The Funny State of Literature

The vapidity of winter probably is a good metaphor for what has happened to literature in the year 2015. It is cold out. Zero. The wind whips against the windows and nothing really moves. As I read Richard Fords Let Me Be Frank With You it is clear what has happened to serious writing in this early part of the twenty first century. It has gone the way the of the LP and the CD. It is simply not relevant to a large segment of the population.

Harper Lee is bringing out a rejected manuscript. Why would an old woman do that who has a secure place in literary history? But of course content is king and so the more the better. Amazing this modality should nibble at the stalwart of classic lit but there you have it. We don't know if she wanted it out there or someone else but it doesn't really matter. What matters is there has been a watershed and there is no going back.

We are writers brought up on filmic imagery. Our scenes are much more relevant to a Parenthood than a reader of E. M. Foresters A Passage to India. It happened to the music industry. The same juggernaut that has pumped out elevator vocalists from American Idol now pumps it out from Dystopian set pieces like Divergent or randy Army manuals like Fifty Shades of Gray.  It isn't so much that any of this is so bad its just that it is not so good.

Then you read Richard Ford and you remember again that literature was never about that. It was about cracking the existential moment. The wonder of being alive in the year 2015. And it is still there but people would have you believe it is not. There is much more money to be made in pulp than art. But like the winter that howls even now. There is that suspicion we are mortal.  And the great consolation is this.

Literature will live on despite our best intentions.

www.williamhazelgrove.com

The Pitcher...Library Guild Selection

 

Californication

Maybe you have seen Californication. It is on Netflix and concerns a novelist who has a lot of sex and does a lot of drugs and drives a Porche. Wow. Not only that he is able to tell everyone how he feels and confronts people in movie theatres because they are talking on their phone and faces off with very tough husbands whose wives he is having sex with but he has no real worries and comes out smelling like a rose as he jets off in his Porche.

But the novelist has problems. He cannot write. He is not happy with the movie version of his movie. Poor baby. Still he has the Porche and a great apartment and lives in San Francisco and basically jets around doing a lot of nothing except for bumping into women at bookstores who are reading his book and then he goes to bed with them.

Now he does have an ex wife and a daughter whom he is trying kind of to be a better dad. I have to laugh or cry at Hollywood's depiction of the working novelist. His good fortune is so glossed over that it hurts the fantasy,. I really want to believe that this novelist life is out there. It is so full of sex and drugs and good times that it is really more of the rock star. It really would be something to strive for and it supposes that people still care about writers and the books they write.

Very cool. Too bad we live on earth.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
Real Santa..."If someone doesn't make a movie out of this book then there is something wrong with the world."

 

The Hawk Who Came through the Window

Writing along when a hawk came though  the window outside the stairs leading to my office in the top of the garage. I opened the door and was met with a wide wing span and very large talons and an expression that did not care for me. The hawk landed several stairs down and blocked my exit. He did not move. I waited and he turned his head and watched me.

So I sat down after I grabbed my phone and took a couple of shots. The hawk did not care. He just kept his one eye on me and we began our waiting game. When I first moved into the house I found the head of a bunny on the roof. Apparently a hawk had decided he no longer needed it and left it for me. I had to go out on the roof and retrieve the bunny head.

And this hawk was big enough to do that. He covered the stair and didn't move. It had been a normal Monday up until now. Dealing with old and new problems. Trying to get things moving and I was headed downstairs for coffee when I met my predatory friend. I always admired the way hawks soared far up in the sky, drifting on the air currents. It did look like pure freedom.

But one of us had to go. I did have to get on with my day and the hawk I assumed had to get on with his. So I waited and watched him and he waited and watched me. And then. As if he had just had enough. He turned and flew out of the garage. I went down the stairs and looked up and just caught him flapping away.

