Scott William Carter's Blog, page 8

New Book Published: A Lighthouse for the Lonely Heart (a Garrison Gage Mystery)

A new book! As I mentioned to my intrepid newsletter subscribers yesterday (over 3200 strong now!), A Lighthouse for the Lonely Heart is now available in both ebook and paperback. The audio should follow in a few months, as usual.

While releasing another book into the wild may not be quite as exciting as the first few times I did it, it never gets old. There’s always this mix of giddy anticipation and mild trepidation. How many am I up to now? Well, it depends on how you count, I guess, but my bibliography says this is number 15. That’s fifteen published, mind you, not written. There are a few books which served their purpose as practice and hopefully will never see the light of day. Hear that, kids? Please don’t publish those books after I’m gone.

Anyway, whatever number it is overall, A Lighthouse for the Lonely Heart is the fifth Garrison Gage mystery. It’s always fun to return to my curmudgeonly private investigator and the extended cast of characters that inhabit my Oregon coast town of Barnacle Bluffs. Zoe, Alex, Chief Quinn — we get to catch up with all of them. Poor Gage really is put through the ringer this time, though, and not just by having to confront the usual assortment of baddies. He’s dealing with a loss of a different kind.

The cover and the description are below. Links to retailers can be found on the book’s page on my site. One little bit of trivia? The lighthouse pictured on the cover really is Heceta Head, located a few miles north of Florence, Oregon. As far as I know, however, no one has died there recently . . .

A Lighthouse for the Lonely Heart

A Garrison Gage Mystery

They find his body at the bottom of Heceta Head Lighthouse—Ed Boone, a longtime volunteer who commits suicide rather than see his grim diagnosis to its bitter end. The strangeness of the old man’s death makes the local news, but Garrison Gage thinks little of it until the famous Nora West sneaks into town with an unsettling letter in hand.

Professing he wants to go to his grave with a clear conscience, Ed claims to be Nora’s biological father. But the revelation stirs up all kinds of complicated emotions for the talented but troubled musician, who hires Gage to find out the truth.

Yet the truth may be a lot more disturbing — and dangerous — than either of them expect.

 

Available in both Paperback and Ebook at Retailers Everywhere

A Lighthouse for the Lonely Heart: Cover and Description

I’ve gotten quite a few emails from readers asking when the next Garrison Gage book will be available. First, let me just say how much I appreciate such avid fans! It’s been really gratifying seeing my readership grow in recent years, and my hope is to write at least one book about my curmudgeonly private investigator a year while also writing other books. Honestly, it’s no hardship. I love revisiting my old friend.

More importantly, the fifth book involving Gage, A Lighthouse for the Lonely Heart, is nearly done. I’m waiting for the final pass from the proofreader before it goes into production, which should come back in the next few days. So end of the month, most likely. I appreciate your patience. Until then, I’ll whet your appetite with the cover and book description:

A Lighthouse for the Lonely Heart

A Garrison Gage Mystery

They find his body at the bottom of Heceta Head Lighthouse—Ed Boone, a longtime volunteer who commits suicide rather than see his grim diagnosis to its bitter end.  The strangeness of the old man’s death makes the local news, but Garrison Gage thinks little of it until the famous Nora West sneaks into town with an unsettling letter in hand.

Professing he wants to go to his grave with a clear conscience, Ed claims to be Nora’s biological father. But the revelation stirs up all kinds of complicated emotions for the talented but troubled musician, who hires Gage to find out the truth.

Yet the truth may be a lot more disturbing — and dangerous — than either of them expect.

As always, remember to sign up for my no-spam-ever-new-release author email newsletter if you want to be the first to know when the book is out.

So what’s the next book after this one? Ah, I never talk much about works in progress for fear of wrecking my creative process, but let’s just say that in the early going it’s both like everything else I’ve written and not like anything else I’ve written at all. I’ve code named it the Big Epic and we’ll see where it goes. Having fun, which is the important thing.

More soon.

 

An Adventure in the Caribbean, Ghost Detective in Audio, and Other News

The above shot is me playing with the kids on Coki Beach on the island of Saint Thomas, which is part of the United States Virgin Islands.

