Like I said in my earlier post today, Cole Drewes releasedhis book HOUNDS OF HEAVEN recently, and was kind enough to host my guest post on his blog. Thanks, Cole! :D
Ruth's first entry is below, and you can continue reading tomorrow here.
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These hands are ninety-three years old. They belong to Charlotte Marie Bradley Miller. She was so frail that her grand-daughter had to carry her onto the set to take this photo. It's a close-up. Her emaciated arms emerge from the top corners of the photo and the background is black, maybe velvet, as if we're being protected from seeing the strings. One wrist rests on the other, and her fingers hang loose, close together, a pair of folded wings. And you can see her insides.
The bones of her knuckles bulge out of the skin, which sags like plastic that has melted in the sun and is dripping off her, wrinkling and folding. Her veins look as though they're stuck to the outside of her hands. They're a colour that's difficult to describe: blue, but also silver, green; her blood runs through them, close to the surface. The book says she died shortly after they took this picture. Did she even get to see it? Maybe it was the last beautiful thing she left in the world.
I'm trying to decide whether or not I want to carry on living. I'm giving myself three months of this journal to decide. You might think that sounds melodramatic, but I don't think I'm alone in wondering whether it's all worth it. I've seen the look in people's eyes. Stiff suits travelling to work, morning after morning, on the cramped and humid tube. Tarted-up girls and gangs of boys reeking of aftershave, reeling on the pavements on a Friday night, trying to mop up the dreariness of their week with one desperate, fake-happy night. I've heard the weary grief in my dad's voice.
So where do I start with all this? What do you want to know about me? I'm Ruth White, thirty-two years old, going on a hundred. I live alone with no boyfriend and no cat in a tiny flat in central London. In fact, I had a non-relationship with a man at work, Dan, for seven years. I'm sitting in my bedroom-cum-living room right now, looking up every so often at the thin rain slanting across a flat grey sky. I work in a city hospital lab as a microbiologist. My dad is an accountant and lives with his sensible second wife Julie, in a sensible second home. Mother finished dying when I was fourteen, three years after her first diagnosis. What else? What else is there?
Charlotte Marie Bradley Miller. I looked at her hands for twelve minutes. It was odd describing what I was seeing in words. Usually the picture just sits inside my head and I swish it around like tasting wine. I have huge books all over my flat; books you have to take in both hands to lift. I've had the photo habit for years. Mother bought me my first book, black and white landscapes by Ansel Adams. When she got really ill, I used to take it to bed with me and look at it for hours, concentrating on the huge trees, the still water, the never-ending skies. I suppose it helped me think about something other than what was happening. I learned to focus on one photo at a time rather than flicking from scene to scene in search of something to hold me. If I concentrate, then everything stands still. Although I use them to escape the world, I also think they bring me closer to it. I've still got that book. When I take it out, I handle the pages as though they might flake into dust.
Mother used to write a journal. When I was small, I sat by her bed in the early mornings on a hard chair and looked at her face as her pen spat out sentences in short bursts. I imagined what she might have been writing about; princesses dressed in star-patterned silk, talking horses, adventures with pirates. More likely she was writing about what she was going to cook for dinner and how irritating Dad's snoring was.
I've always wanted to write my own journal, and this is my chance. Maybe my last chance. The idea is that every night for three months, I'll take one of these heavy sheets of pure white paper, rough under my fingertips, and fill it up on both sides. If my suicide note is nearly a hundred pages long, then no-one can accuse me of not thinking it through. No-one can say; 'It makes no sense; she was a polite, cheerful girl, had everything to live for', before adding that I did keep myself to myself. It'll all be here. I'm using a silver fountain pen with purple ink. A bit flamboyant for me, I know. I need these idiosyncratic rituals; they hold things in place. Like the way I make tea, squeezing the tea-bag three times, the exact amount of milk, seven stirs. My writing is small and neat; I'm striping the paper. I'm near the bottom of the page now. Only ninety-one more days to go before I'm allowed to make my decision. That's it for today. It's begun.
Continue reading tomorrow here...
Fiona Robyn
OH, FRABJOUS DAY!3) Third place gets whatever's left (SHIVER or Synopsis Critique) and choice of *Reading Companion!
"So how the heck do I win already?" I hear you yelling at your computer screens. Patience, and I'll tell you!
There are multiple ways to get points and show BOOK LOVE :).
1) Already be a follower of this blog and comment in this post (1 pt!)
2) Become a follower and comment in this post (1 pt!)
3) Blog about this contest to drum up Book Love, and link to it in the comments (2 pts!)
4) Take a photo of yourself with your home library, and link to it in the comments (3 pts!)
