Susan Koefod's Blog, page 8

Zelda, F.Scott, and me

F. Scott Fitzgerald  and his wife, Zelda, frequented the University Club in St. Paul in the early days of their marriage, and I’m delighted to get to channel their roaring 20’s literary spirit by being one of the guest mystery authors at the October 15 “Reading by Writers” event, sponsored by Public Art Saint Paul/Everyday Poems for City Sidewalk and hosted by Saint Paul’s first poet laureate, Carol Connolly.

I’ve often attended the monthly readings, which “officially” begin at 7:30 P.M., though they “unofficially” kick off at the wonderful University Club bar, where a person can hang out with other famous (you know who you are!) local writers and notable attendees before the readings begin.

I’m so honored to have been invited by Carol Connolly to read, and hope to see friends there too! Other events – readings and signings – are found on my Events page, which is regularly updated.

Tagged: author, book events, books, fiction, mystery, novel, writer

See Me Burnt Out

Burnt Out in all its glory. With two new* events!

When
Where


September 25@6:30 PM
Robert Trail Library, Rosemount MN


October 8@7:00 PM
Barnes & Noble Bookstore, Edina MN


*October 12@2:00 PM
Twin Cities Book Festival, St. Paul MN


October 18@7:00 PM
Chapter2Books, Hudson MN


October 26@2:00 PM
Barnes & Noble Bookstore, Roseville MN


*November 12@6:30 PM
Penn Lake Library, Bloomington MN

 

I hope to see you at one (or more!) of these upcoming events. (More coming soon!). Refer to the Events Page for complete details!

Looking for the book? It should be appearing shortly on library shelves, the bookstores listed above, online in the usual places (and in all the various electronic formats). Order it from your favorite independent bookstore as well.

Thanks and I hope to see you soon!

Tagged: author, book, fiction, hudson mn, independent bookstore, library shelves, mystery, novel, penn lake, rosemount mn, writing

Even for you, Western Wisconsin….

It’s the release day for Burnt Out, and I’m gearing up for appearances in the Twin Cities and in Western Wisconsin (thanks to Sue Roegge!).

I hope to see you at one (or more!) of these upcoming events. (More coming soon!). Refer to the Events Page for complete details!

When
Where


September 25@6:30 PM
Robert Trail Library, Rosemount MN


October 8@7:00 PM
Barnes & Noble Bookstore, Edina MN


October 18@7:00 PM
Chapter2Books, Hudson MN


October 26@2:00 PM
Barnes & Noble Bookstore, Roseville MN

Looking for the book? It should be appearing shortly on library shelves, the bookstores listed above, online in the usual places (and in all the various electronic formats). Order it from your favorite independent bookstore as well.

Thanks and I hope to see you soon!

Tagged: author, book, fiction, mystery, novel, writing

More or Less, That’s What I’m Gonna Do

I used Grammarly to grammar check this post, because I thought I’d give it a try.

With my fourth book in four years coming out in just a few weeks, I’m thinking about what I’ve learned over the past four years. What I’m going to do more of, less of, as my new baby, Burnt Out, makes its debut in the reading world:

Do more:

•          Staying loose. There are ups and downs in this whole author business. A lot of it I can’t control. A lot of it my publisher can’t control. When will books appear in the store, on Amazon? What will reviewers think or not think? Whether they will read or review my book at all? “Lower your expectations,” a boss once said. “Especially when it’s not making the things that are supposed to be fun not very fun,” I’d like to add.

•          Writing. The new book is out, and the others are still out there. The whole game is about the work. Keep working. Keep discovering. Keep creating. Keep getting better.

•          Relationship building. Go to the events I enjoy (Tweet Ups, other authors’ events, TC Sisters in Crime meetings).

•          Celebrating other writers’ successes. I’ve met some fantastic writers in the past few years. It’s a lot of fun to see them be successful, hear about their journeys, and read their books.

•          Arty stuff. Go to movies, plays, museums. Feed the soul. Restore it. Get out of my head and into some other artist’s vision.

•          Reading. Read the good stuff and think about why it’s so good. Analyze books that don’t work for me, and understand why.

•          Submitting. There’s a lot in the slush pile yet to get published. Keep it all moving through the process.

Do less:

•          Worrying about what other people think of the book, the last book, the next one. Taste differs, and it’s easier to worry less when I’m doing more of the “do more” list, particularly more writing.

•          Comparing myself to other writers. Does it really change anything about my work if another writer has a new publishing contract/great review/award/news story? No, it does not. It’s all about my work, which is a  creative journey. I need to stay on that personal journey. Stay on track writing about what I care about – not what the market might or might not buy.

•          Wasting non-writing time thinking I don’t really have time to write. There’s always time to write a paragraph or a page. There’s always a half hour here, fifteen minutes there.

