The Kamikaze writing the Big Book

My mother in law asked me what I was working on. Usually I just say something vague, but I told her I was working on a big book and that I was six hundred and sixty pages into it. She paused, then looked at me and said "who the hell wants to read a book that big?" Fair enough. It gets worse because I will probably break a thousand. But when writing the big book you are a bit like a kamikaze where you are not sure you are coming back from this one.

First of all no one wants a really big book anymore. They are expensive to publish. And there is that old thing that peoples attention span is getting shorter not longer. Look at Kindle singles. Look at what is selling. Look at twitter! And there you go, writing an opus along the lines of Gone With the Wind or War and Peace. Talk about insane. Your agent doesn't want you to do it and yet you persist. Why?

Maybe because you can. Maybe because you wont ever do it again. Maybe you just want to see if you can write the big book and take a swipe at the "whats it all about sweepstakes." Why not? You have written everything else. Why not throw in everything but the kitchen sink and go for it. You only live once right? And so you strap yourself in, start the motor, and fly toward your final destination. A human torpedo headed for total destruction or total nirvana.

That's the big book.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Publishing Worm in Apple

Yeah. I get why the big publishers went to Apple and said you know what; lets fix a price we can all live with here. Amazon is a leaking ship on the good seas of Ebook commerce and the economics are devastating. Ebooks drop pricing to the floor and Amazon was intent on doing just that. I set my own prices on my ebooks (I happen to own the rights) and one thing I found out was that ebooks are priced low low low compared to regular books. You can see the IPOD nightmare of publishing over the next hill with .99 cent downloads.

But you still can't stack the deck. And whose to say what really happened at this point, but it sounds like the publishers tried to turn back the clock and stop the hemorrhage. And it is a hemorrhage. You are talking about a twenty five dollar hardcover versus a ten dollar ebook or worse. And once file sharing really kicks on ebooks that will be getting nothing for that old hardcover. So now what? Well...people still like to read books. And they like a quality ebook.

So instead of fixing the price with Apple for books on their IPADs, really the publishers should come up with their own hardware or high end ebooks. Look. There are a lot of people who do not like the Kindle but there isn't a lot of competition out there.  The Nook. The Sony Reader. They all still feel like a computer. Yeah. I have a Kindle but I still prefer a book. What I'm saying is we are not there yet and there is a lot of room for someone to get it right.

Old Steve Jobs knew that. The IPAD. The IPHONE. The IPOD. Even though he went along with the price fix, he knew it is really all in the delivery.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Writing the Big Novel

Hmmm...about 571 pages into the Big Novel. Probably end up around a thousand. The interesting thing about the Big Novel is that it keeps growing out like an atomic mushroom cloud and instead of retracting as most novels do when you pass the halfway point, it just keeps growing. That is because the Big Novel does not play by the usual rules. Most novels just start and have a middle and an end. Very egg like. And you usually roll in around four hundred pages or so. And you can almost feel the arc and where it will end. The Big Novel follows none of these rules.

And so you are constantly stoking the fire and you have to put all your fears aside that naturally kick in. What if this thing just keeps going? Much like fission the fear is not that it will go off but that it won't stop going off. Then the second fear hits you which is: who the hell is going to want to read something this big? But of course that is ridiculous because predicting reading tastes has never been the purview of novelists.

So you roll along and watch the Big Novel grow. Eventually you figure it will run out of steam and start to close down. Because really, what goes up, must, eventually, come down. At least you hope it works that way.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Women Writing Big Books

A piece in the New York Times Book Review lamented that women are not taken seriously in the Big Book arena. That men are given preferential treatment for the literary heavyweight title and that women are relegated to relationship novels. I can see why some people may think this way but certainly as a male writer of literary fiction I sometimes wish I were a woman. Why? Because women read fiction and it would seem a natural fit for editors to choose a book by a woman over a man.

I get the top of the mountain stuff for the Big Book. I think it is probably given over to men in some way. Can a woman bring the world view into the Big Book that is required for someone to say...now there is a great literary novel that sums it all up. I would say yes, but that is sort of esoteric coin of the realm stuff. Most of us just want to keep getting published and read and let me tell you as a white male writer you feel sometimes you just cant get a fair shake.

