Mike Jastrzebski's Blog, page 96

Prove me wrong, please!

Michael Haskins 

I had my first signing for "Free Range Institution" at Murder on the Beach bookstore last week and the attendance was better than I thought. I sold 14 copies of "Free Range Institution" and five trade paperback copies of "Chasin' the Wind," My first Mick Murphy Key West Mystery.

SleuthFest is only days away and I am on a panel about local in your story and moderate a panel about authors who are published by small presses. My publisher, Five Star, is a small press and it is my opinion that small presses are the only way for new writers to break in. There will be book signings after each panel for those involved and I hope to sell more books.

It is harder and harder to get an agent and/or publisher these days. The big bucks go to the writers on the NY Times bestseller list and with publishing in as much of a financial mess as everyone else, there's little money left for unproven writers.

I look forward to my book tour that will take me to Houston and Los Angeles. I will be at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival with other MWA writers where I will be signing at the Mysterious Galaxy booth.

Then I have three signing that week. The first one at Book Carnival in Orange, Ca. then at the Flintridge Bookstore and Coffeehouse in La Canada, Ca., and finally at Mysteries to Die For in Thousand Oaks, Ca.

I look forward to these signings because I have my suspicions that this could be my last book-signing road trip. Not because I don't want to do it, but bookselling is a business now and not so much about the authors. Sales are important, and always have been, but the independent bookstores used to welcome all authors.

In NYC, one bookstore asked me to guarantee 30 book sales before they would host a signing. Hell, I hoped for 50 or 100, but guarantee – give me a break. Without being a draw of some kind, I think many authors will discover it is harder and harder to find stores willing to host signings. I would love to be proven wrong.

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The hardest part of cruising

By Mike Jastrzebski

For me the hardest thing about cruising is not the boat work or the weather or rough seas, it's saying goodbye. Mary and I have done this twice now, when we left Minnesota to take the boat south and when Katrina forced us out of Mobile. Neither time was easy.

Mary and I still still keep in touch with some of the friends we left behind, but contact is fleeting and more often than not it's a quick e-mail or a comment on someone's facebook wall. We never planned it that way, but jobs and life and new friends take up time. Now that we're getting ready to take off from Ft. Lauderdale we're starting the process all over again.

Many of my writer friends will be attending SleuthFest this coming weekend. We'll talk and laugh and drink, and then I'll say my goodbyes. Many of these friends already know about my plans and although I've known it was coming for some time now, it won't make things any easier. If our cruising goes as planned we're going to spend the next several years cruising the Caribbean and I won't be returning to SleuthFest. So we'll all promise to keep in touch and a few of us will and the others will lose touch with us.

I've already told the members of my writer's group that I won't be attending the group meeting anymore. I have too much work to do on the boat. Fortunately, I'll see them all at SleuthFest and one of the members, Miriam Auerbach, is planning a going away party for us. That's nice, but sad at the same time because I'll miss not only them, but their input on my books.

I've belonged to half-a-dozen different critique groups over the years and unfortunately I've lost contact with all those fellow writers who have helped me to improve my writing. I hope that won't be the case with this group, but I'm a realist. After all, friends come and friends go and if we're lucky we'll connect again sometime in the future.

So when we finally drop anchor after we leave Ft. Lauderdale the first thing Mary and I will do is pour a glass of wine, sit back in the cockpit, and toast to friends old and new.

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Boat Dogs

The Intrepid Seadog Chip

I've been having a tough time this week.  You know what I mean? Yeah, it's been one of those weeks.  I'm working overtime and I still can't seem to get caught up.  So, tonight when I got home and my sweet old dog jumped up and spun around and yelped for joy just to see me, I thought one more time about how great it is to have a dog.  I scooped him up in my arms, buried my face in the soft fur round his neck, and as I grabbed his leash and headed out for a long walk, I felt all that stress in my own neck just let go and drift off on the evening breeze.

I've noticed this is another common thread here at Write on the Water.  Quite a few of us have boat dogs.  CE has shared with us the photo of her crew Moxy and Rex awaiting shore leave, and Mike has shown us Belle enjoying the sunset on the foredeck, in her holiday gear, and as a bathing beauty.  Many of us who love the life of messing about in boats, choose to do so with a good boat dog.

