Scott Pratt's Blog, page 3

The Writer’s Predicament

I’ve spent the last several months searching for someone who can help me effectively market the books I write. There are hundreds of men and women out there who will gladly take my money. They promise the moon. I’ve checked dozens of them out very closely. Not interested.

There are books written by people who want to tell me “How to Sell a Gazillion Books” or “How I Made Fifty Thousand Dollars in a Month.”  I’ve read several of them, and for the most part, they’re a regurgitation of old marketing principles that generally don’t work in the business of selling fiction. Some of them are just fluff. They offer such drivel as ”Don’t give up your dream.” “You can do it.” “Keep writing.” “If it were easy, everyone would be doing it.”

Duh.

While I was scrapping with the mighty Penguin trying to get the rights to my first three novels back, I was also spending a lot of time trying to figure out how I’d go about selling them once I got them back. The amount of information out there is mind-boggling. The number of books that are being published these days is mind-boggling. The number of suggestions on how to sell your books is mind-boggling. The competition is mind-boggling. My mind, understandably, is boggled.

Should I Tweet? Should I Facebook? Should I YouTube? Should I Goodreads? LibraryThing? Shelfari? Google-doodle-doo? Should I give ebooks away? Should I give paper books away? Should I even have paper books in this day of digital? Should I blog? Should I pitch to bloggers? Offer to be a guest on their blogs? Do virtual book blog tours? Should I do press releases? Should I hound television and radio talk-show hosts and try to get them to let me appear on their shows? Should I do the same with newspaper reporters and try to get them to write about me? Should I do book signings? Should I do a book trailer? Should I ask everybody and their brother to write five-star reviews for me and post them on Amazon and everywhere else? Should I try to figure out a way to pay for reviews? (You’d be surprised how many writers are doing that now. John Locke, Mr. “I sold a million e-books on Kindle,” paid thousands for reviews according to the New York Times.) Should I advertise by doing pay-for-click campaigns on Google or Facebook or Goodreads? Should I kiss babies and press the flesh?

Shucks, Wilbur, I don’t know. All I really want to do is write good stories and sell them for a reasonable price and make a decent living and be happy. If I do all the stuff I listed in the paragraph above, I’ll never have time to write another word of fiction. I’ll spend all my time selling. I’m a lousy salesman.

But guess what? I think — maybe — I’ve found someone to help me figure all this stuff out. Her name is Laura Pepper Wu. She lives in Seattle, Washington. She’s young and energetic. She writes a blog called “30DayBooks” and she’s written a few books of her own. She seems to get it.

I’ve emailed her a few times. She seems on the up-and-up and seems to know what she’s doing. Her fee is reasonable. I filled out a long questionairre and sent it back to her earlier this week. I’m going to talk to her for an hour on Monday. She’s going to school me on how to sell these books.

I can’t wait to talk to her. I’ll let you know what she said next week.

 

The Writer’s Predicament

I haven’t been blogging.

I couldn’t. They wouldn’t let me.

I’ve been in limbo.

I’m not Catholic, but I believe in limbo. It’s a place those who haven’t made it to the big show are sent. It’s a place of happiness (sort of) but it doesn’t include the beatific vision. For me, the beatific vision is best-seller status with the novels I write. I’m still hoping to get there, but Penguin sent me to limbo first.

I’ve already told you about my little war with Penguin that ultimately resulted in me regaining the rights to my first three novels, all of which were installments in the Joe Dillard series. I signed the termination agreement and received a copy signed by Penguin a couple of months ago. I naively thought within a few weeks I’d be able to get the books back up for sale under my own, brand-spankin’- new publishing umbrella.

Yeah, right.

It takes an editor at Penguin at least two months to read a manuscript and decide whether or not to buy it. It takes Penguin a year or more to publish a manuscript once they’ve bought it. It takes them ten months to generate a royalty statement for an author. It takes them two months to write and mail a check. I’ll bet it takes a Penguin executive two hours to take a crap.

