book writing – Page 4 – John D Reinhart

Don’t Look Back

You’re a writer. You know how it goes.

We work our brains out on a piece, twisting it, turning it, ripping it up, tossing it out, starting over again. And that’s just the first paragraph. It’s like trying to knit with a garden hose. Or a snake. Or your cat’s tail.

Eventually we win the day – the paragraph, she’s perfect. Not one word out of place – the Pulitzer committee is about to call any old second – gosh, I hope they have my cell phone number. I’ll just said the ring to uber loud so I won’t miss the call… you know, if I’m in the tinkletorium or something. Maybe I’ll take it in there with me…just in case.

The words, they flow like spilled milk on a linoleum floor.

Hello? Pulitzer folks? Oh, it’s you, Mom. Can’t talk – I’m doing brilliant work right now. Have to keep the line open for the ol’ PC – of course you don’t tell Mom that, but it’s in your head.

And then pass the days, the weeks, the months. We sort of give up on the Pulitzer folks – clearly they don’t have our cell phone number.

And then, quite by accident, we glance at a sentence in our epic piece, the piece of OMG-This-Is-BRILLIANT literature, and we spot a typo. The guy’s name is Phil, not Phirl.

First comes disbelief: how did we miss that? How come spell checker didn’t get it?

Then comes justification: well, that’s why we hire editors, right? Don’t they catch stuff like that? What’s one typo? Nobody’s perfect.

But, a piratey ghost enters the room. What do we know about pirates? Thieves and brigands, right? Out only for themselves, right? Ne’er do well cads. What do we know about ghosts? Scary, totally dead folks, right? This is a bad combo.

The piratey ghost tells us we’re a lousy writer. We glance at a single page of a 75,000 word tome, just one page, and we spot Phirl. Holy crackers, how many Phirls’ are in there? What else did we miss, if we missed Phirl? Real writers at least spell their character names right. Real writers don’t make stupid mistakes like this. Rookies and dimwits do stupid stuff like this. No wonder we have our day jobs.

And, the thing about piratey ghosts is that they speak with such conviction…with the occasional whoo-OOOOO-ooo thrown in to remind you that they have otherworldly connections. They must be speaking the truth. I mean, why would a piratey ghost lie?

Well, you’ll find not one but TWO chapters of my Phineas Caswell novel, MARIGOLD’S END, over there on the left. Chapters 9 and 10. And, in copying ’em onto this site, I spotted a, well, a slight… well, it’s fixed now.

They are both bang-up chapters. Full of that stuff that makes you go -say, that’s good stuff. Bang up. Read ’em, let me know what you think of ’em. I’ll sit right here by the Comments box. And, if you’re on the Pulitzer committee…

Aaargh, and whoo-OOOOO-ooo, matey. Ye cannot write yer way out of a Martha Stewart luminary. Har HARRR!

But you’re a writer. You know how it is. You know that 99% of the goomers who want to be writers are sitting at home wondering why they’re not writers. You did it. You wrote a book. Or several books. You did it.

Begone, piratey ghost entity! Take your snide comments with you! Blast your infernally eternal ectoplasmic hide! Pick on someone who hasn’t written a book – someone who hasn’t ground their keyboard to dust looking for just the right word, precisely the right image, the heart, to make a scene come to life. Begone, useless spirit. You ain’t nothin’ but a bit of bad cheese!

Take heart, my writer friend. You are writing – bingo, you’re ahead of the piratey ghost. You work and work and work to make your stuff better and better. You might inadvertently type Phirl instead of Phil, and sort click on ignore by mistake when the spell checker finds it. It happens. Around here, a lot.

Take heart. Omelettes are not made with complete eggs. You have to whisk the batter to make a pancake.

Don’t look back, except to see how much you have accomplished.

Stupid piratey ghost.

Writing Forever

I know you know this, so I guess there’s not much point to telling you about it. But, well, there it is, isn’t it?

I’ve been hating on my book, DROPPINGTON PLACE. Okay, well, not on the book itself, but on the writing of it. Some days it’s a blast, and the words flow like sweet cherry wine. The next day comes the roadblock, the stumbling block, the block of ice that freezes our soul and stalls us just plain dead in our tracks. I hate that block, too.

In my story, the characters explore a surrealistic world made entirely of paper. Their path takes them down, well, a path. So, how do we walk down this path?