He had his day to get to and I had mine.

www.williamhazelgrove.com

Getting Those Trade Reviews

Ok we are talking Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Booklist, Library Journal. The Pitcher was covered by all four. And I am not talking about paying for any of them. I am talking about getting reviewed on the merit of your book. Which brings me to the first point. Write a good book. That is the best thing you can do to help yourself get these coveted trade reviews that sell to the publishing industry and the libraries. Now after you write the very best book you can write then here are some pointers.

Send your book in early. Say four or five months before your publication date. This is standard. Send an ARC if you have one but if all you have is the finished copy then the send that. And do not send it to a general mailbox send it to the editor who is reviewing your particular genre. Now I am really talking about fiction here since that is all I have written. Everyone of my five novels including the last book have been covered by the trades.

Which leads me to another truth. Once you get one of your books covered by the trades it is much easier to get your next novel covered. They know you do quality work and are much more willing to look at your next effort. You may have to send in several copies as they do tend to get lost and some gentle email follow up helps.

But I go back to my original point. All this is lost if you don't have the book. Write the very best book you can. The trades will follow.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher


 

The Writers Vacation

Writers don't really take vacations they just change where they work. But saying that a vacation is about the only place you give yourself permission to do the kind of work you like. Reading is work. Writing is work. Yet during the normal days you give yourself over to the work of making money. A different focus altogether. But on a vacation it is actually ok to read and write and think.

And you would think well this is what a writer does. But only a writer who is not under pressure and I don't know many of those. Pressure makes you constantly re evaluate what you are doing. Is this going to make a difference? Is this going to sell books? I should be doing more. Is this marketable? What am I not doing?

And these thoughts do not give you the permission to sit down and read a book for enjoyment. Or to write something that may not end up between two covers. You just don't. But on a vacation you are able to go back to when you first started and pick up a book that you really wanted to read or to write something that just hits you.

I guess that is why they call them vacations.

www.williamhazelgrove.com


 

Rewriting Old Manuscripts

You really should burn old manuscripts otherwise somebody might offer to publish them and then you have to rewrite. The problem with old writing is it is old and you just didn't know what you were doing. You thought you did but when you go back through that old prose you see someone who just wasn't there yet. Still, there is a story that might be worth something.

So you start hacking. And I mean hack. Like cutting the book by fifty percent and even then you aren't done Because the story is buried in seaweed and just about every other growth. You have to hack through the forest to see if there is a story worth salvaging and you wont know until you are done. And so out goes every bad metaphor you thought was brilliant and every overwritten scene and every sideshow and backstory.

Out the door one two three. And then once that is done you will have something that may or may not stand up on it's own. It is just amazing that at one time you wrote so badly. Like I said, really burning would have been much more painless.

www.williamhazelgrove.com

The Luxury of a Book

I was thinking about going on vacation and I thought I should download a book for the week. But then I realized I didn't want to read on my Kindle. I wanted a book and I thought what a luxury. Funny thought but there it was. Something not tied to a computer. An actual pulp based reading machine that needs no power and is glare proof and I don't have to plug it in. And it doesn't say something to me I don't want to hear.

And I even saw myself browsing for the book. Wow. Picking up books and looking at them and putting them down. Why it was something out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. A real honest to goodness interaction with something that does not glow or buzz. And it does seem luxurious. To sit in a chair by a lake with a book. Something about sitting by the lake with my kindle just doesn't do it for me.

And so that is what I will do. I will treat myself to a book. Hell I'm worth it. I can pay a little extra to have the tactile sensation of turning real pages. I don't have to justify the drive to the bookstore and the extra time it will take.

Sometimes....you just have to go for it.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher...a Real Book
 

Price is an issue in Publishing and then again...

If you follow the Amazon struggle with publishers then you know it is about the price of the ebook. This is what the war is being fought over. Should Amazon be allowed to undercut publishers and get a bigger cut of the profit.  It is true that people are price driven but then again there is that thing called quality. When I sold books at the Printers Row here in Chicago of The Pitcher I sold twenty five books.