It has taken them two months to take my books “off sale.” It’s been quite comical, really, but it’s also been frustrating and maddening, because I couldn’t put them up for sale under my own company as long as they kept selling them. Not to mention the fact that they were collecting royalties every day that should have been going to me. But I’m trying very hard these days to maintain a positive attitude, to refrain from becoming angry, to look at life through those rose-colored glasses and all that, but the entire experience with Penguin would piss off a monk. I’m not a monk, though. I’m more laid back than a monk. I’m easy like Sunday morning.

After our contract was terminated, after I’d received the documents, I kept checking Amazon and Barnes and Noble and kept seeing that they were still selling my books.  I emailed their lawyer. She said it was a complicated process and would take awhile. I waited awhile; they were still selling my books. I emailed the lawyer again and told her I’d published and unpublished books on Amazon and that it only took me one day — twenty-four hours. I told her if they didn’t stop selling my books I was going to get ahold of Amazon and tell them Penguin was infringing on my copyright. She couldn’t understand why I was sending her “aggressive emails.” Penguin was doing me a great courtesy, she said, by returning the rights to me. I should be thankful and patient and shut up.

So I shut up for a while longer and tried to be patient. After a couple more weeks passed I sent her another email. It wasn’t all that vitriolic, really. But you know what? They very next day, they finally took all of my books off sale from every site. The lawyer then emailed me and asked me not to email her anymore. I sent her one more, just for fun. All it said was, “Boo!”

So now I have them back. “An Innocent Client” has already been rewritten and is off being formatted for paperback and ebook. I’m having a new cover designed because Penguin won’t let me use the one I already had. (They also wouldn’t return any of manuscripts to me, in any form. No electronic files, nothing. So petty.)

I have a grand plan for re-releasing the novels, starting with An Innocent Client. I’m going to do giveaways on Goodreads and LibraryThing and Facebook. I’m going to pitch book bloggers. I’m going to Tweet, which I think will be a worthless endeavor. The grand plan will culminate in the release of my fifth Joe Dillard novel around the first of December. (I know, I know. I said I’d release it in October, but that doesn’t fit into my grand plan since Penguin held me up for two months.)

Anyway, I’ll let you guys know how all this is going. If it goes according to plan, my bank balance will change significantly by January 1, 2013. If it doesn’t, it won’t be for lack of effort.

Wish me luck.

 

The Writer’s Predicament

Today’s predicament involves mutts. Specifically, female mutts and what to do with them. I’m a mutt lover, have been all my life, but I’m not a mutt nut. My wife is a mutt nut.

Right now, we have four mutts. One, a little cocker spaniel mix named Bella, was recently dumped on us by my son and his girlfriend. There’s really no other way to put it. They brought the dog over, they left, the dog stayed and has been here ever since. “No,” I said. “We have three dogs. We don’t want another.”

“But she’s so cute,” said my wife, the mutt nut.

“Which part of the word ‘no’ escapes your understanding? No more dogs.”

“But look at those eyes.”

In fairness to my son, he’s been traveling because of his new job. His girl, who originally couldn’t resist the dog when a friend offered her as a puppy, is in grad school and is extremely busy. Like us, they just moved into a new place. Their place is an apartment in the city. Ours is in the boonies on the lake on a dead-end road. It isn’t nearly as crowded out here as it is in the city. They thought Bella would be happier as a country girl.

But Miss Bella is an independent-minded mutt. She doesn’t come when you call her. She comes when she’s hungry. She likes to be chased, especially at the most inopportune times, like when I’m late for something. She respects no boundaries, including the neighbors’ yards and pays no heed to things like roads and cars. She disappears for hours at a time.

Last week, unknown to us, she came into heat. Kristy and I have always had male mutts. We had no experience with females. That has now changed. Bella took off one morning and came back with a beagle named J.J., who belongs to the neighbors a couple of doors down and has the same respect for boundaries as Bella. J.J. and Bella suddenly became inseparable. Even when we managed to get her into the house at night, J.J. stood outside and scratched at the door and whined. All night. Every night for a week.

I have no doubt that Bella is now pregnant. J.J., like any true hound, has suddenly dumped her. Google says the gestation period for a mutt is nine weeks, so in approximately 56 days, Bella will drop a litter of cute little cocker beagle puppies. My mutt nut wife is thrilled.

