“Gorilla Tour” coming: A nail-biters journal.

Saturday Feb 9. 

A day closer and my nails bitten down a little lower as I grow more nervous about whether my book will be ready in time. My publisher, (CreateSpace.com) has promised that a proof of the book will be ready by Feb 12. 

Even then it will be a tight squeeze to examine the book (312 pages), order copies, and have them printed and delivered by February 22nd, the day of my Musehouse Literary Arts Center public reading and signing. My debut for this book! 

Yesterday, a kind soul at the publisher, named Kristina, offered to see what she could do "to move it along." I was very touched (but vowed not to depend on it, if you know what I mean). Wish me luck.

A Personal Excursion through "Redneck Noir," Part 1: John O'Brien vs Chris Offutt

By Hugh Gilmore

Chris Offutt

            My late great friend John O'Brien used to get angry whenever I mentioned the Kentucky writer Chris Offutt. "Southern Gothic!" he'd say, "I hate those guys. They're exploiters." He'd get genuinely worked up if I didn't change the subject.

            Like myself, John grew up mostly (5th grade to high school graduation) in Colwyn, a small mill town just across the Cobbs Creek Bridge from southwest Philadelphia – and conveniently in sight and downwind of the famous Fels-Naptha plant.
           He also had roots in West Virginia since both his parents (and their parents, etc) were from Piedmont and the O'Brien family was notable for having retained a lot of their country ways. They ate cold Cream of Wheat, for example, and owned rifles and went hunting and fishing, and ate deer and rabbits and squirrels. They walked everywhere, even though they had a car. There were somewhere between nine and eleven children in the family, only the oldest five of which I knew, the rest having come along after we left home. Although we all lived on the edge of the city, their family had a sweet, gently folksy way about them.

            More than any of the kids in his family John developed a love of nature and a deep affection for the life "back home" in West Virginia. He'd been an Eagle Scout. He went to the University of West Virginia, intending to be a forest ranger. About halfway through he switched over to wanting to be a fiction writer. He was good enough to be accepted to the University of Iowa Writers Program. After graduating, he received a Stegner Fellowship to the Stanford University Creative Writing Program. Also, lots of writer-in-residence positions at colleges and universities. Mostly, he wrote short stories that were published in numerous prestigious journals. He knew lots of up-and-coming authors, many of them as drinking buddies, including Raymond Carver, now acknowledged as one of the best short fiction writers of that era.

            For about the last dozen years of his life John had moved back to West Virginia, first to a town named Franklin, where his wife, Becky had her roots, and then to a place named Green Bank.

            After a typical adult male contact lapse of about 20 years, John and I resumed our friendship in 2001. Here's how, and John didn't like the first part of it: I had read two books by Chris Offutt and really liked them and was hoping to find more. Borders in Chestnut Hill didn't have any. I was on the University of Pennsylvania campus one afternoon and decided to try Penn Books. Chris Offutt, originally from Kentucky, is another "regional" writer who graduated from, and later taught at, the University of Iowa Writers Program. Offutt's books are short stories set in contemporary, nitty-gritty backwoods, down-in-the-holler Kentucky. The characters are fallible, drawn to alternative interpretations of the legal code, and possessed of really good what I'll call "creek smarts." They're also well written, gripping, and quite enjoyable.

      Penn Books had no Offutt in Literature, so I tried the memoir section since I thought he'd written a memoir. And right there, given the alphabetical nature of bookstore shelves, right where Offutt might have been, I saw the name "John O'Brien" on a book's spine. I pulled the book, titled, "At Home in the Heart of Appalachia."

            I'll be darned, I thought. I felt so happy for John. I bought his book and read it over the next two days. "At Home" is as sweet, complicated, funny, and angry as John himself. You might call it a love song to a battered bride, the bride being the state of West Virginia, the battering being its long and tortured history of being exploited like a third-world colony by the rest of America. John interweaves his personal history, especially with his father, with his attempts to go back and make peace with, while he tries to settle in with, the people he knew and loved back in West Virginia.

