Tag Archives: writing process

Joshilyn Jackson, Author

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Joshilyn Jackson, Novelist

Titles and Book Covers. They go together like bearded ladies and clowns at a crowded circus. It’s what catches your eye when you’re browsing through the library and Barnes & Noble or scrolling on Amazon and Kobo. It’s what first caught my eye when I came across gods of Alabama by Joshilyn Jackson. Don’t you just love that title (with the small g for gods), and the cover, which showed a retro photo of a woman driving down the road in a convertible.

But, the writing in-between the covers is what made me a fan of this author. It soon becomes obvious to the reader that this is a writer who enjoys her own stories!

Joshilyn Jackson is a New York Times bestselling novelist of five books, and gods of Alabama was her first. According to the Library Journal in their starred review of her first book: “Forget steel magnolias—meet titanium blossoms in Jackson’s debut novel, a potent mix of humor, murder, and a dysfunctional Southern family.”

But, she didn’t stop there, and she has kept on producing novels that exhibit wit, warmth, stories of love and betrayal. Everything you want in a book. Her latest is A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty (pub. 2012), which has recently come out in paperback.  The Atlanta Magazine  calls it… “her latest Southern Gothic joyride, Joshilyn Jackson creates an unforgettable story…brilliant.”

Her books have been translated into a dozen languages, won SIBA’s novel of the year, twice been a #1 Book Sense Pick, and twice been shortlisted for the Townsend prize.

Below is the interview.

1) You were on the February 2011 cover of Vanity Fair with other Southern authors such as Kathryn Stockett (The Help), Susan Rebecca White (Bound South), Karin Slaughter (Best selling Crime writer), and Natasha Trethewey, the 2007 Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry, as well as others. What do you believe sets this group apart as a literary group? Do you feel there is an influence from previous Southern writers like Katherine Porter, Shirley Jackson, Eudora Welty, Alice Walker?

I’m not sure we are a literary group. I mean, you’re looking at the Poet Laureate of the United Freakin’ States right there. And, you know, me. So. That’s quite a spectrum already when you look at just TWO of us.

I think it’s a hugely diverse group, and the ONLY thing that makes us a group is location. We all have our own IT we need to say, and we are trying to say our it in exactly our own ways. But, yeah, Atlanta is chock full of talented women doing a vast array of fascinating things with words right now. That’s  true in music and visual arts, too—-Atlanta has a pulsing, living, visceral female art scene. I don’t say this to discount major talents like David Bottoms or Joseph Skibell just because they have outies instead of innies. But Atlanta is FAT AND GLORIOUS with women  writers who are blowing my mind in a variety of ways—I think the point of the Vanity Fair piece was to show a small selection of us that represented the broadness of female interests, styles, themes, and voices happening right here, right now.

As for the history of Southern women writers—well that’s a rich, loamy patch of earth to come of age in, for all of us.


2) Do your books come out the way you intended them?  Or do they get away from you during the creative process the character goes one way when you thought they should have gone the other way?

They never come out as I intend. That illusion happens, yes, where I feel the book has its own life and is now haring off in new direction without bothering to inform me first so I could pack the proper footwear for the climate… I’m a straight up organic writer, and it is an inefficient and ridiculous way to try and make a book. It’s also the only that works for me.



3) You’ve indicated your first novel is still under your bed, and never to be published. How do you think working your way through that unpublished work led you to your first published book, gods in Alabama?

Two of ‘em, actually. I may at some point make them available for DL on my website, if people are interested. I don’t want to take a year or two to revise them into something more like what I write now—I have too many books I want to write to go backwards and try to re-care about these. They are what they are. They are not perfect, but I love them, and I am grateful to them. Writing them let me learn how to write a book. The only way to learn to write a book is to read a million of them and then sit down and write one. But the learning curve is big. It takes years. Some people write and rewrite the same book for five or ten years and at the end of that time, they know how. I chose to write one book after another, and it took the same amount of time.


4) Writing dialogue is hard enough for writers, but you manage to get that “Southern” voice into your characters so well. Do you have suggestions to others on how to do this in their writing (whether Southern, Northern or Japanese, Cuban, etc) ?


Read aloud! I read everything aloud multiple times. If you want to catch your own regional voice, listen to yourself reading it. Some people can’t hear themselves, so if it doesn’t work for you,  get someone ELSE to read it to you. If you are writing in your native tongue, you can hear where it goes wrong much more quickly than you can see it.



5) Your characters are quirky, likable, intelligent and usually go against the norm of society. When you are starting out on an idea for a book, do you come up with a character first, or the idea of a plot?   For instance,  the character, Ro Grandee in Backseat Saints was a minor character in gods in Alabama so how did Ro come about as a fully developed person hightailing it out of Texas with her trusty dog, Fat Gretel? (Loved that cover btw!)

