WRITING WITHOUT A NET

I hardly ever use this blog to promote my own work-- well not much, anyway! --but I have had such an interesting experience preparing SANCTUARY for release that I thought it was worth commenting on.  Briefly. A few years back (quite a few, actually!)  I sold what is called a "breakthrough" novel ( THE PASSION by Donna Boyd ) at auction for a great deal of money.  I had been a hardworking, steadily selling midlist author until this point for ten years, and I understood that what I had written was  really, really good.  I thought it deserved all the attention it was getting.  But when my editor said to me, "It must feel wonderful to write such an extraordinary book!" I remember replying, "Yes, it does.  But this isn't the first extraordinary book I've written.  It's just that no one noticed the others." SANCTUARY  is one of the books that no one noticed. In the early nineties, I sold the manuscript for Sanctuary ...

You know I rarely give bad reviews. I respect the work of the author—however misled he/she might have been—too much to publicly defile it. I know what it takes to write 70,000 words. I know they can’t all be jewels. But O.M.G. I have just read the worst book ever written… And it was mine. The heroine was so stupid I wanted to slap her. Get a life, already! Are you supposed to be real, or did you just step out of a Marvel comic? Ever heard of a little thing called backbone?? Grow a set, already! The hero at least had two dimensions: flat, and flatter. Excuse me, even actors need motivation. Do you have any background whatsoever or did you spring full grown, Glock in hand, from the mind of a singularly demented writer? Are we supposed to believe that dialogue? Give me a break! And the plot! Don’t get me started. First of all, can we say Paranoid Delusional? And pul-eeze, it’s the freakin’ 21st century. Ever heard of a little thing called CSI? Not that hard to solve a crime, cupca...

Pages written since last post: 25 Books uploaded to Kindle: Under Cover He was one of the most notorious racketeers on the East Coast. She was a cop who wanted nothing more than to see him behind bars. But just how far was she willing to go to get her man? Recently I was on a panel at which one of the questions was: What do you hear most often when people find out you’re a writer? My answer was, “ Oh yeah? How come I never heard of you?” This got a few laughs, but it also caused me to start thinking about some of the other conversation-stoppers I’ve heard from people over the years. Here are just the top ten: 10. “Have you ever written anything I’ve read?” The unsuspecting writer has only two possible responses to this. The first is, “Umm, how would I know?” and the second—more common—response is to hang his head in shame, mutter, “Probably not.” and slink off to the bar. 9. “I always wanted to write a book but I never had the time.” My standard pithy reply to this is a ...

pages written since last post : 150 But no... getting a start on a new book is not all I've been doing since February. Like so many of my colleagues of late, I've been re-evaluating the publishing business and my place in it. (I've also been trying to get off sugar and processed foods,lower my resting heart rate and plant an organic garden, but that's another post altogether).  I've also been giving a lot of thought to books in general and the way we read them, and, frankly, how much all of these things have changed.  When I first started buying books, a paperback could be had for 2.99.  When I first started writing books, the average price of a paperback book was 4.99.  When the cost of a paperback book jumped to 7.99, and a hardcover to $20.00, some of the most dedicated readers I know swore they would never buy another book.  Well, now they're paying $35.00 for some titles, but guess what?  They're not doing it very often.  So here's the thing....

Pages written since lost post: 57 Okay, I confess: I’m a complete Winter Olympics junkie. I love downhill, ski-jump, snow boarding, bobsled, luge, skeleton, short track, 1000 meter, cross country, and oh yes, figure skating– men’s women’s, pairs, ice dance. Once every four years, I even love hockey. For two weeks in February, I am glued to the television set for six to eight hours a day, cheering– not for a nation or an individual– but for the best. Because when records are broken, when personal bests are surpassed, when the impossible becomes history, gateways open up for all of us to surge through. This is what I’ve learned from the Olympics this year: You don’t make the podium by accident. Every one of these kids had a dream, and they believed in it enough to be at the rink at four o’clock in the morning to practice, every morning, without fail, for fifteen years, rain, snow, sleet, bad mood, heavy date, flu, birthday, Christmas , New Year’s, whatever ; to move across countr...

Today we come to the last, and most powerful, of the seven deadly sins for writers: Fear Fear is the most dangerous vice of all. Fear stops nine of ten writers dead in their tracks before the first word is written. Fear will cause a writer to put away her manuscript the first time she runs into a plot problem she can’t solve or a character who seems wooden. Fear will rob a writer of her dream the first time someone confirms– or appears to confirm– what she has always secretly believed to be true: that her book is no good. The problem is that you can’t be a writer without fear. Writers live in a constant state of fear. Those who make friends with fear will win the race. Those who do not will never even leave the start line. Fear of failure keeps you going back to that manuscript until you get it right; fear of rejection keeps you sending it to agent after agent, publisher after publisher in the desperate hope that someone, somewhere will give you a chance; fear of losing– your time, ...

