The Book Bin

How to Get Published by 'Island Girl' Lynda Simmons

How to Get Published is a continuing feature at The Book Bin where we ask authors to tell us their publishing stories.  Was it a rocky road or did it come easy for them?  Did they start with an agent and get a NY publisher interested in their book or did they self-publish?  What words of wisdom do they have for all of us who would like to be published one day? 

 Today’s guest is Lynda Simmons, author of the literary fiction novel, Island Girl,  published by Berkley.

I have always told stories. When I was a kid, most adults would have called them lies, but not my parents. They understood that their youngest child had a vivid imagination and they never once tried to squash it with ridicule or punishment. Instead, they explained again and again the difference between imagination and real life until finally I understood: imagination went on paper. Real life just went on.

In school my teachers were equally supportive and I became the kid whose stories were copied and passed around in Composition Class as examples of good writing. It didn’t always make me popular, but it did make me proud and I began to think that maybe I could be a real writer one day.

Naturally, I studied English at university and that almost succeeded in killing my belief that I could write. Still, I kept on scribbling –  horror stories for the most part that were mainstream and plot driven and were never going to be good enough even though they gave me more pleasure than just about anything else I was doing. But it was fifteen years before I finally sent a single one of them out the door.

During those years, I took every writing course available and went to every conference and workshop I could find (they weren’t as plentiful as they are now). And it was finally one instructor who gave me a mental slap and told me to send something out. So I took a chance and sent something out and they took it, which didn’t surprise that same instructor, who then told me that the horror market was soft, and introduced me to the romance market, which was booming in the early nineties.

Turned out there was another conference coming up, a romance conference this time. I already had an idea for a novel (I always have ideas for novels) so I signed on for the conference and made an appointment to pitch my idea to an editor.

Now, I speak quickly at the best of times, but you put me in a room with a timer, tell me I have eight minutes to say my piece, and I will spew words at speeds that could break the sound barrier.

Fortunatly, the editor liked what she was hearing, told the woman with the timer to back off and asked me to go on – a little slower this time. When I was finished, she asked me to send three chapters, which I did. Then she asked me to send the whole manuscript, which I did. Then she asked me to sign a contract, which I happily did!

After that I found an agent, which I should have done earlier, but what did I know? I went on to write six romantic comedies for Harlequin and Kensington, making the jump to mainstream fiction with Getting Rid of Rosie in 2009 and now Island Girl in 2010.

My path to the bookshelves hasn’t always been easy. Any writer will tell you that rejection and disappointment are part of the business. But I’ve learned to pick myself up and try again.
And I definitely don’t leave my stories in the drawer any more.

Eight books and three agents later, I can honestly say that I still love telling stories as much as the little girl who made up tales about bodies in the basement at the dinner table. And I can’t imagine I’ll ever stop!

Lynda Simmons is a writer by day, college instructor by night and a late sleeper on weekends. She grew up in Toronto reading Greek mythology, bringing home stray cats and making up stories about bodies in the basement. From an early age, her family knew she would either end up as a writer or the old lady with a hundred cats. As luck would have it, she married a man with allergies so writing it was.

With two daughters to raise, Lynda and her husband moved into a lovely two storey mortgage in Burlington, a small city on the water just outside Toronto. While the girls are grown and gone, Lynda and her husband are still there. And yes, there is a cat – a beautiful, if spoiled, Birman.

When she’s not writing or teaching, Lynda gives serious thought to using the treadmill in her basement. Fortunately, she’s found that if she waits long enough, something urgent will pop up and save her – like a phone call or an e-mail or a whistling kettle. Or even that cat just looking for a little more attention!

Her latest book is Island Girl.

You can visit her website at www.lyndasimmons.com or connect with her on Twitter at https://twitter.com/#!/LyndaMSimmons and Facebook at www.facebook.com/pages/Lynda-Simmons-Author/149740745067442?.