Oh thank you — That’s so kind. Rose was a pushy little object from the very beginning. When I was first writing gods in Alabama, I planned her as “Jim’s Girlfriend” and felt she would be a very minor character. She did not appear in the draft until chapter 6, but as I wrote what I thought would be her single scene, it kept streeeeetching until the whole chapter was riddled with her. She is such an instigator! Big Trouble loves Rose and Rose loves Big Trouble right back. I realized I needed her energy and drive to start off the action in chapter 1; I went back and revised to make Rose Mae be the push that sends Arlene careening home to Alabama.
 
By the time I finished gods, Rose had insinuated herself all through the book, and I suspected even then that I wasn’t finished with her—or perhaps she wasn’t finished with me. About two years before I wrote BACKSEAT SAINTS, I woke up in the middle of the night. I had been dreaming about her. I shook my sleeping husband and said, “Honey! I just realized, everything Rose Mae Lolley says in gods in Alabama is a lie, and now I know why she is really looking for Jim Beverly.” He said, “Hi! It is 3 AM!” He passed out again, but I stayed up the rest of the night writing little snatches of what would become this book, trying to catch her voice.

6) Do you think your background in theater was an influence on your writing style, and if so, how?

I think my acting background has had a huge effect on my writing. The only thing that has influenced my writing more was becoming a mother. I think the most important tool actors and novelists share is a facility for empathy. Some people are born with a huge facility for empathy, but I was not. I learned it, working as an actor, and I learned it more deeply when I had babies.



7) Your most recent book, A Grown Up Kind Of Pretty, is a mystery with the discovery of a backyard burial and involves the complex relationship of a family of women, the Slocumbs. How do see yourself as evolving as a writer with this fifth book? Does writing get any easier for you?

No, never. It gets harder, in fact, as I want to make sure I am not obsessing and worry warting my same tropes into nubs. Of course, as a writer, I have areas that continue to interest me thematically—redemption, motherhood, brokenness, the mechanics of grace…These are the things I explore, but I want to make sure it is progressive. The questions I try to explore with story have to be the ones driving me now, not the ones that drove me five years ago.

I tell you what, I am more interested in MEN all of a sudden. I have been writing about women, mostly female characters, female relationships, for 5 books now. The last male narrator I wrote was in one of my “under the bed” books.

But in A GROWN UP KIND OF PRETTY there is a male/female best friendship between a weedy little big-headed kid named Roger and the youngest Slocumb, Mosey. I got so obsessed with them. I LOVE all their scenes together, all their dialogue and their interplay makes me SO happy. They crack me up and they break my heart. I think I wrote the whole book, in some ways, for a scene near the end involving Roger and Mosey’s left booby. If you read the book, you know the line I mean. I wrote more than 94 thousand words to get to write that line, writing toward it, waiting for it, hoping it would happen. I still shamelessly adore it.

8: What are you working on now?

The book I am writing now has two narrators who meet when they are caught in a hostage situation. Both are inside a Circle K when a man comes in to rob it. One is a 21 year old college student raising a three year old son; she has experienced a Virgin birth. The other is 30 something geneticist who recently lost his family. He emphatically does not believe in miracles. The girl, Shandi, begins their story, by saying, “I fell in love with William Ashe at gunpoint, in a Circle K.”

Now, each of them has a close friend. Shandi’s is a poet named Walcott. William’s is a divorce attorney named Paula. In a lot of ways, the Shandi/ Walcott, and William/ Paula relationships grew OUT of Mosey and Roger, because I was not finished exploring the mechanics of this kind of friendship. They are possible versions of Mosey and Roger, one pair in their twenties, one pair in their thirties. So this book came out of that book, but A GROWN UP KIND OF PRETTY is really about the search for identity, which is something I have not really looked at since BETWEEN. Meanwhile, this new book, SOMEONE ELSE’S LOVE STORY is about the nature of faith. But the relationships definitely came out of PRETTY, in a “next step” way.




9) What was the best advice you ever got on your writing?  The worst advice?

BICHOC is the best advice. Butt in Chair, Hands on keyboard. This is how books happen. By writing them.

The worst advice I ever heard, and I have heard it MULTIPLE times! “Oh, writers should not READ! If I READ I could have VOICE LEAK and be INFLUENCED!” My answer: Go read Flannery O’Connor and PRAY TO GOD that she influences you. You should BE so lucky.

Every writer I know who is producing interesting things, they are all huge huge huge readers. Addicts. Real writers read. The end.




10) Please give us an Eight Word Description of Your Life.

