Tuesdays with Story

Writer’s Mail
Tuesdays with Story
January 22, 2015

“Even bad guys (most of them, anyway) see themselves as good – they are the heroes of their own lives. Giving them a fair chance as characters can create some interesting shades of gray – and shades of gray are also a part of life.” – Stephen King, novelist/short story writer (1947- )

Who’s up Next?
January 27: Liam, carol, Jen, Rebecca, and Ruth.
February 3: Lisa McDougal (chapter, Tebow Family Secret), Amber Boudreau (???), Mike Rickey (poems), Kashmira Sheth & Amit Trivedi (chapter, novel), Alicia Connolly-Lohr (chapter 11, Coastie Girl), Millie Mader (chapter 60, Life on Hold), and Judith McNeil (???).
February 17: Alicia Connolly-Lohr (chapter 12, Coastie Girl), Andy Brown (chapter, The Last Library), Pat Edwards (???), Kashmira Sheth & Amit Trivedi (chapter, novel), Mike Rickey (poems), and Jerry Peterson (chapter 7-8, Rooster’s Story).

Self-publishing Guides
You’ve finished your novel. You published yourself on the top e-book sites. Now what?! As the publisher, you have full control, but also have full task responsibility for marketing. A quick search of the Wisconsin library LinkCat shows well over a hundred results to help you on your way – for free! http://www.linkcat.info/cgi-bin/koha/opac-search.pl?idx=&limit=&q=Self-publisher

There are even books that focus on using social media for self-promotion. http://www.linkcat.info/cgi-bin/koha/opac-search.pl?idx=&limit=&q=self-publishing+social+media

We – The 77%
The Pew Research Center reported last week that nearly a quarter of American adults had not read a single book in the past year. As in, they hadn’t cracked a paperback, fired up a Kindle, or even hit play on an audiobook while in the car. The number of non-book-readers has nearly tripled since 1978.
The Pew Research Center reported last week that nearly a quarter of American adults had not read a single book in the past year. As in, they hadn’t cracked a paperback, fired up a Kindle, or even hit play on an audiobook while in the car. The number of non-book-readers has nearly tripled since 1978.

If you are the sort of person who believes that TV and the Internet have turned American culture into a post-literate scrubland full of cat GIFs and reality TV spinoffs, then this news will probably reinforce your worst suspicions. But buried beneath it, I think there’s an optimistic story to tell about American book culture. It’s about the kids.

Without question, the American bookworm is a rarer species than two or three decades ago, when we didn’t enjoy today’s abundance of highly distracting gadgets. In 1978, Gallup found that 42 percent of adults had read 11 books or more in the past year (13 percent said they’d read more than 50!). Today, Pew finds that just 28 percent hit the 11 mark.

But here’s why I wouldn’t proclaim the death of the book quite yet (aside from the fact that the vast majority of the country does still read them). Read the entire post at http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/the-decline-of-the-american-book-lover/283222/

Great phrase . . .From Word Spy Paul McFedreis:
flash nonfiction
Meaning: (noun) A very short literary nonfiction piece, typically consisting of a few dozen to a few hundred words.
Examples:
“Inside the 5-inch by 7-inch journal are 131 pages filled with four pieces of flash nonfiction, four pieces of fiction and one piece of analysis.”
– Peter McCrady, Cracking the spine on ‘The Austin Review,’ Community Impact Newspaper, January 14, 2014
“On Aug. 3 from 4 to 5 p.m., Pleska will help writers locate and write about memories for ‘The Five Minute Memoir!’ In so-called ‘flash nonfiction,’ writers take and compress particular memories to write rich, engaging mini memoirs, appropriate for sending to literary magazines that are looking for short shorts.”
– Arts Notes: July 21, 2013, Charleston Gazette, July 20, 2013
“Blotter as #flashnonfiction: 13-y.o. daughter brought to police station because she doesn’t listen. Case referred to parents’ divorce attys.”
– Katjusa Cisar, “Blotter as…,” Twitter, March 1, 2013
Earliest:
“Flashquake is a *paying* independent, quarterly, web-based publication that focuses on works of flash fiction, flash nonfiction (memoirs, essays, creative nonfiction, humor) and short poetry.”
– Pamela Heffernan, From Beginning to End – In a Flash!, Fiction Factor, April 2, 2004
Notes:
It seems to be the fate of relatively new art forms to suffer from an excess of names. Very short fiction pieces have been called “short shorts,” “micro-fictions,” “instant fictions,” and even “smokelongs” (a literal translation of a Chinese term referring to pieces short enough to be read in the time it takes to smoke a cigarette).
The short nonfiction genre has been going through a similar identity crisis for the past few years. It has been called “concise literary nonfiction,” “compressed nonfiction,” the “micro-essay,” and the “mini-memoir.” However, just as “flash fiction” seems to be emerging as the preferred moniker for very short stories, “flash nonfiction” is currently the most common name given to very short essays.
I should clarify that very short fiction and nonfiction are not “new” art forms by any means – both are easily a few thousand years old. What’s relatively new is treating these types of writing as separate literary genres, hence the need for new names.

Last Word. . .
“I try to leave out the parts that people skip.” ~ Elmore Leonard