•          Writing in areas that do not work for me. I’ve been realizing more lately that some writing forms I just don’t get. It’s a waste of my time to mess around with forms I don’t have a feeling for. If I’m not in love with my characters or their story, I need to stop immediately and go to the project that I believe in.

•          Responding to submission calls that offer payment in ‘cool’.  There has to be more in it than getting into the right crowd. Gotta have a feeling for something to write well about it.

Making Sense of the Journey

It was early on an early June day, the sky a weighty sea of impenetrable blue, when I disappeared without a trace.

- The  Year I Disappeared

 

I began my writing odyssey three weeks ago today. It ends* tonight, and I go back to work tomorrow.

Because I’m a geek (or an obsessed nut job), I kept track of my word/page count:

Total words written: 50,098
Total pages produced: 252
WIP #1 – The Big Cheesy Novel - 34 pages, 6,950 words
Brand new WIP #2 – The Year I Disappeared – 218 pages, 43,148 words

Guess which WIP I found more inspiring? I started The Year I Disappeared the first day of my trip. I had hoped to pump out a solid 50 pages on WIP #2, and more than met my goal. I completely stopped writing The Big Cheesy Novel after the first three days.

I brought along three non-fiction books related to The Big Cheesy Novel that I didn’t touch.

I bought six novels (from two fine San Francisco book stores, City Lights and Green Apple Books), read three (Milan Kundera’s Ignorance and Identity and Kjersti A. Skomsvold’s The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am ), and found many connections with WIP #2 which is a story about identity and belonging, themes of Kundera’s and Skomsvold’s novels. I don’t think I would have found any of these novels had I not stepped inside the bookstores and browsed through two wonderful, carefully selected collections.

Does this mean The Big Cheesy Novel is dead? Hardly. I’m very invested in the two main characters and will get back to it. The Year I Disappeared offered me the experimental opportunity I wanted, and I took it.

The majority of the pages were produced during my two weeks in San Francisco. Once I returned home, the volume dropped off quite a bit, which you’d expect. Life began to intervene with its many tasks and obligations, and fun events too, such as a few days at the cabin, dinner with friends, and so on.

What I learned in San Francisco was that the isolation from my “real life” made it possible to get the work done, get most of a first draft of a new novel pumped out (and the rest planned).

*But I think I can carry through with the rest of it at home now. It will be slower going, but it’s now onto the fun part of writing — revising, revisioning, polishing. I want to do some of that before I write the ending, which I think I can clearly see, but is not quite there. Endings bring all the themes together, and themes often arrive by surprise as I write and revise.

I want to make it my best work ever, and that takes a good deal of time for the pages to rest and for me to come back refreshed as well.

Thank you for indulging me, world. It’s been a nice break, though it honestly got a bit lonely out in the country’s second most densely populated city. Nice to be home again.

Tagged: book, books, fiction, mystery, novel, San Francisco, writer, writing

Top Ten Sounds of Columbus Avenue, North Beach, San Francisco

10. Hourly fire truck sirens.

9. Double-decker tour bus guides announcing arrival in North Beach, pointing out Italian restaurants on Columbus

8. Chinese radio station broadcasting at corner newsstand while newsstand owner’s wife does her morning stretches. Guy still owes me a quarter change for the Wednesday newspaper.

7. Loud, late night dance music beats from nightclub across the street.

6. Loud, late night shouts from nightclub guests running up and down the street announcing, “It’s midnight! It’s midnight!”

5. Insistent honking from irritated SF drivers forced to idle through green lights, while drivers ahead of them can’t move because someone is trying to park, take a left turn, or do the kinds of things all drivers occasionally need to do.

4. Bird song limited to wisecracking starlings.

3. Babble of languages from around the globe, foreign tourists and native SF Chinese-Americans, who sound as if they have survived for decades without ever speaking English.

2. Hum of street cleaners every Tuesday and Thursday morning.

1. Crazy old guy with the walker (a very dapper dresser, I should add) yelling “You’re a robot! You’re a robot!” to the world at large.

Tagged: author, San Francisco, travel, writing

How to Set the Inner Artist Free

For the past 11 days, I’ve been in San Francisco, staying in a neighborhood that has often inspired writers:  North Beach, the epicenter of the Beat Generation. This writing expedition is funded by the McKnight Artist Fellowship I won earlier this year.

So far, I’m nearly 170 pages and nearly 35,000 words into an entirely new novel based on a glimmer of an idea that came to mind before I left. Every word I’ve written in the novel has been written in the past 11 days, in a hotel room at the Hotel Boheme. It’s the story of a missing girl and a boy named Fish who is hiding from his past. There are bits of magical realism in the story, and that’s about all I will say about the book.