YARRRRRRRG This is nearly impossible. Everything I write sounds flippant or pretentious or both. I think this is the kind of question only a poet can answer. Lord, but I SUCK at poetry. BUT OKAY! Here we go:
God, kids, husband, dogs, write, yoga, eat. Repeat.

Check out Joshilyn Jackson’s website HERE.   

Her funny blog, Faster Than Kudzu.  and Facebook Page

gods in Alabama

Between Georgia

The Girl Who Stopped Swimming

Backseat Saints

A Grown-up Kind Of Pretty

Writing Advice from Stephen King and Oscar Wilde

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Imagine being in a writing class with Stephen King and Oscar Wilde. What a class that would be….  To get the unique flavor of this unprecedented class, here are some quotes from these authors.


“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
― Stephen King

“The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
― Oscar Wilde

_____________________________

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
― Stephen King, On Writing

“This morning, I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.”
― Oscar Wilde

_____________________________

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
― Stephen King

“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”
― Oscar Wilde

_____________________________

“Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.”
― Stephen King

“I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.”
― Oscar Wilde

_____________________________

“His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.”
― Stephen King

_____________________________

“If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.”
― Stephen King

“One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.”
― Oscar Wilde

Nancy Ellen Dodd: author of The Writer’s Compass

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A scene has to have a rhythm of its own, a structure of its own.
Michelangelo Antonioni

Lazy minds are like Jello, they need a mold for structure and to avoid brain spillage on the floor.
A Writing Primate

_________________________________________________________________________

In a few days, the New Year will be upon us: 2012. This is the time for resolutions, right? So, here is an interview to help you with your creative efforts. I’ve asked Ms. Dodd for the interview, because structure has always been a elusive goal for many writers, including myself. Structure as in discipline (write, write, and write), and structure as in building upon an idea into a complete story.

Nancy Ellen Dodd is a writer, university instructor,and an editor with two master’s degrees in writing from the University of Southern California. She currently teaches screenwriting at Pepperdine University and has studied with a number of award-winning authors. Back in May, 2011, she did an interview with Writer’s Digest Magazine. (Click here).

She is the author of The Writer’s Compass: From Story Map to Finished Draft in 7 Stages, which gives ideas/insight on mapping your novel from idea to final draft.

Nancy Dodd

Tell us what you mean by developing a “mind-set” for writing, and how important is it to the creative process?

Sometimes it’s difficult to shut out the rest of the world. The problem for too many of us is that we let too many other things interfere with our writing. Without a discipline or a mindset, we find that day after day goes by and we aren’t accomplishing what we wanted to in our writing because we haven’t prepared ourselves to see it as important as other things that we allow to interrupt us. 

Getting into a creative writing space, or really any type of writing space, usually means preparing yourself, your mind, to sit down and start working. For many of us just saying it’s time to write, then doing it, isn’t how it works; we have to prepare our “mindset.”

One of the ways to do this is to have a consistent time to write so that your mind and body rhythm knows that every day, or whatever days you choose, at this time you will write. Another way is to have a certain place you write or certain music you write to or certain writing implements just for this type of writing. Again, when you get into that place or use those implements, your mind knows that it’s time to be creative. The more disciplined you are about writing, the more your mind will know when it’s time to focus on just writing and to let everything else wait.

You equate story-telling with building a house: foundation, adding structure of walls and roof, the flooring, painting and adding designer touches. Elaborate for us the use of the 7 stage process described in your book which maps out the writing of a story with beginning, middle and end.

Through years of studying writing I found that there were many questions a writer should ask themselves to help them develop ideas, character, structure, and so forth. I began to organize these questions and tools into stages that would help to build a story organically and more efficiently, much like a house, and in ways that you see the details as you need them.

I recently watched a show in which the contractor finished the walls in the kitchen and was getting ready to put in the cabinets when he realized he had overlooked allowing for the electrical and venting components of the range hood—something he should have done before dry walling. His comment was that even the most experienced sometimes overlook an important detail. The same is true for writing, when you work in stages it can be much more effective, and helps you not to overlook so many details. I suggest the following stages:

Stage 1 – Developing Ideas
Stage 2 – Building a Strong Structure
Stage 3 – Creating Vibrant Characters
Stage 4 – Structuring Scenes, Sequences, and Transitions
Stage 5 – Increasing Tension and Adjusting Pacing
Stage 6 – Enriching Language and Dialogue
Stage 7 – Editing the Hard Copy and Submitting

As you develop your story, in some ways you will be working on these simultaneously throughout the process, you create and introduce new ideas and you work on language. However, by focusing on what a particular stage requires, you address the particular issues for that stage. How I do this is when I feel I have enough ideas for a story in Stage 1, I create a story map and then I work on structure, going from the beginning to the end of the material I have.

