Completing a Novel Manuscript

There is a hiccup in my life when I finally complete a novel and its first revision. I find myself staring at the keyboard blankly wondering where all my wonderful friends in the book went. Fortunately, I can move on by beginning the painful process of trying to interest someone beside me in the work. I probably will try to pitch this book, WOKE UP THIS MORNIN' to the industry.

I also occupy my time with getting my last novel up on Kindle Smart. I will launch it with their free distribution before moving to sell it.

Now, What to write?

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Get A Free Amazon Kindle Ebook Reader

Amazon’s Kindle Ebook Reader has come a long way since it premiered at around $400 plus. A current version is advertised for $139.00, but that’s still a pretty good chunk of change. I will not attempt to compare Kindle with other versions of ebook readers, but there is a consideration you might noodle on.

The most obvious advantage of the Kindel, itself, is its convenience. It’s small, lightweight, and fits in purses, briefcases, and in some cases pockets, which is particularly appreciated by travelers. But what if you find yourself carrying a laptop or notebook plus a Kindle, you can eliminate one piece of equipment – the Kindle.

Log onto a Kindle Store book like Lisa Ray’s Horizons Past(you will need an Amazon account on which you have made a purchase) and scroll down on the right hand column to “Read books on your computer or other mobile devices.” You will see free programs that with one “click” will download to your desktop PC, Laptop PC, Iphone, Ipad, Blackberry, and/or Droid. The program will place a Kindle icon on the device desktop, and you are in business. Log onto the Kindle Store, buy Horizons Past or any book and start reading. The program is exactly the same as a Kindle.

If you download this program to your laptop or notebook, you have a Kindle you can take anywhere, and IT’S FREE. Down load it to your Desktop PC, Blackberry, and IPad also, and using Amazon’s “Whispernet,” you can read the book on any/all of these devises. Amazing.

If you have qualms about ebook reading, this is the obvious approach to keep from buying a Kindle and finding that you are not thrilled by it.

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Propping Up Literary Fiction Sales

Ok, I'll admit it. I lack what it takes to write serious literary fiction. Stephen King settled that issue for me in his book, On Writing, when he said, "You will never be a great writer unless you are born with it." Great writers must be passionate about something, right? I'm only passionate about things I shouldn't eat or drink.

So the arrogance of someone so lacking as myself, offering up a thesis that literary fiction doesn't sell and inferring that cognitive critters might solve that problem, is not lost on me. But even the most calloused devotees of esoteric fiction among publishing gurus, are hard pressed to make the case that a Nobel Prize winner will outsell a good murder mystery, thriller, vampire, or diet book.

Obviously there is a market for literary fiction. I buy lots of it myself. James Lee Burke, recently nominated for a National Book Award, wrote the only crime genre fiction I've ever read until Steig Larsen came along. Among that dedicated cadre of serious readers that have not already jumped ship for nonfiction, there remains a market for quality fiction. Not a huge market, but a market nonetheless.

What's the problem? The characters in literary fiction spend so much time thinking; they never get around to doing anything. They constantly are confronted with deep issues of: Who am I? Why am I here? What should I do? Where am I going? Why can I not love/be loved? What if I'm wrong? What if I'm right? Why is life more difficult than it has to be? Who out there makes my life more difficult than it has to be, and a myriad of other "Oh, woe is me" considerations. There just is no time left to do much. This leaves heaps of the reading public wondering, "Is something ever going to happen in this book."

Yet, during this stultifying process of self-examination, these characters and we readers constantly rub up against all of God's creatures both large and small. Some of these creatures we make into pets. Some we watch with unfeigned interest in the wild or in cages. Some we feed. Some we nuke with pesticides. Some we eat. Some we squash unknowingly underfoot. Some we train to do tricks. Some we shoot for sport. Some we just enjoy. But none of these do we assign any cognitive powers except for "fight or flight" responses, and occasionally mistaking the attention our pets pay to us as affection - when in reality they probably are thinking, "Oh, boy! It's the food guy."

I have a friend, Leopoldo Solis, who is the guru to the tequila producers in Mexico. He has developed processes that tamed tequila from a muy macho kick-your-ass drink, into a delightful sipping beverage. One of those processes is playing Mozart to the yeast as they contentedly munch away on cactus juice during fermentation. He has presented academic papers illustrating the increase in ethyl alcohol production and the decrease in impurities created by these music loving yeast.

If the lowly yeast can enjoy classical music, then maybe we do Nature's woodland creatures a disservice by denying them any cognitive powers. Here might be the salvation of literary fiction. What if we let the characters do lots of fun, interesting, creative, exciting, mysterious, fulfilling, and/or amazing things - while letting the creatures that the characters encounter do the heavy thinking about what is happening to them. The reader gets the best of all genres - plus completely new perspectives on life and the world around us.

I had this idea while in the shower. I shouted the traditional, "Eureka," ran naked though the house to my computer, and launched this entirely new genre of fiction.

The result of my effort is not great literary fiction for the reason stated above by Stephen King. But nestled amongst all this whirl of activity, adding depth and meaning, are the musings of the creatures encountered by the characters. Ruminations like, “Who out there keeps jerkin’ me around? Why? and, How about cuttin’ this crap out?”