It was our first port of call on an amazing Caribbean adventure that Heidi, I, and the kids took in early February. We flew into San Juan, Puerto Rico a day early, visiting Old San Juan before embarking on our 7-day cruise through Saint Thomas, Barbados, Saint Lucia, Saint Kitts, and Saint Martin. It was the kids’ first cruise and also their first time out of the country, passports required, and everyone had a blast. Highlights included zip-lining in the rain forest near the St. Lucia Pitons, swimming with dolphins in St. Kitts, and a snorkeling trip to a fairly deserted beach on one of the smaller islands of St. Martin, after an exciting (though my son might call it harrowing) 20-minute boat ride across a warm but very active ocean. We caught air off some of those massive waves.

(By the way, I don’t usually swim with a shirt, but being the pasty pale fellow I am, I bowed to my wife’s wisdom and wore a “swim coverall” to protect said pasty pale skin. The one day I didn’t, the last day we were there, proved her point, because I got a bad sunburn on my back, the only negative to an otherwise fantastic trip. So the lesson there is: always listen to your wife.)

  

In publishing news, the first two books in the Myron Vale series, Ghost Detective and The Ghost Who Said Goodbye, are now available in audio. You can buy them at Amazon, Audible, or iTunes. The excellent Steve Roy Grimsley did such a fine job with the Garrison Gage books that I enlisted him to narrate the Ghost Detective series, and I was pleased with the results. The last book, The Ghost, the Girl, and the Gold, is also in the can and should show up on the various vendor sites within a few weeks.

One other little bit of publishing news: “The Elevator in the Cornfield,” a short story that originally appeared in Time Streams, has been reprinted in the Fiction River’s Racing the Clock. Really great series, Fiction River, and well worth buying any of the individual volumes or even subscribing to the series from the publisher. Reminds me that I really do need to get back to writing short stories now and then. I made the choice to focus on novels for a few years to try to build an audience (a choice that’s worked out well for me, so I certainly don’t regret it), but I do miss the short story form. The dilemma, of course, is finding the time. Speaking of where I’ve been spending my early morning writing hours, work on the fifth Garrison Gage novel is nearly completed. It will still have to go through the editing process, but I hope to have it out this spring. I’ll be doing a cover reveal before too long.

I’m also teaching WR 464: Writing for Publication again, here at Western Oregon University this Spring term (starting in April). It went well two years ago, with strong reviews from students. It meets Wednesdays from 4 pm to 7 pm, with another hour of work online, and it’s filled with the kind of nuts and bolts information I learned in the trenches that I wished I’d had as an undergraduate. Although I’ll be updating it a bit, the description I posted a couple years ago is still accurate. Feel free to pass it along to anyone in the vicinity of Monmouth, Oregon who might be interested.

That’s all for now. Back before too long.

Postcards from the Garage: Otter Rock, Oregon

I’m writing this as the sun is literally setting on 2016. In a way, we’re some of the last people to say goodbye to 2016 in the United States, aside from Hawaii, that is, as we’re ringing in the new year in a cozy little house just outside of Newport, Oregon, in small community known as Otter Rock. A bit of an impromptu trip, but as we had no plans for New Year’s Eve we thought a couple quiet days enjoying the moody winter weather here on the coast would be a fun change of pace. The shot above was from this morning, when it was bright and clear on the beach, but now the gray skies have moved in, along with a light drizzle. (You can just make out Yaquina Lighthouse on the point.) The fickle weather on the Oregon coast, far from being a drawback, is part of what we love about it.

I have mixed feelings about 2016. On one hand, I think you’d have to be an oblivious idiot not to be concerned about recent trends, both here in my own country and abroad. The rise of nationalist, immigrant-fearing political parties, the never-ending scourge of war, the refugee crisis, cyber espionage, climate change, and just a general turn toward selfishness and fear on a global scale is quite troubling.

On a more personal front, things are going well. In fact, the depressing political season had an unexpected upside. I got so fed up how all the toxic flotsam online was infecting my mind that I made a commitment to become something of an Internet Minimalist, striving to go online only with intention and purpose, and almost never just for something to do. This hasn’t only resulted in a much improved state of mind, but it’s also opened up all kinds of creative energy that I think was  bit stymied and dissipated on trivial things. I’d been trying to reduce my online time for a while but this time it really stuck. It’s wonderfully liberating, as long as you accept that you don’t need to be fully wired-in to everything happening in the world every moment of every day. It will still be there waiting for you when you’re ready for it. I highly recommend it. If nothing else, do what I did and follow the advice of a good friend who suggested doing a complete Internet fast for a week to see how it affects your mood. That really made things clear to me.

