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If I Can, You Can

I began writing my first novel in 1997. Six years, five drafts (give or take), two sons, and one major surgery later it was finally complete. Then it took another two years to get Cryptid published and on bookstore shelves. And don’t even ask how much Cryptid has earned me. The gravy train is certainly gaining speed, but don’t ever fool yourself that writing novels is a get-rich-quick scheme. Even the big boys like Crichton, Koontz, and Cussler will tell you that. The best-case scenario is a get-rich-slow—eternally slow— scheme. Which is to say, don’t quit your day job.

Ah, but then where does one find the time, resources, energy, and muse to write after coming home from slaving for the Man (or Woman) all day? Well, that’s the million- dollar question. Actually, it’s only half the question. The whole question is where does one find the time, resources, energy, and muse to write after working all day… and then cooking dinner, doing the dishes, helping the kids with their homework, paying bills, cutting the grass, washing the cars, checking your email, doing your nails, going for a run, seeing a movie, getting the flu, finishing your degree… need I go on? We all have twenty-four hours in the day, even the big boys like Crichton, Koontz, and Cussler. Life happens to us all. Just ask Stephen King what a crimp his car accident put on his writing.

We all have a list of reasons to not write. They’re not excuses, really. Life doesn’t leave much room for excuses. So don’t add guilt to that list. But that doesn’t change the fact that you’ve only written a thousand words in the past six weeks, does it? Then what’s the answer? How did I do it?

Well, it took me six years. So one answer is simply that I didn’t quit. Little-by-little, day- by-day, year-by-year I worked at it until it was done. But be more specific. Exactly how did I find the time? OK, well another answer is that I woke my computer every night at 9 PM, Sunday through Thursday, and worked until midnight or 1 AM. I did this religiously for six years, sometimes working seven days straight. I took a two-year commercial fiction course at the University of Washington. I was part of a weekly critique group for three years. I immersed myself in the craft. I did everything I could to make myself the best craftsman possible. Does that help?

No, I’m sure it doesn’t, because you’re not me. You will not be able to work at the craft in the same way I do. You may work a double shift for the Man and the Woman and not be able to write from 9 PM to 1 AM every night. So here’s the answer you’re really after, though you’re not going to like it because it means there’s no short cut, no magic recipe that you can simply follow and be assured success.

You see, the million-dollar answer is that I quit.

Or at least I tried to; many, many times I tried to. But I couldn’t. You know why? Because writing is not something I do, it is something I am. I’m a writer. So there is no quitting. I cannot quit being who I am. I can only accept who I am. And once I did, I never failed to find time to write. My cars may not sparkle, I hired someone to cut the grass, and I often sleep less than eight hours a night, but I write.

So my advise to you is to quit. And if you can, then you’re not a writer. It’s OK. Not everyone is. Then find out what you are and do that, but don’t go back to writing. The craft is too hard and the rewards too slow in coming to labor at it unless you have to. And writers have to. However, if you can’t quit then you are a writer. And once you realize that you can only find joy in life if writing is a part of your life, then you will find the time. I promise you. And it won’t be my way; it’ll be your way. Just don’t quit your day job. It may not be who you are, but it will pay the bills until who you are is a writer whose name is listed in the same sentence with the big boys.

Eric Penz is the author of Cryptid:The Lost Legacy of Lewis and Clark. For more information please visit his site. You may republish this article on your Web site or in your newsletter as long as the author resource box remains unchanged. 

We sat down with Cammie McGovern, author of Eye Contact, for a chat about the writing craft, her new book, and advice for writers.

Q: I’ve read that you have three young boys–just wondering when you have time to write?

A: My children are 10, 6, and 3 years old, so the older two are in school most of the year and the youngest attends a wonderful day care/preschool. I make sure to treat writing like anyone who works at home: I turn on the computer the minute the kids are out the door and usually work at least five-six hours a day (this doesn’t always mean I’m writing and certainly doesn’t mean I’m writing well, but having done this for years now, I’m in the habit.)

Q: Do you have a daily writing schedule, or do you write when you can squeeze work it into your family schedule?

A: Oops, I seem to have answered this question above, but I will add something else here: For me, writing is something I do almost every single day and if I’m writing a first draft, I set up daily page goals for myself (usually something like five hand-written pages a day.) I don’t wait for inspiration to hit and many days I write a lot of pages that are truly terrible. Sometimes I get in a bad rut and still force myself to write my day’s page allotment. Later on, when I sift through the masses of material I’ve collected for a first draft, I’ll often be surprised by some idea or thought or plot twist that came to me during a dreadful patch of uncertain writing. It’s always a reassuring discovery in the face of what can also happen so often: the writing that you fall in love with as you’re going along, turns out to be shockingly dreadful when you read it a few weeks later. I’m still not a good predictor of what’s going to work and what’s not as I’m writing. Hopefully I am a better judge when I read it down the road a bit.

Q: Did you always want to be a writer? If so, what lead you to fiction?

