NEW WORLD, OLD DREAMS, SAME HURTS

I read an intriguing post by John Ling:
http://johnlingblog.wordpress.com/

He recounts where he was in his writing dream in 2001:

The path to publishing a novel was strictly linear:

you had to secure a literary agent,

who would then secure you a publisher,

and within 12 to 18 months, your novel would be manufactured, distributed and appear in bookstores.

Point A to Point Z.

No exceptions.

He chased the dream for over ten years, gaining rejections and bruised self-worth issues.

He began to understand the way the game was played:

if an editor gave the green light to a manuscript,

shepherded it through publication and it failed to sell adequately,

it was his or her head on the chopping block.

So it became easier to say no rather than say yes.

Corporate interests, no literary love, prevailed.

He registered a company called Kia Kaha Press,

and he self-published his novel, The Blasphemer, on Amazon.

And in just a month, it rocketed to the top of the bestseller charts.

How many of us have the money, time, or know-how to start our own publishing company?

Kindle Direct Publishing allows us to self-publish, but we languish in the dark along with the unseen mushrooms of thousands of other dreamers.

So how do we draw lightning to our novels? What is the magic lightning rod?

Image courtesy of the fabulous Leonora Roy

WILLIAM FAULKNER'S GHOST_WHERE WE RUN INTO TROUBLE

{"Read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it.

Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master.

Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window and start again wiser."

-William Faulkner.}


William Faulkner, ghost, here :

Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing :

A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station.

And to work well you must write with the embers of truth stinging your eyes.

You can have 13 people looking at a black bird and none of them will get it right. No one individual can look at truth.

Even simple truth. Look deep enough, and the simplicity disappears in the murky depths.

Truth blinds you. It is too much for one set of perceptions to take in. To a man with rose-tinted glasses, the whole world is rose.

And so it is with the writer looking at Man.

We call ourselves Homo Sapien, the reasoning animal. But Man is not made of reason.

A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired, but then time is its own misfortune as well.


And so all human behavior is unpredictable. Considering Man's fragility and the ramshackle universe he functions in, how could it be otherwise?

So how does that affect you as a writer?

1) The writer must not set himself up as judge :

He must focus on action, the character's behavior. Maybe your protagonist, like so many people, has no concept of morality,

only an integrity to hold always to what he believes to be facts and truths of the human condition.

2) The character does what his nature dictates.

He acts not as the writer would, not as a man should do, but what he will do -- maybe what he can't help but do. Which leads me to my greatest fear :

3) I fear that Man is losing his individualism, his sense of self, in doing what the herd does in order to stay safe.

Which is why I do not belong to anything besides the Human Race, and I try to be a first rate member of that.

4) You are first rate as a human being and a writer if :

you do the best you can with what talents you have to make something positive that wasn't there yesterday.

How do you do that you ask :

The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones. And he makes his home of the stones of his efforts.

How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home until I realized that home to a writer is where his mind, his heart is.

5) Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be. Strive to thrive where you are. "How?" you ask again. And I will tell you :

You cannot swim for new horizons until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything good.

You have to have courage. Courage is not so hard to have in writing if you remember that :

All of us have failed to match our dream of perfection.

6) I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible. If I could write all my work again, I'm convinced I could do it better.

This is the healthiest condition for an artist. That's why he keeps working, trying again: he believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off.

Of course he won't. Which leads us to the next point.

7) The phenomenon of writing is its hermaphroditism:

the principles of victory and of defeat inhabit the same body

and the necessary opponent, the blank page, is merely the bed he self-exhausts on.

8) You can learn writing, but you cannot teach it. A paradox but true despite that.

And what have I learned from my novels?

I learned how to approach language, words:

not with seriousness so much as an essayist does,

but with a kind of alert respect, as you approach dynamite;

even with joy, as you approach women: perhaps with the same secretly unscrupulous intentions.

Are you a writer? Really? Then, what are you doing about it? Go, write. And remember :

Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely.

And that's why a dream is not a very safe thing to be near...

I know; I had one once.

It's like a loaded pistol with a hair trigger: if it stays alive long enough,

somebody is going to be hurt. But if it's a good dream, it's worth it.
***
A little humor icing on this literary cake :



*** ONLY 5 DAYS LEFT TO WIN A FREE STEPHEN KING AUTOGRAPH!!

THE WORLD BREAKS EVERYONE

I felt a presence.

