Anne Frasier's Blog, page 11

REIMAGINE

Definition of REIMAGINE: to imagine again or anew; especially : to form a new conception of : re-create

I was reading a review of a literary book and was struck by how much the plot sounded like my first romance, Amazon Lily, which was written twenty-five years ago. And that got me to thinking about how I would have written that book today. And THAT got me to thinking about reimagining the book.  I'm not talking about a tweak here and there, and I'm not talking about a revision where scenes are tossed. No, I mean write the book with a different voice and different tone, but basically tell the same story. I could also imagine it being about 20,000 words longer, with all scenes expanded and more internalization.  I'm sure other writers have done just such a thing.  Some might argue that some writers do it with a lot of books, just change location and names.  Ha.

 But I'm super intrigued by the idea. I love a writing challenge, and this would be extra fun because the entire structure is already there. It would be an enhanced version. This is done with movies all of the time, but books?  Of course we have books like Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours.  And we have books like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.  But I'm not talking about Amazon Zombies.  I'm talking more like Battlestar Galactica Reimagined. Characters who have today's sensibilities. Women who are stronger.

THE ART OF ABSENCE

I've been doing a fair amount of guest speaking lately. Since it's mostly for The Orchard, the art of memoir writing comes up again and again.  I meet people who are working on their memoirs, and one thing I like to share is how surprised I was to find that through writing about my own life I came to a much deeper understanding of things I thought I understood through and through. I think the biggest surprise was finding out how much my father's abandonment impacted me, my mother, and my older brother.  At the time, we all put on a brave face.  We weren't crybabies.  We didn't feel sorry for ourselves. Good riddance, you jerk.  Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. You are dead to us. You aren't worthy of us.
 But until I wrote the memoir, I didn't understand how my father's actions turned all of us into different people. Forever.
I can now see how that single action rerouted the course of our lives in a damaging way. We'd been strong rivers, moving in a solid direction toward the ocean. Now we were trickling streams, trying to find our way across a desert that led nowhere.  His leaving forever changed us. Changed who we were. Changed our core and changed our hearts, making us bitter, jaded children. And once he left, the very act of his bold and crazy move made him bigger than life to me; made him some strange folk hero.
With his leaving, the focus of our lives shifted. Before, it had been about school, home, family. Now it was about absence, rejection, abandonment, and the daily struggles of extreme poverty.
His absence sculpted us. My mother, my older brother, and me. Cutting away clay to create these new people who looked at the world with bitter, wounded eyes.  This is what I didn't realize until I wrote my second memoir.
When I was working on The Man Who Left, I sent the typical proposal to my agent. Three chapters and a synopsis. She liked the material, but she thought it needed a stronger story arc.  We were in agreement about that, and I'd been struggling to find a solid theme. She saw two possible choices that would help make the book feel bigger. One was for me to move to Florida to care for my father, and the other choice was to work in an Alzheimer's care facility.  I understood where she was coming from, but I had no interest in doing either. I finished the book, but she never read it and it wasn't submitted anywhere. Instead, I published it under Belfry Press.  I've been surprised by the positive reader response even though the story still feels a bit incomplete to me.  And many people have asked me to write a third memoir, but I don't know about that.  Maybe someday, but right now I'm anxious to get back into fiction.And just because I love this photo...

THE GEEK WITH THE CAT TATTOO

I've been busy with what I think of as a mini-book tour for the paperback release of The Orchard. Things have slowed down a bit for a few days, so I decided to pull out my cat project. I haven't worked on this for a few weeks, and I didn't remember it with fondness, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that it wasn't awful. It's about 1/4 done. Not sure when I'll have the time to finish it because my main project (when all of this other stuff slows down) will be my Frasier, Play Dead sequel. But the cat stuff is fun. Just plain fun.  

I'm going to post the opening page here. This is the second book in the Cool Cat trilogy, and I think this might be the most fun of the three plots.  Working title: The Geek with the Cat Tattoo.  (Thanks to L.K. Rigel for that suggestion!)

This book stars the brother of Max from The Girl with the Cat Tattoo, and this cat is the most talented (magical?) of the three siblings. 



The Geek with the Cat Tattoo
I'm on my fourth owner and he's giving me a look I've become familiar with over the years. That look of suspicion. That look that says he knows. Or at least he thinks he knows.