During that stage I’m adding more material and ideas to develop the structure of Stage 2. Once I’ve gone through all the work I have, answering the questions and filling out the story, I then go to Stage 3 and work on developing my characters, getting to know them, again filling out the story with more details that focus on characterization.

When in Stage 4, I tear apart the story and develop each scene, determine where I have left out scenes that would add to the story and condensing what I thought was a scene, but really doesn’t have all the components of one, and I make sure all of my transitions are clear and won’t lose the reader. Then by State 5, I go back through the story and I look at tension and pacing and increase it or slow it down as needed.

Now I’m ready to do work on the language and dialogue and by the time I’ve gotten to Stage 6, my story should be well-developed and nearly complete. Finally it’s a matter of printing out the hard copy and editing, then submitting or prepping for publication Stage 7.

What recommendations can you give to a writer who is blocked about writing a certain idea, but can’t seem to get a handle on it?

Understanding what you are writing about, what the theme and/or dramatic question of your story is, can help with getting a handle on an idea. Having a clear theme really helps in making decisions about the story and can help to overcome being blocked.

Along completely different lines, finding what inspires you to write the story, what event, idea, activity, image, music, or whatever stimulated writing this story, then going back to that source, can help get the writer back into the story.

Another method would be to ask yourself, “What if it didn’t happen that way, what if it happened this way?” and seeing if changing direction can get you excited again.

What if you already have a rough draft or even a completed manuscript, how can your book, The Writer’s Compass help the writer?

Having a rough draft or completed manuscript means that you can skim through the questions to see what you may have missed or what you can add to further develop the story. The questions will help you to see where you might have problems you can fix. Using the story map at this stage is a tool that helps you to see where there might be holes in your story. I create a new one after every stage to see what I should change to make the story more dynamic or if I can’t answer a particular element on the story map, then I know precisely where I have a weak spot or a hole.

Building tension is important to any story line. What tools/ideas would you recommend on how to do this naturally in developing this sense of urgency?

People often confuse tension and pacing. Pacing is created by moving things quickly, putting in fewer details, making dialogue shorter, using less narrative. However, this may or may not increase the tension. Sometimes tension is better served by adding details and slowing down the pace. Which is more frightening: running through a haunted mansion, or going slow and being forced to see every shadow, hear every creak. In my book I give an example of a knife fight and how by showing each individual’s movements versus, just getting stabbed increases the tension in the scene. It also helps when the reader is going to guess the outcome. If the reader knows you probably aren’t going to kill off your protagonist halfway through the book, then showing how the protagonist feels and his or her fears, helps draw the reader into the tension of the moment. When you shorten it to something like, “…then he stabbed him.” The sentence goes by so quickly the reader may not catch the significance of what just happened.

Tell us a little about what you are currently working on?

I always have too many projects I’m working on. Three of the areas I’m pursuing include: how using storytelling tools to create ideas helps businesspeople to develop business ideas; how ministers can use storytelling tools in developing sermons; and using story telling techniques to develop case studies.
In my creative writing I’m working on prepping a screenplay for pre-production about a minister whose son is murdered, forcing him to reconcile his own past as a boxer who killed a man in a prize fight; the screenplay has already received awards. I’m also doing a final draft on a play about a clueless father whose wife leaves him and he has to raise their autistic child alone. I’m also trying to finish the final draft of a coming of age manuscript called “Wake-Up! Henny.” And I’m working on a creative nonfiction story on how my friend had to be smuggled out of the mid-east to escape execution for a crime he didn’t commit.

Please give us an eight-word description of your life.
God, family, writing, surviving, and learning to live.

Nancy Ellen Dodd / Facebook Page

Check out 1st 50 pages of

The Writer's Compass

Interview: Donald Maass – Agent

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Donald Maass Literary Agency, founded in 1980, represents 100 authors and sells over 150 novels per year to leading publishers both here in the United States and internationally.  The agency is a known for its fiction writers. According to Publishers Marketplace, all agents of the Donald Maass Literary Agency are members of the Association of Authors’ Representatives (AAR). In addition to being members of the AAR, the agency also holds memberships in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, the Mystery Writers of America, and the Romance Writers of America.

Donald Maass, Agent & President of DMLA

Donald Maass is president of Donald Maass Literary Agency and an author of both fiction and popular craft books for writers as well. He is a past president of the Association of Authors’ Representatives, Inc, and quite respected in the field of publishing. He also enjoys helping writers achieve their goals, and teaches workshops on the art of writing and getting published.


Interview with Donald Maass

Tell us something about how you got started in becoming an agent and then, opening up your own literary agency.

