Suspense builds!

In an odd conflation of life events, jury duty on the federal court in Little Rock, Arkansas beckons just as my book's big release is set to become a reality.  As I write this, it's Sunday, September 21, and in a few hours I make a call to a Little Rock number to find out if I must show up for duty on Monday morning.  If so, let's hope it's a quick and easy case! In the meantime, I eagerly anticipate Island Fog becoming available to order on Amazon any day now.  The official release date is, and has been, October 1, but my publisher Lavender Ink will likely make it available this week to satisfy demands for early ordering.  (In any case, one can already order the book through the Lavender Ink website.)  To top it all off, in the week of September 28-October 4 my university hosts two major visiting authors as well as a host of other speakers as we launch our first ever festivities in honor of National Diversity Awareness Month.  I am one of the co-organizers--and thus co-administrators--of the festivities.  Talk about a lot on your plate!  It's all good, but it's all huge too.

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Pre-release reviews and other online activity seem to pop up every day or so.  At the end of last week I was notified of a review on the Oh My Bookness blog as well as the publication of a short "Books by the Bed" segment I was kindly asked by writer Cheryl Olsen to submit to the website We Wanted To Be Writers.  (The idea is to talk about what books are next to your bed or just were or will be shortly.)  She has also kindly agreed to review my book in the next couple of weeks.  Thank you so much, Cheryl.

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Forgive another obnoxious reminder--maybe my last one!--that a Goodreads giveaway contest for Island Fog is still ongoing.  The end of the contest is imminent, however.  You only have until the last day of the month to enter.  Click this link for a chance to win one of three giveaway copies.

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I can't know what jury service will look like or how long it will last, but I hope to write you next week with more details about UCA's weeklong festival in honor of National Diversity Awareness month.  The bad news is that both the idea of a Diversity Awareness month and our on-campus activites are long overdue.   The good news is that we have a fantastic lineup planned.  This lineup includes world-class creative talents like fiction and nonfiction writer Bernard Cooper (The Bill from My Father, Guess Again, Truth Serum) and poet Jericho Brown (The New Testament, Please); also, the exhibition of a segment of the AIDS Memorial Quilt; a lecture on the origin and turbulent history of Conway, Arkansas's Pride Parade; artifacts from and a lecture on the late gay novelist Peter McGehee and his dark comedies of manners; the screening of two landmark documentaries about LGBT culture: Paris is Burning (1990) and The New Black (2013); a first ever reading put on by members our campus's LGBT organization, Prism; and a reading organized by Sibling Rivalry Press, a renowned and deeply respected publisher--located right here in central Arkansas, by the way--of many gay and lesbian writers.  If you're in the area the week of September 28-Oct 4, check it out!  If you're just interested in finding out more, contact Dr. Gayle Seymour (GayleS@uca.edu) or Joshua Miller (JDMiller@uca.edu) in the office of the Dean of the College of Fine Arts and Communication, University of Central Arkansas.

Island Fog giveaway starts today!

The official countdown for the October 1 release of my linked story collection Island Fog, published by Lavender Ink in New Orleans, starts today!   Beginning today and continuing until the release date, I am running a giveaway promotion on Goodreads.  Shortly thereafter I will be mailing free copies of the book to three lucky Goodreads users.  If you aren't a member of Goodreads already, you really need to be.  (Because if you read this blog I know you're a book lover.)  Unlike some social networking sites, I find myself coming back to Goodreads over and over.   

So how do I enter the giveaway?  Easy.  Just follow this link, and you'll be there.   Click on the "Enter to Win" button, provide your contact information, and you are officially entered!  

 

I'm excited, not just for my book, which I am deeply proud of, but for this chance to get it into the hands of someone who's curious about it and wants to dive in.  Or just into the hands of someone who loves books!  

Good luck to everybody who enters.  I'm eager to see who wins! 

Two years later . . .

[This post originated on my newer blog Payperazzi.  Check out that blog for my latest musings on writing, the writing life, and teaching writing.  I'm publishing it here too on Creating Van Gogh because I first mentioned this subject (briefly) in a CVG post a couple years back.  Consider this an update and a coda.]

