Alison Kent's Blah Blog

I often think that Excited Light was a book that took most of my life to take shape, but there was one, dazzling moment when it all began to come together for me.

Like many writers, I knew I was a novelist at heart—I knew it at 10 years old, when a teacher praised my writing to my parents. However, the idea of pounding away on a typewriter in some attic, and not making any money, didn’t appeal to me. So, I turned to journalism, a way I knew that I could make money from my writing, In a way, I became stuck in newspaper writing, because I truly did love the romance of the profession. I worked in a building where the presses would roar and the whole structure would shake. I loved to watch the paper being pasted up, I even liked getting ink on my hands. But as computers took over and the bean counters started making journalism less lucrative, I started to look longingly at my nearly forgotten desire to write novels.

But how? I was a single parent with a high stress newspaper job in a large metropolitan city. How would I ever find the time to write a novel? I didn’t even have the slightest idea how to find and agent. I remember writing to one publishing house and getting a curt rejection. That deflated my ego for some time

Then I re-married and told my new husband that my life’s dream was to write novels. He was making good money and said it would be fine if I quite my day job, freelanced articles, and also wrote fiction.

The book I wanted to write came to me during a time, when I was still single, and direly ill. I had just been sent home from the hospital, and wasn’t sure how I was going to be able to pick up all the pieces and make a good living for my son and myself. Then something magical happened. I believe an angel visited me: a powerful and direct angel I’m not going to say that I saw a lot of fluttery wings or saw a divine host descend in my bedroom. I only heard a voice, but what it told me probably saved my life. I mended quickly, but never forgot the sensation of having someone look over me.

So, when it came time to write a novel, I wanted to use the angels in an unsual way. No fluffy haloes and silly harps. I wanted these angels to be raw and potent. I created a word in which a little boy talks to strong divine entities as he suffers life with a single, alcoholic mother. I also didn’t soft-peddle the alcoholism. I have had too much experience with alcoholism in the family to pretend that it’s a benign disease. It kills. And young Alex, my protagonist, knows that his mother is in desperate straits.

The book has a romance—a rather sinister one—that brings to mother to the brink of death and it’s up to Alex and the divine wisdom he learned from his angels to save her.

Many people who have read the book say they don’t believe in angels, yet they still love the book. They found the spirits to be metaphors for hope. Certainly, that’s what Excited Light is—a book about the strength of the human spirit. It’s a novel of magic and second chances, and I think that’s what my readers respond to so well.

Excited Light was my first novel, but certainly not my last. I’ve completed two other novel manuscripts (one is with my agent) and I’m working on a third. Because I can’t seem to write a book without magic in it, each one has a bit of a fantastical element, although they are all set in a realistic, modern day environment.

I’m looking forward to the day when Excited Light brings its important message to hundreds, no, thousands of readers. In the meantime, I’m working away on more books about the indomitable human spirit.

Lynn Voedisch

Lilith Saintcrow has a great post on commercialism, starving artists, and selling out.

Don’t tell me art is just a luxury. Souls need feeding just like bodies do, and that food is art. Otherwise cavemen wouldn’t have painted their caves. It’s as necessary as air, or water. But we have this idea in our culture, probably springing from Calvinist or Puritan denial of pleasure, that it isn’t. That it’s faintly dangerous, and those who choose to practice it deserve to starve.

But that’s not precisely what we’re discussing here, is it? No, we’re talking about selling out.

In other words, about an artist getting paid–and paid quite well, because it’s not selling out if you’re still starving–for producing work the public likes a lot.

At Murderati, Alexandra Sokoloff talks about writing that’s worth reading, and if it truly has to be as hard as it is:

Now the bestsellers I read are all recent titles by established writers – not the breakout books that made these authors bestsellers to begin with. Still, I understand why the books sell. It’s pretty much about premise. The books have big, thriller premises. You can pitch them in a logline and GET what the story is and think, “Yeah, I’ll try that story.” There’s a fairly unique hook. The books are also competently plotted – the stories are taut, and flow well, there’s (on the surface) a good cast of characters with good balance between protagonists and antagonists).

But.

I just didn’t care.

I like reading for premise and plot. I do it often. But what was missing was actual empathy with the characters. What was missing was a sensual feeling of actually being INSIDE the story, of having it happen to me, too, instead of just watching. Very bad things happen to the people in these bestsellers I was reading, including to children, but I shed not a hint of a tear for them.

(…)

Yes, it has to be this hard.

Because anything less, and you’ve missed an opportunity to touch readers in a way that won’t be forgotten – that might actually change them a little. A way that means something.

At Access Romance, HelenKay Dimon talks about over the line author promo.

I love hearing about news sales and author achievements. Love it, especially the sales stuff. But every now and then I’ll be on a writer loop or message board and see that a particular person has posted or said something and my initial reaction is, “oh, here we go…” See, to me there seem to be some folks who are so invested in telling you how great they are that they never seem to say anything else.

At Reading While Black, blackromancewriter asks if AAR has become irrelevant.

