RESPECTING THE STORY (or the oil and water of this business)

Dear Friends, Fellow authors, and A Good Blog is Hard to Find Faithful Readers,

Here we are gathered in this room hanging out on the edge of the net and touching one another with our words. And that's exactly what I want to talk about. This month we are speaking about publicity, what to do to give that book a push, to find its readers, to connect with the world but I realized that Patty Callahan Henry just waxed eloquent on the joys of getting out and getting to know your public. Last summer I drummed up a few mistakes I'd made along the way. You can find that post here. 

Me waxing on about the mistakes and learning curves of the publishing business - or what I know now that I wish I knew then: http://southernauthors.blogspot.com/2010_06_01_archive.html

And a few days ago Shellie told it the way it was about the rubber meeting the road here: 

Shellie Rushing Tomlinson wrote about taking it on, the real world and the art of publicity http://southernauthors.blogspot.com/2011/02/marketing-smarketing.html

And our gracious, talented friend Kerry basically taught a class on giving back with a photo montage from the road that speaks volumes here:

Kerry Madden talks about giving back while getting it right: http://southernauthors.blogspot.com/2011/02/tips-to-surviving-book-promotion-by.html

Then I literally spent time reviewing a year of blog posts on A Good Blog is Hard to Find. Amazing. Incredible. Honors and Kudos one and all. And again a special nod to Karin Gillespie for beginning this blog and for Kathy Patrick for the undertaking of it's continuance. How I wish I had been able to tap into this incredible resource so many, many years ago. I think this blog should be required reading for young people, old people and all those in between who struggle and strive to write a story, touch a heart, and get their work published and read in this wild and every-changing business. I think this resource so valuable that I'm going to settle in this week with coffee, notebook and pen in hand and honestly take notes from the authors that have had such incredible, down-to-earth, been there and done it raw advice. This is the kind of advice we PAY for at writing conferences and to PR firms. Seriously. 

That being said - I have nothing to add to this subject that hasn't been captured. Not a clue, not a key. 

BUT -  - - I do have a little something on my mind. 

As the days wear long, with The Miracle of Mercy Land only debuting a few months ago, with Praying for Strangers: An Adventure of the Human Spirit rising to the surface April 5th, 2011 - I have been in a constant state of editing, or promoting for months. (Yes, never mind that I do that little Radio show thing on the side - but people, I do so love author talks, festival news, a GOOD review, and a few great tunes to set the mood. - I'm kinda, well, addicted in the most wonderful way to a little Clearstory every week.) And what I want to say is - looks like those days of authors hanging in Paris with other writers and then moodily walking those smokey streets back to hang over the typewriter and stir up stories like the end of the world was pressing in and all humanity hung in the balance - are over~ 

These days - it's promote, promote, promote. Are you on Twitter? Facebook? How often do you post? Who do you know? What have you done to sell books TODAY? Traveling? Cruising? Talking?

All good and great and needed things in today's screaming society of plugged in professionalism - yet . . . I've got this story  waiting to be told. A big one. It's southern, dark, demanding, dreamy and full of the fight for redemption and the places we have to find in ourselves to forgive and find our way back to the truth. 

BUT - without those dedicated hours where I respectively step back from the PUBLICITY demands of the upcoming book, road tour, social media, Publisher emails, the bing of my smart phone, the call, the demand, the scream of the BUSINESS of this Writing life - there will be no writing life left worthy of all those efforts on my part, my publisher, or my publicist.

I've been looking at the serious output of creative madness of some of our counterparts from the days of old. Men and women with long lives, and histories of making love to the page with a touch of madness. God bless them everyone. Because we need them. We need those words that don't bear the rhythm of us simultaneously trying to answer sixteen emails and forty live chats while bidding on a leather bag from Italy while we write the next line. We need the words from a generation that respected the work of the writer, the REAL work of THE WRITER. The Words they weave into THE Story. 