            I felt uncomfortable calling him after so many years, so I poked around on the Internet until I found what might be an e-mail address for John. I sent an exploratory greeting.

            Two days later, a Saturday when by some miracle my bookshop had no customers for an hour, John telephoned. We had just started talking when he said, "Wait a minute, before we go on, I have to tell you something. I'm fighting cancer right now." And he told me the details and we dropped them for the time being and had a great talk for an hour. Among other things, we agreed I should come down to Green Bank and stay with him and Becky for a few days.

            A few weeks later I took an Amtrak train to White Sulpher Springs, West Virginia. At John's request, I'd brought a cooler filled with hoagie fixings and Tastykakes and a bottle of single malt whiskey. John and Becky awaited me. I was startled by John's appearance. The skinny, curly haired friend of my youth now looked like a huge reincarnation of Marlon Brando as Colonel Kurtz in "Apocalypse Now." Fat, bald, but flashing those same brilliant blue eyes and that dazzling white smile. We had a lot of catching up to do.

           

Hugh's two new books, "Scenes from a Bookshop," and "Malcolm's Wine" are available through Amazon.com and independent bookstores everywhere.

Weary of queries, then: "Hey you: Send pages." Who, me, Mr. Godot?

By Hugh Gilmore

Me? Send pages? To you, Mr. Godot?

 June 3 issue, 2009. A month has passed since I last reported on my quest "to write a novel in a year," a month that had been crushingly discouraging up to this week. I'll share my small triumph with you in a moment, after I tell you what it's been like.

            The original quest, you may recall, was to follow the guidelines set out by Walter Mosley in his helpful little writers' guide This Year You Will Write Your Novel. Write every day for at least an hour and a half. No holidays. Then rewrite. Read it to yourself out loud and take notes. Tape record it and listen to it. Take notes. Rewrite. Within a year, you'll have a short novel.

            So, beginning January 1, 2008, I wrote every day for a few hours and in three months had a 90,000-word typescript. Then I re-plotted and revised and rewrote and re-tortured myself for the rest of the year until I finished. In February of this year, I gave copies of the book to four smart people and they poked their fingers in the soft spots. Through the rest of February and March I rewrote until I was "done."

            Fifteen months of hard work and I finally had a novel in hand.  But as they say in Victorian novels: "Little did I know the trials that lay ahead."

            With only rare exceptions, the way to get a book published is to convince an editor to read your book, get excited about it, and tell his publishing house to buy it. Sounds simple enough, except that editors will not read unsolicited manuscripts. And you can't call them — they won't take your call. You can't send flowers and a note, or a box of candy or their favorite chocolate cake with a Word file inside. They don't want to hear from you.

            And why is that? you may ask. Well, good question, here's the simple answer: There Are Too Many Gosh-darned People Out There Writing Novels. As wonderful as I thought my achievement was, spending fifteen months writing over 100,000 words, 300 pages, I was deluded if I thought what I'd done was rare. The hills are alive with novels and novelists. They've sprouted up everywhere like toadstools after a spring shower. To the publishing world, we are the cast from Night of the Living Dead, staggering forward, manuscripts in hand, chanting "Read. Read. Read" in our mind-numbing voices.

            Only...get this...the publishers know that somewhere out there in the great flood of words, there is a gem of a story, terrifically told by a gifted writer. From this person's talents, say a Stephanie Meyer, or an H.K. Rowling, the industry can make enough money to stay alive. And  subsidize all the other writers, whether literary or mainstream, that make up the rest of the industry.

            To find these writers, the publishing houses turn to talent scouts, aka literary agents. Agents find the good writers and sell their manuscripts for them, charging a percentage of whatever income follows.

            An unconnected writer (i.e. someone who does not know someone, or is not a M.F.A. candidate in a university-based writing program) must seek an agent. With a little resourcefulness, finding agents' names and business addresses is not hard to do, especially given the Internet.