Ahem, that was a while back!   I was previously a junior editor at a publishing house.  What appealed about “agenting” was spending more time working with authors, less time in meetings.  It’s now kind of hard to imagine doing anything else.

You are a writer yourself (both fiction, and non-fiction on writing). Has this given you an insight into what you would look for in a storyteller, and in what way?

One thing I learned is that fiction writing isn’t something you do alone.  Critique friends are essential.  It’s also a lifelong education.  The best writers keep learning.

    Walk us through the process of what happens when a query letter/email comes into your agency, right up to the point where you accept them as a client.

It’s a bit less dramatic than you might suppose.  When one of my agents is excited about a project, that’s it.  We may pass it around, read and discuss out of interest, but the decision to sign up an author doesn’t need the boss’s approval.  What you’re passionate about is what you should represent.  There’s far more discussion after we’ve taken someone on; about the pitch, marketing and such.

We once talked about the death of the small, independent bookstores, and now we are seeing the closing of a major bookstore like Borders. Obviously, the current economy has a hand in that, but do you think the increasing popularity of e-books is also a part of the issue?

The popularity of e-books is due to the success of the Kindle reader, the development of which was somewhat coincidental.  I mean, the Kindle didn’t bring about the demise of Borders.  (Borders did that to itself.)  There’s no question that e-book sales have cut into physical book sales.  Where that will top out remains to be seen.

    With the move into digital forms of books (audio, epub), how do you feel this will change the role of an agent in the publishing world?

Agents help authors get published.  Maybe that’s morphing nowadays but it’s still the same basic service.  And publishing is still publishing.  If you’re one of the Big Six, same job.  If you’re an e-publisher, same job.  If you’re an individual author going the e-book route, same job.  (Except that you’re probably not as good at it.)  Writers still write.  Publishers still publish.  Agents are still the author’s friend and advisor, early editor, deal cutter, subsidiary rights department…really, everything they did before.  The medium is mixing and changing, to be sure.  The process is still essentially the same.

   What advice would you give a new novelist in developing their career and expanding their readership base?

90% of your success is your stories.  Work on those most.  The last 10% matters, but only by 10% and only if the first 90% is already terrific.

    What kind of advances are first novels getting these days, and do you think there is any future for the mid-list authors?

Advances are down (four figures for first novels isn’t rare) and mid-list is not a place you want to be.  Why not aim to soar out of category?  (See comment above!)

    You seem to be invested in teaching writing and getting published (with your books and workshops on the subject). What do you get out of it? 

There are some aspects of fiction writing that are poorly understood and rarely taught; for instance, what I term “micro-tension”, the line-by-line tension that keeps readers glued to everything on the page.  I feel it’s important to get those ideas out there.  There’s too much magical thinking about writing fiction.  Even inspiration and originality are qualities one can cultivate.  I’d even argue that they’re learnable techniques.  Just because some authors do certain things instinctively doesn’t mean other authors can get good at them too.

  What do you think of the trend toward self-publishing? Does this have any effect on an agents’ business?

Self publishing is still self publishing.  Digital only makes it cheaper.  Selling books to the public isn’t any easier.  Social media–?  Helpful but not a panacea.

What books are you reading now (for your own personal enjoyment)?

A history of coffee!

    Please give us an eight-word description of your life. 

Agent, boss, teacher, writer, husband, dad, reader, traveler.

LINKS

www.maassagency.com

Follow Don on Twitter: @DonMaass

Donald Maass – Appearances/Workshops

Books on Writing


Interview with Selina Rosen of Yard Dog Press

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And here in the ring tonight, we have with us a small press publisher in the red boxing gloves ready to take on all contenders, including the big guys like Random House, or Harper Collins.  Okay, maybe not, because small presses are different from those multi-million dollar businesses, and not just in the bank account department.  Sure, they’d like to make money; after all, they are human (at least from what I’ve heard). But, there is something almost spiritual or quest-like in their mission to publish those books that might not have an audience except for the efforts of the small press.

According to Publishers Weekly, there are over 7,000 small press startups every year, and their motivation is to publish what THEY want and not just go along with trend-of-the-moment books.  As you can imagine, not many of these small publishers survive even for the year, but there are some that struggle along and have successfully developed their own customer base.

Among these hardy survivors is Yard Dog Press, based in Arkansas, who has been publishing since 1995.  Here is what their mission statement says on their website:

  • To bring to the attention of the reading public the talent of authors who haven’t earned the “big numbers” yet, so therefore get little or no attention from the corporate giants.  These are great story tellers with equally great stories to share.  We think it is shameful that there is no forum for their work
  • To provide a press for those mid-length novels that the big houses won’t touch.
  • To bring to the reading public stories that they will enjoy.
  • To provide a home for the bastard literary children of some well-known authors in the field.
  • To never forget that we are in the business of ENTERTAINMENT!