My heavy eyes pried themselves open. I heard a deep rumbling voice.

"The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are stronger at the broken places."

I looked to the ghost table and chair beside my bed. I sighed. Gypsy was having another midnight visitor over.

Ernest Hemingway.

He was chuckling as he held one end of a corn cob so Gypsy could nibble the other end. He looked over to me. He shook his head.

"I've seen rocks that were lighter sleepers than you, kid."

He tapped my open laptop on his ghost table. "I've been reading your FRENCH QUARTER NOCTURNE. It's good. What to know how I know it is?"

"Of course, sir."

"All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened. I believe your McCord. In fact, I plan to go to New Orleans after this visit and see if I can't find Meilori's."

"Tell Sam I sent you."

"You're a hoot, kid."

"I'm definitely something," I half-yawned and winced at the pain of my mangled finger when I covered my mouth.

"Forget your personal pain, kid. We are all damned from the start, and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get damned hurt, use it --
don't cheat with it."


"I try my best, sir."


"It shows in your writing, kid."


His eyes seemed to sink deep into his face, and he laid the corn cob down. "Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another."

Gypsy cocked her head, then rubbed it against the big chest in front of her. Hemingway absently stroked behind her ears. His face became lost amidst inner shadows.

"I didn't come here for Gypsy ... for you ... not even for me."

He paused for me to ask, "Who did you come for, sir?"

"I came for her."

"Her?"

"Marlene," he said, whispering the name as if it were a benediction.

"I met her while sailing across the Atlantic on the Ile de France in 1934."

He smiled as if his lips were an open wound. "I called her 'Kraut,' and she called me ... what else? Papa."

The smile died an ugly death. "For a dime movie admission, she could break any man's heart. She could have broken mine for a nickel ... and I would have brought the nickel."

His smile became real as he looked at me. "She's been feeling forgotten, Roland. But you changed all that with your posts."

He looked off into the dark of distant days. "Marlene should know better. Even should the day come when her films are forgotten, she herself will not be."

His eyes gleamed with pride and love. "Her courageous defiance of the Nazi leadership of her own homeland, her beloved 'heimat,' and her calm dismissal of the death sentence on her head while she performed for the U.S. troops on the front lines ...

it all set a standard for principle and patriotism that still inspires today."

"It inspires me, sir."

He nodded that great head of his. "And that means more than even I can say."

Hemingway slowly stoked Gypsy's purring head. "The most important work she ever did in her eyes was what she did for the G.I.'s those three years."

His glittering eyes held mine. "Those years were her passion. She did it for herself. It was personal, not the celebrated Hollywood passion created to sell tickets and to bolster the Dietrich image."

He smiled a sad, wistful smile. "She was a proud German, and she fought for her homeland the only way she knew how."

His smile twisted into something painful to see. "And now, she feels as if her finest hour has been forgotten, lost in the dying of decades."

He tapped my laptop. "Until you. You put spring back into her step. And for that, Roland, I'm going to teach you how to write."

"What? Now?"

He waved a lazy hand. "Don't worry, Roland. This is me. I won't steal much of your precious sleep time. It's a short lesson. One sentence actually."

"One sentence?"

"Yes, as a writer ... to win you have to lose."

"Lose?"

He nodded, extending his forefinger. "One : lose long sentences. The reader gets lost in the tangle of adverbs. Say more by writing less."

Hemingway put out a second finger. "Two : lose long first paragraphs. A block of prose dulls the eyes of the reader. I was challenged once by a critic too dumb to know better to tell a good story in one paragraph. I did it in one sentence."

He drummed his fingers on the desk. ""For sale : baby shoes, never used."

"Wow. That really says it all."

"Shut him up fast enough. Not that I know everything about writing. Writing is something that you can never do as well as it can be done. It is a perpetual challenge and it is more difficult than anything else that I have ever done.”

Hemingway thoughtfully stroked his moustache. “You see I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across, not just to depict life, or criticize it, but to actually make it alive.”

He shook his head angrily. “Charlie’s (Scribner’s) ridiculing of my daily word count was because he did not understand me or writing well nor could know how happy one felt to have put down properly 422 words as you wanted them to be."