Mutt, anyone? Let me know…

The Writer’s Predicament

I’m sorry I haven’t blogged in awhile. My wife and I moved to a little place on the South Holston River. Lots of windows that face the sunset. It’s beautiful and so very peaceful. We’re pretty much settled in now, so I can get back to the routines.

Let’s talk about “River on Fire,” a novel I wrote recently and that I can finally promote now that I have the rights to all my work back. “River on Fire” is a book very close to my heart in many ways. It’s a work of literary fiction that will probably also be classified as young-adult fiction. The plot is episodic, a series of incidents in the life of an orphan growing up in the 1960s in southwestern Michigan. Each incident is planned to illustrate the steady chipping away of the boy’s innocence and the seductive nature of violence in American culture during that tumultuous decade.

Randall Smith, the main character, is a foundling, but more importantly, he is an innocent. The color of his skin, his hair, his eyes, all suggest innocence. He is being raised in a “non-denominational, Christian home for boys.” White boys only, although race is never mentioned out loud. He loves to sing and is easily moved to tears. He loves baseball and is scared of girls.

The 1960s presented tremendous opportunities for me to explore the themes that fascinated me most. Early in the decade, President Kennedy was murdered, a defining moment for any American who remembers it. Randall is eight when the president is killed, and he realizes for the first time that there’s a big, bad world out there that he belongs to but isn’t necessarily a part of, a world controlled by people with money and weapons. He goes on to recall his first day in school, where his teacher introduced the students to dogma and to undergo drills “in case the communists drop a bomb” on the school.

Randall develops a deep fascination with reading the newspaper each day. It begins innocently with him reading the box scores from the Detroit Tigers’ baseball games, but eventually Randall begins reading the entire paper, every word, every day. He reads about Norman Morrison setting himself on fire outside the Secretary of Defense’s office in 1965. He reads about Richard Speck torturing, raping and murdering eight student nurses in Chicago in July of 1966 and about Charles Whitman shooting 31 people from a tower at the University of Texas in August of 1966. He reads about the war in Vietnam, the unrest surrounding the civil rights movement and the war, the women’s liberation movement and the gay rights movement. He reads about assassinations and earthquakes and floods and massacres, all the while questioning how a benevolent God could let so many terrible things happen.

Randall clings doggedly to his innocence. One of his caretakers discovers that Randall has a beautiful singing voice, and each year at Christmas, he performs at churches throughout the community. He develops a love affair with the game of baseball and ultimately gets an opportunity to visit Tiger Stadium and meet his hero, Al Kaline. While at Tiger Stadium, Randall is given a free bat with Al Kaline’s signature etched into the barrel. The bat is one of the most important symbols in the novel, a symbol of innocence, and ultimately, of innocence lost. It is also during his trip to Detroit that Randall sees a river on fire, another powerful symbol of the consequences of greed and complacency.

I could write a long essay on the use of symbolism and metaphor in “River on Fire,” but part of the enjoyment of incorporating literary devices into fiction is to sit back and see how others interpret the work. So as you begin to read, know this – every character, every incident, every situation, can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Racial tension, school yard violence, storms, the war in Vietnam, baseball, love and its consequences, deer hunting, accidents and even the Woodstock concert are all used to contrast the ebb and flow of Randall’s innocence and his faith in God and Jesus against the reality of life.

I decided to go straight up, modern-day indie with this novel. It’s available in digital format only. You can read it on a Kindle, a Nook, a smart phone, or any of the Apple devices. It’s priced at $3.99. I might make it available in print if it really takes off, but until then, it’ll be digital only. The cover, which I love, was designed by my good friend Joo-Hye Park.

I hope you’ll read “River on Fire” and recommend it to your family and friends. I’ve read it at least a dozen times now, and I’ve enjoyed it every time. If you have questions or ideas about anything in the novel, feel free to post them here or on Twitter or Facebook. I’ll be happy to give you the answers straight from the old horse’s mouth.

The Writer’s Predicament

Guess what? We did it.

I received an email from my lawyer Tuesday. Mighty Penguin has finally agreed to give me the rights back to my first three books. It only took a year. As soon as I got the email, I went into the kitchen and told Kristy. We held hands and jumped up and down like children. I called the kids. I called my mother. I called my brothers and sister. I told the dogs about it. When Kristy got home that night, she brought me a fifth of Ketel One vodka. I love Ketel One. Martinis, olives, all that. It was cool.