Walking, and walking, and walking becomes so dull that even I can’t stand to write it.

Instead of walking and walking, the camera drifts up into the sky and looks down on them, telling us where they’ve been and what they’ve seen.

And THAT, my writer friend, is exactly where the roadblock landed. Flooomph, like a big rock in the highway to Interesting Storyland, we stepped out of the lives of the characters, the story became wooden and dull, and no fun to write. And, if you don’t have fun writing a piece, however is your reader going to enjoy it?

Ding-dong. Hello, Mr. Dimwit? Your brain is calling.

It’s a scene, of course. The answer is to place scenes along the path. Scenes that move the story forward even as they move the characters down the road. Cool, huh?

Biggity-big-big-bigger question.

Why do this? Why do you care about great paragraphs, and storylines, and why is it so important for you to put your thoughts on paper?

Why? Why must you publish your book? If writing is so important to you, why don’t you just write and write and let it go at that.

Okay, so maybe it’s not the writing, is it? It’s the reading.

You write your ideas and stories so that others will enjoy, will learn, will see the world in a new way. Isn’t that so?

So, here’s the rub: if you are so concerned about your reader seeing the world in a new way as a result of your work, why put your name on it? Okay, so it’s not just the reading. It’s the fame.

Before we go too far into our writer’s tools and processes, let us get this straight:

You and I are reaching for the brass ring of immortality.

Think about Shakespeare, a household word. Shakespearian theater. It defines a whole category of acting, of playwriting, of presentation. Why isn’t that you?

It could be. If your book is successful, if you find the right combination of story and character, you, my dear reader friend, could be the next Shakespeare, your name whispered and hailed and venerated for generations to come.

That’s immortality for us.

But it’s more than that, isn’t it?

Writing is a business. Success is not measured by finished works. It’s measured by works sold. Sold. Sounds bad, but it is the business.

Sell a million books and you’re doing good. Sell a million books a year and you’re on your way. Sell a million books a year and get a movie deal, and household wordism isn’t far away.

Isn’t that what you want? That’s what I want. I don’t think it will happen, but that doesn’t make me want it any less, or make me work any less hard in trying to get there.

So, go finish your book. Write well. I’m finishing mine. Maybe you’ll read it – maybe I’ll read yours. Maybe yours is so good that Disney is dialing the phone this very instant to make you the next Stephen King.

Hey, it could happen! Immortality could be that close. I’m sitting by the phone.

BN Marketing Promise Kept

I’d say this promise is kept by popular demand, but you, dear reader, and I both know that that’s not true, for there is only you and me in this cruel-hearted world. Please place your beer here – _____ – for crying into, later. For we have work to do now.

First and foremost: below you will find the outline for my book, DROPPINGTON PLACE, precisely as promised in yesterday’s post on Bare Naked Marketing. An important part of marketing, of course, is delivering on your promises. Some of those promises are implied. If you shell out several dollars for a Yugo, that the car has a steering wheel is implied, along with seats and a suitably tame headliner. But a promise like “I will share this with you,” well, that’s a promise with no ifs, ands or butterumpusses about it.

If you were a playwright, you’d know this formula:

Act I: we meet the protagonist and his circumstances. All is well until, just at the end, something dreadful shatters his peaceful existence.

Act II: things gets worse and worse, more and more dire, nastier and nastier, until, at the very end of the act, the idea emerges that will save all.

Act III: we act on the idea, vanquish the dreadfulness, and resolve the manifold puzzles presented during the day. If it’s a musical, the audience walks out humming the overture.

In DROPPINGTON PLACE, we don’t have quite that much structure. You’ll find the outline over there, on the left of this site, under the strikingly original title DROPPINGTON PLACE: Outline.

So, there it is, you and I are sealed at the word processor. I share this with you in the hopes of giving you a window into my creative process.

I trust, of course, that we won’t see you running down the street with my outline in hand bellowing “Eureka! I know what to write!” That would bring bad juju, wouldn’t it?

Your ideas are always welcome – simply comment on this blog.

Stay tuned, dear reader. There are chapters, both of this book and MARIGOLD’S END, to follow.

Remember: no running.

Thank You, Mister Gates

Oh, Bill… whatever would we have done without you? Can you imagine tapping out a novel on an IBM Selectric? Or on a rusty old Underwood? Or, gasp, scrawling it out longhand? That Dickens, huh? Now there is dedication!

