Phillip T. Stephens's Blog: Wind Eggs, page 25

Kindle: Friends in Need

Amazon recently booted a number of reviews on their Kindle site because they decided the reviewers were friends of the authors and therefore biased. To no one's surprise most of the reviews they booted were positive, driving the overall ratings response downward on many authors. Of course, it should also hurt the formulas for their own sales for those books.

This seems like an odd move for a site that depends on authors and their fans to drive book sales. Amazon buyers have long known that sales are driven by more an author's ability to manipulate Amazon's sales system than the quality of their books. That includes the ability to build a base of friends and fans who will trigger the sales formulas Amazon uses to label their books as best sellers.

At the same time, customers depend on the quality of the reviews to determine whether or not we want to even download a sample. Why? Because Amazon sells so damn many books we could spend our lives just wading through the samples. Reviews, whether by friends or not, become important to our decision to browse samples or even download the entire book on faith (or, in the example of free books or Kindle Unlimited, bypass the sample and download the entire book).

I also find it interesting that Kindle hasn't released to the public how they determine reviewers are "friends." Do they track us by zip code? If we happen to give each other good reviews does that make us friends? Do they follow e-mails? Do they scan Facebook and Twitter to see if we correspond? And doesn't that seem like a massive invasion of privacy if they do?

Nor has Amazon shared their criteria for "friendship." Since my membership in Goodreads and the launch of my Twitter campaign, I've built a group of what could be considered online friends based on the Facebook and Goodreads models. We correspond, we follow each others blogs, we download and read each others books and we review them.

We don't hang out for barbecue, our spouses don't know each other, we don't share pictures of our kids, we don't know too many details of our personal lives. In fact, if we socialized in real life, we might not even like each other. And we don't necessarily like each other's books. At least one of my Goodreads friends, whom I won't name, received a 2 star rating on Amazon.

Nikki Dixon wrote the Bonita Bandita series of western romances. As a romance antiaficionado, I was surprised to discover I enjoyed her books about Lucy, a young woman who runs off with Billy the Kid. She's also about as conservative as I am progressive, as we discovered when she, I and my wife Carol got into a Facebook discussion on gun control. In real life we could bond over books and beer, or rift over politics. But who the hell is Amazon to define that for us?

Ultimately, however, Amazon could be shooting themselves in the foot because when they cut authors who are friends, they're also cutting some of the best sources of reviews. Authors write better reviews than many fans, who often don't know how to express the best or worst qualities of books for readers. We can identify holes in books, problems with writing style or even the audiences who will appreciate a book and who should steer away.

For instance, even with my bad reviews, I'm very clear to identify which audiences should ignore my reviews and read the book anyway (assuming such an audience is out there). Not all authors are good reviewers. In fact, some are jealous and looking to promote their own work at the expense of the author they review. But surely Amazon can find a better way to regulate their market than banning friends.

#IndieRoar celebrates the best of Indie Authors

For more than a week indie authors have been promoting the hell out of each other's work on Twitter using selfies, wordle pics, book quips and and other memes.

Our most recent challenge is to blog a list of five indie writers, which is a difficult task. How do you select five from a growing list of accomplished writers?

Selecting is also difficult because indie writers don't have to leap the barricade of editors and publishers. In the distant past the only obstacle the shining guard threw an author's way was to prove she had the talent to catch their eye. Now an author has to convince them he can do the marketing they don't care to invest in. Which is why so many authors have chosen to go independent.

As a consequence, readers have to slog through a lot of crap. And I mean crap. Too many indie authors don't bother to (or know how to) hone their craft and don't bother to workshop their prose either. Which is why I now read sample chapters, something I never bothered with before. I used to read books to the end. Indie authors have convinced me I no longer have, nor do I desire, that luxury.

However, there are still some authors that shine, and I really mean shine.

Rayne Hall @RayneHall tops the list of indie authors who made a difference to the industry. Not only does she continually crank out new books on her own (her personal favorite, and I think fan favorite is Storm Dancer http://amzn.to/1QuXSt ) she authored a number of books for writers looking to enter the industry.

By far the best is The Word Loss Diet http://amzn.to/1GO3xZ4 which every beginning (and, I suspect, most accomplished) indie writer needs to read when time they launch a project. I've long believed in the Hemingway approach to narrative—redundant words kill prose. I don't care if you write like Lessing or Pynchon, dense and complex prose doesn't mean fat prose.

Other Hall books I recommend for writers are Why Does My Book Not Sell: 20 Simple Fixes http://amzn.to/1Dhpvmn which covers marketing and book doctoring, and Twitter for Writers http://amzn.to/1BD2Qxg which is the indie author's essential marketing guide.

Word Loss Diet

Hall also tirelessly promotes indie authors over her Twitter network which is extremely large. She welcomes new writers onto her vine and actively nourishes them.

Jessica Wren @wrennovels wrote Ice http://amzn.to/1x2PyM9 as an homage to Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude. A solid first novel, Ice depicts a twisted long term revenge plot against the citizens of Minterville who have a secret of their own. Jessica deserves her own spot at the top of the list, not only because of her work, but because of her own tireless promotion of writers through the Author Promo Co-op @authorpromocoop ( https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/... ).

Ice

The co-op is an online meeting place for indie authors that she runs with Jen Winters (author of Kissing Demons). Most authors participate to learn about other indie authors but also to download and review each others' books. It's a great way to get recognized and get your name out, and without Jessica (and Jen) it wouldn't happen. But Jessica's also a friend, so, sorry, Jen, she gets the nod.

(And, while Kissing Demons is a good paranormal romance, paranormal romance isn't my bag.)

When people think of indie authors, they think of novels, but a lot of comic artists produce wonderful work. Max West's @maxwestart Sunnyville Stories http://amzn.to/1Ehphdq departs from the usual superhero teenage existential melodrama to stories of standard teen angst as Rusty's father relocates the family to Sunnyville, a town so small there isn't even a theater or video arcade. West recasts his characters as animals, much in the flavor of the old Merrie Melodies cartoons before Tex Avery and his crew took over at Warner studios with Bugs Bunny and played the stories for exaggeration and slapstick.

The third volume is due in 2016, so Max is busy at work and his books are available digitally and in hard copy online and in select local stores. You can buy single issues or in graphic novel format.

Sunnyville Stories vol. 2

Ian Probert's (@truth42) Johnny Nothing http://amzn.to/18znhRx has to be one of my favorite YA novels because I know it will never see the inside of a traditional classroom, at least not with school board approval. Not because the content is dirty, but because Probert understands how adults completely fail to understand kid's minds in a way your average school administrator and teacher wouldn't. In fact, I know that if I were to do a book report on Johnny Nothing when I was in school, I would land in the principal's office before the teacher finished the second paragraph (and I know from personal experience because I spent so much time there).

If you believe school's are a great place for kids, and teachers treat kids fairly, and all parents have their children's best interest at heart, you probably shouldn't read Johnny Nothing because it will be incomprehensible to you. Then again, maybe you should. It's the story of a young boy whose parents would sell him out for an expensive dinner, but sell him out for so much more.

Johnny Nothing

I only ran across Bryce Allen @Bryce_E_Allen and The Spartak Trigger http://amzn.to/1QwVja4 recently and it won't be everyone's beer stein full of whiskey and cocaine, but it stands out to me as the quintessential indie novel. The book is a mind fuck and what he does to his character borders on rape of a different kind. Shane Bishop drags unsuspecting corporate middle managers into conspiracies to provide excuses to fire them. Little does he know he's the pawn of multiple conspiracies between corporate giants. Pynchon gave us Yoyodine. Allen sees an age where Microsoft and Google want to buyout the US, Soviet Union and China as well and crash and burn the planet in the process.

The Spartak Trigger

I'm also a big fan of J. David Clarke's @Clarketakular Missing Time 313 series. http://amzn.to/1BfjTlr .

Indie fans also owe a big favor to authors like William Browning Spencer who wrote before there was an indie market and had to find traditional publishers. Laboring in Austin with writers like Neil Barrett and Don Webb, Resume With Monsters was first released by an independent publishing house. He hawked his books at science fiction and writers conventions for years. His best work Zod Wallop has been released as an eBook http://amzn.to/1daI944 . As someone who paved the way for indie authors, we owe him a debt of gratitude.

Phillip T. Stephens is the author of Cigerets, Guns & Beer and Raising Hell. You can follow him @stephens_pt.