Hemingway's lined face beamed. "And days of 1200 or 2700 were something that made you happier than you could believe. Since I found that 400 to 600 well done was a pace I could hold much better was always happy with that number. But if I only had 320 I felt good.”

He blinked for a moment. "Where was I anyway, Roland? Oh, I remember."

He put out three fingers. "Three : lose the stale prose and insert the fresh. Motion doesn't mean action. Be vigorous in your life, in your prose."

I said, "Like instead of 'he pushed the boulder up the hill' use 'he sweated the boulder to the top.'"

He grunted. "Good but no cigar."

"I couldn't smoke ghost cigars anyway."

"You have spirit, kid. Show any more like that, and you may just end up one."

I have never gotten into trouble by something I didn't say ... so I said nothing.

Hemingway snapped out a fourth finger. "Four : Lose the negative. Write what something is ... not what something isn't. Keep in mind, Roland, the reader will mentally hold onto the first image you give him."

He straightened in his chair. "Using 'painless' still inserts the thought of pain into your reader's mind. 'Inexpensive' is out. 'Economical' is in. 'Error-free' is in leper robes. 'Perfect' is wearing a tux."

He held out an open palm. "Five : Lose the shit."

Hemingway laughed in a deep rumble that merged with the thunder overhead. "I told Fitz ...."

"Who?"

"F. Scott Fitzgerald, kid. And yes, Zelda was just as beautiful and loony as you think. But I told Fitz that for every page of masterpiece I wrote, I wrote 99 of pure shit."

He pounded his open palm on the ghost desk. "So, Roland, try to put the shit in the wastebasket."

Hemingway hooked a thumb with his other forefinger. "And lastly, lose the copy. Keep the original."

"Ah, meaning?"

"Meaning, Roland, do what you've already been doing. Sure you're impressed with Zelazny, Chandler, Simak, and me. But you write in your own style ... influenced by us, sure, but not mirror-images of us."

Hemingway blew out his cheeks. "You'll always be just a second-class 'them.' But you have the makings to be a first-class you."

He rubbed his bearded chin meditatively. "And there's your lesson, Roland."

"Thanks, Mr. Hemingway."

"Didn't do it for you, kid. I did it for Marlene."

Once again the name was spoken softly like a sad blessing. Hemingway disappeared into the darkness before the sound of it was gone.
****************

CASTING DREAMS INTO THE DARKNESS

Casting dreams into the darkness.

That's what you do when you send out queries to agents or to publishers. Writing a short note in a bottle and tossing it out onto the horizon-to-horizon waves. Will it succeed it getting you off the deserted island of unpublished status?

The million dollar question.

{Leonardo da Vinci scribbled in his many notebooks never knowing if all his work would ever be appreciated.}

Like any intelligent person, I read what each individual agent writes she would prefer -- only to read in another article how she just had to sign this debut author. One who broke all the query rules and wrote such a refreshingly different query, breaking away from the crowd who slavishly submitted the same old, same old {in other words : followed her submission guidelines.}

Sometimes I can feel a nosebleed coming on.

I have been following the conventional wisdom lately and feeling a lot like Snoopy riddled by the Red Baron. Once I emailed a query early in the morning to get the rejection in the late afternoon of the same day.

All right. Obviously, it was course correction time. I looked back at the four queries that got 4 agents to ask to see more. They had what I call the 4 C's : interesting Character, primal Crisis, enough of the plot to make the agent Curious, and most important, they were all Concise ... ie. short as to be kind to a weary agent's eyes and frayed patience.

I decided to go with what had won me the attention of four agents and write a query that used the 4 C's, trying to improve upon the theme. And this is what I wrote and promptly sent off to another agent {who did not reject me the same day or the day after.}

Dear Ms. _________ :

Hurricane Katrina has mortally wounded New Orleans. There is no help in sight. Federal agencies are grid-locked. State officials are befuddled and ineffectual. The police are undermanned with little amunition and no sure means of communication.

And along every dark, flooded street ... the dead have started to rise.

Samuel McCord, legendary French Quarter jazz club owner, decides he has lost enough : his family, his wife, and his humanity. He will not lose his adopted city -- not to inept, corrupt politicians, not to the rising dead in the shadows, nor to a life-long enemy whose power is causing the dead to return and the creatures of the night to close in around a helpless New Orleans.

