Where's the writer?

My internship with SFWP couldn't have come at a better time as we are about to put out two new releases on May 1. Wendy J. Fox's If the Ice Had Held and Elizabeth Geoghegan's eightball are currently in presale on Amazon and SFWP's website and we have been working hard to push both books.

Given that SFWP is such a small team and there are only two spring releases I've had the opportunity to interact with both authors during the presale marketing process. Both Wendy and Elizabeth are extremely active on social media and both just attended AWP where their books went out into the world for the first time (ARCs don't count!).

The part of the process I did miss out on for their books was the initial editing phase and cover creation though I have to say, in my extremely humble opinion, that both books came out absolutely beautiful. My job has been to work with both authors to find the best outlets for marketing the book, getting shoutouts and early praise. Both books received positive Kirkus reviews and a heap of advanced praise. Wendy's book was included on BuzzFeed's 37 Amazing New Books To Add To Your Spring Reading List. I'll also be helping both authors find contests that they're eligible for.

I'm also helping with the final go-through of the upcoming fall release, Dan Ford's Body Broker. I'll have the opportunity to do marketing for the book when we get closer to its release.

Beyond that, I've had the chance to read a number of contest submissions which has been an interesting experience. I use Submittable for Dark Ink so I'm generally fine with being rather ruthless about turning down a submission because it's for my own magazine and I know exactly what I'm looking for. With the contest, I have to weigh out more factors. Is this something I think has wide appeal, or am I the only one who's ever going to like it? Does this author seem to have a voice of his/her own, or does it sound like something I've read before? It's a different way of approaching the writer in the process since these contest submissions are supposed to be blind. We have to judge the writer simply by what we get off the page in one reading. It's an interesting, and challenging process.

Overall, this entire experience has been very enlightening, especially watching how each individual author has created a platform and markets their work. I also have enjoyed watching how they interact with Andrew. The relationships are very strong and very easy going, but Andrew isn't afraid to tell his authors what he needs from them to make their books a success. I'm looking forward to what's still to come in this internship!

Time Travel

"Imagine yourself as a young twenty-something who would like to work in a large publishing house."  

When I was applying to college I told my parents I wanted to major in English because I wanted to become a writer. Here's how that went:

Me: I want to major in English.
My mother: ......
My father: .......
Me: No really. I want to be a writer and I need an English degree for that.
My mother: .......
My father: What the hell are you going to do with an English degree? You can't make money as a writer. You need a backup plan. Like teaching.

And so, that's what I did. I went to Elms with the intention of majoring in secondary education so I could teach high school advanced placement English and creative writing while I wrote the great American novel in my spare time.

Then came my early 20's when I accidentally fell face first into special education. It's a long story, and one that involves getting a mechanical pencil jammed in my hand (see earlier posts) but I found myself working at a residential treatment facility and researching my first nonfiction book (even though I didn't know that's what it was at the time).

Even though I was enjoying teaching and applying to grad school for special education, I still occasionally crept through the job postings in the publishing industry. I was never brave enough to apply for them but I certainly dreamed. I thought I wanted to be an acquisitions editor, slogging through the slush pile to find that one diamond in the rough that would become the novel of the year, of the decade, the voice of a generation. I pictured myself kicking off my Jimmy Choos and propping my feet up on the desk in my cubicle while I read manuscripts. Later I thought I might want to be an editor, going through manuscripts with my red pen, helping to shape a book the way Max Perkins did with Thomas Wolfe.

Then I discovered that I hate editing. I hate reading raw material. I also discovered that I'm much better at interacting with authors and helping them build a platform for their already finished book. Eventually, I also discovered the production aspect of a book, creating a schedule for a book's creation and launch, writing jacket copy, having input on the cover design. Laying out a book and formatting a text gives me a much greater sense of accomplishment than editing does. In fact, I've discovered I have neither the attention span nor the patience to edit a manuscript.

I still enjoy the thrill of meeting a new author who has something to say and hearing them pitch their work. I love discovering writers who have an incredible story that wasn't right for other publishers but might be right for a small indie press that can devote more time to the work. But most of all I love being the last person to touch a book before it's released, the person who coordinates all the moving parts and makes the author's vision a reality. Production is the behind the scenes machine that makes the book an actual thing, a product that we can put in a reader's hand and say, "Enjoy".

I'm still teaching and still an idealist when it comes to publishing. I now have friends in the industry and I love listening to them talk about the authors they're working with or the great manuscript they found that they hope the editors will love. I still sometimes wonder what that would be like. But I'm also a realist and I know that I want to be on the other side of the fence, behind the curtain, working to put the finishing touches on a book. Just call me The Wizard....

xoxo
Paste

The Adult Thing

Today a student was trying to guess how old I am, which is a popular game for all ages. It's great how skewed their sense of time is because most of them assume I'm in my 20's. Although I'm beginning to think they're judging less on looks and more on maturity level...or lack thereof. So I finally tell them that I'm 38 and one student tells me I look younger than her mother who is 33. I almost said, "That's because I don't have a teenaged girl in my house" but I caught myself. Her next question was, "How old was your mom when she had you?" I told her both my parents were 30 when I was born and of course she blurted out, "That's OLD!" I laughed because their concept of "old" is so warped, but then she seemed to reconsider her opinion. "Actually, that's not old. That's responsible!" Gotta love teens.