I thought about how David must have felt when the stone hit Goliath between the eyes and Goliath fell. He must have said to himself, “Whoa… did I just do that?” Yeah, he did. AND SO DID I! Yuk yuk.

My predicament now? What the heck do I do with the books now that I have them back? I’m going to try to sell them, of course, primarily because Kristy really wants a jet ski. Since I have them back, I now have a series of four books with a fifth in the pipeline — it’ll be done soon, I promise — plus a stand-alone thriller and two “literary fiction” novellas. I’m excited because I get to go back and take a look at those first three novels and turn them into better books. I plan to take some of the profanity out of them. Not all, but some. The world of criminal justice is often a profane world, and when I was writing the books I thought I needed to convey that to readers. But thinking back, I think I could have told the story I was trying to tell just as effectively without excess profanity, especially the “goddamnits.” I haven’t received much negative feedback on those books, but the limited negative feedback I’ve received has been from folks who were offended by the language, and in particular the “goddamnit” thing. Since I received the feedback, I’ve asked myself this question: “Is it all that important to be profane? Is it all that important to use the term ‘goddamnit’ when you know it offends some of your readers, especially those who are Christians?” And the only reasonable answer is no.

In my defense, I grew up hearing the term “goddamnit.” My grandfathers used the term, my uncles, my father. I didn’t really attach any religious connotation to it because I wasn’t raised “in the church.” My parents claimed to be Methodists but they never went to church, so neither did I. “Goddamnit” meant the same as “shit” and “fuck” and “good god” and “motherfuck” and “fuck me.” It was a term of frustration or anger. When I moved into the world of criminal defense, it was a common term used by cops and lawyers and defendants. Even a few judges used the term, although I will admit that the wearers of the unsightly black frocks restrained themselves when it came to taking the Lord’s name in vain. So when I put it into the books, I thought I was giving readers a real taste of what it was like to be in that world.

Bottom line, I’m going to clean those books up a bit so the lady in Tazewell can enjoy the story without being offended by the taking of her Lord’s name in vain. I might take a few of the fucks out of the books. I might take some of the phrases like “he was fantasizing about his balls slapping off of her ass” out. I don’t want to soften the stories, because ultimately they’re stories about a profane and evil world, but I think I can tell the same stories without alienating a significant part of my target market. Is that a sellout? Maybe, but John Grisham writes similar stories and he uses ZERO profanity. I can’t go to zero, but I can certainly cut it back.

I won’t change the plots at all, but I’ll get help developing consistent books covers for the series. I’ve enlisted a marketing guy who is going to help me and I’ll pay him the same 15 percent I paid the agents who did nothing but read the manuscripts, download them, and send them to editors. He’s all about branding Joe Dillard, and I think ol’ Joe is worth branding as long as they don’t press a hot iron onto one of his butt cheeks and produce an ugly scar which Caroline might find unattractive.

Finally, there are several guys and girls out there who are making anywhere from $20,000 to $70,000 a month with indie publishing, and that is exactly where I intend to go. I’ll keep writing, this marketing guy will keep advising me on how to do it right, and maybe, just maybe, after all these years of busting my butt, I’ll become an overnight success.

If it happens, I’m going to have a big party out at the lake. You’ll all be invited. In the meantime, if you’re happy for us, grab your wife or your husband’s hand and just jump up and down for a minute. It’ll be great fun.

The Writer’s Predicament

I attended the Blue Ridge Bookfest this weekend in Hendersonville, North Carolina. Thanks to James Loy and Jean Tuech for making it such a nice time. The organizers paid for a very nice room at the Claddagh Inn (a quaint bed and breakfast on Main Street in Hendersonville) and they paid me a tidy sum to speak for forty-five minutes. I spoke. I hope the people who heard me speak enjoyed it.