When you tippy-tap your messages out on your cell phone, you don’t use words like ululate, or hypertension, or Zoroastrianism. Too tough to tippy-tap out on that tiny keyboard. Yet Mr. Dickens scrawled out deliciously delightful words longhand. In truth, most people find it easier to block print letters than to try to spell on those itty-bitty keys. Someone, probably aliens, must be laughing their dang-fool heads off – look what I got the humans to do!

In Phineas Caswell’s world, the wind she blows us aback, and we can sail forward no more. We brace the yards around to catch the wind. We loose the heads’ls. We work the rudder and bring her head around to pick up the breeze. We change tack, gather speed, and off we go.

Mr. Gates’ spell-checker has finished MARIGOLD’S END, something few humans have yet to do. The rough-and-tumble Englishmen in this book all drop their aiches, as in “‘ow was I to know?” And Louise, she is French, and she drops ‘er aiches, and she uses French words. And Red Suarez espeaks Espanish…Ay, caramba! But, for all that, the spell checker found out those embarrassing oopsies we try to hard to avoid. Next comes a grammar checker.

Software can never replace the human eyeball and skill set and judgment, but it can certainly point you towards questionable work.

So, thank you, Mr. Gates. Your PC has revolutionized the world, and your spell checker has brought a change of tack to an otherwise stalled project. ‘ats off to ye, lad!

Vile Betrayer Marketing Guru

Back in the good old days, before color TV, rulers declared themselves despots, and tossed out anybody who didn’t agree with them. Those disagreers were labeled “vile betrayer”, and, boom, off they went to the desert on good days, off went their heads on bad.

“Be gone, vile betrayer,” was a pretty common phrase, back in the good old nasty despot days, so I’m told.

In marketing your book, you get to be a despot – a marketing despot. It’s a cool title, like those honorary doctorate degrees that colleges hand out to folks who chip in a bunch of money to build a new teacher’s lounge with a gymnasium attached. Except that this title has power to it.

For one thing, you can brand as vile betrayers those people who tell you that you should be writing with crayons. Be gone, vile betrayer. Or those who tell you they’ve read better material on the artificial butter tub. Be gone, vile betrayer. Or those who just simply tick you off – you there, with the white socks and Birkenstocks – you are worse than a vile betrayer. Be oh so gone.

As the marketing despot of your book, you have to have an iron will – or an iron George if Will isn’t around – to keep the success of your book foremost in your mind, in front of the windmills. You must cast out as non-believers those who don’t believe in your success, because, well, shucks, they’re non-believers – I guess that just sort of follows.

Why must you be so iron-willed (or Georged) despotic? Two answers:

You must be iron willed because you, and only you, are the champion of your book. If not you, whom?
You must be iron willed because faith is a tentative and fragile thing. And, really, all you have is faith that your book is marketable, is fantastic, and is something truly special. That it is your gift to the world.

The marketing guru chosen for MARIGOLD’S END turned out to be a vile betrayer. A non-believer. A nay-sayer. A neer-do-well-cad. A nervous Nellie. Be gone, vile betrayer, and take your encyclopedia-selling mindset with you. Be thankful you’re not banished to… to… well, banished! Be gone!

This is your chance to be the ruler you’ve always known you should be. YOU can take your book to stellar heights. YOU can build a literary empire. YOU could RULE the WORLD!!!

Or, maybe you should just concentrate on selling your book.

Yeah. Probably that.

Tips from a Marketing Guru

Gosh, that’s a selling title. Sadly, I sort of have the opposite in mind, but you can’t make a headline that says “I Need Tips from a Marketing Guru”, because no non-marketing guru will read your blog. And, although my children believe me to be an ATM, I was sort of hoping to get some advice on the cheap.

Here’s my bass-ackwards marketing plan, which needs serious consideration. WARNING: don’t do as I do, for I don’t know what I’m doing.

In the new world of publishing, the reader chooses the author, not the other way around. One way to build steam for your book is to offer it for free, or at least parts of it, to get it out there in the big old WWW. You build interest, you build potential readership, you build search linkages, yada yada yada.

In the new world of publishing, you must be brave, little Piglet, and put yourself into the market. But you needn’t do it all at once – it might be better to have a little cache of readers behind you. That’s the theory I read somewhere.

