KICK ME

I wrote romance for thirteen years, but it wasn’t until I changed my name to Frasier and started writing suspense that the snickers stopped. Really. The change was night and day. From ridicule to respect. Romance-friendly venues and bookstores were the only places a romance writer could go and not be treated poorly. After thirteen years of being looked down on, it was refreshing to walk away from that and start over. I remember taking ARCs of Hush (Frasier) to bookstores expecting the same old reaction. But no, I was treated as a legitimate writer! It was like finding and removing the kick-me sign from my back. So I’m experiencing anxiety over returning to the Weir name because it rarely elicited a positive response outside the romance world. I’m reluctant to let go of the Frasier name because I associate it with validation. So weird. Both are the same person, and yet they don’t feel the same at all, but I think that’s more about public perception of the two names rather than anything internal.

Of course it makes sense to use my real name, and even though The Orchard is considered literary memoir, I drew from those old romance roots when writing it. It's kind of a twisted romance.

I've seen a mockup cover of The Orchard and I hope to have the final version to show off soon!

STOP AND SMELL THE ROSE-COLORED GOGGLES

It’s all been said before. A hundred times, a thousand times, and yet my mind circles back to the same topics, the same concerns, the same thoughts. I worry that writers are putting the cart before the horse. I worry that they aren’t spending enough time on the craft of writing. I’m guilty. When I first started blogging in about 2003ish, my writing time dropped to almost zero. I often wonder if I would have written my first book if the Internet had existed back then, but that’s another topic for maybe another day or never.

Writing is all about time.

There are no shortcuts.

I’ve been writing for thirty years (what?), and I still have so much to learn. You never get there, you never reach that place where you can sit back and say this is how it’s done, now I know and I can go forward and do it. The uncertainties are always there. You do this, then you close your eyes and open them again to see how it looks. You rearrange. You toss out, and start over. (But too much tossing out is another form of procrastination. Anything can be fixed.)

Four years. That’s what I think it takes. Four years of writing every day, submitting, getting feedback, revising, rewriting, starting a new project, putting an old one under the bed, pulling it out again, seeing the mistakes you made when you were young and foolish three months ago.

It’s hell. Especially for a lazy person like me.

A bachelor’s degree takes four years. And then you might go on to get your masters and a Ph.D.

Time. You have to invest the time. There are no shortcuts.


“I just lost my job and need to learn how to write a book fast. Where do I begin? I need to start making money in a couple of months.”

Yes, I get emails like this. But I’m not talking about this person.

And yet it is about him, because this is about time. The more time you spend learning the craft of writing, the better your writing will be. The more time you spend writing that book, the better it will be. As simple as that.

I grew up in the world of romance writing. In the eighties and nineties there was a real push by editors, agents, and writers to get books out as quickly as possible. Publishing houses noticed the writers with the biggest readerships were also the writers with the most books published in a year. So it turned into quantity over quality. Some writers could do both, but not many. We were always thinking about the next book before we even finished the current project. We didn’t have the luxury of time.

It took me a while to get myself out of that mindset, and I think a lot of genre writers are still struggling to step back and give themselves permission to make their current project the best it can be. We didn’t grow up like that. We wrote it in a few months and we mailed it in, very often with no feedback from anyone. Maybe take a day off before jumping into the next book, always that need to hurry, hurry, hurry.

Part of it is just age. I can’t write with that kind of intensity and fervor and drive anymore. I want to enjoy writing. I want to savor it. And sometimes I do.

FORGET ME NOT

Here's a weird thing I've come across a few times when writing memoir.

I have a memory that I feel must be inaccurate.

Example:

I'm currently writing a wedding scene. I feel my brother must have been there, but I have absolutely no memory of his being there. Zero. So my feeling is to write the scene without him. This is my memory, after all. But it's highly possible he was there. I could ask him. And he might confirm that he was there, but would that matter? When I have no memory of his being there? Is memoir all about writing it the way you remember it? I think it is.

IT'S WHAT'S INSIDE THAT COUNTS

I'm posting about memoir writing, but most of what I say can be applied to fiction. The one thing I really noticed about memoir is that much of it is internal. You write the scene, then you DIG DIG DIG. DEEP. You find yourself in that scene, and you react and analyze the events that unfold. So, on the surface, you might have a scene that's not that exciting -- until you put yourself in it, and by that I mean let us know what you think about the events. Let us feel the emotion of the scene. And yes, this applies to fiction. This seems to be one of the last things writers learn to do: let their characters process the event, feel the event. And yet this is an important layer when you're creating a piece of art. Emotion.

ON THE WAY TO MEMOIR

When I first started writing fiction I didn’t know any other writers and I didn’t know of any writers groups or organizations. I’d never taken a creative writing class, and I’d never read a book about writing. As far as education went, I managed to finish high school. That was it. So I pretty much taught myself to write. Well, I’m sure all of the books I’d read up until that point taught me to write. What I did was I wrote until something looked right and felt right. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I seemed to have some instinct about the process. But it involved a lot of trial and error. Write something, come back, throw it out or pat myself on the back. Repeat. Writing the memoir reminded me of those early days of writing, because once again I had to teach myself something completely new and it took a lot of trial and error.