 

How to Get Published by 'The Tapestry Baby' Carole Waterhouse

How to Get Published is a continuing feature at The Book Bin where we ask authors to tell us their publishing stories.  Was it a rocky road or did it come easy for them?  Did they start with an agent and get a NY publisher interested in their book or did they self-publish?  What words of wisdom do they have for all of us who would like to be published one day? 

 Today’s guest is Carol Waterhouse, author of the literary fiction novel, The Tapestry Baby,  published by Zumaya Embraces.

The Writer and Agent Relationship

By Carole Waterhouse

I attended a writing conference earlier this year that had a session called “Why Writers and Agents don’t meet on Match.com.”  I think I understand.

I published extensively in literary magazines before attempting a novel and even then really questioned my abilities. It took me almost ten years to complete my first novel, Without Wings, largely because I never believed it would be read.  After going through extensive revisions and finally declaring it “finished,” I began looking for literary agents because that’s what a writer is supposed to do.  I was surprised when an agent did pick it up—not just any agent, but one who is very well-known.  In fact, if I had realized how substantial her credentials were, I probably would have been too intimidated to submit my manuscript.

My agent was extremely supportive and walked me through the process very gently.  She set up an auction with twelve major publishers she thought would be interested in my work and created enough buzz that a thirteenth publisher contacted her.   Needless to say, for a month leading up to the auction, I could focus on little else. I had a distinct feeling that my life was about to change.  Finally, the day came.  I kept waiting for a phone call, continuously checked my e-mail.  Then late in the day, the call came, but not the one I had expected.  My agent regretfully told me that no one had bid on my work.

Throughout the phone call, however, she was very supportive and encouraging and explained that the first novel a writer has published often isn’t the first one they’ve written.  She also gave me a list of all the positive comments the publishers she had talked to made about my writing, all suggesting that it wasn’t this one, but maybe the next. She suggested writing another one and said once it was published, it may be possible to generate interest in the one everyone had passed on.

Instead of being defeated by this series of events, I was energized. If someone this well-known was taking an interest in my writing and thought it had potential, maybe it was time to start believing in myself.  I completed the next book in a year, in a whirl of energy I had never experienced before.  Everything I did, every encounter I had with people, every conversation I overheard seemed to fill me with inspiration.  After completing a draft and then going through extensive revisions once more, I felt it was ready and I sent The Tapestry Baby off to my agent.  I waited for her response.  And waited.  And waited.   After several months, I received an e-mail saying that I was being dropped as a client.  The book, she said, was intelligent and creative and completely original—and therefore, she commented, probably unmarketable in today’s publishing environment. 

I didn’t know what to do with that assessment.  I shook me completely.  All my life I’ve tried to be creative and unique and to write something different from everyone else.  I always thought that was my job as a writer. I tried to come up with ideas that were less original for my next work, but simply couldn’t stick to them.  I’d start projects and  end them in a matter of weeks.  In the meantime,  I began marketing my original novel on my own, to small presses, and eventually it was published.  I looked for other agents to represent  The Tapestry Baby, but kept receiving the same assessment.  One agent wanted to take it on, but needed approval from another in her firm. She told me the colleague she consulted described the book as a 350-page riddle.  She agreed with the assessment, but in her mind, that was good thing.  In his, it wasn’t.  Eventually I decided to side-step agents and  began marketing The Tapestry Baby on my own and was delighted when Zumaya picked it up.  Smaller publishers, I’m finding, can simply take chances on work they like that larger ones can’t.  And that idea for a new novel came when I least expected it, one that is unique enough that I can fully embrace. I’ve already completed the first draft.

Even though it didn’t work out quite the way I hoped, I’m still very grateful for the time that initial agent took to work with me.  While she shook my confidence in the end, she was the one who had given it to me in the first place, and ultimately her initial belief in me is what gave me the confidence to go on.  If there ever were a literary version of match.com and I found a listing for my former agent, I would treat it as I would any satisfying relationship that ultimately just didn’t work out.  I would look at her listing with fond memories, experience a small amount of regret, and then peacefully move on.   