Meet Jessica Wren

Jessica Wren, author of Ice, volunteered to post this blog with a review of my book Cigerets, Guns & Beer. Naturally, I was glad to accept, not just because the review was favorable but because it was accurate as well.

While studying Latin-American and Spanish literature, I became interested in the picaresque genre. Reading works such as Lazarillo de Tormes and Perriquillo Sarniento gave me a taste for the pícaro, a usually wisecracking antihero who recounts his misadventures. While reviewing indie works, I had the pleasure of coming across two authors who have successfully created a modern-day American pícaro. One is Phillip T. Stephens in his novel Cigrets, Guns, and Beer.

Using dry wit and sardonic humor throughout, the novel recounts the story of Dodd Dodd Dodd (no joke-that’s his full legal name), a recent parolee who, having earned his law degree in prison, is headed to Santa Fe for a prospective job.… read more


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Jessica's first book Ice is an homage to One Hundred Years of Solitude and she's hard at work on her second. She is a wonderful young writer hard at work on her second book.


I recommend you backtrack through the links to read her previous posts.

You can’t fix what you never wrote

Blank page syndrome cripples many starting writers and the most common cause of blank page syndrome is getting past the thought, “Where do I begin?” We’ve watched the trope play out in countless movies, the author ripping the page from the typewriter and tossing ball after ball in the trash can, or (in more modern versions) backstroking on the laptop monitor to erase one line only to replace it again.

You may have watched the scene in Throw Momma from the Train where Billy Crystal and Danny DeVito discuss whether to begin a novel, “The night was moist,” or “the night was wet,” only to have Anne Ramsey rudely interrupt: “The night was sultry.” And you might have known, deep inside, that she solved nothing because you never want to open a novel with a passive verb.

the intimidating blank page

John Vandezande, author of Night Driving , taught me the two lessons that remain at the top of my life’s writing rules. The most important was to write anything.* This may sound counterintuitive, but it worked for more than forty years and worked for my students as well.

Too many writers wait for the perfect beginning. Forget the beginning, and forget perfect. Start writing. Write anything, even if it’s just a scrap of a thought, and a bad one at that. Keep writing from there. Once you have something on paper you can add to it, edit it, cut it, replace it. But you can’t fix what isn’t on paper.

I’ve read a million approaches to starting points that are sure fire techniques for writers. Dream journals, outlining, stream of consciousness. Guess what? None works better than the other. It just depends on whether or not one works for you. The key is to find your best starting point.

Every story begins with an idea in your head, even it’s the tiniest scrap. It could be an image, a character, or a scene. Even if you have nothing else, you have that scrap to begin with. Once you commit that scrap to paper (or a file), it will inspire another scrap and then another.

The biggest myth of writing is that a narrative must be spun from beginning to end the way the readers encounter it. Think of a narrative as a sewing pattern, or a model kit, whose pieces can be put together in any way you please and assembled into final form at the end. You also have the luxury of rewriting sections, rearranging them and discarding them altogether. Sometimes, and I have done this, you end up discarding the scrap that got the story going.

Sometimes, and I have done this, you end up discarding the very best line in the story. But that’s another post altogether.

Before computers some writers would literally cut and tape pieces of the story into its final form, which is how we got the cut and paste metaphor on word processing software. They would tack the pages on the wall and then cut them apart and rearrange the pieces tape or glue on new paper then photocopy the results.

Each story I write is different. Sometimes I do write from beginning to end. Sometimes I start with notes. Sometimes I write from an outline. I wrote an entire novel from the image of the sun shining through the window in a room. (I never published it, but I wrote it.)

You will need to find your own writing conditions as well. I’ve sat through dozens of workshops tell me what the ideal writing setting is, and the truth is, it differs from person to person. Some people need to write on paper, some, like me, type on their iPads. Some people buy into the myth that you need to spend your days at the coffee shop like J.K. Rowling, and for many of you that may work. Others may need to lock themselves in a room with perfect silence, or to put on headphones with soft jazz and a thermos of herbal tea (or a herb that is only now legal in several states)†.

The truth is, you have to experiment to find your own writing space and it will never be ideal. Nor should you follow a specific rule, such as 1000 words a day. You could make the rule a complete scene, a chapter. You can decide to write every day or four days a week. The point is to find a rule that works for you and stick to it. So long as you end with something to edit by the end of the day.

Find your best writing space

As stupid as it may sound, you can’t edit an empty page. So write. Write crap if that’s all you have to write. Even if it feels like you’re squeezing tiny little turds out of your brain, squeeze them out, because those little turds can still be reworked into usable prose. But if you leave the page blank (or the file empty), you’ll never be a writer.

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*John taught at Northern Michigan University in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and actually taught me more about writing than any writer I have worked with since. His second lesson came after a story he told about a violent bar fight that occurred during the depression after a long UP winter. One of his students had the audacity to ask him if the story was true or if he made it up. John studied him for several seconds then replied with his best poker face, “What difference does it make?”

John, who has long since left us, deserves far better than to have his books selling for pennies on Amazon.

†Although whenever I graded the work of writers using the muse of those herbs, I have to admit, I found the muse was often leading them astray. As was the case when I read my own work later. Better to write first and find the inspiration later.

Read Better Than You Write

My wife Carol used to pull her hair out when we’d watch TV thrillers or, even worse, sit in a theater. Why? Because I’d predict how the rest of the show would play out based on one or two lines of dialogue or a single property on the set.

I first did it to her while we were dating during the Dennis Quaid movie D.O.A.. The moment Daniel Stern handed Dennis Quaid the blue cup, I leaned over and whispered to her, “He put the poison in the cup to steal a manuscript.” (We actually bought the cup at a set sale later.)

She thought I was full of shit, but that was exactly how it played out. How did I know? Because I don’t watch shows passively, I study them to see how the screenwriters set up the characters and plots. I want to know what devices work, how they foreshadow events and how they hide the resolution of the plot. I want them to teach me to do my job better.

Now Carol plays the game with me and it actually makes watching shows, and reading more enjoyable. We don’t just follow clues, we follow how well the writers construct the devices that present the clues to the viewers/readers.

This may seem like a strange foothold into the topic of reading better than you write. In fact, you read better to train for your own book.

Today’s indie writers let the market dictate their writing decisions: pick your genre, target your audience and stick to them. How do you select your audience and genre? Probably by the genre you prefer.

Sure, you can stray from those boundaries once you establish your series. If you write paranormal romance, you can play with paranormal fantasy or fantasy romance. Odds are, however, you write those genres because you read them. You may read other genres but you’ll stick close to home. Writers, like their audiences, don’t stray far from their comfort zones.

You’ll make exceptions. We all do. A friend will sell you on a novel with a pitch that hooks you,* you may find yourself compelled to read the latest best-seller, or you swap a read with another indie author for an online review. If we’re honest, however, few of us really like to push our boundaries when it comes to books.

We read to relax, we read for entertainment. We left school behind us, so we certainly don’t read to learn. And this is the worst attitude for authors, especially indie authors to cop.

Read strategically
I read every book the same way, not just mysteries. I want to know how the author constructs her characters, pits them against each other, spins her plots, resolves her conflicts, ties up the small details. I study the language, the metaphors (or lack of them). Is his voice unique or generic, his dialogue witty or dull, and, most important, does he employ a device or technique I haven’t seen before.

You may think I’m kidding. My question to you is: How seriously do you take your writing? Do you want to sell books, or do you want to become a good, even great writer? In my mind, whichever reason motivates you, you need to study the best to reach the top of your profession. These writers not only sold books, they continue to sell books.

They continue to sell books because readers believe they’re great writers.

When my college lit teachers forced me to read books I didn’t want to read, I did so begrudgingly. Sure, I admitted, Conan Doyle wrote some good stuff, Mary Shelly and Mark Twain, but did I really need to read Tess of the Dubervilles and Emma or wade through the mundane mind of Madame Bovary and the tedious musings of Remembrance of Things Past? And why the hell did I have to suffer through Chaucer in the Middle English?‡

I didn’t have to, of course. Like many students I could have sloughed my assignments and coasted, but I chose to read them and discovered how pleasurable they could be. Well, most of them. Including Emma (Thomas Hardy, not so much). As the assignments piled up I discovered a number of writers I enjoyed, many of whom I continue to hold dear even in my sixties. Including writers I previously ignored as pompous, or, even worse, frivolous.