There’s a bit of a rift among writers about whether doing things like going to Bookfests is worth the time and effort. Some say, yeah, sure it is. Whatever exposure you can get, the better. Others say book fairs and book signings are a big waste of time. They don’t really help you sell books and they’re inconvenient and almost humiliating. The way it works is that some bookseller piles your books, along with the books of all the other authors, up on a table in a hallway. Just off that hallway is an entrance into a large room filled with tables, and the authors sit at the tables with little exhibits, waiting for people to come up to talk to them. Some authors are much more aggressive than others, they try to engage people, and they try to convince them to buy their books. I happened to share a table at this event with a man who’s name I don’t recall, but he was passionate about selling his self-published books that, he said, rewrites American history for children. He brought his mother with him, and she helped him. I heard the phrase, “This is my crusade,” from him several times during the day. I looked at his books, skimmed them. Didn’t really understand his crusade. His mother may have understood it, but she was busy crocheting.

My wife came with me. I made her come because I’ve been to a couple of these things and I knew I might spend the day bored out of my mind. I’m so glad she came, because we were able to play games on her Kindle Fire and joke with each other during the five hours I sat there. I signed one book and talked to maybe five people. Three of the five people I talked to were people that talked to every author and were still there when the thing ended. Retired people, you know? Just looking for someone to talk to. I enjoyed the conversations, though.

The “presentations” were held in classrooms at Blue Ridge Community College. The presentations began at eight in the morning. Three or four authors gave presentations each hour. I didn’t give mine until 2:15. I was in the last group. The event ended at 3:00. There were six people in the room for my presentation including my wife and my host. There was a man named Kermit and a man who spoke with a British accent named Colin and a woman named Renee and another woman named Katherine, I think.

I gave them a helluva show, though. I talked about the process of writing a novel, the acquiring of an agent, the business of publishing and the business of Hollywood. I talked about how publishing has changed. I told them about how if I grossed a million dollars for Penguin Publishing, they would generously give me eighty thousand dollars. I talked about how my agent would take fifteen percent of that eighty thousand, reducing the money I received to sixty-eight thousand out of that million. Then I explained that the government would take a third of the sixty eight thousand, leaving me with around forty-four thousand. Then I broke it down to the dollar, which revealed that for every dollar of revenue I generate for Penguin Publishing I net about 4.5 cents under my contract. I told them I wasn’t all that enamored with that kind of slave labor structure, so when the Kindle and Amazon came along and started offering me 70 percent instead of 8 percent on the sales of my novels, I thought it might be best for me and for my family to go ahead and move into the independent publishing arena.

Two members of my audience seemed stunned. Three seemed supportive. And one just seemed bored.

I’m sure I made a major impact in the publishing industry by speaking to six people in Hendersonville, North Carolina. More likely, it was an microscopic impact, or even more likely, what I said had zero impact. So it goes.

Ah, well, it was fun. Thanks to the folks at the Blue Ridge Book Fest for having me. I’m guessing they won’t invite me back.

The Writer’s Predicament

You know what the biggest predicament is if you’re a serious writer, one who has devoted yourself to the craft, who has published books and wants to continue doing so?

How do you sell the damned things?

Because if you don’t sell them, you don’t get any money. And if you don’t get any money, your wife and children look at you and say, “What the heck are you doing? I see you sitting down there in your cave writing and I see the finished product and I see the covers and I see them on Amazon, but why aren’t they selling? Why isn’t there money in the account to feed everybody and cover all the bills and take me on that nice vacation and buy me that cute little sportscar I’d love to have? You’re supposed to be the breadwinner, right? That’s what you said when you blew off practicing law and told us all you were going to take care of us by writing books. That’s what you said!”

Here’s how I think it was done a very short time ago, and how I think it’s still done on a lesser scale because newspapers are strangling. A publisher (and I’m not talking about a publishing company, I’m talking about the man or woman who runs the company) says, “Okay, I need a legal thriller guy. I need somebody who can compete with that damned Grisham fellow.” He has submissions, of course, that have come in through agents and writers, probably hundreds of them. He has people, underlings, associate publishers and executive editors and editors who are all trying to convince him that their guy is the guy. So they go to their meetings and they fight their little inter-office battles and eventually, they choose the guy. Or the girl. But mostly, in that genre, they choose the guy. I had a conversation with a former bestselling legal thriller writer a little over a year ago. He was highly successful as a writer for awhile. He still does pretty good. But he told me that whoever the BIG CHEESE at his particular publishing firm was chose him, and once they chose him, they dedicated their payola money to him.

