Sales!

You know, there's an interesting emotion that surrounds book sales. If it's your own book, it's kind of a predatory thing. Sales = Survival for many, many authors. Unless you're self-published and not existing on your royalties, sales are Super Important. They can be the difference between you getting another book deal with your current publisher or being left out in the cold and on the hunt again. This completely and utterly sucks because you don't make much money off just a few books. Lots of books - back list - is essential for most authors to make decent money.

Then there are sales for the Literary Lab.

We have two anthologies out now, and we donate all the royalties on both toward charity. The charity organization changes every year, and eventually we hope to make enough to also take a percentage and give it back to the authors as prize money. It's just a thought, and it also depends on how the anthologies do. For now, here are a few statistics for you.

NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND SALES
sold through Amazon/CreateSpace

76 print copies sold
16 Kindle copies sold
$291.00 royalties
£4.22 royalties

GENRE WARS SALES
sold through Lulu - but is now being switched to Amazon/CreateSpace and will be available on Amazon soon.

69 print copies sold
5 pdf copies sold
$237.89 royalties




Not too bad, but I think our sales could rock a lot more than that. What we'd love to see are more reviews and buzz going around about the anthologies. Judy Croome just put up the most amazing review on Goodreads and Amazon for Notes From Underground. Jeannie Miernik also left an amazing highlight review on her blog. Clarissa Draper also recently reviewed some stories from Genre Wars. Thank you, Judy, Jeannie, and Clarissa! So many of you have put up posts about the anthology and talked about it. Thank you! It would be fantastic if you could go rate the anthology on Amazon or Goodreads, as well, and maybe even leave a review if you can and link to it from Facebook and Twitter.

So, I'm thinking about the Literary Lab sales with a predatory gleam in my eye. The thing about this, however, is that you, our readers, can also get that gleam in your eye. These anthologies belong to everyone, and the more we publish the more of you will be published in them. That excites us!

To purchase Notes From Underground, visit The Literary Lab Presents... site.

Genre Wars will be available for purchase on Amazon in the next few days. We'll do an announcement when it's up.

How do you slow down time in your prose?

Y'day, Scott talked about his new strategy to slow down time at critical points in his story. I got home from work, excited to slow down my own fiction, when I realized that I only had a few tricks for doing it.

Here's an excerpt from my fictional fictional story, The Cyberlama Cannibal. Spoiler alert, we're in the penultimate chapter and we are reaching the climax of the story.

The cyberlama stood over the man, who cowered and begged for mercy. The man kissed the lama's robotic feet. He stroked the lama's robotic ankle knobs. Cyberlama aimed his subatomic particle departiculator at the back of the man's head and fired. He was dead. The lama picked him up and began to gnaw.

(Dear Pulitzer Committee, you can reach me at dmalasarn (at) gmail (dot) com or call me at 555-Word.)

Now, let's say I wanted to slow this down. I have decided that this scene is important, and I want to make sure that's clear to my readers. What can I do?

One approach that I'm embarrassed to admit I do fairly often is what I call "the window approach." It would go something like this:

The cyberlama stood over the man, who cowered and begged for mercy. The man kissed the lama's robotic feet. He stroked the lama's robotic ankle knobs. Cyberlama aimed his subatomic particle departiculator at the back of the man's head and fired. He was dead. Outside, the sun was setting, and the fragrance of jasmine came in through the high window. The lama stopped just long enough to take in the sweetness in the air before he picked his victim up and began to gnaw.

As stupid as this example is, I do think it serves to slow down the scene like I had intended. It gives CL a bit of humanity, perhaps some emotion (albeit not much) before he gets to his task.

Another approach I use, which is slightly better in my opinion, is "the stopped and looked approach".

The cyberlama stood over the man, who cowered and begged for mercy. The man kissed the lama's robotic feet. He stroked the lama's robotic ankle knobs. Cyberlama aimed his subatomic particle departiculator at the back of the man's head and fired. He was dead. The cyberlama turned and looked across the way at the dingy gray walls that surrounded him. He stared at the walls for a long time. He listened to the noise in the street as a bus full of rowdy children drove by. Then, he picked his victim up and began to gnaw.

Again, I think this manages to slow the scene down and assign the character a moment of contemplation, perhaps regret or some other emotion. It works, but at the same time it's limited in what it can convey. A character staring out at nothing can only give you so much information.

When I'm feeling the most energetic and the most imaginative, I'll do a sort of expansion, like looking at the scene under a confocal microscope (which is similar to other microscopes except that it's optimized for thick sample visualization):

The cyberlama stood over the man, who cowered and begged for mercy. The man kissed the lama's robotic feet. He stroked the lama's robotic ankle knobs. Cyberlama aimed his subatomic particle departiculator at the back of the man's head. He saw the pale part in the man's hair, the goosebumps and beads of sweat that formed there. He noticed that the man was whimpering, a sound that reminded the lama of a young yak that had once fallen through the ice in a frozen pond in U-tsang. The whimpering started softly and slowed down to almost nothing. The man did not look up, but instead kept his head lowered, his forehead touching the cyberlama's feet. He fired. The man was dead. He slumped over. His departiculated brains drifted upward like a thin trail of cigarette smoke. The lama picked him up and began to gnaw. The taste of the flesh was sweet. He chewed several times until the flesh formed a mush in his mouth, and then he swallowed it down to his electronic stomach and turned on the digestive valve.

What I like about this method is that it stays focused on the matter at hand, while the other two approaches I mentioned above have more of an escapist feel to them. I'm not sure how much emotion can come through using the microscopic approach, unless one decides to do some telling or perhaps bring back some symbols that had been set up earlier. Still, it's an approach I try to do more of.

In general, these are the three ways I have of slowing down fiction. I'd be curious to see what other people do. Feel free to use the cyberlama example or one of your own...as long as it also has cyberlamas in it.

What techniques do you use to slow down time in your prose?

Slow Down

No matter how much thought and care I put into my craft, I keep finding more aspects of writing to master. That's good because it means I have lots of opportunities to become a better writer, but bad because, well, it's just annoying to discover that I'm not doing something as well as I could.

Right now I'm considering the way I use detail and pacing in narrative. This weekend I read Joan Silber's excellent little book, The Art of Time In Fiction. It doesn't directly address my particular issues, but after reading Silber's thoughts on fictional time and the organization thereof, I was able to better see the writerly problem I'm solving.

I tend to write almost exclusively in scenes, with few or no transitional or summary passages to connect the scenes. My narratives are very active, and the speed at which the scenes take place is pretty constant. Once in a while I will pause or hesitate, and the narrative will go into slow-motion--as it were--and focus on details. Some of this slow-motion narration is written during the first draft, but a lot of it comes out of revisions. I have a habit of reading through my drafts and indiscriminately asking myself "what more can/should I say about this?" If I can think of a way to expand a thought, I'll do it, usually by pouring details into a scene, expanding the thoughts of a character, describing something, and so on. Lingering, I think, is really what I'm doing. Imagine yourself walking down a city street, keeping a steady pace, looking at the shop windows. Once in a while something will catch your eye and you'll slow down and take a better look, or even stop on the sidewalk to stare. That's sort of what it's like to slow down in a scene and focus on details.