Now I charged full bump and I had three hardcovers priced at twenty seven dollars. The people buying The Pitcher seemed to not care at all. Well you say that is because you had a captive market and no competition. Actually no. Right across from my booth was a discount bookseller who started at eight dollars a book and worked his way right down to one dollar a book. And he was not quiet about it.

As my people were paying sixteen dollars for my book and then twenty seven the guy selling discount books literally yelled across the aisle ALL BOOKS ARE A BUCK. Still people did not flinch they simply wanted to read the book. Now in Ebook land the .99 title is king. But there is a sneaking suspicion that people would spay 2.99 or 3.99 or 7.99  if they decided that was the book they wanted. And yes there are people who live for the cheap book but they are always there.

My point is that if someone wants your book they will pay just about anything for it. Price may be king in some areas but a good book has a funny way of setting it's own price. Or market.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

The Pitcher is #1...How Books Are Sold Now

            The Pitcher is currently #1 in these categories.

• #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Contemporary Fiction > Urban
• #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Teen & Young Adult > Literature & Fiction > Sports
• #1 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Urban Life

 

The Pitcher is selling more right now than monster Bestsellers published by the largest publishers. Book selling has changed permanently. The fight between Amazon and traditional publishers is really the last Battle of the Bulge in a war that has been going on for some time. The fact is that books used to be sold very differently.

 

The stage was narrow because of the physicality of bookstores. Literally stores could only stock so many books and so the Big Authors or Bestsellers were put out where everyone could see them. These books were purchased first and behind them were some obscure midlist authors that were purchased occasionally. Finally was everyone else who never saw the light of day. There just wasn't room.

 

Now in the digital age authors are on equal footing. Of course the Bestsellers dominate the bookstores and always will but people are shopping with their computers and that is taking the lack of space out of the equation. Independent bookstores are still vital because they do bring forth the undiscovered but for the digital shopper the author can bring him or herself forth and have the same displaying power of even a giant like Grisham or a James Patterson.

 

Now a book must still be good for the digital world. No amount of behind the scenes pushing can make a bad book last.  It may sell but books especially in the digital world are sold by word of mouth and eventually the bad book falls. But if your book is good and you work hard then you at least have an equal chance as the big boys.

 

It is truly a different world out there.

 

www.williamhazelgrove.com

The Pitcher

 

Novels Are Changing

Novels are changing. Mine have changed. Is it the influence of computers...the Internet? Hard to say. But they have changed. Yes there are the big  novels still being published but the market seems to be moving toward the staccato chapters that tell a story in bursts. Short novels for people who are extremely busy. The cousin of flash fiction is surely the novels of sixty scenes crammed into two hundred pages.

That is not to say this is bad. I have moved along as a writer to the point where I want to tell a lot of stories versus just a few big ones. I would say I spend an inordinate amount on the net and maybe there is some spillover. I thought it was just me but I spoke with a writer in LA who said he sees the same thing. Novels are just shorter and the chapters are many.

Literary novels once upon a time were composed  of long scenes. But that was for people who did not have a phone beeping every few minutes or House of Cards or Game of Thrones cued up. But of course we reflect our environment and novelists should be of their time. So I will end this now. My phone just went off.


www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher

 

When You Become a Professional Writer

You come into your writing group full of great intentions and are delighted to find kindred souls, people who do this brain cracking work of writing and for a long time you glide along with your fellow scribes. You look forward to reading your work and getting the feedback and now you have a thick skin and are able to ferret out the good criticism from the bad and you all sort of move along at the same pace and then suddenly like high school, you graduate...you get published.

For me it wasn't such a draconian moment. My publisher was tiny and in Chicago. Still, I brought the galleys with me and showed them around and it was then I felt a sea change. Everyone nodded and murmured congratulations and then the group fell into its old routine. I was in the middle of editing the galleys so I hadn't really written anything new and  I read some of the novel.  The comments were muted, some were complimentary, but I felt I had brought a gun to a knife fight.