And we need each other. We need the stories that usher us out of the silence of our souls. We need the incredible clarity that those stories bring to our cluttered lives. The words that so beautifully illuminate our existence and help us laugh at ourselves and love one another again.

. I thank you for every writer that gives a leg up to another writer, blogs on their work, facebooks

But I also ask you, beg you, implore you - step away from the blessed promotional work we all shoulder, burden, and carry - even celebrate - to write. To simply,  strongly, passionately - write. Step away from the noise. Carve out precious HOURS not moments to write uninterrupted. Find a corner, a coffee shop, a library or a graveyard but make a covenant with yourself NOT to answer the bells and whistles that scream for your attention. Dive in and gloriously lose yourself in the characters, place, setting, and creation that awaits.  I assure you, the world will be waiting for you, for me, for all of us, still clamoring and demanding when we return. 

IN the greediest moment of your life, grab that story asking to be told, and don't let go of it 'till it's told. In the most complete,  most powerful way possible.

RIVER JORDAN is the author of four novels, and a collection of essays.  Her first published non-fiction work inspired by a New Year’s Resolution – Praying for Strangers: An Adventure of the Human Spirit will be published by Penguin/BerkleyApril 5, 2011. Ms. Jordan teaches and speaks on ‘The Power of Story’  and produces and hosts the radio program, Clearstory, on WRFN, 107.1 FM, Nashville. Jordan and her husband live in Nashville, TN. You may visit the author at http://www.riverjordan.us or visit http://www.prayingforstrangers.com 

The Next Level is Closer Than You Think by Kristy Kiernan

The first step to taking anything in life to the next level is understanding that there even is another level. There are so many buildings in the Big City of Writersburg, and we're always keeping our eye on those, aren't we?

We think we're on our roof, training our telescope on the swanky Sales Temple, the Advance Tower, the shiny mirrored windows of the Review Complex (which includes the heavily guarded New York Times Temple, the Publisher's Weekly Starlight Lounge, the Library Journal Hall, the hodgepodge Amazon Vineyard, and the recently boarded-up Kirkus Morgue), and the massive Industry Insider Internet Time-Suck, not to mention the welcoming Friends and Mentors Cottages and the dank, odiferous Paranoia Slum where our imaginary enemies skulk around plotting our downfall.

The noise from our crowded city practically deafens us, and at first it's exciting, stimulating, and we run hard to the next level in order to see the next levels on all those other buildings. We gaze hard on them, trying to figure out how to reach their next level, or even how to skip a few levels, Super-Writer style, leaping all those tall buildings in a single bound, and we begin to ignore our own building, the one we live in, the one we've stopped seeing, the one we take for granted.

It's the Craft Building, and it is the tallest, strongest skyscraper in our city, but there is no elevator, express, penthouse, delivery, or otherwise. Our building is filled with steep stairs, and the stairway doors are guarded, videogame-style, with all manner of nasty animals, like fanged Day Jobs, and clawed Child Care, and the dreaded poisonous Spousal Time Jealousy. If we make our way through the first few levels, fight our way to the Chunk of Time Rewards, then we start to learn our craft.

But something happens toward the middle of the building. Maybe we get tired of climbing those stairs, because they get steeper and longer, or we get tired of fighting our way through the Door Guard Nasties because it seems like they get stronger and more devious every time. Or we've achieved some level of success that makes us believe that the levels overhead hold nothing new.

But chances are, we've just become so dazzled by all the other parts of the city that we can now see, that all of our focus turns outward, and we stop achieving new levels in our own Craft Building, stop even realizing that we've stalled, rooted, stagnated.

We've become deaf to the little voice that strains to get through all the noise. The voice that tries to remind you that at one time you fought for time to write your novel, and that now you fight for time to write a pithy comment on a Facebook thread. The voice that reminisces about the time you used to spend reading literature that moved you to tears, and that now you read industry blogs that paralyze you with pessimism over the Future of Publishing. The voice that quietly asks if the sentence is really good enough, if the plot really holds together, if maybe you're…cheating.