Two years ago, I was all set to go into the movie business.  Well, sort of.  Here's what happened.  Early in the summer of 2012 I was contacted by an actress in London, one with reasonably serious stage and screen credits to her name.  In between acting jobs this actress had been serving as an assistant producer on some films.  Now she wanted to produce a film of her own, a short.  And she wanted to base that short on my story "My Word," which she had just read in the online journal Literary Mama.  What's more, if all went will with the short film, she wanted to expand the short into a feature.  You can imagine my surprise and delight.  A film?  Of my story?  Maybe a feature?! This opportunity felt like it had dropped out of heaven and into my lap.   The whole thing was as bizarre and amazing and exhilerating as it was unexpected.  After all, although I have a strong and abiding interesting in writing plays--and in the entire art of stagecraft--I've never, unlike so many of my undergraduate students, had the least interest in writing a screenplay or getting involved in the business of putting a movie together.  And yet here was this movie-making opportunity; from a credible, connected source.  I wasn't about to say no.   And I didn't.

Due to various delays--some unavoidable; some which struck me as quite avoidable--it took two months before the actress had a contract to show me.  But finally in early August she faxed it to me, and I signed it.  The contract would cover a period of two years.  And it would only apply to the short.  I wouldn't be paid for my story, but I would receive co-producer credit on the film, and my specified duties would include reviewing and commenting on the screenplay, which she was determined to write herself.  (I had asked around to various people in the know, and what I heard was that with a short film the writer usually just gives the story away for the sake of publicity.  "But," the same gurus said, "if she does decide to make a feature you need a new contract, one that pays you actual money.  Because if it's a feature there's going to be more money involved.")  After the delays in getting the contract finalized it looked like the project was finally about to take off.  The actress was begining a three week vacation (in America, ironically), and she had decided that it was to be a writing vacation.  In a phone call from her vacation spot, she told me that she would have a screenplay ready to show me in a week.  And she was certain that the film would not only be started but in the can in no more than a year.  Sounded great.

I checked in with her via email after a week, only to be told that she hadn't actually started writing yet.  But she was about to, she said; I should give her another week.  When I checked in the next week, however,  she said she had encountered some problems in the writing and had decided to read a novel by John Steinbeck to give her some ideas on structure.  Hmmm.  Okay.  When I emailed her a week after that I received no reply.  At some point she must have shut down her vacation and flown back to England, but she did so without sending any further word about the supposedly imminent screenplay.   That fall I emailed her semi-regularly--just light, friendly messages--hoping for good news.  I didn't actually ask about the screenplay; I just wanted to keep lines of communication open.  Mostly she didn't respond to my messages, but sometimes she did.   She only addressed the screenplay once.  She said she still hoped to get to it, but she had two or three other projects to get to first.  Oh.  Eventually she stopped responding to my emails altogether, so I just let it go.   If she really did want to do this movie, I figured, she would contact me.  But she didn't.

And she hasn't.

Now, two years later, the movie project based on my short story appears to have been long since scuttled without ever having been launched.  And now that the contract has expired there's little to no chance of the project being resurrected.  Every now and then I check the actress's IMDb resume of acting and producing gigs, in hopes of noticing some reference to our film.  But nothing's been added to her resume in over a year, so I have to wonder if she's even in the business anymore.   I guess so far this post makes me sound bitter.  Maybe I am; just a little.  But, honestly, not that much.  Even when it appeared that all systems were go and my story was about to generate a movie, the project didn't feel real to me.   It felt instead like some kind of pretend amendment to my life.  To my actual life--the one with my family--but also, just as importantly, to my writing life: which is about composing fictions.  (Btw, that August, while I was waiting on the screenplay that never came, I did reconfigure "My Word" as a one-act play.  I wanted to be able to imagine it as words and movements only, in order to be better prepared to "consult" when the time came.  I didn't really write it in order to be performed, but I did publish it last year in the online journal Foliate Oak.)