Where there were a few reader blogs to supplement AAR for those who had tired of happy-go-lucky romance reviews and articles on the genre, there are now many, many bloggers on the web who give hard-hitting reviews and in-depth interviews and articles in the romance and publishing industry while, IMO, AAR has stagnated and become a website visited out of habit.

(…)

These bloggers have breathed fresh life into topics frequently discussed at AAR and spun from a different angle. Where AAR used to be on the cutting edge, at the forefront of practically every bru-haha in the online community (or so it seemed), there to shed light on the topic for open discussion, it has sunk into banalities.

I get my ideas for stories from a lot of different places. The newspapers. Television. Magazines. People watching. Dreams. My own weird imagination. *Trust in the Wind* developed from a dream. A very vivid dream. When I woke the next morning, I could recall everything clearly in my mind. I knew I had something special. I instantly grabbed pen and paper (which I always keep next to my bed for just such occasions) and started writing. Furiously. I didn’t want to lose any of the story before I could get it all out of my head and onto the paper.

When I finished writing, I had an entire story. The whole synopsis of the book. Even now, I can still recall parts of that dream clearly in my mind; it was that dramatic. The story is about a fiercely independent, young teenage mother who only wants to make a good life for her son, Joey, and herself. It tells what happens after she meets a county sheriff who makes a lasting impression on her young son and gets under her skin as well, no matter how hard she tries to fight it.

The sheriff has issues of his own; invisible demons that haunt him, and a job with a lot of risk. He too fights the attraction he feels for the small family he befriends, but can’t seem to help himself. He’s putty in little Joey’s hands. The drama increases ten-fold, when little Joey is kidnapped.

You can read more about */Trust in the Wind/* by going to my website at
http://www.vickimtaylor.com/books.html You can click on the links to read an excerpt or read recent reviews.

If you’re an author interested in a 6-month run at Access Romance (in June look for authors Nina Bangs and Susan Grant to join), Brenda Novak’s auction has one up for grabs! Ending time: 05/31/07 06:06:06 PM PST

Or at least out of the faux terra cotta containers in which our small freaky garden is growing.

We have pablano peppers that when dried become ancho chiles. I’m ready for a dinner of chile rellenos

Read the rest of this entry �

Saturday morning, bright and far-too-early, I found myself putting together nametags at the Naples Press Club’s writers conference and authors and books festival. “Hey. Bob Gelinas,” I announced to my co-worker Phil. I hadn’t realized the co-founder from ArcheBooks Publishing, whose novelist workshop I’d be attending across the state the next weekend, was attending this conference, too. I believed in my soul that Phil had put my name on a short list of wannabe authors to have a pitch session at Bob’s workshop – a week in my future. Here Phil looked at me as if I’d lost my mind and said, “Yes, you have a pitch session with him tomorrow.”

I’m sure all the color drained from my face.

Tomorrow? Sunday? Twenty-four hours away? My blood pressure began a slow upward curve. The good news is I don’t require a lot of sleep and the internet boasts loads of instructions on how to write a book proposal, synopsis, and marketing plan. So I left the conference meeting room at 5:01, sped home, turned on the computer, and began typing.

But wait. There’s more.

With my sparkling proposal in hand, I awaited my pitch session Sunday in a state of heightened anxiety. Between sessions, Phil introduced me to the man who would decide my fate and showed us to a couple of chairs about 8 to 9 feet from the elevator (read: high traffic). Now, by this point in the conference, everybody knew Bob was a publisher, and everyone wanted to talk to him. They proceeded to walk up and interrupt him (and me) to ask him questions during my pitch session. I was shaking with nervous energy. At one point, a gal whom I shall not identify on the world wide web came up to give me some flyers to help her advertise the writing competition the Gulf Coast Writers group was holding (note the detail of that encounter etched in my memory).

I guess the moral of the story is writers must be ready for the odd and unpredictable events that speckle our paths to publication. I somehow stayed on task and spoke coherently enough about Choices Meant for Gods that Bob took the proposal to read and requested the manuscript. Here’s his take on the event:

“My recollection of that fateful day when I met soon-to-be-bestselling author Sandy Lender at a pitch session, as part of the Naples Press Club Authors and Books Festival, was that it started with the keen observation that she wasn’t a quack. Oh no, she was actually quite charming and lovely. When she told me her epic fantasy story was over 200,000 words, and that was less than half of it, I knew that if I liked her project, we were up against some logistical issues in terms of bringing it to life and avoiding the cost of a set of encyclopedias. But if the truth be told, what really impressed me about Sandy was her investing the time to come to my Professional Novelist Workshop (held three times a year, check our website for the next one), which entailed her driving across the state of Florida, braving Alligator Alley, to make it to Ft. Lauderdale to attend. It tells a publisher something when an author takes the time to come to a pitch session and do their best to try and interest me in a project. It takes guts to do that, knowing that rejection can be face-to-face, not just in a cold, uncaring letter. But when that same author also demonstrates the drive to want to learn everything they can about being successful as a professional author, it tells me even more. Specifically, it tells me these are the kind of authors I want at ArcheBooks Publishing. We did manage to get Sandy’s book down to only about 175,000 words…but that’s just book one of three now. Can’t wait to see the other two!”

