Behind The Sausage Curtain My novel.

I finally finished my novel. It was like waking up from one of those long convoluted deep sleep dreams where you are chased by a pack of complete strangers through some semi-familiar landscape with no end in sight, and for purposes you are never quite sure of - but there you are, hoping everything turns out okay. It was both fun and exciting. It was a "stick-to-it challenge that at times made me wonder why I ever started in the first place, but made me feel obligated to the story line and the characters to finish. In fact, there were times when I couldn't sleep because the story and the cast had me in its grip. I will always be happy that I stuck it out and finished the task which ended up to be a 346 page book. It was a three year project of actual serious writing, but in reality if you include the tooling up thoughts and notes and starts and stops and re-writes and goofing off, it was really a 5 year project. I don't know how the big-time genre writers pump out novels so fast. Probably by constant practice - and because I've spent a lot of time on airplanes and in hotels reading genre novels, I've seen a pattern to the plots and story lines. That's okay, it works just fine.

So there it was - this big pile of paper full of words lying on my little writing table and now the real work began. Trying to find a publisher.

I went to the internet and spent several weeks researching agents and publishers who dealt in fiction. There are tons of them and most reside in New York. I also spent plenty of time researching the recommended methods of submitting a manuscript for consideration. Thankfully, the net provides not only lists of publishers and agents, but also advises which publishers and agents are accepting proposals and what they expect to see in terms of proposal packages. Essentially, a writer is told to send a query letter (a cover letter asking to please, please, please, please - consider this manuscript for the following reasons.....). I had an acquaintance - another writer who was enrolled in the local literary center, paying vast sums to get an inside ticket to writing and publishing, who advised me in the art of query letters. There is, it seems, a method involved. It's a method manufactured by the publishing gods in which we earthbound writers must pound the drums and dance the dance under murky skies, and sacrifice time and money and crops and children and whatever else is lying about the house, in hopes of being chosen by the gods to have our little manuscript picked for publication.

It's like a TV reality contest show. Dancing With The Stars or American Idol or Celebrity Apprentice (without the celebrities) or The Great Race or Survivors.

The publishing and book marketing guru, whose seminar I attended, had some depressing statistics which I can't exactly remember, listing the number of manuscripts submitted and the number actually chosen in a year's time. It was shocking. I said "Wow. The postal service is cleaning up!"

Still, I joined the club and fired off a hundred or so letters, resumes, reasons to read, selected competitors, the first three chapters - or selected "best representative" chapters and a couple dozen complete manuscripts. The folks at the post office got to know me on a first-name basis.

The results were pretty much as expected. Even though I enclosed return addressed stamped envelopes, only a fraction of them were sent back to me - raising the opinion that as the guru said, many submissions get dumped without being read. How about that?

I tried a second round of submissions with the same results. Now I'll say right here that I totally understand I'm no Hemingway. No Steven King. No Tom Robins. I'm just a guy who wrote a book, so that's what it is. I do believe it's worth a read however - so what did I say (after 8 or 10 months of shuckin' & jivin'?) I said "Hey, screw this. I need product, not process. I'm gonna publish this thing myself!"

I repeated the self publishing phenomenon for the second time (recall if you will, the "A Few Last Words" eulogy book episode) and sadly, but predictably, I repeated the editing screw ups and the premature launch of a wildly flawed copy. Really bad, was the fact that I handed out several copies of this disaster. Most people stopped reading it after the first chapter. Several others stopped talking to me entirely. How embarrassing is that? Very. But here's the deal. The good news is that my dear wife finally tied me to a door knob and demanded that I find a professional editor. The excellent news is that there is a professional editor lurking right here in our extended family and my wife asked her if she might take a look at my copy. She said yes. I heard her gasps of astonishment all the way from Sheboygan, Wisconsin to Minneapolis when she opened the pages. A month later, Jeri Dale, my new editor, returned the copy to me with so many little pencil marks and corrections that I had to go for a walk with the dog to clear my mind. Now, a month later,I'm approaching the last chapters of correction and feel super nifty about what I will resubmit to the electronic book maker.

