November Hill Press

The Writing Life, part twenty-one: Ergonomically Speaking

2012-02-18T08:05:00.000-08:00

I wrote the following in 2008. It's important to get our writing area and tools set up in a way that sustains comfort during our writing sessions. If we can't get comfortable we won't write much or for very long at a time.

Wednesday, October 08, 2008:

I finally got brave and unplugged the white Apple mouse I've been using for the past few days - and plugged in the funky black upright mouse I had insisted I needed. When it arrived, along with the keyboard, it looked so weird and felt so weird beneath my hand, I chose not to try it out.

But I kept feeling tension in my right forearm using the regular mouse, and yesterday I made the change.

I complained about it for five minutes, then it started to get easier. Today, it's like I've been using it forever. And the arm stays totally neutral and relaxed. My set-up is clunky looking, with cords and boxes and all the other stuff on this desk. Nothing matches anymore. I'm sitting with my feet up on a cardboard box recycled from the last UPS delivery. But suddenly I'm truly comfortable.

In addition to the new chair, keyboard, wrist rests, gel mouse pad, upright mouse, fancy foot rest (not!) and elevated screen, I'm now set up at the desk in the living room. I'm not sure why I no longer want to write in my garret, but I suspect it has something to do with ease of access. This way I can write while cooking. I can dash out to the barn and settle right back in to the pages without disappearing upstairs. It might not be permanent, but for now, I have a new office.

The new-found comfort has translated into writing/editing in several one-hour blocks both yesterday and today. Even better, it has resulted in many aha! moments with regards to book issues. In the bathtub yesterday, in the car today. I love when the book is right beneath the surface of my regular routine, bubbling up whenever there's a lull.

It's good to be back. I've been missing the writing life.

TODAY, February 19th, 2012, I am writing in my bedroom. At some point between then and now I moved my desk and the new big screen desktop I ended up getting, in here where I can write beside the window that looks out onto a large section of our front horse pasture. I love it here because I can much of the time I can see the horses and the donkeys with a slight turn of my head. They know this is where I work, and they often, on a daily basis, congregate outside my window and keep me company.

I still have my ergonomic set-up, and no longer have pain in my arms and wrists. There was a transition and a learning curve adjusting to the new keyboard, mouse, and wrist rests, but they now feel perfectly normal and I can type for long periods of time with no discomfort during or after.

Tips for writers: Find your comfort zone when writing. Take the time to create a set-up that feels good to your body. You're far more likely to write regularly if it feels good - or at the very least, doesn't feel bad.

The Writing Life, part twenty: Ergonomics and Dreams

2012-02-18T07:29:00.000-08:00

Ergonomically speaking, with a Jungian Twist, from September 2008:

I now have about one-half of my ergonomic set-up in place. My laptop is on the bigger desk in the living room, with a new chair that adjusts every which way you can imagine. I have the sapphire blue wrist rests. I've picked out the new keyboard and once that's plugged in I will raise the monitor and get a foot rest.

I can feel the difference with each change, which is a good thing. Maybe I can finally get back to the books!

In the midst of this ergonomic upgrade, my laptop has been acting up (it's old, and has been great, but I think it's on its last legs). I'm replacing it with a desktop, as the portability issue is much less now that it has been in the past.

I'm looking forward to the big screen and the ease of typing.

All that said, not writing for these past few weeks is turning me into the Grinch. I've said before that when I don't write, I start to feel like the top of my head is going to blow off, much like a volcano erupting.

I've been feeling that way lately. The horses keep me from getting to the far edge of blowing, but it's like having my energy at low boil. I'm ready to move on and get back to the page.

Last night I dreamed I was going into a department store. I was shopping for exercise equipment, shoes, and clothing. The exercise piece, you might guess, represents the need to write. Between the ergonomic issues and not writing my body is feeling all out of whack. So in my dream world I was heading out to fix it.

I was very excited. Hopeful. I stepped into the elevator and while trying to figure out which button to push - floor 2 or 3? - women kept getting on the elevator. It ended up being packed. And when we pushed the button, finally, the elevator didn't move. There were windows, and we could see we weren't moving. Stuck!

But then something happened and the elevator began to lift. There was a moment's relief and then we all realized something was wrong. The elevator was buckling. That word - buckling - was the word used in the dream, and we all kept shrieking it. "It's buckling!"

I'm not quite sure what that means yet, but I'm sure it carries its own message. (I just read that in engineering, buckling is a "failure mode." Exactly how I've been feeling with regards to writing!)

So the elevator was buckling and then the bottom dropped out. Another moment of panic. Then I realized as long as I kept my arms and feet in the right place, (aha! hands and feet!) I wouldn't fall out. I was safe.

Someone managed to call for help on the phone, and they said "is the elevator buckling?" Duh - but they also said they were on the way.

By this time the elevator had left the building and was twisting and turning out over the parking lot. We could see all the workmen and machinery gathering to help us. They managed to get the elevator to go back into its "tunnel" and we were able to step out into the second floor.

Right where we had been heading all along.

However, I realized it was the wrong floor. I had misremembered where the exercise equipment was, so I needed to go up to the third.

Obviously I took the stairs! But this too had its own danger. Every stair step was piled with big bags of food, spilling out. Beans and cookies and flour - all the ingredients anyone would ever need to create pretty much anything. It was all out of place, too much, unusable in the way it was being stored. I stepped around it and made my way up to the third floor.

Which was flooding!

There were pools of water everywhere and a clear, perfect stream of water was spilling in from a high-up window, like a fountain. The sales clerks were walking in circles, trying to figure out what to do.

I decided to head back down to the first floor.

I navigated the stairs full of ingredients. I got caught up in a crowd of women trying to get to the first floor and realized in the crowd, with all the junk on the stairs, I had lost my shoes.

There was no way I was going back to find them. I felt sad for a moment - I liked those shoes - but then decided I would buy new ones, better ones, and it would all be fine.

Then, as I walked toward the first floor, down a long passageway, I realized my shoes had miraculously found their way back onto my feet.

Back in my own footprints - this is one of my images of being centered. I use it for myself and with clients. Get in your footprints. Get centered.

And then I woke up.

Tips for writers: Make your writing set-up comfortable for your body. Keep your body fit. When we feel good, we write more and better. Write down your dreams. Many times they have clues to our writing process and clues to our stuck places. I just found this dream from 4 years ago and it gave me a chuckle AND a needed boost on a day when my head is feeling - yes - like it's about to explode from all the stories in it. But this dream has the solution. Get back in my footprints. Get centered.

We Love Readers! A Long Weekend of Fun and Freebies!

2012-02-09T16:43:00.000-08:00

November Hill Press believes in the power of words, the importance of story, and the vision of the unique voice.

We also love readers, and in appreciation and celebration of St. Valentine's Day we've put together a weekend of fun.

Sometime on Friday February 10th, a light, whimsical, romance-filled short called Passion Flowers and Italians will go live on Amazon, and as soon as it does, it will go on free promo for 5 days.

On Saturday and Sunday, Signs That Might Be Omens will be free.

And on Sunday, claire-obscure will be free as well.

Friday through Wednesday, book one in the middle grade Magical Pony School series, Jane's Transformation, is going on sale for 99 cents. And remember: although this was aimed at middle grade readers, it has appeal for horse lovers of all ages.

There's something for everyone!

I think Passion Flowers and Italians would make a nice valentine. In fact, it's OUR valentine to everyone who has supported November Hill Press over the past year. We appreciate it, and we thank you!

The Writing Life, part nineteen: Feeding the Fire

2012-01-03T10:46:00.000-08:00

I commented somewhere today that one of my writing goals for the new year is to ride my horse, Keil Bay. You read that right. A WRITING goal is to RIDE.

We all have things collateral to the writing itself that fuel our writing process. If you don't already know what yours are, your very first writing goal for 2012 should be to figure them out.

Today, our first day of real winter on November Hill, I went out to do the morning barn chores. It's cold out there today, so I dug out a pair of ski pants and a fleece jacket, found some gloves, got my flannel-lined hat with ear flaps, and assembled all of the above on my body before I ventured forth with warm beet pulp and my purple "supplement tray."

Six equines came in from the field, four of them wearing turn-out blankets. They were all ready for a warm breakfast tub and a break from the cold wind.

I pressed the switch in the feed room that turns on the white twinkle lights, NPR, and my electric kettle. I let horses in, unbuckled the front ends of their blankets, and got the first pot of hot water going before I started mixing their feed. As usual, there was a chorus of whinnies and musical neighs as they waited.

Once the tubs were served, I removed blankets, put a lightweight fleece onto my older mare Salina, and focused on warming up water buckets so they could all have a nice long drink of water before going back out to the cold. With horses you want the digestive tract to keep moving. The hay they eat keeps them warm, and the water keeps things moving through their systems. But when it's this cold, they sometimes drink less, so I try to offset that with warm wet meals and warm water to drink. And a little extra salt in their feed!

Once I had all water buckets warmed up, I dumped the muck barrow, checked out the back field (when we have wind I always check for fallen branches, etc. on fences) and removed ice from the big water troughs. Two needed topping off so I got the hose clear of ice and started the filling process.

Back in the barn, even the slower eaters were nearly done, so I brought in a serving of hay so they could start the warm-up before going back out into the wind.

While they ate, I mucked out their stalls and added to my compost snake that is going all the way around my fence line this season.

Finished the water troughs and stretched the hose out down the hill so it could drain in the sun.

While they were finishing up their hay I got feed tubs rinsed and dried, and then waited to see who wanted to go out first. Keil Bay was ready, as was the pony. Cody wanted longer with his hay. Salina and both donkey boys meandered to the back door of the stall I was working on, and I let them out. Cody finally decided he too wanted to brave the cold.

I swept the barn aisle, hung blankets, changed some butt straps (replacing dirty ones with clean ones), and got ready to come inside.

It's true that during this span of time I could have been writing. But doing something physical, with some parts repetitive and some parts creative, in the company of these incredible equines I am lucky enough to live with, actually feeds my creative fire. I came in awake, alert, satisfied, and ready to sit at my desk with hot soup and my keyboard in front of me. All my senses were utilized in the barn and now I'm ready to tap into those as I work on the novel-in-progress.

By the time I get stuck, or need a break from writing, it will be time to go back out again. More fuel for this writing fire.

Tips For Writers: Find the collateral activities that fuel your creative fire. Create a routine that plugs these in alongside your writing time. You'll be more productive. The work you do will be, I predict, better in the first draft if you do this than if you don't. And if you don't know what your collateral fire-feeding activities are, don't fret - what a wonderful excuse to discover them! Try new things, old things, different things. Just make sure it involves something other than your writing mind.

Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.
-Carl Jung

Welcome to November Hill and the Mid-Winter's Eve Blog Hop!

2011-12-21T04:38:00.000-08:00

I've been looking forward to this blog hop because the winter solstice is my favorite holiday of the year. We always prepare a special meal and we take treats by candlelight to our horses, pony, and miniature donkeys. They get very quiet when we walk into the barn and it feels like all of us together are celebrating the turn toward longer days.

We also put out treats for the wild animals who share property with us. Deer, squirrels, many birds, rabbits, raccoons, foxes, and bobcats. This year I bought a fat little Christmas tree for the front yard and we will decorate that on the solstice afternoon. I always think about things I want to leave behind in the darkness of winter and most years I write these down on slips of paper and burn them in the fire.

I'm curious about what other folks do to celebrate, or even just to get through this time of year... if you leave your thoughts on this in a comment along with your email address (you can also use the contact me button up top and right if you prefer to send that email privately) you'll be entered in my giveaway. Easy as that! I will be giving away coupon codes for e-book copies of all three adult novels to one winner per day of the blog hop. Feel free to come back and try again if you don't win!

I'm also trying to build my "like" numbers on Amazon and Smashwords, and to reach more readers, so I invite you to go a little further and help me spread the word. Look to your right and click on any/all of my book covers - you'll go directly to the that book's page on Amazon. For each book that gets 25 or more likes I'll enter everyone who comments through the week into a separate drawing for a grab bag (actually a grab box) of books from my personal library. I am a writer, but I am also an avid reader! So I have way too many books and need to clear some shelf space. I would love to give away some books!

In addition to the above, Jane's Transformation, book one in my Magical Pony School middle grade series, will be FREE on Amazon from Dec. 22nd - 26th. The book begins on the afternoon of midwinter's eve - so I timed the Amazon promotion to coincide with the Mid-Winter's Eve Blog Hop! Just click on Jane's cover to your right to go to the Amazon page and pick up your free copy. And feel free to like it and spread the word!

Last blog hop I posted a new photo each day, and I'll be doing that again. This time the theme will be, of course, midwinter and the solstice. You never know what might turn up on November Hill.

To whet your appetite, here's what I found by the barn a few winter solstices ago... look closely!

Looking forward to hearing from all of you! Make sure you "hop" to the next blog on the list below!! And as always, thanks to Inspired Kathy at I Am A Reader Not A Writer and her co-host Jessie Harrell at Oasis for YA and The Daily Harrell for setting up the hop!

This photo reminds me of winter solstice because of the play of light and shadow along the back of our barn. The windows are closed up tight and the oak leaves are that mid-winter tobacco brown color and everything looks lifeless and still. And yet... that tree of life shadow is there, like a promise of life to come.

We have our first winner in the week-long blog hop. Congratulations to mamabunny13! And please, do feel free if you did not win to come back again. Just write whatever you feel like writing in the comment. :)

And don't forget that Jane's Transformation is now FREE on Amazon. A terrific gift for a middle grade reader AND for yourself this midwinter week.

Although this photo above was not taken in the winter, something about that dark interior makes me think of the solstice time of year. There's something eerie about it and yet magical at the same time. My bit of solstice magic today was when a Carolina wren, known to be a shy bird, arrived at the window two feet to my right and attached itself to the screen, looking in at me for about 30 seconds before flying away. I have never been so close to one, and was able to enjoy the cinnamon color and the little white stripe by its eye. So beautiful.

Helen won the giveaway for yesterday! Congratulations! And please, all who are stopping by, feel free to comment to enter for today.

Even the sky celebrates the solstice! We had another winner yesterday and today, December 24th, are starting yet again with new comments. A couple of the books are getting closer to 25 likes on Amazon, so if people keep clicking I will be sending someone a box of books. All in like new condition, novels, and from a non-smoking home (if that matters!).

And don't forget, my middle grade book Jane's Transformation is free until December 26th on Amazon. Go pick up your copy - book two in the series will be out early in 2012.

To those who celebrate, merry Christmas! We had another winner for December 24th and are wide open today. Leave your comments and meanwhile, have some virtual gingerbread. :)

The day after Christmas! There were no commenters yesterday so I put the commenters who had not yet won in a separate drawing. Mari, you're the winner, so coupon codes are on the way to you.

While the giveaway HERE continues on until December 28th, the free Magical Pony School promo on Amazon ends today, so if you want a free copy of Jane's Transformation, don't forget to go get it!

Today's photo is my midwinter barn rune. Gebo is a wonderful rune that represents partnership and giving and gifts. I often see big jet stream Xs in the sky, but didn't notice until I had taken this photo that there are big ones right in my own backyard. I see these every single day, and it's appropriate they're there - the horses and donkeys always offer partnership and they are absolutely gifts in my life.

It got quiet here yesterday! Today (Tuesday) and tomorrow are the final days of the blog hop. Thanks to everyone who stopped by, and especially to those who commented and entered the giveaways.

A huge rain rolled in this morning and my day is going to be busy keeping three horses, a painted pony, and two miniature donkeys happy while they stay dry. This generally involves hay stuffed into small mesh hay nets so they have to "graze" for each bite, clean buckets of water for all inside the barn, mucking manure many times to keep those stalls clean, and giving them turns in the shelter behind the barn where they can walk and watch the rain fall.

We usually have NPR on in the feed room, the twinkle lights plugged in, and now I have an electric kettle out there so I can make tea for myself. Rainy days are good days to groom horses and clean tack. There's always something that needs organizing or tidying up.

I'll check in here later in the day to see if I have some books to give away - stay warm, stay dry, and I hope you have a good book to read on this midwinter day. :)

Just realized the hop ended on the 27th - yesterday! Thanks to all for coming by, commenting, and I hope all winners enjoy the reads! Unfortunately the likes did not go high enough for me to give away a box (or more) of hardcovers - maybe next hop that will happen!

Happy New Year, all. Let's make it a good one!

loved this interview with Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat Pray Love)

2011-12-11T07:42:00.001-08:00

A good quote for writers to tape to their laptop or desktop screen:

Storytelling - no one's going to give you the floor - you have to earn it by telling the best story.

A Few Recommended Reads for the Holiday Season

2011-11-26T06:41:00.001-08:00

If you're looking for a few books to add to your collection this holiday season, or to give as gifts, I highly recommend the following:

Ten Thousand New Year's Eves by Dawn Deanna Wilson: I loved this one so much I wrote a blurb for it - it's a wonderful book and perfect to buy now and save for your last read of 2011.

Lessons in Forgetting by Malaika King Albrecht: Her poems put us at windows into the moments shared by mothers and daughters dealing with Alzheimer's. Gorgeous and poignant.

Night Swim by Jessica Keener: This debut novel is available for pre-order and will be a gorgeous book to read moving into the new year. Keener creates a story that is its own song, hitting every note perfectly.

Giving Thanks on November Hill 2011

2011-11-24T09:29:00.001-08:00

I'm so grateful today for the readers my novels have found out in the world, and even more grateful for those readers who were then moved to write reviews, email me, and/or to tell a friend about my books.

In appreciation I'd like to offer a little gift to anyone who visits here today and reads this. If you would like to read one of my novels, pick one of the four and use the contact me button on the sidebar to send me your selection and your email address.

I'll gladly send you the coupon code so you can go to Smashwords and pick up your free copy.

Happy Thanksgiving to all - enjoy the day!

The Writing Life, part eighteen: To the Point of its Collapse

2011-11-11T05:46:00.001-08:00

"When I make a work, I often take it to the very edge of its collapse... and that's a very beautiful balance."
-Andy Goldsworthy

There is a creative truth that bears repeating and Andy Goldsworthy's quote above illustrates it perfectly.

When we write from the heart and from the soul, when our goal is a work that speaks deeply, we have to be willing to take it to the very edge of our abilities, our comfort zones, to that place where the work takes over and we're like Andy in the video, holding it there with our hands, supporting and allowing and in some way not really in control of the outcome.

We have to be prepared for the possibility that it may fall. But even if it does, look behind Andy at that flock of birds creating the same shape and form he was so carefully building. The energy of our vision is always there. We haven't lost it. We just have to find the way to balance it in the medium we're using to recreate it.

In the videos of Andy Goldsworthy working, I see the intensity and the focus he brings, and the patience and the deep reverence for what he's doing, and for the materials he is using. And then, when he finishes a work, and it stands alone, we see the beauty and the fragility of the completed project, work that has come into its own shape and form and being.

We can only hold on until we're finished, and then the work stands alone while we move ahead to the next project.

By giving our hearts to the work and then stepping aside to let it stand, we enter the magical balance set in motion in creative being. Working to the very point of fracture and then letting go - I believe this is what makes great work that speaks to many. And the doing of this kind of work is deeply satisfying in its own right, challenging and life-changing for its creator.

Tips for writers: Push to the point of collapse in your writing. Find the heart of what you want to say and go there, and then step back and let the story go. As Andy says, each time a work collapses, we get to know the story a little bit better. And as we live the writing life, our work grows in proportion to that understanding.

The Writing Life, part seventeen: Stop Before You're Finished

2011-11-02T07:57:00.000-07:00

This sounds crazy, right? In an earlier post I said you don't even really know what the novel, or story, or poem is ABOUT until you get to the end. I said that you need to finish what you start.

Well, those things are true. But from writing session to writing session, especially if you have a full daily life that intervenes into your writing time with a vengeance, it's a good idea to leave something slightly undone, or to stop before you feel that sense of completion that ends a chapter or a section.

Why?

Because you're building in something to pull you back to the work. Leave a question unanswered, something for your unconscious (and conscious) mind to work on and ponder. It will keep you thinking about the book/story/poem and you'll have reason to go back to it sooner rather than later. If you don't have a problem getting back to the desk or laptop, this technique will make it more likely that when you do sit down for your writing time, you jump right in to the work at hand.

I don't necessarily trust my brain to remember the thing I've left undone, so I make a note of it in the document I'm working in - I don't allow myself to actually write the sentence - I just make a brief note. When I go back I pick right up where I left off.

The beauty of this is that often when we come back we have an even better grasp of the material. Just by leaving that slight question in place and not finishing it, we've planted a seed in our unconscious that keeps working while we go on with our days.

If I don't have a pulling question or puzzle to solve, I substitute something technical and "busy" - like editing. I almost always leave something that needs a read-over so when I come back I have something to jump right into. If I've written anything in longhand, I don't type it in until the next writing session. That way I have something immediately at hand that needs to be done. It gets me back to the story and it gets me back to where I was when I stopped writing.

I'm not the first writer to note this or use this technique. What I've done that might be new information is to develop this so it's extremely specific to me. I've tried many different permutations of this technique, enough times that I now know what I need to do. If my daily life is extremely demanding and busy with other things, I need to do more than one thing to make sure I pull myself back to the desk. With the advent of blogging and tweeting and Facebook, our need to write has many chances each hour to get satiated. The simple need to write is no longer enough - I have to lure myself back to the writing that matters most deeply to me.

Interestingly enough, this ends up deepening our work. It hooks our unconscious mind into working for us when we're preoccupied with other things. With very good results.

Tips for writers: Leave something unanswered in your work when you need to stop for the day. Make a few notes and walk away from that next paragraph, or chapter, or stanza. Do a brief timed writing longhand and leave the transcription for the next writing session. Explore and find what works best for you - those things that will bring you racing back to the desk, eager to continue the story.

and the winner is...

2011-11-01T05:15:00.000-07:00

Random.org selected #1 as the winner, so Lisa, I will send you coupon codes for the three adult titles in addition to Jane's Transformation, which was already sent to you. If by any chance anyone has trouble with a code, just let me know and I'll take care of it.