On the update front, progress on the new Garrison Gage novel goes well, and it should be out early 2017. Hope all is well going into the new year for you and yours.

New Myron Vale Book: The Ghost , the Girl, and the Gold

Just in time for Halloween, the third book in the Myron Vale series is now out in the world. The Ghost, the Girl, and the Gold is available in both ebook and print. For now, the best place to buy the paperback is Amazon.com, though it will be available online at B&N and elsewhere very soon. If you want the ebook, you can take your pick: Amazon, B&N, Kobo, and iBooks all have it for sale now.

As for the book itself, and what’s in store for the Portland private investigator who works for both the living and the dead, you can read more about it on the book’s page here on my own site. Thanks for reading!

The Ghost, the Girl, and the Gold: Cover and Description

Good news for fans of the Myron Vale series. While I originally thought The Ghost, the Girl, and the Gold, the third book in the series, would be delayed, the copy editor was able to work in the book sooner than I’d hoped, and we’re back to an early October release. I’m going over the edits, then it’s off to the proofreader for a final pass. Meanwhile, I’ve got the cover and the book description mostly finalized. As always, there might be a few last minute tweaks, but I’m pretty happy with how they’ve both come out. (Special thanks to my wonderful wife, who continues to provide invaluable feedback that helps whip things into shape.)

Here’s the cover (which you can click for a larger version, if you like):

It fits in with the design of the first two books. And here’s the book’s description:

The dead do not dream.

A week before Christmas, John and Laura Ray storm into Myron’s office, desperate to find their missing daughter. Money? They don’t have any. Clues? They have few. Plagued by mounting bills and a skull-crushing migraine, Portland’s only ghost detective wants nothing more than to show them the door.

But defying his conscience always proves tougher to Myron Vale than saying no, and he soon finds himself embroiled in one of the strangest cases of his career. The more he learns about this unique little girl and all of her extraordinary abilities, the more he feels a kinship to her. Who took Olivia Ray? And why?

The answers propel him toward a tantalizing solution to all of his problems — and a violent clash with a powerful personality, one who can cause irreparable harm to not just Myron, but everyone he loves.

Myron Vale continues to be an interesting character to me, one with the kind of depth worth exploring further, so I’m sure there will be more books about him in the future. Don’t ask me when, of course, because I’m deep into the next Garrison Gage book, and after that . . . well, we’ll see.

For now, if you’re interested in knowing when The Ghost, the Girl, and the Gold is actually out in the world, please sign up for the mailing list. I know I bang on that drum quite a bit, but other than buying my books, or writing a kind review of them on Amazon or elsewhere, signing up for my very infrequent “new release newsletter” is the thing I appreciate the most. No spam, no giving your email to anyone else — just a handful of emails a year, usually just when I’ve got something new out in the world I think you might like.

Postcards from the Garage: Yellowstone, August 2016

Just a quick summer update, since it’s been a few months. The shot above is from an eight-mile hike I took with the family during our August trip to Yellowstone, walking the south rim of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone and then out to Ribbon Lake where we had lunch. It was a brief trip, far too short to do Yellowstone justice, but we still had a great time, and had all sorts of what I would consider iconic Yellowstone moments: got surrounded by a herd of bison in our car, spotted a black bear playing in a hot spring, saw three of the most spectacular geysers go off, lots of elk, lots of deer, even a few pronghorn . . . Stayed in a nice house in the Emigrant, Montana area, got some reading in, and tried to stay off-line as much as possible (and still gave into temptation now and then, because, you know, Wi-Fi). The book of the trip was Dennis Lehane’s Moonlight Mile, the fourth (and presumably last) in the Kenzie and Gennaro series. If you haven’t read these books, you really should. Excellent stuff.

The summer has gone by in a blur, with the typical things doing the blurring. Kid camps, a brief jaunt to the California Redwoods, a few trips to the Oregon coast, some for the weekend, some for the day, it’s all par for the course. Heidi and I celebrated our 20th anniversary a week ago, and I can honestly say that our marriage is even better now in year 20. Marrying your best friend is highly recommended. As for the writing, I’m putting the final touches on The Ghost, the Girl, and The Gold, the third Myron Vale book, then it’s off to the copy editor. The copy editor is a bit backed up at the moment, so it may not come out until November, but I’ve learned the hard way not to rush this process, or to settle for mediocre editing, cover design, or anything else in preparing a book for publication. More and more, I just focus on the work at hand and let the process play itself out as it will.