I have learned a bunch of good stuff in the process and will have a wonderful little book to add to my collection. Cool!

As always, comments, remarks, conversation is encouraged.

On a different subject...

In thinking about this whole blogging thing, I decided to take a small break from the publishing adventure and send out my little take on the blogging phenomenon. It really is a new experience for this old artist, and while I'm mostly fascinated by the possibilities (none of which have surfaced just yet), I also find myself slightly in wonderment at the magnetic draw blogging seems to have on the human desire to communicate. Again, fascinating.

Instead of launching one of my wordy bloggy bloggs of introspection and opinion, I will just post the following little poem (regarding the blog) that I recently patched together. It is, perhaps, not great literature, but it says some stuff. Enjoy.

BLOG

Do you blog? Are you blogging? Logging? Flogging?

Hot Dogging? Are you pedagoging in verbose delight?

Can you still speak out loud in a small or large crowd without logging in on a site?

Can you converse without digital candor? Can you say what is right -

without dimming the light of honest conversational meander?

I wonder.

Blogging on line is really so fine 'cause doing it frees me to rant.

To say what I mean without being seen and no one can say that I can't -

just put on the page, my anger - my rage, my personal flap doodle slant

on all things whatever, the dumber the better, and there's never a need to recant.

When blogging gets dicey my language turns spicy - "Take that, you bugger,"

I chant. How cool is that?

Some folks use blogs to clean out the clogs - it's rather like digital rolfing.

And seen in this way, you'd probably say we should just change the name

to Blowfing.

But Blowfers you see, would then charge a fee for their therapeutical

on-line ravings.

The rest of us twitters would all get the jitters 'cause we couldn't pay

for our cravings.

We'd be reduced then to texting - a habit so vexing, it's totally not worth

the savings.

And besides, I can't read your writing.

So let's hear it for blogging - let's all keep on logging those hours of digital mush.

Conversing this way - most bloggers would say, is really one heck of a rush.

______________________

As the poem above indicates, anyone reading this should feel free to make bloggy comments.

Sometime in the early nineties, I hired on with one of the country's major oil companies to design site enhancement for the grand opening of a new property development project they were building on the east coast. Site enhancement is an industry term which translates to something more akin to "industrial decorating". It includes things like staging, lighting, plantings, special events - and in this case building an outdoor ice skating rink in a part of the country that isn't known for cold weather. The project had nothing to do with oil and everything to do with property development. They were building a little town - complete with office towers, a hotel, a theater, and many retail stores laid out on a street grid that resembled (what else?) a nifty little town. There was a central plaza (actually, it's still there - the place is called Reston Town Center and it's just outside of Washington DC.) You can google it to see what it's like today.

The experience lasted 2 years and was something few artists get to experience. The project was very high profile and very important to my employers. I'm happy to say that I performed well as designer & production manager for my assigned tasks and the results of my work were roundly acclaimed. While the design work and the grand opening ceremonies and events were exciting enough, the year of planning was even more interesting because I was part of the overall development program so I attended many long meetings in the special conference room in one of the office towers, where there was always lots of heavy breathing.

I won't bore you with the details, but I'll just say that having a glimpse of things inside this kind of economic power structure was really eye-opening. Not so eye-opening in terms of the scale of the project or the amount of money being spent. (that's kind of a given, under the circumstances). More eye-opening in terms of the sociology and psychology and the interaction of the various players involved in the project. Suffice to say, the people watching was spectacular. This part was so interesting to me - an artist/contractor who was flown up to the project site from my home in Florida on a weekly basis so I could attend the planning sessions, that years later I decided to write a novel using my experiences as a background for a story. I should say right here, that no specifics from real life were transferred to the book - and in fact, the story I ended up with is quite far from anything remotely comparable. Still, the high pressure fumes of those days linger in this writing - which turned out to be an outrageous and hilarious corporate adventure in which the city of Minneapolis becomes home to the nation's first illegal toxic waste dump disguised as an underground amusement park with a nuclear meltdown theme. If you want some good laughs and plenty of Midwest humor, pick this book up at Amazon.com It is entitled, "Behind The Sausage Curtain".