Thanks again to all who visited and commented. It's been a fun week and I hope everyone enjoys the book(s) and if you do, don't forget that we love getting reviews on Amazon and Smashwords.

Our Halloween turned out to be a cold and soggy evening! No tricks or treats and here we are in November, my favorite month of the year!

Spooktacular Blog Hop Oct. 24th Through Halloween!

2011-10-23T17:40:00.000-07:00

Welcome to November Hill Press and the wonderful, week-long, Halloween Spooktacular Blog Hop sponsored by Inspired Kathy and her blog I Am A Reader, Not A Writer!

I'll be giving away e-book copies of my middle grade novel, Jane's Transformation, which is book one in my Magical Pony School series. Aimed at middle grade readers and a terrific family read-aloud, this book will also appeal to adults who love magic, adventure, horses, and ponies. Book two will be out in early spring 2012.

All you have to do to get your free e-book copy is to leave a comment here on the blog. Make sure you leave your email address in your comment so I can send you the coupon code.

But wait! There's more! For each of my books (you can see all of them in the sidebar to your right) that get at least 50 likes on Amazon by the end of the Giveaway Hop, I'll do a random drawing from all commenters during the blog hop and give 5 commenters copies of ALL my ebooks! If all four of my books get 50 likes, I'll be giving 20 commenters coupons for all 4 books.

Note: claire-obscure, The Meaning of Isolated Objects, and Signs That Might Be Omens are NOT middle grade novels - these are for adult readers.

To celebrate Halloween and the Spooktacular Giveaway Hop, and in the spirit of the Magical Pony School, I'll be putting up a new photograph every day this week of something spooky from November Hill. Come by every day to see what's happening with the horses, pony, donkeys, cats, and Corgis. Living on November Hill with my animal (and human) family inspired the series, and I'm looking forward to sharing some of our daily life with you here.

This is a tree out near our mailbox that always seems to attract crows, ravens, and sometimes, black vultures:

A very cool double spider web - one literally in front of the other, a few inches apart - in the barn door:

Are these aliens from outer space or miniature donkeys? This particular photo always makes me wonder... meet Rafer Johnson and Redford!

This pumpkin was a jack o'lantern that husband tossed into the edge of the forest. The next spring it was still just like this - carved side down - and looked perfect, as if it had grown there. It remained intact until summer, when it finally caved in and began to decay. Dorian Gray?

This is our Halloween kit-meow, Keats, getting ready for the big day when she is feared by all:

Keats is REALLY getting ready for the big day:

A painted pony with an inverted "V" on his side...

I apologize for today's photo showing up so late - my daughter had a hunter pace that lasted most of the day and when I finally got home there were horses and ponies and donkeys to groom and take care of... such is life on November Hill!

This is Mystic, a beautiful and very unusual feline we adopted as a tiny kitten after a friend's son found him on the side of the road one night. I've been told he closely resembles a breed of cat known as the Norwegian Forest Cat, and that they traveled on ships with the Vikings. Here you see one of the things that makes him unusual. He loves high places. He has fallen behind our refrigerator twice when young because he insisted on climbing up on our high cupboards that go up and over the fridge.

He regularly comes to the upstairs window and asks to be let in. This is HIGH off the ground. Periodically we come in from the barn in the dark and sense something lurking on the roof above the back door to our home. Guess who it is?

And one day, I was taking a shower when something - a shadow of some kind - flitted across my vision as I turned to wash the shampoo out of my hair. I immediately thought it was a giant bug, but no, it was the mystical-kit, balanced perfectly on the upper rim of the shower, reaching across with his paw to stick it in the water. He LOVES running water.

I hesitate to make the connection between myself and the movie PSYCHO, but there you go.

Looking forward to tomorrow, which is both Halloween AND the final day of the Spooktacular blog hop! Although I've not reached 50 likes on Amazon for any of my titles yet, I am so excited about the folks who have stopped by and participated I've decided to stick to the original secondary contest if it happens - but even if it doesn't, I'm going to do a drawing of everyone who has commented this week and give away one coupon code for every one of my books to the winner.

I'd love it if things went wild and I got to give away more - so pass the word! But no matter what, there WILL be a drawing. Thanks, all!

And don't forget - this is but one stop among many this week. I've listed the entire blog hop participant list as links below so you can easily HOP from November Hill to your next blog stop. Many, many thanks to Inspired Kathy for sponsoring this and doing so much work to make it easy for the rest of us!

ALSO: if you prefer NOT to leave your email in a comment, you may use the CONTACT ME button at the top of the sidebar and send it to me there. Thanks and enjoy the blog hop!

Come chat with me and Janet Roper on Tuesday night!

2011-10-17T16:27:00.001-07:00

Janet Roper, of Talk to the Animals, will be chatting with me about horses, books, life, and who knows what else Tuesday night on her BlogTalk radio show:

GO HERE for the details.

And if you can't join us live, you can always listen to the recorded chat at your leisure!

Knowing me and knowing Janet and knowing the animals on November Hill, I expect this will be a blast in every single way!

The Writing Life, part sixteen: Find The Seasons of Your Discontent (and make them work for you!)

2011-10-16T09:11:00.000-07:00

Most of us have favorite times of year as well as times when we seem agitated and restless. These are more pronounced for some of us, and for those on the more extreme ends of the spectrum, SAD (seasonal affective disorder), cyclothymia, or bipolar disorder might be an actual clinical diagnosis.

Wherever you lie on this continuum, the first step is to document when your energy is either high or low. Once you have your individual pattern identified, you can use it to your advantage.

I tend to have very intense energy in May and October. May is usually a more agitated kind of intensity. Staying busy is a good thing for me in May - gardening, outside work, and on the writing front, heavy editing is a good task for me to have at hand.

October, on the other hand, is intensity but of a more contemplative sort. October is hands down the BEST time for me to start a new writing project or dive into a first draft in progress. If I don't have something to channel the mood, it can turn from my favorite season into a season of discontent.

All of us have different cycles and different responses to times of day and year. Some might be based on the hours of sunlight in a day, others might be anniversary reactions that we simply haven't connected. For a few of us, there might be chemical imbalance occurring. But if you are living the writing life, there's no reason not to utilize the ebb and flow of mood and energy to do your most effective writing and editing.

Of course, if you feel the cycles of your energy are causing an inability to function normally, I strongly advise an appointment with your doctor to explore options for relief. Bipolar disorder is frequently misdiagnosed and sometimes poorly treated. It's worth it to find a doctor and therapist who understand the disorder and have experience treating it. Alternative medical treatments can also be extremely effective.

Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament by Kay Redfield Jamison is an excellent book that offers insight into the connection between creativity, temperament, and the spectrum of "disorders" I think of as bipolar.

Wherever we lie on this spectrum, there's absolutely no reason not to utilize our highs and lows to enhance the work we're doing creatively. Most artists do it without even being aware of it, but if you learn what your cycles are and match the "right" kind of creative work with those times, you can not only harness the energy in a positive way but end up with good work to show for it.

Tips for writers: Pay attention to your moods and cycles of energy. Make notes on the calendar for at least a year so you can identify larger patterns. Then use those to fuel the work you're doing. Pair parts of the writing process with the kind of energy that will enhance each one. If you experience extremes that seem unmanageable, consult with a professional experienced in treating mood disorders.

The Writing Life, part fifteen: Fleshing Out and Paring Down

2011-09-29T06:27:00.000-07:00

Sometimes writing is like swinging on a pendulum. Depending on your default writing style (wordy or spare) you might begin high in the air on one end and then purposefully move to the other.

I tend to overdo it with the first draft. I write a sentence and then write a few more to clarify. This mostly involves description and images and the physical movement of characters, and it probably has to do with me seeing the character in the room and wanting to capture every detail.

Later, in the first few edit passes, I go through and choose what's best. I think of it as carefully paring away the excess. Usually by the time I get back to it, it's obvious what needs to go. If it's not, I leave it for later. I know I'll be passing through the pages again.

There's a popular line that says we must "kill our darlings." It's never resonated with me. There are always passages in my work that I especially love, and I don't feel that by default means I need to cut them out. What it usually means is I got caught up in something in that passage that resonates so deeply I'm lost in the weight of that. If I go back with my paring eye, with the idea of actually sharpening the thing I like instead of cutting it out, it often becomes better and stronger to the point that readers mention it as something they too liked.

And I admit that if I like something a LOT, I will not cut it out. If early readers hate it, I will think hard about why. But ultimately, it's my book. It's my decision.

Sometimes when we pare things down, what happens is the one image, or the one line that is left, stands out in sharper focus and becomes that much more telling. It's sometimes difficult to see this when in the thick of writing - it becomes much more apparent after we've let the pages rest for a few weeks or a month, and I've found it is markedly notable when I read pages out loud. There's something about the rhythm of reading that instantly tells us when we have too many words.

After a few edits that involve this paring process, and some time off from the newly crafted pages, I go back in. It's almost always true that by paring the excesses along the way, I've now opened up gaps in the story. Places where I can go deeper, that were invisible before due to all the words.

So ironically, after paring away a good portion of the first draft, I'm now ready to add back to it.

If you look at your word count in this process you'll see it start high, go way down (sometimes that's scary!) and then it goes back up, but only to a point.

Over the course of writing four novels plus the in progress work I have right now, I've gotten better at paring as I go. But there is still that see-saw part of the process, where I pare and flesh, pare and flesh, and I've come to enjoy it. The rhythm of that pendulum swinging has come to be part of my editing process, and even thinking about paring in order to sharpen takes me deeper.

We are creatures of habit, and when we thoughtfully apply good, well-chosen habits to our writing and editing, we find the rhythms that work for us. It's not the black and white "kill your darlings" kind of thing that makes a good story. It's the thoughtful, ongoing practice of writing - the intimate experience of writing and observing with a very careful eye your style, your habits, and the ways you can stretch and work them.

Tips for writers: Don't get stuck with writing platitudes. Get on the pendulum and see where you start from. Ride the curve all the way to the other side. Find the rhythms that enhance your writing style. Try my paring and fleshing rhythm out on a paragraph you think is boring and see what you end up with. Then try it on a paragraph you love. Make the process work for you. But always make it worth the time you spend.

The Writing Life, part fourteen: Find and Celebrate Your Unique Voice

2011-09-15T06:29:00.000-07:00

I was recently invited to write a guest post about the first step in publishing - penning.

I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about, writing about, and teaching the writing process in workshop formats. You'd think when given the opportunity to write about penning, the immediate image in my head would be that of a dedicated writer, sitting intently at her desk, pen in hand, or as it happens more often these days, fingers on keyboard.

That's not the image that popped into my mind.

Instead I saw a woman dressed in cowboy gear, lariat in hand, chasing down renegade words and outlaw sentences. Trying to herd them into a large corral where maybe, if she ever managed to get them contained, she could begin to put them together into some semblance of order and story.

For me the very first step in writing involves finding a metaphor for my process. It shifts with each new book I write. While writing my first two novels I thought of myself as an archaeologist, carefully excavating my story layer by layer. Somewhere around the third I shifted my metaphor to that of diver, going deep into murky water, swimming back up to the surface with treasure I'd found in the depths.

Right now I'm working on a book set in the west, a young woman in a gritty, rural man's world, and my writing process metaphor has followed me there.

Once I have that initial working metaphor in place, the real work begins. As writers, we have to find our story, discover our characters, and follow them into their world. We have to unleash our imaginations while at the very same time put some firm discipline into the seats of our pants.

Explore. Journey forth. Sit. Write.

There's no way around it. We have to get good at doing two very different things at the same time.

There's no way to fit all the tricks of the writing trade into one post, so I'll say this: writing begins when you find your story and sit yourself in the chair to write it. Now I'll leap ahead to something I think is very important.

Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.

-Franz Kafka

A lot of what we do as writers is try and try and try again to get ourselves in that "zone" where the words flow and we get so caught up in the story we tell it without thinking through every line. If we do this long enough, and enough times, we get to a deeper place - one where we find our unique voice. And then the challenge is to believe in it and trust it enough to leave it that way.

Every time a beta reader reads your story or novel, or you read it out loud in a writing group, you'll get feedback. You need that feedback. You need the perspectives of readers/listeners who are outside the forest of the writing. Some of the feedback will be right on target. Some of it will be a very subjective reaction to your work. It's important to learn to distinguish one from the other, or you'll end up listening to every single thing and the final result will be a watered down, weak version of your own unique voice.

I don't think the market needs thousands of bland, similar voices. If you like X, you'll love Y. What I look for when I shop for a new book to read is one that has set out on a unique journey. Not necessarily to a new place - but from a new perspective, with some heart and soul in the telling, and with creative use of language and structure. And yet, as writers, we often get feedback that focuses us in on making our book more like the books that have come before ours.

We have to learn to listen to feedback and let it wash over us for a little while before leaping in and changing things. Take the notes and let them sit a few days. Then read them and mark those that seem to resonate. Sometimes we get feedback that seems crazy and we have an instant negative response. No way am I changing that. When you hear that instantaneous negative voice, jot that down too. Sometimes it shows us our weak spots and points the way to issues that do in fact need revision.

When we engage deeply with the writing process, and pay attention to our personal reactions as we write, we not only get a richer experience, we get a richer story. Look closely at the scenes you avoid writing. The ones that you can't wait to write. The ones where you get caught up to the point you don't want to move on. The ones that take you off on side paths - often these will either be your subconscious avoiding a difficult scene OR they will be ideas for new stories or novels.

What makes your voice unique is your own personal way of telling things. The way you see, via your characters, the world you have entered. The way you string words together, and describe landscapes, faces, movement, pauses in conversation. When you engage deeply, you get to the root of your distinct writing self. You tell a story that no one else can tell.

As a writer, as a reader, I think these are the most important, and most beautiful, stories in the world. It's like finding treasure when I find a book where the writer took the time, and cared enough, to write from this very special place.

Tips for writers: Dare to tell the story your own unique way. Put your heart and soul into the writing and see where you end up. For awhile now, it's been true that writing a book similar to those already selling well was the way to get published. This is changing. There are readers hungry for unique voices. And now, finally, there are many options to get those stories to them.

and I'm guest-blogging at Workaday Reads today

2011-09-06T12:16:00.000-07:00

Come on over and say hello!

CLICK HERE.

Keith Cronin's terrific novel, Me, Again, launches tomorrow!

2011-09-06T06:12:00.000-07:00

I'll write more about this book next week, but for now, check out the wonderful trailer, get ready for the launch tomorrow (Wednesday, September 7th, 2011) and go ahead and buy this one. It's a great book.

Coming this weekend: Indie Book Blowout!

2011-08-31T05:41:00.000-07:00

You can GO HERE to see the mainstream/literary titles that are on sale for 99 cents - and click straight through to buy any that appeal! Shop for other genre titles too!

There are giveaways, including a Kindle!

November Hill Press has put The Meaning of Isolated Objects on sale for this blow-out weekend both on Amazon and finally on Smashwords!

Interview today with Unbridled Editor!

2011-08-20T06:36:00.000-07:00

Come join me today at 1:30 pm EST. I'll be sitting in a chair under the big oak tree by the barn, talking with Unbridled Editor John Rakestraw about my novel, claire-obscure.

Direct link to radio show HERE.

On Hiatus For August

2011-07-28T17:31:00.000-07:00

November Hill Press will be on hiatus for the month of August - writing, editing, and doing some of the more solitary work of making books while the summer heat is still oppressive. And yes, hosing hot horses, keeping a donkey with wanderlust on the property, watering a bedraggled but still very productive garden, and trying to keep cats and Corgis flea-free without the use of chemicals. (it can be done but is labor-intensive - frequent vacuuming, flea combing, and baths as needed)

Meanwhile, you can still buy and read the books to your right - all are available at Amazon, and all but one are now also on Smashwords. (I'm working on getting Isolated Objects up at Smashwords as well!)

In the fall, look for these new offerings:

The Writing Life: Essays on Living and Writing : An expanded version of the Writing Life posts you'll find here in the archives.

Partners in Zen: A nonfiction book about living and learning with horses.

Fiona and the Water Horse: book two in The Magical Pony School series.

We're also working hard to get all our titles into POD via Createspace at Amazon.

Have a terrific end of summer. We'll see you in the fall!

Give me work to do, Give me health, Give me joy in simple things, Give me an eye for beauty, A tongue for truth, A heart that loves, A mind that reasons, A sympathy that understands. Give me neither malice nor envy, But a true kindness and a noble common sense. At the close of each day give me a book and a friend with whom I can be silent.
-S. M. Frazier

The Writing Life, Interlude Two

2011-07-24T10:27:00.000-07:00

We're in the middle of a heat wave this month and I haven't gotten much writing done. There's more work, and harder work, with the equines when it gets either extremely hot or extremely cold, and I've been coming in from the barn each morning drenched in sweat and water from hosing horses (and myself). By the time I shower and do the things I have to do to keep the house in order, I'm ready to sit down with a book or a movie to relax.

After a few weeks of this, I gave myself permission to kick back and let the summer wear itself out, without my focus on getting writing work done. I have a lot of reading to catch up on, and this is definitely the month to do it. I've set August as the time to return to my own books.

In the bigger picture of the writing life, these interludes from writing can be restorative or they can be huge detours from which we have to extricate ourselves when they go on for too long. My fall-back position is that I can't go too long without writing. At some point the books in my head start throwing fits and the pressure builds. Eventually there will be a conflagration and I will get back to the necessary work of writing.

This hot dry week we started having rain showers in the middle of the afternoons. Today is the fourth day in a row this has happened and I've become moderately obsessed with monitoring the weather radar to see if I can spot the first hint of what a friend called “popcorn showers” spring up. Unlike the fronts that come through, these little storms literally pop up from nothing. These four days the cells have been tiny, and centered right over us. With the oppressive heat, the rain brings not only welcome water but relief from the pressure.

And bringing this back to writing, the little popcorn clouds of inspiration will do the same thing. Sometimes we just have to watch our internal weather radars, see if we can spot something forming, and then leap into the cloudburst that follows.

Tip for writers: Even when, especially when, the writing is slow or motionless, keep an eye on things. Often in a dry spell something will in pop up, unexpected, out of the blue. When it happens, run out and dance in it. That's just part of the writing life.

The Writing Life, part thirteen: Writer as Maverick

2011-07-16T09:46:00.000-07:00

There's an element of the independent spirit in almost everyone who lives the writing life. Writers often seek out interesting experiences, soaking in details, alternating between living and observing, noticing and recording.

In order to transfer what we've experienced and observed to the page, we take time to ourselves and write things down. This generally requires periods of isolation - either literally, away from family and friends, or figuratively, where we simply get lost in our pages, with the whirl of activity going on unnoticed around us.

Both pieces of the writing life pull us outside the norm a little. And when we as writers decide to pursue publication we go even further out. We bare our souls on the page, subject the pages to writing groups and readers, edit and polish, many times usually, before we hopefully send off a one page query letter hoping to snag the interest of an agent.

We ride the roller coaster of rejection, the ferris wheel of excitement when we get interest, then ride the bumper cars through the submission process to editors. Sometimes there is a walk through the hall of mirrors, where things aren't quite what they seem when it comes to advances and royalties, promises of marketing, and ultimately, the roll of the dice that comes into play for almost every book that finds its wings and gets a chance to fly.

Will the readers come? Will they buy our book, read it, talk about it, recommend it to their friends and acquaintances?

Living through this kind of long haul of hope and belief in one's work requires some stamina. It demands that we put ourselves out there, and not only once, but over and over again, with each hurdle in the process, with the first book, the second, and every single one that comes after.

Those of us who take this lifestyle on for the long haul generally have a wild streak. We're comfortable striking out alone, at least for parts of the writing journey. It's easy to get caught up in the crowd, going to conferences, getting feedback from other writers on our work, our query letters, who to query, how to publish. Feedback is critical in the process of writing and editing and selling, but too much of a good thing can be deadly to a beautiful and unique voice.

A few weeks ago, I read an interview with an author who said, "Now that I'm on a contract, I write off an approved outline."

I recoiled, literally, from the computer screen. Writing off an "approved outline?" I'm sure it works for some, but the thought of outlining a book ahead of time, having it approved, and then writing from it, is the furthest thing from my idea of living the writing life that I can imagine.

It's not always easy being a maverick. But the unfettered voice, in my opinion, the one that strays off the well-traveled path, the one who goes off alone and finds the seldom-told stories, are the ones to watch. And to read. Most importantly, I think, that journey is the rich and full one.

Tips for writers: Whether you're a maverick or not in daily life, let yourself experiment with the maverick lifestyle as a writer. Take the back roads. Look beyond where everyone else stopped and turned back. Find the stories only you can tell. Your writing will soar, and your journey will be the better for it.

Blog Tour de Troops Follow Up

2011-07-03T07:56:00.000-07:00

I emailed Amber Scott, one of the Indie Book Collective members who coordinated the recent Memorial Day event, Blot Tour de Troops, to find out what had happened with the Kindle giveaway and the actual free e-books for the troops.

She responded:

Karen Martin is the commenter winner. We aren't drawing actual troops names for the Kindles, however, but leaving that to the organization (Kindles for Troops) we're donating them to. As for the books, exciting news, we're building a database for troops to get their free titles be simply filling out a quick form. This way, we have control over how many of each title are available and can include vets, too.

Hopefully once the website is completed the Indie Book Collective will announce it so that we can all check it out!

Apologies for the delay in announcing the Kindle winner - and thanks again for all the comments here during Memorial Day!

The Writing Life, part twelve: When The Retreat Is Over

2011-06-30T06:59:00.000-07:00

How do you go from writing here to sitting back at the cluttered desk of home?

I try to get at least two writing retreats in each year. Times when I am away from home, free from the daily routine that gives me far too many opportunities to get up from the desk, to let the book in progress languish, and to fall into those slide things that happen in board games. It's Tuesday and my goal is to finish a chapter by Thursday. And then suddenly I land on slide and it's Sunday and I missed Thursday altogether.

Writing on retreat is focused time. It's free time, but it allows a supreme, exquisite focus on the book that I need to do certain parts of the process most efficiently.

I love doing first drafts on retreat. It's a good time to either start a first draft and really get into the meat of it, or alternately to finish a first draft, when you really need to write straight through to the end.