In my case, I’m a chicken. In my brave new world, we put chapters out and sort of test the waters. You sort of tentatively do things in tiny fits and starts just in case you’ve done something majorly idiotic. Hey, it could happen.

So, when you have a minute or twenty, if you wouldn’t mind, would you be so kind as to visit my pages and read the first and seventeenth chapters of my recently completed novel? I promise you’ll be entertained. Promise. Pinky-swear.

I also promise to keep you apprised of new happenings in this wacky adventure.

Especially if I hear from a marketing guru!

Stick a Fork in Me

Done like a ton of finished, like a taco casserole in a thousand degree oven I am done, done as the day is long, done. Finito. Wrapped it up. Did the deal, finished across the line with a big ol’ smile across my face. DONE!

72,584 words of pathos, humor, and history all wrapped up in a nice little package featuring my friend Phineas, who gives up, gets angry, blows his top, cries, and finds his father, all the while fighting a running battle with the sea. Phin, my boy, carped at by the ship’s sailing master, driven to near distraction by the French king’s granddaughter, and called every harsh, rude, hurtful name in the book, tries to find his way, figure out how he got thrown into the seagoing gulag that is the Kathryn B.

Not a spoiler alert, not here – you’ll have to read for yourself how this one turns out.

In fact, my next step is to find a reader. Someone who can be honest with me, but someone who knows a thing or two or three about the Young Adult Fiction business, what they’re looking for, what will float, what will sink like a stinking stone.

Really, my next stop is on the publishing wagon. Get this monster read by someone with brains, rework it to their thoughts, and then Wordsmash it or Yahoo it or Amazon it or something.

Really, the next step, which starts tomorrow, is to think about marketing. Building the old platformaroony that will carry this book into the bazillion dollar sales range.

You, my friend, need not worry. I will not try to sell you a book. You are my only reader, and I thank you for sticking with me. Stay with me, sail with me over the horizon of the publishing adventure. I promise to tell you everything. The rewards could be great.

For now, the goal is to simply enjoy 72,584 words of doneness. Finitoness. Ah, sweet victory, thy name is Phineas.

The End of the World

It could all be whipped away from us in the very blink of an eye, this trusty old world of ours. I might not even be able to finish this post because the dumb old world ending thing might happen fir… st. If you’re a fan of Dr. Who, it almost happens every week.

On a totally different subject, my wife and I were talking about absolute cold… well, I was babbled about it and she was very nice… absolute cold. So cold that all of the heat is drawn out of the molecules, down to the quarks and their cousins falling to infinitesimally small particles of nothing, but not falling because there is no energy. No energy, no heat, but absolute cold. Maybe that’s the end of the world.

Or, maybe it happened today, when my daughter told me that maybe I should reconsider my book – you have a good idea, there, but maybe you should write it this way. Excuse me? Excuse me? Excuuuuuuuuse me? You’re my kid. You’re supposed to think it’s better than Gone with the Wind, for crying out loud. Maybe it would be better if…?

It’s not the end of the world, but, you’re a writer, you know how it feels.

This afternoon was supposed to be a nice editing session, powering through the last quarter of the book, reworking working sentences into elegant, beautiful descriptions of the human condition.

He pulled the trigger. The pistol exploded in fire and smoke. The pirate swore and ran for the ladder. Lah dee dah dee dah.

Maybe she’s right. Maybe I should sit down and write a book like J.K. Rowling, or Stephen King. Yes, perhaps I’ll try that. Maybe I’ll just write version seven of this stupid book off as a whim, one that’s lasted a good six years, and do something else. I hear that wallpaper’s easy to hang. Taco Bell’s hiring.

It’s not the end of the world. But some simple conversations can cool your heart until the quarks cease their tiny orbits.

Now, I’m not complaining. I am sharing this with you, dear writer, because the day may come when a loved one delivers to you the blow that ends your world, your entire universe.

But you know that you’re good – you just have to hold onto that, because you ARE good, dear writer. And tomorrow the sun will come up and the absolute zero in your heart will thaw, and your muons will start their crazy dance, and life will go on.

And you’ll think about what you’ve been told, and you’ll put it into the salad bar of your mind, right next to the windmills, and continue your work.

See? It wasn’t the end of the world.

Alert: Monster in the Cupboard (not Closet)

If you write a lot, but don’t get feedback, yours, my friend, is a lonely game. You toil away, fitting together the pieces of your written puzzle like so much cheese at the mousetrap factory, when, one day, the monster grabs you.