He didn’t specifically call it “payola” money, but he explained how things worked, and there’s really no other name you can give it. All those snooty reviewers that all seem to agree that a particular book from a particular writer is good? And not just good, it’s a must-read, a life-changer, a LITERARY contribution to the genre fiction.  The Boston Globe reviewer and the New York Times reviewer and the L.A. Times reviewer and the Chicago Tribune reviewer and the reviewers from Denver and Portland and Baltimore and Philadelphia and Miami and Phoenix and Dallas, even the pisant New Orleans Picayune, they all receive advance copies of the new guy’s books and they all LOVE it? These are people who masturbate to the thought of tearing a writer apart. These are literary gas bags, as Stephen King refers to them, who like nothing better than to rip apart the work of an author who, unlike them, actually has the brains, the balls, and the persistence write a novel.

“A literary force in crime fiction,” they say. “He’s changing the genre,” they say. They use words like intelligent and ethereal and exciting and the old “couldn’t put it down” cliche. A “roller-coaster ride that will keep you glued to your seat and keep you up far beyond your bedtime.” They all say the same thing about the same books. They fall all over themselves trying to outdo each other in their praise, their insight, their connection to the book. And in doing so, they’re goal is one thing: to get you to read it.

Why?

Because they got paid.

Before you know it, everybody in the country thinks they need to read the book, because if they don’t, well, they’ll be out of the loop. Their friends at work will look at them over the water cooler and say, “What? You haven’t read ‘Into the Heat of the Nightstalker?’ What cave are you living in? Are you anti-literary, are you anti-intellectual, are you anti-social? C’mon, man! Are you just uncool?”

It’s pretty sick when you think about it. All these gas bag reviewers who wrote their glowing reviews got paid by the publisher. They got paid by their newspapers, of course, but they also got paid by the publishers to write favorable reviews. It’s the old model when the record companies were paying disc jockeys and radio stations to play records over and over and over. They called it payola, and you know what? The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Once the reviewers have been greased, then the retailers have to be greased, whether it be Barnes and Noble, Borders, Books-a-Million, whatever big book retailing company happens to be in the business of selling retail books at the time. The publishers grease them to put the books out front, in prominent displays. They charge ridiculous prices for hard cover books because they’ve had to pay out so much bribe money to get the reading public to believe if they don’t read the book they’ll become a social pariah, or worse, a plain old dumbass. And let’s not forget the printing companies who actually produce the product. They get paid bupkus. Then there are the distributors, the middle men who haul the books from the print warehouses to the retail stores. They need their share, too.

I guess that’s why the old, traditional, Big 6 New York publishers pay their authors slave wages. That’s why the best deal an author can get on a hardcover book is around 15-17 percent. That’s why the paperback royalties paid to authors are between six and eight percent. They spend so much money bribing people, they don’t have anything left for the authors. Their executives and stockholders do very well, thank you very much. These big companies that are being sued by the Department of Justice right now for collusion? They’re multi-billion dollar corporations, every one of them. And they’ve become multi-billion dollar corporations by bribing their way into bookstores and then screwing both their customers and their writers.

To hell with those people. You and I and Amazon are gonna get along without them.

The Writer’s Predicament

So let’s get back to the predicament presented when a publisher abandons a writer. The most serious predicament? Confidence.

Confidence is a fleeting thing, something that comes and goes without warning, sometimes without reason. There’s a sort of “Catch 22″ involved in confidence, because without confidence, it’s tough to succeed, but without some success, it’s tough to be confident.

To write a novel… heck, to write anything that you know other people are going to read, requires a tremendous amount of confidence. The writer has to believe that what he has to say has some value, and he has to believe that he can say it in such a way that others will read it without losing interest. He has to be part entertainer, part philosopher, part comedian. It depends on the genre, of course. If you’re writing horror, you have to be horrific, if you’re writing suspense, you have to be suspenseful, if you’re writing crime, you have to be criminalistic… you get the idea. You have to make thousands of choices during the writing of the a novel, and you have to have confidence that they’re the right choices.