Anyway, my method has generally been to slow down and expand the bits of narrative that caught my eye and imagination as I went along in revisions. I really enjoy this and often come up with little moments that amuse and please me no end. And that's all great, but I haven't been using this tool with the sort of deliberateness I should have been. In other words, what I ought to do is look at my scenes and ask myself which moments/images/emotions in them are most important and in need of the reader's greater attention, and then slow down to expand those bits of the narrative. I've been adding details and increased focus more or less as it suits me, with no real method in mind. This strikes me (and my taskmaster Virgo mind) as sloppy, as poor craft. So my intention--if I can stick to it--is to watch out for the moments that require more attention and then give those narrative moments the attention they need.

It's possible that, writing by feel or instinct the way I've been doing, I've actually accomplished just what I need to accomplish, but I have doubts. It's also possible that I can't have fabulous and amusing or pleasing ideas to work into the narrative on demand. But this is the problem I've chosen to work on right now, so we'll see how it goes. Slowing down with intention, with an eye to the needs of the story and not simply as it strikes me.

So that's my craft issue as I embark on a new first draft. There are all the usual issues of voice and story, but now I'm also asking myself to concentrate on the line-by-line structure of scenes, which is not something I'm used to doing.

I'm also still trying to find a working title for the detective book. Right now I'm calling it "the detective book" but that doesn't really pop, you know?

See What No One Else Sees

If you're a subscriber to our mailing list, you might have read my review of Haruki Murakami's After Dark. This book is short and relatively light, but it taught me the importance of seeing things that other people don't normally see.

After Dark takes place in the middle of the night, during hours where much of the people in the Japanese city where the story takes place are asleep and unaware. Murakami creates an entire "invisible" world here that seems to be right under our noses. Like the wardrobe in The Chronicles of Narnia or the telephone booths in The Matrix, these magical places seem thrilling because they are at once so close at hand and yet so alien.

The same thing can be said for countless things that go on around us every day. What do our pets do when we're not home? What sort of negotiations happen behind the scenes at a museum? As writers, we have the exciting opportunity to uncover those things that no one else has paid any attention to.

This idea has really opened up a lot of story ideas for me. One sad topic that I had to confront back in 2007 was the death of my dogs, a brother and sister pair that were part of my life for over fifteen years. On the surface, this event probably doesn't sound that unique. A lot of people lose their loved ones and family members. But, when I reached an emotional place where I could actually write about it, I focused on the details of the death that people didn't ask about or pay attention to. It wasn't enough for me to write about the fact that they were dead, but I wanted to and needed to explore the events leading up to their death and the actual details of what happened when the deaths occurred. This led to my story "I'm Waiting For My Dogs To Die," which for me personally is one of the most emotional pieces I've ever written.

This concept of seeing things that no one else sees has become a really important component of my writing. In honor of my grandmother's death, I wrote a short story called "The Wild Grass." It's a piece that means a lot to me, but it was one that I had written BEFORE my grandmother's passing. When her death actually did come and I learned the details of it, my picture of the death was far less romantic than what I had created in "The Wild Grass." Because I felt that the real details were important and something that needed to be written down, I included them in another story of mine, Bread. It's strange to me now, because "The Wild Grass" is more obviously about my grandmother, but it is in this other story where I feel like the real unseen details emerged.

Some of the greatest authors have created masterpieces from observing something common in a very different way. Virginia Woolf delves so deeply into the mind of her characters during a fairly mundane day in To The Lighthouse. Leo Tolstoy follows a dying man to the smallest detail in The Death Of Ivan Ilyich. In Cinders, our very own Michelle created a whole story simply by asking what happened to a character after she reached her "happily ever after."

Often books and stories become popular because they transport us to an exotic location that we aren't familiar with. I think what's important to remember is that these strange places can be as close as our kitchen sink if we look at it with the proper mindset and the proper eye.

So, have you uncovered something before that other people don't seem to pay attention to?

Voice is Choice

I'm re-reading Albert Camus' novella The Stranger right now, for a variety of reasons. I don't speak French and so I only know the work through English translations. Specifically, I know it from the 1946 Stuart Gilbert translation, which I read way back in college. That's not the edition I have at home, however. The edition I'm currently reading is newer: the 1988 Knopf edition translated by Matthew Ward. From the very first page, I realized that Ward's translation was going to be quite different from the version I first read. I'll give you the opening passages from both editions.

From the 1946 translation by Stuart Gilbert:

Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure. The telegram from the Home says: YOUR MOTHER PASSED AWAY. FUNERAL TOMORROW. DEEP SYMPATHY. Which leaves the matter doubtful; it could have been yesterday.

The Home for Aged Persons is at Marengo, some fifty miles from Algiers. With the two o’clock bus I should get there well before nightfall. Then I can spend the night there, keeping the usual vigil beside the body, and be back here by tomorrow evening. I have fixed up with my employer for two days’ leave; obviously, under the circumstances, he couldn’t refuse. Still, I had an idea he looked annoyed, and I said, without thinking: "Sorry, sir, but it’s not my fault, you know."

From the 1988 translation by Matthew Ward:

Maman died today. Or yesterday, maybe, I don't know. I got a telegram from the home: "Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours." That doesn't mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.

The old people's home is at Marengo, about eighty kilometers from Algiers, I'll take the two o'clock bus and get there in the afternoon. That way I can be there for the vigil and come back tomorrow night. I asked by boss for two days off and there was no way he was going to refuse me with an excuse like that. But he wasn't too happy about it. I even said, "It's not my fault."

Gilbert's language is more formal than Ward's; he uses longer phrases and is perceptibly less immediate (compare his "which leaves the matter doubtful" to Ward's "that doesn't mean anything.") Ward's translation seems to me to be a very American version of the narrative, with his clipped rhythms and less complex sentence structure.

Gilbert also translated the edition of The Plague that I read, and so my idea of Albert Camus is more-or-less based on Stuart Gilbert's idea of Albert Camus (I'll have to see who translated the edition of The Fall I read). Peter Newmark has written critically of Gilbert's "jigging up" of Camus' text and the problematic nature of translation in general, but today I'm not interested in the challenges of translation. What I'm thinking about lately is word choice and the enormous effect it has on writerly voice. Reading the recent Camus translation just sort of spurred me on to write this post today. (Apologies for not making this a Friday Filler, Davin.)

I've been noticing that, no matter if I'm writing from a first-person or a third-person point of view, or if I'm writing about people from the 16th century or the 21st century, I tend to use the same set of words in the same sort of ways in a great many cases. And while I try to expand my working vocabulary all the time (because I like to learn new words), I have noticed that one thing that creates boundaries around my vocabulary is a refusal to use certain words at all.

