12 Friday Apr 2013
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The Plain Dealer in Cleveland has this to say about FELLOW MORTALS:
Every character in this tightly knit debut novel has a choice to make in how to handle the aftermath of the tragedy. What each one does affects the rest, bringing home the truth that ‘you’re not alone, even when you are.’
Read the review (halfway down the page), and please buy the book!
04 Monday Feb 2013
Hi, all. Remember that radio show I recently prerecorded? Well here it comes.
I’m hosting an hour of songs related to FELLOW MORTALS tonight (2/4) at 11pm EST, with a replay this Saturday (2/9) at 8am EST. I’ll talk between songs and sound professionally stilted. The show will be streamed live here:
FSG’s Book Keeping has posted a descriptive playlist I wrote to accompany the show. You can read that here:
04 Monday Feb 2013
Posted in Writing
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FELLOW MORTALS is getting some nice early attention from local publications. Below are links to two articles and one review:
Interview with The Troy Record
04 Monday Feb 2013
Posted in Writing
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Our great local bookstore, Market Block Books in Troy, NY, is hosting the FELLOW MORTALS release party this Thursday (Feb 7) at 7pm. I’ll be there signing copies. There will be coffee. 
If you live around Troy, I hope you can make it. If you don’t live around Troy, this is one more reason to lament living elsewhere.
Note: You can, in fact, purchase e-books at local indie stores. If you do so, I will be happy to gouge my signature into your reading device with a sharp metal object.
Whether or not you can attend, the book is available everywhere tomorrow.
Event info at: MARKET BLOCK BOOKS
12 Wednesday Dec 2012
Posted in Writing
Weather
Tough scraping
Item
Today the peerless Red Pen of Doom challenges writers to compose four-word loglines for their own books, and then for other books or movies. It’s often said that if you can’t pitch your work in a single sentence and get someone interested, you probably don’t know your work as well as you should. Or worse, your book’s an unfocused mess that defies clarity.
A short logline isn’t supposed to tell a potential reader everything. That’s what the book is for. But with so many other books and movies competing for people’s limited and often scattered attention, a pithy hook is essential. It’s like writing a strong first line: you’re not showing off, but rather drawing the reader in. If the first line pulls a reader to the second line, and you can keep that going for 300 pages, you have a bestselling page-turner. And the way to get a reader to encounter that engaging first line is with an effective logline.
So I’m trying the four-word challenge. Four words is surprisingly harder than five, because you can’t waste space with “and” or “from” or “after” or any of the other soft connective tissue that comes so naturally to any description. But here goes, beginning with my forthcoming first novel.
Quiz Part 1: Describe Current Project
FELLOW MORTALS: “Tragic fire heightens relationships.”
My novel in progress: “Woman outshines 18th-century dangers.”
Quiz Part 2: Make Fun of Current Project
FELLOW MORTALS: “Feelgood tragic relationship story.”
My novel in progress: “Historical bildungsroman. Zzzzzzz.” (Three words!)
Quiz Part 3: Write Fresh Loglines for Books or Movies That Spoiled Their Own Excellent Promise. The goal here is to present what would have worked better than the actual result. I’m doing only movies, because I’ll often sit through a failed movie but will rapidly abandon a failed book. And I’m going with the big easy targets of recent years.
STAR WARS PREQUELS: “Hero believably chooses evil.”
(No one kills these movies harder and better than THIS GUY, who’s truly a genius when it comes to isolating the exact, numerous storytelling mistakes in all three movies.)
KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL: “Weathered Indy’s gritty quest.”
(All we wanted was a tough old S.O.B. version of the tough young Raiders hero, with dirt and blood and realistic sets. The opening warehouse scene, prior to the fridge, had such wonderful promise.)
SPIDERMAN 3: “Parker-centered, one villain.”
(Like Spidey 2, the best.)
RECENT M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN MOVIES: “We’ve hired another screenwriter.”
(I continue to think the guy is super-talented, and that it’s the scripts, not the direction, that’s murdering his career.)
Colonial-American Word of the Day
To Flux: (v) to cheat, cozen, or over-reach; also to salivate
Go Forth!
PHANTOM MENACE critique. Seriously, this is the sharpest, funniest thing ever. You won’t be able to stop watching. Once you look beyond the swear words and sicko humor, you’ll begin to realize he’s presenting a master class on storytelling. I’m not kidding.
Music
“Neil Gow’s Lamentation for the Death of His Second Wife”
23 Monday Jul 2012
Posted in Writing
Tags
2013, Cover Design, Dennis Mahoney, Fellow Mortals, FSG, Novel, Preorder
I’m thrilled with the Fellow Mortals cover. It was designed by Charlotte Strick at FSG. The painting is by Jennifer Mehigan, whom I blogged about several months ago. I found Jennifer’s work online accidentally and showed it to my editor. She and the designer loved it, too, so they secured the rights and here we are.
Fellow Mortals is now available for preorder, even though it isn’t coming out until March 2013.