Of course it is the work that matters. And so maybe all of this is frivolous talk about who gets preferential treatment in the grand sweepstakes of literary glory. I suppose women see men as still dominant in the Franzen top of the mountain epics...but for this writer, I sure wouldn't mind being the gender that loves to read fiction.

Being a man, I think I'm stuck.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Hunger Games for Authors

Hmmm...young adult his hot right now. Very hot. If you can write a YA novel that gets on board the Hunger Game juggernaut then you are set. The problem of course is that young adult novels were dead for a very long time until they wern't. The genre became inflamed with Harry Potter and it has been a red hot hand for YA authors ever since. You think writing a YA novel would be easier than writing an adult one but this is not true. Walking the line between what entices teens and adults is a strange blend of writing for different worlds.

You take the old books like Catcher in the Rye or To Kill a Mockingbird. Adult YA I would call them. Take Harry Potter. YA that adults can read too. The problem is that if you read YA novels a lot of them just aren't that good. They are written down for kids and read like army manuals. Many of these books are series if not all of them and they get progressively worse. So why is it that something like Hunger Games would catch? Well, kid gladiators. High concept plot maybe. Or just that strange weird thing called mystical kid appeal.

You cannot write for this market and not be in it. You have to live through your character and so you must find a portal into the young adult world. My first novel was YA but it was more traditional and did not ignite the minds of young adults the way later mystical dystopia novels would. Harry Potter books are wizards and magic and well written for their genre. To take aim at this market with the intent to make money brings on failure and disaster. You simply can't slot a book, though many try.

And so we watch over the fence as Hunger Games tears up the book selling world and now with the smash movie. Hey man. More power to that author. You never know what is going to hit and you never will.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Is The Big Book Dead?

On vacation with the inlaws in Florida and stumble over Don DeLillos Underworld in the library of a gated community center where some white guy is singing Louis Armstrong's What a Wonderful World and the Greatest Generation is applauding like mad and there is DeLillos monster novel among all the John LeCarre/Grisham debris and my thought is well at least it is some literature with a capital L among the slickies and the mystery novels the Greatest Generation prefers along with their Phantom of the Opera (which is what the one man show is ending up with) and so I grab it and head out into the warm night.

I had read White Noise a while back and couldn't stay with it. It felt dated and sort of turgid like a heavy car trying to get up a hill. But I wanted to take a crack at Underworld because I was writing a Big Novel myself and this was a Big Novel and my thought was there should be something here for one Big Novel man to instruct another Big Novel man fifteen years later. So I read the first chapter and it was entertaining and sprawling and big and had everything but the kitchen sink and of course DeLillo is a good writer and this is a big swipe at American life...but it felt, ultimately, like a big old building that had seen better days and better times.

And part of this is I am not a fan of post modern fiction ala DeLillo. It is just too big. Too... look how much I can write and how well I can write. I don't find this with Franzen novels. They are big but they don't feel like they take up a city block. Don DeLillo is the appointed great writer so you can see him writing like a great writer and building these monstrous novels, but I guess my question is do we care about Big Novels anymore? I mean do we really want to invest all this time in this Titanic that lumbers across the sea when in fact we could probably get across in a smaller sleeker boat?

I like to think the Big Novel is still relevant and Franzen gives me heart because his novels don't feel like a big lumbering whale although they are long. But there is something very immediate and and that saves them from the DeLillo big novel fate. And maybe this is unfair because Don's novel  is fifteen years old and it does feel like one of those books you find in the attic and you stare at the wall of prose like...wow...people read this...all of this! Or maybe it is  just the Mailer big foot white male writer time has passed.

I dunno...but I think I'm going to put Don back in the Community Center because I am only here a week and that is not enough for a Big Novel. Maybe Louis will be playing again and maybe I can find something shorter among the literature of the Greatest Generation. Probably not.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Novels as Commercials

Just read a novel that should have been a commercial. There were so many gang banger mainstream idioms that I surely could have been watching a commercial for Vans(which were probably mentioned twenty times as well as Timberlands) and maybe that is what it was. A very long YA commerical for hip hop gang banging dudes and dudesses who really could walk off the page and hawk some product with a yo  inference and then slink back into the book in their hoodies and Vans and cruise away sucking on jungle juice, giving us all "daps" and slouching into the fade away sunset.  CUT...that's a wrap.