Speaking of that, I’ve read lot of good books on that very subject lately — on staying focused on the moment and the work at hand — as I’ve tried to recalibrate my life a bit to make sure I’m spending my time and my attention on what really matters, and here are a few I heartily recommend:

Mastery by George Leonard
The Practicing Mind by Thomas M. Sterner
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki
Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel
The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

I’d let myself get a bit sidetracked and distracted earlier this year, and these books all helped me settle into a much better rhythm, with my writing, my university work and life in general. Nothing serious, just the normal recalibration and tweaking that all of us have to do from time to time. The most important takeaway of my little personal odyssey could probably be summed up with this: life is better when you reduce distraction as much as possible and focus as fully on the present moment, whether that means writing fiction or washing dishes. Some people call this a Zen approach. Others call it mindfulness. You can use whatever term you want, but for me it means letting go of my attachment to results and fully embracing the process for its own sake, knowing that the results will take care of themselves if you live the right way. This does not mean ignoring all the things you need to do to be successful; it must means doing them without judgement and worry. It’s a subtle difference when described, but it can have profound effects on your life, I’ve found.

Anyway, for you Garrison Gage fans, you’ll be pleased to know I’m a couple chapters into the fifth Gage novel and having a blast. Man, I love that curmudgeonly bastard. Fall’s almost here. The temperature is cooling in the Willamette Valley, many of the oaks, maples, and other trees are already changing their color and dropping leaves, and the rainy season will be on us soon enough. Cities on the Oregon coast get twice or more the annual rainfall that we do just a bit inland, so I can’t complain too much. Students will be coming back to campus in a few weeks, and that will bring its own changes.

I’m sure I’ll be sending out publishing news to my newsletter list before too long. If you haven’t already done so, please consider signing up. Last time I checked, we were closing in on 2500 subscribers, which pleases me to no end. Since I’m obviously not much of a blogger, and even worse at social media, it’s the best way to make sure you don’t miss a new release.

Postcards from New Zealand and Fiji (April 2016)

(A shot of Otago Bay from Larnach Castle in Dunedin, New Zealand.)

Partly to celebrate our upcoming 20th anniversary in August, partly because the kids have wonderful grandparents who are happy to watch the kids for a few weeks, and partly because I’ve come to believe that these sorts of adventures are good for both the body and the soul, Heidi and I spent two weeks touring in New Zealand followed by four wonderful days soaking up some sun on the Fijian Island of Malolo. (A brief aside: A conversation with a workaholic friend years ago when I was about to go on another adventure, who snorted that he couldn’t even remember the last time he took a vacation, made me start using the phrase “go on an adventure” rather than “take a vacation” when explaining a jaunt like this, which is a better descriptor, I think, of why I think it’s important to break free from your routine and shake things up now and then on adventures both near and far — even when, or perhaps especially when, you’re somebody like me who pretty much enjoys all the “work” he does, both in my writing life and my university life.)

Crossing the dateline and losing a day in the process, we flew into Christchurch, a beautiful city still picking itself up from the terrible 2011 earthquake, drove to Mt. Cook, where we stayed in the wonderful Hermitage resort, right in the national park and with a fabulous view of both Mt. Cook and many of the Southern Alps that run the length of the South Island. After that, we drove south along the east coast to the beautiful port city of Dunedin, where stayed in Larnach Castle and managed some close encounters with the Albatross, the Yellow-Eyed Penguin, and other wildlife.

Then it was on to Queenstown, where we made a jaunt to the stunning Milford Sound and went on a fun tour of many of the locations used in the Lord of the Rings films. A short flight to Rotorua, in the North Island, allowed us to visit the Hobbiton tourist attraction — 14 acres that were leased from a family farm in the area, which actually exceeded my expectations in really making me feel like I was in Middle Earth. We also made stops at the Waitmu Caves, to take a boat trip through absolute darkness to see the glowworms, and the Waimangu Volcanic Valley, where we both hiked and boated around geysers, hot springs, and a unique ecosystem that felt like something out of the Jurassic era. Then an early morning flight out of Auckland — where about a third of the 4.5 million people who call New Zealand home live — took us into Nadi, Fiji. A bus, another bus, and a catamaran boat finally brought us to own private beachfront “bure.” Here are a few digital postcards from our trip, some of which might show up a bit better if you click on them for the larger versions:

(The happy couple beginning their journey with a shot from the Botanic Gardens in Christchurch.)