A creative writing professor at California University of Pennsylvania, Carole Waterhouse is the author of two novels, The Tapestry Baby and Without Wings, and a collection of short stories, The Paradise Ranch.

Her fiction has appeared in Arnazella, Artful Dodge, Baybury Review, Ceilidh, Eureka Literary Magazine, Forum, Half Tones to Jubilee, Massachusetts Review, Minnetonka Review, Oracle: The Brewton-Parker College Review, Parting Gifts, Pointed Circle, Potpourri, Seems, Spout, The Armchair Aesthete, The Griffin, The Styles, Tucumari Literary Review, Turnrow, and X-Connect.

A previous newspaper reporter, she has published essays in an anthology, Horse Crazy: Women and the Horses They Love, and Equus Spirit Magazine. Her book reviews have appeared in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Pittsburgh Press, and The New York Times Book Review.

Her latest novel is The Tapestry Baby, a novel depicting a mother who believes her child is born to fulfill some special destiny and discovers her life is intertwined with six other people, raising the question of whether any of us really control our own decisions, and through the process learns that greatness can be defined in the simplest of gestures.

You can visit Carole’s website at www.Carolewaterhouse.com.

 

How to Get Published by 'The Tapestry Baby' Carole Waterhouse

How to Get Published is a continuing feature at The Book Bin where we ask authors to tell us their publishing stories.  Was it a rocky road or did it come easy for them?  Did they start with an agent and get a NY publisher interested in their book or did they self-publish?  What words of wisdom do they have for all of us who would like to be published one day? 

Today’s guest is Carol Waterhouse, author of the literary fiction novel, The Tapestry Baby, published by Zumaya Embraces.

The Writer and Agent Relationship

By Carole Waterhouse

I attended a writing conference earlier this year that had a session called “Why Writers and Agents don’t meet on Match.com.”  I think I understand.

I published extensively in literary magazines before attempting a novel and even then really questioned my abilities. It took me almost ten years to complete my first novel, Without Wings, largely because I never believed it would be read.  After going through extensive revisions and finally declaring it “finished,” I began looking for literary agents because that’s what a writer is supposed to do.  I was surprised when an agent did pick it up—not just any agent, but one who is very well-known.  In fact, if I had realized how substantial her credentials were, I probably would have been too intimidated to submit my manuscript.

My agent was extremely supportive and walked me through the process very gently.  She set up an auction with twelve major publishers she thought would be interested in my work and created enough buzz that a thirteenth publisher contacted her.   Needless to say, for a month leading up to the auction, I could focus on little else. I had a distinct feeling that my life was about to change.  Finally, the day came.  I kept waiting for a phone call, continuously checked my e-mail.  Then late in the day, the call came, but not the one I had expected.  My agent regretfully told me that no one had bid on my work.

Throughout the phone call, however, she was very supportive and encouraging and explained that the first novel a writer has published often isn’t the first one they’ve written.  She also gave me a list of all the positive comments the publishers she had talked to made about my writing, all suggesting that it wasn’t this one, but maybe the next. She suggested writing another one and said once it was published, it may be possible to generate interest in the one everyone had passed on.

Instead of being defeated by this series of events, I was energized. If someone this well-known was taking an interest in my writing and thought it had potential, maybe it was time to start believing in myself.  I completed the next book in a year, in a whirl of energy I had never experienced before.  Everything I did, every encounter I had with people, every conversation I overheard seemed to fill me with inspiration.  After completing a draft and then going through extensive revisions once more, I felt it was ready and I sent The Tapestry Baby off to my agent.  I waited for her response.  And waited.  And waited.   After several months, I received an e-mail saying that I was being dropped as a client.  The book, she said, was intelligent and creative and completely original—and therefore, she commented, probably unmarketable in today’s publishing environment. 