The director was the only dude missing in the novel. But he or she was there in the editing looking for a hook. The bi-racial hook was the one used in this novel and one can see the plot slither away under the pressure of this editing. I don't think we need this...maybe a little more angst about being half black and half white...and so the author lays it on, but there is a fault line that gets violated. What was the authors original intent? What engine drove the story.

Books are written from the inside out and not the other way around. The problem with the publishing environment of today is that a lot of editors will tinker around and ignore the core of the novel and try and hang "popular" ornaments on the novel tree, but like a tree that is over decorated the book sags and eventually falls from the weight. These ornaments slow the book down and destroy the focus and worse they stand out as bogus...someone elses design other than the sculptor. And it happens all the time.

The author wants to get published. I get that. What is sad,  is that the original intent of the author , the thing that got he or she  to write the book in the first place is really the only chance for a book to take off.  Originality with a big O. You cannot fake it....though some try.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

No New Books under the Sun

Just had a friend tell me there is a book out very similar to the one I just finished. Whoa! You mean that book I just spent two years writing... someone else wrote? That is your first thought. So you scurry and download the sucker onto your Kindle because you want to find out if somehow somewhere somebody busted out your book before you could. Yeah the plot is similar. Heart pounding now you read along and the main character does seem like yours and now you are into the thick of the reviews and synopsis and yes there are more similarities and you might even think this book influenced yours, because the character and the plot and the action are all similar....but....it's not your book.

Not by a long shot. You didn't write it. This is not Hollywood. You did not just come up with the Horse Whisperer ala high concept plot that someone else can steal and then produce and you are out half a million on that screenplay that would have been produced. This is a novel.. And novels are individual. Period. When I wrote Tobacco Sticks everyone said it had been done. To Kill A Mockingbird. Trial.Twelve year old narrator. South. Racism. Nope. Been done. So the publishers kept saying right up to the auction with ten publishers bidding.

Why? Because there is nothing new under the sun in terms of plot, but there is everything new with every book. It is simply you. A book is your view, your voice, your breath. It is everything about you and somebody might write the same book, same plot, same characters, but it really doesn't matter. The reader doesn't care about that. Look at sequels. People know a sequel is the exact same story just done a little differently and they pay to see it again. Why? Because people are always up for a good story.

So when someone tells you, hey I just read a book like the one you just wrote. Say, yeah. I know. But it wasn't my book.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Advantages or Reading and Writing Fiction

The New York Times Sunday Review just had an article about the neuroscience of reading novels or fiction. The upshot is that reading fiction is good for your brain. Apparently all those neurons like the connotation of metaphors and description. Your brain lights up like its on crack from reading fiction and goes dark like a dead bulb watching television. But there is more. People who read fiction have more social intelligence and pick up on social cues faster. They seem able to decipher human relationships and understand people more quickly  as opposed to their nonfiction reading breathen. To those of us who have been reading and writing fiction for years there is nothing new here.

You always knew that your ability to finish other peoples sentences, pick the word for them while they said,..what that's word...I know it...was related somehow to all those books you read that no one else cared about. Or the way you could know somebody from a single sentence, gesture, nuance. It just happens like that. Reading fiction is probably the most intelligent thing anyone can do because as the NY Times article points out more of your brain is used in the process than sucking in information via digital land.This makes perfect sense.

You quickly saw your ability to speak when reading fiction shoot up. Reading a novel or a poem allows you to simply think faster. There is something totally engaging about a great story that probably allows your brain to play in a way it cannot when stuck in some turgid nonfiction task. Great fiction really gets you going because it engages your humanity and probably touches your soul. Now you are really getting a great bang for your buck from that novel...it is simply teaching you how to be.