My first boat dog was Nosey, a Schipperke, otherwise known as a Belgian barge dog.  She sailed to Venezuela and back with us when I was married and sailing aboard the SUNRISE, a 55-foot cutter my husband and I had built from a bare hull. All our cruiser friends said they could tell where I was in the boat as Nosey moved about deck sticking her head into whatever port was nearest to me.

I home schooled my ten-year-old son during those years, and the dog was only allowed below decks to study alongside the boy.

But Nosey loved to hang out on the bow, and I remember the time we were anchored in the lagoon at Sint Maarten, and we were getting strong gusty winds.  In the lulls, the boat would creep up on the anchor rode, then a gust would hit and she'd sail off on a tack until she hit the end of the chain with a jerk.  Little did we know, that happened once when Nosey was standing out on the anchor platform.  At some point, I looked up from my book and saw the neighbor on the boat next to us.  He was waving his arms and shouting, but his words were carried off by the wind.  He kept pointing down.  Finally, I got up and looked down at the water and there was an exhausted Nosey proving why they call it dog paddling.  I never knew how long she had been in the water, but she was pretty worn out.  In all those miles, though, that was the only time she went overboard.

My current boat dog is Chip, otherwise known as The Intrepid Seadog.  This, however, is always said with a dash of irony because Chip a) gets seasick and b) is terrified of just about everything.  Intrepid, he is not.  Chip is the progeny of a St. Lucia street dog who was picked up by a German cruising boat, brought to Fort Lauderdale where mama dog escaped and got knocked up by some local canine lothario.  I also refer to Chip as a son of a bitch from the Caribbean.

This little guy has been my first mate on TALESPINNER ever since I bought my own boat six years ago.  Even though I have sailed across oceans as a wife, it's been a whole new story sailing as the captain of my own little boat.  Chip has always looked at me with confidence (well, he only has one eye, so I've assumed that was the case).  We've sailed though the Florida Keys and the Abacos together, and Chip makes a helluva first mate.  He never talks back or disagrees with the captain.



See?  Did he say a word?

While Chip doesn't like rough water, he is a great companion on board and he thrives in the islands.  I know he will be happier (as I will be) when this semester ends and we take off for the Abacos in the Bahamas once again.  Nosey lasted until her 16th year.  Chip will turn 16 this summer. Though I know it is coming,  I can't bear the thought of losing my first mate.  I keep hoping I will get a few more years with him.

What about you?  Do you have a great dog? Please share!  Help me believe I'll keep my little guy for a few more years.

Fair winds!

Christine

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Permission to Publish

By Richard Jordan 

I fear publishing content on the internet. 

No medium before the internet has had such an immediate, far flung, and lasting reach.  Newspaper, books, movies need a significant time to construct the medium, use highly structured distribution networks, and inherently degrade within a quantifiable time period. 

A common saying is that "publishing anything online is like posting it to the front page of the New York Times."  And unlike the times, there is no editor.  And the content stays there forever.  Imagine your great grandchildren reading it. 

In the style of this discussion group style blog, I want to share my publishing pain with you all and welcome your thoughts or silence.  When I distrubute content online, I fear if certain people will read it, what they will think, and feel powerless to control the spread of the content.  My reputation is on the line with every video, specification sheet, and story I produce.

 I try to live by the principle in life to never say anything behind someone's back that you would not say to their face.  I fail constantly offline.  The internet is the ultimate test of this principle. 

Don't get me wrong.  My articles are pretty lame and have little importance in regards to reality.  But even so, I think it is a natural feeling – I hope so – to be concerned about the effect of what you publish on the lives of those people whom your content relates to. 

For instance many times I think of quoting people that said something pertenant to a topic I am discussing and sometimes I do slip them in there – sometimes anonymously, othertimes not.  I hope they will never research that topic or google their name.  Or if they do stumble on it, I hope they like what I wrote. 

An obvious answer is to get approval from that person to quote them or name them.  But darn is it tempting, and I confess my guilt, to just skip that step.  Other times it is impossible or at least very difficult.  I do not have contacts for everyone or time to track them down.  I have unlimited excuses.

 Another example is when I review a product or place.  Then my content does not affect a person but a company or posibly an industry.  I have contacted and worked together with companies to make reviews acceptable.  But I lose somthing. 

There is a principle of unbiased journalism to never share you writing with your subjects.  If you do then they affect what you write.  They do not like this or that and might want subjective details changed.  You lose control of your writing and no longer are the sole author. 