I didn’t know what to do with that assessment.  I shook me completely.  All my life I’ve tried to be creative and unique and to write something different from everyone else.  I always thought that was my job as a writer. I tried to come up with ideas that were less original for my next work, but simply couldn’t stick to them.  I’d start projects and  end them in a matter of weeks.  In the meantime,  I began marketing my original novel on my own, to small presses, and eventually it was published.  I looked for other agents to represent  The Tapestry Baby, but kept receiving the same assessment.  One agent wanted to take it on, but needed approval from another in her firm. She told me the colleague she consulted described the book as a 350-page riddle.  She agreed with the assessment, but in her mind, that was good thing.  In his, it wasn’t.  Eventually I decided to side-step agents and  began marketing The Tapestry Baby on my own and was delighted when Zumaya picked it up.  Smaller publishers, I’m finding, can simply take chances on work they like that larger ones can’t.  And that idea for a new novel came when I least expected it, one that is unique enough that I can fully embrace. I’ve already completed the first draft.

Even though it didn’t work out quite the way I hoped, I’m still very grateful for the time that initial agent took to work with me.  While she shook my confidence in the end, she was the one who had given it to me in the first place, and ultimately her initial belief in me is what gave me the confidence to go on.  If there ever were a literary version of match.com and I found a listing for my former agent, I would treat it as I would any satisfying relationship that ultimately just didn’t work out.  I would look at her listing with fond memories, experience a small amount of regret, and then peacefully move on.   

A creative writing professor at California University of Pennsylvania, Carole Waterhouse is the author of two novels, The Tapestry Baby and Without Wings, and a collection of short stories, The Paradise Ranch.

Her fiction has appeared in Arnazella, Artful Dodge, Baybury Review, Ceilidh, Eureka Literary Magazine, Forum, Half Tones to Jubilee, Massachusetts Review, Minnetonka Review, Oracle: The Brewton-Parker College Review, Parting Gifts, Pointed Circle, Potpourri, Seems, Spout, The Armchair Aesthete, The Griffin, The Styles, Tucumari Literary Review, Turnrow, and X-Connect.

A previous newspaper reporter, she has published essays in an anthology, Horse Crazy: Women and the Horses They Love, and Equus Spirit Magazine. Her book reviews have appeared in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Pittsburgh Press, and The New York Times Book Review.

Her latest novel is The Tapestry Baby, a novel depicting a mother who believes her child is born to fulfill some special destiny and discovers her life is intertwined with six other people, raising the question of whether any of us really control our own decisions, and through the process learns that greatness can be defined in the simplest of gestures.

You can visit Carole’s website at www.Carolewaterhouse.com.

 

How to Get Published by Michael Scott Miller

How to Get Published is a continuing feature at The Book Bin where we ask authors to tell us their publishing stories.  Was it a rocky road or did it come easy for them?  Did they start with an agent and get a NY publisher interested in their book or did they self-publish?  What words of wisdom do they have for all of us who would like to be published one day? 

Today’s guest is Michael Scott Miller, author of the contemporary fiction novel, Ladies and Gentlemen: The Redeemers, published by Kindle Direct Publishing.

How the eBook Revolution Saved my Writing Career

By Michael Scott Miller

The most difficult question I get asked as an author is how long it took me to write Ladies and Gentlemen…The Redeemers.  The honest answer is that I don’t know.  I do know that I began writing it ten years ago, long enough that before publishing the final version, I had to go back and change all the comically dated references from audio cassettes to CD’s.  But the ten years is only elapsed time, not active time.  Perhaps the best way to answer this question is to tell the story in chapters.

Chapter 1:  Writing the “final draft” (for the first time J)

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”  With this proverb in mind, I committed to myself that I would wake up early and before my day job began, write one page each day.  It might take awhile, I knew, but by definition, every page I wrote, even every word, brought me closer to finished.  No outline.  No timeline.  Just an idea of the vessel I would use to carry the story and the ending.

It wasn’t a bad idea, and in fact, I’m not sure I could have pulled it off any other way.  Most of the time, the page per day method worked.  Other times, I would have rushes of ideas, of scenes that I couldn’t wait to get onto paper.  Other times, though, it meant long stretches of nothing.  I refuse to call it writer’s block since that label seems so trite and I really feel that it was more that I needed to stop and muse over the next direction the story would take than any inability to write.  Sometimes it would only be a day or two.  Sometimes it would be months.  But finally, after three years, I wrote that last word, ending the novel just as I had imagined it.