Most editing I can do anywhere, but if I need to edit to deepen the work, I find a retreat is a great way to dive headfirst into the ms and come up dripping at the end of my time away.

Retreat time is a wonderful time to do the pass through the completed ms when you are looking for loose ends, or looking to tie things together in the story.

Last week, I was fortunate to be able to journey to the very place in the photo above, where I taught a writing workshop for a wonderful group of women writers. Each day I got a chunk of time to do my own work, and at the end I was able to stay an extra couple of days to continue my writing. It was glorious. The mountains function for me as a sort of huge, environmental writing prompt. Put me in a car headed to the mountains and I start churning sentences even before I get to the foothills.

This is one reason I end up traveling with yellow legal pad in the passenger seat, pen ready, and I make full use of the pull-offs to stop and write as I go. It gets me rolling before I ever get to my destination. This trip, the destination just happened to also be the perfect setting to write more first draft in my second Magical Pony School series middle grade novel.

Sitting in the areas by the creek I met the water horse himself. And with the deck right there on the water he was never far away from me the entire time I was there. It was easy to write because the setting so perfectly enhanced the material itself.

So what did I do when it was time to come home? I hadn't finished the first draft, and didn't expect to. How do you carry that retreat magic back to the cluttered desk?

I have learned a few things over the years. First, I make lots of notes. I jot down almost everything that comes to mind when I'm on retreat, whether it pertains to the novel or not. I make notes on the location, the setting, the place I'm staying. In this case, for me, the setting happened to be so similar to what I was writing it all pertains to the book, but often enough it doesn't. That doesn't really matter. The notes might come in handy for a different book, in the future, but what they do for the current book or story is clear the cobwebs, open the windows, and provide a way to get back to that free and open space when you're back at the desk.

The second thing I do is stop when I get to a really good scene that has come to me on retreat. This part requires some timing. You don't want to stop early and waste the retreat time. But you don't want to leave having finished everything you can think of (unless it's truly finished and you can go home with the goal being to let it rest - even then I think you should write something ELSE - some snippet of something different you can pick up when you get back home) - set something up that you can jump right into, without thinking. Something that will pull at you the moment your eyes hit that page.

In this case, I started the new chapter I'd gotten to, on the last day, literally the morning I was to leave. I wrote a few paragraphs to set it up, immediately had the fleeting thought that maybe I could stay just one more day to write the chapter, and knew that it was the perfect chapter to set up for coming home because I could not resist getting right to work on it.

The last thing I do is take the long way home. Now, this seems a bit crazy. I just said we should set up something that's going to lure us back into the book when we get home to all the things that need doing after being gone for however long. Why would I want to delay that by meandering along the way?

Because making yourself wait, and taking the scenic route to boot, will simply enhance the entire process. I took a side trip and had lunch at a little place I'd been to years back. I browsed in a used bookstore where I'd browsed during another writing retreat I took to finish claire-obscure. I made more notes on my yellow legal pad.

I took the Blue Ridge Parkway and had to pull off almost instantly when I saw two horses grazing in the sunshine that made me think not of this book I'm writing, but the next one. I made even more notes.

I had dessert in another little restaurant and took a completely different route home than I'd ever taken before. I drove through an afternoon thunderstorm, my first on mountain roads where sheets of water were washing across in front of me. It was ... noteworthy. And I made sure to write down the details.

By the time I actually drove into my driveway I'd taken twice as long to get home as it takes going the "short" way. But I had a new chapter started, pages of notes, and I was FULL. Of images, of new ideas, of things that aren't in my daily routine. This is FUEL for writers. Fill your tank while you're out in new territory. It doesn't matter what the details are. It's the observation, the being in them, that fills you up and gives you what you need to drive that next distance in your work in progress.

Of course by now you imagine I drove home and said hello to my family and went right to that fabulous chapter and finished it, sitting right here at my cluttered desk.

But that's not how it worked. I got home and stopped the car outside the garage to run into the barnyard to check the injured eye of our wonderful mare Salina. My husband had told me on the phone as I neared home that she had scraped it the night before. I was instantly drawn back into life on November Hill. The puffy, scraped eye of Salina, and it's her only eye, as she lost the other one years before she came to live with us, needed my full attention.

That led me back into my daily life here, with animals and teenagers and husband and a house that seems to suck dust in from the outside. I drove into the driveway last Wednesday, a full week ago, and as I sit typing this I STILL haven't made it back to that chapter or my notes.

But that's life. That's the difficulty in sustaining a long form writing project. Or even a short form one. We have to persevere in balancing life with the work. The very last thing to do, if you know, like me, that something is going to pull you away from the writing even BEFORE you get home from retreat time, is to get a little sneaky. Schedule something for yourself that forces you back to the book or the story or the poem. If you're in a regular writing group, that will do it. I scheduled my monthly writing group weekend for this weekend. Tomorrow.

So it's only one more day before I get back to that chapter. And my notes. And that picture up at the top of this page.

Tips for writers: Schedule retreat time. Use it well. Set yourself up for an easy transition back to "regular" life. Visualize or write down a few paragraphs about your writing space at home. Something you might create there to make it an even better place to work. Bring something from your retreat home with you. A pebble, a little gift for your desk, anything that will remind you of that special time. Take lots of notes. Just reading them will take you into that "magic space." Take the long way home. When you get there, expect something to pull you away from the work you just did. And don't worry when it does. You can get back to the magic.

ADDENDUM: Had to dash back in to add this. Even writing this post took me back. There was one germ of a short story I found en route to the cabin week before last. I don't really write short stories these days so didn't even bother to write it down. But it stuck there, and today, as I wrote about the journey to writing retreat and back, the germ surfaced and started writing itself as I did morning beet pulp prep for horses and donkeys. Just like the beet pulp rinses clean and plumps up with moisture, the story bloomed. I had to come back to the desk to write the first page. Now I'm good to go to the barn. I can get back to this later!

join me this Friday on LitChat!

2011-06-20T19:13:00.000-07:00

Carolyn Burns Bass and LitChat have been providing fast, intense, and insightful discussions on Twitter since January 2009. Each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 4 p.m. EST, Carolyn moderates lively discussion about all things literary.

This Friday, June 24th, I'll be guest-hosting as we talk about Taking the E-Road. I hope you'll stop in and join the discussion!

The Writing Life, part eleven: Writing On Retreat

2011-06-14T18:42:00.000-07:00

I'll be setting forth very soon to a cabin in the mountains where I'll be teaching a 5-day writing workshop and then staying an extra couple of days to get some uninterrupted writing time for myself. I can already feel the wheels beginning to turn, in anticipation of adventure and unfamiliar territory.

There is something about traveling, even short distances, to write in different space, that opens up the airways and gets things rolling.

The first official writing retreat I ever did was a mid-winter middle-of-the-week stay at the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, NC. I had a novella that took place there and wanted to make sure the details I'd used were reasonably accurate. I purposely chose the "old" side, and ended up right beside the room that F. Scott Fitzgerald used when he lived in Asheville during part of the time Zelda was at Highland Hospital. The retreat was lovely. Being in the space enabled me to expand the novella and enrich the layering of details I'd only guessed at when I wrote the first draft.

There was an entire scene born on an evening sitting in the lobby bar, by one of the massive fireplaces. Watching one of the staff stoke that huge fire became not only a scene in the novella, but a living metaphor for my writing retreat.

Most places have a distinct mood about them, almost as if they're alive, and it's an amazing thing to be able to write about a place and then go find out how much of that ambiance you got right.

Many of my writing retreats have been taken at Weymouth Center in Southern Pines, NC. The first time I was scheduled as a writer-in-residence it snowed so much they had to call and reschedule me. A few weeks later I went, and ended up being the only writer in the entire mansion. It was both wonderful (I love time alone) and a little spooky. But I got much work done and knew I'd be going back many times if they'd have me.

I've been to Weymouth enough times by now that when I drive into town the writing starts to flow. I have a very specific ritual I almost always do when I arrive: check in, unpack, and then go to the local ice cream parlor for ... not ice cream but their incredible chicken salad. I stop by the indie bookstore, head down to the coffeehouse, then hit the grocery store. Sometimes I stop by the ABC store for something special so that the "cocktail and critiques" can happen in style. I have a very specific and happy memory of four of us drinking sour appletinis and reading incredible work to one another, each writer's subject matter and writing style completely different, and yet each piece that was read buoyed all the rest of us. That's the kind of magic you couldn't plan if you tried.

I've written first drafts and done final edits at Weymouth. The place just oozes writerly energy, and it also happens to have some ghosts. Fortunately that just fuels my writing fire.

I've also gone to the mountains of NC a number of times for writing retreats. Usually I end up pulling over and writing along the way. The flow begins before I ever reach my destination. The mountains pull the words up to the surface.

Just like at home, the trick to getting work done on retreat is to create a space for the writing. I've shifted kitchen tables around, moved chairs, carried lamps onto decks, and once, in a tiny motel room that seemed to hang quite literally off the side of a mountain, I edited my entire novel sitting Indian-style on the bed, laptop in front of me, notes to the left, blank notebook to the right. I sat there for three days and three nights and worked like a crazy woman with the huge picture window in front of me open to the elements. It thundered and stormed, lightning streaking past the window so close I could smell it. Double rainbows came and went, and every evening, the fog rolled in like a tide. I lost all sense of time and place.

I was doing final edits for claire-obscure, with my agent's few notes to guide me. The last morning I was there I went to the office lobby to get the incredible breakfast they provided, instead of having them sit it outside my door. As I waited for the home-made yogurt and granola, fresh fruit, and pot of coffee to be put on a tray for me, a little red-headed girl walked up and thrust a red-haired doll into my arms. "Her name is Claire and she loves you," she said.

That's the kind of magic that can happen on writing retreats.

While this is technically a working retreat, since I'm teaching the workshop part, it will be a little different. But I'm working on Fiona and the Water Horse, and this cabin happens to be on a mountain stream with a natural pool and huge rock formations. I suspect I'll be tracking water horses and new plot points once I get there.

If I have time, I'll write an interlude, and if my camera battery allows, I'll see if I can't find a water horse and take a picture.

Tips for writers: Honor your work by creating special time and space away to write. Find a place that makes your writing self sing. If you find a really special place go back when you can. Regular retreat time can become a driving force in your writing life.

The Writing Life, part ten: Agents and the Full Mailbox

2011-06-06T05:49:00.000-07:00

For several years a huge part of my writing life had to do with agents. How to get one, how to keep one, how to sell books with one.

I think the majority of serious writers face this hurdle when they begin to think about publication. It's been a milestone on the path for many years, but even when I started querying, about 10 years ago, it was tough. Getting an agent was a huge big deal. These days it remains a big deal - mainly because it's become difficult for agents to do just that - make the big deals. Which is what everyone hopes for and wants when it comes to books.

Early on in the process of getting claire-obscure ready to query, I queried her. I know everyone says don't dare query agents until you have the very best book you can write, until it is polished and shiny and perfect. I'm not really disagreeing with that suggestion, but for me, I had to find out, early on, if I could get an agent to even respond to a query. It seemed so mysterious and scary. I wasn't about to wait until I had a perfect book whose heart would be broken by no response!

So I went to a writers' conference, met some actual agents, chatted with the one I liked best, and revealed that I was terrified about the process of querying. He told me to query him, and to remind him of our conversation when I did.

I went home and promptly queried him. He wrote back (this was before everything went to email!) and asked for 50 pages. I was absolutely over the moon. This thing that everyone said was so hard had worked the first time I did it! Now, in my deepest heart of hearts, I knew the book wasn't ready. But somehow I hoped he would see the possibility and seize it. That he would tell me what to do to GET it ready and then I would do it and we would both make a gazillion dollars because I had written a good book and he had seen the possibilities in it and sold it. We would be best friends and I would write many more books that sold and sold and sold.

All the hopes and dreams I had about writing and selling books got woven into the period of waiting I then had to do. Because once they have the pages, there's nothing more a writer can do. We just wait.

Needless to say, the mailbox became very important to me. Either he would write asking for the entire ms or he would write saying no thank you. Every day I walked down our driveway to the mailbox, long before it was time for the mail carrier to arrive, checking. I became obsessed with checking. Many times a day I would check, and each empty mailbox notched up my level of stress. When the mail carrier came and there was no letter from the agent, all the anticipation for that day would hiss out of me, like air out of a balloon.

It went on and on, day after day, for several weeks. My 6-year old at the time son asked me one day: why are you going to the mailbox all the time?

I explained to him about the book and the query and said I was waiting to find out if this agent liked my book enough to represent it. I'm not sure my son got the notion of artistic representation, but he understood that finding that acknowledgement in my mailbox had come to be something hugely important to me.

One morning a couple of days later I purposely did not check the mail. I was trying to take back my normal life, one that didn't hinge on a mail carrier bringing a letter postmarked NYC. One that was able to focus on the day at hand, with two terrific children and editing and gardening to do. A goldfish pond to sit by, and books to read. I was pacing around the house trying very hard NOT to go to that mailbox.

My son kept watching me and finally he asked, "Why don't you go check the mailbox?"

"I'll just wait 'til later," I answered, and he said, "Maybe you should go check it now."

It occurred to me that he might have that sense children get about things. Maybe the mail carrier HAD come early that day, and left the letter I'd been waiting for. Maybe it was the very best news and all I had to do to step into the dream was walk out and get it!

So I did.

When I opened the mailbox it was stuffed with envelopes. Literally full, in a way our mailbox had never been full before. I stood there, speechless, not sure what in the world was going on. When I started digging out the envelopes I realized that every single one had 'Mom' written on it in my son's handwriting. It took me a few minutes to get all the envelopes out and into my arms.

As I walked up the driveway, laden with letters, my son met me at the garden gate, barely able to contain his excitement. "Did the mail come?"

"Yes!"

When I opened the letters, each one had a single piece of paper on which he had written: I love you Mom, along with a heart and his name. As I meticulously opened each one and read it, he sat beside me beaming. "Now you don't have to worry about that agent's letter. Look how many letters you got today!"

That day I learned exactly how much weight should be given to getting an agent. Not that much.

For a long time in publishing it's been the way of things. And to publish the traditional way, it's still a very standard part of the writing life. You write the book. You get feedback and edit. You polish. You start querying agents.

I went on to query again a few years after that full mailbox. By then the book had been edited to within an inch of its life. I sent the letters. I even broke two of the rules: I forgot to put the SASEs in, and I addressed an agent as Ms. when it was Mr.

About three days later the emails (by this time email responses were starting to be the norm) began to arrive. Send me 50 pages. Send me the entire ms. I faithfully sent the requested pages off. I even emailed the ones who'd only asked for partials and informed them boldly that others were asking for fulls - did they want to upgrade to fulls? Emails came back almost instantly. Yes!

It took one week until the first phone call came in. I got to my office later than usual and was rushing to check voice mails before my first client arrived. It was the agent I'd mis-gendered. He wanted to "talk about what we can do with your book."

I didn't have time to call him back, but later that evening I sent him an email and we scheduled a time to talk. I did not gush and say yes. I made a list of questions and I interviewed him. And I did the same thing with a couple of other agents who were reading very fast indeed once they realized I had "an offer."

In the end I did pick that first agent. And he turned out to be wonderful even though he didn't sell the book. But that's another story.

Tips for writers: If you opt to get an agent (we have other options these days, so explore all of them) start the process in the right frame of mind. The agent works for YOU. The agent-author relationship is first and foremost a business relationship. Agents are not gods. Agents are people who try to sell books to publishers. You want the one who loves your BOOK. But whether or not an agent loves your book has nothing to do with who you are as a person or even as a writer. Some of the time it doesn't even have anything to do with the quality of your book! Find your own full mailbox story. It will serve you well when you need reminding about what is really important in life, and that includes our writing life.

Announcement! Blog Tour de Troops info!

2011-05-31T18:39:00.000-07:00

Indie Book Collective and all the authors associated with this Memorial Day weekend event are happy to announce that instead of matching each commenter with ONE book for a soldier, we have each agreed to give anywhere from 3-5 books per comment and as a result, the troops will be given 10,000 books total!

I think everyone involved was deeply moved by the comments, the sentiment, and by the end of the weekend it became clear that each author involved wanted to do more.

We generated enough money between us to give away one Kindle to a commenter and SEVEN Kindles to the troops. The winners will be announced next Tuesday night on the IBC blog radio show. I will announce the winners here as well.

Congratulations to all authors and commenters, and a big thank you to the soldiers - we hope you enjoy the books, and most of all that you know how much people appreciate your service.

The Day After the Blog Tour

2011-05-31T12:41:00.000-07:00

This weekend's blog tour for the troops was a smashing success and I am both suffering the consequences of sitting for too many hours at the computer AND exhilarated at how many people participated, how many copies of claire-obscure have made it out to the world, and how many e-books the troops will get as a result of this experience.

Around November Hill, though, life gets back to normal pretty immediately once I am back on regular duty as wife and mother, and caretaker/companion to horses, pony, donkeys, Corgis, and cats.

This morning I was back in the feed room mixing up six feed tubs, getting slimed by sweet horses loving their wet feed, scrubbing and refilling water troughs, picking bugs out of my hair, and getting drenched when the Big Bay (my big bay horse) decided I wasn't moving quickly enough with the hose and used his hoof to splash both of us from head to toe with water from his trough.

It's 96 degrees here today and just about the time I get showered and into clean dry clothes, it will be time to go back out to the barn again!

I did write the general idea for chapter two of the book-in-progress up on my "white board" - and will hopefully get some time to actually sit here and WRITE that chapter.

The final numbers for the blog tour should be out soon and I'll post them here. I hope people who came by over the weekend will stop by again!

And I have another Writing Life series post later this week, so come by and read/comment.

Blog Tour de Troops - you've reached November Hill!

2011-05-28T03:00:00.000-07:00

If you're following the blog tour set up by the Indie Book Collective's Blog Tour de Troops, you've just come from Gary Ponzo's site. I can't help but think of this as a cyber-train stopping at many different stations this Memorial Day weekend. After you leave here, you'll be heading on to visit George Sirois and Excelsior. And if you get off the track and need to start back at home base, just return to the Indie Book Collective's BLOG PAGE for an entire listing of this weekend's tour.

Welcome to November Hill! I hope you're commenting along the way and winning lots of free e-books - and in doing so, winning them for our troops as well. AND REMEMBER - YOU CAN COMMENT FOR FREE E-BOOKS ALL WEEKEND LONG, THROUGH MONDAY NIGHT!

When I read the IBC's invitation to participate in this event, I immediately thought of my literary/psychological suspense novel claire-obscure. While researching two of the book's main characters, both elite Special Forces soldiers, I had the opportunity to lurk on a listserv with a wide range of special operations personnel, and was and still am grateful that I was allowed a behind-the-scenes look at some of the issues soldiers face on a daily basis. No question was too silly, and I realized quickly that these guys read lots of books. I had quotes and passages and book recommendations coming out of my ears! It was wonderful. I also learned enough that at one point I started dreaming I was a member of Delta Force. Secret missions and danger, Blackhawks and opsec.

But my dream missions were ultimately safe, and I always woke up in the comfort of my own bed. I'd like to take a moment here to say THANK YOU to all those men and women who leave the comfort of their lives so that the rest of us don't have to. They are called Quiet Professionals for a very good reason.

from claire-obscure:

Sometimes when Raoul is away I go to the Periodicals section in the library and scan the headlines of the major newspapers and magazines. Guatemala, El Salvidor, Beirut, Honduras, Kuwait, Iran. Where the worst stuff is happening, that's probably where he is.

Raoul in concert with Bingham, shoulders slung with weapons, in perfectly orchestrated maneuvers, but that's as far as my imagination takes me. I don't know what his days are like, or his nights. If he's comfortable or miserable. I don't know if he thinks of me or if his work requires all of him, every bit of his concentration.

I don't know why he does it, I'll never understand, I don't think, why he devotes himself to such work. I ponder the nameless, faceless girl who left him - the girl I've decided he couldn't save, so he's saving every other person he can, me even.

What he said when I asked him why. "People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." A quote attributed to George Orwell, who couldn't possibly have known Raoul. No one would ever call Raoul a rough man.

A huge thank you to all the men and women, and their families and loved ones, who work hard protecting our country and our freedom.

And now, here's the blurb on claire-obscure:

Claire Caviness loves words and books. She wears vintage clothing and hides behind the camera lens and in the red light of her makeshift darkroom. She wants to be a writer but all she manages to write are letters to Virginia Woolf.

Lonely, unfulfilled, and envious of her best friend who has moved to Italy, Claire heads out to the same old club one night but takes a right turn out of her usual routine and meets Finn Weston, a mysterious and disturbed medical student who lures her into a folie a deux - a shared madness that forces Claire to look at the things she's tried desperately to leave behind.

When Claire's friend Lucy is found dead and Finn is implicated in the murder, Raoul Duras, a Delta Force operator with a penchant for rescuing prostitutes, offers a way out of the madness.

In a raw, edgy journey from trauma to restoration, Claire examines her deepest fears: grief for her distant mother and gay father, the awakening of her conflicted sexuality, and the darkness that pulls her to the intrigue and danger of two very different – and dangerous - men.

If you'd like to read a review of claire-obscure, head over to Dan Holloway's Eight Cuts' blog. While you're there, read the Eight Cuts manifesto - I was thrilled when Dan chose claire as a book he and Eight Cuts recommend. Take some time and browse the books Eight Cuts is publishing, and Dan's books too!

Then come back to November Hill, make sure to comment and make sure to leave your email so I can send you a Smashwords coupon code for your free e-book copy of claire-obscure! You and a troop will receive the coupon code, and you and a troop will also be entered in the Kindle Giveaway contest.

If you have a specific troop you'd like to gift an e-book to, leave his/her name in your comment as well. If you don't specify anyone we will find a troop for you.

And wait, there's more! If you write a review of claire-obscure, on your blog, in any publication, on SmashWords, or on Amazon, and send me the link, I'll give you a coupon code for the second book in the Claire Quartet, Signs That Might Be Omens.

Before you go, take some time to browse. If you're a writer or artist of any kind, you might enjoy my Writing Life series. Be sure to check out all my books - including my middle grade novel for the younger readers in your life.