And if you want to knock it down to a more utilitarian sense...fiction blows out your vocabulary and allows you to connect the dots quicker and understand situations faster that your non novel reading friends. So you can make the sale, get the friend, win the girl, and appear witty, conversant, and more than all that, well read.

What more can you ask of a book? Or a Kindle?

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Athletics of Writing

You start out by trying to wake up and get the brain going so you go for a run or a bike or something to flood the neurons with blood and get the connections going that make writing writing. The best plots laid while shooting down country roads or jogging paths or pumping under a big iron dumbbell. And then there is the shower to further get you into the world and getting dressed and then  it is time to fuel up. An article in the New York Times says that your brain is depleted by exercising, that the glycemic index plummets and then when you eat it ramps up sixty percent higher than before. Rocket fuel.

So now you are finishing up your eggs and toast and coffee. Two cups while you read your latest jumpstarter novel or short story to prime the pump. Pop the vitamins and read a little more and now you are buzzing. A lot of psychic steam is in play from thinking, exercise, food and caffeine. Close the book and walk upstairs to your garret. During all this prep you talk to no one. You watch nothing. Maybe a little low classical music to further wake up the brain. And now you are shutting the doors and drawing the blinds and sitting down at the chair in the darkened room.

Kick off the shoes and put your feet up on the legs of the chair and position the notebook with your latest notes and maybe some sugary cereal for an extra buzz and in go the ear plugs and you look at the page and go for two hours straight. You blast along like a madman letting all that psychic steam out and by the end you need the cereal and you finish your ten or fifteen pages and it is game over for the day. Now you spend the rest of the day reading and thinking and doing life things until you start all over and wake up the next day and wonder if you ever will write again.

But you do.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Book Clubs Get Fiery

Just did a ladies book club for Rocket Man and I expected it to be the normal give and take of any book club with questions about the writing process and themes. I don't know if it was the wine or what but these ladies came at me with both barrels. Why did I write a book about someone losing their home?  A lot of people keep their homes and don't shortsale them away they pointed out. True. True. It's fiction. But your character just keeps doing all the wrong things! He is so immature!

Now you may think fiction gives you a sort of bye on the I made it all up front. It doesn't. These ladies saw the main character ( a man hanging on the edge of a cliff financially, morally, losing his home, marriage_ as myself and they asked me if I was getting a divorce, if I really hated my father, if I was losing my house. I told them that I see things going on write about it and that I saw the American Dream in trouble and that was my theme. Huh!

Which brings the whole thing of suspension of disbelief. Rocket Man is about what is happening right now to people in their homes and so there is a natural inclination to say that is me! But in fact it is fiction but I think reality television has blurred the world in terms of what we think is true. The ladies at the book club never for a second believed I had made up this story of woe. "It is just too much like what is going on," one lady told me, pointing out that real fiction takes places in different times and different places. The novel of social commentary really didn't compute with her.

Anyway, it was a great time. But man, those book clubs can get rough!

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Quest for Writing Privacy

It is getting increasingly harder to isolate yourself for sustained writing which is writing a novel. I have no phone or Internet connection in my office but the day to day life of kids and work and logistics chases me like the long the tail of a kite. It is just harder and harder to disconnect. I use earplugs and a laptop with the Internet connection turned off. My one office is outside the home (Hemingway house) but a lot of times I just go up to the office over my garage. There is no entrance from the house and no phone. I sit down and close the blinds and put in my ear plugs and you would think that is enough. It isn't.

The UPS truck pulls up. Ding dong.  Hmmm...I wonder what that is? No matter back to the writing. Intense. Amazing. My neighbor rolls past with her trashcan then stops and talks with another neighbor. Incredibly I can hear them. I redouble my effort. Now I am really going. Very good. In the zone. Thump thump thump. I hear the steps like an executioner, the door opens and my wife faces a man in agony....WHAT? I need that phone number I asked you about earlier? NOW the man in obvious pain screams. Yes.

I get the number and the steps recede. Now...where was I. Yes.Yes. Moving again. Moving along. DO YOU WANT TO UPDATE YOUR MCAFEE VIRUS CONTROL? What? Where the hell did that come from I have no connection, some  cyber bomb built in by the software gurus...I know even if somebody goes off line we will hawk our product. I respond. NO! And the spy ware slips under the screen like a mole. Now...where was I. Oh yes....yes...yes...I am in the zone....yes...flowing again...perfection.