Chapter 2:  Literary Agents – Round 1

“Thank you for your submission, but we are not interested.  Peace.”  That was the entirety of one of my rejection letters that came from a literary agency that thought it was really cool to write their letter using an old fashioned typewriter.  I appreciated that they responded, but I can’t say they were as cool as they thought they were.  This was back in 2006, when kindle was something you did to a fire.  There was only one direction to go with a book, and that was to literary agents.  So I spent some time writing synopses and query letters and sending them, along with sample chapters, by snail mail to these agents.  Do you have any idea how difficult it is to write a one or two page synopsis of a nearly three hundred page book?  Especially for a character driven story.  I found it impossible to capture the depth of the characters in the synopsis.  But I found it easy to build up a nice collection of rejection letters.

Chapter 3:  Professional Editing

It eventually dawned on me that my book needed professional editing before I sent any more query letters, synopses, and sample chapters.  After some research, I landed at the virtual doorstep of Editorial Alchemy, run by Carol Gaskin.  Carol rocks.  In addition to writing a twenty page detailed critique of the book and editing every single page, she taught me how to establish point of view, which was inconsistent at best  in my first pass at the novel.  Carol also deftly added a word here or a phrase there to make scenes work.  She recommended that I allow her editing and comments to marinade for a few months before attempting to work with them and I did just that.  Plus another two years.

Chapter 4:  The Free Novel

Now it’s 2010.  I had brushed off the book’s digital dust and spent the past year incorporating virtually all of Carol’s edits and suggestions into the novel.  The combination of the internet and e-readers has now made it possible for a completely unknown novelist like me to release his work into the wild.  And that’s what I did.  For free.  The only people who knew I had even written a book were my immediate family and while their reviews were good, they were hardly objective.  I needed to know what detached readers thought.  Plus, I figured that if I could get enough reviews and momentum, I could get the attention of the agents.

I posted the book on more than twenty websites for readers to download free of charge including Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo.  The downloads came fast and furious.  Then it happened.  I was sitting at Tinto, a restaurant in Philadelphia, when I looked at my Blackberry and saw a notification that someone had posted a comment on my book’s website.  My heart raced as I clicked through and began to read.  “This is the most entertaining story I've read in a long time,” the review from Ginger C began.  I was overwhelmed.  Someone I didn’t know read my book.  And she loved it!

Chapter 5:  Literary Agents – TKO in Round 2

The average literary agent gets 100-300 queries per week.  That’s a statistic that I didn’t know when I set out once again to get their attention.

Ginger’s review ended up being the first of many wonderful reviews and I had now amassed a nice collection of positive reviews.  I had 4-star or 5-star ratings at all the major book sites.  How could I miss now?  How many people could say their books have been market tested when they reach out to agents?  I painstakingly researched agents, customized query letters, hyped the reviews the book had received, and sent the queries, this time by email.

 

What I learned this time is that a) agents receive a ridiculous number of queries now that email has become an accepted method of delivery, b) agents prefer books that are in the genre(s) of the moment, and c) agents take on very few new projects at a time.

I know that many successful authors tell stories of hundreds of rejections before getting their break, but after about forty of these emails, I had had enough.  The odds just seemed too long and too much was out of my control.  Some agents responded politely, some indicated they would only respond if interested, and one agent took only four minutes to reject my query.  Seriously.

Chapter 6:  A Whole New World

Amanda Hocking, J.A. Konrath, John Locke.  I discovered a world that I didn’t realize existed.  Indie authors were selling their ebooks for as little as $0.99 and with incredible success.  Some had become millionaires doing it.  I began reading everything I could.  All of Amanda Hocking’s blog posts over more than a year.  All the advice and insight that J.A. Konrath writes on his must-read blog, A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing.  John Locke’s story of how he migrated from the business world to the writing world, just as I was attempting to do.