Just a few days before I left, a letter arrived from the McKnight Foundation which included this quote from President John F. Kennedy:

“…if art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him…”

JFK said this in a speech just before the National Endowment for the Arts was established. While McKnight is funded by an independent philanthropic organization, so my generous patron is not subject to the political push-and-pull of  NEA funding, I wondered what it really takes to set the artist free. Don’t get me wrong — the McKnight has changed my artistic life, and I’ve been using the affirmation (?) to push myself to a new level. Still, why do I hold myself back at times?

Today I visited the de Young galleries and took in the Richard Diebenkorn retrospective of his years at Berkley. I was inspired by the following list, which was found among the papers of the painter after his death in 1993. (Spelling and capitalization are as in the original.) I thought they are exactly how I’m trying to drive myself through this period of intensive writing. There were many other things Diebenkorn had to say about his process along the lines of the list.

There are areas in the new novel I’m writing where I’m feeling uncertain. I’m so glad that the McKnight Foundation is giving me faith in myself and my process. At the de Young, I felt I was with fellow artists, all trying to, in Diebenkorn’s words, “tolerate chaos” in the artistic process. In other words, don’t worry too much about making meaning out of everything, making sense. Just practice the art. Get it out there. The rest comes later.

————————————————————————————————————————————

Notes to myself on beginning a painting

1. attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion.

2. The pretty, initial position which falls short of completeness is not to be valued—except as a stimulus for further moves.

3. Do search. But in order to find other than what is searched for.

4. Use and respond to the initial fresh qualities but consider them absolutely expendable.

5. Dont “discover” a subject—of any kind.

6. Somehow don’t be bored—but if you must, use it in action. Use its destructive potential.

7. Mistakes can’t be erased but they move you from your present position.

8. Keep thinking about Polyanna.

9. Tolerate chaos.

10. Be careful only in a perverse way.

Tagged: art, artist, author, book, de Young, fiction, novel, painting, philosophy, San Francisco, winner, writing

New Release from Award-Winning Novelist (ahem – me)

A burnt-out social worker is reluctantly caught up in the suspicious disappearance of a world-famous geologist and learns her own life is in danger.  Will she be able to forget the disaster of her failed love affair and reach out to the only person who can truly help her — detective Arvo Thorson?
Praise for Burnt Out

 “Prickly-but-principled social worker Christine Ivory is feeling burned out on the job, and retreats to the family place in Minnesota’s north woods. Burnt Out, the third in a richly realized series from Susan Koefod, captures the complex push-pull of home and family, not to mention the dark underbelly of idyllic small-town life. Add a missing geologist and a ripped-from-the-headlines clash over oil and gas rights, and Koefod hits a gusher of motives for murder.”

Erin Hart, award-winning author of The Book of Killowen

“Koefod skillfully captures the many layers of drama and tension underlying small town life.”

Brian Freeman, international bestselling author of Spilled Blood

From North Star Press of St. Cloud

ISBN-10:                                 0878396632

ISBN-13:                                 978- 0878396634

Tagged: author, book, crime writing, family, fiction, mystery, novel, writing

Burnt Out? I Have the Book for You

Check out what Erin Hart and Brian Freeman have to say about the next mystery in my Arvo Thorson series.

“Prickly-but-principled social worker Christine Ivory is feeling burned out on the job, and retreats to the family place in Minnesota’s north woods. Burnt Out, the third in a richly realized series from Susan Koefod, captures the complex push-pull of home and family, not to mention the dark underbelly of idyllic small-town life. Add a missing geologist and a ripped-from-the-headlines clash over oil and gas rights, and Koefod hits a gusher of motives for murder.”

Erin Hart, award-winning author of The Book of Killowen 

 “Koefod skillfully captures the many layers of drama and tension underlying small town life.”

Brian Freeman, international bestselling author of Spilled Blood

Tagged: author, book, book reviews, crime writing, fiction, mystery, novel, writing

The Inconsistent Muse

Some writing prompts inspire, others leave me cold. For example, no matter how much I thought about Vita.mn’s ”choose your own adventure” prompt, I couldn’t come up with a thing. I don’t find structure inspiring I guess. It’s not a jumping off point.

Revolver’s “the city was in a mild state of ache” was weirdly inspiring, and an oddly placed letter (misspelling anyone?) in my first line sent me off in a direction I didn’t expect.

The former prompt was for a no-fee contest with a $1,000 possible reward. The latter promises publication to the winner, no money, but given the structure of the contest, one is instantly published on Facebook. So why couldn’t I bite the bullet and come up with something, anything for the possible monetary prize?

Who knows. It’s the nature of the muse. Wish writing were a piece of cake. A luscious, chocolate, calorie-free piece of cake.

Tagged: award, contests, fiction, prompts, writing