Looking back on this curious episode, I'm tempted to try to draw some lesson from it.  But the only lesson I can draw is one I already knew at the time.  That is: Know who you are and keep doing what you do.  After all, it's the only thing that's really yours; the only thing you can control.  Even as I emailed and phone conferenced with the actress, even as I hoped for and looked forward to her screenplay, even as I prepared myself to help with it, even as I was disappointed that it never came,  I kept working on stories.  I wrote new stories; I revised previous ones.  It's who I was.  It's who I am.  It's what I do.  Now, two years later, I have a book of short stories called  Island Fog forthcoming from Lavender Ink press in New Orleans, and I couldn't be happier.  Lavender Ink is clearly serious about the project.  Lavender Ink has promotional plans.  Heck, Lavender Ink answers my emails!  And still, even as I busy myself this summer with marketing work on the book--lining up reviews in magazines and on blogs, drawing up plans for a late fall book tour, consulting with the woman who will be designing my website--I'm composing new stories.  It's who I am.  It's what I do.  Any life and any career will encounter setbacks.  This includes a writing career.  And with a writing career the best way--the only way, I think--to handle any setback is to keep writing.  It's hard to concentrate on, or even remember, bitterness from a lost opportunity when you're engaged in creating a new story with new characters and all new oppoertunites.   The story of your last story falls away and all you see is the story of the new one: the potential there and the pleasure.  Suddenly you're thinking not about the recent past but the future, the future of this story.  After all, in two years who knows where it could be?

Why we write together

[This post originated in my newish blog Payperazzi.  I crosslist it here on Creating Van Gogh, for the sake of CVG readers and also because I provide some news about my forthcoming book Island Fog, half of which is made up of historical fictions.]

In a recent commentary in The New York Times, Bonnie Tsui discusses her lifelong difficulties writing around other people and her recent breakthroughs doing just that.  (Thanks, by the way, to Erika Dreifus for another great reading recommendation.)  Interestingly, one of Tsui's discoveries stems from the fact that when she is around other people she talks more than she writes.  But that, it turns out, is a good thing.  The talking lets her flesh out various possibilities in a piece and thus decide what it is a right path and what a false trail without wasting several hours of writing before coming to the same conclusion.  (I'm not sure if, for a fictionist, any writing is truly wasted--but that's a discussion for another day.)  More intriguing is Tsui's past reasons for resisting writing in groups and the fact that despite these reservations she finally found value in it.  Some of the reasons--e.g., fear that someone will steal one of her ideas--seem almost amateurishly overblown (nothing is more commonplace than an idea); other reasons--such as the fear of distraction--strike me as more realistic.  The bottom line, though, is that Tsui has discovered a generous, supportive community that not only gives her important feedback on her work but informs her about, and connects her to, many important aspects of the writing world that lay beyond her narrow personal focus: readings, conferences, classes, etc.  Tsui has discovered that writing is both solitary and social; that the two aspects can and do feed each other.

Since in just about every class I teach I make my students spend at least some in-class time generating new material, I was heartened by Tsui's essay.  I can't remember when I first started making my students produce original work in class--I was never made to do this myself as an undergrad or a grad--but it has come to seem essential to me.  This is especially so in a forms class, in which I lead the students through a series of specifc fictional or non-fictional or poetic forms, and I want to make sure that they actively try every form we cover.  But no matter what the class, I always set aside in-class writing time.  In my mind, it's as central to a creative writing class as workshopping.  After all, if one takes a class in painting or dancing or acting or playing the piano, one expects to paint, dance, act, or play the piano in class.  One would feel cheated if denied the chance to do so.  So why should it be any different for a writing class?  Just as with painting or dancing, it's a matter of working on one's craft.  A minute spent practicing writing is about the best minute a writer can hope for, and the minute in which the writer learns the most.  And if one does that writing in the company of others and then shares that work with others--or at least hears about it from others--one learns not only about his or her own work but about someone else's and about the genre at large.  The learning is multiplied.

I always write along with my students, and I look forward to those days more than any other on the schedule.  First, as anyone who has taken a creative writing class can tell you, doing nothing but workshopping each other's stories or essays or poems all semester long can wear you out and finally even sap your creativity (because you're exercising your analytical and not your creative self).  Meanwhile, doing nothing but reading the work of masters, while an extremely valuable activity, turns the class into a literature course.  Having the element of on-site creativity affords a crucial pedogogical element of pause, of rest, of reenergizing, of rediscovery.  And far from being "just crap"or "just writing," what my students generate in class often becomes what they work on for their formal assignments.  Often what I write in class leads to a finished and published story.  I can't tell you how valuable that time has been for my career.

