Kae Cheatham's Blog: Whoa! Another Author?, page 26

Blood and Bond - Interviews

I've had a couple of online interview/posts about the book Blood and Bond.

The Indie Spotlight interview went up today.

Drive-Thru Interview was last month.

Both of these sites are good examples of book promotion for Indie authors.

Let's Talk Readership

A few days ago, Richard S. Wheeler wrote on his blog: "In any case, publishers are to this day prisoners of their readerships. If the remaining western lines publish formulaic stories, little different from tens of thousands already published, it is because that's all their readers (and distributors) will buy...."

I've been pondering this, and I really believe it's more that readership is prisoner of the faulty publishers. Readers are changing and now find more pleasure with mysteries (contemporary and historical) set in the west, books billed as Novels of the West (usually contemporary), Historical Fiction (set in the West). Authors such as Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Coel, Ivan Doig, Alexie Sherman and more, have good followings by readers who want the West but not the term "Western". These authors also aren't usually published by the houses that put out traditional westerns. read more at Mental Geysers




Okay, so some of you don't want to skip all over the Web to read stuff?
Sorry. Be a follower ate Mental Geysers and get all my rants.

Another Blog

I am not a two-blog person, and I haven't been faithful to this one.

My main effort is at Mental Geysers I post there at least twice a week. Go on over and be a follower.

The most recent post is geared for writers: "Trim the Fat" -- how to self-edit for a tighter story.

I hope the summer has been good to everyone.

Does your writing style match your characters?

I checked out a site mentioned on an Amazon forum, Gender Genie, where you can insert a passage of text and it the program will analyze it and determine if it was written by a man or a woman. Since I write stories from both gender perspectives and with male and female protagonists, I thought I'd give it a go.

Here's what I put up from The Adventures of Elizabeth Fortune.

Elizabeth rolled across the warped floorboards, scooted behind the bar and grabbed up the double-barreled shotgun the bartender had dropped when he was shot. A bullet careened off a nickel-plated beer spigot, sending six bystanders closer to the walls...read more

Glowing Growth

I read this, several years ago, Glowing Genes: A Revolution In Biotechnology; nonfiction and an interesting blend of scientific history and contemporary breakthroughs regarding bioluminescence (think glowing jellyfish and lightning bugs). I enjoyed the history and insight into the early (think 400AD) scientist who looked at these creatures.
One section told about how, in present day, the glowing genes have been used to monitor the growth of tobacco plants, whereby a test plant would glow when the crop was somehow stressed. From this, researchers learned that wind stressed the plants more than low water or not enough sunlight.

For me this was an answer to a "growing" problem. At my place, the wind blows 70% of the time and on many of those days, it reaches 25 mph or more. The five-inch lilac bushes I had planted several years before reading this book hadn't died, but only increased in size one or two inches. I had put it off to poor soil, not enough water, yada yada yada. After reading about the tobacco plants, I constructed little tents for each shrub and staked them in place. In the three weeks after that, the plants grew two inches and look healthier than ever.

This year, after continued protection from the wind (and deer), I actually had lilac blooms, and one plant is nearly two feet tall.

I really got a lot more in this reading than what I expected when I pulled it from my public library shelf.

Home Away From Home

A surprise that I would finish this book. The theme is a young woman dealing with the sudden loss if her much loved husband, Dill. Death. Grief. Angst--I usually avoid these topics as they often become maudlin in the story telling.

Home Away From Home did not do this as Lorna J. Cook tells the first-person story of Anna during the year of her emotional and physical wandering. Anna cannot bring herself to return to the house she shared with Dill, and lives with friends and at various other places. She interacts with other people who are grieving for different reasons and circumstances, and gains insight from them.

Excellent language and writing.

Different Styles, Both Effective

Here are two books that have different and effective ways of handling the backstory. The tactic often used is a direct narrative flashback, but the authors of these titles were more creative.

In the historical piece, Diezmo, The: A Novel, Rick Bass used a first-person narrative, and the reader learns right at the beginning that the story is a remembrance, told fifty-years after the fact. This allows information to be presented that the narrator wouldn't have known at the time, and we're told: "...he always paused near the end. It was not until much later...that I found out he had been skipping a sentence..." (page 11). Background information about characters is given ("$1400 worth of jewelry…")--precise facts that the narrator wouldn't have known at the time. Bass also relates incidents about other people who weren't in the narrator's presence--information the narrator learned during the ensuing 50 years ("John Alexander and his group spent the rest of the day lying in that pool...In the meantime--never dreaming of Alexander's success...")