And so begins the 90,000 word urban fantasy, FRENCH QUARTER NOCTURNE. I'm including the first three pages of my novel to give you a feel for my writing voice :

It rained lies and death today.

I stood knee-deep in water outside my French Quarter jazz club, Meilori’s. My soul stretched tight across my chest. Everything I saw and heard in the shadows spoke to me ... in threats. The sudden, short explosion of an unseen gun. A quick, sharp scream in the distance. And the blue spurt of a lighted match at the far end of the street. My city bled slowly in the ripples of the flooded streets.

I leaned back against the door to my club as if for reassurance that something solid still remained to me. That it had survived Katrina was a mixed blessing. It was all that was left to me of my wife. Staying here was both penance and purgatory. Meilori’s was the kind of place in which almost anything was likely to happen and in which almost everything had. Inside, fifty-one survivors of Katrina were huddled in shivering, too quiet clusters. Words have no meaning when a city dies. Nothing much does.

Somewhere distant in the hot, red darkness a shot rang out. Another called out to it like a wolf. But it came from a different direction. I smiled bitter. The predators were crawling out of their boarded shelters. They knew the restraint of law had died this day. Soon they would come for me.

You see, I had enemies in the night. And not all of them were human.

But what was human? Science kept telling us that human was only another kind of animal. We certainly acted it.

The lights were out all over New Orleans. And the real face of Man was showing. I knew what so many were thinking : ‘Now, I can do what I’ve always wanted. No one to see me. No one to stop me. No one to make me pay.’

“There’s me,” I whispered to the approaching darkness. “And soon there’ll be hell to pay.”

The water lapped at my knees, and I shook my head. Hell had already come collecting. But it seemed Hell was never satisfied. Soon it would demand more.

I had no words. An entire life’s outrage at lying politicians tried to crowd itself into this one moment. It wouldn't fit. In fact, I felt like I was about to explode. My anger was a wild beast inside my heart. But the outrage was slowly pushed into the background by the numbed shock of the sight before me.
My city shouldn't be drowning in front of me. And yet, here it was doing just that. I tried to remember what these streets had looked like dry and filled with laughing tourists. I couldn't. My mind felt broken.

The love that had kept me whole in its invisible sheath was gone. Gone. And what was left worth having? There had to be something better than cursing the darkness. But for the life of me I couldn’t think of it. All I could do was mourn.

I thought about the words Wilde had me carve on his false tombstone.

“Alien tears will fill for him

Pity’s long-broken urn,

For his mourners will be outcast men,

And outcasts always mourn.”

I looked all around. Yes, those words fit the desolation I saw. Hell, they fit the desolation inside me. The emptiness that had been born seven years ago when Meilori, my wife, could no longer stand the sight of me and had stormed away into the night.

Now, another lady named Katrina had come storming back. And she didn't seem to like me any more than had Meilori. I shook my head. That particular line stretched around the block.

The light was quickly fading. A last crimson glory filled the French Quarter. Its glow lay on the flooded streets like a crown of blood. A whisper of ice murmured that I was watching more than the death of the day. I was watching the death of a city, of a people’s hopes and dreams. Sadly, it wouldn’t be the first time. And like the people now inside my club, they had looked to me for answers and meaning then, too.

My jaw firmed. It would be different this time. I heard Meilori’s mocking laughter in my mind.

Damn it. It would be different. I would be different.

The laughter continued.

********************************************


To get a better idea of my writing voice, you may want to check out my blog, WRITING IN THE CROSSHAIRS, www.rolandyeomans.blogspot.com .

I am a former high school teacher, family counselor, and now a blood courier. The last a result of being evacuated from Lake Charles due to Hurricane Rita and having to support myself any way I could. I found I liked the job and the people with whom I worked. I stayed.

Thank you for taking the time to read my query. I would be happy to send you sample chapters or the full manuscript. I hope that you find some gem in the flood of submissions that pour your way. May your Spring hold only happy surprises with some relief for punished eyes and swamped workloads.

Roland D. Yeomans M.A.
*************************************
I included the first three pages as that was part of her submission guidelines. If no pages had been requested, I would have sent the first three paragraphs anyway. That is usually all weary agents read of our submissions before deciding to reject or not.

