Making It in Changing Times 2013

 We all know that there are major changes happening in the industry, many of which are working against authors going after traditional publishing deals. We all know that there are also other opportunities available for authors at all levels, but these opportunities require professionalism and know-how. That’s why its so important to take advantage of every opportunity to improve your odds.Here's your opportunity:

A one-day conference jammed with helpful information.

Learn from a stellar line up:

Jessica Morrell

Deborah Reed
Gigi Rosenberg

Kevin Sampsell

and keynote speaker Lidia Yuknavitch The Worth of Risk

This is an event you shouldn't miss. Seriously. 

Date: January 26th
Place: Tabor Space, Portland, Oregon
Cost: $99

The complete schedule will be available soon.

Just for Fun

“This sentence is made of lead (and a sentence of lead gives a reader an entirely different sensation from one made of magnesium). This sentence is made of yak wool. This sentence is made of sunlight and plums. This sentence is made of ice. This sentence is made from the blood of the poet. This sentence was made in Japan. This sentence glows in the dark. This sentence was born with a caul. This sentence has a crush on Norman Mailer. This sentence is a wino and doesn't care who knows it. Like many italic sentences, this one has Mafia connections. This sentence is a double Cancer with a Pisces rising. This sentence lost its mind searching for the perfect paragraph. This sentence refuses to be diagrammed. This sentence ran off with an adverb clause. This sentence is 100 percent organic: it will not retain a facsimile of freshness like those sentences of Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe et al., which are loaded with preservatives. This sentence leaks. This sentence doesn't look Jewish... This sentence has accepted Jesus Christ as its personal savior. This sentence once spit in a book reviewer's eye. This sentence can do the funky chicken. This sentence has seen too much and forgotten too little. This sentence is called "Speedoo" but its real name is Mr. Earl. This sentence may be pregnant. This sentence suffered a split infinitive - and survived. If this sentence has been a snake you'd have bitten it. This sentence went to jail with Clifford Irving. This sentence went to Woodstock. And this little sentence went wee wee wee all the way home.” ― Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Shaped from the Past

Understanding your protagonist’s psychology, including his deepest fears and yearnings will result in a fictional person who acts in ways that are logical, fascinating, and believable. And the seeds of his or her psychological make up will always be found in the past. And likely that past will include some troubling or scarring times and events.

In fact, all your protagonist’s actions, choices, and emotional needs in the front story are shaped by the back story. Fiction characters do not spring fully grown like Athena from Zeus’ head—their pasts, particularly their socioeconomic circumstances, and traumatic events, cast a distinct, complicated and powerful shadow over present events.

While you’re creating your character’s past, be sure to include physical characteristics including any unusual features and inherited traits—an odd blue-grey eye color that in certain lights has tints of silver. Sculpted cheekbones from Cherokee heritage. Capable-looking hands. Hairy chest, propensity for early male baldness, flat feet. Smallish breasts, freckles like constellations, shapely feet.

Add psychological quirks: attention deficit disorder, dyslexia, restlessness, obsession with details or compulsively neat and orderly—so much so that it irritates other characters who are always requested to take off their shoes when entering your protagonist’s domain. Keep adding or subtracting if needed-- rodent phobia, problems with authority figures, mom/dad never loved him or her, mama’s boy, daddy’s girl. Which can be not so cute if your character is 30-something.

Just as in the real world, these are factors which provide the foundation for your character and his values, which in turn affects how he acts or reacts badly and changes and has trouble changing/coping/succeeding in the story.

What is new adult fiction?

From Media Bistro: 
YALitChat.org founder Georgia McBride interviewed JJ, an editorial assistant who worked on the St. Martin’s writing contest. Here’s an excerpt:

there is a gap in the current adult market–the literary fiction market–for fiction about twentysomethings. You never stop growing up, I think, but little in the market seems to address the coming-of-age that also happens in your 20s. This is the time of life when you are an actual, legal adult, but just because you’re able to vote (in the US, anyway) that doesn’t mean you know HOW to be one. This is the first time when you are building a life that is your OWN, away from your parents and the family that raised you. It’s a strange and scary place to be. Just as YA is fiction about discovering who you are as a person, I think NA is fiction about building your own life. (Very generalised, of course.) I hope that the creation of this category will allow the adult market to develop and expand in similar ways the children’s market did.

