Tuesdays with Story

Writer’s Mail
January 3, 2014

“Sometimes you don’t just want to risk making mistakes; you actually want to make them – if only to give you something clear and detailed to fix.” – Daniel Dennett – Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking

Who’s up next . . . weather permitting!
January 7: Lisa McDougal (chapter 11, Tebow Family Secret), Cindi Dyke (chapter 2, North Road), Millie Mader (chapter 50, Life on Hold), Ruth Imhoff (chapter, Motto of the Hound), Bob Kralapp (???), and Jerry Peterson (chapters 22-23, Capitol Crimes) . . . *Meet at Barnes & Noble Westside at our regular time of 7 p.m.

January 14: Karen Zethmayr (page of pop-up book instructions), Holly Bonnicksen-Jones (chapter 6, Coming Up For Air), Deb Kellerman (chapter 3 of recent work), Carol Hornung (chapter, Ghost of Heffron College), and Ryan Wagner (poems)… *Meet at Barnes & Noble Westside.

January 21: Amber Boudreau (chapter 28, Noble), Andy Pfeiffer (chapter, The Void), Kashmira Sheth & Amit Trivedi (???), Pat Edwards (???), Judith McNeil (chapter 8, My Mother, Savior of Men), and Jerry Peterson (chapters 24-26, Capitol Crimes).

TWS alum publishes

Cathy Riddle put her first mystery, In the Hops Seat, up online as a Kindle book in October. The flap copy starts this way: “The Wisconsin craft beer scene is rocked by the sudden death of an up-and-coming brewmaster, Jarrett Armstrong, a seemingly likable guy many locals thought was poised to please the palates of the most discerning beer drinkers and take the highly competitive industry by storm this summer season.”

The murder of Armstrong – yes, it’s murder – takes place during The Great Taste of the Midwest beer exhibition in Madison.

You can read the first four chapters by going to Amazon, then buy the book – upload it – for $2.99.

Cathy will share what she’s learned about the business of publishing a book with our TWS first-and-third group on January 7.

Evil Editor – Why You Don’t Get Published
http://evileditor.blogspot.com/
How to Submit to the Evil Editor

Face-Lifts
Authors with books that they feel are ready for publication prepare query letters (or synopses), which they plan to send to publishers or literary agents. They get these into the best possible condition, and then email them to Evil Editor. Evil Editor prints them exactly as they came to him, adding his own comments in a different color. Evil Editor’s comments are intended for entertainment purposes only, although many readers insist on finding them instructional as well. The word limit for a synopsis is 400. Queries aren’t limited by EE, but if you can’t fit it on one page, it’s probably too long. http://evileditor.blogspot.com/p/submit-to-ee.html

Great word
You thought pi only had something to do with the circumference of a circle. Surprise, that’s the third meaning – the third meaning, not even the first. Here’s the story from Wordsmith Anu Garg:

pi
PRONUNCIATION: (py)

MEANING: noun:
1. A confused mixture, originally a jumble of printing types. Also spelled as pie.
2. The 16th letter of the Greek alphabet.
3. A mathematical constant (approximately 3.14159), representing the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.

ETYMOLOGY:
For 1: Origin uncertain. Earliest documented use: 1659.
For 2 and 3: From Greek pi/pei, of Semitic origin. Earliest documented use: 1425.

USAGE:
“The Indiana soldier’s letter, however, ‘has completely `knocked into pi` all the arguments [they have] employed.’ ”
– Glenn David Brasher; Peninsula Campaign and the Necessity of Emancipation; The University of North Carolina Press; 2012.

The writing life is not easy
Need confirmation for that statement? Here it is from YA author and blogger Nathan Bransford:

I’m on record saying Writer’s Block doesn’t exist. There’s really no writing problem that can’t be solved by staring at a blinking cursor until you think of something.

But, man, do I get tired sometimes. This happened to me in November. I worked like crazy to get my Guide to Writing a Novel finished and published and promoted just as I was starting a new job while still maintaining my commitment to make sure I’m getting enough time away from the computer and spending time with friends in person. It was a lot.

I got it done, I got it promoted, the job is going well, and then I had that thunk that sometimes happens when you work like crazy and wake up and realize you’re creatively exhausted.

I had to let the blog slide for a while, I took a break from writing even though I’m itching to get going on a new project, and I had to trust that I would get my creative juices back when some time passed and that there would still be people visiting the blog when I returned to it.

But then I think back to 2008, which was by far the most productive year of my life. I was working twelve hours a day as a literary agent, I was blogging five days a week, and I wrote a novel on top of that, which ended up being the start of the Jacob Wonderbar series. I have never gotten so much done in a single year, and it laid the groundwork for a lot of the things I look back on with pride.

And yet I was also really unhappy. I was neglecting friendships, I wasn’t feeling like myself, and I paid the price in many ways.
All of those tensions are so incredibly difficult to manage. Sometimes you have to push yourself to get things done. Sometimes you have to let things slide for the sake of your own happiness. Sometimes you have to stare at the blinking cursor until you think of something. Sometimes you have to know to step away.

I don’t think I’ll ever totally figure it out. All I know is I’m ready to get working again.

How do you figure out when to push forward and when to pull back? http://blog.nathanbransford.com/2013/12/creative-fatigue.html