There are some words that I just don't like, and some words that I absolutely hate with a hatred usually reserved for use by totalitarian dictators considering their political enemies. My novels and stories are mostly free of current slang, for example. I just don't like it on the page. That's really more a stylistic choice, though.

No, the words you won't find in my writing are words that I just, for whatever reason, don't like the sound of. I'll use "vomit" but I'll never use "puke." I'll say "bellow" but never "holler" and rarely "yell." And "crappy" yes but "shitty" no. I have no idea why, except that I don't like the sound of "shitty." Possibly, in general, I tend to lean more toward Latinate words and away from Anglo Saxon words, but I'm just guessing. Surely "I should prefer not" and "I don't want to" mean the same thing, but they are spoken by two different voices and Melville's Bartleby would be less compelling and enigmatic had he said "I don't want to." (What? You haven't read Bartleby the Scrivener? Off you go to find it on Project Gutenberg or on the Melville House website. It's short so you've got no excuse.)

Anyway, I've been thinking about how writerly voice is partially defined by the words we won't (or should prefer not to) use. I know that the list of words I refuse to use is as long as my arm but--maybe because I don't use them--I can't think of many right now. Which is sort of irritating, you know? Here I am trying to make a point and I can't come up with any examples. Oh, "garbage." I don't like that word. I prefer "trash" or "rubbish." Go figure.

You? Words you can't stand/won't use? Thoughts on word choice as influence on voice? Too obvious? Why do I waste your time with posts like this? Hey, maybe this is Friday Filler after all!

Read Like You Mean It

Read like you mean it. You may be saying, "What does that even mean and who are YOU to tell me I don't read correctly?" and this is where I ask, "well do you?"

Read like you mean it. I am a college student and all I ever hear about is close reading. Reading so that you understand the "text" as they say. Reading and marking things up; more than underlining and highlighting, I'm talking annotations, acronyms and yes, underlining and highlighting. They call this "marginalia" and as I stated, close reading. I call it reading like a writer. Let me explain.

It is all well and good to read for inspiration but did you ever question how or why someone has written that beautiful sentence or constructed a paragraph the way they have? How all those elements, the sentence, paragraph, rhythm of the prose relates to the theme of the novel? If you have, you are reading like a writer.

But I think it is important also to use the margins and no it is not because I'm Ms. Jo College. I can't tell you how many times I've read something, mentally noted that this sentence is constructed with the most fluid language I've ever seen, went to sleep and have totally forgotten not only where the sentence was located, but about the entire sentence. That kind of error impedes my growth as a writer. Why? Because I am not actively looking for ways to practice different styles, forms, ways of communicating that may benefit my work in some way, whether or not I use the same structured sentence as Amy Hempel or not it still helps. It is important to annotate and put into practice what you've annotated.

Another way of looking at another writer's work is rewriting it after you've read and annotated the novel. For instance, I've rewritten one of my favorite short stories, "In the Cemetary Where Al Jolson is Buried" by Amy Hempel. This is similar to annotating in that you get the feel of the direction the writer wanted to go, how he/she uses language and it becomes a part of your own writing, but in your own style.

A suggestion for those of you who feel like it is a lot of work when you just want to enjoy a book, read the book first without annotating or underlining. Soak it in. Enjoy it. Then scrutinize the hell out of it later.
Reading like you mean it is essential to writing like you own the language. Now, feel free to chastise and debate me, if you wish. ;-)
___________________________

Tiffany White is a regular reader of The Literary Lab. She writes literary fiction which is also a testament to her insanity, her thirst for realism at the expense of a successful career. She bites kittens and puppies and wears her socks on the outside of her pants regularly. You can find Tiffany on her blog, The Inkwell.

I am very happy to have Tiffany as a guest blogger today. As an English BA major, I agree with her that reading as a writer can be a really important step in a writer's growth. I never read anything in college without putting in "marginalia." I was always taking notes, writing in my books, discussing the work with fellow students and my professors. Let me tell you, I learned so much about writing by involving myself like that. These days, I've found some of the books I remember the most are the manuscripts I review for other writers. Why? Because I'm taking notes and writing out my comments. I'm thinking critically about the work.

Thank you, Tiffany, for a great post today! I'm interested to see our readers' thoughts on this subject.

The Hijacking Of Original Language

You've probably typed it yourself, or at least you've been on the receiving end of someone who typed it. Yes, I mean that long stretch of exclamation points. The excitement was so great, how could we expect anything less than the complete loss of restraint?

But, it's not always a perfect stretch, is it? Sometimes...sometimes we can't quite muster the strength to keep that shift button down the whole time. The exclamation points turn into lowly ones.

This can happen to you!!!!111!!!

The mistake is something that's fairly common. In fact, I'm pretty sure I made it Monday when I was chatting with Michelle (who is, by the way, co-editing an anthology to raise money for Japanese earthquake and tsunami victims). So, it wasn't too much of a shock when I saw this same supposed slip while reading a post from the hilarious and brilliant Kuzhali Manickavel.

Now, so you know, Kuzhali is one of the few living writers that I am truly, truly jealous of. Sometimes I read a piece of her writing and feel the need to wring out a wet cloth she's go good. I was, then, ever so slightly disappointed to see that she of all people had made that ! to 1 slip. Kuzhali, could you possibly have made a mistake?

Then, the realization struck me. The more I read, the more I noticed that she was consistently 1-ing her !s. She did it nearly every time she !!!!ed. In fact, it hadn't been an accident at all. Kuzhali had hijacked a common linguistic mistake and was using it to help her reach her own goals of taking over the world (or whatever it is she's trying to do). She was creating original language by observing the behavior of our society.

Maybe this sounds like I'm making a big deal about something trivial, but I really do think she has hit upon something.

We often criticize writers for sounding too writerly. I think that "writerly" quality that sometimes seems suspicious comes from that fact that we may be trying to mimmic the great writers before us. In Kuzhali's case, she's done the opposite. She's not stealing something great and pawning it off as her own. She's finding something in the scrap heap and turning it into something great. If art is an imitation of life, then this is how it should be done.

Think of the greats like Shakespeare, Dante, Joyce, and Faulkner to a lesser extent. We may be able to find the roots of their inspiration, but in the end they created language that was completely their own. How do they do that? Where did they get the building blocks from? I'd argue that it must come from some source other than the work of earlier artists.

To see how Kuzhali has done this is not a lesson to me to use more OMGs and LOLs in my prose. (OMG, Vincent just ate someone.) It serves as an example to me of how one can (and should) create new language by looking at life rather than looking at art.