A big thank you for visiting and for saying thank you to our troops.

Enjoy the rest of the tour! Next stop, on Sunday morning: George Sirois and Excelsior!

NOTE ON MONDAY EVENING, MAY 30th: Entries for the Kindle giveaways must be in by midnight, but I will give out coupon codes for claire-obscure to any comments that come in overnight - I need to send in totals to IBC tomorrow morning.

Watch for an announcement about our total gift to the troops as well as the winners of the Kindles!!

Thank you to every single one of you who participated. This has been an amazing experience.

Blog Tour de Troops this Memorial Day weekend!

2011-05-25T06:37:00.000-07:00

Starting on Friday May 27th, November Hill Press will participate in a blog tour in support of giving free e-books to troops, as a small way of saying thank you to those who put their lives on the line every day for our country.

More information is AVAILABLE HERE but the bottom line is that you can get free e-books for yourself by following the blog tour, commenting, and by commenting on each blog, getting a coupon code for a free e-book for YOU. And for every free e-book YOU get, a soldier gets one as well.

It should be a lot of fun and I'm looking forward to it. See you on the weekend! My post here goes up early Saturday morning.

claire-obscure now on Smashwords!

2011-05-22T09:56:00.000-07:00

GO HERE to purchase claire-obscure in a variety of formats, including Nook, Sony, Apple, etc. as well as to read online w/o having to download any software.

The Writing Life, part nine: Ride the Waves, Avoid the Undertow

2011-05-19T06:12:00.000-07:00

First, you have to figure out which is which!

In the writing life and the world of publishing, one woman's wave might be another man's undertow, so take some time and figure out what is what for YOU.

For me, some of the waves are: when I get into a writing flow, when synchronicity starts to happen while I'm writing or editing, when I get thoughtful feedback that advances the entire book, starting something new, finishing a manuscript, getting good feedback, sales, reviews, reading someone's early draft ms and realizing its wonderful potential.

The thing is, waves are not constant. They are regular and predictable, but in between the waves, you have to wait for the next one. The waiting isn't necessarily down time, but it's not always exciting. And while we're riding waves, we aren't always doing the work of writing, so that in-between time is valuable. The key is recognizing where you are. When I'm riding a wave, I don't try to do anything else. When I'm waiting, I plug in the little things that need to be done. I can almost always edit, so I use that to fill the time between the writing waves.

Avoiding the undertow - again, you have to identify what, for you, is undertow. It's basically anything that pulls you out, away from the work of writing.

For me, undertow is getting out of balance with writing and the rest of my life. It's a constant, steady pull. Sometimes I just give in and let it take me out - to the barn (one example of how undertow can sometimes be a Good Thing), to the baseboards of the house that need cleaning, to clearing closets and drawers, to the basics like sleeping and eating. It's not the individual tasks that are the undertow - it's the struggle to balance them all without allowing my writing time to get swallowed whole.

At this point I've accepted that this form of undertow is just part of my daily life. I have spent a lot of time fighting it, and now I'm doing what is actually suggested one do in the real ocean if you find yourself being pulled out to sea. You don't fight and head for the shore. You swim parallel to the shore until you get free from the pull.

I have learned that some days I won't write at all. I'll swim parallel to my story all day long. While I'm doing other things that make my life full and complete. I trust that I WILL get to the shore, where in my mind the story lives, and I might be there for an hour or a day or a week-long writing retreat. While I'm there, I immerse myself. This is the time when I'm writing, in the zone, when nothing else enters my consciousness.

There is no movement - I'm no longer riding the wave, I'm THERE. I'm in the story. The magical place most of us go when we're deep in the writing.

But I also spend a lot of time in the surf, riding waves, floating, swimming parallel to the shore. All of which are okay and keep me close to the magical place. (and I have a lot of fun coming up with these metaphors and seeing how far I can stretch them to my purposes!)

Other undertow for me: getting too caught up in things I can't control. In years past I have gotten stuck in the undertow of agents and editors and submitting and waiting. I've fought the undertow of being obsessed with how the books will do when I haven't even finished writing them. I've stressed about things like book tours (which I have no desire to go on and now I don't have to!) and readings and how in the world anyone manages to do all the daily life things if being sent on a big, long book tour.

More undertow: fretting over author photographs, bios, one-sentence book pitches, query letters, the actual stamps to put on the query letters, whether the agent read the entire ms he requested or just read the first chapter and wasn't pulled in enough to finish it.

Is it better to have an agent who loves your book but can't sell it or no agent at all?

What should I wear when I go on the book tour? How should I do my hair? What if no one likes my book?

How do I promote the books I've written? Is the cover of this one good enough? Should I spend more time Tweeting about the books?

You can see how these things pull us away from the work of writing. The process. The writing life itself. Because for me, the writing life is the WRITING. It's not all the stuff that attaches to it once a book is sold and published.

I can control the writing. I can learn to ride the waves in my daily life, and to avoid the undertow. I can learn to use the waiting time, to work with the undertow, and to make the best of the magic flow times I suddenly encounter. I can stay in the moment when it's time to write.

I can't say it enough: the writing life is about WRITING. Selling and promoting and all the rest is important (if you want to travel that path) but if you don't take care of the writing you'll have no use for the rest of it.

Tips for writers: Identify your waves. Name the undertow. You'll never rid the ocean of undertow - but you can learn how to swim in it. How to swim out of it. How to use it. Your waves and your undertow are unique to you. My nightmare for years (literal nightmare) was that my book sold, but in mass market paperback. A writing friend told me that would be her dream come true. We are all different, and we have different goals and plans and dreams for our work. Figure out what yours are and get comfortable with them. That's when they will happen.

one space in writing workshop

2011-05-15T10:24:00.000-07:00

One space just re-opened in my June 16-20th writing workshop in the NC mountains. "Creating Forward Motion in Your Writing" takes place in a wonderful cabin on a mountain stream, with a small, dedicated group of serious writers.

Earth, air, water... and we will make our own fire as we work on both new and existing projects.

Contact me for more info.

The Writing Life, part eight: When Writing Hurts

2011-05-14T07:43:00.000-07:00

Awhile back, I read a blog post by a successful in the mainstream published author who had a lot to say about how terrible it is to write. The stress, the difficulties, the fear, the anguish. My response to this was: then why do it?

Why do something that is painful and filled with dread? In my line of work as a therapist, sorting out why someone is driven to repeat painful experiences is a common occurrence. And yet this writer had no intention of stopping. Why does someone live a life doing work they hate doing?

I went over to mystic-lit, a writing blog I started years back, and proceeded to ask that question. I rambled on about how much I love the writing process (I do) and that I wouldn't in a minute keep doing it if I felt the kind of agony this writer had described. (I wouldn't)

But I had overlooked one important point in my post. And fortunately for me, one brave writer commented to tell me exactly what it was.

This writer had suffered severe trauma as a child, and was driven, driven in the most intense sense of the word, to write about it as an adult. She described her process, which involved true agony as she wrote scenes from her memories of extremely difficult experiences. And she told me that she felt she had to write these things out, in order to heal. She needed to write them, as painful as it was, in order to take some control over the past.

I was grateful for her comments and for her reminder about this thing we do called writing. We might be writing fiction, nonfiction, memoir, poetry, but whatever the form, we are in some way telling a story, and in doing that we tap into our own experiences, our histories, our hopes and fears, our inner worlds.

For a few people, writing can quite literally hurt.

Recently I noted that writing is both tender and fierce. It opens us up if we're writing from the deepest places, allowing and in fact seeking vulnerability. When we share that tender work with others, we sometimes need to get fierce about protecting our feelings and our selves.

At the same time, this works the other way around. We have to be fierce as we write, pushing into those secret places, finding the tender spots when we listen to the feedback.

It's this going back and forth, opening up different parts of our selves, integrating light and shadow, that I think makes a writing life so worthwhile.

If it's too easy, we're probably not digging deeply enough. And if it's too hard, we might be focusing more on the outcome (what will people think? will this get published? how good is this, really?), beyond the writing itself, too much.

The bottom line: writing is a powerful process. Use self-care and be thoughtful about your own reactions, your emotions, and your physical body as you write.

Tips for writers: Find your own unique balance between the tender and the fierce. Dig deep, but keep a line to the surface. If you hit something painful, if it literally hurts to write, find a way to create enough distance that you don't get flooded. Write through the lens of a camera that you can turn off when you need the words and images to stop. Create visualizations for starting the flow - and for stopping it. Most writers need the on button - but some need an off switch as well.

claire-obscure in the UK!

2011-05-11T05:56:00.000-07:00

Claire goes UK - check the sales ranking!

Book Review: MJ Rose's The Hypnotist

2011-05-08T16:31:00.000-07:00

MJ Rose's novel, The Hypnotist, is available in hardcover, as an e-book, and now out in paperback.

About The Hypnotist:

An FBI agent, tormented by a death he wasn't able to prevent, a crime he's never been able to solve and a love he's never forgotten, discovers that his true conflict resides not in his past, but in a…Past Life.

Haunted by a twenty-year old murder of a beautiful young painter, Lucian Glass keeps his demons at bay through his fascinating work as a Special Agent with the FBI's Art Crime Team. Currently investigating a crazed art collector who has begun destroying prized masterworks, Glass is thrust into a bizarre hostage negotiation that takes him undercover at the Phoenix Foundation—dedicated to the science of past life study—where, in order to maintain his cover, he agrees to submit to the treatment of a hypnotist.

Under hypnosis, Glass travels from ancient Greece to 19th century Persia, while the case takes him from New York to Paris and the movie capital of world. These journeys will change his very understanding of reality, lead him to question his own sanity and land him at the center of perhaps the most audacious art heist in history: the theft of a 1,500 year old sculpture from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

International bestselling author M. J. Rose's The Hypnotist is her most mesmerizing novel yet. An adventure, a love story, a clash of cultures, a spiritual quest, it is above all a thrilling capstone to her unique Reincarnation novels, The Reincarnationist and The Memorist.

This book, the third in Rose's Reincarnationist Series, is a seamless, elegant read by any measure. If you happen to also be intrigued with reincarnation and the world of art and antiquities, you'll find this an even more compelling read, written so well you'll just sit back and enjoy the experience.

It's also of note that the first book in this series inspired the TV series Past Life.

The Writing Life, part seven: Camaraderie

2011-04-30T08:41:00.000-07:00

I sat by another campfire in the front field last night, this time alone. It was lovely, and a good night for it, as we had a cold front move in yesterday, but it was not the shared experience turned transformational that the last campfire precipitated.

Why? Because last time I was with another writer, and we were discussing our work, our plans, and our goals. As the sparks lifted and took flight, the creative sparks lifted as well.

In short, we had camaraderie. We were comrades.

For many years as a young person, I wrote regularly, but without sharing either the work or the discussion of doing the work with anyone. I wrote because I had to, because writing is the primary way I make sense of things. It's how I process emotions and events. For years I found my comrades in the diaries of Virginia Woolf and the writings of Anais Nin, and in reading biographies of writers like Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Jane Bowles. I corresponded with the writer Paul Bowles for years, feeling a kinship with someone who knew what it meant to have one's life revolve around writing.

But at some point I had a strong need to sit in the room with other writers - not so much to share what I'd written - that part came later - but to be in the same physical space with kindred spirits.

I did this by taking classes at first, and then workshops, and then by joining critique groups, or writing groups as most people refer to them.

As I began to get feedback on my work, and learned constructive ways to offer feedback to other writers, my writing improved. I couldn't wait to get back to the desk and look at my pages with the notes from the group in hand. There's a synergy that happens when you get a group of well-matched writers together and they sit listening to one another read pages out loud. The work takes on a legitimacy it might not have had before, and as the group begins to gel, it generates its own power.

It's not all about the critique and the feedback - much of what happens is a shared experience of the writing life itself, the ups and downs, the stuck places, the fear, the frustrations. There is suddenly a place to bring those things, an audience who understands.

For around three years I was in a writing group made up of four women: 30-something, 40-something, 50-something, and 60-something. As the weeks passed it became clear what a treasure the group was. Every time any of us read pages out loud, the responses to the work were like a fan that spread perfectly, the perspectives of four smart and thoughtful women, all coming from slightly different perspectives, different times growing up, different life stages. We didn't plan that age range when we formed, but it was one of those happy serendipities that worked beautifully for all of us.

When the group disbanded due to relocation and redirection of two members, the remaining two of us continued to meet, reading and talking. The day I got the phone call from the first agent offering representation, my writing partner came to my office bearing wine and chocolate and we sat there with candles burning, windows open, the night air and city sounds coming in, celebrating something we had talked about a hundred times. The time we spent that night was as important as the landing of an agent!

There is something incredibly valuable about sharing the hurdles in a writing life. The postal clerk who handled my ms when I sent it off to the agent was sure I would be coming back in a month being driven in a limo - that was his idea of what it meant to sell a book. Fame, fortune, and FAST. We in the writing world know how very unusual that scenario is. Having someone to share the ups and downs - celebrating the leaps forward, but knowing that new hurdles pop up constantly, is priceless.

On a writing retreat one time a friend and I had adjoining rooms and agreed to leave the door between cracked as we worked. The sounds of another writer typing, making the occasional comment or sigh, fueled our time there. Creative energy seems to pool and become a shared resource.

Over the past two years I've started a different kind of writing group. It was meant for more than two people, but thus far only two people have joined. Yet I keep calling it a group because it feels that way to me. We meet monthly for a weekend, and we do the serious work of setting goals, reviewing goals, reading pages, and making lots of progress - but we also celebrate the process itself. We celebrate living our lives as writers.

The way we feel as we write, the slow simmer times, the rushes of time when the pace of the work becomes lightning fast. The two of us went on a writing retreat together for a week last year and still to this day look back with wonder at what we accomplished there. We entered what John Gardner calls the "vivid continuous dream" of our works in progress and did nothing more than write, eat, sleep, and share pages late at night, when it felt like we had tapped into some kind of cosmic flow and were merely taking a break to breathe.

I've been on writing retreats and hit similar flow, but I don't think I've ever made so much progress in so short a time. It's the synergy that comes from working in the same space as someone else doing creative work.

My old office, the one where I wrote and edited claire-obscure, was on the top floor of an old building inhabited by another writer, several architects, and a design company. I'm not exaggerating when I say that you could feel the creative energy when you walked up the stairs. Even early on, when I didn't even know my office neighbors yet, I felt their buzz, and it led me directly to what I think of as the conveyor belt to the flow.

That conveyor belt is always moving. Creativity is always happening around us. What we have to learn to do is walk, walk, walk, then SLIDE onto that belt into the continuous dream. When it's time to stop working we slide off again, knowing the moving belt of creative energy and space is always there, kept going by all the creative people in the world, always moving. All we have to do is find the right pace and rhythm to get back on.

Writing with comrades, whether they're in the room, down the hall, on writing forums, or on Twitter or Facebook, is one good way to do that.

Tips for writers: Don't assume you have to do it all alone. Find kindred spirits for the journey. Try a writing group. A good group has clear rules about how to give constructive criticism. A good group is one where the basic abilities of the members are similar. Take the time to find the group that clicks. A writing partner can work equally well. Try writing where other creative people are working in close proximity. Feel the buzz. Get in step and jump in to that moving belt of energy. I hope to see you there!

Signs That Might Be Omens, excerpt: mesmer light, post rain

2011-04-24T07:09:00.000-07:00

mesmer-light, post-rain

Elkmont, Great Smokies, and Stecoah, 1984

Sharon, the girl he’d been dating, had stood him up, retaliation for what he’d done. Or hadn’t done, more accurately. He hadn’t called last time he was in town, telling himself she’d never know the difference. Which was stupid, of course she got wind of it, either that or she drove by his house and saw the Trooper.

He didn’t even know why he hadn’t called. There wasn’t another woman, there was nothing, all he did was stay home and catch up on sleep and a few books. Duras came over one afternoon with Claire in tow and they both shook their heads at him.

“Damn, Bingham, you hell-bent on screwing this one up too?”

“Call her,” Claire said. “We’ll all go out to a movie or something.”

He stubbornly held up the book he was reading. “This is all the company I want right now. You two get out of here.”

So they did. He finished the book and when it was time to leave town again, off he went. And came home again somewhat hungrier for female company than when he’d left. Only Sharon, who said on the phone she’d love to go to the mountains with them, never came. Wouldn’t answer her phone. Was giving him a message.

Duras and Claire couldn’t keep their hands off each other. She seemed better since she’d left Finn, relaxed through the shoulders, and her smile was easier. Softer eyes.

They stopped for gas just inside the Tennessee border, and she went inside to get a soda. Duras followed her, then Bingham went in to pay. Claire had gone in the ladies’ room and come out again, and two guys walked through the front door, headed back to the drink coolers where she was.

Instantly Duras was on one side of her and Bingham was on the other, flanking like overzealous security guards. On the way out to the car, they kept their bodies between Claire and open space, as if something might be lying in wait for her, some monster waiting to reach out and take her away.

When they got to Elkmont, Bingham purposely set up his sleep spot away from their tent, across the river hidden in a crevice. He was tempted to go to town and find a bar and maybe a woman, but it was so damned good to be in the mountains he just tapped into that. Or tried to. What stole his attention was Claire, city girl suddenly infatuated with water and the woods. She stuck bare feet in the river and squealed at the cold water, dragged Duras up the trail while Bingham fell back, to give them space.

Nevertheless, he heard her talking about a horse, “Look, I’m cantering up the path. Now I’m trotting, watch me extend.” She broke into what he assumed was a full gallop and threw her head down and then up, looking for all the world like a red-haired, two-legged filly just full of herself.

Duras turned back to Bingham and threw his hand out. Bingham knew what he was saying. Look at her go. There was no trace of the bruised and broken girl he’d brought home those months back. Duras wanted all that to be over but Bingham knew better. It was in her eyes, deeper than Duras could bear to look. She was better, it was true, but the wounds were still there.

She stopped along the trail and exclaimed, took off the little pack to get something out, but Duras pulled her up, and they kept walking. She glanced back and stopped again and the way she looked, hungry for the mountains, needing to stop and soak things in, opened something up. A place Bingham had sealed off years back. Suddenly he knew.

She had fallen in love with the wildflowers in Bingham’s mountains, and he was falling in love with her. Which was neither here nor there; she belonged to Duras and he had her heart, so far as Bingham could tell. The way she looked at him.

Even as Bingham told himself, once and then again, OFF LIMITS, he still followed while Duras ran ahead, maniac that he was, driven by his addiction to endorphins. She was making sketches of the flowers, from the ground where she had curled herself almost in a ball, tiny book and pencils in hand. Her hair was lit through the trees by pure sunlight, evanescent, red and gold and lovely, dripping in curls around her face, which was hidden from view.

He clearly recalled the night Duras had dragged him to that club in Raleigh, when they’d both spotted her on the dance floor but Duras had put his hand on Bingham’s chest and said “mine.” He went and got her and neither of them came up for air the rest of that night. Bingham had known when Duras showed up on base the next day bragging he’d already called her, mere hours after hitching home, that she was his girl. Months of Duras disappearing to Durham, meeting her in motels, talking about her in a way Bingham never heard him talk before. He’d taken Bingham to her apartment one night, to stand guard so he could make love to her while Finn was gone, in an effort to take her away, but it had been far more complicated than Duras or Bingham could have known at that point. Finn had bound her up in love and fear, the kind of relationship that if you’d looked it up in some kind of relationship dictionary would simply have read: FUBAR.

Duras had given her Bingham’s telephone numbers so she could call when he was out. He’d called Bingham and his medic bag when he found her bruised and broken and half in shock from pain, her own private war with Finn, and it just about killed Duras when she turned around and went back for more. Had she been a soldier in a different kind of war they’d have given her a medal.

In the tent, sheltered from the rain, Claire’s body formed an ellipse, hands folded as if in prayer beneath her cheek, flat against the army green sleeping bag. She watched Bingham and where he would normally have smiled and looked away, he ignored Duras’s sleeping body behind hers and let her in, one long drink of gaze that felt like skiing downhill on new snow.

Bordered on both sides by evergreens, branches dripping with white, the soft hiss of ski on slope, the rise and fall of the hill. Forward motion. Fast.

She slid one hand across the tent floor, more than halfway, paused, then the rest of the way to his.

Snow, visible breath, the occasional grunt of the man behind him. They skied like they were connected, moved as if one brain signaled both their bodies. The other guys joked how Duras knew what Bingham was going to do before he did it, the seamless way they cleared a room in training exercises. Neither of them knew where it came from. They were like brothers.

Claire’s skin on Bingham’s, the few centimeters of skin on the tip of her finger touched the same on his wrist. The tiny hand, the silver ring on the index finger. The unbearable look in her sea-green eyes. Asking for something she didn’t want and he couldn’t give anyway.

They cut skis to the left, leaned through the curve, straightened as they hit the fastest part of the trail, pure speed if they had the guts to go for it. At the bottom there was a patch of trees with the path forking around. And a bet on back at camp they wouldn’t make it. So long as they stuck together, they’d make it. One wrong move, though, and one or both of them would go down, full force.

Duras went left and Bingham aimed right, but just at the base of the tree, Bingham’s knee locked up and he hit the tree head-on.

But damn it, Bingham wanted to try. He wanted this girl.

He didn’t remember anything after that, but what he knew later was that Duras towed him eight miles in frigid cold and a sudden snowfall that came down so fast he could barely make his way. They were young and foolish. Duras had saved his ass that day.

Claire’s hand on his face. She pressed one time and he kissed her fingers and pulled away, hard, rolled forward onto his feet and got the bloody hell out of the tent. The thunderstorm was nowhere as dangerous as what was running through his head. What he felt for his best friend’s girl.

The rain was slowing anyway, he might as well get on out in it and walk it off.

Up the hill he came to the abandoned cabins, left behind when the little resort town that thrived here, Elkmont, was bought up by the Park Service. The cabins still stood, most nearing ruin, supposedly off-limits to the public, but each bore its own signs of forced entry, trespass and violation. Claire had called them gingerbread houses earlier because of the shutters painted cheerful colors, some cut out with shapes, a child’s drawing of a fir tree, hearts, whatnot, all fading and peeling, sad next to the broken windows they framed.