So it all turned out great! I even posted the flyers for the GCW contest for my poor friend who couldn’t stop apologizing once she realized what had happened.

Fantasy readers can get Choices Meant for Gods at their local book stores or at www.archebooks.com or at the juggernaut of online book trafficking, Amazon.com

I know a lot of writers this year are bummed to have to choose between RWA and ThrillerFest. If you haven’t decided which to attend, or if you would like to check out what the ITW offers, here ya go!

ThrillerFest is the most exciting event of the year for fiction’s most popular genre. Over 150 of beloved and best selling authors will be in New York City to mix and mingle with fans during this unprecedented four-day celebration. Attending writers will include Clive Cussler, James Patterson, Jeffery Deaver, Heather Graham, Vince Flynn, Lisa Gardner, Lee Child, Gayle Lynds, Tess Gerritsen, David Morrell, Jim Fusilli, John Lescroart, M. Diane Vogt, M.J. Rose, Steve Berry, Doug Preston, Joe Finder, David Hewson, Jim Rollins, Michael Palmer, Christine Kling, D.P. Lyle, Christine Goff, Robert S. Levinson, Jon Land, Shirley Kennett and many more.

CraftFest, a day of intensive, interactive presentations the day before ThrillerFest opens, is for writers at every level. They’ll learn from the best, a truly awesome group of thriller professionals assembled for one day to teach and inspire!

Registration for ThrillerFest is open to everyone, with three separately-priced events packages: CraftFest on Thursday, July 12; the ThrillerFest Conference from Thursday, July 12 – Sunday, July 15; and the Thriller Awards Banquet at 7:00 p.m. on Saturday, July 14. Day passes are available.

ThrillerFest 2007. July 12 – July 15 2007
Grand Hyatt Hotel New York City
www.thrillerwriters.org – www.thrillerfest.com

When I made the decision to write romances, the thought that I wasn’t allowed to write what I wanted to never crossed my mind. Like most romance writers, the embryo of my writing career began through reading. Once I’d outgrown YA novels and crossed over to the adult fiction section, I somehow gravitated to romance novels. Traditional regencies. Historical Fiction with romantic elements. A bit of romantic suspense. Regency Historicals. And so on, and so on. What slipped my mind was the fact that typically, the characters white, as were the authors. In fact, I now realize, most of the novels and series I read as a child and teenager were white–Sweet Valley High, Judy Blume, The Baby-Sitters Club, Lois Lowry, Lois Duncan. Granted, neither the race of the author nor the characters impacted how I view its quality–I see characters and a great writer–but it wasn’t until I entered the field of romance writing that I bumped into a glass ceiling.

After battering my head a few times, it gradually dawned on me that my outward appearance and the outward appearance of my characters would automatically consign me to the proverbial “back of the bus”. And even worse, if I chose to write what I read and appreciated–mainly, European-set historical romances, being the Anglophile that I am–I could be told to hide myself or be asked to write characters who shared my outward appearance–exclusively, as seen in the case of Millenia Black. I would also be forced to deal with people of my ethnicity who would view my decision to write as I chose as “selling out” or “pandering” to the masses for money.

Certainly I’m not going to allow any of those hypothetical circumstances to upset my goals or change my course of action, but I have one question to ask: why am I, or any other writer of color, granted second-tier status within the industry solely because of my external appearance? Why would the external appearance of my characters, if and when I chose to write stories featuring characters of many different ethnicities, automatically place me within a “niche” market?

Our nation thrives on the “American Dream”–the dream that regardless of your antecedents, ethnicity, criminal record, damn near ANYTHING, you can succeed. We teach our children to press beyond their limitations, to dream, to create, to think. And people who have lived extraordinary lives are held as examples of all we can be. But despite these examples, a segment of people in this industry are marginalized due to limitations unwillingly foisted upon them because of circumstances far beyond their control.

It’s well-known that unpublished authors eagerly await The Call, writing and revising, editing and writing again, submitting and nail-biting, as they hope and pray their dreams of finally selling a manuscript will come true. Most dream of instant fame, while the more pragmatic of group merely want someone to believe in them–we all share the same aspirations. But what of life after The Call? Though disappointments know no racial make-up or ethnic background, I find the tolerated existence of a glass ceiling for a particular segment of authors ironic considering the potent atmosphere of camaraderie within the writing community.

Camilla Bartley

Getting Your Glinda On: How To Start A Writing Group Be honest.

How many of you who did immediately thought, “I want one!!!!”

This is Jack. Here’s his story.

Jo will drive make a day’s drive to meet someone or deliver him, so sing out if you’re close enough to do this good deed. And please link to her post or mine! The more visitors we can get, the better for Jack!