Now here's the deal. This is my third book and my first novel. It is 346 pages long and I spent roughly 3 years writing it. After I got over my initial fears of making a complete ass of myself - I mean, hey, I'm a papa Hemingway fan - the process was super fun. I discovered almost right away that this being a story of the mind (fiction), my best bet at ever actually finishing the book was to let my imagination run free, write the chapters and then reign them in with the realities and language of the characters. Unlike the two non fiction books previously discussed, this thing had a life of its own. Sometimes I just hung on for the ride and sometimes I slogged along trying to remember why I ever started the journey at all.

When the manuscript was finished, I gave copies to six different readers and waited impatiently for their reactions. I also began the long process of manuscript submission to literary agents and publishers. This is a real "pain in the ass" process because first, one must find the contact information necessary to, well, contact these places. I don't know how writers found publishers and agents before the internet wasinvented. Maybe things were simpler then. Maybe a writer scrounged up a list of publlishers out of the library. Perhaps a writer would have a list of a dozen publishers to send his/her manuscript to and when these dozen publishers turned the work down, the writer just went back to his/her day job. Simple. Now, with access to the internet, the problem is reversed. There are hundreds - even thousands of publishers and agents listed on the web. You can spend weeks and months mulling through all these names to find the 50 or 100 publishers or agents who just might be receptive to your new book. I did that. Then I sent a well prepared query letter, a small resume and three chapters of the book to 100 or so addresses. In some cases I sent the entire manuscript. Expensive and time consuming. Weeks and months later, I received back, something like 50 form printed rejection slips and not one little note about why my book wasn't chosen. "Screw this," I said. "I'll publish it myself.

More notes on the "Sausage Curtain" saga, to come - alongwith some "art talk." Comments and chat are invited.

My first Print on Demand book results.

I got so excited when my second proof copy of "A Few Last Words" arrived in the mail that I over reacted and under examined. I gave the book a quick once-over and like the artist/painter I am, quickly saw a few small glitches in the text, but determined that like a painting, those glitches could be explained away as "process" glitches and that the reading public would either miss them entirely or would absorb them into the experience, and focus instead on the message of the writing. Zowee, was I wrong! And I mean, REALLY wrong.

This is where literary art differs from visual art. The visual art phenomenon (in most cases - especially now in the post modern era) tends to allow for all kinds of creative process forgiveness. Accidental drips on certain paintings can be seen as process drips. These drips might even be seen as intentional and planned. Sometimes that's correct. Sometimes drips and scratches and scribbles and loose brush strokes are used to camouflage a really mundane painting. It's eye candy.
We might talk more about that later. Suffice to say, here in literary land, incorrect spelling , incorrect capitalization, bad spacing, awful punctuation etc. etc., are not seen as eye candy. These things are seen as stupid mistakes and no amount of telling readers that it's the message that matters will fix the problem.

I had to learn that the hard way - and, it took more than one book to make me a believer. How dumb is that? Very. The reading public demands perfection when it comes to editorial presentation. And why not? Readers have been reading and writing for most of their lives, and by association, expect better than inept technical skill when it comes to a piece of writing they are paying for. Otherwise, the book is just a waste of time.

So here I am with this nifty but technically flawed proof copy on my desk. And what do I do? Well, I'm so excited that I order twenty of these flawed books from the print on demand publishing outfit and when they arrive, I distribute them to friends and relatives. The results, as you can guess, were quite embarrassing.
I won't go into detail here, except to say every one of those twenty friends and relatives changed their image of me as an intelligent if quirky creative type of person, to a totally inept goof-ball. My believability took a major hit.

The good news (I guess) is that I deleted the edition from Amazon.com and spent another month or so re-editing the book. I was too embarrassed to ask for help - another super dumb decision. The correct decision would have been for me to wheedle and arm twist someone with their hat on straight, to edit the book for me. See, the deal is, the first law of the literary jungle states clearly - authors should never edit their own work.