            But agents have the same problem the rest of the industry has: a heck of a lot of people want to be writers — probably as many as who want to be rock stars. No one can screen every book that is for sale out there in the cosmos.

            So, a protocol has emerged. Unknowns can only get the attention of an agent through the equivalent of "speed dating," or an "elevator pitch." They must write a "query letter." Some agencies accept only e-mail inquiries, some only snail mail, some both. Some none, as they post: "We do not accept unsolicited queries."

            The query letter is one page, but they do let you single-space it. It usually is formatted thusly:

            1. Greeting: Hi, I chose you because you agented the book "X Meets Y," and you are the best person in the world for my book, "Y Meets X," a clever spin on the original. Edgy-like, you know.

            2. Synopsis: "When X, the loneliest letter in the Alpha-Bits box, first tumbled out of the safety of the only home he'd ever known, down into a cold ceramic bowl, and felt the chilly milk pouring over his neck, he never expected to meet Y, the Vanna White-like letter-turner of his dreams (and heir to the Post cereal fortune). But how will they get out of the bowl together while a giant spoon keeps descending and randomly tearing their world apart? Perhaps by telepathically making the phone ring in another room X can buy time for himself and his beloved Y to escape. Will it work?"

            3. Bio. What makes me qualified to write about soggy cereal with a professional's eye?

            4.  Marketing Plan: Describe what I'll say if I go on Oprah or am forced to get deep and thoughtful with Maury Povich.

            Just kidding, folks, but after you do a number of these query letters you start to go a little batty.           

            From April 6 of this year, up to and including this morning, my first piece of business every day has been to send off at least one query letter to an agent. Occasionally I'll get an e-mail response that my letter has been received "and will be carefully considered within 6 to 8 weeks."

On three occasions I received e-mails saying, "Just doesn't seem right for our list," or "We are not buying fiction at this time."

            Most agencies, however, take a "Waiting for Godot" approach: If they like you, they'll get in touch...soon...maybe. If they don't, you'll never hear a word from them. Not even "no."

            I have never felt so discouraged in my life — throwing stones in the canyon and not even getting to hear them hit bottom. I seriously wanted to just stick the manuscript in the drawer, give up, and enjoy the rest of my life without this daily angst. But I felt a commitment to the four people who took the time to read my book. And a commitment to the readers of this column. I kept plugging.

            And then, this week, something wonderful happened: for the first time, an e-mail response came back, within hours, saying: "Thanks for the query. Please email the first fifty pages as a Word attachment; include the query, bio, and synopsis at the start of the document."

            This is called  "being asked for pages." I sent them, of course, quietly thrilled to at least be acknowledged. Many a novel dies right there. Most, in fact. But, if this agent likes what he reads, he'll ask for the whole book. And if he likes the book, he'll try to sell it. And if an editor likes his pitch and they do a deal...well, the world will be my oyster —maybe sometime late in 2010.

Probably nothing will come of it and I'll have to keep plugging along. But at least I got a small response and that's enough to let me know there is, indeed, a world out there I might escape to if "Y" and I can only get over the rim of the bowl.

gilmorebookshop@yahoo.com

           

Shadowing Walter Mosley, Part Two. You wrote it ... ha ha, now try getting in published!

By Hugh Gilmore

            April 29, 2009. The most recent installment of this "writing a Novel" series ended thusly:

            "In the movies, the aspiring author sends his book off to the publishing company in the morning and waits for the afternoon mail. "Dear Mr. Doubleday," right?

            My real education as a writer of novels was just beginning. Any dolt can write a book. Getting it published is a whole other story."

            Well, Mr. Doubleday is no longer answering his mail. Nor are Mr. Scribner, Mr. Houghton, or Mr. Harcourt. Most of the publishing companies are owned by huge foreign conglomerates that also make sponges and ball bearings while broadcasting Hollywood gossip television programming.