Yard Dog Press Mascot

That says a mouthful, doesn’t it? The people behind Yard Dog Press are Selina Rosen and Lynn Stranathan, who are not only a couple, but the driving force behind YDP. Selina, herself is an avid writer in many genres: Fantasy, S/F, Horror, Humor, Mystery, Suspense, Action Thrillers, and do on… The woman has a definite addiction to writing. Her latest book is Black Rage, a very-nearly-paranormal romance.

YDP publishes dark humor, s/f, fantasy, gay/lesbian, mysteries and anthologies (You should check out their Bubba anthologies!). They have some great authors on their list, such as Beverly Hale and Laura J. Underwood among others.

Below is an interview with Selina Rosen. 

Selina Rosen, Editor-in-Chief / Yard Dog Press and Author


Tell us how YDP got started in 1995, and what has kept up your enthusiasm for a small press?

Yard Dog Press started as the brain fart of myself and artist Brand Whitlock. Through the convention circuit we had meet many talented authors and artists that for what ever reason couldn’t make their voice heard. A lot of that was location. Southern and Midwestern writers and artists still have trouble getting representation and being taken seriously. There is this idea that if we really wanted to make it we’d move closer to New York or at the very least get an agent from there. But the cost of living there is insane so unless you’ve made it as a writer or artist you can’t afford to live there and as for getting a New York agent that can be almost as financially unattainable. You need to be the places they are to get their attention.

At the same time readers were complaining that they were getting tired of reading the same book over and over…that they wanted to see something different.

We saw a need and we tried and are still trying to fill that need. We started with a small comic book that featured at least one short story a month and from those humble beginnings sprang Yard Dog Press.

I don’t know that you could say I’ve kept my enthusiasm as much I feel like I have a responsibility to the community of writers and artists we’ve worked with and the readers who count on us to give them exactly what they’re looking for in a good read.

YDP is entering the e-book field in the near future. How do you see this move as changing your view of the publishing world?  Tell us where the e-books will be available, and how difficult or easy has the transition been technically for you?

YDP already has several e-books up they are at Amazon and Smashwords. Frankly I’m doing the e-books because it’s where the readers are going. I like to read a book something I can hold in my hands and most of our titles will continue to get a print run. Some like our recent book I DIDN’T QUITE MAKE IT TO OZ will be released as an e-book only, but that will be rare and it’s really sort of a test.

I’m not happy with the speed the titles are being put up at, but I can’t do it so I’m at other people’s mercy.

In my opinion the e-book market will either save publishing or be the final nail in the coffin. Jury is still out, of course I’m hoping for the saving but after 12 years of the worst economy of my life I’m not going to hold my breath or sell the farm.

What advantages do you feel a small press has over the more commercial companies? What disadvantages/problems?

The advantage is not having to go through a process that rapes your work and leaves you feeling like you owe the publishing house a big ass favor because they took your book. Simply put I like a well-told story, I’m not looking to tear a writer apart or rebuild them in my image. I don’t want to put them into a box and tell them how to write. I’ll know when I read their work if they can write and if they can I will gently edit their work so that it’s still their work.

Disadvantage is always going to be small press doesn’t have the deep pockets. Money and the right push can make a book huge. Mass distribution can make a fist full of people rich. No small press can get your book the kind of distribution one of the bigger houses can get you. You’ll never make really good money; you’ll never be a household name.

However we will let you keep your soul. It really all comes down to what a writer ultimately wants their work to do for them.

What attracts your attention when you read a mss submission for YDP?

Good old fashion story telling. A robot can put out grammatically correct, work all day, no typos, no spelling errors and no heart. Now I don’t want something that’s a G-d awful mess, but I’d rather see something that has a few problems that has heart then some perfectly written meaningless, heart less, drivel.

A writer’s words need to take me someplace I haven’t gone before make me feel something I might have never felt, or what’s the point? For me a good story still has a beginning, a middle and an end that is conclusive. I don’t want to be sucked into a story and find out the book has no real ending or worse yet I have to wait for the next 50 books to get to the ending.

I despise descriptive narrative masquerading as story.

What ways do you try to attract attention to the books printed under YDP cover? What can you recommend an author to do to help their book become more visible to the public?

We have given away hundreds of books as well as other promotional items. We are probably best known for the “Coupons of Great Value,” which our writers hand out at each convention we attend.

I do between 10 and 15 shows a year with the company where the books are prominently displayed in the dealer’s room. We have a web-site, we run sales, we send our books out for review sometimes we run adds. We encourage all of our writers to get on the Internet and work the social networks.

