Laurie Boris's Blog, page 41
June 24, 2013
The Other Half of the Story
You can’t stay married to the same person for almost twenty years without amassing a goldmine of writing material. In some form or other, I’ve used a lot of events from our “real life” in my fiction, good and bad. The bad ones somehow end up funnier. Heck, if life gives you citrus fruit, why not squeeze them into tasty adult beverages for other people’s entertainment?
This past weekend, we were with family, and one story led to another. It never takes much prompting for my husband to start telling the Tale of the Worst Day of his Life. Although the years have magnified each horrible turn by a factor of ten, it originally started like this: My boss at the time, a lovely woman, decided that when she turned fifty, she would throw herself a bat mitzvah. Great. I had no judgments about that. I even helped her type her script and do her invitations. But it happened to fall on the hottest day of the year, in a building without air conditioning, and went on for three hours while we sat on metal folding chairs sweating through our itchy grown-up clothing. This was in Woodstock, so nearly everyone else wore Birkenstocks and shorts, a fact that irked my spouse all the more, as did the fact that the rabbi performing the ceremony was the same one who’d refused to marry us because “it would be a hollow experience,” [his exact words] as we had both stepped away from our Jewish roots. But if we paid five hundred bucks to join the Congregation, he would be happy to oblige. Okay. Given all that, however, Husband is no stranger to religious ceremonies, so he expected that after being forced to sit through such a ceremony, with the Torah performed as interpretive dance, yet (I may be exaggerating), at least there would be food.
No food. Just tabouli, iced tea, and an awkward wait at the receiving line. He made me stop at McDonald’s on the way home.
We perform this story as a duet now, filling in the parts that the other didn’t remember or was laughing too hard to get through. As I chimed in with, “and in the first row they’d wheeled in ten people from her mother’s nursing home, and they were hooting and singing all the way through it,” my stepmother and my brother’s girlfriend just about lost it. At the same time, they said, “Use it! Why haven’t you used that somewhere?”
I was flummoxed. It’s great stuff. I don’t know why I never used it. Maybe I felt it would be disloyal? Or maybe I just never found a home for it yet. But it’s there, waiting for the right set of characters.
Is there a story from your life that you yearn to write about one day? What’s stopping you? Or do you have one that gets exaggerated every time you retell it?
[And don't forget, if you'd like to hop aboard my mailing list, you'll be among the first to get announcements of new publications and other goodies. I promise not to spam you.]
June 18, 2013
Author Spotlight no.267 – Laurie Boris
Reblogged from Morgen Bailey's Writing Blog:
Complementing my interviews, today’s Author Spotlight, the two hundred and sixty-seventh, is of contemporary fiction writer Laurie Boris. If you would like to take part in an author spotlight, take a look at http://morgenbailey.wordpress.com/author-spotlights.
Laurie Boris has been writing fiction for almost thirty years, inspired by the work of Joyce Carol Oates, TC Boyle, John Irving, Vladimir Nabokov, Gail Parent, Nora Ephron, and many other brilliant, prolific, and funny writers.
Author Spotlight #267 reporting in today from Morgen Baley's Writing Blog! Come visit and leave a comment!
June 16, 2013
Of Dogs and Writers
Reblogged from Facing 50 with humour.:
Some days you read a book by a fellow author and think 'This is mega. It'll be a massive hit. I wish I had written it. Dash it all! It's brilliant.'
This is one such book. The entire Mr Pish series is not only delightful but educational, and if I had grandchildren I would buy them the entire series. (Having no grandchildren, I actually bought them for myself.)
Yesterday, I reviewed KS Brooks' sixth book in the Mr. Pish educational series, Mr. Pish Goes to the Farm, but Carol Wyer says it so well here that I wanted to share.