            They still publish books, but they do not have time to read all the books that would be submitted to them if they allowed people to submit books to them. Manuscripts sent directly to publishing houses are either trashed immediately or dumped in an abandoned room in a heap that is called "the slush pile" by the industry. Imagine, all those voices crying to be heard beneath the plain brown wrappers, so carefully tied with string and neatly addressed. 

            What the editors and publishers do instead is let another sub-industry wade through the wall of manuscripts that surges in with each change of tides. I'm speaking of literary agents. These people are the primary gatekeepers who influence what manuscripts get seen and considered for purchase by the publishing world. (There are others who can get an editor to look at your writing: another editor, a respected writer who knows your work, your writing teacher at a major writing program, your uncle Louie in accounting, maybe even the lady who comes in at night and empties the office waste baskets, but today's discussion centers on agents.)

            An agent is, in theory, a person with good taste in literature who also has an eye for the publishing market. Very importantly, the agent has inroads with a number of editors and publishers. You could Google the names of publishing house editors yourself and come up with a list longer than the Monongahela River, but they won't talk to you if you call them. But an agent with a hot manuscript in her or his hand can tap the speed dial and get through to just the perfect editor for your book, someone who loves your kind of book, or at least thinks it's the type of book that might sell well in today's market.

            If so, your agent sells your book to that publishing house. The sales price is negotiated. Skillful, prestigious agents know how to get the best prices for their clients' work. The percent you'll get is negotiated (but is fairly standard for new authors). If the book gets translated and published in another country, if the book is made into a movie, a television show, or a cereal box mini-novel, your agent negotiates those deals for you too.

            In theory — or folklore, at least — your agent supports your work, believes in you, sometimes offers suggestions to improve your manuscript, lifts you up when you fall, gives you hope to carry on, and takes a mere 15 percent of what you make. That's a bargain. One of the last good deals on earth.

            Okay, you say, that sounds good. I'll take one. Do they come in mauve? Could I have a good-looking one also? a kind of always-dress-in-black, New York-chic person who occasionally gets noted in the New York Times bold face celebrity news? 

            Then I found out that there are no agent stores at the mall. You can't just go in and contract for one, as you do for a cell phone. No, if the agent has never heard of you and no one has recommended you, you must apply to that agent and beg like a slumdog to be noticed.

            And the begging must be done in a quite restricted, highly regulated form known as a "query letter." Oh what holy horror those words raise in my heart. Read any of the many books or websites devoted to finding an agent and you'll find advice and directions, often contradictory, for how to write a query letter to an agent.

            After a year or two or three of writing, rewriting, revising, thinking, despairing, hoping, and rewriting some more, you finish a novel. Now you must write a letter to an agent seeking representation. The letter should be one page long (though you may single space). You must say: (1) What is it about that's agent's career, interests, and track-record that made you write to her/him; (2) Offer a three-sentence synopsis of your 300-page novel; (3) Reveal your marketing plan; (4) Describe your career, especially any writing awards you've won.

            I felt I'd swallowed a fat stone that would take a long time to digest when I learned those criteria. And I really started sweating when I learned that agents reject 90 percent of the queries sent them. Then, of the 10 percent they ask for samples from, they reject 95 percent of them. Is that what this comes down to, I wondered? after thousands of hours of writing and dreaming, my fate depends on how well I write a one-page letter? A sales pitch?

            "Reality is always therapeutic," my friend, Tom Rosica, used to say. If this is the way they do things up there in New York, who am I to naysay? I spent three intense weeks writing that simple letter.

            And this week I took a deep breath and sent that query to six different agents. And guess what? By Friday, I'd already heard back from one of the biggest, busiest agents in New York,  Daniel Lazar!

            Unfortunately the answer was: "We’re afraid your project does not seem right for our list, but thank you for thinking of Dan, and best of luck in your search for representation."

            But I was heartened to know that the canyon echoes when you shout into it. I'll send one a day for a year.

            More to follow...