For instance, for some reason, I got it into my head in high school that reading Kurt Vonnegut was a complete waste of time. I can remember the moment. It was the moment I saw the picture of the asshole asterisk in Breakfast of Champions.

Vonnegut’s immortal asshole/asterisk
from ”Breakfast of Champions”

One of my stoner buddies showed it to me with a hash smoke releasing giggle as we sat in his closet thinking we would be sheltered from discovery by his mother should she wander into his bedroom and somehow fail to notice the light behind the doorway or the haze of residual smoke. Seeing that picture was enough to convince me Vonnegut was the reading material of mush-brained morons. Mind you I smoked as much as he did (largely in rebellion against my Baptist Preacher father), but he considered his stash of underground comics to be the high point of Western literature. Under the influence of of cheap Mexican weed I found the furry freak brothers frightfully funny too, but I knew Larry would never scale the first two pages of Catch-22. (see footnote‡)

By finishing my assignments I discovered the caustic wit of Flannery O’Connor (whom I will discuss in greater detail later), the playful prose of Donald Barthelme and the dense prose of Roland Barthes and Robert Coover. My feminist lit teacher browbeat us with Sylvia Path, Anne Sexton and Doris Lessing, every one of whom could write circles around half the male writers advocated by the male professors who mocked them.

I consider Lessing and O’Connor two of the finest writers of the century, and Lessing’s Shikasta series the best example of science fiction written. Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem taught me how to write the literary essay.°

During my course on novels I was assigned Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King and I fell in love with the novel as an art form. Humbolt’s Gift moved me so much I sat at my typewriter and finished my first novel. I’d played with them, had a hundred page satire in my bedroom at my parents’ house that was a structural disaster, but this was my first real novel with three acts, a real protagonist, awareness of literary themes and poetic devices. It’s shit (although I still have it on the bottom of a shelf somewhere) but I finished it it one semester.

I finally learned to write because I quit reading to entertain myself and began to study books to see how the authors wrote them. I went on to discover Tom Robbins, John Updike John Irving (another writer I’d avoided) and Bernard Malamud (including his wonderful novel The Natural) Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. I strayed south of the border to explore Carlos Fuentes and Garcia Marquez.

Then there was Joyce, whom I have yet to decide is worth all the bother. Yes, I read Portrait and Ulysses twice through. I made it halfway through Finnegan’s Wake, but life intervened. I tried again ten years ago, but life intervened even sooner. At times I think he deserved his reputation, and when it comes to mastery of the language, he does. But overall, truthfully, most of the time I think that, had they not banned Ulysses, he would be regarded no more highly than Samuel Beckett (which is still an honor).

I devoted my craft to Borges and two authors who hated each other: Hemingway and Faulkner. I copied Borges for his magical fantasy, Hemingway and Faulkner for their contrast in style. This may seem counterintuitive, but I had to try.

Hemingway provides a study in stark simplicity. So stark and so simple that his prose is often mocked and parodied. Yet young writers would do well to study him to see how he moves a story with a handful of words. He began his career as a journalist at a time when the industry was changing. Where papers once paid writers by the word, his stories went over the wire in wartime and words were at a premium.

Faulkner’s prose was as lush as the plantation landscapes in the deep south he memorialized. Hemingway preferred to portray his characters in a sketch, Faulkner in a labyrinth of prose. You can get lost in a paragraph which can stretch across pages. One of his best novels, As I Lay Dying is nothing more than sleight of hand as he distracts the reader for the length of his book from his characters’ true motivations.

In grad school my thesis advisor introduced me to Walker Percy and Love in the Ruins. I fell in love with that book and it remains my favorite. I’ve returned to the well more than any book besides the Bible. Soon after Gravity’s Rainbow fell into my hands and Pynchon and Percy sit side-by-side on my shelf as the two authors who most influence my writing.**

(When I finally bring my two personal masterpieces to light for publication and quit tweaking them, they will bear the earmarks of those early influences, especially Pynchon and Percy. For now though, they remain the early works of a writer learning his craft and not masterpieces at all, precisely because they were so heavily influenced by the authors who taught me so much.)

Flannery O’Connor: A Case Study
When I taught college lit, I loved to push students into the pool with O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” The story provides a great working model for young writers as well, if only because she deceives writers so well, many of whom miss the point entirely. (If you haven’t read the story, I suggest you follow the link and read it now. Or, your can be a typical college student and take my word for it, which was something I always told my students to never do)

O’Connor typically has two types of readers, naive and discerning. The type of reader you are will influence the type of writer you become. Here is the story in broad strokes:

A grandmother and her family leave for vacation in Florida even though she tries to talk them out of it. A killer named “The Misfit” is on the loose and she fears they might encounter him in Florida. She hides her cat in a box because she doesn’t want to leave it at home. As they travel through Georgia she convinces them to take a side road to visit an abandoned mansion, which, in turn causes them to wreck the car when the cat escapes the box.

When a car approaches they believe they will be rescued, but the grandmother immediately recognizes them as the Misfit’s party. The grandmother and the Misfit commiserate over the cruelties of the world as his cohorts execute the family. He kills the grandmother last, lamenting she would have been a good woman “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

This line should be the lens through which we understand the story, but many readers gloss over it. I suspect this marks the first distinguishing feature between naive and and discerning readers. The two readers experience two entirely different stories. Let’s walk through them:

The naive reader’s version
A well-meaning grandmother warns her family that they should avoid a Florida vacation because a criminal called the Misfit is on the loose. When they make her go, she has to smuggle the cat in a box so she isn’t left uncared for. Her son doesn’t treat her well, and when she suggests the family visit a plantation she saw as a child, she has to fudge some facts to get them to visit.

Unfortunately, the car goes off the road and the cat escapes, causing it to crash. When the a car passes by, they ask for help. Unfortunately, the grandmother recognizes the passengers as the Misfit’s crew. The Misfit pretends to be nice to the grandmother while he executes her family, then he kills her anyway. He makes a cruel joke that she would have been good if someone had killed her every minute of her life.

The discerning reader’s version
The grandmother is a busybody who meddles in everybody’s business using flimsy rationalizations to justify her behavior. When her son wants to go to Florida, she tries to talk him out of it by claiming the Misfit will be there (which we know from later in the story, he’s not). She deliberately hides the cat from her family because it “might turn the gas stove on,” which is perhaps the most preposterous rationalization imaginable.

When she wants to visit the plantation, she lies outright about hidden treasure and secret panels to whip the children into a frenzy until her son has no choice but to relent. And when she does realize she has no idea where the plantation is (or if she even remembers it correctly), she refuses to tell anyone so they can turn back. Nor is it any surprise that the cat, who has no business being stuffed in a box, escapes and attacks the father at the worst moment, causing the car wreck.

The grandmother doesn’t know when to shut up either, as evidenced by the fact that at the moment she should most keep quiet she immediately announces the identity of the Misfit. Were it not for that, the family might have been robbed, but escaped with their lives. And, just in case we missed O’Connor’s point, the story closes with the Misfit exchanging his own rationalizations with the grandmother to justify his own criminalization while she twitters on, allowing her family to be brutally executed. She repeatedly tells the Misfit what a good Christian man he is, deluding herself into believing her life might be spared even while her family is being executed.

I learned more about writing from this story than a semester of creative writing classes. Hyperbole? Yes and no. I can certainly say the story encapsulates the lessons of a semester: plot structure, characterization, and dialogue. The language rolls of my tongue, some of the best southern dialogue in fiction and it’s not because she’s a southern writer. I can think of a dozen southern writers who sound as hoaky as molasses on corn pone.

You’ll never learn these skills in the pages of a fast read tea cozy or paranormal romance. You can catch a hint in Raymond Chandler, but he learned working side-by-side with Faulkner hacking out screenplays in Hollywood. I’m not knocking tea cozies. Nor are they devoid of great writers in their own right.

Alan Bradley’s The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is deliciously wicked and exceptionally well written. Some readers will scream to hear me say this, but he’s a better writer than Rowling. I count Bradley among the authors I learn from.

Nor do I dismiss the potboilers. I learn as much from the bad books as well. As much as I love Stephen King, and I do love to read King, half of the items on my “don’t do” list come from his books.

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Postscriptural
Let me close with a final recommendation, the book that lies at the heart of American literature and civilization, whether or not we choose to admit it. Every writer owes a debt to the Bible and you need to read it, preferably the King James. (If it helps to have a more modern translation as well, go for it, but the language of the King James is embedded in American and English Lit).