He's going to ditch me. He's already contemplating the how and where. Take me to a shelter? Been there, done that, have the T-shirt. Or pack me in a box, drive fifty miles from Minneapolis, and dump me on some country road? Neither of those choices scare me, I try to tell myself. Living in the country. That might be nice, right? A lot of field mice to eat. A big sky.

Oh, my God. What am I saying? I'm a city cat through and through. I couldn't survive out there. I'm already imagining myself falling in with a bunch of feral cats who have rotten teeth and mange. Egads!

"What the hell are you?" asks my fourth owner. He's standing in the kitchen looking down at me, and the terror in his eyes has turned into something that scares me more than the possibility of life in the country with a pack of inbreds. 


 "Are you the devil?" Fourth Owner nods his head, as if coming to a conclusion. I remember when he picked me up from the shelter. He didn't know anything about cats. I wasn't even sure he liked cats, but lucky for me he wasn't around much. He works somewhere in downtown Minneapolis, and always talks about the cubicle where he goes with his slicked-back hair and body spray I can smell from a mile away. But like all of my previous owners, he's finally figured me out. He's figured out that I can put thoughts in his head.

Gorgeous Music Video

Check out this gorgeous video for my son's new band.

Carson's 'Silent Spring' spurred environmental movement – USATODAY.com

Fifty years ago today:


Carson's 'Silent Spring' spurred environmental movement – USATODAY.com

CELEBRATION DINNER SEPTEMBER 25

Indie booksellers design beautiful displays for books they believe in. They suggest books they love.  They help build a sense of community. Every month, indie booksellers pick their favorite books and vote on them, creating the Indie Next list. (The Orchard was number two on their list last September.) I can't imagine a world without independent bookstores.


 I came here planning to post information on an upcoming book event, but then my brain took off in the direction of indie love.

Indie booksellers have been a powerful force behind the success of The Orchard.  I know of independent booksellers who've hand sold hundreds of copies. They've LOANED the book to customers who said it sounded boring.  They've tied customers up and made them sit in chairs while reading the book to them. Wait. I think that last one was just a dream. But you know...

But anyway, back to my post.

I will be in Winona, Minnesota, September 25 to help celebrate the ten-year anniversary of The Book Shelf.  They have a lovely dinner planned.  Here is a bit from

The Book Shelf website :


 09/25/2012 6:30 pm
In celebration of our ten year anniversary, we are having an author dinner with Theresa Weir on Tuesday, September 25 at 6:30pm. The Blue Heron Coffeehouse will be providing a multi-course fine dining experience, where Theresa Weir will be reading from her book, The Orchard. Dinner is $35.00, $50.00 with wine.
You can find more information about it on their Facebook page

VIEW FROM THE BELFRY

Most writers don't have savings or 401ks. Many can't afford heath care.  I've been thinking about this more lately because…well, I'm not getting any younger. Heck, I'm so old that when I was a kid I had to walk three miles through a foot of snow for a hit of acid. 


 Not really. I just wanted to say that, but I also wanted to give you a time frame on which to hang me.  I'm a child of the 60s.


 I've never been one to think much about the future, but I've been thinking about it more as the road in front of me becomes shorter than the road behind me. 
So as an artist with no savings and no 401k or anything like that… What is the future? What is retirement?  Not that I will ever deliberately quit writing, but you know what I mean. 
Lately I've been thinking that my books are my retirement fund. My 401k. And the thing is…once the rights to a book are signed away, that book is no longer part of your retirement package. It's gone. Goodbye.
Back when I started writing, the rights reversion clause was usually 7 years. And I watched that stuff. As soon as a book hit that 7-year mark, I began working to get the rights back. I now have the rights to 19 old titles. One I resold, and it will revert back next year. So The Orchard will be the only book I won't own unless I go with a new contract on a new book.  And since The Orchard was a later contract, I doubt I'll ever see the rights revert to me. But that's okay. I could never have gotten that book to so many readers. I may never make another dime on it, but that's okay too. I didn't write it to make money. I wrote it in order to document 70s and 80s farm culture. Anthropology.  Anthropology.
Some people don't understand why I'm not submitting some of my new books to publishers.  Retirement. I don't want to sign away the rights. 
Years ago, in a publishing world far, far away, the pie was very big. And the writer got 5 – 8 % of that pie. And the agent got 15% of that 5-8%.  It wasn't a bad gig. Now the pie is very small.  And the agent get's 15% of that tiny slice.  And the writer might get an advance, might sign away rights for the rest of her life, and will most likely never see another dime for the book if she got an advance.  (With no advance, the writer might see a few payments trickle in over a couple of years, then nothing.) In most cases, the book comes out, it's available for a few weeks, and then it's pretty much over.  Most sales occur within the first two – four weeks of release. If you're lucky, you might get a bit of this:

 And then it's over.Move on.