Social networking.  I began reading and participating on book forums like Kindle Boards, Nookboards, BestsellerBound, even Twitter.  I learned there was a whole ecosystem out there -- authors supporting authors, sharing advice, introducing each other to new opportunities, critiquing one another’s work.  It was incredible.   One story sums up the entire experience.  I was struggling with my cover art and posted a plea for feedback on Kindle Boards.  Within minutes, I had a host of suggestions from other authors and readers.  Minutes later, another author posted his vision of my cover with re-worked colors and fonts.  He had taken the time to download my image and add his artistic sense to it.  People commented.  Then another author made further modifications and posted it.  Before long, I had my new and improved cover.  Now, I give back the same way.  Just the other day, an author was struggling with her back cover blurb.  So I re-wrote it for her.

Chapter 7:  Virtual Book Tour

Present day.  The book world has evolved.  The bookstore to bookstore tours of old have transformed into virtual tours.  Instead of visiting bookstores, the author visits book blogs.  I am in the middle of my first ever virtual book tour and it has been a blast --- book reviews, interviews, guest blogs.  I have met so many great people and had a chance to interact with my audience.  It’s a great time to be an indie author.

Michael Scott Miller works with numbers by day in the business world and with words by night.  He began writing shortly after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania and has had his work published in the Welcomat (now Philadelphia Weekly) and wrote music reviews for the Wharton Journal while his wife was getting her degree there.

Miller’s debut novel, Ladies and Gentlemen…The Redeemers, has been downloaded more than ten thousand times and has received tremendously positive reader feedback, earning 4-star to 5-star ratings at Amazon, barnesandnoble.com, Smashwords, and Kobo.  The complete set of reader reviews and comments can be accessed at http://feeds.rapidfeeds.com/40309/ .

Miller grew up in Cherry Hill, New Jersey and now lives in Lafayette Hill, Pennsylvania with his wife and three children.

You can visit Michael Scott Miller’s website at www.ladiesandgentlementheredeemers.com or connect with him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/MichaelScMiller or Facebook at www.facebook.com/home.php#!/profile.php?id=1206880325.

 

How to Get Published by 'Eyewall' Buzz Bernard

How to Get Published is a continuing feature at The Book Bin where we ask authors to tell us their publishing stories.  Was it a rocky road or did it come easy for them?  Did they start with an agent and get a NY publisher interested in their book or did they self-publish?  What words of wisdom do they have for all of us who would like to be published one day? 

Today’s guest is Buzz Bernard, author of the suspense thriller novel, Eyewall.

If someone had told me when I began my novel-writing efforts that it was going to take--with absolutely certainty--10 years and 4 manuscripts before I got professionally published, I probably would have spent my time improving my golf game instead.  Fortunately, no one told me that; I was informed only that it was going to be a tough journey--one that not many writers would complete. 

I began Eyewall, my fourth manuscript, in 2007.  I fired off my first round of query letters in 2008.  Result: 50 rejections and no requests for a full manuscript.  It was obvious a rewrite was in order.  After grinding that out, I launched a second salvo of queries in 2010.  Result: 62 rejections, but also seven requests for a full.  So, some improvement, but no cigar.

And I'll have to admit that after over one-hundred "thanks, but no thanks" I was ready to run up the white flag.  So many golf balls to hit, so little time.  But, one last try; a long shot.  There was a small boutique agency in Georgia whose president I had become friends with over the course of several years while attending the annual Southeastern Writers Association workshops. The agency didn't handle thrillers, however, which Eyewall was, so I never queried them.  Then I discovered a "loophole."  The agency seemed interested in books with a regional bent, so I could certainly make that argument for Eyewall, set as it was on the Georgia coast.

I emailed the president a query.  She said she was no longer taking on new clients, but would pass the query (and first three chapters) to her associate.  A day later the associate asked for the full manuscript.  I think she read it in one sitting.  Three days later I was offered a contract.

