day by day they fade more and more until they are all black and white, leaving you in a world full of color.

Worse, they become more and more dead-faced and robot-like until you catch them whispering ominously behind your back in a strange buzzing not unlike worker bees.


There is hope, fellow strugglers. THE LORD OF THE RINGS caught the hearts and minds of high schoolers and college-aged with hobbits, old wizards, dwarfs, elves, and a long-lived human named Aragon.

Yet, LOTR would have never been ...

had not the young son of the publisher liked the submitted manuscript of THE HOBBIT his publisher father gave him to read.

How many publishers or agents do that today with their children do you think?  Lightning needs to strike.  All we can do is present our best, while holding up a lightning rod.

How can you bring hope to your novel?

Make the magic real. Even if your protagonist is older, keep a child-like sense of wonder and curiosity to his/her world.

And now, a little practical nuts-n-bolts advice that was sparked by Donna's post :

If you find yourself feeling hopeless with the words dammed up inside your wheel-spinning mind, it is probably caused by one of five things :

1) Overwork -
Stop writing for a few days. When you're ready to start singing tales into the night once more, you will know when the keyboard stops being forboding and starts to become a delightful toy again.

2) Boredom -
Put your novel down no matter how close you are to the finish line. Start that new idea that has been buzzing around in the back of your mind. Trust me. If your novel has begun to bore you, it will certainly bore the agent to whom you submit.

3) Self-Doubt -
Starting something new will work here as well. The joy of the new idea will spark your love of writing which led you into this profession in the first place. Then, read the first few new pages and see if you can find echoes of your old work in them.

After a few days of your new project, go back to where you were in your old novel. Read the five pages prior to your stop-point. Then, write on the novel again. It will be reborn. Trust me.

4) Financial Worries -
Tough one. No easy remedy here. You must solve them or lighten them somehow.

If it means stopping the writing to take a second job, then that is what you must do. Family comes first. Dreams second. Those months spent apart from your keyboard will sow your unconscious mind with new ideas.

5) Emotional Problems -
If charged relationships are shortcircuiting your muse, you must find a safe, neutral way to sit down with your loved one and talk through what is eating away at you.

It will clear the air between the two of you or bring a much-needed lance to a painful boil. Have a rear-exit stragedy already in place just in case things should go south. No relationship or person is or can be perfect. Look at areas where you can grow.

In the end, the only person you can change is yourself. Sometimes retreat is better than painful staying in an unhealthy situation or relationship.

There is hope ... for your writing ... for your life -- if only you do not give up on yourself and your own worth.
***

THE GOOD THING ABOUT SUICIDE

Ghost of Hemingway here.

I noticed today as I visited various of your computer journals

that many of you are uniting for a cause:

OUT OF THE DARKNESS

Suicide Prevention and Awareness -

http://justine-dell.blogspot.com/p/out-of-darkness-suicide-prevention.html

I committed suicide at the age of sixty-one.

If you are considering suicide ...

PAUSE.

REFLECT.

RECONSIDER.

Most gut-wrenching problems you encounter will thankfully be short-term ...

although the darkness they give birth to seems to threaten to last forever.

Do not choose a solution for them that is long term and permanent.

The good thing about suicide is that you can always do it tomorrow.

The overlooked thing about suicide is that it is infectious.

There have been five suicides in the Hemingway family over four generations --

my father, Clarence;

my siblings Ursula, Leicester ... myself;

saddest of all, my granddaughter Margaux.

The generation skipped was not. Not really:

My youngest son, Gregory, died in 2001 as a transsexual named Gloria, of causes that make a mockery of the term "natural."

I recall the time that I, in one of my arm-around-shoulder moods,

congratulated him for his fine attempt at a short story, which Greg had stolen word for word from Turgenev --

one of the masters I prided myself on knowing.

Yes, I knew he had done it.

But I was trying to ... to build a bridge I had torn down with my own actions and words.

One moment cast a shadow, one long enough for Greg to write that he was glad that I was dead so "I couldn't disappoint Papa any more."

The moment came on Greg's last visit just after the death of Greg's mother, Pauline.

She died suddenly, about the time Greg had gotten into trouble for taking drugs. I was raw with the loss.

His visit to my home in Cuba went well for a time only because I kept biting my tongue.

Greg confided his plans for medical school. If only he had kept his mouth shut after that, but no, he always had to speak that one word too many.

He spoke of his drug incident.

"It wasn't so bad, really, Papa," he said.

"No? Well, it killed Mother," I said.
He left. I never saw him again.

Anger. Depression.

Those are the monsters you have to kill, not some mindless elephant or lion.

I remember those heads of tigers and lions I kept on my wall. I can still see in my mind the Marlins mounted next to them.