I’m not advising this route. If I’d gone to college, if I’d taken writing classes, I would have gotten from there to hear a helluva lot faster. But I do think my stumbling around in the dark may have helped in some odd way. Like maybe helped me find my own voice. Or not. I’m now working on a second memoir, and this second time around is a lot easier because I’ve learned some basics.

What I learned when writing memoir #1:

Don’t throw everything in the pot. I thought I needed to tell everything because I was writing nonfiction. No. It’s okay to leave things out even when dealing with a single event. In fact, it’s often necessary. This isn’t an autobiography, it’s a memoir. A slice of life. If something doesn’t fit the theme and the trajectory, it doesn’t belong.

It’s okay to focus on one or two emotions. Events have a lot of moods and emotions to them, and at first I tried to tell them all. This diluted the story. I finally came to realize that I had to focus on one or two things and forget the rest.

Focus on a few character traits. Just like fiction, you want to define your characters clearly, and if you focus on too many conflicting traits it confuses the reader. Most people are bad and good, but it’s very hard to portray that kind of character depth. I would run into situations and scenes where a person might be an asshole one day and an angel the next. Or even an asshole and angel in the same scene. People are like that. But when writing a condensed version of an event, I had to decide which part of that person I wanted to portray in that particular scene. Hero or coward, angel or devil.

You can’t tell it all. If you do, you begin to sound like some gossip or some kid standing in front of class giving a book report. And then this happened, and then this happened. Oh, but wait. Offstage this was taking place, which led to this and led to this and led to this.
Cut.


Memoir should be a piece of beautiful art. It’s that one photo that perfectly captures the mood of the day. It’s a painting that reflects the color of life at that particular moment. It’s a single blue egg in a nest. It’s a dirt road on a hot summer day. It’s a desert sky, or the haze over a field of corn.

You are an important part of the story. This is a big one. I thought I was the lens, but I finally came to realize that people want to experience what I experienced. That’s why they’re reading a memoir. Don’t leave yourself out of the story.

I learned a lot more, but that’s all for now.

KINDLE SALES

There's been a lot of online chatter about Kindle sales figures, so I decided to post mine. Not sure this will help anyone because there are so many variables. One big thing to keep in mind: I do zero promotion, and that probably impacts my figures. I decided to spend my time writing and working on new material rather than focusing on my backlist. Another thing to note is that my reissues contain errors. I don't think they contain a lot, but they aren't error-free. The professionally formatted books have errors, the books I formatted myself have errors, the pirated copies have errors. Doesn't seem to matter. Yes, I downloaded pirated copies of my books and put them on Amazon. Thank you, pirates. But please try to do a better job of formatting next time.

FYI: The cleanest is probably PLAY DEAD, which I edited and formatted.

DECEMBER SALES:



PREVIOUS SIX WEEKS:




Do you have ebooks available on Amazon?

Please consider leaving your sales figures in the comment area. I'd really like to see writers come forward about their sales, especially those writers who have only sold a few copies. Making your backlist available in digital format takes a massive amount of time and can be a big expense. Is it worth it? Anonymous comments are fine!

WHEN FAILURE LEADS TO SUCCESS

Or thoughts for a Sunday when I'm trapped by the biggest snowfall we've had in a gazillion years...


When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.
When one door closes, another door opens.
What doesn't kill you makes you meaner, stronger, meaner, tougher, meaner. (Or something like that.)

What do these lovely cliches have in common? I hate them all.

Even if they're kind of true. But today I was thinking about some of the fantastic writers I know who've experienced huge failures only to come out on the other side with major book deals. Some with movie deals. Does failure lead to success? In some cases I think it does. I think artists reach a point where there is nothing to lose. Nothing to risk, because we've already hit bottom. We've already lost everything.

Nowhere to go but up. There's another one. Hate it too.

Cream always rises to the top.


But I do think we develop this screw-you attitude. And also this sense of freedom. My god, the freedom! I'm especially talking about writers who've been dumped by their publishers. Taboo topic! Taboo! Is this a published author's biggest fear? I think it is. And we can't talk about it even though it's always looming.

Elephant in the room.

Once that thing happens that we've worried about from the moment we get up until we go to bed (I used to dream about getting dumped, and would wake up in the middle of an anxiety attack), there's no longer anything at stake. Nobody to please. Nobody leaning over our shoulders, breathing down our necks. Yes, it's terrifying, because there's nobody WRITING CHECKS, but we end up turning to the one person we can trust. Not an editor. Not an agent. Not our friends and family. Not fellow writers. Although all or some of those people are still around to support us.

We turn to ourselves. Through misfortune, we've been given the opportunity to shut off the noise and listen to our own voice for a change. That's where great art comes from.

What is your voice saying?