What's Good About Being Unpublished

I'm hard at work drafting a new novel. I have a plot outline in Excel that would amaze and confound you were I to share it. Why Excel? Mostly because this novel is very plot-driven, being a detective story. I wanted to not only keep track of each scene in the narrative, but also have a detailed timeline of all the events that take place off-screen, which events the detective (and reader) discover over the course of the investigation. So I needed to write down, for example, that in Act 1 somewhere the murderer tells a joke that the detective overhears, and then in Act 3 the murderer tells the joke again within earshot of the detective, but the detective has in Act 2 learned something that gives new and significant meaning to the joke when she hears it again in Act 3. Not that there's actually this joke-telling in my book. But still, there's a lot of stuff like that going on in the story and I needed to keep it all straight. My first thought was to use index cards, and I even wrote out a few this weekend, but I decided that I wanted to be able to see the whole timeline at once, and be able to insert things and keep track of characters and days and places and of course when I am faced with such a task, I turn to Excel with its nice sorting and filtering features. Yes, just like Shakespeare did.

The point of all this is not that I'm using a hated Microsoft product to plot out a novel. The point of all this is that I'm writing a detective story right now. I admit that I'm actually surprised to find myself writing it. It's not what I do, you know?

I have two literary novels with my fabulous and charming agent at this point, but because I don't have a publisher yet breathing down my neck to meet any sort of expectations, I'm pretty free to do what I like as long as it amuses me. My agreeable agent tells me that she'll read anything I write and by gosh, she's a fan of anything as long as it's well-written so that's all cool. BGut mostly, as an unpublished novelist, nobody has heard of me so there are no barriers to my writing a murder mystery and so that's what I'm doing. Possibly I'll have a career like Iain Pears, who wrote a string of mysteries (the "Jonathan Argyle" art mystery books) and also wrote some dandy literature (The Dream of Scipio and An Instance of the Fingerpost).

Never having written a detective story before, I'm having a lot of fun building the plot mechanism. There is certainly an art to crafting a convincing and intriguing mystery and this is my very first attempt, so this book might be awful and I'm prepared for that. As I say, I have the freedom right now to experiment and have fun. A few knowing fans of detective fiction have already told me that I'm playing too fast and loose with the genre conventions and that, too, is perfectly okay by me because, as I say, I'm mostly amusing myself by writing this book. I have no deadlines, nobody is asking for my next manuscript, and so far I'm having a lot of fun. Plus, Excel! I love spreadsheets.

Anyway, how about you? Are you writing a style/genre/whatever that you wouldn't believe you were writing if you weren't doing it?

The Birthday and the Empty Mind

Happy Monday, everyone! And, Happy Birthday to my friend, partner in crime, and writing colleague, Michelle!

Michelle, the more I get to know you, the more I admire you. You impress me with your writing and your limitless energy. I admire you for the work you've already done, and I'm excited about all the cool things that are happening for you in the very near future!

Everyone, please join me in wishing Lady Glam a happy happy birthday.

I spent the last four days in the desert (Joshua Tree to be exact) letting my mind empty, and it apparently worked. I haven't felt this relaxed in over a year. Among other things, I spent hours in a hammock listening to the wind and watching lizards run around.

I am indeed reminded of the importance of taking some time off. Not only does it relieve stress, but it helps you to regroup and reflect, possibly helping to re-steer your work in a good direction on the off chance that you've gone off course. So schedule some relaxation today if you haven't had a break in awhile, and remember to back up your computers first!

How To Tell If Your Writing Is Any Good - Part 2

(Read Part 1 Here)

I have had the most interesting experiences with my writing as of late. The most exciting experience has been what I like to call THE RIFT in feedback. Among many, many other reasons why I self-published my novella, Cinders, one reason I did so was to get feedback on my writing - writing I felt was the best I had done up to that point. I knew without at doubt that by keeping the book unpublished and handing it only to people I had some sort of connection with, that I would never find absolutely honest feedback. My way of thinking was that I would never know if my writing was truly any good. I thought it was good, but what did I know? Readers are who mattered.

Of course, hindsight is 20/20.

I see now that my way of thinking was terribly wrong. Although I would have never put my own work out there without feeling it was really good, I still ultimately put all my hope in the opinions of others more than in my own. Every time I read a crushing review or received less than 4 stars, my heart sank and my opinion of my own work withered. Then, on the other hand, every time I read a 5 star review by someone who really seemed to understand the work the way I intended, my heart soared and my opinion of the book blossomed. Talk about a roller coaster.

This is THE RIFT, and it will happen with every single word, sentence, short story, and novel I ever share with others.

If I'm not careful, I'll fall into that rift and never emerge. This is one of the reasons I don't feel reviews are for writers. It's good for me to know how readers react to my work, but one of the things I learned very quickly - all those reviews were the exact same reactions I received from beta readers and friends who read the book, just on a much larger, more dramatic scale.

So, with no further babble from me, let's look at the paragraphs from yesterday's experiment. We're the Literary Lab, after all. We like to experiment.

#1
The owl lives behind my home in a tall pine that is bald on one side and heavy on the other with frost-laden boughs that groan with every snow fall. At night, when flakes gather in drifts and heaps against my back porch, the owl plunges from his hunting perch, his sooty brown feathers driving tunnels through snow until all that is seen are whirlwinds of white—feathers and snow creating silence in chaos. I strain to hear any sound at all, but only succeed in finding the crashing thumps of my own heartbeat. Solemnly, after I know the kill has taken place, I enter my cabin, assured in the warmth of my small, but necessary fire.

This paragraph comes from a long short story I wrote in college titled "Sounding Light." I wrote it at the brink of my awareness with language, and decided to experiment with merging prose and poetry. I was really happy with the end product - a literary, quiet story, which oddly enough, was part of the inspiration for my spy thriller novel, Monarch. "Sounding Light" was published in the literary journal, Touchstones, in 2002.

Hmmm, there were 15 solid votes for this paragraph as the best written and liked. It came out as the winner. General consensus:

• easiest to read
• too generic
• good imagery
• both poetry and prose
• strongest writing
• grammatically wrong
• good technical quality
• sentence structure is strange
• style over narrative
• compared to several classic authors (not in a good way)

#2
They questioned him the day after Naomi’s disappearance, although he didn’t know anything. Naomi hadn’t shown up to his house the night he asked her to, and that was that. “You were the last to speak to her,” the police kept insisting. “And you’re her best friend. Can’t you give us some clue to what could have happened? Would she run away?” Brad only shook his head, fear clawing at his heart. He was most likely more frightened than Naomi’s own parents, who believed she had just not come home for awhile. She was frequently away from home, but when that happened, she was with Brad. She was not with him now.

This paragraph was written somewhere between 1996 and 1997 while I was in high school. It's the beginning paragraph of my novel, The Breakaway, which I've rewritten more times than I can count. I am currently working on this novel to submit for representation. The paragraph above no longer exists, even remotely, and the beginning is now much altered.