Over the years, nearly all my students have appreciated this in-class writing time, even my graduate students (and never more than when I teach Novel Writing Workshop). But of course this is not always the case.  Most years there is a student or two who turn their noses up at the practice, as if they are too good to waste precious time wrting in the presence of plebes.  Yes, as you can tell from my description, these students don't simply not want to write in class but, almost to a man--and they are always men--believe that they are better than that.  They glance around the room, at the other students and me--our heads bent over notebooks or laptops--with a caustic smile on their face, as if we are all dupes, or beginners carrying out grade school games.  Their writing time, you see--unlike everybody else's apparently--is special, holy, inviolate.  It must be done entirely in priviate--like some cultic religious function--or it can't get done.  In fact, again, to a man, that's what they tell me when I question them about their in-class inactivity: I have to write alone.  I became so quickly tired of this attitude that years ago I installed in my syllabus a warning (yes, I felt I had to warn them) that--gasp--we would actually be writing in this writing course.  I would remind them that my department existed in a College of Fine Arts, an arm of the university where creativity was routinely expected in classroom settings (painting, playing, dancing, etc.) and no excuses were afforded.  Finally, I felt I obliged to add this sentence:  "Being writers, this prospect ought to excite not discourage you."  

And that's really what it comes down to for me.  Of course writing is a solitary activity.  And I am someone who typically tries to keep distractions to a minimum when I write.  I don't write to music (although the vast majority of my students do); I don't write with the television or talk radio on; I don't try to write and text at the same time; I even like to keep the internet out of the way, unless I need to quick research a point directly related to what I'm working on.  I am by nature quite the solitary person.  But I learned easily enough, as soon as I started asking my students to, to compose while in the company of twenty or more people.  You do that by not being so much into yourself and about yourself and your holy rituals as into and about the work at hand.  You let the work at hand take you away.  And that can happen anywhere, in any company, no matter how large or small in number.   Finally--finally--you need to get over yourself.  That's what it's about.  For the good of your own writing, your own development, you need to.  And that includes the attitude the you can't ever learn from the people sitting in class with you; and the attitude that you can never learn a new way of composing.   To me, the writer who can't summon the necessary power of concentration to be compose--and I mean compose meaningfully--in a group of others is not more of a writer but less of one.  He is not able to do what others clear can do, and even enjoy doing.  His proud resistance is revealed to be less that of a genius than that of a misanthrope.  And perhaps, for all his haught, an insecure one at that.  Fortunately, with every year I see fewer of these types of students.  Perhaps initiatives like NaNoWriMo, with its big fat group writing parties, has shown young people the value of writing together.  Or perhaps this generation of students has just been been better taught how to work in a collaborative fashion, or at least in group settings.  But so far there are still the tenacious holdouts.  God bless them, I hope for their own sakes they leave aside the tiresome role of lone wolf, roaming the woods at night in search of inspiration, and allow themselves a step into the sunshine of immediate generation.

Quick personal note: I had a wonderful vacation last week in South Dakota, specifically in Custer State Park in the middle of the Black Hills region.  I'd never been to the Black Hills, or even to the state, before.  And now I won't ever forget it.  (Trying to figure how we can import buffalo herds down here to Arkansas.)   

Follow-up to my book marketing post:  Several weeks ago I put up a post that highighted all the marketing and promotion work I'd taken on for the sake of my book of linked stories, called Island Fog, which will be out in October from Lavender Ink press.  The last few weeks, thanks to a great reference book my wife gave me, I've been researching hundreds of book bloggers, national and international.  (Yes, I am pleased to report, there are hundreds of them out there.)  As a result, I contacted 65 or so to ask if they wanted to read and review Island Fog.  To date, 25 of these bloggers have said yes!  This is better than I could have anticipated, and now I can't wait to see the results.  A few of them are ready to go right away and I have to tell them, "Wait, it's not available for sale until October!" So I talk them down to September. I'm so glad I'm doing this all in advance.  (And I have to thank my publisher for the timely kick in the pants to get going.)  Hopefully Island Fog will be blogged galore come fall.  I'll let you all know.  