Free Samples of New Adult Fiction Authors Who Landed Book Deals
Losing It by Cora Carmack
Because of Low by Abbi Glines
Slammed by Colleen Hoover
Beautiful Disaster by Jamie McGuire
Easy by Tammara Webber

Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart

"I think that whenever we give our pen some free will, we may surprise ourselves. All that wanting to seem normal in regular life, all that fitting in falls away in the face of one's own strange self on the page." ~ Sharon Olds from The Writer's Almanac

I would rather see words out on their own, away
from their families and the warehouse of Roget,
wandering the world where they sometimes fall
in love with a completely different word.
Surely, you have seen pairs of them standing forever
next to each other on the same line inside a poem,
a small chapel where weddings like these,
between perfect strangers, can take place.
~ Billy Collins
from Thesaurus

"Isn't all art irreverent? It is irreverent to create that which doesn't exist; the newly made thing flies in the face of the already created and as such is based on negation (what already exists is simply not enough!), but born also out of the greatest reverence for all that already is. When Borges, visiting the Sahara, picked up a little bit of sand, carried it in his hand and let it fall someplace else, he said, "I am modifying the Sahara," and he wrote that this was one of the most significant memories of his stay. What Borges did is what we do when we write poems after millennia of poem writing. We aren't saving the Sahara, we are modifying it, and you have to be irreverent to think you can modify the Sahara in the first place, and sincere in your attempt to do so." ~ Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures

"A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them. That is, he does not draw on a reservoir; instead, he engages in an activity that brings to him a whole succession of unforeseen stories, poems, essays, plays, laws, philosophies, religions." ~ William Edgar Stafford

Something to ponder: 

"Writing is a very, very unnatural act. Most people are out living - their bodies are, they're walking and they're talking and they're working and playing and they're interacting. Writing's very unnatural because you are not living when you write. But at the same time, what a great paradox - because you're all writers so you all know. You're all going, Oh but no, no, I'm most alive when I write. So are you more living or less, we can't use "more" or "less," it's just different. And this is the crux of any writer's life. It is the essential paradox and question and torment and joy. Are you writing or living and what's the difference and where's the line and how do we divide those activities?

I've spent my whole life thinking, Is this unnatural? Shouldn't someone be parading outside my apartment with a cardboard placard saying, "Insanity's taking place on the inside?" They really should, there'd be a point to it. And then, in other moods, I go, No, no, no, the insanity's taking place out there. And I waffle back and forth. And this waffling back and forth, when you yourself experience it, it's called life. And you are going to experience this waffling back and forth for the rest of your life. And whenever you do, don't think you're unnatural or broken or different. It's life, and we're living it, and that tension is life." ~ Mary Ruefle

Scholarship 

I have a $cholarship available for my Line by Line workshop on Saturday.
Contact me via email so we can discuss details.

VoiceCatcher’s journal to reopen for submissions
VoiceCatcher: a journal of women's voices and visions will accept submissions for the Winter 2013 edition between November 1 and December 15, 2012. Managing Editor Helen Puciloski and Co-Editors Ginger Duncan, Lisa Maier and and Celina Wigle are eager to read your poetry or prose and view your art work for the online journal’s second issue.

If you haven’t seen the Fall 2012 edition, go to www.voicecatcherjournal.org. Take a look at our mission on the "About" page. Read our contributors’ work for a taste of what we’re publishing. Click on "Submissions" and follow the guidelines (a few of which have changed).

We look forward to sharing your voices and visions in our new publishing venture

Thought for the Day

"I once had a friend. He had been teaching a long time when I was just starting. He liked telling his students he'd seen them before. In another life, at another school, the same hairline, the same kid brother back home in eighth grade. In class, he gave them obituaries to read. And though we're no longer close, here is consolation: I still believe in what he was up to: seeing if he could make them dizzy. Suggesting they write their way into or out of the disquieting facts he offered up. Offering the chance to find themselves breathless, to consider themselves a point on a circle falling and rising, falling/drawn up, as the wheel moved, moves, is moving relentlessly on. He wanted them to feel conveyor beneath their feet, when all along they'd assumed they were walking. To consider they might, somehow, for another, be a mark and a measure of vastness. A site.

What does my friend want his students to say, what does he want them to stumble into, considering those obituaries? "Nothing in particular," he'd answer, meaning "I have no plan." No one thing in mind. Only for them to skid to a halt, to go breathlessly forth, for here is their chance to see: the patterns keep coming, all the lives theirs resemble - in the newspaper photo, the deceased at age twenty, the jaunty tilt of that head so like the tilt of their own. That they share the same name, the same birthday and interests. That the most basic, seismic events daily converge and include us."
~ Lia Purpura, On Looking

Quick Take:

When you're writing scenes you'll want to nail the action, weave in setting, create dialogue that dazzles. But you also need to know the emotional content of the scene. What is each character feeling at the beginning, middle, and ending? Why? Can you use subtext to communicate these emotion?

November

If it's November first that means NaNoWriMo has begun.

Write on......

Join in

Lose yourself in your writing practice...