June 12, 2013
Tools of the Trade: Graphic Artists
One snowy evening last year I was goofing off taking a well-deserved break on Facebook when I started chatting with a woman from Rhode Island. It turned out we’d both worked in graphic arts in the days before desktop publishing. We grew nostalgic about the tools we missed: T-squares, melted wax, non-reproducing-blue pencils, drafting tables. I told her that I’d worked late every Thursday night for three years in the bullpen of a Boston advertising agency to type-spec and paste up ads for the Sunday newspapers. Every sweater I owned had bits of border tape stuck to the elbows. One time I even found a piece on my cat. Soon we’d attracted a small crowd of our former colleagues, and we swapped X-acto knife horror stories and fond memories.
I’ve ditched a lot of my equipment over the years – mainly the drafting table and the cartons of type specification manuals – but I saved some favorite things. I kept the hand waxer I’d used on my first freelance job, a project so large and cumbersome I’d had to spread out the components on the floor of my bedroom and ended up overturning the wax receptacle on the top of my thigh, fortunately and unfortunately covered by very thick cotton sweatpants. I saved my pica rulers because they make great flyswatters. An E-scale and a set of rapidograph pens just because they’re cool.
But all that got me thinking of what happens when an entire industry is replaced. All that knowledge, all those skills I’d acquired, passed along from my art directors and more experienced colleagues, skills I’ve passed along to students and newbie artists. Just…gone. Another obsolete job wiped out, its downfall starting not with a bang but with an odd little box people were calling a Macintosh.
At first, the page-making programs (starting with, of course, Pagemaker, owned by the Aldus Corporation before they sold out to Adobe) were a tremendous relief. Measuring off a two-column newspaper ad with blue pencil on a chunk of board and then neatly drawing it out with a rapidograph pen and triangle or making neatly mitered corners with border tape did not take kindly to a shaky hand or a dull X-acto blade. Pagemaker actually made precisely measured boxes at any point-width we desired! Even with, be still my beating heart, rounded corners!
But then I started missing things. Small things, like sketching out headline type by hand (called “comping” back then). I missed using the math and eyeballing required to specify type to fill a particular space. I missed the craft of production.
I wanted to do something more to preserve that moment in time, that lost art. Perhaps I’ll write a book about our former line of work, at some point, preserve it for generations of kids who grew up thinking Gutenberg was that guy in the Ghostbusters movies.
But I’m starting with fiction, so I thought it fitting that Sarah Cohen, one of the protagonists of Sliding Past Vertical (due out later this summer), should be a graphic artist on the cusp of that great cultural change. It was more than swapping out our drafting tables for a computer desktop. It was a movement that changed the way we worked and lived.
More about that later.
If you’d like to be among the first to know when Sliding Past Vertical hits Amazon, please join my mailing list. I promise not to spam you or sell you out to the NSA.
June 10, 2013
Traits of the Successful Author---Self-Discipline
Reblogged from Kristen Lamb's Blog:
Last week, I talked about the first trait of the successful author, discernment. I deliberately addressed discernment first because discernment keeps us in balance. No amount of "success" is worth our peace, our health or our relationships.
Also, we'll need discernment to manage the second trait of the successful author---self-discipline. Why? Because even self-discipline needs to be disciplined. Sometimes we need to re-prioritize.
This blog from Kristen Lamb inspired me today. Hanging with writer friends who push me to raise the bar on my work and DON'T let me slack off have made such a difference in my writing. They inspire me, too.
June 7, 2013
Sneak Peek from Sliding Past Vertical
Happy Friday! It’s raining like mad here, but I’m a happy little duck. I have a title for the new book (more about the meaning of that in a later blog), Husband and I are working on the cover, and the manuscript is going through beta readings. Meanwhile, I wanted to share a bit. If you’d like to sign up for my mailing list and be one of the first to know when the book hits Amazon, hop over here and leave me your e-mail address. Thank you!
——
“I spoke with her last night,” Rashid said.
Milk dripped off the piece of chocolate donut Emerson had just dunked into his glass. Rashid merely sipped his tea, prepared, as always, with one sugar, stirred five times counterclockwise. He set his cup on a folded napkin, arranged his small, brown hands right over left on his lap, and gazed mildly ahead.