(Another shot within the Botanic Gardens.)

(The one’s from our room at the Hermitage at Mt. Cook.)

(A couple glasses of wine, the biggest mountain in New Zealand, what more could you ask for?)

 

(This, called the “Clay Cliffs,” was just one of those random stops that wasn’t on the agenda, proving that New Zealand has something remarkable almost everywhere.)

(Not the best shot in the world because of the light, but this is Larnach Castle in Dunedin (where the first shot above was taken — high up in the hills over looking Otago Bay). Most of the locals use the word “castle” with a wry grin; you can read the local history if you want to know why.)

(The view of Otago Bay, from Larnach.)

(Two panoramic shots of Queenstown and Lake Wakatipu. Click for a larger version. The top one was from our room at Hotel St. Moritz, where we learned that many of the cast and crew of the LOTR movies stayed when they were filming in the area. The second is a shot at dusk from the top of the gondola.)

(Heidi standing behind a hot springs in the Government Gardens in Rotorua.)

(Me in the Waimangu Volcanic Valley, waiting for the dinosaurs to appear . . .)

(Lots of shots of Hobbiton, which was about an hour’s drive west of Rotorua. What made the place so remarkable was the landscape around the area, which really made you feel like you were in the Shire. I don’t think I could have afforded Bag End, but I could have been pretty happy in Sam’s hobbit hole.)

(Sunset at Lomani, our resort on the island of Malolo.)

(A shot from within our room, me standing on a fairly private strip of beach, since we were on the far end of the resort, near the point.)

Other highlights? Though remembering to drive on the left side of the road was always going to be challenging for an American like me, I really loved just driving through New Zealand, in all its beautiful and varied landscapes. Like a lot of people, I became intrigued with the country after the original Lord of the Rings filmed came out over ten years ago, and I have to say that it didn’t disappoint. Heidi and I even started joking, when we came around a corner and saw yet another amazing site, that “yes, it’s beautiful, but by New Zealand standards …” That’s right, it’s a country so beautiful that it needs its own scale to measure it. In many ways, Oregon is like a “hobbit size” version of New Zealand, at least in terms of the variety of landscapes (the total land area is almost the same, about 100,000 square miles, and our populations are about the same, too). Oregon has more variety in climates and topography than just about any state in the union; New Zealand just has greater extremes of it — and of course a lot more coastline.

Two weeks was far too short a time for New Zealand — we barely touched on the North Island, for example — which gives us a very good reason to go back, and I’m sure we will. The question, of course, is when. So many other places to see . . .

In other news, I’m back writing the third Vale book. A lot of you have emailed to ask when the next Gage book will be coming along, and all I can tell you is that there will be another, and it won’t be too long, but I can’t say more than that. When it comes to the books, I don’t do deadlines these days. I just write my five or ten pages a day and let the chips fall where they may. That may change someday, I certainly recognize the value of deadlines as a motivational tool, but with the family and the university work, I’ve got enough stress in my life without adding a bunch more for no reason. The writing’s the thing for me, after all. Publishing, as important as it is, and as much as I appreciate my readers (and boy, do I, after many years laboring with very few of them), is in some sense merely a byproduct. So as long as I keep plugging away at the pages, eventually a book emerges.

Since I don’t have a publication schedule, I do encourage you to take two minutes and sign up for my “no spam ever, new release email newsletter.” You won’t get more than a handful of emails a year, and I make sure my newsletter subscribers — over 2000 strong now — are the first to know when a new book is published.

It also looks like I’ll be teaching a new online course for the educational technology master’s program here at Western Oregon University this summer, one called “Publishing in the Digital Age,” focusing heavily on all the changes in how information and entertainment is distributed — not just with the printed word, but with music, video, and even comics.  I’m still fleshing it out, but it should be a lot of fun. There’s no better way to further your own learning on a subject than to teach it.