Dad?

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Television and Books

Bill O'Reilly is bringing out a sequel to Killing Lincoln aptly named Killing Kennedy. Henry Holt the publisher says that due to vigorous sales the second book should be well received. Billy uses a co writer and I would bet he is the writer seeing the big mans schedule. Popular history requires some research and this takes time and the writing takes time and thought and Billy (pardon to all O'reilly disciples) does not seem like the kind of guy who sits around and writes historical books. What Holt really loves of course is having his name on the book, they could care less if he pens one word.

Television has become the instrument of book selling. Every cable pundit has multiple books. Chris Matthews even hawks his own book on his show in a third person commercial "And it would make an excellent Christmas gift" You  could just see the publishers asking him for that plug. So it doesn't matter really who writes these books as long as the television personality can say it is theirs and plug it on their show. With publishing undergoing the equivalent of the Titanic going down (unsinkable) you cannot blame them for grabbing onto any piece of flotsam in the e-market sea.

Glenn Beck is a novelist and he sells well. Many Beck followers will plunk down the price of a hardcover and so we can expect a long line of Beck fiction. What does this say? Just that advertising is expensive and doesn't work and if you can use a television personality who is on the air night after night then there is a lot more bang for the book. To the victor belongs the spoils and certainly for the modern author one sure road to bestsellerdom is to have your own show.

Or at least stick your name on someones book who has a show. You will probably be doing the writing, but there are worse ways  to get on a bestseller list. I just don't know what they are.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Help Needs help

Watched half hour of The Help and turned it off. I committed the cardinal sin of watching a movie that I READ THE BOOK. The movie was just so over the top and so obviously slanted toward women and so Mad Men esq and so Southern The View/Devil Wears Prada/Dont We Look Great in sixties garb that it was nauseating with the overplayed saccharine accents that woman in Jackie Kennedy garb just cant help themselves doing and  beating us over the head with AREN'T WE THE PRETTIEST RACIST WOMEN YOU HAVE EVER SEEN. They needed some homely women at least to balance it out.

But it really was Hollywood. Hollywood ruined their own movie. Mary Steamburgen(sic) was ridiculous in her portrayal of the Jewish Editor sitting on her desk talking to someone who had never published anything like she had all the time in the world for budding writers who want to write radical books about racial relations in Mississippi. Sissy Spacek should have just kept drinking or playing bridge or whatever she was doing. Hattie McDaniels was rolling in her grave at the short distance Hollywood has traveled for black actresses. Mammy was more authentic in every way than the maids.

It turned into a Nora Ephron vehicle about Skeeters empowerment. Skeeter who screeched along under her mothers fierce eye and finally blows the whistle. She was about as believable as my left foot. So wide eyed so surprised, so obtuse at the revelations of racial mores in the society she had grown up in as a privileged white girl provided. The book did not suffer this way because the book could float into the readers mind and we could edit out the fluff and the dribble that did not pertain. Hollywood lives in fluff and drivel.

And it will sweep the Oscars. No doubt about it. I could see that in the twenty minutes I watched. Take women and put them in a racist time and give them kicking dresses and have them pee every five minutes (it seemed everyone was on the toilet) then you have a winner. I dunno. Maybe I'm jaded against Magnolia and lace and urine.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Mockingbird Film at Fifty

If you read the book then the film follows. I always felt the book was better. To Kill A Mockingbird was just so rich in atmosphere and literary sugar that the film always seemed a bit awkward to me. Maybe it is hard for Hollywood to hit the mark on Southern stories. There is Gone with The Wind and then there is what...Cat on a Hot Tin Roof...or Mississippi Burning...but Mockingbird is Gregory Peck. No doubt. Atticus Finch became him or he became Atticus Finch. But once you saw the movie you were stuck with Gregory Peck in your head.