I am not here to stir up trouble or dirt – to be Perez Hilton or Julianne Assange.  Thankfully, I have never actually had anyone contact me in rage.  But darn do I worry if what I publish online will displease anyone – the cold knowing stare and silence. 

How about you?  Do you ever fear the openess of the internet?

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Turning the page…

I'm coming to believe that the nice people here at Write On The Water are contagious. I could say you're bad influences, or perhaps good influences, but whatever the case, the fact remains that by association several of you are rubbing off on me. Maybe it's the tag-line: So you want to quit your job, move onto a boat, and write. Or maybe it's the posts. I've followed Mike's count down as he and Mary prepare to cast off their lines and cruise aboard Rough Draft. I've marveled at Christine's bold move to let go of her teaching career to pursue her true dream, and I've admired her insight on what true wealth really is. Mike Urban posted about the new wave of e-books and the changes in publishing as he moves ahead, and it's all got me to thinking. What are my priorities? Where am I headed these days, where would I like to be, and how would I ever get there?

For years I've pushed ahead with my writing even as I juggled the demands of a full-time day job, a family, house and the perpetual project boat. Through marriage, motherhood, mortgage, multiple jobs, six years straight of DIY home renovation and a series of boats, if I wanted to write I've had to scrape out the time. That has usually come down to me hunched over the keyboard during those odd hours before the rest of the household was up and moving and after they've all settled back down for the night. Caffeine is my friend. I'm regularly up by 4:30 a.m., and staying up until midnight or 1:00 a.m. isn't unusual. It isn't healthy either. Throw in forty hours of mind-numbing bureaucratic municipal drudgery and you're talking hard-core burnout. It took me years of perseverance to write one book, and at the rate I'm going it would be the same or longer for the next. Time for much else was all but non-existent, and whether I liked to admit it, this was all taking a toll on me.

Earlier this month I learned that due to budgetary constraints there would be a reduction in workforce at my job. This didn't come as a surprise; in fact it had been a possibility for the last year now, which turned the office into a tense and uncomfortable environment as the powers that be met to debate our fates. But strangely, I wasn't all that concerned. It wasn't that I thought I was safe; I knew I was anything but secure. All my coworkers had been there longer than me, several had tenure, and in government jobs that often counts over performance or skills. The truth is, I began to hope mine would be the head to roll, and the more certain I was that I'd be the one getting the ax, the happier I became. People began remarking that they'd never seen me smile so much, and none of them could comprehend how I could be so ecstatic over the prospect of unemployment. But at home we'd already crunched the numbers and figured where and how we could cut back. We agreed; we could quite happily make do with less. And at this point, if I wanted to be serious about my writing and take it further, the day-job was holding me back.

So you want to quit your job, move onto a boat, and write.



That's a statement, not a question, and the answer is YES. While I know it's not exactly quitting my job, getting laid-off is a step in the right direction. And as of last week it became official: I've got until this Friday and I'm a free woman! In three more days, I start a new chapter in my life… one where I can truly concentrate on my writing and marketing… and working on the boat.

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The Best Part About Boat Shows

A Trawler Yachtbuilder's Owner Blog Community

No, it's not the boats, although there are lots of pretty vessels on display, along with booth after booth of accessories, gear and gadgets. The best part of a boat show is the people you meet.

First of all, they're boaters, or at least seriously interested in boating, which means we share many of the same types of experiences.  It turns out that many of these boaters share a darker secret with us — they are writers!  And they write on the water!  I met a prolific blogger in the elevator in my hotel at the Miami Boat Show last week and between the lobby and the 10th floor she managed to tell me all about her blog and pass me the URL.  That was one of the, eh, most unexpected conversations I've had in a hotel elevator.  But it got me thinking about how many of them there are now doing the same thing.

Seriously now, there is an explosion underway of boating bloggers and writers and they are adding to the Internet's collection of sea stories at a remarkable rate.  Yes, the writing is a little. . .uneven, but some of it is really good and all of it represents a mother lode of nautical storytelling and raw material for new stories.

Here are some good places to start looking at these blogs.

Pacific Asian Enterprises, builder of the Nordhavn brand of bluewater passagemaking trawlers, keeps track of as many Nordhavn owner-bloggers as it can HERE.

Kadey-Krogen Yachts, which also builds full-displacement, ocean-going trawlers, has a list of its owners who blog HERE.