If maybe you're…skating by.

If…MAYBE…you're…LAZY.

And then it's time to quiet the city. It's time to stop obsessing over all the other buildings. It's time to take the weapons of knowledge you've already won, gird yourself, and attack the stairway. Fight through the Guard Nasties, whatever they are this time (the Spectre of Sales Past, the Willies of Expectations, the FoP [Future of Publishing] Ogre), and emerge into the white space of the next level.

The next level is silence. The next level is control. The next level is blank white walls and high ceilings and it echoes as you walk through it. The next level is solitary. You are the only one there. And your sales do not matter, and your advance does not matter, and your reviews do not matter, and what your friends and enemies are doing does not matter.

You will never learn anything if you never enter that silent blank white space, that empty echoing chamber.

The next level is up to you. It's there, waiting for you. You know what you need to learn there, and if you don't, then you're not listening hard enough, and you're concentrating not just on the wrong level, but on the wrong building entirely.

Kristy Kiernan's third novel, BETWEEN FRIENDS, will be published April 2010, and has recently been chosen as a Featured Alternate for the Literary Guild, Doubleday, and Rhapsody Book Clubs.

The Call

by Cathy Pickens

I came to writing as a reader. That doesn’t, I’ve learned, go without saying. I’ve met several folks at signings who want to write a book but who never read books. That’s another blog.

I love reading, and I knew I wanted to write murder mysteries when I was 11 years old. When I announced that, the head librarian gave me old copies of The Writer Handbook and back issues of The Writer and Writer’s Digest, on their way to the landfill. I poured over those magazines and books, musty from the library basement.

I wanted to know how all this worked. I realized later I was looking for THE PATH. I figured there was a secret entrance to the magical world of “published author.” All I had to do was find it.

I read and I read. I wrote and I wrote.  For years, I looked and listened for word on the magical entrance.

When Duane Lindsey asked me to write an essay for the book How I Got Published, I wrote about The Path … and about how I discovered, after I was published, that everyone has a different path. I haven’t met a writer yet who got there in exactly the same way any other writer did.

There are some rules, though: Good news comes by phone. Bad news by letter. Don’t wait by the mailbox.

For both my first short story (in the Sisters in Crime/Private Eye Writers of America anthology Deadly Allies II) and my first novel, news came by phone. Sue Dunlap, anthology editor and one of my mystery writing idols, called me on a Sunday afternoon. I managed to hang up the phone before I started jumping around and yelling.

The second phone call came while I sat in my office at Queens University of Charlotte, nearing the end of my five years serving as Provost, not because I ever wanted the job but because the president was quite a salesman. That’s another story.

Anyway, Ruth Cavin, the iconic mystery editor, was calling to tell me I’d won the St. Martin’s Malice Domestic Award.

I calmly thanked her, hung up the phone, nodded to the folks working in my office, walked quickly across campus to my husband’s office, closed the door … and started jumping up and down and yelling.

I had only a faint glimmer of how that would change my life. I was glad to be leaving the administrative job returning to the classroom I loved. But the bigger transition was to one-year deadlines, travel schedules, and life as a real, live mystery writer.

My husband didn’t know either what that meant. That we’d travel to Bristol, England and Anchorage, Alaska, and Boise, El Paso, Tucson, Denver, New York City, and Kings Mountain, North Carolina. 

We’ve had a blast over the last five years, meeting writers (mostly of the murderous type but also folks like Karin Gillespie, blog mistress extraordinaire – that was in southern Kentucky), and running into them again and again. The writing and reading community is a large, ever-changing, welcoming, quirky, bookish, fun bunch.

Six books later, I’m so glad the phone rang.  The secret entrance? Read, read, read. Write, write, write. Learn the business. Perfect your craft. 

Take yourself seriously. Persistence trumps talent every time. 

And take every opportunity, at bookstores, libraries, book festivals, to meet authors, to join the incredible community of readers and writers. The entrance isn’t so secret after all.