Scout always seemed a little tougher than the girl in the movie. Jem probably was right. Dill was Truman Capote...good luck with that one. Boo Radley was Robert Duvall. He was awful good looking for Boo but he did seem deranged. But the set never seemed to do the book justice. It just didn't conjure up that small Alabama town in the Depression. And again the novel exists apart in time so Hollywood can only do what it can with lights and sets and actors.

Of course the story set the bar. After Mockingbird there followed a whole rash of bad Southern sheriffs in small towns picking on African Americans and Northerner's. And lots of courtroom scenes in hot stuffy Southern towns. Well it's a great motif and in Mockingbird the blend of a child narrator and the adult story is dead on perfect. There would follow many child narrators set in Southern towns as well (see Tobacco Sticks) But there I go talking about the book again.

I am glad there is a Mockingbird film and I am glad there was a novel. When I tried to get Harper Lee to review my novel Tobacco Sticks, I spoke with a man Roy who said he put the book on her nightstand. She never read it. I am glad. There is really only one Southern novel of racial injustice that is resolved by a man of conscience. And only one film.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Tobacco Sticks... Explosive racial tension  and a dramatic denouement in a sweaty Virginia courtroom are entwined in this haunting tale, which has all the characteristics of a good summer read. Publishers Weekly

The Sword of Age

In this country it is all about those two numbers that correspond to that weird date on your birth certificate where you left the cosmos and started your life on the planet earth. And from that day on the bastards started tracking you. They  just had to know how many years had passed since the day that nurse spanked you on the ass and you screamed out in protest because you had just left this nice warm dark place and you intuited that from here on out it was every man or woman for him or herself.

And so you tooled along and went along with the birthday parties where they made this big deal about this number and gave you presents and cake and ice cream and you were down with it because it all worked in your favor and who cared about a little number anyway? Then the little number started to grow and the birthdays changed. Not so many presents or cake and ice cream ,but still everyone wanted to always know what that number was. In fact it was the first question out of a lot of peoples mouth a lot of time.

And then somewhere it started to become this thing around your neck. People didn't seem to care about your birthday at all anymore, just the little number. And you noticed people used the little number against you especially if their number was smaller. And the weird thing was that people always guessed your number about ten years off. Thinking your number was ten years light. But they always persisted and had to know...really what is your number...how old are you really?

And then you realized at at point that number was a sword. They couldn't get you any way else. People a lot dumber than you, slower, uglier, still wanted to know that number. And so you start to lie to them. Just to piss them off. And they would look dismayed. But i thought you were...nope. Not that number, this number. Really? Oh yeah. My number is less than yours. And you leave them there wondering, staring at you and you think to yourself, fuck em.

I mean, what's in a number, really?

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man...funniest novel since Straight Man...Chicago Sun Tiimes

Authors and the Fight Between Amazon and Barnes and Noble

There is a big fight going on between Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Basically Amazon is trying to squash traditional book publishing with the Kindle and Barnes and Noble is fighting back and saying they are Custers last stand between traditional publishing and the cold windy streets of Ebooks. Authors are in the middle but according to the NY Times article we will suffer if BN goes down because people will quit buying books and we will be left with our little downloads to make a living. That would suppose authors are making a living now.

The one percent rule applies here. About one percent of the authors make all the money and the rest scramble for the crumbs. Shelf space is the dividing line and if you cannot get shelf space in a store then you do not exist. You may be one great writer but there are only so many slots or so much space in a store and your book might not make the cut. So you have effectively disappeared. Or you never got up to bat in the first place. Getting a book of fiction published has never been easy and now it is something like winning the lotto (except for the money of course)

So where does that leave authors. Wellllll (as Ron Paul would say) you know having an ebook out there might not be like having a real book but it beats the alternative: oblivion. And I don't mean you are not still writing oblivion, I mean you are still writing very good books that you simply cannot get published or get onto the shelves. So you really don't exist. And that is a very real fate for most authors in the old paradyme. Not to say we all don't want the book published route, but if presented with some water verus no water in a desert, I will take the few drops offered.