YDP is also known for its humorous, offbeat anthologies, like the Bubbas’ series or the I Should Have Stayed in Oz anthology.  What do you have in store for the your anthology readers for the future?

Something really campy, playing with Alice in Wonder Land. Maybe titled, Waiter There’s A Hare in my Soup. I say maybe ’cause I’m sure that if that one’s good enough someone else has already snagged it.

You’ve had many books published and a number of short fictions in magazines. What keeps you fresh as a writer? How has your writing changed through out the years?

In fact I just sold a short story today to a Joe and Kasey Lansdale anthology that comes out next year titled IMPOSSIBLE MONSTERS.

My life is constantly changing so my work is bound to change. But honestly what keeps my work fresh is that I just write exactly what I want to write and I jump around from one genre to another. I learned a long time ago that writing for “The Man,” didn’t work for me. Writing just exactly what the big houses say they want is no guarantee you will sell to them in fact odds are you won’t. There are too many good jobs out there that pay better there is no sense in writing if you don’t write what you want to write.

I’ve been told my writing is darker and less hopeful. I don’t know that I’d say that’s really true I know it is more realistic.

How do you balance being a writer and an editor?

Damn! You’re supposed to do that?!

The editing eats my writing time. Devours it in fact. There is nothing creative about editing and there shouldn’t be, the editor isn’t there to make the work sound like them. They are there to make the book easy to read and understand for as many people as possible while hopefully leaving the writer’s voice in tact.

I actually hate editing. Hate it like pulling teeth. No doubt this is why I’m good at it. You’re always better at the things you hate, which means you have to keep doing them.

Who are your favorite authors?

Me, Joe Lansdale, Connie Willis, CJ Cherryh, Robert Howard, Lee Killough and of course everyone who writes for YDP.

Yes I said me if a writer wouldn’t rather read their own work than anyone else’s then they aren’t where they need to be as a writer. A writer should always be writing the book they’d most want to read. Like the guy with the tiny pecker at the whore house… if you can’t please yourself you can’t please anyone else.

Give us an eight-word description of your life.

Brutal, sad, hard, painful, futile, tiring, frustrating, brilliant.

Check out these links for Yard Dog Press.

Yard Dog Press website

YDP Facebook

Selina Rosen’s Books

YDP Books

Fun Blogs on Writing

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The Internet can be cheesy, annoying, perverse, but it also can be interesting if you happen to hit on the right sites. Below are some of my favorite Blogs that deal in some way with the art of writing.

Top of the List is The Dark Side of History.  I’m going out on a limb on this one because it’s a brand new Blog, and I’m hoping the blogger keeps it up. What I like about the posts so far is they are written with elegance, and I especially love the ones on Fun With Words, where words are dissected based on their historical roots. Check out the one on the word Villain.

D.W. Beyer, Steampunk Author has a great site. He states that  his plan for this blog is really nothing more than chronicling and sharing my journey to becoming a writer. What he’s come up with is an enjoyable Blog, where he shares his enthusiasm for writing with discussions on his characters and the quirky books he’s read and liked.

I haven’t forgotten you poets. Although I’m not the most poetical writer, I do enjoy this particularBlog, called We Write Poems. They give writing prompts for poems and they make it fun.   It’s a good way to tickle those brain cells into creative activity.

Hope you enjoy them…if so, drop the bloggers a comment or click on a Like button to let them know there is someone out there reading their Blogs.

Interview with Wally Wood – Author

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Author of Getting Oriented

Wally Wood is a professional writer and a member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, with 19 business books to his credit. He holds an M.A. in creative writing from City University of New York and a B.A. in philosophy from School of General Studies, Columbia University. Mr. Wood is a long-time volunteer in local prisons and he teaches creative writing in the local library.

His first novel is currently available on Amazon: Getting Oriented: A Novel About Japan. (see  A Writing Primate’s New Writer for July post for more details.)

Click HERE to read the first chapter of Getting Oriented. You can also check out his BLOG which talks both about writing and about Japan.

INTERVIEW:

Tell us about your first contact with Japan, and what was it that interested in the country and culture?

After the Korean war, I was stationed in an infantry regiment just south of the DMZ. On my way to Korea, my troop ship stopped in Yokohama for 24 hours and I had an eight-hour pass to walk around the city. I was astounded by the contrast between suburban Cleveland, Ohio, where I grew up and Yokohama. The architecture was unfamiliar. I couldn’t read signs or posters. I couldn’t talk to anyone. Shops carried goods I didn’t recognize. I’ve been trying to understand the country and the culture ever since. 

You have an extensive editorial background. Can you tell us about this experience and how it has influenced your own writing?