So more and more I'm thinking it makes sense to retain rights to a large portion of my titles. Right now. if I count my short-story collections… I have 30 books available and published under my own imprint. Those books support me. Now I know that's partially because I've had success in the past and some people recognize my name. And it's also because of the number of books I have out there.  If you have a lot of titles available, then one single book doesn't really need to make that much.  And you don't give up your rights forever and forever.  And when I die, my kids will hopefully continue to benefit from the income generated by my books.  So I guess for somebody who never really looked that far ahead, I'm suddenly seeing my writing in a new light. My retirement fund. 

SEPTEMBER 19 EVENT

A friend recently pointed out that September 19 is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. 
Not sure how this will impact my event at the Jon Hassler Theater in Plainview, Minnesota, where I will be reading short stories, along with an excerpt or two from The Orchard.

Rural America Writers' Center

Taking the day off

Last time I sat at this picnic table in this park, I was waiting to hear back from an agent I worked with for a very short time four years ago. He wanted me to add a murder to The Orchard so he could sell it as suspense. And I couldn't make him see how ridiculous that idea was. To take my life and add a murder to it.I understandably ended our association, but that was the darkest period of my writing career, my short association with him. Today I'm thinking about how writers have so many more choices than we had four years ago. I feel so much more in control of my future, my career, and my own writing than I did then. Back then I felt at the mercy of one person. Sending this from phone so we'll see if it posts!

JUST SAY NO

I solemnly swear to never write another newsletter.My newsletter went out this past week.I don't like newsletters.I don't like writing them.I don't like sending them.Newsletters feel too much like spam, and the writing itself isn't fun or creative.So that's it. No more. I suspect most go unread or end up in the spam folder anyway.  So here is my newsletter. Dry, broad, and impersonal. Possibly containing some important information, but probably not. If we'd had no contact in ten years, then maybe this would have seemed...well...okay.


______________________________________________________________

Hello to everybody who signed up for my newsletter. It's possible you signed up for this years ago, or maybe you signed up recently after seeing the link on my website. The sad truth is that I've sent out maybe one newsletter in the past ten years. Ha!  So anyway, I'm trying something different. This is called TinyLetter. 
 The past year has been kind of crazy with the release of The Orchard.  Combine that with the instability of traditional publishing… A strange year. A lot of writers are reluctant to sign away their book rights to companies that are on shaky ground, which is why I've been doing some experimenting with my own micro-publishing venture called Belfry Press. In the past year I've published another memoir (The Man Who Left) and a novella (The Girl with the Cat Tattoo), along with a lot of short stories. Right now all but The Man Who Left are exclusive to Amazon, but that will probably change at some point. If you're in the mood for Halloween tales, you might want to check out Deadly Treats. This is a fun anthology that was released last year through Nodin Press. It's available in both paperback and ebook. 
The Orchard is now available in trade paperback, and is the Target Book Club September pick.  I love the new cover. 
For people who wonder about my Anne Frasier titles… I'm really excited to say that I will be writing the sequel to Play Dead this coming year. I'm actually waiting for an offer on the proposal as I type this. Regardless of the outcome of that offer, I plan to write the book. It will feature all of the same characters from Play Dead, and of course it will be set in Savannah. Six months will have passed since we last saw the characters, so we won't have a large gap of time. There will be a bit more romance in this story, with David trying his luck at a love spell in hopes of making Elise fall for him. I'm SO looking forward to writing another Frasier crime-fiction book. Been way too long.
I have one or two events/appearances per week scheduled through November, most in Minnesota. The most up-to-date public appearance information can be found on The Orchard Facebook page even though all appearances aren't necessarily for The Orchard. I'm also visiting private book groups where I will shoot apples off readers' heads. Wait. That can't be right about the apples and the shooting.
I'm still blogging.
I use Twitter, but my personal Facebook page is the place I hang out the most. Too much.
 Have a lovely fall!
Theresa Weir/Anne Frasier

SEE??  BO-RING!!!  SPAM!!!!!!

So how about a picture of Lee Goldberg and the naked bookseller?