This paragraph came in 2nd place at 12 votes as the best written and liked. General consensus:

• felt like newbie writing
• good sense of plot
• felt flat
• too telling
• was in the character's head strongly (in a good way)
• easy to read
• immature
• strongest story
• immediate hook
• author isn't trusting voice
• confusing narrative

#3

I buy a snakeskin bag today, lizard green and shiny patent leather and the silver accents catch the sun on a sunny day before the clouds decide to come. When they do, they split open and rain all hell down for five minutes, plaster my hair to my skin, soak through my white shirt so the boys on the corner smoking pot whistle and lick their lips and yell, “Nice tits!” and I roll my eyes and think immature and wish I’d remembered to bring my long jacket that goes down to my calves. At least my green bag looks good with my green skirt, my six-inch green heels and green toenails that are starting to chip and I need to schedule another pedicure tomorrow and pull out my phone to punch in a reminder. I feel like a walking lime tequila.

This paragraph was written in 2010 as part of Loren Eaton's Six-Birds prompt. It is from a flash fiction piece titled "True Colors." You can read the entire pieces on my author site, if you're interested.

This paragraph came in as the third best written and liked with 11 votes. General consensus:

• strong voice
• great sense of voice and confidence
• too much description, sentences too long and run-on
• felt flat
• great sense of character
• style over narrative (not good)
• last line was cheap
• last line was too cutesy
• last line was a treat

I think the most interesting thing was how several readers mentioned that they hated #1 or #3 because of the present tense or first person POV, yet didn't say that this bothered them in both of the paragraphs. This confused me. Did you not notice that both 1 and 3 were both in present tense and first person POV or was I misunderstanding what you said?

Moving on, I think it's quite clear from the general consensus lists that feedback overall (on anything) is extremely subjective. I don't wish to focus on that today, though. I want to point out that each of these excerpts was taken from a different period of my life. #2 was from when I very first started writing novels, #1 was from college when I started experimenting with language, and #3 was from only a year ago when I was really starting to feel confidence in my writing. I think from the general feedback given in the comments that many of you picked up on these things in my writing. Many of you seem to favor plot and a good hook over technique or prose - at least in a small excerpt like this. All of this tells me that feedback is helpful to hone my writing, but I should never rely on it to direct my writing, or even worse, tell me if my writing is good or not.

One of the most important things I have learned over the years is that it is IMPOSSIBLE to judge a writer's worth or abilities from a short excerpt, maybe even from a whole chapter or short story, or even an entire novel. I have read absolutely amazing pieces by authors I truly admire, and then read something else of theirs that fell completely flat for me. Overall, though, I still admire their work because I have read enough of it. What does this tell me? Simply that I must turn this around and see if from the other direction. If I get feedback that rips me to shreds, does that mean I'm a bad writer? I think the answer is obvious, and it leads directly into the question: How can you tell if your writing is any good?

If you can't answer that, go back and read this post again.

How To Tell If Your Writing Is Any Good - Part 1

(Read Part 2 Here)

A long time ago I wrote my first novel. It was so long ago that I was still sitting at a desk in a high school that smelled like that lemon-smelling stuff they use to wax the linoleum floors. My locker was an awful contraption that proved my horrible memory for remembering its stupid combination, and all I could think about was boys and writing. I wasn't popular. I had my little group of friends and one guy I crushed on for four solid years. I did kiss him. We never married. I did, however, stick with one thing I still crush on - my writing.

When I sat in class I had a little notebook I would write in with a mechanical pencil. I wrote so tiny that I could fit 15 pages on one sheet. I thought if I wrote that small nobody would be able to read what I was writing. I finished the book and let only my most bestest friends read it. I also let two of my English teachers read it. They said it was good. They encouraged me. They must have been dying with laughter inside. Seriously.

That novel was bad.

Still, if I were an English teacher today I would have said the same thing to someone like myself with a novel like I wrote. It had potential, and that's all that really mattered. To do this day, 16 years later, I still think my writing is bad 95% of the time. I give it to my most trusted friends to read. I even let real agents and publishers and editors read it. They say it's good. They encourage me. Things are a little different now because I believe in myself more. I have more confidence and more experience, but I still doubt my work. I have a novel coming out in September from a traditional publisher. They love my work. Lots of people seem to want to read the book, and I still doubt my work. I have learned a few things, however.

AN EXPERIMENT
Here are three paragraphs I've carefully chosen for reasons I won't say yet. I would really like to know which paragraph you feel is the best written? Why? Is it sentence structure? Does it have the most confidence, more obvious experience? Does it speak to you more as a reader? Try and pinpoint those reasons as best you can.

I'll be putting up another post later this evening when there are enough comments here for me to draw my conclusions. I hope you'll join me to see my thoughts based on what you say! 

#1
The owl lives behind my home in a tall pine that is bald on one side and heavy on the other with frost-laden boughs that groan with every snow fall. At night, when flakes gather in drifts and heaps against my back porch, the owl plunges from his hunting perch, his sooty brown feathers driving tunnels through snow until all that is seen are whirlwinds of white—feathers and snow creating silence in chaos. I strain to hear any sound at all, but only succeed in finding the crashing thumps of my own heartbeat. Solemnly, after I know the kill has taken place, I enter my cabin, assured in the warmth of my small, but necessary fire.

#2
They questioned him the day after Naomi’s disappearance, although he didn’t know anything. Naomi hadn’t shown up to his house the night he asked her to, and that was that. “You were the last to speak to her,” the police kept insisting. “And you’re her best friend. Can’t you give us some clue to what could have happened? Would she run away?” Brad only shook his head, fear clawing at his heart. He was most likely more frightened than Naomi’s own parents, who believed she had just not come home for awhile. She was frequently away from home, but when that happened, she was with Brad. She was not with him now.

#3

I buy a snakeskin bag today, lizard green and shiny patent leather and the silver accents catch the sun on a sunny day before the clouds decide to come. When they do, they split open and rain all hell down for five minutes, plaster my hair to my skin, soak through my white shirt so the boys on the corner smoking pot whistle and lick their lips and yell, “Nice tits!” and I roll my eyes and think immature and wish I’d remembered to bring my long jacket that goes down to my calves. At least my green bag looks good with my green skirt, my six-inch green heels and green toenails that are starting to chip and I need to schedule another pedicure tomorrow and pull out my phone to punch in a reminder. I feel like a walking lime tequila.

5,300 miles

Sendai, Japan is about 5,300 miles away from where I live in Sherman Oaks, California. I woke up grumpy this morning because I didn't get enough sleep as a result of daylight savings time. I brushed my teeth. I fixed my hair. I put on a blue shirt and fretted for a moment because it had too many wrinkles in it. For breakfast, I had a bowl of Cascadian Farm Organic Dark Chocolate Almond Granola Cereal.

At the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, workers were asked to evacuate because of a cloud of smoke that appeared above them and a sudden spike in radiation levels. I complained about having to wipe the dew from my car windows before making my 40-minute commute to work. As I waited to turn onto Coldwater Canyon, the drivers in front of me were annoying. The street narrowed from two lanes to one, and I was so upset by their aggressive behavior that I merged without bothering to signal.

When I got out of the car in the crowded parking lot at UCLA, I did not find that my science building had collapsed under the weight of a giant wall of water. I did not have to scour through city blocks of debris in search of food or my possessions. I did not pass a single dead body as I crossed the street and took the five flights of stairs up to my office. I noticed that it was a windy day.

