Fame, Fortune and Chapter One

By Pat Browning

Writing. What’s it all about? Dozens of books will tell you how to do it, but nobody can do it for you. Sure, you can hire a ghostwriter, but then it’s not really your book, is it?

Advice? I have some advice for anyone starting to write a first book.

1.Don't take rejection personally, just keep working on it. Quoting Sue Grafton, who spoke at a conference in Boise a few years ago: "The free world does not hang in the balance. You are only writing a book."

2.Talent, like murder, will out, but be prepared to wait. What I heard repeatedly when I started was, "Don't give up your day job." If you’re addicted to food and shelter, that’s good advice.

3.Write for the thrill of it, and what you learn from it. Quoting Holly Lisle in HOW TO FINISH A NOVEL: "Write what you love, not 'what sells.' ... What you will not do for love, you should not do for money."

Plan and plot? I swear, one of these days I'm going to try that. Maybe then I'll write a best seller. In the meantime ... Settings usually present themselves, because I love places. Characters seem to arrive, probably from my lifelong love of people watching. That’s it. I can't plot my way out of a paper bag. After I've done pages and pages of drafts I start thinking, what will I do with this mess?

Recently, I enrolled in "Discovering Story Magic," an online workshop presented by Robin Perini and Laura Baker through www.writersonlineclasses.com. A story board I made for my work-in-progress is marked off like a calendar, with yellow sticky notes for First Turning Point, Second Turning Point, Third Turning Point, and Fourth Turning Point ( Black Moment, and Realization). It keeps me on track.

Nothing, but nothing, inspires me like reading a good book. Some of my favorite authors may or may not struggle to get those words on paper, but for reading enjoyment it’s best not to look for sweat and tears between the lines. Better to accept it as magic.

I have too many favorite books to list but here are four.

NICE TRY by Shane Maloney (2001 Arcade Publishing, First published in Australia in 1998)
Maloney wraps social commentary around a mystery featuring Murray Whelan, a political dogsbody in Melbourne, Australia. Recruited to help with the government's bid to host the Summer Olympics, he ends up trying to outwit an Aboriginal activist while investigating the death of a promising young triathlete.

SUMMER OF THE BIG BACHI by Naomi Hirahara (Bantam 2004)
Mas Arai is an aging California gardener who harbors a secret going all the way back to Hiroshima before the A-bomb dropped. There is a murder, but the story belongs to Mas and the way he puts his long-held secret to rest.

THE SIXTEENTH MAN by Thomas B. Sawyer (iUniverse 2001)
Sawyer weaves together parallel lines of history and present time, with an intriguing JFK assassination angle and the best "what if" ending ever. Sawyer was head writer and co-producer of the TV show MURDER SHE WROTE so he knows how to keep a story moving.

PLAY MELANCHOLY BABY by John Daniel (Perseverance Press 1986)
In 1977, lounge pianist Casey Jones tickles the ivories for customers who love the songs of The Great Depression and World War II. Then a mystery woman yanks him back into a past he wanted to forget. It's a mystery in a time capsule, beautifully written.


Note: I found this blog while trying to clean up My Documents. I posted it six months ago, but it seems worth repeating. Hope you agree.

Fame, Fortune And Chapter 1

By Pat Browning

Writing. What’s it all about? Dozens of books will tell you how to do it, but nobody can do it for you. Sure, you can hire a ghostwriter, but then it’s not really your book, is it?

Advice? I have some advice for anyone starting to write a first book.

1.Don't take rejection personally, just keep working on it. Quoting Sue Grafton, who spoke at a conference in Boise a few years ago: "The free world does not hang in the balance. You are only writing a book."

2.Talent, like murder, will out, but be prepared to wait. What I heard repeatedly when I started was, "Don't give up your day job." If you’re addicted to food and shelter, that’s good advice.

3.Write for the thrill of it, and what you learn from it. Quoting Holly Lisle in HOW TO FINISH A NOVEL: "Write what you love, not 'what sells.' ... What you will not do for love, you should not do for money."

Plan and plot? I swear, one of these days I'm going to try that. Maybe then I'll write a best seller. In the meantime ... Settings usually present themselves, because I love places. Characters seem to arrive, probably from my lifelong love of people watching. That’s it. I can't plot my way out of a paper bag. After I've done pages and pages of drafts I start thinking, what will I do with this mess?

Recently, I enrolled in "Discovering Story Magic," an online workshop presented by Robin Perini and Laura Baker through www.writersonlineclasses.com. A story board I made for my work-in-progress is marked off like a calendar, with yellow sticky notes for First Turning Point, Second Turning Point, Third Turning Point, and Fourth Turning Point ( Black Moment, and Realization). It keeps me on track.

Nothing, but nothing, inspires me like reading a good book. Some of my favorite authors may or may not struggle to get those words on paper, but for reading enjoyment it’s best not to look for sweat and tears between the lines. Better to accept it as magic.

I have too many favorite books to list but here are four.