So I took a few weeks off and worked on my galleys. When I returned I was exhausted and hollow eyed  and only had my novel to read again. I sat and listened to the same works in progress, the bits of poetry, short stories, fragments of novels, then it came to Robert's piece. Robert wrote non fiction for a small magazine in the city. He tried to write fiction but it never worked. For years we had listened to Robert read these words that were like boxcars in a line but there was no ignition. We had all been in a secret conspiracy with Robert, who was a very nice guy, to give him a pass and not really criticize his work.

But this time I felt we were doing Robert a huge disservice. For two years I had been listening to Robert's bad fiction and for two years I had said nothing. He was a lifer. They existed in groups. People who came for the social aspect as much as the writing. And so you laid off. But l had changed. Something about working on those galleys with an editor had pushed me to the next level and I couldn't go back. So when it came to me, I blasphemed. I commented on Roberts work.

We are doing Robert a big disservice here. I looked around at the group. We haven't been honest with him...I paused. We haven't told him his fiction doesn't work. Someone dropped a pen. Someone coughed. I have violated a group taboo. A little man named Pee Wee who was also a lifer piped up. You have no right to judge Roberts fiction that way. I looked at him. Are you kidding? That's why we are here. No, Pee Wee persisted. You are assuming you know good fiction and Robert doesn't and you have no right to tell him he doesn't know how to write fiction.

And it was then I knew I was done. The group that I had been so much a part of for years was suddenly irrelevant. I couldn't stay if  I wanted too. So I sat through the rest of the readings and said nothing. There was no point. I never went back. It was much later I realized my crime wasn't that I had criticized Robert's writing, it was actually something much deeper and much more serious-- I had stumbled into becoming  a professional.

www.williamhazelgrove.com

Time is the Difference For Most Writers

It really is time. After you have the talent it is time. There are many good writers out there who will never publish and that is because they will never write. The reason most artists don’t succeed is really because they do not have the time to develop their craft. Talent must be there but so also must there be time to create and in America that time comes at a high price.

So what is your day job? The standard question has the built in assumption you must support yourself to do your writing or your music or your acting. You have to do sometning to pay  the bills. But that something destroys most artists. Their energy goes into the support and not the art. Art takes time to come to fruition and it takes time to make its way in the world.

Take writing for instance. You only have so much psychic energy and then it is gone. Most writers support themselves by teaching. This drains the writer of his precious mental  reserve and by the time he or she sits down at the writing table there is simply nothing left.  It was given away to a student who will face the same thing one day. 

So really the great dividing line of those who go on to produce songs or novels or become actors is that they had years to develop their craft. Time it turns out is precious.

 

www.williamhazelgrove.com

 

The Art of Rewriting

You don't learn to write until you learn how to rewrite. This is true. My first novels I did not rewrite mostly because I didn't know how. But of course that is what you learn over years and it can not be taught. You have to find out how to do it on your own because it is the million and one things that have to be addressed and yes people can critique your work but you really have to find your own tuning fork.

It really comes down to connotation and denotation. And connotation is the one that guides all rewrites. How much work is each word doing. And this is something writers know or they don't. You know the writers who have not gotten a handle on this because they are the ones that flood you with words that do nothing. And again it is nuance or instinct and you either instinctually know a sentence is not right or you don't.

The big debate in writing classes is of course can writing be taught. Not really. You can lead someone to the water but they really have to have the ability to swim. And that is something in rewriting that can not be cheated. Because the book does not come from a first draft but a careful re-imaging of each scene and then the whole movement of the book has to be evaluated at the same time.

Again these are the hard to define skills  the writer must find on their own.  That is why it is an art.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher...sometimes a dream is all you have

Components of a Bestseller

Bestseller. It has a ring to it. But what are the components to a book that make it take off when another book sputters. First. It has to be good. And maybe that lets out a lot of books. Good is defined by the reader who tells another reader who tells another. Bestsellers are a word of mouth phenomenon when it is all said and done. Even today with the Internet the word is still passed on from trusted source to trusted source.