Emerson chewed his bite of donut. He admired his housemate’s resolve. It terrified Emerson to imagine spending the rest of his life with a stranger of his parents’ choosing. His greatest fear was that she’d find him inadequate, that she’ll long for a “manlier” man, with broad shoulders and a square jaw, one who would take charge, make lots of money, never complain, and always know how to fix things. Inevitably, she would leave him and sleep with other men, like Sarah had. He swallowed and said, “How did it go?”
Rashid shrugged. “She comes from a good family. She is studying business management.”
“That’s it?”
“It’s a very demanding program; I don’t see how she has time for much else.”
“No, I meant, that’s all you learned about her?”
“It was a short conversation.”
“But she’s…no offense, but a total stranger. What if you’re, you know, wildly incompatible?”
“My parents would never choose such a woman for me,” Rashid said. “They know me best and only have my best interests at heart.”
Emerson noted the quiet confidence radiating from his friend. There had to be a great sense of security in knowing that when you’re ready to marry, a compatible woman would appear. How much time, money, and anxiety had Emerson wasted on women over the years, looking for someone who could love him? And how many fragments of his soul had died in the quest?
“At least her voice isn’t unpleasant, and that is a good thing.” Rashid took another sip of tea. Set the cup gently on the table and straightened his spoon. “Don’t you think?”
Emerson looked up from his breakfast. It was the first time he’d seen Rashid display anything less than utter sangfroid about his impending nuptials. The corners of Emerson’s mouth dipped further down; his shoulder sagged. Maybe he would continue to flounder with the opposite sex, maybe he’d been hurt and disappointed. And maybe he’d never find a woman who would love him as much or in the same way as he loved her, but he hoped to God that when and if he did marry, he’d have more good reasons to cling to than a voice he didn’t detest.
June 6, 2013
Traits of the Successful Author---Discernment
Reblogged from Kristen Lamb's Blog:
Many of you who follow this blog have a dream to be a successful author. This requires writing, social media, blogging, revisions, and on and on and on. It's a lot of work and life, family, kids, day jobs, and housework all provide tempting distractions. The past two days here in Texas have had gorgeous weather and I just wanted to go do something outside and enjoy the balmy temperatures before being thrust into three months of triple-digit hell.
This post by Kristen Lamb hit home with me today. I edit, write, and do my other wordly tasks with such ferocity. But sometimes I need to pick my head up out of my work, because the world hasn't stopped moving just because I closed my writing room door.
June 5, 2013
How Research Can Save Your Book
I’m funny about doing research for my novels. If I’m not collaborating on a project, I like to wing it with what I can pull from my subconscious memory, on the first draft at least. Then I go back and fill in the missing holes. It’s fun to cover a fresh printout with sticky notes and make lists of what I need to know. But I’m kind of geeky that way.
The Poughkeepsie Train Station. In a novel I read, the author gave it blue plastic seating, like a Trailways bus station. Research, people!
For Sliding Past Vertical, the novel that’s coming out toward the end of the summer, I thought I had it made, as far as knowing my locations. Part of it is set in Boston, part in Syracuse. I lived in Boston for five years and in Syracuse for the whole of my undergraduate degree. I thought I knew what I was writing about. But something nagged at me when I read my drafts. I needed another dose of both places to make sure I was remembering correctly. Memory can be a strange beast, and I’d be mortified if the book came out with glaring errors that could have been avoided with a bit of research, or, even better, a trip.
Syracuse was the hazier memory of the two, so I took a few days off, booked a hotel room, packed up my manuscript, and drove the four hours to the university area. I walked the streets my characters walked, felt the broken pavement under my shoes, smelled the smells, and made notes about the architecture. I had my particular fond memories of different parts of campus. For instance, most of the quad proper sits on a drumlin. Basically, a drumlin is a giant mound of debris left behind by a retreating glacier. Much of upstate New York is peppered with them. They make handy places upon which to build a college campus, although climbing all those stairs to get to the top grows old after about three days.