I’m not evangelizing, and I’m asking anyone to read it for a spiritual message. As writers you should read it to find stories handed down over time, and to discover, to your surprise, how much you’ve gotten wrong. For instance, did you know that Mario Puzo ripped off the Godfather from the Old Testament? The climactic scene where Michael Corlene removes his father’s enemies during his son’s baptism comes straight from the ascension of Solomon to his throne.

The Book of Revelation, the Book of Job, the sacrifice of Isaac, the gospel stories and parables, the Psalms, the Proverbs have all been woven into the tapestry of the books we read. So much so that they’ve become transparent, and yet we depend on them. I’ve read it a dozen times, marked up four different Bibles over forty-five years, and use those stories often—usually without letting readers know where they came from. (Half the time my Christian family members and friends don’t know.)

And the best part is, you’ll encounter more NC-17 tales of adultery, incest, fornication, battle and bloodthirsty murder than between the covers of any other printed pages. Because you need those things to move any good plot to redemption.
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*recall that pitch and the qualities sold you because you should use those qualities in your own book descriptions.

‡Yes, we, all discovered the bawdy parts of Chaucer, the Miller’s Tale, for instance, but do we need to relive in the Middle English? Well, this depends. I discovered a little known gem of language, that the word “quaint,” comes from “queynte” which was the Middle English word for “cunt,” which comes straight from Chaucer. Yes, a fact they hid from us in high school, and probably sophomore college English as well. So, hold on to your hats, you few feminists who still survive. The word “quaint” is a masculine stereotype used to ridicule women by reducing what is being described to the equivalent of a vagina. And that little tidbit, to me at least, was worth the sixty thousand dollars I am still paying off in interest on my student loans. (The last sentence would would be an example of hyperbole.)

To extend this footnote into total digression, however, I had stumbled onto a few literary works well before college, or even high school. For instance, I found a copy of Catch-22 in the eighth grade on the grocery store book shelf, which might seem like a lot for an eighth grader to tackle, but I had already seen my mother reading James Clavell's Taipan and tried that. When I discovered some of the scenes people underline in that book, I realized those thick books might have something worth reading them for. (I hadn’t discovered pulp paperbacks yet.) Hence, the 25 cent investment in Catch-22, which paid of well in that regard. However, I enjoyed it so much I even took it with me to read in church, which caused no end of a scandal when the deacons found out the son of the pastor was openly reading an anti-war screed during the in 1967. I was still on my father’s shit list from the time my third grade friends ratted me out for reading the library’s copy of Frankenstein. Rather than being happy that I was reading above my level, or acknowledging that the book was, in fact from the public library, the deacons were in a furor that I was reading a copy of a book with a wood carving illustration depicting a woman’s bare breast.

To add to this story, however, the budding writer in me became so intrigued by the use of multiple flashbacks that I paid careful attention whenever I encountered them in the future. I should also add that I wrote my thesis on the book and was able to demonstrate that Milo Minderbender turned a handsome profit selling eggs at a loss. The paper was lost in my divorce, and I no longer remember how I did it, but, I know for a fact that it was possible.

°I’m steering away from my discovery of poets and poetry, which also swept me off my feet, only because fiction became my greater love and poetry only a casual affair.

**Quite frankly if you asked me to choose between Pynchon and Joyce as the heavyweight champion, the writer who produces pound for pound, based on Gravity’s Rainbow and Ulysses, I would go with Pynchon.

Need Book Sales? Here's the Manual.

Rayne Hall’s Why Does My Book Not Sell? 20 Simple Fixes. 5 Stars

Since the Amazon revolution, the independent publishing business can be reduced to three simple rules: writing a book is hard, publishing a book is easy, selling a book makes writing look like a cakewalk.

Authors spend hundreds of hours writing the book. Some of us took college writing courses and edit ourselves, others lay out money for professional editors, and others workshop. Most of us end up spending hundreds, if not thousands of dollars pitching our books to editors and agents at writers’ conferences and sitting in on countless seminars where we hear the discouraging word: Publishers, editors and agents could care less about us unless we come pre-packaged with a marketing platform.

What does your platform include? A web site, not just a web site, but an active site with lots of visitors. A mailing list with current names of people ready to buy your book now. A Twitter presence with followers itching to buy your book before it’s even published. At least one trailer for your book, three would be better. And not something filmed in your back yard. Oh, and that web site I mentioned earlier? It needs a blog with followers who check in regularly with comments.

Who has time to write a book?

Are you thinking what I’m thinking? If you’ve already got all that going for you, who needs a publisher? Which is exactly what so many young authors have concluded. So they go the indie publishing route which is a lot simpler. This involves downloading a graphics program for your cover, deciding between Smashwords or negotiating with Amazon, Nook and iBooks yourself and learning how to format eBooks and Print on Demand (POD). (Actually, that part isn’t as easy as it looks, but it’s still the easiest step). It’s so much easier that many indie authors rush ahead and publish their book before building their marketing network.

After all, how can you build a network when you have nothing to sell? Now their books are out there on the Internet for everyone to download or order with two day shipping. They can even avoid shipping fees with Amazon Prime.

That’s when authors discover how difficult marketing an eBook, or eBook and POD combo really can be. If you’re like me (and believe me, I found myself at that stage, which is how I came to be on Goodreads writing this blog), a simple first step would be to buy Rayne Hall’s Why Does My Book Not Sell? 20 Simple Fixes.

Why Does My Book Not Sell? contains more useful information than I remember gleaning from a decade of seminars, and corrects a great deal of misinformation passed out to boot. For instance, at the turn of the century publishers and agents buzzed about platforming, much of it an excuse to avoid marketing their own writers. Hall’s information was more concise and, in my opinion, far more correct. And she only brings up platforming in one or two instances.

This is especially important to me, whose wife reminds me at least once a week that she supported me for thirty years of marriage by working a real job in a real office with a real boss to earn a real pension while I pursued my dream of writing, published one book of poems, several academic articles, three novels on Amazon (with a combined sales of less than four dozen) and little else to show for it.* Needless to say, I was interested in what Hall had to say.

Hall covers three basic strategies: Tweak your book, tweak your marketing campaign, and, most important, improve your writing.

It may seem counterintuitive to discuss writing skills when your book is already on the market, but Hall believes writers sell books by looking forward to their next book. She also recognizes that many authors now use POD and eBook delivery, which allows them to revisit and revise their books without interrupting online sales.

Culling novice words, freshening your voice and infusing a more original opening scene might breathe life into your sales. Should you attract reviews to the revitalized manuscript, you will be off and running. Be forewarned, if you applied for an ISBN, you may require a new one should the revisions be substantial.

Hall’s tweaking strategies, such as a cover redesign, are right on target. Hall and my first publisher, the late Susan Bright of Plain View Press, are in total agreement. Covers sell or kill books. I’ve been unhappy with the cover of one of my books from the beginning and just a glance at some of her examples allowed me to rethink the problem entirely. In addition, Hall suggests exploring your book’s title, your author profile and other aspects of presentation that might be out of sync with the market for your target audience.

original cover

Independent authors new to the publishing game may find Hall’s marketing strategies formidable, but well worth exploring. From trimming and focusing your social media presence to positioning your book for special category sales, she offers a number of precise tools to position you to boost sales.

revised design

As with her popular Twitter for Writers, Hall’s prose is clean, enjoyable and easy to follow. Even if your books are selling, you would be wise to see if she has a few tricks you haven’t stumbled across.

_________________________________
*Too be honest, the combined sales are three and a half dozen more than we had in January, mostly thanks to techniques learned in Hall’s Twitter for Writers.

Carol also conveniently forgets that I supported myself by free-lance writing and teaching ungrateful overprivileged college students who thought they knew more than I did. But because writing stories and poems from my head, selling ad copy and articles to the highest bidder, creating lesson plans and staring at countless student design projects on a monitor didn’t look like work, it couldn’t be work.

I don’t say this out of bitterness. She’s far more supportive about my career than my blood family who still believe I failed God by not following them into the ministry. Not just any ministry, but some form of the ministry that involves Southern Baptists or speaking in tongues. And all I have to do when Carol complains is draw attention to the foster cats who are competing to sit across my arms while I try to type, and we’re in love again.