So when I got tossed overboard by Penguin, my confidence suffered. My biggest concern was, how in the heck do I get back on the boat? And each day that went by, and with each rejection of the manuscript of the fourth book in the Dillard series, the boat seemed to be getting farther and farther away, until finally it disappeared altogether and there I was, treading water, wondering which direction I should swim.

I swam in circles for awhile, and while I was swimming I wrote “Russo’s Gold,” “River on Fire,” and a little novella called “Screaming Rabbit.” (I wrote “Screaming Rabbit” under the pseudonym “Prudence Juris.” It’s way out there, but it’s also hilarious, if I may say so.) “Russo’s Gold” was crime/legal thriller, “River on Fire” was young adult/literary fiction and “Screaming Rabbit” was humor. I also learned a great deal about self-publishing while I was swimming in those circles. I didn’t really want to publish books myself, because it wasn’t long ago that self-published books were called “vanity” books. But then I crested a wave and I spotted this big, shiny new boat called “The Good Ship Amazon.” Beside the Good Ship Amazon was the boat I’d been thrown off of, and I realized that the old boat was sinking, slowly but surely.

So I swam toward the Amazon and climbed aboard, and the strangest thing happened: the folks aboard the Amazon told me I should write what I enjoy, that I should write what I know, that I could price the books reasonably and make money at the same time. They said I shouldn’t worry about what those stuffy codgers on the old boat said. I listened, and as soon as I realized the Amazon folks were right, that elusive thing called confidence returned.

So the Dillard series is reborn, and I’m now riding along on the Good Ship Amazon. It’s gonna be a long ride, and I’m looking forward to it.

 

 

The Writer’s Predicament

 

I thought you might enjoy this little story, especially since it’s true.

I’ve done some things that I suppose people would look at and say, “Hey, that guy’s pretty smart.” But I’ve also done some stupid things, and in my late-thirties, I wasn’t making any money to speak of and I decided I needed to make a major change. So I took the LSAT, the test people have to take to get into law school, and I did it without taking any prep courses like everyone takes now. The score I made, along with the grades I’d made in college over the course of my twenty-year undergrad career, got me into the University of Tennessee College of Law. Good for me, I thought. Maybe you won’t be poor if you can get through this place.

Persistence and toughness got me through law school, because I was thirty-eight years old when I started, I was a husband and father, I had a part-time job, and I was commuting more than two hundred miles a day. I made that commute for three years. I’d get up at 4:30 a.m., leave a little after five, drive the hundred and ten miles campus, study a bit, go to class until noon or two or three, depending on the schedule, drive another hundred and ten miles home, do my best to love my wife and kids, study, work, blah, blah, blah. I’d listen to cassette tapes about contract law and criminal law and tort law and civil procedure during the drives. I drank a lot of coffee.

I remember I used to get tears in my eyes occasionally when I would think about walking across the stage at graduation while I was driving to and from Knoxville day after day after day after month after month after year after year. Graduation always seemed so far away, and the process was so difficult, and I’d think about it finally being over and how proud my wife and kids would be and I’d tear up. And then it finally happened. Graduation day arrived. Kristy, my wife, said to me on the drive down to my graduation ceremony, “I won’t believe it until I see your name in the program.” I said, “Thanks a lot.”

When we got there, I went into the building to put on the robe with all my classmates and my wife and kids and my mother and my grandmother had to go sit in the audience. There weren’t any programs available to the graduates while we were getting ready, so I didn’t know if my name was in it. I was relatively certain my name would be in the program, because I figured somebody would have told me if it wasn’t, but Kristy had spooked me, so I wasn’t going to believe it until I walked across the stage and the dean of the law school “hooded” me. (They call it a “hooding ceremony” when you get a doctorate, which is what a law school degree is. A doctor of jurisprudence.)

So I got in line and walked into the auditorium with all the other graduates and I sat down and looked around and spotted Kristy and she was holding a program and she gave me a thumbs up.  My name was in it. I had graduated. I felt a sense of relief like I’d never felt in my life, but I also felt this strange sense of rebellion, a sense that I’ve felt before and that has never done anything for me besides get me in trouble.