Two Reasons I Love Oregon, a Brief Update, and a Helpful Metaphor for Writers (And Other Creative Professionals) Struggling with How to Spend Their Time

Reason #1:

Reason #2:

The two pictures above were taken about a week apart, both in the heart of winter here in Oregon. The first was at Cape Lookout, a two and a half mile hike that juts almost straight out into the Pacific Ocean. We took the whole family in early January and it was warm enough, even with the breeze, that most of us were shedding our jackets before too long. At the end, not far from where this shot was taken, we spotted quite a few whales making their migratory journey. The second shot are the kids playing in the snow a few days later in Sunriver, a resort on the Eastern side of the Cascade Mountains.

Sun on the coast one weekend, snow in the mountains the next, both within a few hours of the house. That said, you’ve got to be able to stand often weeks and weeks of near endless gray and drizzle, and we’ve certainly had that in spades. But if you want a different climate or topography, you often don’t have to go far in Oregon to find it.

The fourth Garrison Gage book, A Shroud of Tattered Sails, has been selling very well. It seems with each Gage book I release, the audience grows a bit more, and for that I’m quite thankful. Right now, I’m working on the third Myron Vale book and it’s coming along nicely. After that, well, I don’t like to think that far ahead if I don’t have to, and I have the luxury of being a writer who doesn’t have to. If I start to think I’ve got my writing projects all planned out, that takes a lot of the fun out of it. But rest assured, there will be another Gage book before too long. I’ve been working on being a bit more prolific going forward, something I’ll discuss more in a moment.

Astute readers may have noticed a slight change in the website. A series of vicious hacks forced the issue (all automated hacks exploiting weaknesses in the WordPress platform), but I took the opportunity to revamp the look, modernizing it and cleaning it up a bit. It got me thinking about promotion, about how little I really do, at least as most writers would define it. I don’t really blog, usually only updating my website when I have news. I don’t podcast. I don’t spend much time on social media. I don’t do many book signings, conferences, or workshops. Because of my day job at the university and my busy life with a wife and two kids, I’m very much a self-promotion minimalist. In fact, the past two years, as I was getting a Master’s degree, I spent very little time on the marketing side at all.

And yet I had the best two years of my life as a writer.

This isn’t to say that I think marketing is a waste of time. Oh no, far from it. I really believe in loss leaders, for example, especially when it comes to writing in a series, and especially in a digital marketplace where the cost of production, at least for the writer, is nearly zero. (Writers still applying twentieth century brick and mortar thinking to a twenty-first century digital marketplace are seriously handicapping themselves.) There are lots of other things worth doing, and even more things that aren’t. But I do think that any professional writer — really, any professional artist, musician, or entertainer in general — should be clear about their choices, about where they spend their time, and about the actual impact those choices have on their long-term success.

That brings me to a little metaphor I created, one I designed to help me get better focused about what I’m trying to accomplish. It was so helpful to me that I also plan to use it the next time I teach a writing class. I call it the Professional Writer’s Table, but it could just as easily be a professional artist’s table or a professional musician’s table. Just change the word “write” to “create.” It looks like this:

The main question I’ve been asking myself is this: What do I have control over? Or at least, what do I have the most control over? Where do I have choices, and how do those choices affect my success? Basically, the idea is that there are four main areas that a writer has the most control over that directly affect his or her success, each of these being a leg of the table:

What you write
How much you write
How much you learn
How you market

Rather than abstract terms like “content” and “productivity,” I prefer concrete words that are more actionable — which, of course, is a fairly abstract word, but we’ll let that pass for now. There are so many ways for a writer working today to spend his or her time that it’s easy to get overwhelmed. These four legs are what I think constitutes a very sturdy table. If you are negligent in any of the legs, well, it can make your table pretty shaky after a while. A lot of writing with a poor marketing strategy often results in lackluster sales. A lot of learning without actually producing much — like the workshop junkie who goes to lots of classes but doesn’t actually write unless compelled to do so by a teacher — is equally out of whack.

Let’s take them each in turn.

1. What you write. Do you write mysteries or romance books? Do you write short stories or novels? These are decisions about content and format. How much control you apply here will depend on your view of the creative process, and your particular make-up as a creative professional. Some people prefer to just let a story go where it wants to go, starting with a title or an intriguing idea and imposing little control over the process in the beginning. Others do market research and try to pinpoint what they feel is an under-served market (say, romances featuring werewolves). I don’t think either approach is wrong, but I would say if you’re not having the kind of success you want (notice how I phrased that), it’s a good place to start questioning your assumptions.