This is why the people who buy  two hundred five starred reviews get little traction. The reader is missing in that scenario. And yes bait and switch is alive and well. We will still download a book that looks great from the Amazon reviews only to find we have been had. The reviewers were friends or family or they were bought and paid for. This sadly happens.

But the book that is honestly reviewed by someone who really loves it is a double edged sword. Not only will that person review the book they will then tell someone about it. It happens more than you think. I get asked a lot what I am reading and I will rattle my brain and say...well this is a great book that I read a while ago. I even helped sell a copy of Wilson's biography when a man picked it up and stared at it and I spouted out and said, 'That's a good book." We talked and then he bought it.

Yes of course you have to market. Yes you have to do all those thousand and one things to get people to notice your book. But really the real test is is your book good enough to have someone in a Barnes and Noble blare to someone else "hey I read that book! It's good." That is the acid test of any potential bestseller.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher...sometimes a dream is all you have

This is It...Call it a Year

For writers this is it. You have written what you will write in 2013. Squeak one more in the door but really it is times up. The holidays are beginning and the year is ending and you either did it or you didn't and all you can do is tally up the year and live with it. I snuck in one more rough draft before the year ended and gave it a rewrite and then realized today was it. There will be no more writing in 2013. At least serious writing.

I have burned through gallons and gallons of coffee and exhausted my body with sugar and trashed out my insulin and my eyes and everything else to produce fiction. And it is over and let the chips fall. The books are out there or they are not out there and the world will turn on and maybe there were things I could have done that I didn't but it just doesn't matter now.  Sweep the floor and break the pencil and ride to the New Years.

And you do that look back thing and did you move along the bar and did the books you wanted to write come out and the ones you didn't write are they still there. But for now it is all water over the dam and all you can do is let the dead dogs lie and  uncork on the bubbly.

2013 is already a ghost.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher
 

Shooting a Book Trailer with a Drone

Since Amazon is hyping drones I thought I would tell my drone story. We shot the first book trailer for my novel Rocket Man with a camera mounted on a drone. My friend is a filmmaker and he procured the use of the drone and since the book involves rockets I brought the model rockets to a field in Oak Park Illinois just west of Chicago. The drone we were using was worth thousands and the digital camera was worth more. Ok. Keep that in the back of your mind.

He set up the drone and I set up the rockets. It was cold and our fingers numbed out fast but we got to the point where I was holding the ignition switch and he was holding his laptop for the drone. His drone looks just like the ones we are now seeing in Amazon commericals and news footage. A spider with a bunch of propellers. So he lifted the drone off and got it above the trees and I hit the ignition switch and whoosh. The rocket blasted off.

We watched the footage in his laptop as the drone hovered and followed the rocket until the parachute popped out. We did this over and over. On about the tenth time we decided to put a bigger engine in the rocket and so we took the drone really high. We were staring up when the drone suddenly took off for Chicago. My friend jammed the keys on his laptop but the drone had slipped out of range and was now cruising for the West side.

We jumped into his car and started chasing the drone. It sends out a wifi signal he explained and I grabbed the laptop and started searching for the DRONE2 signal. We drove into residential neighborhoods. The drone had a fail safe where once it lost contact it was supposed to set itself down and send out its signal. That is if it didn't just crash into a tree or lose power and smash into the ground. We drove and drove looking for the thousands of dollars that would be lost if we didn't find the drone and the camera.

We were about to give up when we turned a corner and I picked up the drone signal DRONE2 searching wifi signals with my phone. We pulled over and looked up and down the street. It could be anywhere my friend muttered as we got out of the car. I turned and saw twinkling green diodes on a slanted roof. The drone. One in a million we would find it, but we were able to bring it down with the laptop.

So when Amazon talks about delivering your packages with a drone... know that it might get there or it might just take off and fly over Chicago and go land on someone's roof.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
Rocket Man Book Trailer
 

Cutting the First Forty Six Pages of a Novel

It happens every time. Every time I write a novel I end up cutting the first quarter of the book and I wonder why that is. When I wrote Tobacco Sticks I think I cut seventy five pages before I said that is where the novel begins. And you would think six books later I could stop this needless exercise but it happened again. I was rewriting and I realized the first forty six pages had to go. Now why is this?