NICE TRY by Shane Maloney (2001 Arcade Publishing, First published in Australia in 1998)
Maloney wraps social commentary around a mystery featuring Murray Whelan, a political dogsbody in Melbourne, Australia. Recruited to help with the government's bid to host the Summer Olympics, he ends up trying to outwit an Aboriginal activist while investigating the death of a promising young triathlete.

SUMMER OF THE BIG BACHI by Naomi Hirahara (Bantam 2004)
Mas Arai is an aging California gardener who harbors a secret going all the way back to Hiroshima before the A-bomb dropped. There is a murder, but the story belongs to Mas and the way he puts his long-held secret to rest.

THE SIXTEENTH MAN by Thomas B. Sawyer (iUniverse 2001)
Sawyer weaves together parallel lines of history and present time, with an intriguing JFK assassination angle and the best "what if" ending ever. Sawyer was head writer and co-producer of the TV show MURDER SHE WROTE so he knows how to keep a story moving.

PLAY MELANCHOLY BABY by John Daniel (Perseverance Press 1986)
In 1977, lounge pianist Casey Jones tickles the ivories for customers who love the songs of The Great Depression and World War II. Then a mystery woman yanks him back into a past he wanted to forget. It's a mystery in a time capsule, beautifully written.

Little Cat Feet

Gutenberg Memorial Sculpture, Berlin - photo from Wikipedia

=============

By Pat Browning

Change, like Sandburg’s fog, comes in on little cat feet.

Modern publishing started with Gutenberg. Almost 600 years later came offset printing, and then print-on-demand. Mercy, where will it end?

The signs are that there is no end, thanks to the Internet, but you can follow the changes like an Indian looking for broken twigs and crushed leaves on a forest trail.

Here’s a big broken twig for you, snapped on TV during the Democrat convention in Denver. Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada said, “The population center in this country has come west. It’s now west of the Mississippi.”

That’s good news for writers and fans of the western regional mystery. Tony Hillerman in New Mexico, J.A. Jance in Seattle, Joseph Wambaugh in Los Angeles, are the contemporary pioneers. Robert Fate, with his Baby Shark series set in Texas and Oklahoma, and Craig Johnson, with his Walt Longmire series set in Wyoming, are coming on strong.

Got me to thinking about the books I read during the past couple of weeks, all set in the West.

*BLOOD MEMORY by Margaret Coel, set in Colorado, a tale of skullduggery and the Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians. This is a standalone. Her Wind River mystery series is set among the Arapahos of the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming.
*SUMMER OF THE BIG BACHI by Naomi Hirahara, first of a series featuring a Japanese gardener in Southern California.
*KINDRED SPIRITS by Marilyn Meredith, latest in her Deputy Tempe Crabtree series set in the foothills of Central California.
*LOCATION LOCATION, latest in Kit Sloane’s Margot and Max series. Technically speaking, Margot and Max are in Panama for this one, but only to make a movie. Sloane may eventually do for the Hollywood movie industry what Wambaugh did for the LAPD.

Another twig snapped, this one on a different front, but also from coverage of the Democrat convention. Frank Rich, a New York Times columnist, writes in an Op-Ed piece:

“We, too, are made anxious and fearful by hard economic times and the prospect of wrenching change. YouTube, the medium that has transformed our culture and politics, didn’t exist four years ago. Four years from now, it’s entirely possible that some, even many, of the newspapers and magazines covering this campaign won’t exist in their current form, if they exist at all. The Big Three network evening newscasts, and network news divisions as we now know them, may also be extinct by then. … The Web, in its infinite iterations, is eroding all 20th-century media.”

Speaking of the Internet, here’s something posted to DorothyL by Carola Dunn, an author with a long list of Daisy Dalrymple mysteries to her credit. I repeat it here with her permission:

“All my regencies (previously published on paper) except a few novellas are available as e-books. I can’t say I’m making a fortune but it’s a very nice bit of change. Two Daisy short stories are available free online. I understand St. Martin’s is trying to figure out the best way to go electronic with their backlists, so one of these days, with any luck, all Daisy will be out there.”

Oh, but you ain’t heard nuthin’ yet.

Here’s a sci-fi novel with a difference. Try wrapping your mind around a Quillr, on Nicola Furlong’s page at www.hereendsthebeginning.com

The teaser (abbreviated):

“John the Apostle is a reclusive and temperamental rock star struggling to balance the pressure of celebrity with the burden of protecting an astounding secret. His charisma and stigmata attract global attention and curiosity yet he desperately wants to be left alone with his family.

“But when three unwelcome strangers infiltrate his secluded west-coast compound, all hell breaks loose… Scroll down and click the video… but beware… a Quillr is NOT a book. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED”

So what is a Quillr?

Quoting : “Quillr is the exciting new platform for multimedia storytelling combining text, audio and video. Part movie, part soundtrack, part graphic novel; with Quillrs, stories will no longer be read ... they'll be experienced.”

Gutenberg would be dumbfounded. Then again, maybe not.