2. How much you write.  Pages written, words typed, books finished. At the university, I work around people who think producing one book a year is lightning fast. Most of my professional writer friends think that’s painfully slow. It’s the simplest leg of the table to fix, and the hardest to actually do. Just write more. And yet, it’s usually the leg of the table that’s the weakest for most people. But focus on this area, and options open up in the other three. You have more choices about what you write. You have more opportunities to practice and learn, and of course more possibilities when it comes to marketing your work.

3.  How much you learn. If you want to have more success, you have to keep learning, not just about the craft of writing, but the business side of things as well. This might mean taking a class, attending a workshop, reading a how-to book, or keeping up with publishing news. It might mean simply spending a lot of time studying master storytellers (hopefully people succeeding now, not twenty or fifty years ago). This changes from person to person, and even for a single person during different points in their life. For example, I used to take a lot of classes and workshops, but I eventually hit a point where I felt that approach was hurting more than it was helping, and I now I spend more time studying on my own. That may change in the future. Every writer is different, but it never hurts to keep asking yourself a simple question: “How can I get better?” From my point of view, it’s one of the great joys of the creative professional. If I didn’t think I could get better, I’d probably stop. And if you’ve hit a plateau with your creative life, focusing heavily on learning is a good place to start.

4. How you market. I use this word in the broadest sense, as in both “bringing your work to market” and marketing as promotional strategies and tactics. I thought about calling it “how you sell” instead, and some people may still prefer that. But whatever you call it, this is such a critical area that it fully deserves its own leg of the table, and it’s the one that also offers the most traps and pitfalls. There are no right answers. There is only what works, and what works for you. Those “experts” who offer lots of restrictive do’s and don’ts are usually saying more about their own biases and blind spots than about what will really work for you. Every creative person needs to figure this out for themselves, and that usually means casting a wide net and a lot of trial and error. But it’s also a good idea to ask yourself what’s working for people now (not ten years ago), and seeing if what they’re doing will work for you.

There’s a lot more that could be written about these four legs of the table, and I know a lot of people will quibble that I’m missing some key areas. What about the business side of things, for example? Doesn’t that deserve its own leg? Well, in my mind, that’s covered under “how you market,” but the truth is that I wanted to keep this metaphor very simple so it helped me focus on what I could do that would have the highest impact on my success. There are so many temptations for my time, so many rainbows I can chase that probably won’t have much effect on helping me achieve my potential as a writer — which is my singular goal right now. Start a magazine? Blog about the changes in publishing? Edit an anthology? Start a business that offers publishing services? Do more paid teaching and presenting?

These are all things I’ve considered, and each of them has that bright and shiny allure that makes them especially tempting, but this tool made it abundantly clear to me that writing more is the best thing I can do for my writing career, which will in turn give me more options in the other three areas. Perhaps this is no surprise, since I’m the one who coined the WIBBOW test (which stands for Would I Be Better Off Writing?), but it still reaffirms what I really believe has the biggest impact on my long-term success.

This metaphor isn’t meant to be all-encompassing, and I’m sure others will have their own take. It certainly started a lively discussion at a monthly professional writer’s group I often attend (If you find it useful, feel free to use, share or modify.) There’s no health leg, or family leg, or fun leg, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to help me stay focused on what will get me where I want to go as a writer, even when that means most of my effort is, as usual, done far from the bright lights and the big crowds. That’s often the way it is. It doesn’t mean those other things I mentioned above aren’t worth doing, or that I won’t do them at some point in the future; it just means I’m making the hard choices to spend my time on what matters the most to me, right now, to get me where I want to go, even if those choices don’t always seem to offer the most enticing short-term rewards.

I’ll finish this post with another picture from our Cape Lookout hike a few months back. Why? Well, just because, that’s why.

 

A Shroud of Tattered Sails Audio Book Available

For those of you who love audio books, the always excellent Steven Roy Grimsley has finished narrating the fourth Garrison Gage book, A Shroud of Tattered Sails, and it is now available for sale on Audible.com, Amazon.com, and iTunes. If you like audio books — and why wouldn’t you, when you have top talent like Grimsley bringing a story to life — please check it out.

Work on the third Myron Vale book continues to go well. More on that front hopefully soon. Otherwise, the winter has been full of lots of writing and lots of reading, just the way I like it. Hope the winter has been equally kind to you. Maybe not the writing, unless that’s your bent, but certainly the reading.