Why? I told reporters because they reminded me of their fierce beauty.

A lie. I thought my mother beautiful.

I kept photographs of her.

I felt a man when I looked at the evidence of my skill, my bravery.

Bravery?

If they held rifles that could shoot back, then I would have been brave.

Tame the anger, the depression in your own soul.

You will bag the biggest, deadliest game in the world.

That is how you prove your worth ...

and save those around you from the poison you would otherwise feed into their souls.

{The photo of Hemingway is in the public domain because it was published in the United States between 1923 and 1963 and although there may or may not have been a copyright notice, the copyright was not renewed.}

I QUIT

Actually, I have already quit.

Quit what?

I have quit what so many other authors have ...

Seeking traditional publication.

Nathan Bransford once did an excellent post :
http://blog.nathanbransford.com/2011/10/do-you-plan-to-bypass-traditional.html

{Yes, I have submitted to Harper Voyager, but they will pick only 12 from the hundreds of thousands of entries.  The odds are better with the Powerball.}

Let's face it : a lot of us are questioning the wisdom of querying agents and trying for traditional publication at all,

whether because of the length of time it takes,

the fear of losing control,

e-book royalties, and many other factors.

1.) Length of time it takes :

A year? Two? John Locke has a point:

 

When the product you have is hot, two years to get a second book into the reader's hands is too long for the interest not to have cooled down to an Ice Age.

A salesman with a hot idea and no merchandise to sell is in agony. With ePublishing, you can have a backlist of seven books for readers to gobble up in the time it takes a SECOND PRINT BOOK TO COME OUT!

2.) Control :

Let's be real. What prompts you to pick up a book? Usually the title at first. The Publisher can stomp on your beloved, carefully chosen title to shove in theirs.

Case in point:

F. Paul Wilson wrote a book that sold well, THE KEEP. He wrote another with the title of the creature who was the adversary in it. The Publisher shelved that title and named it THE TOMB.

Problem? There's no tomb in THE TOMB! Wilson pointed that out and was told that by the time the reader realized that, he would have bought the book! Aaaaargh!

3.) The cover art:

 

Again control. You're a newbie. You get the bottom of the barrel in artwork. But with ePublishing, you choose the artist and the artwork. The cover to the first CONAN THE BARBARIAN by Frank Frazetta was the first paperback to sell a million copies in weeks.

Why? That stunning cover.

4.) eBook royalties and shelf life.

You sell your eBook for 99 cents, you get back 35 cents ... 60 days later WITH NO AGENT CUTTING OUT HER 15%.

You sell your eBook for 2.99, you get back 70%.

Yes, you pay for the artwork, the formatting, and the marketing. But do you believe in yourself or don't you?

Shelf Life:

The shelf life of a print book is like unto that of a gnat these days. Your eBook? It's there for as long as you want it.

Distribution:

I've sold books to readers in Germany, France, England, Australia, New Zealand, India, and of course, the USA. You won't get that kind of worldwide distribution for a newbie print book.

5.) Your book is yours:

Neil Gaiman wrote BOOKS OF MAGIC for DC COMICS before HARRY POTTER -- the two main characters are so similar at the start that it is striking. Why no lawsuits? WARNER BROTHERS owned DC COMICS and THE MOVIE RIGHTS TO HARRY POTTER.

Also DC comics owned the characters of BOOKS OF MAGIC.

YOU WILL OWN THE CHARACTERS OF YOUR BOOK.

You may never sell the movie rights to them, but if you do, the money will come to you alone and not the publisher, agent, etc.

Like most print authors, you will probably never get to make a living off of your novels. But you will have the control and freedom to chart the seas as you choose.

Yes, you will have to hustle to get your book out there. But being an author is a grand, epic adventure, testing your wit, resolve, and passion. Remember ...

Impossible just give birth to legends!

 

{Image courtesy of the talented Leonora Roy}

YOU MEAN I GET A MENAGE A TROIS FOR MY BIRTHDAY?

{Time for another Friday Romantic Challenge:
http://romanticfridaywriters.blogspot.com/ }

YOU MEAN I GET A MENAGE A TROIS FOR MY BIRHTHDAY?

{ From SLAYBELLES IN THE NIGHT hopefully out by Christmas }:

 

 {Gorgeous art by the genius of Leonora Roy}

Mother told me that I was born the very instant the old year died and the New Year began. I figure the Angel of Death should know.

I lay on my bed in agony. What part of my body that wasn't cut, was bruised, or throbbing -- or all three. A sharp pain stabbed into my chest as I turned.

"Happy Birthday to me," I groaned.

I heard another groan from the mirror.

"Elu, are you all right?"

His gruff voice rumbled from the mirror, "Define 'all right'."