The edge of the SU drumlin that faces the city of Syracuse is a fairly sheer drop. A wooden stairway had been built into the side that took groaning students some 100 steps from the Brewster/Boland dormitories to the level top of the quad. One of my favorite places was a small, grassy ledge just to the side of the top stair. When I had a late class or team practice, I’d sit for a while and watch the sun set. In fact, I’d written this into the book. Much to my dismay, when I toured the campus this time, the stairway was covered with Plexiglas domes and the ledge, my lovely ledge, was gone, an expansion of the law building now in its stead. I don’t necessarily begrudge the law department an expansion (okay, yes, I do), but why did it have to be built on my ledge and screw up my book?
I grumbled about this all the way back my hotel room, where I furiously scribbled on my manuscript. Then it came to me. Why not use these changes, and these tricks of memory, to my advantage? So when Sarah revisits her alma mater some eight years after graduation, she can react to the changes. She can bemoan the loss of her ledge as well as the lovely overstuffed chairs she remembered from the basement coffee house of the campus chapel.
Sometimes, you just need to use change to your advantage. Take that, law department.
June 3, 2013
Fissured by Lynne Cantwell: a review
Once again, Lynne Cantwell has kept me up past my bedtime with Fissured, the second book in her Pipe Woman Chronicles, just because I needed to know what happened next. Blending into the evolution of the relationships between the characters from the first book is a storyline about hydrofracturing, or “fracking.” [A subject close to my sensibilities because we're fighting it here in New York.] This was woven into the story in an organic way, so it didn’t feel preachy to me. Adding to the strain of the budding relationship between Naomi and Joseph is a potential spanner in the works in documentary filmmaker Jack Rivers. I like these characters. I really like the interplay between the “real” characters and their fantasy doppelgangers, and I love Naomi’s friendship with Shannon. What worked so nicely in the first book—Naomi’s wit and cynicism at being dropped into this world with a huge weight on her shoulders—still works here. I’m eager to keep reading!
BEA 2013: A quick wrap-up
Hugh Howey!
The temperature hit 100 degrees, I nearly got trampled trying to get a signed copy of Guy Kawasaki’s new book, and I didn’t get to meet Amy Tan or Buzz Aldrin, but I was like a kid in a candy store at BEA this year. It was great to see and hear what’s new in the publishing industry, on both the traditional and self-publishing ends.
If you guessed that services surrounding e-book production, sales, distribution, and promotion were all the rage, you’d be right. Funny, because according to the latest Bowker industry stats (keep in mind that these are from 2011; the new report is due out some time next summer), e-books only make up 3% of all book sales. Expect to see a large jump in this figure when that new study comes out.
The lovely Tina Folsom!
Some other little tidbits from the show:
• I scored a couple of good interviews; these will be posted on Indies Unlimited over the next few weeks.
• I now have more tote bags than I know what to do with. Contact me if you’d like one.
• Hugh Howey, author of Wool, is a really nice guy and let me take a picture with him. So did a few of his friends. Next year I hope to see the “Indie Bestsellers” booth double in size.
• A panelist on one of the workshops I attended turned out to be Nina Amir, who, like me, was a member of the Syracuse University women’s soccer team. (Although she was by far the better player.) She has written many books, is a creativity coach, and still radiates positive energy. Go Orangewomen!
• There are hundreds of people willing to sit on a concrete floor for two hours to see Neil Gaiman.
• Apparently, according to panel of articulate, talented, and ridiculously young YA authors, “realistic YA fiction” is the newest thing. I never realized it had gone away. A Catcher in the Rye? To Kill a Mockingbird? Deanie? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? So maybe Drawing Breath is YA after all.
• Thanks to postcards printed with QR codes and other doodads on their backs, an author can sell or give away e-books at events and autograph the cards. No need to haul all those books! Hundreds of thousands of chiropractors are now very nervous.
• And speaking of hauling books, I walked off with a nice selection of signed ARCs. After all, I’m more than willing to give an unknown, traditionally published author a try!
Hope you have a great week.