The Circuitous Tale of a (Finally) Successful Book, Part 1

I've mentioned here and there on this blog that I've created a collection of stories--half historical in nature--all set on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts.  I received the wonderful news not long ago that the book has been accepted for publication by Dialogos/Lavender Ink, a press run by the legendary poet and novelist Bill Lavender, who worked for so long for the University of New Orleans press.  (Yes, that's him in the picture.) As a general rule I hesitate to say that everything happens when it's supposed to--because that's kind of like saying everything happens according to God's will (which is a lie)--but in the case of Island Fog being accepted for publication, I have to say that I am glad it's happening now rather than, say, five years ago.  And thus begins my tale of how this collection came to be.  I'm going to break it into two parts, because the tale will take some time.

I started several of the stories in Island Fog perhaps twelve or thirteen years ago--during a trip I made with my family to Nantucket.  As is my wont, I was up before everyone else each day, trying to get a little writing done along with downing some come-alive coffee.  I hadn't planned on writing about Nantucket before I went, but ideas for stories just started coming to me.  In fact, I had so many story ideas--and was so afraid I might lose them--that I did something I've never done before: I started a brand new story each day of that vacation, writing as far into a story as I could before the family awoke and then leaving that story behind to begin a new story the next day.  In this fashion I laid down the tracks for the stories that now make up the second half of my present book.  But I hardly thought of them as a book back then.  They were just stories I wanted to nail in place in order to get back to later.  And I did, struggling mightily to read my atrocious handwriting, which turns from ordinary small/bad to illegible during the fury of engaged composing.

Eventually, I finished every one of those stories and in the years that followed I edited them mercilessly, revised a few significantly, and kept sending them out to various magazines.  A few were accepted and were long ago published (but not the title story, one of my favorites, which is one of the many reasons I'm so happy the book will appear).  A story about a plumber who hears some painful facts about his wife's death during a breakfast at a diner was published in 2005 in the now defunct Dana Literary Society Online Journal; a story about a couple struggling through the emotional fallout of several failed pregnancies was published in the journal Oasis, also in 2005; a story about a ghost tour leader haunted by his former male lover was accepted by Seattle Review and, after a wait of numerous years, finally appeared in 2009. 

It wasn't too long after the Nantucket stories began to be accepted by journals that it occurred to me I had a neat little set that could form a solid portion of a story collection.  Not enough pages to make a whole collection, but perhaps a half.  So I gathered together some non-Nanucket stories I thought worked all right together and combined them with the Nantucket stories to make a book I called--tah-dah!--Island Fog.  To the non-Nantucket stories I added the section header "Off-Island"--using stories that I thought had an enhanced sense of place--and the Nantucket stories were given the section header "On-Island."  Very clever, I thought.  The headers, and the organizational strategy they highlighted, would make this disparate group of fictions seem to belong together.  Well, in truth they didn't.   At least not enough to convince me or any of the many contests and small presses I submitted the book to.  Not knowing what to do, deciding the collection was a misft, I finally put it aside.  I didn't do anything with it for a long time except to occasionally submit one of the Nantucket pieces to a seemingly appropriate journal.

Well, what should happen except that I returned to Nantucket in 2011--for the first time in several years--having more or less finished my Van Gogh novel, having started this blog, and suddenly having historical fiction on the brain.  Lots of new ideas for Nantucket stories came to me, except this time all of them were historical in nature.  Like the first time, I started as many of the stories as I could while I was on the island, but I think I only managed to get three underway.  Later I drafted a fourth and, still later, a fifth. Certain characters I just could not get out of my head.  I had to write them: a retired whale ship captain who long ago was stranded at sea and forced into cannibalism (inspired, I know, by the real life story of George Pollard, commander of the Essex); a whaling widow who feels the first inklings of lesbianism; an African-American schoolteacher walking through some mid-island streets on a foggy afternoon, early in the twentieth century; a self-satisfied twelve year old, the son of a sheep farmer, who has befriended a half-Indian boy early in the nineteenth century.  I fleshed out these characters' stories, having a ball with them, and at some point--I can't remember when-- it occurred to me: I've got a new Island Fog book now.  The real Island Fog.

Next post: The process of getting done, getting it out, and getting it accepted.