I am a miserable novelist. I just realized it. Not misery like in hey lady, that was my ANKLE thank you very much, but in misery as in whoa, dude, do you, like, know any words? How many ways can you say “said” without sounding moronic, he intoned. Whimpered, whispered, hissed, murmured, muttered, uttered, grunted, yelled, roared, bellowed. Well, that’s it for me.

And that sentence structure, what’s up with that? He opened the door and looked inside as the tree fell through the neighbor’s roof. He drove the car and whistled a happy tune as the rain pattered joyfully through the open sunroof. He wrote the post and congratulated himself on at least writing something as he bored his reader (bless you, whoever you are) to tears. Subject verb the noun clause and verb a noun clause as noun verb preposition noun clause. Booooooooooooooring.

Maybe it’s because, as a technical writer, my is writing is limited to “attach the motor mount to the casting with (2) socket head cap screws.” It isn’t romance, but it pays the bills. While it’s easy to write “carefully place the hinged device against the casting and thread the screws, one-by-one, into the small holes”, my editor would hand it back to me faster than a greased bowling ball on Crisco Boulevard.

In truth, there’s something else going on.

You’re a writer – I ask you: who is your worst critic? Go ahead and think, we’ll wait… do you need to make a phone call?

Of course it’s YOU, you ninny!

Except not really you, but the monster in the cupboard. I was going to say monster in the closet, but that now leads to coming out of the closet, which has a whole different meaning than what I was shooting for, and oh, now everything’s all tangled up. One moment, please…

So, the monster in the cupboard is your own self-doubt, self-fear and self-loathing (if you’re in Las Vegas), trying to sell you a bill of goods. I know it’s just a bill of goods because my daughter told me today that she likes my book better than Hunger Games. She might be bucking for extra allowance, but I’ll take what I can get!

The monster lives in the cupboard of your mind, next to the windmills, and sees the absolute worst in everything that you do. And it loves, Loves, LOVES to point it out to you.

Part of the monster is good. I mean, it’s the only one who makes you go back and polish that sentence once more – you know it needed it. It’s the only one who makes you question whether this book really needs this scene.

But the monster is also baaaaad, baaaad, because it can convince you that you are a miserable writer. You know it isn’t true, but the monster seems so authentic, so… so… so right.

You know that you are the monster – your parents said you were a little one when you were a kid – which means you can stop being the monster.

The next time you flop into a heap in front of your word processor, crying because you just aren’t good enough to write this book, and you really should not have quit your day job, and how could you have EVER thought that you could do this…well, you can just stop it with the Mr. Nastypants routine.

Nobody’s buying it, and you’re just being a whiney crybaby because you listened to the monster in the cupboard.

Shut the cupboard and get back to work.

Phineas Begins Anew

I’ve added the first chapter of my most recent rewrite of Phineas Caswell, the novel, variously called Marigold’s End, Phineas Caswell, The Journal of Phineas Caswell, and The Treasure of the Tres Hermanas. Those are the ones that come to mind – I guarantee there are more.

My brother told me a story once about an old man who carved elaborate, beautiful wooden doors. He would sit at them day after day, whittling, cutting, shaping, without end. Someone asked when he knew a door was done. His answer was simple: “when someone takes it away from me.”

Yuck.

Phineas, the novel, is headed for online publishing: I’ve been told precisely 753 times that this story doesn’t lend itself to the young-adult publishing model. I was actually told that by the head editor at Disney – yes, that Disney. I believe that one was the Journal of Phineas Caswell…

Suzanne, the love of my life and my editor (all the same person), prompted this last rewrite. And believe me, this is the last one – I’ve twisted this poor kid so many ways from Sunday his name may as well be Larry. Reach inside, she suggested, but not for what you know, what you feel.

Beyond queasy, I didn’t know quite what she meant, but eventually figured it out.

Chapter One, over on the page called Phineas the Novel, comes from down inside. It comes from a place of regret, of something lost than can never be regained. It’s not a generated feeling – I have some regrets, believe you me. I sold that hillside, ocean-view house for $175k when today you can’t touch it for under two million… just kidding (although, I did sell that house, and I do regret not having two million bucks).

My daughter cried when she read it and said “you can’t start a children’s story this way.”

Tells me we’re on to something!

Do me a favor and visit the Phineas the Novel page and let me know what you think.

Thanks!