A: I always kept a journal as a child and always loved writing letters, stories, articles, almost anything, really. When I first started writing after college, I began with plays and screenplays because I was living in New York and working as an administrative assistant for a theater producer. At the time, that was my world, and I didn’t really discover the wonder and joy of fiction until I got a job as a book reader for a movie company (where I would read maybe three or four books a week and send back reports.) It was a wonderful job (with a fast learning curve–I had to think a great deal about how stories are constructed, good plotting techniques, etc.) After a year or so, I had fallen so in love with fiction that I knew there was nothing else I wanted to do. Oddly, this realization came just as I was having a bit of success with screenwriting. I ended up paying for most of my MFA at University of Michigan with the money I got from a screenplay option. I’d still say it was some of the best money I ever spent. I’ve never wanted to go back to any other genre.

Q: As the mother of an autistic child, did your own experiences generate the book, or did the idea of writing a mystery come first?

A: Though I had been reading mysteries for quite some time, I hadn’t thought of writing one myself until I was watching my son one night in the bathtub. He was maybe four years old at the time and finally beginning to talk, though most of it was echolalia (repeated phrases he’d heard during his day.) It was such a thrill to hear his voice and so bizarre, too, because he could so perfectly recreate the accents other people used. Listening to these odd snippets that would come out of nowhere, I suddenly thought: what if a whole community was hanging on these words because he had information no one else did?

Q: Although Eye Contact is written from many points of view, did you ever think about writing it solely from Cara’s point of view?

A: One of the challenges of writing a “literary thriller” where your “detective” figure isn’t actually a detective, but an involved layperson (like Cara, Adam’s mother) is that they simply don’t have all the tools or skills to decode a crime investigation. I wanted to use different points of view in order to give the crime more complexity and more puzzle pieces to fit together, and also so that the reader knows certain aspects before Cara does and can be a few steps ahead of her in the search for what happened. This was my original motivation, but as it turned out, quite a few people have read the book as a study in a community that’s been rocked by a crime. Several people have told me that some of their favorite parts of the book are the glimpses we get into how a little autistic boy like Adam (who theoretically has such difficulty making connections) has touched so many people and, in the end, has connected all of them.

Q: Are there any authors that particularly influenced your own writing? If so, who?

A: As I was writing this, I read a great deal of the great British Ladies of Mystery: Ruth Rendall (especially her Barbara Vine novels), Minette Walters, Denise Mina. I also tried to read books that are mysteries without a detective at the center, and are much more character driven, around ordinary, heartbreaking people trying to solve or resolve some terrible crime that has nearly destroyed their life. Especially good examples (or ones that I loved) are Strange But True by John Searles, Hidden by Paul Jaskunas, Land of the Blind by Jess Walters.

Q: Did you plot Eye Contact before beginning writing, or did you let the story evolve?

A: I have never plotted out a novel before I’ve written it which probably unfortunate as I’d be a faster writer if I could. The problem, for me, is that novel writing depends so much on surprises and you can’t plan for those, or write toward them consciously, I don’t think. So I end up writing a great deal of material that I never use (like hundreds and hundreds of pages) with delightful subplots that are completely extraneous and twists that are so far fetched and implausible I can’t imagine why I didn’t see that when I was writing. Hopefully this impractical “process” gives me a lot of material so I use only the best when it comes time to put a book together.

Q: What would you like readers to know about the process of writing a novel?

A: Every published writer I know has at least one (or two or three) unpublished books sitting in a drawer at home, and every published writer I know has another drawer stuffed full of the countless rejections those manuscripts received. The writers who end up seeing publication are really the ones who stick through all that and keep at going.

You are free to duplicate or distribute the following information to your blog, Web site, ezine, newsletter, or friends. We would appreciate a link back to BloggingAuthors.com.  If you would you like to review this book for your site, blog, or ezine, email nancy at bloggingauthors dot com 

The Remembering
By John Nelson

A Gripping Spiritual Thriller Shyloh Ravenswood wants to know. Seeking answers to life’s deepest mysteries, this gentle warrior embarks on an epic spiritual adventure through six lifetimes in exotic settings and decisive moments of history.

At times dwelling in the body of a man, at others a woman, Shyloh encounters romance, intrigue, and danger during the flowering of civilization from humanity’s earliest roots in Paleolithic Africa to classical Greece and its oracular mysteries. From there the karmic trail leads to renaissance Venice and its fanatical Inquisitors, then on to San Francisco’s wildly anarchical Summer of Love.

In search of the elusive grail of wisdom, Shyloh ventures into the future and the paradisiacal island of Bali caught in the grip of global catastrophe. Shyloh’s soul-quest comes to a suspenseful climax in the Himalayan summits of Tibet where humanity’s last survivors confront an ancient karmic stain.

Let The Remembering lead you on a daring quest for enlightenment through the world’s great spiritual traditions. Continue reading »

You are free to duplicate or distribute the following information to your blog, Web site, ezine, newsletter, or friends. We would appreciate a link back to BloggingAuthors.com.  If you would you like to review this book for your site, blog, or ezine, email nancy at bloggingauthors dot com

Submitted by Simon Barrett

Green 61 by Cody Fowler Davis

I will be the first to admit that when I picked this book up I muttered “Oh no, it’s another John Grisham wanna be), another Lawyer book, another peek inside our not so clean legal system.
 