And, because some readers seem to believe my tales of domestic drama (in spite of my wilder biographical episodes elsewhere in this blog), I should remind them that I specialize in fiction and they should take nothing I say about my private life at face value. Except the book sales. But the fact that you were taken in my my domestic tales should tell you how convincing I am, and you should immediately go to Amazon and download at least two of my books.

Phillip T. Stephens is the author of Cigerets, Guns & Beer and Raising Hell. You can follow him @stephens_pt.

Grawlix in Poems? Ginsberg is howling from his grave

Warning: This blog is rated MA for Mature Audiences . It contains graphic language that we have all been exposed to since elementary school and should give absolutely no one reason to blush, but will cause some adults to believe is totally inappropriate for children, the silliness of which, in fact, is the whole point of the blog to begin with. The words in question are.... Ah, hell, you can guess what they are. And, yes, one of them contains the letter “f.” And it is used more than once.

(To be accurate, quite a few words in this blog contain the letter “f,” including the words “few” and “refer” in this paragraph, but I think we all know which particular word to which I refer.)

Editorial concerning the MA rating: Dear reader, In spite of the MA rating I would have let my eight-year-old son read this because a) he would have read it anyway, b) he knew every “bad word” because he heard his mother shout them while she was driving, c) the truly adult content was over his little head anyway, and d) preparing his brain to think like an adult isn’t a bad thing.

Recently I started contributing to an online poetry group. In one of the threads I posted the following poem:

Viewing Easy Rider

In the end
Just before Peter Fonda shot the bird at two 
Shit faced rednecks who shot back with both barrels, 
After trading cocaine for cash to traipse the country,
After sharing the crops of hippie children
Posing as the poster children for poverty,
After watching Jack Nicholson beaten to death by
Trash talking shitkickers too afraid to 
Open their eyes and see the queer in the mirror, 
After dropping too many tabs of downer brown and
Tripping through the tombstones of Mardi Gras,
Peter Fonda got it. He said, “We blew it man.”
Dennis Hopper said, “Whaddaya mean, man? We’re rich,”

You see, Peter Fonda discovered everyone 
Rolls a different road to the American dream, but
Dennis Hopper was just an asshole.

As soon as I posted I noticed a comment by another poet who’d used grawlix (!@*$_&) in one of her poems. She was concerned it might have been too much, since the profanity was implied. From there began a long stream of threads, including concern over the use of profanity in my own poem. It seems ours was a family poetry group whose children not only read the poems, but post them as well. The language in my poem, members pointed out, was inappropriate.

The group, they reminded me, was rated PG-13. To my surprise, the language in my poem merited an R (or even NC-17, the exact rating was never specified).

Were I in my twenties, attending the graduate writing workshop at Michigan State and working with my mentor Diane Wakoski (and this is probably the last real biographical detail I will reveal on this site) I know what I would say. It wouldn’t be polite, nor would it be PG-13.

But I am forty years past (okay, that was the second to last biographical detail) and my more mature self, who has perspective, understands that parents can be overly protective and Goodreads needs to maintain a censorship policy in order to ensure that parents will allow their children to let their seedling skills sprout.

At most I might suggest the group simply adopt the entire rating system to their posted poems so that parents or older siblings sit next to their under 17 children when they read the R rated poems on their monitors, iPads or iPhones.

There are, however, two of me who are forty years past. The other me is the self-anointed prophet of the poetic muse and she says poetry serves more than the desire to amuse and depict pretty images that never offend. She says sometimes poetry should slice readers’ souls from pubis to skull, rip out their psychic viscera and dangle them bloody and dripping before their third eyes with their ectoplasmic inner lids stapled to their skulls in order to make them see what shallow shits they must be if they’re afraid to expose their children to a few harsh words in verse.

If you read my last post, you'll know I’m the last person to advocate throwing profanity onto the page to see if it sticks. However, words are tools and the responsible poet uses every tool at her disposal, even if she doesn’t feel comfortable with them. The best artists experiment with different tools, different media and try to gain some level of mastery, then incorporate them into the media they know best.

I’ll be honest, even I would be loathe to post a graphic sex scene, at least without <spoiler>a spoiler alert to hide the scene</spoiler> on a Goodreads forum, nor would I advocate frequent “f” bombs hurled at the page like shit from a monkey’s diaper. (Yes, I know I mixed a metaphor, but this is a blog not an Aristotelian treatise.)

However, to toss aside any word as garbage, detritus, or inherently offensive is an act I find equally offensive. It is an act that stunts the poet’s growth and restricts his vision. It blinds on the artist and says to him “your verse can develop down this path only and wander down no side path no matter how interesting it appears.”

So let’s walk through some of those side paths to this particular question:

Protect kids? Really?

I went to elementary school in the sixties and there wasn’t a kid who wan’t intimately familiar with the words “shit,” “piss,” and even “fuck.” Sure, some of us would whisper them, or say “fuck” as “the ‘f’ word” in semi-reverent tones as though the “f” word were only one step less sacrosanct and unspeakable than “Jehovah.” But we knew the words. They were burned in our little hearts as sacred objects to be taken out, discussed reverentially and rolled off our tongues when adults weren’t around to listen. Some of us would giggle, some would blush, some would shudder with childish pre-orgasmic pleasure. Others would hide their faces in shame and confess to either their priests or in private as soon as they reached their prayer closets before joining the next available discussion.

Then there was Delbert Thrash. Delbert, whom I adapted into a much kinder character in my upcoming novel Seeing Jesus, was the rooster of our elementary school yard and he spread his seed by introducing us to every form of lewdness his child mind could entertain. How he came by it, I shudder to think, but he was the first to know every variation of every sailor’s swear word, story and sexual position. He could spot animals mating in the next yard, in the trees and down the block and he was certain to draw them to our attention. Ever heard of Dirty Ernie, the hero of innumerable lewd (and hilarious) jokes? Delbert inspired the character.

Like it or not, every school yard has a Delbert. And your children have been exposed to a Delbert unless they’ve been locked in a back yard and home schooled since diapers. Even then, chances are, they met a Delbert on a church trip. Trust me, I was raised a Baptist Preacher’s Kid, and I was one of the better behaved. (Goddam it. All right, three biographical details. But I draw the line at three.) And I still encountered my share of Delberts.

Children love to play with language, whether or not you, as their parents, like it. So don’t bother to protect them, they’ve already been exposed to the virus. My wife Carol loves to remind me that had she been forced to listen to the white bread school approved poems, she would never have been attracted to poetry. When she found out poetry could break those boundaries, that poetry could swear like real people, she found something worth reading.

Besides, your kids hear bad language in every PG-13 movie, and on most TV shows, especially on cable. Did you let your kids watch True Blood? Do they watch Buffy reruns? Holy Shit, they’re humping on Buffy all the time and that’s kid’s fare. You’ll even catch the occasional blue word and scene on the Disney Family channel. They use it to boost the ratings.

Speaking of which, I watch kids TV today and Delbert seemed tame by comparison. He wouldn’t even end up in today’s principal’s office. I worked with Charter Schools in Texas, the bread basket of the Bible Belt, the Holy Mother of God’s land of Righteousness. Trust me, these Christian kids could take down Delbert in any trash talking contest. (Holy Mother of... I give up. I now declare this a faux disclosure zone. Every thing I disclose is made up for the purpose of making a point. It’s true, but a useful fiction for the point of my biography.)

Protect your kids from bad language in poems? There is so much worse in the world, people. For four years I left college teaching to work with a charter school. One of my students had to clean the condoms, beer bottles and needles from her bedroom after mom’s tricks dropped by. Why? Because her mother didn’t want to trash her own room. One of my student’s father beat him with a belt because he didn’t properly honor his father the way scripture told him. One of my students genuinely believed smoking pot all day was good for him because his father did it and he never had to work a day in his life. One student intentionally got pregnant because she believed her thirty-year-old boyfriend would marry her and take her out of school. (He dumped her.) I can no longer recall the number of students who were raped before their junior year. In Texas, Black and Hispanic students are inherently disadvantaged because they have to pass a standardized test to graduate from high school, while white students can transfer to private schools where the same tests aren’t required.