She was enchanted with the cabins, crept silently to the open doors and windows to peek. Many of the rooms still had old mattresses, piles of rodent-chewed summer clothing, broken radios, hot plates, small appliances tumbled on their sides by people intent on walking through the dusty old rooms.

She whispered to Raoul and Bingham: “You can feel them moving if you stand very still.”

“Who, baby?” Duras had stopped to listen. The way he looked at her, no need to measure the length or depth of his gaze, for him there was no line to cross, no reason to stand back.

“The ghosts.” She had closed her eyes and extended her arms, fingers moved gently as if the air around them swirled, tiny currents set in motion by the spirits of Elkmont, men and women on holiday then and now, seeking respite from work, from their lives, seeking solace in the magic mix of mountain and watersong.

Just like Bingham right now, walking the path to Claire’s favorite cottage, bounded by mountain above and river below, the river rushing stronger and faster with the rain.

Soaked to the skin by the time he got to the one she loved best, he took shelter on the stone steps, beneath the overhang of the roof, looking down at the patio built of river stone out over the edge of the river itself, a place Claire had stood just that day and twirled with delight at the thought of cocktails and lanterns, vintage dresses and music mingling with the rush of water.

If Bingham closed his eyes, Duras disappeared from the invented, fantastical memory. In the future when he looked back it would be just Bingham and Claire, cast back in time to a year neither of them knew. He’d have been the owner of a lucrative logging company, never mind that he’d raped the earth to make his living, and she the nature artist vacationing in Elkmont. Maybe they had just met and danced at the Wonderland Hotel down the road, and he’d walked her home after, or perhaps they were newly married, on holiday together. Either way, she’d perched long-limbed on the wide stone wall that bordered the patio, legs crossed at the ankle, silky skirt falling against her bare leg.

Lost in reverie, he was lost altogether when the background noise of reality shifted and the change snapped him back to the present. The rain had stopped. The sun carved circles through the leaves of trees, tiny dancing orbs of golden light.

Further up the path he glanced ahead. A few hundred yards in front of him, in an overgrown clearing in the trees, in the mesmer-light of post-rain late afternoon sun, the shape of a little house sat in faint outline. Not a real house, not actual stone and wood, just the shape, an apparition. He stood still for fear it would fade. Stood and looked, trying at first to make sense of it, then accepting its mystery.

After a few minutes he heard them, Claire and Duras walking up the rain-soaked path, Duras’s voice deep and resonant in the clear clean air, hers a higher sound, lilting and carrying like bits of birdsong.

Bingham did not look back. The ghostly cottage ahead would surely disappear when the angle of sunlight changed. He wanted to see it as long as it lasted. He wanted it to remain long enough that Claire saw it too.

Little house that was, or might have been. Might still be someday.

“What the hell, Bing Cherry.” Duras stepped up beside him.

“Look.” Bingham tipped his head forward, and Claire gasped, a long soft intake of breath.

“Oh, Bingham, look at it.” She squeezed his arm.

“What is it?” Duras shaded his eyes with one hand.

“It’s a house, Raoul, a spirit house, just the outline. There, in those trees.”

“You two have gone crazy.”

She looked at Bingham and turned loose of his arm. When they turned back, the house was no longer there.

The Writing Life, part six: Writer As Child

2011-04-19T16:38:00.000-07:00

One of the things that makes writing the amazing process it is, if we are willing to dive deep and look at what is at stake (for our characters and for our selves), is that we regain access to memory and sensation from our entire lives.

So many times when I am writing about a character, something very specific and real comes to me from my early life. The color of a sky, the smell of something cooking, the feel of a blanket, the way my youthful body felt wearing a very specific dress, a memory of shame so real my cheeks still burn.

There is something about opening up to let the story unfold that opens us up as well. When readers ask, "is this book about YOU?" the answer is generally NO, but the more accurate answer is of course YES. Not the way the reader means, exactly, but of course, as writers, we weave many things from our memories into our stories. Tiny pieces of ourselves that illuminate our characters and make them just real enough for us that suddenly they come into themselves and tell us the things we never knew.

Putting our work "out there" means putting our very selves out there. We are vulnerable when we create and when we share our creations with others.

In the traditional publishing world, the way things are done can exacerbate that feeling of vulnerability, and of feeling like a child being directed through a process much like we were directed through our days as children.

If we're lucky we meet good people who respect us and treat us well. Even then, sometimes, it's easy to step into a lesser role, allowing people with more perceived power to dictate the rules to a world and a game we very much want to live in and play.

It's important to get in your footprints as a competent, independent, capable adult before you engage in the work of querying and submitting your books and stories and poems.

Do the work of editing and polishing and incorporating solid feedback so that when you send your work out, you have a good sense of its value. Negotiate like the adult you are. If at any point someone treats you as less than an adult, move on.

As artists and writers and creators, we constantly open ourselves to vulnerability when we work. When we sell, we have to find our adult selves that can draw boundaries, advocate for our work, and walk away if necessary in order to find the right agent, editor, and creative path.

Below is an essay I wrote a number of years ago. Reading over it today I got to the end and smiled, because as you know if you're here right now reading, I in fact decided to forge my own path in the publishing world, and now that I've done it, I can say it: it feels wonderful.

Nurturing the Young Writer

by Billie Hinton

Undaunted by her mother's occasional whine about the angst of publishing, my 8-year old daughter is sitting at the cluttered dining room table with our old typewriter, WRITING HER FIRST NOVEL. She has titled it:

I Can't Tell My Painted Ponies Apart

The book, she says loudly, might need my help getting published. "So, if you know any publishers," she adds, "you can let them know it's coming."

I politely refrain from reminding her that if I did indeed know some publishers I would be mining them for my own novel. The appropriate answer? “I certainly will.”

Thus satisfied, she heads back to the dining room. "Oh," her voice sails around the corner to where I’m still sitting, "I might need some of your writer friends to look over it for me to see what they think before it gets published."

I keep her brother out of the dining room, promising him that of course, if she makes a staggering amount of money from this novel, she will almost assuredly share it with him. I hover in the doorway between dining room and my writing chair in the bedroom. How best to nurture this young writer, so untainted by rejection, completely certain anything she writes will be born between hard covers with the blink of her blue eye?

All I can think to do is sit silent while she works, waiting for the next question or announcement. It comes soon enough, when she thrusts the first page of her first draft into my hands.

She likes putting many spaces between each word, which has the overall effect of making every word seem very, very important. Plenty of room for editing, but I’m not sure what to do. Does she want the hard line? Gentle feedback? I decide to offer what I feel works best with tender new words: encouragement paired with a few notes in the margin.

“I’m interested in these ponies,’ I tell her, and watch as she beams. “I’m eager to read more.”

“Is that all?”

She manages it well when I point out to her that titles are usually capitalized, and don’t need periods at the end. She actually seems thrilled when I mark the correction on her page, and zips back to the dining room to incorporate these changes.

"How do you spell chunky?"

I call it out from the bedroom.

She types, then canters around the corner and into my bedroom. "I like that word CHUNKY!" Runs back to the typewriter.

With children, fancies sometimes pass quickly, so I wonder if this one will last. It does; she continues to work each evening, wedged in amongst the remnants of the day’s projects that all seem to congregate on our dining room table: older brother’s masterful Lego creations, pile of math books, skeins of teal yarn needing only knitting needles and know-how to turn into a poncho, a dozen of her own sketches exploring the movement of a horse at the canter.

I suspect I would need to clean the table before working there, but she merely shoves the typewriter front and center until it has its own territory and takes up where she left off.

I realize when she comes in with a sheaf of papers she has meticulously typed over and over that she is recreating the nightmare I used to endure before the advent of the word processor. Aha! I think. I can help with this.

Her father installs the latest edition of MS Word for Macs onto her computer and off she goes. No more crooked lines across a bent sheet of paper, no more groans of frustration when typing the same page over three times only to make the same mistake yet again.

Now she can fix things with the slide of a mouse across a pad, something she is intimately familiar with.

In a flurry of excitement she calls me in to see the new document she’s created. Giddy with the possibilities of the word processor, she has abandoned the first novel for a new one:
Sue and the Half-Arab Mare

Is she knocking off the new Harry Potter book? I don't know -- we don't have it yet but I suppose if she is, she's in the company of a slew of other YA writers.

I settle into my reading chair and wait. It’s only a matter of minutes before she comes galloping in.

"Mom, I KNOW what the red ones mean, but what are the green squigglies under my words?"

I, being the evil rebellious writer that I am, say, "Just ignore those."

She is perfectly happy to comply with that. Satisfied with her evening’s work, she sets up poles (yardsticks) in the living room and walks, trots, and canters herself over them. She transforms herself into a young horse, one who, in the midst of training, gallops off and has to be continuously coaxed back to the task at hand. I am intrigued by the fact that in her play my daughter is both trainer and horse, so the work is seamlessly executed.

It occurs to me later in the evening that all this reminds me of a book I had when I was not much older than she is now. It was called Schooling the Young Horse and I pored over it page by page, fascinated by the time and patience and thoughtfulness it apparently took to teach a horse the many things it needs to know to carry a rider.

There was something about using treacle to help the reluctant horse accept the bit, and I loved that word: treacle. It wasn’t a word I was familiar with, but I adored the way it sounded and that the young horses loved licking it so much they would take the cold hard bits without fuss.

Now, with my young writer, the bit is nothing more than the frustration of a poorly functioning typewriter or the green squigglies beneath her words. The treacle, I suppose, is the pleasure she gets from being taken seriously.

Since she was quite young we’ve done things to nurture this blossoming joy of writing a novel. We have read endless books out loud, listened to the BBC edition of Winnie The Pooh (one among many audio books bought or borrowed) on tape in the car until we wore it out, made newspapers complete with dictated articles and hand-drawn illustrations.

I have printed out short stories and essays with numerous mistakes and offered them to my children with red pens for editing.

For a year or so we had a blackboard in the kitchen where I instituted “Word of the Day,” my not so subtle attempt to model the love of words for their own sake. I carefully printed the English word and its French, Latin, Spanish, Chinese, and sometimes Italian, counterparts, because these were the languages we all had interest in.

I chose the words with nothing short of glee each morning before they awakened, with no logic other than the felicitous sound of a syllable falling off my tongue. “Umbrella” was selected because its French counterpart was “parapluie,” a word I adore. “Bat,” because of its Italian “pepestrallo.” “Star” because of the Latin “stella,” and so on.

I believe my delight in the sounds of words has transferred to both my children, as we often debate the perfect word or simply take turns saying words we love to say or hear spoken.

As is often true with most experiences, this one has a deeper layer. In learning how to nurture the young writer my daughter is becoming, I am learning how to nurture the young writer in myself.

Mine also walked, trotted, and cantered, but had golden brown hair instead of golden red. Mine filled yellow legal pads with pretend sentences in blue ballpoint at the age of three. Marked through the authors' names on title pages of her mother's novels and wrote her own, in tall angular letters that only approximated the real alphabet.

Today mine worries whether her agent will like the new book, whether the first one will sell, if she has somehow pulled the wool over his eyes altogether and no one aside from him will ever see the beauty in her stories. Mine sometimes, in the dark solitary moments of Being A Writer, longs for someone she could send her writing to and just get back a grade in return. There is no A-plus in this writing world she's chosen to inhabit.

My young writer secretly wonders if publishing is a world to which she really belongs.

And then, the other young writer in the house, the red-headed one, comes flying into the room, does a handstand on the bed, and with a landing that might get her a ten in the Olympics, shrieks, “My book is almost done!”

And that calls for celebration.

(Billie Hinton is a novelist and psychotherapist who lives on a small horse farm with her husband, two home-schooled children, five cats, two dogs, four horses, and two miniature donkeys.)

Tips for writers: Nurture your child writer. Protect your child writer. Find the Business Suit Self you will need to dress up in when you negotiate in the business world. And don't forget to celebrate!

The Writing Life, part five: Finish What You Start

2011-04-14T06:55:00.000-07:00

I have a theory about writing. The best way to learn to write is to read the very best examples of the kind of work you're doing, and then to WRITE one of your own. One of your own could be a poem, a short story, a novella, a novel.

And when I say write one, I mean the WHOLE thing. If it's a novel, that whole thing is a fairly big commitment. And it's tempting to write pieces of it, hit a frustrating point, and stop. Sometimes new and seemingly better ideas come into our heads while we are struggling with a piece of work. It's tempting to throw the difficult work to the side and follow that enticing new idea.

But what happens when we do that, especially if we do that repeatedly, is that we get good at having ideas but not so good at finishing.

Think of it as making a commitment. To continue writing, even through slow spots and dull spots and spots where we have no idea what is supposed to happen next, when our mind goes blank, and suddenly it feels like we're trying to write someone else's book.

In an odd sort of way, I think it's when we suddenly don't know what comes next that we hit the real flow. It's a scary place to be, and sometimes nonproductive for a little while. If we have seriously engaged with the story and with the set of characters we've introduced, those characters, and the story itself, will lead us forward.

We have to allow ourselves to be led, sometimes we have to PUSH ourselves from behind to get through the first draft. But that's an important thing to do - getting to the completed first draft, with beginning and middle and end. It doesn't have to be perfect (how could it be?) and it doesn't have to be even close to what the finished work will be.

Because until you write and get to the end, you don't even really know what the book is about. And if you don't write to the end, you never get to see how much your unconscious has laid out for you in that first draft.

This is one reason I never ever refer to my first draft as crap. I hear that a lot - and cringe. Because the first draft, if you immersed yourself in the process, if you engaged fully with your characters and the story, is bound to have some gold there. Some silver threads simply begging to be found and pulled through. There's no question that it will have too much of some things and not enough of others. Our writing faults will appear page after page.

How many more times can I use a passive verb construction? She was walking. He was lifting. I am standing.

Seeing the repetitions of a single weakness can be discouraging - it also pushes us to self-correct. And it's easy enough to do. She walked. He lifted. I stand.

By the next novel that particular problem will likely be solved. A new, more advanced, problem will rear its head. But that is the trivia of writing. The faults can be fixed.

The hard part and the important part is not quitting. Not getting seduced by all those new and better ideas. Of course, write all of those new and better ideas down! Get a notebook for that express purpose, and when something pops into your head, jot it down in its special place, then return to the work at hand.

Sometimes those new ideas are not even about a different book. They have to do with the CURRENT book, and when we jot them down, we secure them in our minds. It might be that 25 pages further in, that intriguing new character walks right into our story.

Write your way through the first draft, even leaving blanks if necessary in places where you are just not sure what happens, and when you get to the end, take a break from that book. Focus on something else for a few weeks or a month. Let that first draft sit for awhile. THEN go back and read. Often you'll see that things start to fall into place. Something that didn't quite work is now a key plot point when you read back over it because now, from outside the forest of writing, you know that it links to that other part you forgot you wrote.

At what point is something finished?

When you get to the end of the first draft, have done a rewrite, connecting the dots, and filling in things that didn't come through in the first draft.

Get this version as clean as you can, and then ask for feedback. Preferably from readers who will tell you the truth without being cruel. When you get their responses, read through the notes. Let yourself soak in what they're saying. And then listen to your gut. Sometimes readers are right on with their impressions, and sometimes what they offer is a suggestion, subjective, and if taken, will make the book different, but not necessarily better. Sometimes readers are just wrong. You have to trust yourself to decide which is which. But make sure you're truly open to the suggestion in the first place - no defenses, no excuses.

Finishing what you started in the case of writing includes the step of getting feedback and implementing some of it. Once you've done that, you can set the book aside again, give yourself time away from the work, and then come back to it to decide what you're going to do with it next.

The bottom line is that there are very specific things you learn about writing, about storytelling, about developing characters, and about yourself - if you finish. What you end up with might not be the novel you choose to query or publish. But the writing of it, the journey through the complete process, from beginning to end, is worth more than anything else you can do when learning to write. You can take 127 classes on writing, but if you never finish a piece of work, you haven't learned what you need to know. Finishing, revising, and getting feedback on a complete piece of work IS a class. It's a free class, one where you are both teacher and student. You answer to your own self. And in my opinion, it's the most valuable class you'll ever take. There is no substitution for finishing what you start.

Tips for writers: Carry something through all the way to the end. Commit to the process. Allow that the end result doesn't have to be perfect or even good. Write with all senses open to what you learn as you go. You have to finish the book to understand what it's really about. In some ways, that's when the story becomes real - when you get to the end.

The Writing Life, Interlude One

2011-04-09T08:50:00.000-07:00

Last night as I got ready for my monthly writing group weekend (which is actually a group of two right now, meeting mostly at my home one weekend a month) I was thinking about the process of starting new work.

We always sit down on Friday night to review what we've done since the last meeting, and to set goals for what we want to get done before we say goodbye on Sunday. I had been planning for several months to finish the nonfiction book I've had on hold for two years. It has to do with living with horses, and is probably two-thirds done -- but I discovered in the past few weeks that for whatever reason, the structure of that book is still not quite formed for me.

After sitting with the pages a number of times over the past month, I made a very sudden shift this week, changing my focus to the new novel, which puts me into a place I haven't been for awhile - me, a notebook half-filled with research notes, a very raw idea of what happens in this new story, and a blank page.

I'm very aware this week that it has been a long time since I've had the experience of writing a first sentence. So far I've written two different openings. Neither one is quite right, but both are taking me closer to the story, and I can feel myself wanting to nail it - while knowing that nailing it means I simply need to keep writing. And to stay open.

Right before dark last night I was at the barn, mucking stalls, and enjoying the camaraderie of my equine herd: three big horses, a painted pony, two miniature donkeys, and one feline cowboy who has to be included because he spends so much time with them.

I noticed almost immediately that while the sky was falling toward night, there was one perfectly white cloud in the sky, illuminated from within, a very unusual effect I don't think I've seen before. As I watched it, lightning flashed inside the white cloud.

I went to spread the full wheelbarrow of muckings and suddenly had the idea that it would be nice to make a campfire. There's a stump in the front field that needed to be burned, plenty of fallen wood that I've been stashing around trees for just such an occasion, and two writers who needed to meet and talk about goals.

I gathered the wood and laid the fire, then went back to finish the stalls. All the horses and the donkeys were lingering by the barn, enjoying the evening, waiting for their dinner tubs, intrigued by what I was doing in the front field.

When I went in the feed/tack room to put halters away, I realized the mama bird who recently built a nest in my tack cleaning bucket (which hangs on the same four-pronged hook as the halters) was already settled in for the night, keeping her eggs warm. We're going to have to move the halters someplace else until these baby birds are hatched and fledged.

My husband came out and started the fire. D. and I got chairs from the tack room and took our glass of wine, a beer, and ourselves out to sit and watch as the wood burned. A sliver of moon hung in the sky, and as we sat and talked, the wind blew up, sending sparks into the air. We were soon joined by Dickens E. Wickens, the feline cowboy, who seemed to know that sitting around a campfire at night while horses snort in the distance is a very cowboy thing to do.

Unlike traditional cowboy fare, we had strawberries and gingersnaps dipped in chocolate, served by my husband, and I was able to watch the night-time feeding through the open barn doors as we made our weekend writing goals.

After the horses finished and were turned into the paddock, they stopped their nightly routine, which is normally a single line march to whichever field we've opened for them. They huddled together by the barn, all watching the campfire, not quite willing to walk by to get to the back field gate. At one point, Cody headed out, but then he stopped and turned back.

The wind had really whipped up, and the fire by then was burning down. I went to see if the horses needed a leader to get to their hay out back. As soon as I went through the fence and walked through the darkest area by the back gate, the three geldings started walking. I heard the sounds of hooves walking behind me, then cantering, and finally trotting as they caught up and passed me by, big floating trots. I was in the dark with wind and horses moving forward, fast, and in that moment I felt the opening. A very clear path into the new novel.

Moments later it started to rain. There's a Native American tradition that involves trekking to a mountain top and releasing your intention to the sky. When the sky forms clouds and rain falls, your intention has been noted and fulfilled.

It seems clear to me that last night there was a creative flow, and when I got that fleeting thought, campfire, and followed it, I put myself into a path of discovery, and wonder.

The illuminated cloud with lightning, the bird's nest with the mama bird incubating her babies, the cowboy campfire with Dickens, the wind, the horses waiting for me to lead them so that they could then show me how to canter forward into the darkness, through an opening, and then the rain falling, saying yes, saying here is your opening, take it.

It will probably make this more relevant to know that the new novel is about a young woman and her horse, and the Civil War, and the Pony Express, and that something compels her to make a journey from the safety of her home, from a place where her life is clearly mapped, into the darkness of the unknown, and that her horse takes her there.

And the tip from this interlude is this: There is always an opening into new work. It almost always starts with a fleeting thought, something that leads you in and tips that first domino. Then all you have to do is follow. Be in the moment and let it happen. And there you are, right in the middle of your story.

eight cuts recommends claire-obscure!

2011-04-06T05:45:00.000-07:00

Taking a quick break from The Writing Life series to announce that Eight Cuts has put claire-obscure on its "what we recommend" list!

Take a look at the review and then browse Dan Holloway's entire site. You'll find he's doing something very exciting and you'll also find a new group of writers to read.