Laziness Or, "It’s good enough." Laziness, believe it or not, is more closely akin to defeat than it is to arrogance, singularity or ignorance. Laziness is usually justified by "Oh, what the hell? No one is ever going to read it anyway." Laziness refuses to tweak that one scene that just doesn’t make sense, to rewrite Chapter Five even though it clearly has nothing to do with the rest of the book as it stands, to do the final read-through, to rewrite the last sentence one more time. Laziness won’t waste time or paper printing out a draft for proof-reading, or run the spell checker more than once. Laziness doesn’t show, but tells, resolves plot dilemmas with thinly-disguised twists from last week’s CSI: Miami , sets his stories in his home town so he doesn’t have to research other locations, writes cartoon sketches of characters because he can’t be bothered to delve into what really makes people interesting . Laziness doesn’t read– his own...

We are on Day Four of my list of the Seven Deadly Sins for Writers, and this is one of my favorites. I could have written volumes on this particular subject, but, you know, brevity is a virtue. Ignorance As hard as it may be to believe, ignorance is a vice that afflicts our industry more often than you might imagine. It may have to do with the proliferation of mass media, particularly the Internet, and the belief that if you can post a comment to a blog, send a Tweet, or set up a Facebook page, you can write a book. What truly amazes me is that with such an abundance of legitimate information out there on the subject of writing and publishing-- the numerous agent, publisher and writer blogs, the hundreds of books written on the subject, not to mention the online writing courses offered-- so few people actually bother to research and/or educate themselves in the profession they want to join. I recently ...

Today's deadly sin for writers is: Singularity Sometimes known as stubbornness, inflexibility, or self-importance This writer is easy to spot. He has a Vision that he refuses to compromise (never mind that no one else is at all interested in reading about that vision). He has a Style that is all his own (and completely incomprehensible). His words are a pure and unmitigated expression of Himself (which is, unfortunately, painfully obvious). This writer never takes a class because he has nothing to learn. He refuses to hire an outside editor or coach for fear his words will be tampered with. He never bothers to read the query or submission instructions on agents’ or publishers’ web sites because those kinds of mundanities do not apply to him. He will never take a suggestion for revision because of the afore-mentioned Vision. And he will never be published.

Welcome back to my series on The 7 Deadly Sins of Writers. Yesterday we talked about Arrogance. Here is today's topic: Avarice a.k.a. "I deserve more than this!" Well, don’t we all? Avarice, when used in reference to a writer, has a slightly different meaning that it might for the average person. While a greedy person is commonly assumed to be seeking more than his share, a greedy writer usually spends his career just trying to get enough. Enough money, enough attention, enough promotion, enough marketing, enough books printed to actually earn out his advance. The problem with this affliction is that it, too, is self-destructive, and after a time it becomes such a way of life that even the writer doesn’t know how much is enough. Here’s the thing: if you think you deserve more, get better at what you do. And if you still think you deserve more, you’re probably right. And you’re in the wrong business.

Pages written since last post : 5 This week is Graduation Day for my summer writing class (an extraordinarily talented group of people if I do say so myself) and as always I’ ve been searching for a inspirational speech, some weighty last words with which to send them off into the cold harsh world of publishing. I finally decided that in these uncertain times what is needed is a call to the Straight and Narrow Path, and devised this warning against falling prey to the seven deadly sins for writers (I was going to call it The Seven Deadly Sins of Beginning Writers, but then realized how many of them I’ve been guilty of, myself!). Over the next week I’ll be blogging about a different writer’s vice. Do any of them sound familiar to you writers out there? Here is Deadly Sin Number One: Arrogance Also known as the you-won’t-believe- what- I-can-do or the I’m-the-best-that’s-ever-been syndrome, arrogance is often considered more of a survival tool for writers than it is a sin. Anyo...

Pages written since last post : 297 I have just written an entire book (yes!with words and everything!) in 62 days. Do you know that wonderful scene in Romancing the Stone in which Kathleen Turner finishes her latest masterpiece, blubbering like a baby (and searches all over the apartment for tissue, paper towels, toilet paper, anything on which to blow her nose but of course there is nothing because she hasn’t left her desk in weeks, perhaps months)? The average movie-viewer thinks that she’s crying because she’s so caught up in the beauty of her work. The average writer knows she’s crying because she is undergoing a complete meltdown due to a) sleep deprivation b)starvation and/or dehydration c)she knows (or believes) she’ll never have a high like this again. This is what I call Writing Fever. It is a rare degenerative disorder that affects only the most talented, the most brilliant, and the most dedicated of our kind. It happens when the writer gets so caught up in the...