I swayed to the side of the bed and looked into the mirror. Ouch. His face looked like raw hamburger meat.

He grunted, "Don't worry, Elu. I am Victor Standish, and I always have a plan. Some plan! You nearly got us killed!"

I made a face. "Well, we got the bad guys killed."

A snowball hit me in the face from the mirror. "There is the icing to your birthday cake, Standish."

I wiped the snow from my face, seeing the mirror had gone black. "At least, you're all rig...."

Another snowball smacked me in the face. "I am not all right! Now, go downstairs and clean up the mess you made."

I swayed to my feet. "Aw, man, there's body parts all over the place."

Elu chuckled, "You cannot say Dyami does not know how to throw a New Year's Eve party."

"Body parts are not my idea of the perfect Birthday present." The back of my head got smacked with another snowball.

I smiled bitter. Snowballs were cheap presents, but at least they were handmade.

I limped down the hallway with scattered monster parts all over the carpet. I made it to the head of the stairs.

Whoa.

Meilori's was a burning battle-zone below. Marshal Hickok was dosing what I considered my birthday candles on the steps.

He glared at me, and I sighed, "Don't tell me you're holding a grudg ----"

He dosed me with the fire extinguisher. "Go downstairs and start cleaning up, Birthday Boy."

I shook my head. Never, ever, had I been thrown a birthday party.

I thought Alice might --- but she had gotten mad over something I had whispered to Becky in her revealing Steam Punk outfit. So there went my party.

I started to sway on my feet. I had taken a few good hits last night. More than a few actually. The pain spread from my chest and down my left arm.

I was so hot suddenly.  Clammy sweat beaded my body.  I couldn't catch a breath.

I smiled crooked. "Alice will be so mad. She missed me dropping dead like she ask ...."

Someone cut the strings holding me up.  I fell.

Out of the growing darkness, I heard Alice scream, "No!!"

Suddenly, my head was cradled in her soft lap. My head was resting on her bare legs. Finally, a good Birthday present.

My head lolled to the left. Cute knees in fishnet stockings. Becky? I flicked my eyes to the front of me. Glasses in her Maid Marion outfit.

I glanced up at Alice. "Y-You mean I get a menage a trois for my birthday?"

My head was jerked and thumped off her pretty legs. "That for your present!"

I weakly raised my right hand. "Dying here. Doesn't that buy me a ---"

Alice threw my right hand to the smoldering carpet. And just like that, an icepick stabbed into my chest and everything went black.

I heard Becky snap, "Oh, perfect, freak. The last thing he'll remember is your throwing his hand down."

Alice grumbled, "Or perhaps it will be your wanton knees in his face!!"

Women! I had died. And they still made it all about them.

Glasses sobbed, "He never even saw the surprise Birthday Party we had prepared."

I floated in an ink sea for long moments.

I shook my head, and suddenly became scared that I had a head at all to shake in the darkness. There was a bright light right in front of me. I squinted and smiled.

A long marble table with the biggest Birthday cake I had ever seen. And standing by the table was Mother ... the Angel of Death.

"You remembered, Mother."

Black tears gleamed in her eyes to drift up from her lids in tiny swirls of dark snowflakes. "I always remembered, Victor."

"Now, back with you!" she said.

"I'm not dead?"

Mother smiled coldly. "You die when I say you die, Victor. Besides, it will be so much fun to see you try to extradite yourself from the hole your brash tongue has dug for yourself."

Her black robe billowed as she gracefully gestured. Suddenly, I was back. Three pairs of pretty knees. Now, THIS was a Birthday present.

Alice hugged my head against the torn satin that barely covered her breasts. I hadn't died. But I was certainly in Heaven.

"Alice, you sure about that menage a trois?"

She threw my head down to the floor. "Oh, Victor! I should have known you were faking."

I staggered to my feet as the three of them looked at me like the Gorgon Sisters.

"Whoa. My mother WAS waiting for me. She just sent me back to say ...."

The three of them wailed and clung to me like a life saver in a rough sea.

Becky husked, "We will not let you say good-bye!"

Glasses hugged me tight. "You're Victor Standish. You can't die."

Alice embraced me with her icy arms. "You are my Victor. I will never let you say good-bye. Never!"

I made a sheepish face. "Ah, Mother just wanted me to say 'I'm sorry."

All three pairs of arms popped off me like I had been hot brass.

Alice glared at me. "So much for my special Birthday present for you!"

Becky sizzled a look at me. "And mine!"

Glasses just giggled, running off with Becky. "Only you, Victor. Only you."

Captain Sam loped up with a plate of birthday cake.

He grinned like a wolf. "Devil's Food Cake, son. Seemed to fit."