I didn’t care much for law school, especially the arrogant professors who had never actually practiced law and who flirted with the pretty young girls. I didn’t care much for the fact that they’d put me through three years of hell and hadn’t taught me a damned thing about the actual practice of law. There was a dean of students at the law school with whom I’d had a nasty encounter who was arrested for possessing child pornography a couple of months before I graduated. His name was Pollack, may he rot in kiddie porn hell forever. Maybe I disliked it because I was fifteen years older than the rest of the students and had developed a keen sense of cynicism, or maybe it was because it was just so freaking hard, or maybe it was because I’m just a jerk by nature. But once I was certain my name was in the program, once I was certain I had graduated, this irresistible impulse took over my mind and my body. I had to get out of there. So what I did was, I walked onto the stage from the right, went through the hooding, walked off the left side of the stage, turned right, and walked out of the auditorium. I didn’t go back and sit with the students, didn’t finish out the ceremony, didn’t toss my cap with the rest of the graduates, didn’t hug anybody, didn’t take any pictures. I just left.

About halfway to the car, I looked back and sure enough, here came Kristy, along with the rest of the fam, hurrying across the parking lot. Kristy was smiling. My mother was not.

“I knew you’d do that,” Kristy said. “I knew it, I knew it, I knew it. I told your mom you’d leave and she said you wouldn’t dare.”

“She looks mad,” I said.

“She is. I bet her ten dollars you’d leave. She owes me.”

 

The Writer’s Predicament

I’m writing a new book. My predicament?

Well, there are dozens of predicaments, starting with the choice of what I write now after the Dillard series has been tanked by the publisher. I sent an email to my agent a couple of months ago and told him Penguin had at least made an offer to sell the rights to the first three Dillard books back to me. I asked him whether, once I get the rights back, we might be able to go to another publisher who might publish the series right. I told him I wanted to write another Dillard book.

His answer? Once one of the big publishers tanks you, you’re screwed. It’s a small fraternity and none of the others are going to pick up a series that one of them has deemed tankworthy. He told me I should forget Dillard and go on to something else. I’d put the email up for you to read but it I like the guy and don’t want to antagonize him any more than I’ve already antagonized him by writing this blog.

But you know what? For the first time, I’m going to ignore his advice. The advice he’s given me over the past few years has been pretty much dead wrong, but I understand why. He’s been in the business a long time. He thought the business would go on the way it’s always gone on. He didn’t want anything to change. But it’s changed. Drastically.

So I’ve decided to write another Dillard book and just publish it myself. I’m not even going to send the manuscript to him. And then I’m going to write another, and another, and another.

And do you know what? For the first time in awhile, I’m excited about writing. I love the Dillard books. They’ve been an important part of me, an important part of my development as a writer, and I’m going not to blow them off because a publisher tanked them. My brain has been buzzing…

Once a decision is made about the first predicament (what to write) then the next question comes up. What story am I going to tell with these characters? When I last left Dillard, he’d become involved in a crazy situation that caused him to defend his home and family by killing people. He killed several. He resigned as the district attorney. His daughter had just had a baby and his sister had maybe fallen in love with one of his old Army buddies. His son was off playing baseball in Arizona. His wife was recovering from breast cancer. Leon Bates had betrayed him, or, at least, chosen to distance himself from Dillard. He was wounded, at least emotionally, and confused.

So what do I do now?

I have a basic plot in mind. A bare bones plot, but that’s the way I always start a book. I can’t do detailed outlines. I’ve tried it, and when I start writing, I feel like I’m just filling in the blanks in the outline. It doesn’t feel fresh. It doesn’t feel spontaneous or creative, and finally, at 55 years old, I’ve realized that creativity is an important part of my psyche. So I’ve chosen a story that incorporates the LOCK system propounded by James Scott Bell. Lead: Dillard. Objective: Satisfy his hero complex. Confrontation: I have a bunch of them in mind for this book. Knockout: I can’t tell you about that, now can I?

In this book, I want to explore Dillard’s recovery from the violent episode, his decision to get back into law as a defense attorney, and his psychological battle as he tries to reconcile his values with the strange and difficult demands of defending criminals, whether they be innocent or guilty. (Most of them are guilty, as you know.) I also plan to get into a major surprise, and an extremely difficult conflict, in his family. How I present and resolve those conflicts will determine how satisfying the story is to you guys.

I’m working on it. And when I’m done, I hope you like it.