Just thought my query might help you write your own -- either incorporating some of its facets or steering away from them. Good luck with your queries everyone. And success to us all.

And here is a tune that describes how Samuel McCord feels towards his one great love, Meilori Shinseen.

STARTING YOUR WRITING CAREER

Starting your writing career.

That's something all of us want to know more about. Here is a link to an article by agent Michael Larsen on that very topic in the latest GUIDE TO LITERARY AGENTS : http://www.guidetoliteraryagents.com/blog/default.aspx?aspxerrorpath=/blog/default,month.2010-1.aspx.

And TJ was right when she wrote me in the last post in that my query was long according to what conventional wisdom advises. I have taken that thought into consideration, and based upon another article from GUIDE TO LITERARY AGENTS, I sent off a "wiser" query. Here it is :

Dear {First Name of Agent -- I think it is warmer to address an agent by the first name} :

After your April 5th interview on GUIDE TO LITERARY AGENTS, I am sure you are swamped by queries. You stated you were interested not only in urban fantasy but in lesbian characters that had more to share than the angst of coming out. In my urban fantasy, Lady Lovelace, Ada Byron, daughter of Lord Byron {and author of the first computer language a 100 years before the computer's invention,} is a major player. As is Margaret Fuller, the first woman foreign correspondent. The year is 2005, and they should be long dead. But they are not.

And they have been lovers for a 150 years. How? It is explained in the 90,000 word urban fantasy, FRENCH QUARTER NOCTURNE. Neither one is the central character. But they are his anchors to sanity.

In a world where reality is but a walking dream, nightmare is only a shadow away. A legendary jazz club owner decides he has lost enough : his humanity, his family, his beloved wife. He will not lose his city -- not to politicians, not to predators in the shadows, nor to his life-long enemy returning for a final revenge. His tale is set in post-Katrina New Orleans.

I have finished FRENCH QUARTER NOCTURNE as well as the first three chapters of its sequel, NEW ORLEANS ARABESQUE. As you requested in AGENT QUERY, I am sending the first five pages of my novel in the body of this email :


"Our nation is prepared, as never before, to deal
quickly and capably with the consequences of
disasters and domestic incidents.”
--FEMA chief Michael D. Brown - March 09, 2005
Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans August 29, 2005


CHAPTER ONE

It rained lies and death today.

I stood knee-deep in water outside my French Quarter jazz club, Meilori’s. My soul stretched tight across my chest. Everything I saw and heard in the shadows spoke to me ... in threats. The sudden, short explosion of an unseen gun. A quick, sharp scream in the distance. And the blue spurt of a lighted match at the far end of the street. My city bled slowly in the ripples of the flooded streets.

I leaned back against the door to my club as if for reassurance that something solid still remained to me. That it had survived Katrina was a mixed blessing. It was all that was left to me of my wife. Staying here was both penance and purgatory. Meilori’s was the kind of place in which almost anything was likely to happen and in which almost everything had. Inside, the fifty-one survivors of Katrina that I could house were huddled in shivering, too quiet clusters. Words have no meaning when a city dies. Nothing much does.

{Then follows the remaining 5 pages, but I wanted to be kind to your punished eyes.}

************
To get a better idea of my writing voice -- and if you care to challenge the murky blog waters -- you may want to check out my blog, WRITING IN THE CROSSHAIRS, http://www.rolandyeomans.blogspot.com/.

If not, I understand. Some of those blogs are truly scary.

{Of course, I was not referring to any of the blogs I follow here.}

I would tell you mine isn't. But I would sound too much like Richard Nixon claiming he wasn't a crook.

I am a former high school teacher, family counselor, and now a blood courier. The last a result of being evacuated from Lake Charles due to Hurricane Rita and having to support myself any way I could. I found I liked the job and the people with whom I worked.

Thank you for taking the time to read my query. I would be happy to send you sample chapters or the full manuscript. I hope that you find some gem in the flood of submissions that pour your way. May your New Year hold only happy surprises with some relief for punished eyes and swamped workloads.

Roland D. Yeomans M.A.

{Say a prayer for this query, will you, friends? I'll say more than one for yours. I just added this new query to show how a short query would look. Subtract the requested 5 pages, and it is fairly short.}

Here is a lovely rendition of a prayer that means a great deal to me :