Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION - Posts Tagged "as-i-please-writing-reading"

So you may have noticed I've been a little busier on this blog than usual lately. I guess the whole "this wedsite is dedicated to books and reading, why the hell don't I talk about books and reading more often?" question finally required an answer, in the form of adding frequent book reviews to the stew of other-subject blogs which makes up Stone Cold Prose. In any event, I plan on releasing several of these short but I hope impactful book reviews each week in addition to anything else I may be doing. For the moment I'm concentrating more on novels, but as I read nonfiction to fiction at a rate of anywhere from 3: 1 to 5:1, depending on my yearly whims, I can't promise I won't be reviewing a lot of history, biography, autiobiography, and so on as well. I really am making a concerted effort this year to read more novels, especially by authors I've never read before, and it is paying off, but it will take years to redress this particular balance.

Exactly why I, a novelist, do not read more fiction is a curious question. The most obvious answer is that I enjoy nonfiction, especially history and biography/autobiography/memoir. This is true, but it is not the whole story. The answer also lies within my own mental laziness -- novels take more imagination and therefore more energy -- and in my own fragile egotism. As a writer I find great inspiration in reading fiction, but I also get very frustrated when I read "the best book this year" and find it, or merely believe it anyway, to be a huge pile of crap. As someone who fleetingly had a top literary agent, and who has sat down with mega-producers, or had such meetings inked onto the schedule only to see them go up in smoke due to freakish circumstances such as vehicular accidents or last-moment changes in studio regime, you can perhaps understand my bitterness and jealousy in this area even if it is childish and does me no good and probably much harm. But here at any rate is what I'm working on to push my "brand" a little farther forward in the Year of our Lord, 2024:

* In a week or so I'm sitting down to lunch with a publicity agent I met down in Miami when I accepted the Readers Favorite Gold Medal for my novel Sinner's Cross. I have previously been on his podcast, and was deeply impressed by the seriousness of the questions he posed to me. I've done just enough interviews and podcasts to distinguish between the guys that are just looking to fill up space in their posting schedule with a warm body, and those that actually want to coax some interesting responses out of their guests/interviewees, and this gentleman falls into the latter. I won't mention his name here because I've not asked permission to do so, but if anything substantive happens at our luncheon (and what a fancy word that is for a cheeseburger and a beer consumed in a diner), rest assured I will announce it here.

* I now have five, count 'em, five novels (rather, four novels and a short story anthology) submitted to Readers' Favorite's book awards for this year. I have another novel called The Night Hunter, which I finished some time ago but chose not to publish myself, submitted to a contest for, you guessed it, unpublished novels. I also subbed Sinner's Cross, to two other contests I've never entered before, and put my latest (Exiles) up for a review via Author's Reading, with intentions of entering that contest as well, provided the review is good enough.

* In two weeks I will be at the In Your Write Mind conference at Seton Hill University, both as an attendee and a presenter. I shall be teaching two hour-long modules, "Writing Violence" and "Writing Dialog" and look forward to sitting down to dinner with my old writing mentor and occasional partner, Patrick Picciarelli, and my editor, Michael Dell. Writing by nature is a solitary occupation so it is always good to be able to mingle with your own kind in both a learning and a social capacity.

* I have now bought most of the equipment I need to begin either a podcast or a YouTube channel, or both. I am still gunshy about these projects, because a) I'm intimidated by learning such things as editing and so on, and b) I have so many ideas that it's impossible for me to focus on anything specific. But in this day and age it's impossible to get anywhere unless you're willing to embrace technology, meaning social media and so forth, to its fullest extent.

* As I said above, I plan on being much more active with blogging than usual, but also possibly joining Word Press or some other popular blogging site since Goodreads by its nature is rather a niche market and not really suited to the sort of blogs I often produce. I also plan a massive overhaul of my (cough) charming but (cough cough) rather dated author site, mileswatsonauthor.com, which (cough cough cough) offers my entire catalog of paperback books, autographed and personalized.

* I spent the last two days drafting Dark Trade, the third installment of my CAGE LIFE series. I am really very happy with the manuscript, but the time has come for me to pass it off to my editor for a really thorough scourging, the dreaded "structural edit" which tests not grammar and spelling and syntax and the rest of that crap, but the stuff that really matters, story and style and continuity and logic and plot. There is always a kind of tussle in these moments between my vision and his suggestions for improving it, and while the final say is of course mine I have learned to trust his instincts. A good editor is, like a good mechanic or a good doctor, absolutely indispensible; the very best writer in the world can only improve if he has the right guy scribbling notes in his margins, and the very worst will improve under the prod of his red pen, even if he lacks talent. In any event, Dark Trade will be released sometime in the fall of this year, I hope to the same acclaim that greeted its two antecedents.

I believe that covers the updates. Dunno about where you live, but here in Pennsylvania it is a beautiful sunny day, not too hot and not too humid, and a lengthy hike in the woods is calling my name. After that, I must return to the salt mine that is South of Hell, the third installment of my SINNER'S CROSS series. This book is giving me a hard time, as every book in this particular series has given me, but I expect nothing less. A novel is very much like a human being: it has its own personality, its own identity, and its own journey to take; the difference is it takes the author with it, from first word to final period...and sometimes that journey is a castiron sonofabitch. So be it. Unlike some vocations, nobody ever tells a writer, "This is gonna be easy." In fact, everyone usually tells you the exact opposite, and they're right. Writing is, if nothing else, one endeavor in which you will generally find there is truth in advertising.