Regardless, I re-edited again and got pretty close to a clean copy out of the time spent. It was a good thing the book is only 157 pages long. It's now on the street for sale and has done better than the average 75 copies sold in the book marketing guru's statistics so I feel pretty good about that - although it has not broken the 500 mark. I'm sure there are some little technical glitches in the text, but life is short and I had a 400 page novel to finish. Plus, I admit to being slightly stubborn.

The good news is, that if you ever are called upon to create a eulogy for someone else, or decide to write your own ( a very good idea) "A Few Last Words - Your Guide To The Art Of Self Memorializing" is your ticket to success. Check it out at Amazon.com

Continued bloggy blogs about writing and publishing and art and sailing and more are on their way. Stay tuned and remember, comments and chat are welcome.

self publishing notes

Self publishing a book has had a bad rap since the idea was first invented umpteen years ago. Those publishing companies which indulged the desires of writers who either could not get published (for a million different reasons) in the traditional manner - or those who simply wanted printed evidence that they could write something, were commonly called "vanity presses" They still are called that, in quite a few circles, and writers were warned that if they ever wanted to be published by a "real" publishing company they should stay away from self publishing. "It's poison," said the pundits. At one point this was no doubt true, and those of us who even considered the possibility of self publishing had nightmares of being branded as heretics and outcast from the writers world.

I thought I had escaped that scene when my book "The Lilibet Logs" was published by a traditional publisher in New York. I thought I was home free and started serious work on finishing my new book in progress. Cool!

After spending six months mailing the manuscript of my little self help guide book "A Few Last Words" (my second actual finished manuscript) to at least a hundred publishers and writer's agents, and receiving back perhaps 75 decent rejection slips, I decided to check other options. What I discovered was a couple of general options - true vanity presses being one option. Vanity presses seem to be publishing companies that will take your manuscript and for a really large amount of money, build your book and sell it back to you for more large amounts of money. You have to buy a minimum number of books and this means the author has to fill up his/her basement with these books while he/she is pounding the pavement trying to sell them. The cost is considerable and sometimes these companies retain the rights to the book, which makes it hard to approach anyone else in hopes of re submitting the writing to the publishing world. Like, what would happen if by some strange circumstance a movie production company wanted to make your book into a film? Guess who would make all the money? Right - the vanity press would clean up, and you'd be left out in the cold. Given this scenario, it's easy to see why vanity presses have a bad name.

The other option I found was something called "print on demand" publishers. This was something new a couple of years ago, (directly related to the advance of electronic technology) and while I don't know the exact facts, I'm guessing that because book writers had multiplied like rabbits and traditional publishers were becoming swamped with manuscript submissions - and lots of books don't have the mass sales appeal that it takes to pay for the editing, design work, printing, binding, sales and marketing, shipping and storage - someone came up with the idea of "print on demand". Wow! In addition, most of these places are connected to Amazon.com, so the writer gets a sales listing on the world wide web. And, best of all, you don't have to purchase a pile of books. You can buy them one at a time (at a nice author's discount) or you can order a couple of hundred or even a thousand - depending on what you need.

Being old fashioned and ever-so-slightly computer challenged, I puttered around with this concept and finally hooked up with a print on demand publishing outfit. Essentially, what happens with this system is that you, the author, are responsible for writing, editing, setting up the page sequence and font style and spacing etc., designing the cover according to an electronic template, providing and inserting artwork, choosing the retail price of the book and lots of other stuff. When you think everything is perfect, you make a pdf of the file and upload it to the publisher. The publisher prints one proof copy and sends it back to you.
It took me six months to do all that with my little how-to book "A Few Last Words".

When the proof copy arrived I was initially thrilled to see my book between a shiney nice cover. When I reviewed the text however, I was amazed at how totally screwed up my copy editing had turned out. I was bummed out and spent another month and a half re editing the writing. This is where I should have listened to lots of well meant friends and relatives who said, "Ya know Jack, you really should get a real copy editor involved here." No truer words were ever spoken - but did I listen? No! I resubmitted my latest copy edition and waited with baited breath for the new proof copy in the mail. I'll talk about the results in my next electronic gig, here. Thanks for reading.