I gobbled my very first slice of Birthday cake. "When you're right, Captain Sam, you're right."
***
What William Jospeh played for Victor's birthday (remember he is a gypsy) :

BRUCE LEE, GHOST_THE WAY OF THE WRITER

 

 

 

{Cover of MAIJA'S REVENGE courtesy of the genius of Leonora Roy}

 

There are things only the dead know, vistas 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 musak 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.
***
Don't forget to join Alex Cavanaugh's INSECURE WRITERS SUPPORT GROUP: http://alexjcavanaugh.blogspot.com/2012/10/insecure-writers-support-group-ninja.html 

THE SCRATCH OF THE CLAW_INSECURE WRITERS' SUPPORT

*

How do you write?

Do you write as if your novel were a pressurized airplane cabin?

Are your characters insulated from the truth of their environment?

Is your locale as flat as a cardboard movie backdrop?

Are there smells to your surroundings? Does the soft breeze make an airy stew of their aromas?

Or do you drag your poor reader down sterile, silent streets?

What are the prevailing winds of mindset, manners, and economic demands of your setting?

Does your main character sail against them? Or does he/she flounder in their wake?

Or does he, puppet-like, go through lifeless motions, tugged by your whims and not by motivations relate-able to your readers?

And what about you as a writer?

Do you persist? Or do you stall out when the words become lost in the mist.

Persistence. It is what separates those just playing from those dedicated to the dream.

When the writing is sluggish that is when it is most important to bull through to the end. Writing is like life in that.

Winners don't stop when they meet resistance. Weight resistance builds muscle. Blank-out resistance builds fine prose.

Persistence is the heart. The story is the soul.

For luck, Ernest Hemingway used to carry a rabbit's foot in his right pocket. The fur had long since been worn off. The bones and sinews were polished by wear.

The claws scratched in the lining of his pocket,

and by that sting he knew his luck was still there.

Why was that?

When you feel the scratch of life against you, you know that your luck as a writer is still at your back. How is that?

The sting of life makes you aware :

of your own humanity,

of others' failings and strengths,

of the precious fragility of life.

And that awareness gives your pen the gift of perception, depth, and heart.

What did Ernest put in his journal?

"Travel and writing broaden your ass, if not your mind, so I try to write standing up."
***

{Col. Charles T. Lanham and Ernest Hemingway in Germany 1944.

This image is a work of a U.S. Army soldier or employee, taken or made during the course of the person's official duties. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the image is in the public domain.}

***

DOES GOING TO HARPER VOYAGER MAKE SENSE?

 Harper Voyager is accepting submissions:

When to submit:
October 1 through October 14th

Where to submit:
www.harpervoyagersubmissions.com

What sort of submissions:

          "We’re seeking all kinds of adult and young adult speculative fiction for digital publication, 

but particularly epic fantasy, science fiction, urban fantasy, horror, dystopia and supernatural. 

For more idea of the type of books we love to read and publish, check out our authors and their titles at www.harpervoyagerbooks.com."

Harper Voyager plans to release one book a month.  If accepted, how long before they get to yours?

Initially the books will be published as ebooks but if one does well, a print copy will be issued.

But does it makes sense to submit to Harper Voyager?

The playing field in the digital world is pretty level for traditional and self.

I. We're going to be trading a 70% royalty for 17.5% royalty.

  (From a post by Michael Sullivan, who has been both traditionally and self published http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=254364&page=2 ):

Signing a "digital only" with a big six means you get 17.5% of list rather than 70% of list.

 And books priced at $6.99 - $9.99 will sell fewer copies than those priced at $2.99 - $4.99.

*In a "full publishing deal" you also get print sales and that helps to offset the difference income but Haper is offering only digital.

*So what do you get for the difference in money (no advance royalty):

Cover design: which can be purchased for $150 - $350 (Of course sometimes for much more if you do not research)
• Editing: which can be sub-contracted to a freelancer for $350 - $1,000
• Their name on the title - yes this is worth something.
• Loss of control over key factors like pricing and categorization

And self are selling comparably (in numbers) to traditional in this space.

50% of the Amazon Epic Fantasy list is self-published, the other 50% is traditional.

II. On the other hand:

Even if they decide not to publish a print version, the fact that an unpublished writer would have a legit publishing credit works in their favor, over a self published credit.

III. Consider if you are selected...

take a minute to consider that you have a "stamp of approval' indicating that a major publisher finds value in your work. You should realize that they are not the only option.

Try to balance the "excitement" of someone providing validation for years of work with the "business sense" to make sure you are maximizing your income.

You are about to cross a threshold to earning from your writing - and as such you need to be aware of the various alternatives.

IV. What do you think?
{THREE SPIRIT KNIGHT cover courtesy of the talented Leonora Roy}