Imagine me, sitting in my chair in my fifth floor office beside several dirty windows. The pointed leaves of a liquid amber tree are rustling outside. I can hear the voices of two female students in the hall as they walk by, heading for class. Imagine me turning on my Powerbook, the quiet tone it makes. I type in some letters and check my email and my stocks. Imagine, if you can, me sorting through a crooked stack of papers while I decide what to read first as I continue drafting a report about the effects of nickel toxicity on algae.

Depending on where you are in the world, I could be as close as three feet away from you, or I could be as far away as 5,300 miles away from you. And, yet, we can sympathize with each other, we can experience each other's lives, if only we just try.

Ides of March Official Post

Today is the first day of the ancient Roman New Year, so happy new year, kids! That is all I have to say about that. Okay, don't turn your back on folks named Brutus, either. Which reminds me of this joke:

Brutus walks into a bar. He says to the bartender, "I'll have a martinum."

The bartender says, "Do you mean a martini?

Brutus says, "If I'd wanted a double, I'd have said so!"

Oh, that one just slays me every time. Latin jokes are hi-sterical. And now enough of this ides of March stuff.

Today, I think, I want to talk about voice. My last novel was written in a sort of mashup of the styles of Ernest Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy, Herman Melleville and the King James Bible. Which was a lot of fun and, I think, appropriate for the story I was telling, but it was exhausting to maintain and a few steps removed from my sort of normal prose voice, which is similar to but not as chatty as the way I'm writing this very minute.

The book I wrote before the last one had a sort of modernized Elizabethan English prose style, based as it was on Shakespeare's "Hamlet." Again, that voice was appropriate for the tale but it wasn't my voice. It was me doing a voice, doing an impression of Shakespeare, kind of.

The next book I write (and it could be any one of three novels at this point; I haven't truly decided) is going to be in a modern American prose voice, by which I really likely mean a mid-20th century prose voice similar to Hemingway or Chandler or O'Connor, or possibly what I really mean is the writing will be similar to mid-20th century translations of 19th-century Russian novels, because I think that's really where my sort of bedrock, basic writing style comes from. Or not. I'm not actually certain about that.

My point, however, is that the next time I seriously pick up a pen to write, I'm not going to be attempting to create any historical mood or sense of place with the prose style. I did that for two or three books and I'm tired of it. Now I just want to write in a clear, elegant manner. It's true that none of the three ideas for novels I'm considering is actually set in 2011 (one's in 1914, one's in 1923 and one's in 1790), but my current approach is to be a guy in 2011 writing about previous time periods, not to have the narrative seem to really "live in" those time periods. That may be a mistake, but we'll see. Since I don't consider myself to be a writer of historical fiction, I don't think that it matters. The tale and the telling are the things, not any sort of nod to ideas of history.

But right now I'm in that sort of fumbling about in the dark stage before I've actually committed to writing a specific novel. It's like being in heavy fog. Yesterday at lunch I sat and wrote out a rough outline of one possible book. It was not very good, frankly. I realized that I don't know enough about the ending in order to start writing. Though, truth to tell, I might not let that stop me this time. I might just throw all of my rules for rational writing to the wind and just grab a pen and see what happens. After all, I lean most strongly toward writing not a novel but a novella right now, and not even something that would be for publication. I'm possibly burned out from the last couple of years of writing Serious Literature and maybe, I think, I might want to just have some fun and write something frivolous and possibly not even very good. We'll see. Yesterday Domey mentioned that he's not really writing with an eye to publication right now and he's happier with his work than he's been in a long time. I am envious, so I might follow his example.

Can Confidence In Writing Be Defined?

During my writer's group meeting this weekend, someone brought up the need for confidence in writing.

He suggested--and I agree with him--that readers enjoy a story more when they perceive that the writer of the story wrote confidently.

But, how exactly does confidence come through on a written page?

That's something I've never been able to answer. In my group, it was suggested that confidence comes from clear decision-making.

This sentence might not feel confident: "The dress was an odd shade of pink, something between grapefruit and bubblegum." The writer gets close to the idea he or she is trying to express, but doesn't quite land on it.

This sentence might feel more confident: "The dress was the color of smoked salmon." Here, the decision was made. Whether or not it matches the color the writer had in mind, the reader is left with a detail that is more precise. It feels confident. (And notice that the perception of confidence by a reader doesn't have anything to do with actual confidence in a writer.)

This example is simplified, but I think there's some truth behind it. Consistently making clear decisions like this requires a lot of expertise. When we're writing as many words as we do, it's hard to keep our mind from straying off the page at least a few times. Or, even if we are focused, there might simply be certain sections of a story that we never work on long enough to see clearly. It's good to learn to recognize those sections, to see when the writing starts to get hazy. Those are the moments that might feel insecure.

In college, I once sat in on an art critique that taught me a lot about making a work feel confident. An artist had built a beautiful sculpture out of wood but had propped it up in a flimsy way using fishing line because she didn't want the support to be too distracting. What happened was that the support was more distracting because everyone was wondering if it would actually hold. The professor suggested that the artist should have instead made the support obvious and strong because that would tell the viewer that she had thought about the problem and solved it in a way that didn't need hiding. It was a subjective decision; I can imagine that some people might have preferred a more "invisible" solution. But, the idea of not needing to hide anything was something that has stuck with me for over ten years.

What do you think? Do reader perceive confidence in writing? And, if so, what is it in the words that feels confident?

Friday Filler! 3-Day Weekend!

Through the magical magic of the internets and blogger’s ability to schedule posts in advance, I write this on Thursday! That’s yesterday! This is a time-travel post! Isn’t that cool? I think it is. Anyway, because I’m writing this yesterday, I’m thinking about Michelle’s post about single-sentence pitches for novels and that gets me thinking about what my novels are actually about. As Michelle said yesterday (which is actually today as I write this but yesterday as you read this because it’s a time-travel post), any book worth reading cannot be reduced to a single sentence--or even three sentences—without ignoring most of the elements of the novel that make it special and cool and unique. It’s those elements that I’ve been thinking about lately.

A few days ago (a phrase which still works in a time-travel post because it doesn’t matter if I say that today or yesterday, thanks to the vagaries of the construction)…Okay. I have to just let the whole time-travel thing go, or I’ll never get through this post. Which is supposed to be all filler anyway, but I’m leaning at a serious angle which is a problem but let’s just ignore that for now. Where was I?

A few days ago (etc time-travel etc) I sent the MS for a new novel off to my agent, to see what she thinks about the book. On one level, the new book is a fairly straightforward story about 18th-century criminals in a love triangle. The plot, I think, is very linear and I don’t do “plot twists” anyway so all of the surprises come out of character development. But it occurred to me that, just below the surface, this is a really freaking weird book because it deals with religion and God and moral compasses and slavery and ideas of ownership and control and I ask a lot of questions about all of these things without supplying even the barest hint of an answer and I begin to wonder if the book comes across as a sort of rant, which surprises me a lot. I didn’t realize, when I was in the thick of the actual writing, that I was so concerned with some of the themes of this book, but apparently I was. About which, huh. You could knock me over with a feather. I’m just hoping that the themes don’t oversway the groovy adventure story and that this book can still be read as a sort of historical fiction piece about 18th-century criminals in a love triangle.

