Lloyd G. Francis's Blog, page 4

From Rum To Roots

With only ten weeks before the novel From Rum to Roots is available for sale, I am restarting my blog to keep my readers abreast of the latest novel-related news. On August 31, 2010 I made a blog post that became my last here at RumtoRoots.com. The blog crashed and despite my having an audience that was following me, I decided to stop blogging and to concentrate my attention on the manuscript.

I spent three years working closely with an editor. Ricky Weisbroth was the best thing that happened to me in my writing career. She coached me on how to approach the character development, plot, and the various conflicts that I had to create. I learned through her that seizing the moment with words required an attention that was more technical than the awareness I had developed as a photojournalist. There is a sensation that accompanies the photojournalist that helps a writer to render a scene more forcefully. But the technical demands: sentence construction, spelling, grammar, and other language skills that demand a totally different style of attention.

When I started to write the book on May 7, 2007, I literally finished the manuscript in six months. I rewrote a few things and then went to the San Francisco Writers Conference with big dreams… I pitched the story to a few agents and received an enthusiastic response. Several asked me to send them the first 50 pages, and a few even asked me for three chapters.

Just a little brush up, I said to myself as I walked into Ricky’s studio…. This is going to take a couple weeks….

Four years passed. I was writing every day.

She forced me to work harder than I ever thought possible, and by submitting to relentless criticism I gradually learned how to write a novel by rewriting From Rum to Roots. In January 2011, after rewriting the book several times with my primary editor, Ricky Weisbroth, I brought a copy to Alan Rinzler.

Alan wasted no time bursting the bubble I came in on. He loved the idea, liked the writing, saying Ricky had done an outstanding job. But he hated the last third of the manuscript. He refused to edit it. “It’s not ready,” he said. “The ending sucks, I hate it.”

He laughed at me when I was foolish enough to ask him how he’d end the book.

“No idea how you end it,” came his answer. “It’s your story.”

I remembered Ricky suggesting that the plot could use more development but I chose not to listen. Four years had made me bullheaded. Chastened, I retired to my office in the Haight and started to read the manuscript. I began to play with ideas. Possibilities presented themselves. I started to write, tenatative at first, but as time passed my prose became bolder. A year later I returned to Rinzler who finally agreed to edit my book. I went home and spent another year revising and rewriting. Then my Mother-in-law read it … and LOVED it. Patricia Henigman proceeded to insist on proofreading it with her critical eye searching for spaces, typo’s and other annoying details that can get in the way of enjoying a book. I proceeded to go to New York.

That’s when I entered the world of “MARKETING.” More on that experience in the next post.

The final result will soon be in your hands, July 4, 2013. I plan to have a drink to celebrate.

ON TWITTER LOOK FOR THE HASHTAG: #RUMTOROOTS

The plot point

If life is art then this is a plot point in the story of my life. I sit here waiting for word about my manuscript while he days drag by. With my blog having exploded, leaving http://www.rumtoroots.com as a broken link, I concentrated on revising the novel. After several months, I am coming out once again. The book is almost finished and it is truly time to move to the next phase.

When I take a moment to ponder the past four years, I see that I have lived in a world populated by characters from my imagination, doing imaginary things in a universe that resembles our own, and yet, doesn’t exist. No wonder the feeling of loneliness arises. Linton, Daisy, and all the rest of them are animated for now. They come alive when I awaken in the morning, and sit down at my desk. But one day soon, they will be like insects suspended in a drop of amber, frozen in a transparent orb, to be observed, and admired. Or so I hope.

Reluctantly I have brought myself to start writing my next novel. All I’m willing to say about it is that it too is a story about both Jamaica and the United States, but in more recent times.

So I am glad to be back blogging once more.

Indeed where have I been?

There’s an essay of T. S. Eliot’s in which he praises the disciplines of writing, claiming that if one is forced to write within a certain framework, the imagination is taxed to its utmost and will produce its richest ideas.

quote from Joseph Heller

I’ve been working revising the novel. The only comfort I have found is a recent post at The Paris Review about Erica Heller’s book about her father, the author of Catch 22, Joseph Heller. It took him ten years to write that book, his first novel.

Writing this book is probably the equivalent to a very difficult pregnancy that causes me to interrupt my life in the interests of the one living inside me. I’m trying to nurture it to maturity. But it’s hard. I’ve never done this before, and like Heller, I am very slow, very dense, very methodical. This revision process has taken far longer than it took for me to write the first draft.

So now the book is in the hands of my editor. And I’m waiting. Waiting. Waiting….

Then I read Erica who writes in the Paris Review blog:

When Catch was finally taking off, about a year after publication, my parents, who had now moved us to a much larger, far grander apartment, would often jump into a cab late at night and ride around to the city’s leading bookstores in order to see the jaunty riot of red, white, and blue and the crooked little man the covers of �the book,� piled up in towers and pyramids, stacked in so many store windows. Was anything ever again as much fun, I wonder, for either of them?

I’m sure that was a blast after ten years of searching for the right words, sentences, and paragraphs…. I cannot wait, even if I will be reduced to looking at a computer screen instead of a store window….

One of the reasons I stopped blogging is that I began to wonder about using my energy up writing this rather than spending time with the characters in my book. I’m pouring my heart into this. Be patient. Thanks…..

Where Have I Been?

Why revising of course! In January I had a major critique of the novel and received several helpful suggestions. Between February and June I have been pondering what I have learned, not only about the book, but about myself. More than anything else this has been an intense personal journey that has demanded that I sacrifice some ideas and conclusions that are very dear to me.

But that sacrifice liberated my characters and once again they became deeper and even more alive in a plot that never ceases to surprise me. Writing a novel is like skydiving at night in a fogbank. Disorienting, frightening, provoking panic with every change, the process of revision is not for the faint of heart. It’s what seperates the writer from success. Between 2007 and 2011 I struggled to assemble the parts for this tale. Only now is it apparent that I have all the neccessary parts. It is in the assembly and wiring that the device will animate itself.

I have had a wonderful summer with my family, traveling to Jamaica and spending time with Judith, Pauline, Diann, Miss Martha, Robbie and Ann in Roaring River, a small village near Petersfield 45 minutes from Negril. I will be back in Jamaica in October.

Now as the school year approaches, (San Francisco Unified begins on the 15 of August) we are gearing up for the academic challenges ahead. I am trying to work as hard as I can for my wife helps me out in many ways in revising the book. I do bounce ideas off her and she is amazing in her talent and uncanny ability to understand human nature. In many ways, she is my key to understanding.

3-12-2011

Quitting.

An impulse.

But not today.

Simple.

I keep moving.

RIP 2-13-1924

For you.

lgf