Because it would seem the store is given away too early. Or maybe I cant find the characters for a while or maybe I just need to warm up for forty six pages before I can really find the book. Hard to say but there is no doubt these pages have to go. The consequence of not cutting the pages is a not only a slowed book but a flawed one. Truly less is more can be applied here.

But maybe it is just where the voice of the novel kicks in and this can take some time. Many times you start writing about one thing and end up writing about something else entirely and usually that one thing is in the first forty pages.  So you really have two different books and then it is an easy choice. If sixty thousand words are written one way and twenty thousand written another then it is very easy to know what is going under the chopping block.

The twenty thousand. 

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

Why Do Anything?

It comes like that. It numbs out your head and you are paralyzed. A fog really before the world and you sit in your car or in front of your computer or at your desk and the enormity of the task hits you. And it comes just like that. Why do anything? Maybe it is better to go back to bed because it all seems so hard. Writers know what I am talking about. Entrepreneurs  know it. People who have  lost their jobs. It is the knowledge that if you don't do it nobody else will

And that can get you in the strangest times. Take book marketing. A thankless toiling job with little result. And yeah the writing is great but marketing feels like a trudge up a hill with a weight on your back with buckets of mud on each foot. You get the picture. Its a bit like Walt in Breaking Bad. The reason that show was and is so popular is not because of the meth component but because Walt is a middle class guy who goes bad. He hits the f it moment.

And who has not felt that? But of course right behind this is the moment where you try again. You put one foot in front of the other and really what is the alternative? To do nothing. Certainly the odds are against you but isn't that true in life? So it is the action taken that wins out. Really it comes down to just do something. Anything.

You can always deal meth if all else fails.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

The Building Anxiety of Breaking Bad

Can't sleep. Tossing and turning. Or better yet waking up after an hour of sleep and not knowing where I am or who is next to me. Freaky. Then tossing and turning again and not sleeping. Too much coffee. Too much sugar. Maybe. Or is that show that has me up all night and I am now in the fifth season and when I go to bed I am  wound up tight like a spring about to pop...could it be the building anxiety of  Breaking Bad.

I had been warned. Don't watch it before you go to bed. Pshaw. I can handle it. I have watched worse. But no there is something bothering me now. The moon night.  The blue glow outside where the wheel barrel sits in the yard. Did I leave it there? What about the step ladder still on the front porch from Halloween. What about the back door...did I lock it.

The dog jumps up and barks by the window. I  jump out of the bed and stare out the window. Wired. Too much. Too much. And I am only season five. Something has to give. This watching before bed is making me strange. Back under the covers and watching the bright yard. No one is there. But there is that shadow....I have really got to stop this.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher
 

Giving it Away Again or...FREE

I will be doing it again. Mica Highways my third novel (Southern Mystery) is the story of an African American  man and a woman in 1968 who are murdered for having a relationship and will go on FREE kindle download November 19-23. This novel is the follow up book to Tobacco Sticks that was on free download before and while I understand the logic behind these giveaways they are hard to get used too. Why in the world would you give something away to sell more?

But that is the new marketing. Read it to sell it and of course this is only possible with the ebook because a publisher would go broke doing this with a real book. But of course the big publishers do give them away. They give away a thousand copies and more to create buzz for their lead titles. For their smaller titles maybe twenty ARCS (advanced reader copies) And these publishers knew then that if they flood the booksellers with comp copies the booksellers  will read it and recommend the book.

Now take the new modality. You allow people to download as much as they want of a book for a restricted time period say five days. On Tobacco Sticks 31,000 people downloaded the book. Staggering. That many people got the book for free. Is there anyone left who will pay to download the book? Maybe.

But that is what is now. Free to sell. Crazy world we live in.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
Mica Highways