Anyway, kids, there’s all that on a Thursday/Friday (time-travel, you know) morning. Because I always generalize from my own experience (who doesn’t?), I assume that I’m not the only writer here who’s been surprised to find themes in his novels that he wasn’t really aware of at the time of writing. Have you been shocked to find something coming out in your writing that you didn’t realize you were thinking about or felt particularly strongly about?

Also, this is a time-travel post because Mighty Reader and I are traveling today and I will not be around to read your amazing comments. I will read them later, I promise, but today Michelle and Big D will have to amuse and amaze you in my stead. I have full confidence in them.

Also-also, Sunday in the USA and Canada, we set our clocks forward an hour. I despise thee, Daylight Savings Time. I don’t want to get up an hour earlier on Monday. That’s the worst possible sort of time travel.

Do You Have to Sum Up Your Book in One Sentence?

Not long ago I believed that if you couldn't sum up your novel in one sentence, you were doomed. If you couldn't do that, you didn't know at all what your book was really about. In several ways, I still believe it, but as I write more and more I've discovered that part of that belief is complete nonsense.

Why a sentence is good
First of all, it's kind of nice to be able to talk about your book in one sentence. You know, when people find out you're a writer and they ask you what one of your novels is about, it's nice to feel confident in that one sentence. I used to hate it when I stumbled and fumbled with my words, trying to think of how I could sum up that huge story into a little tiny description. Now, if someone asks me what Monarch is about I tell them it's about a CIA spy who who has to track down a big-time terrorist, but also save his own heart in the process. The problem? There's so much more to the book than that. There's even more to the book than the back-of-the-book blurb. Lots more. The blurb on the back doesn't even mention the other two huge story lines and points-of-view.

 

Oh, well, though. That's marketing for you! It's also unrealistic to think everyone wants to sit down and talk about all the intricacies of your book with you. What they really want to know is the basic plot and idea, and honestly, if you don't know that about your own book, you might have some problems.

For instance, when I first wrote Monarch, I honestly had no clue what the book was really about. It's about a spy, I told myself. A spy who isn't like other spies. I wanted to take the James Bond character ideal and turn it on its head a little bit. I did, but even after two drafts the focus in my story wasn't clear. So, after realizing this, I finally took the time to figure out where I wanted to focus, and I rewrote the book with that focus in mind. Tada! The book worked. It wasn't quite as easy as I make it sound, but that was the core of it.

Why a sentence is bad

Just like you as a person can't be summed up in one sentence, neither can your novel. There are so many layers, so many characters and intricacies and ideas that boiling it down to one sentence is almost absurd. I've often thought the idea of my books sound absolutely boring when boiled down like that. For instance, Cinders is the story about what happens to Cinderella when she decides her prince isn't who she wants after they get married. Hmmm, interesting concept, but wow, that's missing a lot. My novella Thirds is about a girl who wants the same magic as her two evil stepsisters. That sounds overdone, if you ask me.

What I've concluded is that summing up your book into a sentence can help you in a lot of ways, but I don't think it's absolutely necessary. I also don't think your book is totally lost if you can't sum it up. Some stories are much more complicated than others, and all writers function completely different from one another. I know I've asked my friend, J.S. Chancellor, what her books are about in one sentence, and she told me I was nuts if I wanted her to do that. 

Will learning how to sum up your work in one sentence help you with a query? Probably, yes, but as I've discovered, a query isn't the embodiment of your novel. It doesn't even begin to explain your book to its full capacity. It's more like dangling a worm on the end of a hook, like the back-of-the-book blurb of my novel, Monarch. My publisher and I decided what to focus on, and we ran with it. That book could be marketed probably 80 different ways. The blurb that's there now is the worm we decided to dangle.

Writing With Depth

I always feel silly writing about my own progress because I assume the lessons I'm learning are already common sense to everyone else. Nevertheless, I recently gained some insight into storytelling that I didn't fully understand before, so I want to celebrate it here.

Up until about a month ago, I saw a story as a progression of elements that moved from Point A to Point B. A character overcomes an obstacle. A character makes a journey. I had actions, emotions and ideas, and they all changed along the way in a linear fashion.

Take, for example, a short story I wrote called "The Wild Grass". In this piece, a woman named Kimchaa loses her husband and has to live out the rest of her life alone. The action of the story includes her aging and growing more stubborn. The emotions include her increased sadness and acceptance. The ideas include her reflections on life and what it means to grow old. I like this story of mine. I think it works. But, all of the elements move in a linear fashion, the way most of my stories do.

I'm now writing my current WIP tentatively called "Cyberlama". Without spoiling too much, this piece is also about a woman who grows old and loses the people she loves. It's slightly more extreme in that the woman here is much older than the woman in "The Wild Grass," and I think it was that extreme quality that gave me some insight.

See, it wasn't enough for me just to have my protagonist, Jacqueline, grow old and sad. She is a very curious character and is constantly trying to learn. She befriends the Dalai Lama who teaches her some things about Buddhism and the idea of reincarnation. While Kimchaa was content to wait peacefully for her death, Jacqueline is working harder, putting new ideas together. Instead of a linear progression in her thinking, there is a compounding effect, something synergistic. Her ideas--and thus the ideas in the book--add up to something greater. They go deeper.

Jacqueline reflects on aging, but thoughts of time progression get complicated by the idea of reincarnation and violence and existence and some other topics that are floating around. And, along with all of this, her emotions are getting more complex. She's not just waiting, she's having conflicts because of contradictory ideas that she's learning about. She's calculating and planning and making mistakes. While the actions are still going from Point A to Point B, the ideas and emotions go from Point A to a deeper version of Point B, which I have uncreatively called Point B'.

The key to what I'm trying to explain is that I have figured out that a writer can make a linear progression in a story, or a writer can make a more compounding progression. In other words, the steps along the way are not constantly being discarded as a new step comes along. Instead, all of the steps are adding together, becoming something messier and deeper.

Does this make any sense at all? I've been wanting to write about it, but I feel like I don't quite have the words to express myself yet. Scott told me to write about it, so blame him if this has done nothing but muddy the waters. It all reminds me of the best English teacher I ever had who would start on a topic that was very interesting and then just trail off, leaving the rest of the thought to be finished by anyone who cared enough to do so.

P.S. Buy Notes From Underground! I just got my final copies today, and they really are beautiful. Even just flipping through the pages, you can see the big variety in story structures that people employed. It's a great mix!

(Scott, was the shadow effect underneath the A and B too much?)

Does Size Matter?