This week in class we are being asked to consider what it means to be an "accomplished" writer and it's funny because this is something I think about often. Like most people, I buy a book, I read it, and sometimes I'm left with barely lukewarm feelings and all I can think is, "How did this person get published and not me?" I think it's only natural that we as humans spend a lot of time comparing ourselves to others. If you asked me ten years ago what I would consider accomplished, I likely would have said something about the NYT bestseller list and a piece published in the New Yorker. At one time I even had dreams of seeing one of my books become a film.

By the time I actually had a finished book in my hand, I lowered the bar a bit. Accomplished began to mean simply published. I thought getting an acceptance from an agent or publisher would mean I had "made it" as a writer, until I started papering my office with rejection letters. I knew I had a good book and it occurred to me that an agent/editor's job is so largely subjective-- I would never be able to please everyone with my work so I had to work to fulfill my own desires.

Once my first book was self-published and I ambushed the world with it, I realized that true accomplishment as a writer is having someone come up to you with your book in their hands as they tell you how much your book meant to them in some way. My greatest accomplish became the conversations I had with folks who had read my book and come away from it having learned something. I enjoyed the press, I saved every article (and still do) written about my work, and though I could collect these little mementos of accomplishment, it meant more to me that I had started a long-running conversation.

I didn't consider myself successful until I started getting messages from strangers who thanked me for my work. When you write about something as complicated and socially taboo as mental health, positive reactions to your work are cherished. When someone reaches out like that, it means you've broken down a barrier, scaled a wall, kicked a stigma in the face. The greatest success I've had as a writer is turning my book into someone else's accomplishment. Some folks who read my books would never have openly discussed mental illness without my books as a vehicle. I've raised their social consciousness in a very small, but powerful way. On top of that, participating in the MFA program has helped me remember, regularly, that as long as I keep writing, I will have accomplished something profound, even if it never sees the light of day.

The Paint Chip Post

I don't know how many of you fine folks are aware of this, but I decided to take my writing to the next level and make it official: I'm getting my MFA in Creative Nonfiction at a local university and at the beginning of the semester we were asked to choose a paint chip color that represents us right now. Now no one who follows this blog should be surprised by my answer- gray. Shocker, right? In fact over the past few years that we've actually been putting the house together rather than taking it apart, I've chosen to paint each room a slightly different shade of gray. The kitchen has a blue undertone while my studio is more of a minty shade. My love of gray is lifelong but right now, here is how I came up with my response:

I chose the paint chip, "foggy day" but not for the reasons one might think. First, I have a deep and abiding love for the Victorian era and there is no more Victorian weather than fog. As a kid I grew up watching Jeremy Brett star as Sherlock Holmes in the miniseries and I became addicted to the image of 19th Century London with its gas lamps and cobblestone roads. The color gray was synonymous with the air of mystery that wound its way through Arthur Doyle's prose, making his stories come alive.

Later, when I started developing an interest in history, gray also lent itself well to my growing appreciation of all things mysterious and creepy. Gray has gotten a bad rap, being generally associated with doom and gloom, but often times it is doom and gloom that inspires incredible bouts of creativity—like every horror film ever made. Most every corner of my imagination is clouded with fog; the fog of history, of spirits, of death.

I have some very vivid memories associated with the color gray, most of them of photographing various buildings. The first time I photographed Northampton State Hospital for the Insane was in the fog. It was winter and the ground was covered with snow. Because the hospital is at the top of a hill in the bowl of the Pioneer Valley, the fog settled in and hovered just about the roof line of the asylum, floating in wisps in and out of the empty window frames. The fog made the red brick of the hospital look like granite instead, like a desaturated photograph.

There is a great deal of mystery in the fog and dark and because of that, human beings have become inherently frightened of both, yet the waning light brings us closer to a state of true meditation where we are uninterrupted by the demands of the day. But instead of embracing the fading of the day, human beings have learned how to fight the darkness with artificial light that draws out the hours, pushing back the nights when we could be embracing the darkness of thought and the spark of imagination it ignites.

I love gray, rainy days when all I want to do is sit, cozy in my reading chair with my old Rochester lamp burning and my cat in my lap, pretending I’m in 19th century London around the corner from Baker Street. Or I imagine I’m walking through the haunted halls of Ohio State Reformatory, or the back wards of Westborough State Hospital. I will settle in with a cup of tea watch my favorite thrillers, or perhaps an episode of Masterpiece Mystery, the opening credits of which also fostered my love of grey scale, the muted, less colorful sibling of black and white. To this day when I hear the sounds of the lady fainting in the opening credits, I get a thrill and remember watching Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express for the first time.

Strangely gray fog also transports me to our campsite on days when summer thunderstorms rock our trailer and a heavy mist rolls off the reservoir. Sometimes we will take the boat out after one of these storms and it feels as if we are the only ones on the water in a land that time forgot, bobbing along on the gray, misty waves until the sun breaks through and warms the day, chasing the gray away.

In many ways, the grayness of fog is also the herald of sun and light. It is the end of the storm, the gray day that breaks and brings warmth and new beginnings. It is the absence of color, yet the foundation of so many. It is the fog of creativity in which I live on a near constant basis, and I find I’m alright with that!

So there you are kiddies, don't be afraid to think gray thoughts and if any of you teachers out there are looking for an activity to try with your students, grab a few paint chips at your local hardware store (go ahead, they're free!) and ask your kiddos to do the same. I bet you'll get some interesting answers!

xoxo

Paste