Shadowing Walter Mosley

This Year You Write Your Novel

By Hugh Gilmore

            April 22, 2009. You may recall that in January of 2008 I invited the public to join me in the daily rigors of writing a novel. Though I had wanted to write a novel for a while, my all-or-nothing attitude had blocked me. If I couldn't create something as deeply artistic as Dostoevsky or Flaubert, or good old "F. Scott," I couldn't bear writing something superficial. Or merely "entertaining."

            I got over that when I read Walter Mosley's entertaining and useful little book, This Year You Write Your Novel (112 pages, 2007). I had read numerous writing guides before, but Mosley's book has the special virtues of being simple and patient. He understands all the things that can get in the way of writing a book and offers a sympathetic, and knowing nod. But then he rattles the cage.

            You either want to write or you don't. Everybody has obstacles, problems, crying kids, leaves to rake, other work to do. Yes, that's too bad. Write every day for at least an hour. Same time of day, if possible. First thing you do on arising, he suggests. If you can't think of anything to write, you must at least sit in your writing chair for an hour. Get in the habit. If you write a page or two a day, it adds up soon.

            So, I did. I decided to write a mystery novel. I worked on the book first thing every day, putting in between two and six hours a day, rain or shine. By the end of March last year I had written the entire story, more than 90,000 words. A mere three months to finish a novel!

            But it wasn't very well written. I decided the problem lay in my having chosen First Person point of view to tell the story. Didn't feel right. Plus, First Person limits your ability to say what's on someone else's mind, unless you know a variety of narrative tricks. In April I began rewriting the book using Third Person point of view. I finished that version in mid August.

            "Finished" is a relative term here. The novel continued to need plot doctoring, dialogue sharpening, and character developing. And cuts. Oh boy does that hurt. You can't help but fall in love with clever lines or daring scenes you've written, even if they don't belong in your book and would do better in a book about life on Mars. Out they went. Perhaps some day when I'm dead, but famous, an aspiring Ph.D. student will "discover" the original versions in my saved files. Then the world will admire my wit for creating those clever lines and my good taste in omitting them. The best of both worlds. Too bad I won't be here, but anticipation is its own reward sometimes.

            From August 2008 till late January 2009 I rewrote and revised every day. That process is tedious most of the time and seldom feels like the creative funkiness people envision when you tell them you're writing a novel.

            By the beginning of February, I had taken the story as far as I could. I needed other people's perspectives. For the first time, I let someone read it. My wife, Janet, was the first reader, as she is a good editor and is insightful. She read the book in four sittings and offered suggestions. I rewrote again.

            Janet said she enjoyed the book, but her opinion didn't count since she likes me. I wrote to four other people I knew and asked if they'd read it and comment. They agreed. Three of them are Hillers — Bethany Maloof, Peg Smith, and Tim Moxey — and I met with them on successive nights at the warm and cozy Hill Tavern. I met with Mt. Airyite Shawn Hart at his kitchen table.

            I'm not sure what I had in mind before I met with them, but I supposed I'd take their suggestions about comma placements, or errant spelling, and make some quick changes. They had much more substantial comments than that, however, and I had to work long days for another six weeks to incorporate their ideas. I pared 312 pages, 118,000 words down to 275 pages, 90,000 words. Thirty-seven brilliant pages sacrificed to the god of deletions, but now a polished and gleaming story! So I hope.

            At the end of March, I was finally done. But done what? I now had a box sitting on my desk that contained about 280 pieces of paper. Where do I sign up for fame and fortune? What kind of jacket photo should I use? Maybe I'll go for the Walter Mosley, man-of-mystery look: dark overcoat and snap-brim hat, peering from the harsh shadows.

            In the movies, the aspiring author sends his book off to the publishing company in the morning and waits for the afternoon mail. "Dear Mr. Doubleday," right?

            My real education as a writer of novels was just beginning. Any dolt can write a book. Getting it published is a whole other story.

            To be continued ...