Within a month, the agent, Jeanie Pantelakis of Sullivan Maxx, had a verbal commitment from a publisher, BelleBooks, and a month after that, a signed contract.  BelleBooks even agreed to move Eyewall up in its publication schedule.  The novel will be released in May.  By the way, to get a book published within a year after signing a contract is pretty remarkable.  The joys of a small publisher!

 Of course, I don't get out on the links often now, but at least all the little animals in the woods are safer.

H. W.  “Buzz” Bernard is the author of five nonfiction books on weather and climate.  Eyewall is his first novel.  He’s won numerous awards over the past decade as both a fiction and nonfiction writer.

Buzz is a veteran meteorologist having spent 13 years as a senior meteorologist with The Weather Channel, and 33 years as a weather officer in the U. S. Air Force.

His background as a meteorologist informs Eyewall.  He’s had first-hand experience with hurricanes, having penetrated the eyewall of Hurricane Felix in 1995 with the Air Force Reserve Hurricane Hunters.   The mission he went on wasn’t nearly as exciting--or as terrifying--as the one described in Eyewall, but he did get an up-close and personal look at how the job is done.  At The Weather Channel, he worked closely with some of the most highly regarded hurricane forecasters in the business.

                                                                                 

Besides his trip with the Hurricane Hunters, he’s flown air drops over the Arctic Ocean and Turkey, and was a weather officer aboard a Tactical Air Command airborne command post (C-135).  Additionally, he’s provided field support to forest fire fighting operations in the Pacific Northwest, spent a summer working on Alaska’s arctic slope and served two tours in Vietnam.  Various other jobs, both civilian and military, took him to Germany, Saudi Arabia and Panama.

 

He’s a native Oregonian and attended the University of Washington in Seattle where he earned a degree in atmospheric science and also studied creative writing.

 

After leaving active duty with the Air Force, he spent twenty years in New England, but now lives in The New South.  Along with his wife, Christina, he calls Roswell, Georgia, near Atlanta, home.

 

You can visit his website at www.buzzbernard.com.

 

How to Get Published by 'Too Jewish' Patty Friedmann

How to Get Published is a continuing feature at The Book Bin where we ask authors to tell us their publishing stories.  Was it a rocky road or did it come easy for them?  Did they start with an agent and get a NY publisher interested in their book or did they self-publish?  What words of wisdom do they have for all of us who would like to be published one day? 

Today’s guest is Patty Friedmann, author of the literary fiction novel, Too Jewish.

I suffer from a disease: I'm a congenital New Orleans writer. I was publishing novels about my home for many years before Katrina laid waste to my city and me, and, well, I'd like to say I was doing the same afterward.

 But it wasn't so simple. 

The carpetbaggers came to town and wrote up a storm, if you'll excuse the expression, but for someone like me, whose stock in trade was the nuances of the humor and social fabric of this strange and wondrous city, I was stymied. So when Julie Smith asked me to write a short story for a collection called New Orleans Noir, I said, "Sure." But I was a literary writer; what did I know of the genre? Write about the darkest part of life in New Orleans that you've ever known, she said. No problem. I'll write about high school!

Forget murder and mayhem and dark streets. My story about mean girls was surely the most evil one in the book. And when Julie, a writer also silenced by the storm, decided to start her own e-publishing company, she came to me first and asked me to expand that story into a novel we titled Too Jewish. The story ends with the tragedy that befalls the protagonist's father. Of course he's also my father, who was a Holocaust survivor who didn't fit into New Orleans any better than I did. Too Jewish is the back story of the short, dark tale in that collection, and as a new publisher Julie sensed it needed to be told.