Here's the Eight Cuts Manifesto to whet your appetite:

the eight cuts manifesto

Culture

Culture has no boundaries. It has no preconceptions as to what is literature. If we can display it on site, that’ll do us. And if we can’t, then maybe we can do something with it live. Whether you feature words, material, sound, or images, or anything else, if you think your work belongs here then we’re interested. And everyone else should be too
Maybe there is no way to leave the world a better place, and all we can do is tell the truth (Daisy Anne Gree)
Who you are, where you come from, and what you have done before have precisely zero relevance to whether your work is any good. Anyone may submit anything, provided it’s theirs to submit
Readers deserve not to be patronised by genre, category, boundaries, market norms, commercial interest. Some great writing will sell in large numbers; some won’t; and readers have the right to both
New isn’t always great, but great is almost always new

eight cuts

eight cuts has no desire to change the world beyond it, and is happy leaving its traces to be found as doorways to its own world.
eight cuts is for everyone who wants to find amazing new literature and is sick of the false boundaries and limits the publishing industry and cultural establishment place on what can and can’t be accessed
eight cuts is unashamedly exclusive and curatorial. It exists to find – through submissions and relentless trawling – things it considers fabulous and then not rest until the whole world is talking about them, and about literature as a whole
eight cuts exists to interrupt space and discourse with fabulousness – through interventions in traditional dialogues in print and across the web, through installations, by presenting work to academic conferences, by leaving work in public places, by championing amazing literature in any forum it can find
eight cuts exists to encourage writers to DO not debate
the argument about the means of production – self- mainstream- vanity- indie- e- publishing is irrelevant. The meta-argument has been had, and any point of view that seeks to impose limits on literature has lost. The field is open for writers to do what suits their writing best. And if they do it amazingly, we will shout it from the hilltops
eight cuts gallery is a virtual space that exists to bring together collections of works and writers and artists
eight cuts will curate, facilitate, and promote real world events, readings, exhibitions, and performances
eight cuts seeks to put together compelling grant proposals from individuals and groups whose work we absolutely love, and to match, if at all possible, patrons with projects
eight cuts is not a group, a collective, or a publisher. eight cuts is a space to bring writers to readers and readers to writers in the most exciting way possible

The Writing Life, part four: The Slow Simmer

2011-04-01T11:03:00.000-07:00

It's inevitable. At some point in the magic, somewhere during the process of writing, probably more than one time, things will slow down. Sometimes they come to a screeching halt. There are entire books devoted to writers' block and how to get out of it.

What I do, and what I propose to you, is to reframe this phenomenon. Come up with a different name for this very normal place to be. Find a way to consider this place in a positive or neutral way. I'm not giving this place a name here, intentionally, because it's important that each person do it for him/herself. It's the act of making the reframe, in your own thoughts, that has the power to move you forward. So, think of what you can call this slow period in the process that is honest but not negative. Find your own personal, relevant name for this quiet time.

Often when we get to this place, it's because we need to step back from the work, get out of the forest, and stimulate our senses in a totally different way. Something physical and visceral that has nothing to do with writing or thinking about writing.

It may also be that we have hit on something in the work that is either very personal or triggers something personal in our life experience. And we may not even know that's what's happening.

For me, going to the barn and mucking or riding or both are all good ways to clear the channels. A drive on an empty highway, windows down, works too. Sometimes a bath with the jets on full blast works. It doesn't really matter what you do, as long as it engages you in a different way than the way writing does. For the technically minded, think of it as a reboot. Sometimes things jam up, and we need to clear them. Something that involves the large muscle groups almost always works. In my opinion, it's best to find something physical that you also love doing - make it fun and rewarding to take breaks from the work of writing when you need them. It feeds you in a very different but equally important way.

Which is a point I'll make again and again in this series. The creative mind, whether it be used for writing, painting, sculpting, collaging, etc., needs FUEL. It needs stimulation and lots of material. Each person has to sort out the best sequence in which to do this - some need stimulation and then a pristine environment in which to work. Others need stimulation while they work. You have to figure that out, but whichever way you work best, don't forget to feed the creative mind.

How? Go for walks in nature. Look at everything. Listen. Stop and touch things. Get your hands into the earth, lay them flat on rock, stick them in the water. Touch a flower petal. Feel the grit of sand between your toes.

Go to museums. Work with clay. Listen to music. New music, different music. Take photographs. Not the usual kind you often take - photograph light, or color, or extreme close-ups, or animals, or people's feet. Shake things up. Turn things around.

Make a complex meal that requires a lot of steps. Serve it on the plates you never use, with candles and flowers. Or if that's your norm, eat standing up. Focus on the texture of the food in your mouth. Take note of every single bite.

Go to an art supply store and browse the colors and the different media. Pick things up. Pencils, paper. Feel the textures. Buy a blank notebook and start clipping interesting words and photos from magazines and catalogs. Listen to the sound of the scissors snipping. Paste or tape the things you clip
into the notebook.

Take a trip. It can be a day trip, to someplace free. It can be a trip to someplace you've always wanted to go. A drive through a section of town you've never been. Take the slow way when you go places. Head to the country. Take the road you don't know. See what's down that street you always see but have never driven down.

Volunteer to do something you don't know how to do well. Where they teach you what you need to know to do the job.

There are a million things you can do that stimulate the creative mind.

At some point in all this you'll start to get little nuggets of information that have to do with your writing. You might get a word. Or an image. An entire scene. Jot them down. Make sure you write down enough so you don't forget the nugget. Around this time you might also have more vivid dreams. Jot down the parts you want to remember. Don't try to make sense of them or analyze them - just capture the pieces that move you on paper.

You can do all the above while still working regularly on your writing, or you can take a break from writing to do all of the above. Only you know which is working.

If you go back to work and you still feel like nothing is coming but you really want to move forward, just skip that part of the book (or story, or poem). Go further into the story and start writing in a new place. Pretend the missing part is not missing. Pretend you know exactly what you're doing. I guarantee your unconscious does know!

Write the next chapter. You can always come back to the missing piece. In fact, sometimes that missing piece will end up getting filled in with something you didn't even know until you write to the end of the work. It was never a block or a stuck place, it just needed more time to simmer.

Tips for writers: Trust the process. Feed the creative mind. Feed it something it hasn't had in a long time, or ever. Name the place something other than stuck or blocked. Let it be what it is. A hunger pain, a signal, a sign that something you're working on wants more time to simmer. You don't have to stop writing. You can write sentences and lines and paragraphs and scenes and entire chapters that aren't perfect. You'll work on fixing them up later. Many times the things that slow you down, that halt you in your steps, turn out to be the glittery, best parts. Or the shiny stepping stones that get you to the best parts.

The Writing Life, part three: Allow For Synchronicity

2011-03-29T19:18:00.000-07:00

The most wonderful part of writing is what happens when I get deep into a first draft and then again when I begin to edit the rough draft ms. I have always called it getting in the flow with the work in progress.

When you get there, magic seems to happen. Suddenly there are all kinds of synchronicities going on, and serendipity is the order of the day. You write about three crows and then, later in the day, you look out the window and there sit three crows. You need a tidbit of information about something in your novel and someone just happens to email you a link that takes you to exactly what you need.

It never fails. When I'm in the flow with my book, things start happening all around me.

When I was writing claire-obscure, I was doing research on the male character Raoul Duras, who rescues Claire in the story and in several key scenes, takes her back to a time in her girlhood when she felt safe and free - on the back of his motorcycle . I had been walking through the streets of a small southern town, and when I went to where I thought I had parked my car, it was gone. As I stood there on the sidewalk, a man dressed in black rode up on a motorcycle, stopped, took off his helmet, and asked if I needed help. He bought me a glass of iced tea and orchestrated the police department finding my car.

Later in the process of writing this same novel, through a series of serendipitous recommendations, I reconnected with an old friend who had written HIS first novel. When we met, neither of us were writing. When we reconnected, both of us were. I had named my main male character, Raoul, after him.

There seems to be something about the writing process, and being in that magical flow, that opens us to synchronicity. And if we pay attention, the synchronicity feeds the writing process. Rich and nourishing food indeed.

When editing claire-obscure, I got stuck one day on a very specific passage that had to do with Claire and Raoul meeting at a little motel. I'd written the motel setting blind, and later, on a research trip, discovered that I had written it perfectly - there it was, right off the side of the road, as if I had photographed it and wrote the section right from the photograph.

By the time I edited the novel, we had moved to our farm, in the same vicinity as that little motel. I was sitting in my garret, stuck, when the phone started ringing. It rang and rang. I didn't want to interrupt my stuckness to go answer. It kept ringing. Finally, after many episodes of ringing, I went to see who was calling. It was a motel. A small chain motel in the same little town as the motel I was writing about. I shrugged and went back to my work. Later that day I had to run an errand that took me past the original little motel I'd discovered on my research trip, the one my passage matched perfectly. Only the name had changed - it was now the little chain motel whose number had been on my phone earlier in the day. Someone calling repeatedly. I had the sense it was my character, calling to tell me what to do to unstick myself in the edit.

With each book these things seem to happen. Suddenly I meet people who look exactly like my characters. Poems seem to appear out of nowhere that relate. Songs that fit perfectly come on the radio. It's like the entire universe is on the exact same wavelength as I am, and everything I need to keep me writing, keep me working, happens.

I know I'm not the only writer who experiences these serendipities. I also know many writers who seem puzzled when they hear me expounding on this phenomenon. The only thing I can think is that they aren't really paying attention. They miss the magic.

Which for me is one of the most wonderful parts of the writing life.

Tips for writers: Don't miss the magic! Pay attention. Stop, look, listen. See what the universe is saying to you as you work on your book, story, or poem. When open to synchronicity you'll find it. And it will feed your process. Suddenly things will flow. And guess what? When you get in that flow, you write. You meet your goals. You succeed.

The Writing Life, part two: Writing Process Metaphors

2011-03-23T06:47:00.000-07:00

Part of bringing writing into your life in a regular, productive, and fulfilling way has to do with how you think about writing. Not the end result of writing, but the physical act of writing, the time when you are sitting in the chair, doing the work.

At some point in my writing life I began to use different metaphors for different parts of the writing process.

Much like I have used visual imagery and metaphor in other aspects of my life. When nervous, I envision a stormy ocean slowly calming to perfect stillness. When worried about children, animals, friends, and relatives I surround them with white light. These techniques work well for many things.

Without putting too much thought into it, I've ended up with a number of writing metaphors that are so habitual for me they now happen automatically. And just as being thoughtful about your writing space and time can help the process happen more easily, finding your own metaphors can do the same thing.

In my first novel, claire-obscure, the main character Claire wants to write, and has a very interesting relationship with words. Although drawn to words, and to writing stories, she struggles with finding the endings. She prefers telling stories from behind her camera. In one passage in the novel, though, she is struggling to finish a story on paper and she describes the process this way:

I wait on the sofa with my pen and notebook. It gets late and the pace of my writing increases. Whole sentences float by and I reach out with the tip of my pen and hook them by the edges. The inside of my head has expanded to encompass the whole city, maybe more. I let the words come, I let myself go, I don’t even notice time passing.

My process with a first draft is a little like Claire's. I have a sense of the entire story being "out there" and that my job is to capture it. This is generally true for the beginning of a book. A scene, usually the ending, comes to me fully formed and I have to get it down onto paper before I lose it. Once it's down, that part of the process is done and I move on to the next phase.

At that point my work becomes more like that of an archaeologist. I have a sense of where I'm writing to - what the end will be - and some vague sense of the "whole story." Although that whole story is ethereal and almost elusive in nature. But like archaeology, the object is there to be uncovered. It takes careful attention and the use of brushes and picks and various tools, and with time and care and work, the entire object is brought forth.

These metaphors for writing - hooking scenes and sentences, and carefully uncovering the whole story - become a way to get to the real work. If I sit and wonder what happens next in the plot, or what this new character might say and do, it's easy enough to sit there and get completely stuck. But if I think about the process of hooking something, or uncovering something with a tiny pick and a soft brush, it occupies my mind while my unconscious offers up the gold.

All I have to do is be ready to grab it.

Editing continues the archaeological metaphor but usually on one of the edits things shift. I'm no longer uncovering. Suddenly I'm into deepening the story.

At that point I shift from earth to water. I have a very clear image of diving deep into cool, clear water, and finding the still hidden layers of the story I'm telling.

In my second novel, The Meaning of Isolated Objects, the main female character Wendell dives deep in the water of a community pool fed by a spring:

She dove down into the Texas spring, deep, came up slowly through the water. Blew bubbles that rose, her own breath captured inside, and once again, opened her eyes to the light above, the muted shimmer of sun, the feeling of being washed clean, of weightlessness. Whatever she needed to she had left below, on the craggy rock bottom of Barton Springs.

This captures a little of what I think about when I'm deepening the work.

Near the final edit I shift once again to a new metaphor. As I look at the whole again, I read through the entire book a number of times, looking for what I call the silver threads, and making sure they're pulled all the way through the entire story, from beginning to end.

The image of the silver threads, and pulling them all the way through, keeps me focused on what needs to be done in the last stage of the writing process.

In my novel Signs That Might Be Omens, this was one of those silver threads:

Later, deep in the night, the river song pushed at his resistance. The incessant rush of water, wearing the stones and finally him. All these years he had lived fully, he thought, but not honestly. Instinctively he reached over, wanting her to be there. Years past he’d have found someone else to fill the void, a stand-in. But now, finally, he accepted the empty air beside him. Lay his head down and let the past go. It leaked out until the slick fabric of the sleeping bag was wet with it, the heaviness had gone.

Tips for writers:
Create sensory experiences that can enhance the actual, physical time you sit and write. Find metaphors that make your writing process rich and interesting, and that give your active thinking mind something to "do" - while your unconscious mind delivers the story.

The Writing Life, part one: The Writing Space

2011-03-21T06:31:00.000-07:00

Back in 1996 or thereabouts, I had a nearly two-year old son and a soon-to-be-born daughter and it was around that time I decided to settle down and begin a novel. I had been writing stories and articles for years, and had many files full of pages that I had shared with friends and in writing classes and workshops. The most common feedback was: This is a chapter of a novel.

I had planned to write that first novel during the pregnancy of my first-born, but that was before I became pregnant and learned just how much energy it takes to grow a baby. I waited.

Several years later, pregnant and with a toddler in tow, it was time to try again. I enlisted the help of my husband to create a designated writing space in our tiny house. We went to an unfinished furniture store, bought a fairly gargantuan desk, and set it up in front of the picture window in our small living room. That evening, my young son came running to get me, wanting to show me what he'd done. He had decorated the entire desk with a purple marker!

I was both charmed and horrified. A little sandpaper took away the purple marker, I felt some gritty guilt at erasing my son's artwork, and I realized there was probably no way my precious files of pages were going to be safe in that desk's drawers.

So I boxed up the pages in several very nice black and tan boxes I bought from The Container Store, stacked them on top of the 7-foot bookshelf, and forgot, momentarily, about writing that book.

In 1997 my daughter was born. Suddenly I had two children, the most clients I'd ever had in private practice, and the least time to write. But I was also doing my own sandplay process with a wonderful sandplay therapist, Alexander Shaia, and each month when he came to town, each set of sand trays I did urged me closer to what I had always known I had to do: write novels.

The only problem was where to write them.

Another year passed and we bought a house. Not huge, but bigger than the tiny rental. My computer and a much smaller desk were set up in the master bedroom closet. It was somewhat private, but not very conducive to creative thinking.

By this time I had moved my therapy practice to my own two-office space. It was big. I loved the space. It was all mine. But I found I couldn't write there. The energy from clients was so strong, and my own energy was so wrapped up in therapy mode, I couldn't get from there to writing mode.

Desperate to write, nearly bursting with words and sentences, I carved out one evening a week and named it "writing time."

Every Thursday night I closed my office, took my laptop and my files, and parked myself in a tiny booth in a local coffee house. The booth was the only one that had cushions and its own lamp. The tabletop was slightly rickety, but it soon became "my" space. I arrived in the slow half hour before things picked up, grabbed that booth, and worked for 3-4 hours, coming to only to find the place buzzing around me. I did that for a year. And ended up with the first draft of the first novel.

When it came time to edit that gigantic first draft (which turned out to be three novels compressed into one) I found the buzz that had propelled me into the story had become too loud. I couldn't focus. I craved silence as I read through the pages and worked on pulling out the silver threads.

I had a lovely space - my office - but something had to be done to make it work for writing and editing.

Around that time I learned, out of sheer necessity, how to create a space that would allow me to get my writing work done. I shifted my schedule so that on my one day a week of afternoon and evening writing time, I saw no clients. I looked on free-cycle and found someone offering boxes of candles. I instituted what became a long-time ritual of stopping by the nearby gourmet grocery and getting a single truffle and a nice coffee. And when I arrived at my office, I spent five minutes lighting candles, sat myself down at the desk and ate the truffle, and then slid into editing mode.

After a few weeks all I had to do was light the candles and sit at the desk and magic happened. Everything else fell away and there was nothing but my book and my characters. As I got closer to the rewrite I added one weekend afternoon to my writing time. The same beginning ritual, the same magic. I had learned how to make a writing space that worked.

The amazing thing is that the words and ideas and story learned immediately to hold themselves, like small airplanes in a holding pattern around an airport, until that time and place arrived. My brain would buzz on Fridays and again on Mondays, the days after my writing times. But what was there stayed there, knowing that in only a few days I would sit down at the desk and give them permission to land.

Over the years since that time I have shifted my writing space. I moved offices, we bought a small farm that had a garret for my very own dedicated writing office. But to my surprise, I used it for a couple of years and then moved my desk downstairs. I've learned that I can write anywhere, as long as I create that sense of space and time.

I've written in dedicated office space outside the home, in the home, in dark bars seeking atmosphere, in silent and perfect retreat settings, in inns and hotels, in my barn aisle, mountain cabins, and on the sides of roads on pads and scraps of paper.

And as of today, there are four novels in the world as a result.

Tips to try:
Do what works. If creating a special space and time is what you need, do it. Keep doing it until it stops working. Then do something different. We are creatures of habit and yet we are also creatures that succumb to boredom. Use the setting and routine that yields the most exciting work. Don't be afraid to try something new and different. Find a way to slide into the writing with a beginning ritual that you can take anywhere you go.

almost here...

2011-03-20T19:07:00.000-07:00

celebrating the upcoming new release with a SALE!

2011-03-19T12:49:00.000-07:00

Both claire-obscure and The Meaning of Isolated Objects are now on sale for .99 at Amazon - a great time to get both books and help November Hill Press celebrate the new release coming in the next few days!

Also check out The Meaning of Isolated Objects' new cover design!

Coming Soon! Signs That Might Be Omens

2011-03-18T05:38:00.000-07:00

Signs That Might Be Omens is the second novel in the Claire Quartet, four books that stand alone but are connected. They tell, from different points of view and different times, the story of Claire Caviness and the people who most affect her.

The first novel in the Quartet, claire-obscure, focuses on one year in Claire's life, when she is in her early twenties and meets a dangerous but intriguing medical student and lives with him. This novel tells the story of a remarkable young woman who transforms her life.

Signs moves forward 20 years, and in alternating points of view, tells the story of Claire and Bingham Wade, a special ops soldier she met during the time-frame of the first novel. Signs is about long-held desire, synchronicity, and the intricate weave of emotions and behaviors that both complicate, and enrich, our lives.

Sheaffer Donkey reviews Jane's Transformation!

2011-02-28T04:59:00.001-08:00

My dear friend Sheaffer has reviewed Jane's Transformation! What a treat to get his hoof stamp of approval.

You can READ IT HERE.

And of course, if you want to read the book itself, just click on the book cover on the sidebar to your right. Or do a search on Amazon.

Thank you, Sheaffer!!

Jane's Transformation

2011-02-16T05:49:00.001-08:00

- #16 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Children's eBooks > Animals > Horses
- #83 in Books > Children's Books > Animals > Horses
- Way to go, Jane!!
- Later in the day Jane's Transformation, book one in the Magical Pony School series, cantered up to #8 and #41!

The Magical Pony School, Book One: Jane's Transformation

2011-02-11T06:25:00.000-08:00

November Hill Press is pleased to announce that Book One in the Magical Pony School series is now available on Amazon.

Written for the early middle grade reader, this book will also appeal to anyone who loves ponies, magic, horses, classical riding and humane horsemanship, and nature.

Billie Hinton says: I wrote the book I wish I'd had to read out loud to my children when they were young.

Look for Book Two in this series in late spring.

*******

Excerpt from Chapter One, Jane's Transformation:

Chapter One

It was the afternoon of the longest night of the year. The chill of the season was tempered somewhat by the warmth of the sun, which passed through bare-branched trees surrounding the arena and sketched jagged patterns on the sand footing.

Jane was trying hard not to think of the evening’s solstice ceremony, and what would come with the darkness.

Eilidh, one of the teachers, stood in the center of the arena, square on the spot marked X, which she had told them many times during the past month was not only the midpoint of their riding space but Gebo, the rune of partnership and gifts. When riding through X, Jane’s mind darted quickly to fancy wrapped packages and good fortune, but she suspected Gebo’s gifts were different.

She shook off her thoughts to focus on Eilidh’s words and the exercise. Trotting circles, or turas, as Eilidh called them, a mounted meditation for the shortest day of the year.

Jane was riding Ryan, the red bay pony often called the little king. Her short dark hair matched his black points perfectly. Ryan extended his trot and snorted as Jane renewed her focus and accidentally shifted her weight to the inside, undershooting the circle she was riding. “Go around again,” Eilidh called out. “Let Ryan do more of the work. You’re thinking too hard.”

Across the arena Gillean sent Keir forward out of a spook. Keir’s black coat shone with sweat as he went sideways and then straightened. Gillean, tall and thin with red hair bursting out from beneath his helmet, had to sit deep in the saddle to bend Keir back to the circle, but he did it. “Good job, Gillean.” Eilidh’s voice arrowed through the midwinter air, and Gillean smiled. They all loved praise from Eilidh.

Once they got the ponies settled in circles, each of the four students in different corners of the arena, Eilidh moved on with the lesson. “Now, keep to your circles, but slow the trot just a bit, and as you feel your ponies collect beneath you, close your eyes.”

What she wanted was for the riders to join with the ponies. She called it partnering. Eilidh told them every day that the horses were the teachers and the students were there to learn their secrets.

Jane, Gillean, Fiona, and Birk all met in the evenings before bed to whisper about what it was they were there to learn. The older students in the small, exclusive Magical Pony School murmured of magic and transformation, and Jane hoped what they said was true.

Mostly though, she was there for the ponies, to ride, to study the old ways, to find her footprints.

When the sun began to fall behind the tree line, Eilidh shaded her eyes and called the end of the lesson. “Cool your ponies, and Fiona, take care with Rowena. She’s eyeing the woods and I bet that wild boar is back looking for acorns.”

Fiona walked Rowena, the dapple gray mare, to the far side of the arena, and sure enough, Rowena spun and snorted. She hated the smell of the boar, and Fiona had not yet learned to ride through her spooking on the trails and in the arena when the boar came close.