And because I have already shared enough biography, I won’t tell you some of the hair raising shit that my two sisters and I, as good Baptist Preacher’s children, were exposed to. (I know, the correct form is “to which we were exposed.” But the correct form didn’t <spoiler>fucking</spoiler> scan as well, okay?) Not exposed to by our Baptist family, who were by any standard, bat shit crazy (with cousins marrying at fifteen, my uncles telling one nigger joke after another at family gatherings even though we knew them all by heart, my grandfather scribbling out entire passages in his encyclopedia in bright red ink that differed with his interpretation of the Holy Word and everyone picking apart the arcana of scripture at family dinner to the point that faces would sometimes turn as red as the ink in that encyclopedia), but from the good Christian families at the church, including the children of the Deacons who paid my father’s salary, and the Head Pastor’s children, who may have been scariest of all.

Poetry and fucking are joined at the hip

Let’s face it, poetry and sex predate Sappho. Poetry has long been a key element of the ritual of seduction. Maybe not with the pickup truck dating crowd, where seduction is reduced to booze and forcing a girl whether she wants to or not. But certainly in my crowd where brains and desire were as much a part of seduction as fumbling with buttons and bras.

Readers may recall that when our teachers made us read Chaucer, at least one of us was bound to point out the bawdy passages—including the Miller’s Tale which featured adultery and carousing. What you may not know is that Chaucer’s liberal use of the word “queint” is actually the middle English word for our word “cunt.” (So when you refer to something as “quaint” you are really saying its “cuntish,” which should make any modern feminist bristle, with some justification.)

The interrelation of poetry and sex becomes clearer with the metaphors of poetic deconstruction left to us by Derrida. He reminded us the pen is a penis ejaculating the seed of meaning on the folded page of poetry (the hymen) and each time the page opens, a new meaning blossoms. Sadly, the metaphor loses something in translation when poems are posted on the web. We may have to be satisfied with more sterile image of fingertips massaging the keyboard/clitoris. Still, sexuality cannot be circumcised from poetry no matter how hard parents try.

I could give you a list of erotic poetry to prove my point, but I’ll go straight for the jugular. The ultimate fucking poem. The prize poem of the Hebrew language, The Song of Songs. Fundamentalists will howl and scream to hear me call it a poem about fucking, and swear it’s an allegory, a poem that symbolizes the love of the body of Christ. Maybe it is, but at the same time, from the other side of their mouth, any good Fundamentalist will tell you the Bible is literal. Every word written on its pages is literal. There is no allegory or symbolism. So they can’t fudge when it comes to The Song of Songs. If parents want to protect their kids from evil sexual poetry, they need to keep them away from the Bible.

They also might want to keep them away from the Bible to avoid exposing them to all that violence, and betrayal. For instance Jepthah, who promised to sacrifice the first creature to cross his gate if he won a battle. It was his daughter, so he sacrificed her. Or Jezebelle, whose enemies tossed her underneath horses to be trampled to death. Or Jael, who smashed a sleeping man’s skull with a hammer and tent peg. Or how about the death of Absalom, who was hanged in a tree by his long hair? Only that took too long so his father King David’s men finished him off with spears.

Nor am I knocking the Bible. I’m still Christian. I’ve read the Bible a dozen times, which is how I know it’s no stranger to profanity, and not just “damn” and “hell.” Even Paul unleashed the occasional blue word. For instance, in Philippians where he wrote, “I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but crap....” And, believe it or not, there are other examples such as “piss,” and “bitch.” I could go on with my list of examples, but you need to read for yourself to see.

Oh, I know, good old King James used the word “dung” in Philippians instead of “crap,” but “dung” and “crap” and “shit” are synonyms. Sorry, parents, they mean the same thing, so why is “dung” okay for your kid to read, but not “shit?”

Which brings me to:

A history lesson in profanity and discrimination in language use

When I taught college freshman English I would put the following lists on the board and ask students to tell me the difference between the two:

shit defecate
piss urinate
f__k* intercourse
damn anathematize
lie prevaricate
steal expropriate
yell vociferate

*Notice I used grawlix in this example. These were college freshmen, and the last thing I needed were endless complaints to the Dean about corrupting influences on young minds during their first weeks in college.

The students inevitably leaped to the conclusion that the words in the left list were the “bad” words and the words in the right list were “good” words, even though the last three words in the “bad” list are acceptable in any conversation. I also doubt any of the students knew the meanings of the last four words in the “good” list until they saw them paired with their “bad” counterparts. In fact, had any of my students encountered those words before, I feel certain they would have sailed over their heads without ruffling the surfaces of their short term memories.

After pointing this fact out to them, I would provide a history lesson. Granted real historians could ream me over the coals for the lesson’s authenticity, but they were freshmen. I would’ve been lucky if they remembered there was a list by the end of the semester.

In 1066 the Normans (French) invaded England and took power from the Saxons, a backstory easy to remember if you watched any Robin Hood movie. The Normans replaced the Saxon’s language (left column) with their Latinate based polysyllabic language (right column). Why? Because that’s what people in power do. As a result the Saxon language earned a reputation for being brutish and crude, and the Norman became the language of educated and polished speakers and writers.

In reality, however, American speakers and writers only gravitate toward the Norman column when they’re referring to bodily functions. The rest of the time they avoid any words with more than two syllables. Notice, however, that those preferred Saxon-based words are the words most curse words come from. So why do we prefer Saxon-based words for all of the words in our vocabulary except for when we refer to our bodies?

It’s the fucking French, who, when they were in power, made us feel ashamed and crude. We may have thrown the yoke of power of when Cromwell pitched them from power, and restored our language, but the psychic shame never went away. It’s time to liberate our minds and free all of our language so that we can free our poetry for our children from the last vestiges of the insidious French influence. Any Tea Party Patriot and forebearer of Faithful Fundamentalism should demand this little of our language.

Which leads me to suggest that a word is just a word. Its “goodness” or “badness” is all in our heads. There is no difference between “poop,” “dung,” and “shit,” or “fucking,” “intercourse” and “sex.”

If you’re going to say “fluff,” as my niece used to say, why not just call it a “fart?” Sure, “fluff” sounds prettier, but a fluff still stinks. Some people may think it matters what word you use to describe the same damn thing, but if we recall Jesus’ views on real and imaginary adultery (and he would have to be the expert, wouldn’t he) a word is a word is a word.

I think I’ve exhausted this subject. So with all of these thoughts in mind, please let me close with:

An example of appropriate profanity (combined with an ingenious, not to mention self-serving, product plug)

I believe the case can be made that sometimes words that are ordinarily believed to be profanity are not only acceptable, they may be the best choice for the situation at hand.

Consider the following passage taken from my own novel Raising Hell, which, because of my kindness and fundamentally Christian and anti-capitalist leanings, can be purchased for the remarkably generous price of $1:

“Wouldn’t you admit that there are times when things just spin completely out of control and create this huge mess? And when all these things happen, the only thing you can do is wait for them to end and then clean up the mess or leave it lying around to annoy you?

“I mean a really nasty mess. Something stinking and obnoxious. But you can mean it metaphorically too. You can’t deny those situations happen, can you? I mean, you might say my being here is one of those situations, couldn’t you?”

Lucifer drummed his fingers on the desk.

“Think about what happened to you, sir. You think God should maybe give you a little bit bigger piece of the pie, right? Maybe stop acting so high and mighty, right? So you share your opinion with a couple of other angels, and BAM…”

He slapped his hands together, startling Byron who dropped a pen which, in turn, spilled ink on the rug.

Pilgrim didn’t skip a beat. “… Before you know it, you’re cast out of heaven and left to run this shit hole. I mean, wouldn’t that be one of the situations I’m describing?”

“You could be right,” Lucifer admitted as he imagined a list of new hells he could create just for this soul.

“Well, there you go, sir. If those situations exist, then we need a word to describe them.”

Lucifer didn’t like where this was going. He rolled his eyes and waved his hand at the pitiful soul to get on with it, to get to the bottom line.

“Shit’s that word. And it’s a pretty good word when you get right down to it. Short and to the point. You get it out right away. Then you’re done with it.”

“Are you coming to a point? Or do you intend to endlessly endorse the efficacy of excrement?”

“That was my point.”

Lucifer continued to drum his fingers. Wisps of smoke drifted from the desk where his fingertips hammered at the surface.

“How about this then? Is it a sin to use this perfectly good word to describe those perfectly awful situations? Or is it a sin to have all these awful situations and also have this perfectly good word to describe them, but send everyone to hell when they use it?”

Lucifer stared at Pilgrim. He imagined Pilgrim’s pink flesh oozing through the meat grinder’s holes. He found himself totally unable to answer.

“Does that mean you see my point?”