Patty Friedmann’s two latest books are a YA novel called Taken Away [TSP 2010] and a literary e-novel titled Too Jewish [booksBnimble 2010]. (www.pattyfriedmann.com) She also is the author of six darkly comic literary novels set in New Orleans: The Exact Image of Mother [Viking Penguin 1991]; Eleanor Rushing [1998], Odds [2000], Secondhand Smoke [2002], Side Effects [2006], and A Little Bit Ruined [2007] [all hardback and paperback from Counterpoint except paper edition of Secondhand Smoke from Berkley Penguin]; as well as the humor book Too Smart to Be Rich [New Chapter Press 1988]. Her novels have been chosen as Discover Great New Writers, Original Voices, and Book Sense 76 selections, and her humor book was syndicated by the New York Times. She has published reviews, essays, and short stories in Publishers Weekly, Newsweek, Oxford American, Speakeasy, Horn Gallery, Short Story, LA LIT, Brightleaf, New Orleans Review, and The Times-Picayune and in anthologies The Great New American Writers Cookbook, Above Ground, Christmas Stories from Louisiana, My New Orleans, New Orleans Noir, and Life in the Wake. Her stage pieces have been part of Native Tongues.

In a special 2009 edition, Oxford American listed Secondhand Smoke with 29 titles that included Gone with the Wind, Deliverance, and A Lesson Before Dying as the greatest Underrated Southern Books. With slight interruptions for education and natural disasters, she always has lived in New Orleans.

 

You can visit her website at www.pattyfriedmann.com, her blog at www.pattyfriedmann.typepad.com  or friend her at her Facebook at www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=527384281. 

 

 

 

Book Excerpt: The Katyn Order

In an excerpt from his new book,  The Katyn Order (McBooks Press May 2011), Douglas Jacobson gives us the nitty gritty view of the Resistance fighters who rise up against their Nazi occupiers. The Katyn Order is an actual historical document – an order – signed by Josef Stalin and every member of the Soviet Politburo in 1940 authorizing the execution of more than twenty thousand Polish army officers, doctors, teachers, and civic leaders. The executions were carried out in secret by the Soviet NKVD in four locations in Russia, including the Katyn Forest near Smolensk. The Soviet Union denied this atrocity for more than fifty years until 1992 when the President of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, made the Katyn Order public.

* * *

Natalia bent down to see out the window as they crept slowly into the station, passing a line of grim-faced German SS troopers who stood on the platform clutching sub-machine guns. When the train finally shuddered to a halt with a blast of venting steam, Natalia jumped to the platform, blinking her eyes against the sting of smoke and ashes. As she pulled out the step to assist the departing passengers, she heard a clatter of hobnail boots pounding down the wooden platform. A guttural voice barked in German, “Raus! Raus! Everyone out!”

As the SS officer approached her, Natalia adjusted her blue railway conductor’s cap and shouted to be heard over the noise, “This train is continuing on to—”

The officer jabbed his nightstick into her ribs. “Everyone off! Schnell! Mach schnell!”  Then he marched on ahead, banging against every window, waving his hand, “Raus! Raus!”

Instantly it was chaos: bewildered people stumbling off the train and scurrying along the platform, dragging luggage and children behind them, SS troopers shouting, dogs barking, the air thick with smoke and haze. Natalia backed up against the brick wall of the station and watched for a moment, keeping her eye on the SS officer, who was trotting further up the train, banging on windows, jerking people out of the cars and onto the platform. She removed her conductor’s cap, stuffed it into the black bag clipped to her belt and stepped into the flow of departing passengers.

* * *

Douglas W. Jacobson is an engineer, business owner and World War Two history enthusiast. Doug has traveled extensively in Europe researching stories of the courage of common people caught up in extraordinary circumstances. His debut novel, Night of Flames: A Novel of World War Two was published in 2007 by McBooks Press, and was released in paperback in 2008. Night of Flames won the “2007 Outstanding Achievement Award” from the Wisconsin Library association. Doug writes a monthly column on Poland’s contribution during WW2, has published articles on Belgium’s WW2 escape organization, the Comet Line and other European resistance organizations. Doug’s second historical novel, The Katyn Order, which will be released in May, 2011, focuses on one of history’s most notorious war crimes, the Katyn massacre.

You can visit his website at www.douglaswjacobson.com.