Sailblogs is a website that lets sailors establish a blog for free.  Not all of the blogs listed here are active all the time, but there are some jewels in the list HERE.

This list is just a tiny sample of what's out there.  As you explore these and others, you'll see that not all are the products of gifted writers, but many are and you might find some storytelling inspiration out there.

If you know of other blog collections, or especially noteworthy individual blogs, let us know in the comments.

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SLEUTHFEST 2011

I have been attending SleuthFest for seven years now and I have to say that this conference is hard to beat. What I like the most about SleuthFest is that all of the writers, agents, and editors who attend are readily available to the attendees. This year's Guests of Honor include Dennis Lehane, Meg Gardiner, and SJ Rozan.

There's still time to sign up for one of the top writers conferences in the country. If you're a writer, especially a mystery writer, and you live in Florida or want to get away from the cold, mark your calendars for March 3rd-6th.

I'll be there along with the following Write on the Water bloggers, Christine Kling, Victoria Allman and John Urban, so why not join us and the other writers, agents and editors who are attending. If you want to say hello I'll be at the registration desk most of Thursday and at the Agents and Editors pitch session desk Saturday from 2:00-4:30. I will also be on the Alternatives to Publishing panel Saturday from 11:00-11:50 in the Key Largo room.  

Here's the link to the conference page if you want to check out what's being offered and who's going to be there. SLEUTHFEST LINK

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The power of serendipity

When I was casting my mental net for a blog topic for this week, I kept coming back to this word: serendipity. It refers to the ability to make happy discoveries totally by accident when in fact you were looking for something altogether different. I recognize and cherish the role serendipity has played in my life. I have often quit a job, only to find a better one that I had no idea would turn up. Or I've started to write a story about one character, only to have a minor character shoulder his way in to the lead. Most of the discoveries I've made, the happy events in my life, I found when I was looking for something else. And because it has worked out well for me in the past, I've not been afraid to take risks.

So I announced to the world recently that I am taking a huge risk by walking away from tenure and a good job teaching college English. I'm going to quit my job, move on my boat and write. But now, the voices in my head have started up. If you're a writer, you know what I'm talking about. What if my books don't sell? What if my boat sinks? What if I run out of money and wind up destitute and dependent on others. Do I have the courage to sail off without much support? As a writer, the "what if" is my métier. Bottom line: I'm scared.

This past Monday morning, I had an email in my inbox from a textbook company head honcho suggesting I apply for a job as their New Media editor developing online content. With money for travel and the possibility of telecommuting from my boat in the islands, I thought, wow, this is another example of serendipity. I decide to take early retirement from this good teaching job and another super cool job (for this iPad loving, e-everything techaholic) comes along.

Then last night after class, a student came up to me after everyone else had left. He wanted to talk to me about his own writing. He wasn't sure if he really wanted to be a writer — if he had the "right stuff." He said, "It's so clear that you have such a strong passion for writing."

I paused and said, "I do."

"Yeah, well, that really comes across in your class. I think you have to have that to be a writer."

That night as I walked out to my car, I thought, yes, I know that's what makes me a good teacher of writing, but he didn't say it's what makes a good teacher.  Teaching writing wrings all that passion out of me and leaves so little left over for my own writing.  He was talking about being a writer. That has always been my dream: to move onto my boat and write.

I want to give full time writing a shot. And no matter how much it scares me, it's worth it to try. As Mark Twain said, "Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear."

So while casting about for the answer to the question of whether I should apply for another job in education, I found the answer when I was not even looking for it. That's serendipity.

Fair winds!

Christine

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Joyce Holland on The Joys of Writing

I was just going through some old files and came across a magazine article written by Lawrence Block. (Block is a writer's name? Oh, boy.) It was about "The Joys of Writing." My first thought was, yeah right, if everything is going well, writing can be a joy. When your brain is pumping and sparks are coming out your ears and you have more to say than you can get down and worry you will lose the thread – the inner glow you experience is euphoric. When things don't come quite so easily, however, euphoric is not the word I would choose to describe my mood.
 