Lucifer snapped out of his fugue and kicked his desk at Pilgrim, toppling him from his chair. “See your point?” he shouted. “Of course I don’t see your point. That has to be the most half-assed, cock-eyed, ill conceived, pinheaded idea I’ve heard in an eternity of listening to half-assed, cock-eyed, ill conceived, pinheaded ideas.”

He ripped a whip from his exotic weapons collection and flayed Pilgrim with it, over and over again, laughing maniacally as the flesh and blood splattered on his carpet like paint on a Jackson Pollock canvas. “What do you think of your half-assed, cock-eyed, ill conceived, pinheaded idea now?”

Pilgrim brushed himself off, picking off some of the larger, looser pieces of skin with his finger, and said, “I think you’re afraid to admit I’m right, so you’re punishing me to save face.”

Lucifer cracked the whip against the desk and shouted, “Afraid to admit I’m right?”

“It’s not a criticism, sir.”

Lucifer felt veins three through twelve pop. Then he blew his carotid artery. “I’ll show you saving face,” he said. He spread his wings and hurdled over his desk, grabbing Pilgrim between his claws. He lashed Pilgrim with his tail and kicked him with his hooves until Pilgrim parts lay scattered across the floor and his own fury sated.

Lucifer kicked his desk. “Shit,” he shouted. He kicked it several more times, shouting, “Shit! Shit! Shit!” He thumped his tail on the floor several times, shaking the paintings and the books on the shelves. Then he remembered he was wearing his good toreador pants.

He slipped them off and found a huge split down the back seam where his tail sliced through. “Shit,” he shouted, throwing his pants into the fire. He kicked the bookshelves, shouting “Shit! Shit! Shit!” until every book in the shelves fell out, pounding him on the head, shoulders and wings.

Dazed, Lucifer finally managed to get a grip on his temper. He inspected the pile of books on the floor and his cracked cloven hoof. He could think of only one word that would truly express what he felt at that moment. “Shit,” he said to himself.

Then he said it again.

Writers’ Workshops (Beware the Validators)

In the days before the Internet and Goodreads, writers conducted workshops in livings rooms, face-to-face, with other writers and wannabe writers. We printed our manuscripts (or, at one time, typed them and took them to the copy shop) before driving across town to meet once or twice a week and pretending to enjoy the company of people we quite often despised. Just to share our work and exchange hopefully helpful criticism.

Don’t get me wrong. I made some great friends at the workshops, but to meet them I had to sort through a horde of putzes, posers and pompous morons who dispensed inanities as though they were precious pearls. I also learned a lot about writing, including the kinds of advice to ignore.

Writers attend workshops for a number of reasons. Some want to socialize, some want validation of their talent (whether or not they actually have any), some want an audience for their writing and others want to improve their skills and their manuscripts. Almost all tend to be young writers (unless they’ve been long-term members).

Now that those workshops have rezed into virtual space, it’s harder to recognize the older stereotypes. We no longer face each other over coffee and pretzel snacks, but in comment boxes with 80x80 pixel avatars. I suspect, however, the stereotypes remain, lurking behind the posts on your groups.

Here are a few I’ve worked with:

The Validator

Validator attend workshops solely to have other writers lavish their writing with praise. Validators believe the best way to make sure readers praise their writing is to praise everyone else’s. This means if you’re workshopping to improve your own writing skills, validators won’t be of much help to you.

Validators also believe you should always say something nice about everyone because negativity will bring down the entire chat room, if not the universe. In fact, validators don’t like criticism because it’s hurtful and discourages writers. They believe that if a writer becomes discouraged by criticism he or she might abandon her calling. They don’t like it when you suggest that, “If a writer gets discouraged because of a little criticism, we have more time to focus on real writers.”

You can tell validators by comments such as this:

“I was really moved when the lesbian nazi werewolf ripped out her own heart to feed the dying vampire hooker in denial of her sexual identity.”

“That scene where the two sharks drowned while trying to save each other during the hurricane was totally realistic.”

“I was completely riveted by that thirty page description of the turtle turned on his back in the children’s sandbox recalling how his father abandoned him.”

A validator will probably not like this description of validators, but they also might not recognize themselves from the description either.

Before I go on, I should add most writing workshops operate under a rule, taken from college workshops that goes like this:

Constructive criticism = something positive + something that could be done better

Which means that for thirty years of workshops I had to find something good to say about lesbian nazi werewolves, sharks who drowned, turtles with abandonment issues, and in one case, a play which consisted of no dialogue and a single actor running naked in a jungle with live bears and lions with no dialogue for three of four acts, one of them with the jungle in flames.

At least with online groups I can just not post.

Trend Follower

The trend follower comes back from the latest Con workshop with a new technique that is guaranteed to open up the group to the creative flow. And they usually insist that the workshop will fail without it. Quite often imposing the innovation for the remainder of the meetings. We might end up playing the exquisite corpse, word transformation games and even improv skits. One trender even wanted our group to try meditation followed by stream of consciousness writing.

My favorite was a trend that common to business and school meetings as well, the open circle. The workshop facilitator always insisted we sit in a circle (sometimes on the floor) to foster creativity and spontaneity. It was her home after all. Once I suggested we forget the circle and sit anywhere we want in the spirit of spontaneity. The facilitator said, “No, goddam it, we have to sit in a circle.”

Occasionally trends have value, usually they work for one group, but not most. The beauty of online groups is that users only have to participate in the exercises that make sense to them.

The Man of the House

The man of the house always drags his woman with him. Sometimes she sits at his feet, sometimes she sits beside him, but she rarely opens her mouth except to ask if he wants more coffee or another drink, or to say, when another writer has been particularly critical, ”I thought it was good, honey,” (or “dear,” or whatever term of endearment won’t diminish him in front of the other writers).

The man of the house may write manly-man material, he may even be a manly-man. But since the seventies he is just as often an ardent feminist, writing poems about the women’s movement and women’s rights and the need for men to recognize the needs of women even as he tells the little woman at his side to get him another beer and, should she dare suggest an idea of her own (especially about the needs of women) also tell her to “not be silly.”

The man of the house is often a good writer (although sometimes he’s terrible) but he’s almost always looking for an audience, which is why he carries his personal audience of one. But if the only one the group who praises his work is his tag along woman, he’s on to another group in a matter of weeks.

The Exhibitionist

(Jump to the Mr. Profane if you blush easily)

The exhibitionist writes about one thing only, the human genetalia in all of its graphic splendor. Not erotica, not sex; genitalia. Penises, vaginas, clitorises and every variation thereof—schlongs, dongs, cocks, dicks and every possible human interaction involving them, cunilingus, fellatio, analingus and penetration involving every possible orifice that you can imagine and some that you might not have imagined before (or even been aware of) not to mention sex with animals, household objects, vegetables and even carnal acts with angels, demons, aliens, alien invaders and their alien invader overlords.

I haven’t begun to catalogue the glands, digits, organs, smells, sounds, secretions, rooms, plants, trees, furniture and household objects the exhibitionist includes in their depictions. It gets worse when exhibitionists insist that a workshop be held in their homes because they insist on giving a tour and that tour usually includes graphic paintings of penises sliced open and nailed to walls, nude photos of their spouses in awkward positions you didn’t know the human body could contort itself into and possibly even their dungeon, complete with costumes and toys.

When the rest of the group gets squeamish at one of their tales or poems, the exhibitionist will be the first to remind us that the true artist has no inhibitions. Furthermore, if an artist can’t push her creative boundaries they should content themselves with being drudges and drones. Thus chastened, the rest of us feel compelled to compliment their work and return to our homes to dream feverishly of succubi and incubi for the remainder of the night.

Mr. (or Ms.) Profane

The profane writer is the exhibitionist’s distant cousin, with a lot more anger. Her output is entirely scatological, primarily consisting of four letter words that serve as verbs and nouns that represent bodily functions and activities, including: f__k, s__t, p__s, c__p and a_s (that was three but you get my point). These words can also be converted into adjectives, gerunds and any number of additional grammatical variations to express the profane writer’s need to rail against ex-lovers, current lovers, bosses, former bosses, co-workers, people who don’t understand poetry, Republicans, Tea Party Republicans, sell out Democrats who might as well be Tea Party Republicans, parents, parents who abused them, parents who neglected them, parents who didn’t get them the bicycle they asked for when they were six-years-old, parents who told them there was no Santa Claus, school teachers who gave them C’s for upholding truisms about the universe, the jerk who cut them off on the freeway, the barista at Starbucks who doesn’t know a f__king macchiato from godd__ned flat white, the Pope and Jesus Christ who doesn’t exist but the Christers are too f__ing stupid to know it.