The book's Epilogue reinforces the fifty years that have past before the telling, and give closure to the story.

The other title was contemporary. Blue Dog, Green River author Brock Brower chose to make his first-person narrator the recipient of a story. The "I" character is river rafting with a friend, and the friend, Paul, tells the story. Opening lines: "'I spaced the dog [Blue Dog:].' Paul Nozik started telling me his story up on a Navaho sandstone ledge..." The narrator isn't really a participant in the story, but the verbose Paul tells it all, including the background of other characters, the geology of the region, and more.

The reader is reminded of the passive narrator on occasion: "Paul stood up, dusting his palms.... He does love to tell you the best part of a story...He got me up, politely dragging me along for company, talking his way around to the far side of this squared-off limestone." Brower breaks up Paul's storytelling with chapters from Blue Dog's perspective, in an omniscient narration rich in language and detail.

Both authors kept their stories short (Blue Dog, Green River - 108 pages, The Diezmo - 208 pages). I enjoyed reading these well-crafted books.

Writing (out) Family

I'm doing the outline for another contemporary western. I am realizing again how much trouble it is to write "family". A contemporary story, with a twenty-something protagonist, usually needs family to round out the character. We're talking two, often three generations.

I can see how other authors have handled this. Characters of many books I've read have deceased spouses or lovers, siblings off at college, feature grandparents in assisted living settings, or suffering from Alzheimer's--a convenient way to "write" those family members out of the picture. And there are philanthropic uncles (or even parents) who just happen to be on a world cruise, or examining artifacts in Ponga Ponga, thereby leaving the protagonist on their own.

I'm currently trying to determine just who I want to include, or exclude in this new venture. I've already killed off the dad, and put the brother in prison; but this is a ranching story, and removing (either by sickness or accident) too many family members won't seem believable in this contemporary setting.

I always knew I had trouble writing family; many of my books are odysseys about orphans. Fury in Sumner County was an exercise to develop a protagonist with extended family, so my protagonist has in-laws, two brothers, both parents, and lives in an active community. Blood and Bond also has family situations, so maybe I can pull something off in this new book.

Maybe I need to eat more--or at least cook more

I have noticed the use of food in more of the books recently. There mysteries where the protagonist is a chef, or runs a catering business, and one book I read, The Old Buzzard Had It Coming, has several yummy recipes at the end of the book. Preparing food is also a backdrop while protagonist Alafair Tucker, attempts to learn who killed the much-hated Harley Day. Casey's well-constructed mystery is a period piece set in 1912 Oklahoma, and warns at the beginning of the recipe section "These are not health foods". And they sound delicious. The mystery was quite good, too.

All this got me thinking of my own paltry pantry and lack of enthusiasm for stove-borne pursuits, and I wonder if this has affected my writing. I used to have an annual day-long banquet for all my friends and relatives, beginning preparation weeks in advance (feeding more than 100 people some years), and I developed several tasty dishes over the years. But cooking, as with other arts, is stimulated by some sort of approbation: "Gee, Mom, this is really good!" or "Can I get a copy of that recipe?", and so on. For writers, the positive response from editors and readers serves this purpose, and when not forthcoming, it's a bit hard to get enthusiastic about creating new fare.

I'm in that phase of things at the moment. Perhaps I need to host a dinner party, or at least a small luncheon, and maybe that will at least boost my creative efforts.

Not Reading or Writing

I went to the movie today. A very rare occurrence for me. But the documentary "Sweetgrass" was playing at the Myrna (Myrna Loy Theater of the Arts). I had wanted to see this since viewing the trailer several months ago.

It's contemporary history, actually, about the last major sheep herd to be driven into the mountains for summer graze, a practice which, until 2003, had been going on since the nineteenth century. Another "era" gone; I don't lament it, merely note it. It was filmed here in Montana. Spectacular scenery (of course)!

My interest in the documentary was heightened, since I'd just spent four weeks caring for a neighbor's small flock of Shetland sheep--12 adults and five lambs. (Nothing compared to the 500 + in the documentary.) I also live near the large sections where the Sieben ranch winters their sheep.
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