So who knows if BN will win. The big authors do have a lot to lose. They are making real money. The literary mid list fiction writing authors probably will do better in an Amazon dominated world. At the very least they will get their books out there and if they hustle and word of mouth gets going, they might even sell. And they can have all the shelf space they want.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man...one word...plastics

The Big Book

You think in terms of smaller books. They are easier to sell and handle. Big books not so much. They are scary because you are investing time and energy in something a lot of people will tell you not to write. Big Books are The Corrections or Freedom or The Art of Fielding. You are trying to get your arms around the whole picture and that's a hard thing to do. And it is physically demanding

You cant just sluff up to the writing table. You cannot do a few things at once. The big book requires everything you have and then some. Very athletic. It is physically longer, maybe two or three hundred thousand words. It is psychically more demanding because you have to stay big picture even as you dive down into intimate scenes. And it is a longer time commitment....writing a first draft for at least a couple hours a day or more if you can keep from burning out.

But there is that challenge. You want to challenge yourself and see if you can pull of the big book. You probably only have one shot at it in a lifetime. And you can only do it when you feel you are ready physically, emotionally and financially. So you do it. You go for it. In a way, you will never be better. Even if you fail

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man...a story of one mans war with suburbia

Serial Sex Murders and the State of Publishing

I had  a friend say to me he was glad he had published his two books when he did and gotten the contract he did then because now it would be impossible Maybe that is why a film company is bringing out a 3D version of The Great Gatsby. They said it would allow them to give a faithful telling of the novel by bringing a stage quality (3D) to the film. Hmmm. Or like my dad said the other day, the only  people getting published are those that do something notorious (branding/celebrity) and suggested I go ride a motorcycle off a mountain or leap from this planet to the next and write a book about it. Thanks dad.

But if you are a fiction writer then there is a bit of feeling of yelling into a void. It would seem that Fitzgerald might reach more people in his 3D format than the original pulp version. Or that might friend might not get the contract he got before or maybe I really should jump into the next universe and write about it. But certainly a lot of the rules governing fiction might be on their head between the Kindle, the economy, and the more brazen publish somebody famous and play it safe.

Saying all that you have to believe good fiction by unknown writers is still being published. I remember a letter I received when I first started out and she said I had a good novel (an agent) but that serial sex murderers are what get published now. But for me to keep at it, "quietly good books do get published" One would like to believe that but maybe that quietly is the undoing of it all now. Quietly might not suffice in the age of the Internet.

We live in a loud polymorphic culture of multiple stimuli. I run my UVERSE from my phone and DVR movies while I  sit in the dentist office so I hae them to watch when I get home. That is a lot of  options to have in the palm of ones hand. And yet there those novels I still flip off the television to go read. I am a writer, so I may be the exception, but maybe those "quiet books" are the ones that people will still seek out. But you have to have a publisher take a chance on those people who will turn from the media of the age.

I have to say though, a good story should be the determining factor. As a novelist you have to cling to that notion and ignore everything else. So in a way I guess I am back to to battling it out with the serial sex murders with the book quietly published. Let's hope it still gets published.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

It's called Fiction Folks

That question.You get it on the tip of the tongue. So what do you do supplement your incom? It is asked as the innocent probe sandwiched in there with how are the kids. And you treat it the same way. Oh, a little of this and that because what they are really asking is how do you keep writing? Why are  you not working a job like I am? And they are pleasant. You still have your house? My last novel was about a man who was losing his house and a financial wreck. Rocket Man It's called fiction.

But in the reality of our reality age there is no line anymore. Of course you are writing about yourself otherwise why would you write? So I get the looks, the side glances. Does your wife work? No. That throws them off but they keep coming. Well I hope you are still with her and she can put up with someone like you. Where do you go with that one.. But the last novel also had a crappy marriage at the center. Again, you surely are not writing about someone else!

Writers get this kind of stuff  all the time. It goes with the territory. So is your dad really that much of an asshole. Did you really blast off all those rockets? Did you really cut down the sign to your subdivision? Oh your poor wife. So when are you moving? Do you really hate the suburbs that much? And what other jobs do you work?

It called fiction folks. Remember. Suspension of disbelief. You make it up. Right. Sure you do.

www.billhazelgrove.com