Should anyone in the workshop suggest that, perhaps, just occasionally, Mr. Profane find phrases less likely to provoke readers, Mr. Profane will respond with a defense of their art similar to the exhibitionist. Only it will sound more like this: “The true godd__ned artist has no motherf__king inhibitions, you __sh__e. If you can’t push your c__ks__king creative f__king boundaries you should motherf__king well content yourself with being a c__ks__king tea bagging drone doing reach arounds for overtime.

The Tyrant

I saved the tyrant for last because he (or she) tries to dominate the group (I’ll refer to the tyrant as S/he and S/him). The tyrant believes s/he knows everything there is to know about writing and intends to pass s/her wisdom to the other workshop participants, whether or not s/he actually knows s/hit. Unfortunately what few nuggets of wisdom s/he may have picked up from real writers may not have any bearing on the poem or story a given writer is presenting at the time.

The Tyrant is quick to dispense vital advice such as,

“You should always be writing with active verbs instead of passive verbs because passive verbs are bad.”

“Don’t be longwinded and use excess verbiage in your writing because your readers might lose track of your thoughts if you don’t keep it tight.”

“Show, don’t tell because readers need a picture in their minds not a lot of description. A picture is worth a thousand words.” And, of course,

“Avoid cliches.”

Like the trendsetter, the tyrant will also browbeat the group with the latest trendspeak from the paid workshops at the Cons, and, like the trendsetters, he will reverse himself with the latest trendspeak from next year’s Cons. Should any holdovers from the group remember last year’s wisdom and be silly enough to question, the Tyrant will be sure to hold them up for ridicule.

Even less fortunately, less experienced writers may not know enough to ignore their advice. And the tyrant feeds off their affirmation.

Sadly, many writing workshops tend to devolve into two groups. Groups that revolve around validators will spend their evenings in constant affirmation. Groups that revolve around the tyrant will produce writing that sounds essentially the same. Few produce publishable work.

If you participate in writing workshops, find the group that serves your needs. For instance, writers in need of validation probably won’t thrive with a tyrant, unless they get their validation by sucking up. If you secretly lean toward masochism, you will fit right in with the exhibitionist and Ms. Profane (and probably the Tyrant too).

If you need a strong man in your life and your group already has a Man of the House, you should probably move on. You may become the target in a fatal attraction scenario. And if you need validation, look for a room filled with validators and trend setters. But for god’s sake, avoid working with a writer like me. Unless, you actually want to learn.

If you want to learn, however, and actually improve your writing skills, the workshops aren’t a total waste. Here are a few tips I learned.

If you like a writer’s work, listen to what they say about writing. Their advice has merit.

If other readers seem to gravitate toward one writer’s work, pay attention. There must be something about their writing that appeals to those readers (don’t just assume popularity or a social clique). What is that writer doing that you can learn from? You don’t have to write like them, but you may pick up some tricks or advice that can help.

If one reader has a problem with your work, listen, but don’t panic; unless you respect their work. If every one in the room has the same concern, they’re onto something. It’s time for redrafting.

The tyrant or trend setter may be an ass, but he probably heard his advice from someone who knows his stuff—even if it’s sixth or seventh hand. See if you can apply it to your own work. You don’t have to do things the way they say, but you may find a way to apply their advice that neither of you thought of at the time.

Always keep criticism in the back of your mind when you redraft (and, yes, redraft, redraft and then redraft again). Sleep on the criticism. Let it bubble at the back of your brain for a week or two. You may discover that it inspires you to make new and delightful changes to your story and poem. The final product may look like nothing you could have anticipated, or the members of your workshop either, but it will be worth it.

Then, when you present the new version, should they say, “That’s not what I intended,” you can be Mr. or Ms. Profane and say... Well, I’ll let you craft your own profane response.

If, however, the entire group says, “Sorry, the new boat sprung a leak and sunk,” then it’s back to drafting. Writing is painful. So is giving birth. If you aren’t up for the labor pains then maybe you should be hanging out with the validators.

Rayne Hall's Twitter for Writers Jump Started My Campaign

I published my latest eBook with low sales expectations, but the reality proved to be far more grim than anticipated. I couldn’t get my friends to buy, my family to buy, much less strangers to buy. I ran Facebook promotions, but nobody nibbled. I went on Goodreads to learn how to find blog sites for reviews, but couldn’t score a single reviewer. I expanded my blogging profile.

I even lined up a marketing firm, but when the rep looked at my platform, she returned my money. “You don’t even have a Twitter presence,” she told me. I’d heard that tune before. If I want to sell my book I need a healthy Twitter campaign.

Unfortunately, I’d tried Twitter before, to promote my fictional cat column Ask Tabby featuring my polydactyl cat Jennymanytoes. It failed miserably. I got a lot of cat followers and saw hundreds of pictures of their cats, but drew no traffic to the blog. (If you’re interested, the real Jenny, no longer with us, had twenty-seven claws.)

Even worse, once I reviewed the marketing contract, I realized my rep only had to return half of my money.

Out of desperation, I decided to try my hand at Twitter again, so I searched the virtual shelves on Amazon and settled on Rayne Hall’s Twitter for Writers . ($2.99 Kindle, Nook and iPad; $0.99 for Amazon Prime members.) Given the amount of money I pissed away on marketing, the price was well within my budget.

Readers who buy Twitter for Writers to promote their books may be frustrated that Hall’s main advice is to not promote their book with their Twitter accounts. At least, do so sparingly. Instead, she walks writers through the steps they need to develop a loyal following who will want to buy their book and continue to follow them in the future.


Hall knows her stuff. With sixty thousand followers and several successful Twitter promotions under her belt, she's well versed on building an audience with faithful followers. Twitter for Writers is no Dummies book. Hall provides a well-paced, well constructed manual for thinking writers determined to build a grounds-up Twitter campaign. Novice and experienced users can start at any chapter and find the advice they need to fashion their strategies.

Twitter for Writers builds on proven formulas, both with her book's chapter structure and realistic expectations for a Twitter platform. The early chapters focus on setting up a Twitter account, eavesdropping and attracting followers. They quickly move through networking, surveys and attracting reviews before finishing with more esoteric topics such as app and account management, scheduling Tweets, fan interaction and online safety. She also covers what writers can do when they reach two thousand followers and Twitter blocks their follower access.


Hall’s campaign formula is simple as well, don’t expect overnight success and expect to put in a lot of hard work.

Hall doesn’t bury readers under technical details. She offers a quick, heads-up read that can be finished in two or three days even with the reader’s browser and Twitter account open in separate windows (as mine were).

Some readers may stumble across aspects of Twitter for Writers that they don’t care for. Hall fills the book with cute cartoons that don’t compete with the New Yorker for quality. Given the low cost of the book and her conversational approach to her readers, I don’t see this as a criticism. However, I recognize that more critical readers might not be so generous. (My son Bryan created these cartoons with Bitstrips.)

She also promotes her own books throughout the pages (books such as Storm Dancer and her series of help books for writers). If readers take umbrage, I might remind them that they probably bought Hall’s book intending to learn how to promote their own. The glass houses metaphor shouldn’t be necessary, but I invoke it nonetheless. If nothing else, readers can use how often she mentions her books as a gauge for how often to Tweet promos for their own.

One thing was clear as I worked through the pages: Hall and a network of fellow writers are committed to nurturing emerging independent authors who are looking to emerge through Twitter. If you follow her advice, you may find yourself engaging in chat with the circle of authors as well (no guarantees). And, yes, once you master the principles in Hall’s you should be able to wisely, sparingly, and hopefully successfully promote your book on Twitter.

Thanks to Twitter for Writers I’m ready to launch my Twitter campaign. My wife Carol, who proofread this for me, laughed when she handed the pages back. “You expect me to believe you’re going to share online when I can’t even get you to share about your morning?”

A man can dream.

Follow or Tweet me @stephens_pt.

Shout Out to The Story Telling Ape

Thanks to Chris the Story Telling Ape for posting a promo to my book Cigerets, Guns & Beer.

It's tough for indie writers to promote their books, much less make a living, and they rely on bloggers like Chris and Jessica Wren, who tirelessly promotes writers on Goodreads, to get the word out on their books.

Check my post and explore his site to see what other writers are doing.