I’m enough convinced that this new genre of fiction has a future, that I am well into the second novel. I urge all of you literary authors, more gifted at birth than myself, to let a few cognitive critters do some thinking to free up your character’s time. They then can get off their butts and do something; possibly winning back some of the literary fiction market.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

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Exception Rejection

I’ve been doing serious agent querying for my current project, and I’ve learned that agents have discovered something more demeaning and insulting than the “Dear Author” form letter/post card/email rejection. I’ve dubbed it the “Exception Rejection.”

Here’s how it’s explained on the agent websites: “We receive such a high volume of queries, that we respond only to those in which we are interested. If you have not heard from us in four to six weeks then consider that we have passed on your project. Do not under any circumstances inquire about your submission or we will put your nuts/tits in a vise and force you to watch us eviscerate your first-born. ” Actually that last part I added.

Back in the Underwood Typewriter days, agents/publishers would not accept carbon copies of query submissions. There was the taint of multiple submissions. They expected authors to query exclusively with original drafts. Then wait six to eight weeks for a response. That meant an author could query a maximum of six agents/publishers per year. Any author over fifty years old might not live long enough to get an agent acceptance.

I ran the numbers and here are the statistics of agent querying:
65% will accept only email queries. (“We are a green company blah, blah)
20% will accept both hard copy and email queries
Of the 85% who will accept email queries, 80% will only accept a one-page query (“We will contact you if we wish to see more of your material.”)

Reading these one-page email queries from the screen takes less time than printing them, so I did some research on the time required to respond to an email query after reading:
1) Click on “reply” - 3 seconds
2) Paste in the “Dear Author” rejection - 15 seconds
3) Click on “send” - 2 seconds
Total time required to respond to an email query - 20 seconds.

So what the “Exception Rejection” agents are saying is, “All the time, money, and expense you’ve invested in this query is not worth 20 seconds of my time.” So we authors sit around for a month or two wondering did the query even get to the agent, will I get a response, or what the fuck is gong on here – when the agent could have responded in 20 seconds. Oh! Yes I did study the time taken responding to the SASE. The response averages 30 seconds to stuff the “Dear Author” rejection into the SASE and seal it.

Some “email only” agents set up auto responders on their websites that notify the author that their query was received. This is very easy to do and costs almost nothing. I think this shows a little respect for the author’s efforts.

Short of asking authors to write their own rejection letters, I don’t see any worse affront coming down the publishing pipe than the “Exception Rejection.”

It leaves me wondering why bother with the whole agent/publisher (or self publishing, for that matter) thing, when July 1st, an author can place his or her book in the Kindle Store and receive 70% commission on every download sold. Hook up with a good Internet marketer and laugh all the way to the bank.

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To Write or Not
originally posted: November 18, 2010

For God’s sake let’s quit whining about how the cold cruel world stands between us and our chosen profession of being a universally loved and disgustingly wealthy author. We blame our lack of writing time and effort on distractions heaped upon us by family, friends, responsibilities, professions, politics, economic necessities, weather, business associates, church, the neighbors’ lawnmowers, the three-hundred pound tap dancer upstairs, television, Internet surfing, blogging, video games, debilitating flatulence, and myriad other rationalizations.

A universal axiom of human behavior: we find a way to do those things we really want to do. So the only thing standing between us and writing is not the world out there. It’s us.

The only blog I’ve ever followed and/or commented on is www.betsylerner.com. I accidently discovered it after reading both of Betsy Lerner’s books (Food & Loathing snd The Forest for the Trees). Lately I’ve studied how much time it takes to read Betsy’s Blog and the comments and possibly formulate a personal comment. Many other BL blogees comment almost daily. About half of them have their own website or blog. I started tracking their stuff, and found they all list “Links or Blogs I Follow,” sometimes exceeding fifty URLs. If I were to follow twenty-five to fifty blogs, I would have to hire two assistants.

The troubling truth about writing is that it’s a hobby. Making a wild ass guess, I would approximate there are a few hundred living authors that became stinking rich with their writing. Add in a thousand more who’ve made a comfortable living writing (not including those with real jobs writing for periodicals). There is a significant number that every year or so knocks down a $5,000 to $20,000 advance.

Then there are the rest of us who, unless we are wildly gifted AND wildly lucky, will never see our manuscripts bathed in printer’s ink by a major publisher. I’ve been told by two agents and an editor within the last six months that any male debut novelist’s chance of being published by a major house in today’s market is somewhere south of their finding Osama Bin Laden.

If after understanding that we are our only impediment to spending time and effort on our manuscript, while realizing that we are enjoying a hobby, we still are willing to sit our butt in a chair and write – then maybe we really are writers.

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During the last twenty years Bill Stephens has written over 1,000 weekly columns and features on wine, food, travel, and outdoors for Murdoch, Harte Hanks, and Hearst newspapers. His features and contributions have appeared in national periodicals like Chef, Wine Spectator, Wine News, Wine Enthusiast, Field & Stream, and Food & Wine. He has published two short stories “The Decanter, A Christmas Story” and “Toby Tire and His Erratic Curve Ball”

At one point during his three-decade food service career, he concurrently owned and operated a leading white tablecloth restaurant, three airline in-flight kitchens, three employee feeding facilities, catered a dinner train, and his company was third largest full service off-premise caterer in South Texas.

Stephen’s catering clients included Texas governors, presidential candidates, the family of the King of Saudi Arabia, The Prince of Wales, Pope John Paul II, Tom Jones, Neal Diamond, Willie Nelson, and many other notables.