Fiona had curly blond hair and pink cheeks, and when Rowena spooked, Fiona’s eyes got big and her curls bounced wildly around the edges of her helmet. She lurched onto Rowena’s neck and flung herself back into the saddle. A few strides further she regained her balance and settled the frightened pony.

“Are you okay?” Eilidh took a few steps toward Rowena and then stopped as Fiona nodded. “Nice job getting back into the saddle. Stick with it, Fiona. You’re getting better with her.”

Fiona nodded and sat taller.

“Jane – I loved that last circle you did. You breathed it rather than thinking it.” Eilidh always left each of her students with something to think about. “Gillean and Birk, there was a moment when the two of you were riding in perfect cadence in opposite corners of the arena. Remind me and we’ll try some pas de deux next time.”

“What’s pa-dee-dur?” Birk asked.

Eilidh answered, “It’s when two riders and two ponies ride in sync, usually with music. It’s just one of the many new things we’ll be doing in the next few months.”

Jane was eager to hear more, but as usual they were quickly brought back to the task at hand.

Eilidh rubbed her forehead and continued. “For now get your ponies cooled and cleaned up. Karina will help throw the hay and she’ll coordinate the evening feed. Then you’ll all go to cottages and get ready for dinner. You’ll want to be dressed and in the dining room by six-thirty. We’ll have the meal and the ceremony schedule will be shared at that time. The ponies will be ready when we get back to the barn.”

Birk raised his hand. “Is it really true we’ll be riding with torches?”

Eilidh shook her head. “You’ll know soon enough, Birk. Part of the power of the ceremony is experiencing it in the moment. Be patient.”

Fiona and Jane giggled. Birk patient? Not hardly. Birk was the prankster in their small group, with long brown hair he pulled back with a leather band, and a mouth that seemed always busy. Birk tended to ask questions, and if he didn’t like the answers he didn’t hesitate to say so.

Jane and Fiona waited, thinking he would surely contest Eilidh’s admonition, but he didn’t.

Eilidh removed her wool cap and they scrambled to form a line in the center of the arena. The ritual of the lesson’s end. Eilidh dropped her head first and they all did the same. Then Eilidh, clad in chocolate brown breeches and boots, her special cobalt blue wool jacket, and the familiar black wool cap now back in place, left the arena.

Birk rode to the wooded side and listened for the boar. “Come on,” he called.

Jane glanced at Gillean, who had halted but quickly rode Keir into a canter toward Birk. Rowena bolted to follow Keir, and Fiona lost her seat and hit the ground. Before Jane could dismount to help, Ryan spun and reared, and Jane fell off too.

The ponies had gone crazy. Birk jumped off to help, Gillean followed, and suddenly, without any warning, all four ponies galloped to the other end of the arena, jumped the fence one by one, and disappeared.

Birk took off his knitted scarf and whirled it around his head. “Woo-whee! Did you see them jump the fence like it was nothing?”

Gillean seemed unsure about whether it was funny or upsetting.

Jane and Fiona both snapped at Birk. “It’s not something to cheer about,” Fiona said. They could get tangled in the reins.”

“We need to go tell Eilidh,” Jane added. “The ponies could get hurt.”

Eilidh’s brow furrowed as she asked them each in turn what happened and listened carefully to every detail. “It could have been the boar,” she said, “ but it seems more than that. Only Rowena is afraid of him.”

“I heard something, a snorting sound.” Birk’s voice was excited and he gestured with both hands. “It was gross, like a huge mad pig laughing. We need to go get the ponies. And what do we do about the ceremony?”

Eilidh pushed her hair behind her ears and sighed. “We’ve got Karina out looking for the ponies. No worries, children. We’ll find them.”

She sent the four on to their cottages. Birk grumbled all the way. “Children. Ha. Why did she say that?”

“It was just a figure of speech, Birk. Not a personal insult.” Fiona sniffed and turned down the path toward the tiny cottage she shared with Jane.

In the woods some miles away a wild pig trotted along, snorting and snuffling with glee. As the pig moved, its legs grew longer and then merged from four to two. The snout flattened and hair sprouted from its pig-like head.

Not a boar, but a sow, a female pig, now transformed into a woman. Her name was Dwyn. Tall and angular, with stiff white hair and long fingernails, she slowed to a walk, shaking out the tightness in her joints and muscles. She stopped and spat to the side of the path. A bit further, she leaned down and touched the hoof print left by Ryan, the last pony in line as they ran away. She smiled and followed.

Dwyn smelled the ponies before they smelled her. They were in a clearing deep in the forest, standing close together in a huddle. Only Rowena was breathing hard.

Dwyn crept closer and held her breath for a moment. She’d never gotten on well with ponies, and feared she would alarm them now no matter what she did. But the stupid ponies had stopped in a circle of hawthorn trees, bad luck for them, but perfect for Dwyn’s purposes.

She eyed the bits in their mouths. If she could get hold of the reins of the red bay Ryan she knew the rest would follow. He was alert, though, and any sudden move would cause him to bolt.

Before she could move in, she heard a soft whistle. From the other side of the clearing a head poked through the trees. The young woman Karina, the one they called the Maiden. She had shimmering white yarn dripping from the pocket of her jacket. The tips of knitting needles whispered and clicked as she began to knit, absent-minded, while she soothed the ponies.

The tapping of the needles seemed to calm them, as did the Maiden’s soft voice. Dwyn took a step forward. Karina looked up and into the trees. She lifted the shawl she was knitting and sang, “Be gone, be gone, boars and SOWS, be gone.”

She fluttered the shawl in Dwyn’s direction and silver arrows of light pierced the shadows where Dwyn hid. She crouched and covered her mouth with one hand, cradling a sore shoulder with the other.

The Maiden had won. This round.

what exactly is remote viewing?

2011-01-30T06:39:00.000-08:00

From Wikipedia:

Remote viewing (RV) is the practice of seeking impressions about a distant or unseen target using paranormal means, in particular, extra-sensory perception (ESP) or sensing with mind. Scientific studies properly controlled conditions, and therefore, like any other forms of ESP, constitutes pseudoscience.^[1] Typically a remote viewer is expected to give information about an object that is hidden from physical view and separated at some distance.^[2]^[3]^[4] The term was introduced by parapsychologists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff in 1974.^[5] have been conducted, and although some earlier, less sophisticated experiments produced positive results, none of the newer experiments concluded with such results when under
Remote viewing was popularized in the 1990s, following the declassification of documents related to the Stargate Project, a $20 million research program sponsored by the U.S. Federal Government to determine any potential military application of psychic phenomena. Although one Stargate viewer had been awarded in 1984 a legion of merit for determining "150 essential elements of information (...) unavailable from any other source",^[6] the program was eventually terminated in 1995, claiming a lack of documented evidence that the program had any value to the intelligence community.^[7]

In Billie Hinton's novel The Meaning of Isolated Objects, one of the main characters, a CIA operative who was trained in remote viewing and then pulled from the RV unit, discovers that his gift for remote viewing is also a curse. And that worse, his young adult daughter Wendell has it too.

An excerpt:

Scott woke in the dark of another country thinking of his daughter. Tested the wind, got his bearings. Listened. Sighed.

He tracked her in his head from Charlottesville to Georgia. That was the last place he knew for sure she was. His mind kept going south and west. He felt sure she was in Texas. He stopped. Wendell could take care of herself.

Come morning he rode ninety miles in a jeep with a haji who’d as soon cut his throat as look at him, but he was the ride to the border.

Scott spoke Pashto and Dari like a native and the driver knew but pretended not to, grunted and gestured when the front tire blew and they pulled over to change it.

He kept one hand on the gun under his belt, felt with the other for the blade strapped to his boot.

The driver dropped the threadbare tire on the ground and kicked it, then looked back. His eyes were dark and his jaw tense. He shifted his eyes and then looked back to Scott, who didn’t even blink, ready to do whatever needed to be done. They said time itself slowed when you killed a man, and it was true.

Scott waited. Accounted. Blocked the images of acts this man had done to other men, women, young women no older than Wendell, girls even. The last man he’d killed had been raping a girl behind a bombed out house in a village. He had dragged him off her and made the girl run away so she wouldn’t see. Then found her and asked when her birthday was. How old she was.

The driver cut his eyes at Scott and looked away again. Scott squeezed the handle of the gun. Hand-to-hand combat, how to move and take advantage, compensate for the difference in ages. Something he’d never taught Wendell and maybe should have. How to kill a man if he made the wrong move.

His mind flashed back and forth. This present, Wendell’s present on the other side of the world. He could see what was around her, but couldn’t afford to lose sight of his own situation.

The driver finished changing the tire and they both climbed back in the jeep, wary. Scott scanned: driver, road ahead, driver, behind.

What would it have been like if Lynnie hadn’t died? Would Wendell have run off to Texas? Would Lynnie have gone after her or called Scott home? He hated that he didn’t know.

The year before Lynnie died, they had told him he met every criterion for the study: assignments successfully completed, well thought of by colleagues. Though considered a maverick, he was not a loose cannon. He was opinionated and creative.

He had been handpicked and carefully trained. Learned the protocols and worked his way up to the highest levels of remote viewing they’d seen. His gift was his ability to empty his mind. He created empty space for the images. He had no fear of the unknown.

After Wendell was born and Lynnie died, he’d thrown himself deep into the work. For several years that was all he cared about. The targets. What he could do with his mind. Just when he’d mastered the flow of time and was moving toward understanding how to alter future outcomes, they‘d shut him down.

That was when things got hairy. That was when he’d lost control.

He looked at the haji and then ahead to the ravaged road. The stony ground was marked with coarse grass. He could close his eyes right now and look at what this man had done, what he would likely do next. If he emptied his head, it would fill with images of whatever he focused on. It was too much sometimes. Having access to that much. Not always being able to turn it off once it got going.

He’d gone too far and seen too much. Made some things happen that no one knew how to explain. That was when they reassigned him. He had known he needed to pull back. He didn’t want to live his life seeing things inside his head. He wanted to live in the moment. He wanted to be surprised and delighted and shocked. He was careful now how he used it. What he let himself see.

He’d never talked to Lynnie about it. But she had known somehow. She sent him a letter once, one of many she sent when he was someplace just like this. He still had that letter, folded, soft with age, in his wallet. She wrote that she loved him. That she wished she knew where he was and what he was doing. She’d quoted Rumi.

Look at your eyes. They are small but they see enormous things.

No Kindle? No Problem!

2011-01-15T13:37:00.001-08:00

If you're interested in reading the November Hill Press titles I have available on Amazon but don't have a Kindle, there's a free and easy way to access them on a number of electronic devices, including;

your iPhone

your Windows PC

your Mac

your Blackberry

your iPad

your Android

or your Windows Phone 7

All you have to do is to GO TO AMAZON and download the appropriate free software that will work for you.

It's free, it's easy, and the software will enable you to buy not only my books, but many others, including including friend and fellow writer Dawn Deanna Wilson's wonderful collection of short stories: Welcome To Shangri-La, North Carolina.

Thanks to Dawn for allowing me to use the "No Kindle? No Problem!" phrase. She's brilliant. :)

The Meaning of Isolated Objects, Chapter 1

2011-01-02T11:28:00.001-08:00

The Meaning of Isolated Objects, Chapter 1

Scott arrived in Kabul wearing loose pants, kurta shirt and chapan, and the pakol hat common to Afghanistan. He’d grown his hair and stopped shaving several days before traveling. He had passed for Afghani before, but mostly he aimed to be unremarkable, just another man on the street.

The room he chose was in a dirt-colored building that had holes blown in the outer walls, perfect for its narrow window that overlooked the watch site. It was empty except for the crumbling debris in the corners.

On the way to a nearby market he passed a woman wearing a shabby burqa. Her four children lay around her, sleeping in the dirt as she bent forward gathering money offered by passing men. Scott pulled a roll of bills from a pocket and tucked it discreetly next to one sleeping child’s shoulder.

He breathed in dust and smoke and walked on.

Further along, a boy minded a wall filled with clocks, all showing opposing times. Wasted time. He needed to get back to the room.

He arranged the rickety table and chair he’d bought at the market, and made the legs stable using duck tape. His food within easy reach, he sat and adjusted the camera’s small tripod. Once the target showed up, the rest would be easy, but it was the waiting he didn’t relish. The sitting.

After awhile his cell phone vibrated. The connection was weak but the office put her through. Jess, the sister-in-law from hell, had used the number he’d given her for emergencies only, which meant something bad must have happened. He had the brief panicked thought: they finally decided to go after my daughter. He flashed back to his wife Lynnie’s last words. Take care of Wendell.

Jessie’s shrieking voice interrupted. When she hit the high notes she sounded just like Lynnie.

“Wendell is not at her apartment. I haven’t talked to her in three days.”

He managed to get out of her that this was not necessarily unusual before the connection cut out. He wasn’t sorry. Jess had a way of pissing him off. He didn’t need to sit there seething for hours on end while waiting on a Pakistani known for being unreliable.

In most ways Scott was not surprised about Wendell. She had his restless nature. He’d expected her to blaze up for years.

Jess had accused him of not caring. Of liking it that Wendell resembled him. “All that mystery stuff, the secrets. It’s your fault she’s done this. She’s acting just like you.” Well, maybe she had something there.

When Lynnie had died, Jess wanted him home, taking care of Wendell. How many times had they been through that scenario over the years?

And how many times had he pissed her off, not doing it.

Jess didn’t understand his work. Had no idea the way he tracked his daughter using skills he’d been taught two decades earlier on the government’s payroll. Remote viewing. The ability to see things from afar. What he knew how to do allowed him to see his daughter from anywhere in the world. Trouble was, his daughter had it too. The gift, some would say, but he often thought of it as the curse.

He could keep tabs on Wendell. What worried him was that someone else might be doing the very same thing.

For the moment, he was waiting and watching, no way could he leave without the photos he’d been sent to take. One hand on a gun, comforted by its heft and balance. There was little other comfort to be found in Kabul. Pleasure had been banned for years on end. Music, cards, chess. Flying kites and keeping birds. Some of it was creeping back. Already he’d noticed men carrying birds in cages, like they’d missed the birdsong and would have it back, by god.

He sympathized. He knew the loss of beauty.

But still there were men doing bad things and that’s why he was here. Someone higher up decided a bad man had to die and sometimes Scott was the one who killed him. There was no way to take that home to Virginia.

He closed his eyes and breathed until an image came. A Welcome To Georgia sign. Wendell had crossed a number of state lines. Otherwise he sensed nothing amiss. She was safe, for the time being.

Lynnie had predicted this before she died. She’d nailed Wendell still inside the womb. He’d come home from two months OCONUS when Lynnie was pregnant and the first thing she’d said was they had to get a rowan tree for the baby.

“Why rowan?” he’d asked.

“It has protective powers.”

He hadn’t needed to ask why their baby might need them.

He remembered his hands on Lynnie’s belly. How her soft skin felt tight. He detected the flux of movement beneath the layers. Skin and muscle, amniotic sac filled with warm fluid.

Quickening. Kin to the verb quicken, kindle a fire. Wendell born with a head full of flaming red hair, just like her mother.

He watched out the window. Across a street that was mostly dirt and rubble dragged into piles to allow passage. He’d take two dozen digital photos of the man when he arrived and deliver them across the border in the next twenty-four hours.

Women in burqas passed. Even now, when it was said in the free world that they no longer had to wear them. He felt their eyes beneath the heavy cloth, sensed the women beneath, still not talking to men, not even shaking hands.

The window was small and the day long. He couldn’t read. All he could do was sit and watch, so Jessie’s phone call, annoying as hell, provided an opening to a memory. Lynnie, in that gown she’d worn when he came home from places just like this. Her body showed right through. The opposite of a burqa. Something to think on. Let the details come back. He didn’t control this as much as it did him.

That rowan trip. Twenty-seven years ago.

Lynnie sat up and lit an amber-colored candle. Her invitation to lovemaking. His relief. He had dreaded the thought of coming home to a pregnant wife and no sex. The next day they’d headed for the parkway and spent the week looking for the rowan seedling. Lynnie pregnant. A perfect peach, ripe and juicy. She looked sexier than ever.

Each night, in pine-paneled rooms with double beds and satin-edged wool blankets, Lynnie climbed on top of him, all hot and bothered from the day’s drive. Afterward he sliced apples and bananas with his pocketknife and slipped the pieces into her mouth. Cheese, bread, rolls of deli meats sliced extra thin, cold water. He could never get it cold enough to suit her.

She fell asleep while he hummed songs he’d forgotten the words to and rubbed her feet. He studied her face as she slept, guilty at the ferocity of his desire. Sometimes coming home the roughness of those countries stayed with him, Afghanistan, dust and grit, wind and Kalashnikovs. All sensuality buried. He had to let it wear off, like a bad smell.

The next day he took the picture she’d clipped and found a seedling in the crevice of a huge rock outcropping. It was not a tree he’d ever noticed.

They’d planted it in the back yard. Lynnie tended it the same careful way she would have tended the baby. The way she went on about that little tree. In the end the deer got it, same deer she wouldn’t let him shoot. He held her while she cried. She was close to the end by that time, emotional and easily moved to tears. But she would have cried about that tree pregnant or not.

Years back, Lynnie had asked just the one time. “Scott, will you quit the Company?”

He had paused to consider. A pretense, really, but he’d got lost in it. Dust storms in the afternoon, hair matted, mouth full of sand, sweat dried on his face. The cratered landscape, decades of war. She wanted him to give it up. Why wouldn’t he?

There were reasons. Lamb cooked on skewers. Green tea and sugared almonds. Simple meals shared by people who had little but gave anyway. Glimpses of human nature, primitive and often raw, a man who would share a meal with you and later sink a knife in your gut without a thought. The distance between the extremes made him whole somehow.

He’d turned to Lynnie and answered her question.

“Hell, no.”

She never asked again.

All these years later the pull to be in Afghanistan was still strong, the call of something wild and violent. The rough men. Brutality that burned. Secrets he heard and kept.

Wendell had some of that.

Charlottesville was not big enough for her. Just like it hadn’t been for him. What she was doing – a young woman leaving the safety of home – was normal. It was what she might find that worried him. Who might follow. But he’d seen her remotely, minutes earlier, and she’d been okay.

When she was young she cried when he left. He ignored the tears. At fourteen she flung her hair and screamed, “Leave, just go, like you always do.” In college she seemed not to care.

And suddenly she’d lit off like she used to when she was little. Playing hide and seek. That game always did her in. She wanted so badly to win but couldn’t stand not being found.

Scott’s life ran in two streams, there was never a confluence. Wendell. Work. Jess filled in through the years, accepted his lifestyle even though she hated it.

He worked for the government. Only a handful of people knew what he did, where he went. Wendell had never asked.

Truth was, he could fly out of Kabul tomorrow and go straight to her if he wanted to. That sketch he’d made the night before he left Culpeper. Working oil wells. He knew exactly where she was.

But Wendell didn’t think so and for the time being, that’s what she needed to believe.

(to purchase from Amazon, click on the book cover on the sidebar to your right)

claire-obscure, chapter 1

2010-12-19T12:00:00.000-08:00

-1-

palimpsest, noun: a manuscript, usually of papyrus or parchment, on which more than one text has been written with the earlier writing incompletely erased and still visible; an object or place whose older layers or aspects are apparent beneath its surface.

Dear Virginia Woolf,

My name is Claire Caviness.

I am twenty-one years old, with an English degree and a job in a bookstore. I am the only child of parents I rarely see.

My mother has never hugged me. My father takes pleasure with men. I am no longer angry about that, but jealous, because he does something I cannot.

I think about being a writer like you were, but all I do is write the beginnings to stories I don’t know how to finish. I have a word box, filled with paper rectangles on which I have typed words and meanings. The curves of consonants and vowels twine and caress, the words on the slips of paper penetrate every single thing. I pull them out at random, when I feel like I might crumble, or detonate.

Sometimes the words stop the slide show that plays in my head. The front seat of a red car. Kudzu growing and twirling. A gun on a sofa. The flipping of numbers on a clock.

What I want most: one person who can hold all my secrets. Meanwhile I hold them close, and write what I can.

The words rush forward like a stream. They never stop telling.

Sincerely,

claire caviness

(to purchase from Amazon, click on the book cover on the sidebar to your right)

Partners In Zen calendar now available

2010-11-07T14:12:00.000-08:00

November Hill Press is very happy to announce that our first photographic calendar, Partners In Zen 2011, is available at our shop on Zazzle.

The calendar features many of the animal partners from our forthcoming nonfiction title, Partners in Zen, which will be available in early 2011.

You may get to the November Hill Press shop via the Zazzle link on the sidebar to your right.

outside the conservatory, and a bit on writing process

2010-11-01T07:01:00.001-07:00

These were a few shots I took outside the conservatory. Once I walked by the door, it was hard to stay interested in what is a gorgeous garden. All I wanted to do was get inside!

Next comes a series of photos at one of my favorite places on the earth. I've been many times but never took photos. This time I did.

I'm labeling these posts as writing in addition to the place names - because for me, seeking out these magical places feeds my writing whether or not I end up using the places, or anything I see while exploring them, in the work itself.

One of the best ways to deal with writing blocks, or to stimulate a new project, is to get away from the desk and go out into the world, especially outside the circle of our everyday routine.

For me, finding places that have been around longer than I have always stirs things up in a wonderful way. I can feel the stories of all the people who have lived there, traveled there, remain there - swirling in a sort of wonderful cauldron of creative unconsciousness. It puts me right in the place where I want to be to access my own stories floating around in the deep places we all carry with us but don't always recognize when busy with our daily lives.

Sometimes I find a path for my story through making my own journey to new or beloved places. And other times, like this one, I feel like the path was already there inside my head, and in a streak of pure synchronicity, I managed to recreate it in my actual travels. I could feel the distinct sensation this trip that I was following the path of the main character in the new book, which is at the moment nothing more than an idea, a premise, with one character vaguely in mind.

And yet as we went from place to place last week, I could feel her becoming more solid, and was able to begin to see a little form coming to the idea. This part of the writing (or creative) process is nebulous and I don't think people write much about it. The focus tends to be on how to sit down and write, getting the words onto the page or the screen. But this part, the part where it's all wispy and not graspable, is in my opinion the most important part.