I was a trade magazine editor for 25 years. I began as a reporter and eventually was promoted to editor of one magazine and hired to be the founding editor of another. As an editor, your function is clear: How does this article help the reader? You always have to think of the reader. For a trade magazine, the question is easy: Does this help the reader make money or save money? Then: Is it clear? Is it interesting? We spent a lot of time thinking about headlines, decks, leads, captions, callouts, sidebars—the whole package. The influence on my fiction is to do my best to make the characters, the situation, and the writing as engaging as possible.

Do you have a particular person/author who has inspired you as a writer?

No. Or no one comes immediately to mind. I discovered when I was 14 years old that I could entertain people—adults, no less—and I have been writing ever since.

What is your favorite place in Japan, and why?

I like Kanazawa, a small city on the west coast that was never bombed during WWII. I spent a little more than two weeks there in an immersion Japanese language program in the early 1990s and have been back several times. It has one of the three most famous gardens in Japan, several interesting museums, and a “ninja” temple—a Buddhist temple built (I guess) for a paranoid lord because it is filled with secret passages and hiding places. Kanazawa was the castle town of one of the richest fiefs during the Tokugawa era (1600-1868), and a surprising number of the artifacts remain.

Describe to us about your own writing habits (favorite place/time to write, tools, etc.)

I regard myself as a professional. I try to get to my desk by 9:00 and write until 5:00 with breaks to get tea, lunch, check e-mail (although I’ve learned to turn off “mail” so I am not tempted to distract myself every time something comes in; I now check it before lunch, and in the late afternoon unless I am waiting for something special), waste time on the internet. If I’m not in the mood to write, I write in my journal about why I’m not in the mood to write. Recently I’ve found it useful to think about the day’s writing while I am walking for half an hour after breakfast. It accomplishes two things; it gives me a head start on the day’s writing and makes me exercise.

Tell us something of your experience in getting this book published.

  I published the book on CreateSpace, a subsidiary (division?) of Amazon. The process is embarrassingly simple: Either let CreateSpace do everything (for $300), or—my choice—do it yourself (essentially free). I thought I’d finished Getting Oriented two years ago and spent time and money trying to interest an agent without a nibble. When I decided to publish the book myself, I began re-reading it and found it full of small embarrassments, repetitions, awkward sentences. My wife, Marian, who is also a writer, read the manuscript and pointed out infelicities I missed. I would urge anyone thinking of self-publishing to hire a good copy editor. Because of my background, I was able to design the interior of the book and a good friend, a graphic designer, created the cover. Once you have a formatted manuscript and a cover design, publishing the actual book is mouse click.

Since you teach writing, what do you feel would be the one piece of advice you would emphasize to a new writer?

Write every day. If you write just one page of fiction every single day, at the end of a year you have the draft of a novel. Read the best writers you can find, not only the classics but authors publishing today. Read on two levels: the surface, what the story is about; and the technique, how the author is doing it.

When you are writing fiction, what do you usually come up with first: the place (like Japan), the conflict/plot or the characters?

  I don’t know. I think I come up with a situation (a guide leading a tour in Japan), then populate it with characters and try to provoke lifelike conflicts among them.

Who are your favorite Japanese authors?

This is a two-hour discussion because I like different authors for different things. I just read Kensaburo Oe’s A Private Matter, which is fascinating. I liked—and mentioned in my book—Jun’ichi Watanabe’s A Lost Paradise. I’ve read everything Haruki Murakami has published in English. Others I like in no particular order include Nagai Kaifu, Ryu Murakami, Amy Yamada, Shusaku Endo, Morio Kita. I’m still discovering wonderful Japanese writers.

Please give us an eight word description of your life. 

Boundlessly curious, avid to learn, eager to share.

From the Mouth of Oscar Wilde…

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Oscar Wilde is an Irish Poet, Novelist, Dramatist and Critic who lived from 1854 to 1900. For some reason, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) has been one of my favorite reads. Something about the mask vs the true being fascinates me. Oscar led a wild life (sorry, couldn’t help the pun), going to prison and dying destitue in Paris at the age of forty-six. But, his genius lives on and on.

BTW, his complete name was Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde...how could he not end up as a poet and dramatist with a name like that?

Here are some quotes from him that even today could relate to modern writers:

Art never expresses anything but itself.

I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.

Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

I love talking about nothing. It is the only thing I know anything about.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.

And I leave you with this last quote from Oscar Wilde:

All great ideas are dangerous.

The writing process | Not Exactly Rocket Science | Discover Magazine

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The writing process | Not Exactly Rocket Science | Discover Magazine.

I love the graph on the process of writing…oh so true, whether fiction, non-fiction, book, short story or whatever. The Highs and the Lows. Check it out for yourself and see if you have the pulse of a writer.