I have written four novels at this point. Two of them, I think, are even publishable. My first novel was short, about 68,000 words. It would no doubt have gotten longer had I ever bothered to revise it but it was so awful that the mere thought of working it over gave me a headache. Heck, that thought still does. My next three novels have all been in the 80,000-word range, and that seems like a nice, comfortable length for me. I can tell the sort of story I'm currently writing in that number of words and the books don't feel short; they seem to be just the right length. In order to make them longer I'd have to pad them out or radically change my prose style (which is admittedly pretty dense and tends toward brevity).

My next novel will be, I think, about 90,000 words long. That's not much longer than my current efforts and is still not a long novel. A friend of mine has a book with an agent right now, preparing for submission, and that MS is 150,000 words. Such an undertaking boggles my mind. I don't want to read anything I write of that length, kids. Really I don't. But there are plenty of good long books and as a reader I don't shy away from them. Moby-Dick? Tristram Shandy? Ulysses? Swann's Way? The Iliad? Bring 'em on, I say. But don't ask me to write one.

I've noticed that not only are "door-stop" books of 600 or so pages still selling well, there's also been an increase in the number of short novels and novellas being published lately. I'm pleased, actually, to see the new arrivals table at my local indie bookstore packed not only with monstrous tomes but with slim volumes as well. Freedom sits next to Tinkers, and there are all sorts of books in between.

Which gets me wondering about you fine folks, and my wonderment results in these three questions:

1. Is there a length with which you find you are most comfortable working? If the answer is "it depends," then just tell me what's the length of your current or most-recent MS.

2. Do you shy away from shorter works or from longer works, or do you just not think about a book's length?

3. Do you have any tendency toward reading longer or shorter novels? I know some folks who won't read anything that's under 600 pages ("Less than that's a waste of time," they say), and I know some folks who are intimidated by anything over 200 pages ("More than that's a waste of time," they say). What about you?

The Speed Of Your Read

Are you a fast or a slow reader?

I've always been slow, and I often wonder if those speed readers around me are having the same reading experience that I am. I know, for example, that not everyone "hears" a voice reading along with them the way I do. Some people read with their eyes and only have to "see" the word. (I've done this on occasion, but it's difficult. I tend not to trust what I've read until I internalize it.) I've also heard that some people can read multiple areas of a page at once.

Ignoring accuracy (because that's a whole other topic), do you think the different ways people read result in dramatic differences in their reading experience?

If you're a writer, do you think what you write is more successful for one type of reader versus another?

Don't forget our Notes From Underground Anthology is available. Check it out! You can read it as fast or as slow as you like.

Friday Fille...

Phew! I'm too tired to even write the "r" in Friday Filler. It has been an exciting week here, and thank you to everyone who has supported the anthology, either through taking part it the contest, contributing, cheering us on, advertising, buying a copy, helping us run the contest (Becca) or even just saying hi. I think all three of us are really just blown away by how much everyone is willing to let us have so much fun.

We're already talking about what we're going to do for Anthology #3. We're so excited about it, we might just play along this time and include our own stories tucked away in the back somewhere. Is that selfish of us?

We were all pretty exhausted by the time we got the book out. Michelle, who always works especially hard on these things, deserved a round of applesauce.

And, I wanted to apologize to Yvonne because it did turn out that we spelled her last name wrong in the table of contents. We're really sorry, Yvonne. I'm glad that your name is correct in front of your story though!

So, it's Friday and on Friday anything goes. Someone entertain us!

The Notes From Underground Anthology is Available Now!

Grab it while it's hot! The Literary Lab's second annual publication is now out and ready for you to pick up!

We'd prefer our readers to purchase copies from the CreateSpace store. Although we don't mind at all if you prefer to go through Amazon, we do get a larger profit margin directly from the CreateSpace store, which means we get more money to donate to the Writer's Emergency Assistance Fund. Every cent of the proceeds for this anthology goes to charity.

PRINT COPIES through CreateSpace Store
$10 each 
click here

PRINT COPIES through Amazon
$10 each
click here

KINDLE COPIES through Amazon
$4.99 each
click here

We're very excited about this anthology, especially about what's inside. There are some fantastic stories we hope you'll enjoy. The list of authors and their words inside is as follows:

_______________________

Cee Martinez

Little Shark, Little Shark

Beth Overmyer

Mirror Image

Anne R. Allen

The Golden Age

No Happy Endings

Judy Croome

Whispers of Love

3 Triptych Poems

Anne Gallagher

Who Are You?

Taryn Tyler

Hellebore

B.A. McMillan

The Making of a Witch

J.B. Chicoine

Four Words

Erin Leigh Harty

Reflecting the Imperfect

Intermittent

Lisa M. Shafer

Voices From The Sidelines

Loren Eaton

The Apocalypse Closet

Jean Michelle Miernik

Notes From an Enchanted Castle

Summer Ross

Vanished Words

Nevine Sultan

The Smell of Closed Windows

Your Eyes Will Open

Candace A. Ganger

Before and After

Trade

Gone

Fumes

Yvonne Osborne

Maybe

Rachel Becker

The Truth of Her

Excerpts from Saving Throw, a young adult novel in progress

A Sedar Story

Little red riding hood undresses

Suicide at 90

Aerin Bender-Stone

TRAVELOGUE: AUSTRALIA 2002

Matt Zandstra

Competence

Simon C. Larter

The Return

And then the choir

Avoidance

R. Mac Wheeler

Hot House

C.N. Nevets

Terminal Instar

Lavanya Krishnan

Heat three spices in a pan

Susannah E. Pabot

Trees Without Trunks

**authors, if you'd like your name linked to your site, please let one of us know and we'll add it**

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Entries were put into the anthology at random. Every author was amazing to work with, and we look forward to another anthology for the year 2011. We hope all of our readers will consider picking up a copy of the Notes From Underground Anthology not only to support your fellow authors, but to get your hands on some very fine work. The book is a beautiful testament to the wonderful writers we have the privilege to interact with every day here at the Literary Lab, and we want to say thank you to each and every one of you for making The Literary Lab what it is today.

[Scott interrupts Davin's wonderful post to say: Hey, we've been waiting for this day for months and months and, yes, months! And it's finally here! This anthology is full of strong, imaginitive writing and I can't find words enough to tell you how pleased and honored I am to have been part of this fabulous party. It amazes and humbles me to think that so many talented folks hang out in our little corner of cyberspace. Thanks to everyone who entered the contest, thanks again to the amazing and infinitely patient Becca for doing All The Hard Work during the first phase of the contest, and thanks in advance to everyone who buys a copy of this wonderful collection. Also thanks (yes, I watched the Academy Awards on Sunday night; why do you ask?) to all of our brilliant readers here at the Literary Lab. Without you, it's just the three of us whining about our inability to write good Miley Cyrus short stories. Nobody wants that. Anyway, we are pleased to release this anthology into the world and pleased that you all could be here for its birth. We've made a lovely child, folks.]

Davin,
Michelle
&
Scott