Buy Online from an Indie Bookstore
Find an Indie Bookstore Near You
Also available at:
11 Monday Jun 2012
Posted in Writing
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I’ve been doing Fancy Writer Stuff and haven’t updated here in a while, but now I’m back and ready to blog the living hell out of this blog.
The aforementioned writer stuff was the line-edits for Fellow Mortals. This is where my editor does a fine-tooth read and makes final suggestions, mostly minor but often important, before the manuscript goes to production and they begin to galleys. The edits took me less than four days, so it wasn’t nearly as dramatic as the major edits of several months ago. I love this kind of revision, which is mostly a chance to strengthen what already works. I’m ready to let the book go at this point, even though I’m sure to regret certain lines and find terrible shortcomings once it’s totally out of my hands.
We’re close to having a final jacket design, too. It’s been fun looking at the drafts.
Thanks to input from a friend, we now believe that Bones is not a Jack Russell/Boxer mix as we were originally told, but a Labrador/German Shepherd mix. Which means we’re likely to have a bigger dog than anticipated. He’s packing on a pound a week and continues to be 100% awesome. Be sure to follow the Daily Bones on Pinterest.
The pumpkin seedlings took to the patch like champs but had a slow, chilly week of minimal growth. I expect them to make better gains now that the weather is back to a sunny 75-85. If all goes well, I’ll be pollinating pumpkins by early- to mid-July.
I’ve written 5 chapters of my next book. Having a blast writing this one. I’m taking two weeks off to tackle odd jobs and hang with our son, and then I’ll be back to daily writing for the summer. Ideally I’ll have most of the first draft finished by the time Fellow Mortals is released next March. That way Mortals‘ reception, for better or worse, shouldn’t dramatically affect my work. Every published writer seems to suggest this: have the next one very far along or you risk freezing up in the face of public praise/dislike/indifference.
Melissa Mykal kindly zombified my author photo:
06 Tuesday Mar 2012
Posted in Writing
Apologies to my readers for not posting in a week. Please stop nailing chicken hearts to my door. I promise to be better.
How’ve you been? The reason for my delay is that I’m doing Fancy Author Stuff, by which I mean revisions and trying to manage my stress level.*
Bunny Mold
I expected to have a few months to button up my novel before it heads to galleys. Contractually speaking, I still have until May 30 to present the finished manuscript, but the publisher wants to take it along to the London Book Fair in mid-April, where there’s a chance of selling it to publishers overseas. They don’t need a perfectly edited book to try to sell it, but I do need to finish this round of (rather significant) revisions. So I have about four weeks to do a whole mess of work, and we’re going to Philadelphia for a three-day weekend that was planned over a month ago, and I’m doing my best to stay on schedule but damned if I haven’t neglected my humble blog.
I’m not complaining here. I always imagined it’d be thrilling to buckle down and work like gangbusters on a publishing deadline, and while “thrilling” is no longer the word that I would choose, it is satisfying to know I’ll have a much better book in less than a month, right around the time that spring kicks in and I can look around and appreciate the season. So: lots of work, daily personal deadlines to say on track, excellent progress so far, basket of candy rabbits at the end.
(The whole revision coincides perfectly with Lent, incidentally.)
* I almost wrote “levels”, which seems to be the common way to say it. I try to avoid subdividing my stress, as that would only result in multitasking, which is, itself, an infamous cause of the very thing I’m trying to manage.
20 Thursday Oct 2011
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I’m writing a novel (again) and figure I’ll be at it for a long time. Why not blather on about it? OK!
This newest novel is bigger and has a lot more research than I’m used to (I’ve already taken Field Trips), so I’m approaching the whole thing differently, and I intend to blog about it all. I like talking about writing because I think about it too much, and once I’ve said a thing out loud I tend to let go of that particular fixation, or at least concretize it, so I can clear my head. The talking, or in this case blogging, is either a warm-up or a cool-down, part of a larger routine I’m establishing, so I’m able to keep up discipline and make steady progress, week after week.
Which really isn’t difficult anymore, truth be told. I haven’t worried about the fabled blank page in half-a-decade; I’ll eventually post about that, too. I’m going to cover my writing life in general, or rather in specific, day-by-day as I write the new book. Why bother, aside from anchoring a daily routine? I’m alone all day, and when I’m working on a piece of writing nobody’ll see for 2+ years, it’s nice to post immediate junk and imagine somebody reading it. Plus it’s that or talk about writing to people I know, and that’s difficult to do, what with the whoosh of roaring fire as they light themselves aflame.
To organize my thoughts, here’s a list of stuff I’m going to cover, in a slipshod manner, in future posts:
1. How I easily stopped worrying about the blank page, of which far too much is generally made; the cure involved crumb cake
2. A brief history of the last four novels I wrote, and their fates
3. My pursuit of publication, which has been comically awful but has, of late, changed dramatically for the better
4. How I’m writing this new novel, and why I’m enjoying it so much
5. The Scheherazade Experiment for testing plots
6. My oft-derailed daily schedule
7. Many other things, such as yard animals, baroque music, inexperienced attempts at home repair, lifting weights, growing pumpkins (spring/summer), professional boxing, weather, Colonial America, and other crap
I will also post pictures.