It's where we trust that the germ of something is worthwhile, and where we allow the unnamed magic to happen without trying to plan it or control it.

It's a valuable time for us as individuals too - allowing ourselves to be in the numinous. It's healing, it's transforming, and all kinds of good things come when we let it happen. Not just in our writing, but in our lives.

celebration: Jim Harrison

2010-10-13T09:59:00.000-07:00

I'm taking a hiatus from the "Treasures in Small Places" posts and starting a new Wednesday series here. This one is going to be my "Celebrations" series, in which I will post about anything that charms me to the degree I want to celebrate!

Today I saw a Tweet by Paris Review with a quote from Jim Harrison:

Habit is what destroys art.

This intrigued me enough to follow the link and I devoured this WONDERFUL INTERVIEW with Jim Harrison. Love it, love it, love it.

When asked if he has advice for young writers, he responds:

Just start at page one and write like a son of a bitch.

As far as I'm concerned, that is worthy of celebrating! Go read his interview and if you're similarly moved, buy his books. He's a wonderful writer and poet.

letting the acorns fall

2010-10-05T07:01:00.000-07:00

I want to take a moment to talk a little bit about November Hill Press and why I decided to launch it at this point in my writing life. I've been writing novels since I was around 3 years old. The early novels were a toddler's version of cursive writing in blue ballpoint on yellow legal pads. I would meticulously put my scrawl on every centimeter of every legal pad line, filling page after page. There are pictures of my toddler self sleeping, pen in hand, with my pad filled with writing. That I was wearing footed pajamas adds to the charm. Sadly (for me, only) I don't remember what it was I wrote, and so those early works are lost!

But the point is, from that very early time in my life I was driven to write. My mother still has a few novels in which I scratched out the author's name on the title pages and tried to write my own name there. I have no memory of that, but it seems even before I could write, I wanted to be a writer.

I've spent years reading and writing. I have an undergraduate degree in English and a master's in clinical social work. I've written poems, short stories, feature articles, papers, and novels. I went through the usual channels with the novels, and although I met wonderful people and had generally good experiences with agents and editors, the process was slow. I am impatient. And the years roll on.

One evening last summer I walked down to the very back of our farm, November Hill. I was standing on the slope looking across at the "hundred acre wood" that lies behind us, when a huge herd of deer came from behind me, leaping together in such a way that it seemed they never touched the ground, their brown bodies arching away from me, down the hill, up the other side, and into the forest. White tails were flashing as they went. The herd was so large this took awhile. I stood, feeling like magic was happening. And then the last deer passed. She slowed and stopped. She turned and looked at me, and then leaped out of sight, hidden instantly as she entered the tree line.

Ted Andrews in his beautiful book, Animal Speak, says that deer often symbolize a call to adventure. An invitation to a journey that might take several years to come to fruition. For days after that encounter, I kept seeing the image of that deer who stopped and turned back. I kept feeling the call.

And that's how November Hill Press was born.

The journey is taking longer than I thought. When we hand our novels into the hands of editors, we hopefully trust them to make the books better. The first novel that is slated to come out under the November Hill Press umbrella has been edited and commented on and reworked. It's been ready to go for several years, if only it had a place to go TO.

And yet, now that I am singly in charge of its publication, I am obsessed with reworking it yet again.

This week I read Michael Cunningham's NY Times Op-Ed piece, "Found In Translation:"

Here’s a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they’d intended to write. It’s one of the heartbreaks of writing fiction. You have, for months or years, been walking around with the idea of a novel in your mind, and in your mind it’s transcendent, it’s brilliantly comic and howlingly tragic, it contains everything you know, and everything you can imagine, about human life on the planet earth. It is vast and mysterious and awe-inspiring. It is a cathedral made of fire.

But even if the book in question turns out fairly well, it’s never the book that you’d hoped to write. It’s smaller than the book you’d hoped to write. It is an object, a collection of sentences, and it does not remotely resemble a cathedral made of fire.

It feels, in short, like a rather inept translation of a mythical great work.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/opinion/03cunningham.html?_r=1

As I read the above passage, I breathed a sigh of something close to relief. It's true. The cathedral made of fire is getting ready to be put into something concrete, an e-book, and then a paperback. Will it lose its brilliance in that translation? That's what we all fear, I think, and it's certainly part of what I'm struggling with as I try to get my manuscript, which has long been titled "claire-obscure-final" in my document file, to the point where I am able to send it on to the next phase.

Beyond this first title, there are four more ready to go.

It's a big leap, just like what the deer were doing last summer, when I stood and watched in awe.

Earlier this week I had another encounter with the November Hill deer. It was evening. They were standing in the arena, a place I've never seen them. There were five of them. They were eating acorns under the big oak tree.

Ted Andrews says in his book Nature-Speak that the oak symbolizes strength and endurance winning out, and opening to new spirit forces. He says the acorn is a symbol of fertility and fruition and the manifestation of creativity, and that the presence of acorns in a meaningful way can be a sign that the fruit of our efforts over the past year or two is about to be harvested.

Bear with me as I deal with these cathedrals made of fire issues. It's part of this process, and I'm trying to honor it while keeping to my original goal - which is letting these acorns fall.

taking a detour: treasure in a not so small place! Susan Henderson's Up From The Blue

2010-09-21T14:29:00.000-07:00

This week's treasure is not from a small press, but it's a beautiful debut novel from a lovely and generous writer who has spent years highlighting the work of other writers, asking questions of all of us on her wonderful blog LitPark (and caring about the answers), and because it happens to be her debut week and because this is all about reading pleasure and finding treasure, here it is:

Head over to Susan's blog to read the LONG list of glowing reviews for Up From The Blue and then head to your favorite bookstore and pick up your own copy. It's what I'm reading right now, and I'm absolutely thrilled to be able to recommend it here.

Proust's Overcoat by Lorenza Foschini

2010-09-15T13:10:00.000-07:00

Today's treasure is in honor of my starting a year-long Proust group where 8 of us will read the entirety of Proust, meet weekly to discuss, and share writing of our own along the way. Judy Hogan is our guide, and I've been very excited to begin what is for me a re-reading of a work I read in my early twenties. And we began this week!

Foschini's book:

Description from Amazon:

Jacques Guerin was a prominent businessman at the head of his family's successful perfume company, but his real passion was for rare books and literary manuscripts. From the time he was a young man, he frequented the antiquarian bookshops of Paris in search of lost, forgotten treasures. The ultimate prize? Anything from the hands of Marcel Proust.

GuÉrin identified with Proust more deeply than with any other writer, and when illness brought him by chance under the care of Marcel's brother, Dr. Robert Proust, he saw it as a remarkable opportunity. Shamed by Marcel's extravagant writings, embarrassed by his homosexuality, and offended by his disregard for bourgeois respectability, his family had begun to deliberately destroy and sell their inheritance of his notebooks, letters, manuscripts, furni-ture, and personal effects. Horrified by the destruction, and consumed with desire, GuÉrin ingratiated himself with Marcel's heirs, placating them with cash and kindness in exchange for the writer's priceless, rare material remains. After years of relentless persuasion, GuÉrin was at last rewarded with a highly personal prize, one he had never dreamed of possessing, a relic he treasured to the end of his long life: Proust's overcoat.

Proust's Overcoat introduces a cast of intriguing and unforgettable characters, each inspired and tormented by Marcel, his writing, and his orphaned objects. Together they reveal a curious and compelling tale of lost and found, of common things and uncommon desires.

And a note about the press... Ecco Press has long been a favorite of mine. I discovered it when I discovered the writing of Paul Bowles. Below is a brief history of the press, which started small and grew bigger over the years.

DANIEL HALPERN met Paul Bowles in 1968 when Bowles was teaching for one semester at California State University at Northridge. Bowles invited Halpern to visit him in Morocco, and in 1969 Halpern moved to Tangier where he was a neighbor of Bowles in the apartment building Immeuble Itesa for two years. In 1969 Bowles and Halpern founded the literary journal Antaeus. Upon his return to the United States, Halpern established The Ecco Press in 1972, and the inaugural list of publications included a reissue of a collection of Paul Bowles' short stories, The Delicate Prey. Daniel Halpern is editorial director of The Ecco Press, an imprint of HarperCollins.

November Hill Press hits the road

2010-09-08T16:43:00.000-07:00

I didn't forget this week's Treasures post - but November Hill is going on the road this week and I'm trying to get ready for the trip!

Look for a special weekend blog post, lots of tweets, and next week's regularly-scheduled Treasure post which is already picked and waiting. It has a connection to next week so I'm saving it 'til then.

Novello Festival Press and Dot Jackson's Refuge

2010-08-31T18:46:00.000-07:00

Novello Festival Press published one of my favorite books, Dot Jackson's Refuge. I just read that they were unable to publish a book for 2011 due to budget cuts, which saddens me greatly. Take a look at their list and if any of their titles looks interesting, buy them.

Late one night in the spring of 1929, a young Charleston society matron goes to bed while considering what to wear for her suicide. Instead of going through with it, she takes her children and her feckless husband’s new Auburn Phaeton and literally heads for the hills. Mary Seneca Steele is searching for a new life – but first she must learn how to drive.

Dot Jackson’s debut novel, Refuge, carries the reader deep into the Blue Ridge, where birch forests shimmer in ethereal light and where lush valleys hold dark family secrets, blood-filled tragedies and, ultimately, a hard-won salvation.

In his praise for the book, author Ron Rash calls Refuge “a beautifully rendered portrait of a lost time and place.”

Dori Sanders proclaims, “Refuge is an intensely readable novel of the complexity of family ties… Dot Jackson is a true Southern voice, a master storyteller and an Appalachian treasure.”

“I came here desperate, and I thought my heart would break for the love of what I found. And then I would not rest until I destroyed it. And you want to hear the worst? I would do it again.”

Dot Jackson is an award-winning journalist and environmental activist. She lives in the shadows of Table Rock in the foothills of South Carolina where she is co-founder and on-site manager of the Birchwood Center for Arts and Folklife.

About Novello, from their website:

Novello Festival Press is the nation's only public library-sponsored literary publisher. An imprint of the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, NFP seeks to enhance awareness of the literary arts and expand opportunities for readers and writers from within our community and beyond it.

Founded in 2000 and named for the library's innovative reading festival, the press garnered national attention with its premiere publication, Novello: Ten Years of Great American Writing. This anthology, which features 25 short works from such renowned writers as Pat Conroy, Tom Wolfe and others who have appeared at the festival, received the first of four Independent Publisher Book Awards bestowed upon the press.

Novello Festival Press has since put nearly 300 writers into print, through anthologies and works of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and children’s literature. NFP books have garnered critical acclaim from such prestigious outlets as the New York Times, National Public Radio, Publisher’s Weekly and Southern Living magazine. Two NFP works have been named Literary Fiction Book of the Year by Foreword Magazine. Refuge, by Dot Jackson, received the prestigious Weatherford Award in 2006, which is given to a work of fiction that best illuminates the challenges, personalities and unique qualities of the Appalachian South.

All NFP titles are distributed nationally through John F. Blair, Publisher. Proceeds from NFP books benefit the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County.

Bring Down the Little Birds, from University of Arizona Press (coming soon)

2010-08-25T13:06:00.000-07:00

Bring Down the Little Birds
On Mothering, Art, Work, and Everything Else
Carmen Giménez Smith

How does a contemporary woman with a career as a poet, professor, and editor experience motherhood with one small child, another soon to be born, and her own mother suddenly diagnosed with a brain tumor and Alzheimer’s? The dichotomy between life as a mother and life as an artist and professional is a major theme in modern literature because often the two seem irreconcilable. In Bring Down the Little Birds, Carmen Giménez Smith faces this seeming irreconcilability head-on, offering a powerful and necessary lyric memoir to shed light on the difficulties—and joys—of being a mother juggling work, art, raising children, pregnancy, and being a daughter to an ailing mother, and, perhaps most important, offering a rigorous and intensely imaginative contemplation on the concept of motherhood as such.

Writing in fragmented yet coherent sections, the author shares with us her interior monologue, affording the reader a uniquely honest, insightful, and deeply personal glimpse into a woman’s first and second journeys into motherhood. Giménez Smith begins Bring Down the Little Birds by detailing the relationship with her own mother, from whom her own concept of motherhood originated, a conception the author continually reevaluates and questions over the course of the book.

Combining fragments of thought, daydreams, entries from notebooks both real and imaginary, and real-life experiences, Giménez Smith interrogates everything involved in becoming and being a mother for both the first and second time, from wondering what her children will one day know about her own “secret life” to meditations on the physical effects of pregnancy as well as the myths, the nostalgia, and the glorification of motherhood.

While Giménez Smith incorporates universal experiences of motherhood that other authors have detailed throughout literature, what separates her book from these many others is that her reflections are captured in a style that establishes an intimacy and immediacy between author and reader through which we come to know the secret life of a mother and are made to question our own conception of what motherhood really means.

READ AN EXCERPT HERE.

Treasures in Small Places: Algonquin's Robert Olmstead and two treasures at once

2010-08-17T18:02:00.000-07:00

This week I'm stretching the notion of small a bit by featuring Algonquin Books. Algonquin started small and then got bigger, but the fact that they still have an office in Chapel Hill, NC, and still take unsolicited manuscripts for consideration keeps them, in my mind, on the small side of the fence.

For a number of years in my twenties I eagerly awaited the beautiful, smaller than usual and sometimes chunky, hard covers they published. Easy to hold in the hands, beautiful of cover, I trusted Algonquin to publish stories I would enjoy. And I have.

Although Robert Olmstead's Coal Black Horse is very well-known at this point, it's one of those books I've had on my radar but haven't yet added to my pile.

When Robey Childs's mother has a premonition about her husband, a soldier fighting in the Civil War, she does the unthinkable: she sends her only child to find his father on the battlefield and bring him home.

At fourteen, wearing the coat his mother sewed to ensure his safety—blue on one side, gray on the other— Robey thinks he's off on a great adventure. But not far from home, his horse falters and he realizes the enormity of his task. It takes the gift of a powerful and noble coal black horse to show him how to undertake the most important journey of his life: with boldness, bravery, and self-posession.
Coal Black Horse joins the pantheon of great war novels—All Quiet on the Western Front, The Red Badge of Courage, The Naked and the Dead.

Lucky for me, having hoarded this read for several years, Olmstead has a new book out, so I get double the treasure:

The year is 1916. The enemy, Pancho Villa, is elusive. Terrain is unforgiving. Through the mountains and across the long dry stretches of Mexico, Napoleon Childs, an aging cavalryman, leads an expedition of inexperienced horse soldiers on seemingly fruitless searches. Though he is seasoned at such missions, things go terribly wrong, and his patrol is suddenly at the mercy of an enemy intent on their destruction. After witnessing the demise of his troops, Napoleon is left by his captors to die in the desert.

Through him we enter the conflicted mind of a warrior as he tries to survive against all odds, as he seeks to make sense of a lifetime of senseless wars and to reckon with the reasons a man would choose a life on the battlefield. Olmstead, an award-winning writer, has created a tightly wound novel that is as moving as it is terrifying.

Reviewers compare Olmstead to Stephen Crane and Cormac McCarthy, two favorites of mine, so I'm very excited to have these titles in my reading pile. Enjoy!

treasures in small places: Venus Khoury-Ghata's A House at the Edge of Tears

2010-08-11T06:40:00.000-07:00

In A House at the Edge of Tears a sister struggles to carry on the legacy of her brother’s budding talent for writing. Only she can save her brother’s poems from her tyrannical father’s beating induced psychosis. A semi-autobiographical account from National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Vénus Khoury-Ghata, translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker.

In the city of Beirut, five shabby dwellings circle a courtyard with a pomegranate tree weeping blood red fruit. The residents hear screams in the night as a boy is beaten by his father—a punishment for masturbating in his sleep. A crime not worthy of the punishment: the neighbors gossip and decide that he must have tried to rape his sisters. The poems he writes are perhaps an even greater crime to his father, but ultimately a gift to his eldest sister, who narrates their story with a combination of brutal truth and stunning prose. As her brother becomes more and more lost to his family and to himself, we also learn of a Contessa who teaches tango, a family who spends every Sunday in search of buried treasure, and the miracle of a weeping Madonna statue that cries when human tears run dry.

In this mesmerizing novel, celebrated novelist and poet, Khoury-Ghata, presents the disintegration of a family and a country—both ruled by a fury fueled by fear.

I've long been a fan of Graywolf Press - here's more on them:

In 1974, Graywolf's founder Scott Walker embarked on a publishing adventure. Originally working out of a space provided by Copper Canyon Press in Port Townsend, Washington, Graywolf soon moved in to a shop of its own, or rather into Scott's backyard in a small outbuilding affectionately called the "print shack."

It was in this small, cramped building that the first books were produced for the reading public. Each book was painstakingly hand-set and hand-printed on treadle-operated machines. After six months of fourteen-hour days, the first full-length poetry book, Instructions to the Double by Tess Gallagher, was given life. The small print run of fifteen hundred copies sold out in four months.

Since then, Graywolf has expanded its list to include novels, short stories, memoirs, essays, as well as poetry, and has discovered and/or promoted such writers as Elizabeth Alexander, Charles Baxter, Sven Birkerts, Linda Gregg, Eamon Grennan, Tony Hoagland, Jane Kenyon, William Kittredge, Carl Phillips, William Stafford, David Treuer, and Brenda Ueland. A commitment to quality, and a willingness to embrace or invent new models, has kept Graywolf at the forefront of the small press movement. Today, Graywolf is considered one of the nation's leading nonprofit literary publishers.

treasures in small places: Dylan Landis' Normal People Don't Live Like This

2010-08-04T05:26:00.000-07:00

This week's small (though very established and with a lot of books) press treasure just arrived in my mailbox. Published by Persea Books, it's Dylan Landis' collection of short stories, Normal People Don't Live Like This.

An extraordinary mix of the work of Mary Gaitskill and Scott Spencer, this remarkable fiction debut piercingly yet tenderly portrays the inner lives of a girl and her mother in New York City in the 1970s.

In ten stories, written from a variety of perspectives, we follow the uneasy yet magnetic relationships between Leah Levinson, a guarded teenager, and the delinquent girls she worships. Leah and her artistic mother, Helen, struggle against the confines of their pasts and personalities, unaware of how similar their paths are as they make repeated, touching attempts to break free. Just when they seem to have reached an impasse, each makes an impulsive change of place: Leah takes a trip abroad with an endearing young man, and Helen rents, and fantastically ornaments, a secret room in a welfare hotel. Jolted from their old patterns, daughter and mother independently glimpse the possibility of a different, more vibrant life.

I am also enjoying the author's blog, Notebook, which is its own chest full of treasures. Enjoy!

treasures in small places - a weekly event here starting today

2010-07-28T09:29:00.000-07:00

I've always been interested in small presses and the books they bring to the world, and starting today, I plan to do a weekly post on Wednesdays where I feature a small press, a title from their list, and invite suggestions for the next week's offering.

Today I'd like to share Kalorama, by Carolyn Muehlhause, published by Wolf's Pond Press.

From Amazon:

Carolyn Muehlhause's moving novel of the Great Depression takes us back to a time and place lovingly remembered. The year is 1935, partway through the decade known as Hard Times. In an old and once prestigious neighborhood of Washington, D.C., Nels and Mid Weigmann try to make a home for themselves, their daughter Nora, and assorted "guests" in Kalorama, a rose brick mansion turned boardinghouse. As the story of Kalorama's residents unfolds in a rich tapestry of hard times and good times, secrets are revealed and lives are changed.

I'm reading it now, and if anyone knows anything more about Wolf's Pond Press, please share in the comments. I've done a preliminary Google search and am not pulling up anything except titles of books (which is nice, and I'll be following up on those!) but would love to know more about the press itself.

If you have suggestions, either book titles or names of presses, please pass them on!

And remember: I'm also looking for e-books to share, so if you know of small presses publishing in the e-format, I'd love to hear about any you admire.

claire-obscure

2010-03-24T09:56:00.000-07:00

November Hill Press will publish its first title, the adult literary novel claire-obscure, in late August or early September of 2010.

The novel will initially be available in e-book format for the Kindle (please note that if you do not own a Kindle, Amazon offers free e-book software for both PC and Mac, iPad, iPhones, Blackberries, and Androids) and other e-book devices, with plans to offer a POD trade paperback version shortly thereafter.

More info on claire-obscure:

Claire Caviness, a 21-year old with an English degree and a job in a bookstore, reads Proust but quotes Virginia Woolf, wears vintage dresses, and frequents antique shops. Her most treasured possession is a small box full of intriguing words she meticulously typed on her father's typewriter, cut, and collected.

Claire is struggling to change her life when she meets Finn Weston, a mysterious and deeply disturbed medical student who collects paintings and seems like a soul mate. Finn’s protracted seduction leads her into a dance of desire and then terror, a folie à deux that becomes increasingly destructive - until she meets Raoul Duras, a Delta Force operator with secrets of his own: a penchant for rescuing prostitutes, devotion to a girlfriend who died, and a fierce need to find someone to take her place.

When Raoul falls in love with Claire and offers a glimpse into his “high speed low drag” world, neither expect that what each of them knows about life will heal and awaken the other.

In a journey from trauma to restoration, Claire examines her deepest secrets: grief for her distant mother and gay father, conflicted sexuality, and the darkness that pulls her to the intrigue and danger of Finn.

Advance quotes on claire-obscure:

"claire-obscure is sophisticated, eerie, fascinating, literary. It has a spare, sexy Duras feel and a Donna Tartt-like magnetic quality."

-Peggy Payne, author of Revelation and New York Times Notable Book Sister India

"In claire-obscure, Billie Hinton creates three amazing and mysterious characters, in a fresh voice that has echoes of Donna Tartt and Sylvia Plath. Couldn't wait to see how it turned out, hated for it to end."

-Dale Edgerton, author of Goneaway Road

"Simply brilliant; a lyric dreamsong."

-J.S. Kindrick, former Special Operations soldier and author of Spirit Horses

Welcome!

2010-03-01T06:17:00.000-08:00

Welcome to November Hill Press! Stay tuned for announcements as we roll into the new year.