It was with great joy that I found “Green 61” to be different. Mr. Davis weaves an engaging tale, two Lawyers that had recently ‘gone their separate ways’, one taking the high road, and one taking the not so quite high road. They are destined to meet again following an accident.
 
This is a classic tale of good versus evil. The plot revolves around a boating incident, three people are dead, two are small children, and the question is who is responsible for this horrible situation? Is it the professional test pilot of boats for Pacer Marine, or was it Kevin Holson, the drunk driver of boat number two? The only boat clear of blame seems to be a small Kayak skippered by Terry Harmon and his two young children.
 
It is the function of a lawyer to do his or her best for the client. In this book we find Anderson Parker and Justin Cartwright represent two very different sides of the legal process. Anderson is clearly on the side of justice, while Justin’s must win attitude reveals that he cares little about ethics, the law, or truthfulness. Maybe these characters are not quite black and white, but they are certainly at different ends of the grey scale.
 
From an early point in the story Anderson guesses that Justin (his ex boss) is hiding some information, the question is what? More importantly how can Anderson uncover the truth?
 
Eventually the case comes to the court room. Justin loves the courtroom; it is his theatre of choice. One by one Justin destroys the testimony and credibility of Anderson’s witnesses. What can Anderson do?
 
To tell more would spoil the story!
 
At 213 pages it is a short read, the story moves at a breathtaking pace, but it is well crafted and the development of the main protagonist’s characters is done with style.
 
Mr. Davis may not have the ‘word-smithing’ abilities of John Grisham, and his style is a little rough and ready in places, however this is one book that you should not pass up. For a first novel it is a great entrance into the literary world.
 
Mr. Davis apparently is working on his second novel, and I for one am eagerly waiting for it to arrive in the bookstore.

You are free to duplicate or distribute the following information to your blog, Web site, ezine, newsletter, or friends. We would appreciate a link back to BloggingAuthors.com.  If you would you like to review this book for your site, blog, or ezine, email nancy at bloggingauthors dot com

Slow Hope
by Anita Swanson

She knew it was over as soon as her second child was born. However, by that time she was barely able to complete a thought. Let alone organize a plan for getting out of her marriage. So she just let herself drift, until finally nothing seemed to matter very much at all.

She still went to church, of course. Sundays she sang at the Baptist church where her husband served as Minister of Music and Thursdays, even though her husband told her he didn’t approve, she attended a Presbyterian Bible Study for women.

And still she prayed. She prayed for guidance and understanding. She prayed for wisdom and forgiveness. She prayed for help and endurance. But mostly she simply prayed for deliverance. She wanted out. Out of the bonds of her fundamental marriage. Out of her feelings of oppression. And out of the black hole that now surrounded her with every breath she took.

~Excerpt from Slow Hope
by Anita Swanson

The easy questions come first. Have you ever lied about anything and suffered for it? Have you ever self medicated through pills or alcohol? Have you ever contemplated or gotten divorced? Have you ever contemplated or had an affair? Have you ever felt abandoned by the church? Have you ever contemplated leaving or left the church because you found it too judgmental or oppressive? Then author Anita Swanson says Slow Hope’s message of courage, restoration and forgiveness is for you.

The hard questions come later. How can you save a life gone haywire? Can anyone really heal from child abuse or do the effects lasts forever? What’s the church ever done for me anyway?

And the answers can be found in the often difficult journey she travels and the light that guides her path along the way.

Slow Hope is a multi-layered love story that focuses, among other themes, on child abuse, as well as the church and its initial resistance to Psychotherapy. Slow Hope does not attempt to convert anyone nor attempt to change the laws of leadership in the fundamental church. Slow Hope shows that as the author states “with ordinary courage and determination, oppression can be overcome and generational cycles of violence can be stopped.”

Slow Hope is for anyone who needs to be reassured that there really is power in prayer and simply hanging on. This impassioned narrative teaches that we can learn, we can change, we can be forgiven and finally, that our faith can be restored because if you can face your past, you can heal your past.

About Anita Swanson
As a writer Anita has studied at the UCLA Writers Program and attended numerous writing programs including the prestigious University of Iowa Writing Program. First Place Winner of fiction in the Taproot Literary Review she is a published author of essays as well as her first book, Slow Hope, an acclaimed narration of what it takes to heal from a childhood of abuse to live a life of triumph.

As an actor Anita has appeared in regional and national television commercials and through her membership in the prestigious West Coast Ensemble Theater Company she received outstanding reviews from the LA Times for her role in Susan Griffin’s, Voices.

As a parent Anita successfully raised two daughters as a single mother following her divorce from a high-profile Baptist Minister of music.

As a Christian she has assisted in the teaching of Bible Classes and sung in countless church choirs.

Now remarried and living on the lake in Lake County, CA, Anita continues to write, speak and enjoy her many grandchildren. She is happy to call First Baptist Church of Lakeport her home.