Now that I'm writing again, I remember what being blocked meant to me. Well, it wasn't being blocked exactly, it was when what my characters were doing felt wrong, as though I didn't really know them after all. Hey, I wasn't blocked, they were. Not my fault. Ha! One particular recollection stands out. I was in the middle of a murder scene and I couldn't figure out which way to have my characters go. I became so frustrated I finally pushed away from my desk and abandoned them to the page. I turned on the TV for inspiration. (?) There was a movie on about people — people making a movie. The director had just yelled 'cut.' The camera man, from his perch on a small crane like affair, complained about the angle of the shot. The actress was in tears and the leading man swore like a writer. Ah, ha! I thought, they're blocked.
 
That's when I had my epiphany. I needed to be all things to my characters, their director, their camera man, the actors, you name it. Since the camera man saw them all, I started with him. I looked down on my scene from an omnipotent point of view. The old "writer as God" thingie. The Force was with me. I took notes. As the narrator I described what I saw in detail. As the audience, I anticipated what would happen next, and realized that whatever it was, as director I had to lay obstacles in the way. I had it going now. An Oscar loomed on my horizon.
 
Looking at your story from the outside is like taping your golf swing and watching to see where it went wrong. Everything must come into play in your story. Is the scene inside or outside? How's the weather? Is it raining? Cold? Read the dialogue aloud. Do your actors sound like real people? Does something they say, their clothing, or their expressions reveal what they want in the scene? What I like most about studying your material cinematically is that you have to get your meaning across with little or no explanatory asides. No interior monologue, no footnotes allowed. I could go on and on with this, but you get the "picture." Try it.
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Catch the Wave

There is something underway in the publishing world and it's big. Think of it as a coming wave, one that will lift and carry many while it crashes down on others. This coming, or should I say arriving, wave is not (unfortunately) good news for independent bookstores. For that matter, it's not good for the the national brand bookstores. It is, however, good for independent writers, at least in the short-term.

My goal? See if I can catch this wave – the e-book wave – with the hope that I can ride it while trying like hell to avoid what surfers call "going over the falls."

Steve Windwalker of the Blog Kindle Nation, recently wrote of how, as of this month, USA Today is including self-published direct-to-Kindle authors in its bestsellers list. The young author Amanda Hocking (who is expected to reach the million copies sold mark this spring) was the first independent writer to receive this distinction. Windwalker expects that other best seller lists, such as the New York Times, will follow USA Today's example.  This is no small feat, no insignificant change.

Mystery writer Joe Konrath has been writing on the subject of e-books with ferocity over the past year. In one recent post Konrath describes how traditional hardcover book readers have faced the economic question of why they should purchase a $25 book from an unknown author. As a result, publishers were slow to take on new authors and when they did, distribution was limited. Yet now, with e-readers, all authors get broad distribution and Kindle provides a viable business model for new authors to price their books at $2.99 meaning that readers can still purchase their favorite authors while they trial work from new authors.

Back in 1982, just out of school,  I started in the cable television business.  ESPN was three years old and still filling time showing Australian Rules football, Ted Turner had launched the first cable news network two years prior, and MTV was a brand new service.  Fifty-two channels of TV was high-tech.  But back then, if you were in the industry, you could feel the change, one that felt like a wave that you wanted to ride.  In 1993, I went to a two-day symposium at the Kennedy School where a hundred or so people, including software visionaries such as Mitch Kapor, talked about the commercialization of the Internet and how government and business might leverage this resource.  Same sense.  Fast forward a few more years to 1995, I remember sitting in a room with our top engineer, a member of congress, and a few others to demonstrate the capability of the yet-to-be-deployed cable modem.  When the modem loaded up the web page there was a simultaneous, uncontrolled "Wow!" from a few of the people in the room. They were the ones who had been suffering through dial-up and they knew the power of what he had just seen.  At the time, the doubters  predicted that cable modems would penetrate maybe 5 or 10 percent of homes served. But in that room, listening to that reaction, you knew it was going to be something else, something much bigger.

I say none of this from the perspective of being able to pick winners or forecast the future.  However, I have seen a few of these waves of change come, I've felt them below me, and I recognize that feeling again in the form of e-books.

My own book, A Single Deadly Truth, is just out of the gate.  Next month I will run some Kindle sponsorships and hopefully push sales, and later this year I am following up with a second Steve Decatur mystery.  I have no idea how these will sell over time.  However, I've come to sense that same feeling that I had in 1982, in 1993, and in 1995. It's my hope I will ride this new wave. In any event, I know that I am once again witnessing a remarkable change.  I'm glad to be part of it.

(Click on the below link for a video clip of big wave surfer Laird Hamilton)

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