5) Take a photo of yourself carrying a book to an unusual place or doing something hilarious w/ said book(s) (link in comments) (4 pts!)
6) Take a photo of yourself buying a book in an actual bookstore (link in comments) (5 pts PER BOOK!)
7) Review a book on your blog or on Amazon and link us to it (5 pts PER BOOK!)
8) Write an author to tell him/her you love them (honor system/tell us in the comments) (5 pts PER AUTHOR!)
So as you can see, there are lots of ways for points to add up :).
*"Reading Companion" prize choices (you may pick one of the following if you're a winner):
1) Fancy bookmark
2) Coffee**
3) Chocolate!
This contest will be going strong until Valentine's Day, so get crackin! After that, I will put all your points into a hat and pick some winners! The more book love you display, the greater your chances to win!
I can't wait to see all the Book Love you guys pay forward :). Thanks for being awesome!
** This part used to say "small bottle of booze," but I changed it after realizing I have no way to check ID that isn't totally unfun and lame. So, everyone likes coffee, right? Even kids? Eh? Eh? They did in World War II! My grandparents said so. Coffee it is!
I have a special treat for you today: An interview with contemporary romance author, Lisa Dale!I recently read her book, IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT, loved it, and thought I'd ask her to share her journey to publication with us.
She graciously agreed!
Becca: Can you please tell us about your road to publication? How did you meet your agent?
Lisa: I met my agent while I was working at another literary agency; she and I sat on a panel together at a conference in Toronto. At the time, I hadn't really had any ideas about writing books in the near future. Then, later on while I was in school getting my MFA and was working on my first book Simple Wishes, I got to thinking of her again and thought she would like it.
She didn't accept the book right away--she asked for some pretty significant revisions. Her critique was dead on, and I find myself thankful for her excellent editorial advice again and again. Once we sent Simple Wishes out, we got the first offer in less then two weeks and a second offer just a few days after that. I always thought I'd be the type who would take the news with cool aplomb, but instead I screamed like a little kid on the Fourth of July!
Becca: I would definitely have screamed, too :)! Did you ever think about giving up along the way? If so, what kept you going?
Lisa: Oh yes. A hundred times. A thousand. Sometimes I still flirt with the idea (a writer's life is never easy), but the fact is I know I never ever will quit. Writing is a fundamental instinct. I'm ALWAYS writing. So what keeps me going is mostly the fact that there are no other options that will work for me. When there's no plan B, plan A can't be allowed to fail.
Becca: I love that philosophy!
I'm a fan of your blog, and follow you on Twitter as well. Can you tell us about what you did to promote the launch of your book? How much social networking do you do? Any advice for newbie authors on building a readership?
Lisa: Promoting my second book, It Happened One Night, has proven to be a bit easier than promoting the first book, Simple Wishes. I'd say I do middle of the road social networking. Some do more than me, others do much less.
My favorite social networking tool is easily Twitter because it's so easy to meet new people who are into the same things. Twitter-folk are there because they want to talk to and meet new people (strangers), while Facebookers tend to be a bit more private. There are lots of people who tell me "I don't get Twitter," and all I can say is that I didn't either, at first. But there is something special about it as a networking tool, and the advice I would give to people who don't get it is "Start getting it." Read up. Learn. Push yourself. There's a reason everyone is saying how awesome Twitter is.
Becca: That’s so true. I didn’t get Twitter at first, either, but now I’m officially addicted :). Can you tell us what it's like to work with an editor and go through the revisions process? Is there anything that surprised you when you first sold Simple Wishes that you'd wish you'd known as a newbie?
Lisa: Revisions take a lot of patience and humility--when you work with an editor it's no longer about writing to please yourself. It's about writing to meet another person's requests. That's kind of a hurdle to get around. As to the second part of your question--what surprised me--I wasn't prepared for how nervous I would be to learn that the book would come out. I was excited, sure. But I was also scared out of my mind. With the second book the jitters calmed down a bit and I had a lot more fun.
Becca: I’d never thought about being nervous when your book is actually coming out! I’m loving the insight here ;).
That's fascinating that you worked in a literary agency before getting published. Did anything in that experience give you a leg up when you first reached out to your agent? Any query advice for us?
Lisa: Well, I don't want to overstate my role at the agency--I was an intern then a junior agent. Actually, I wasn't really able to write well while I was working at the agency because I was so overwhelmed by technique, rules, marketing, etc. It wasn't until I left that I could "hear" the sound of my own writing voice again.
As for query advice, the best advice I can give is to just be quietly confident in your query letters. If you know your stuff, it will show without your needing to flaunt your knowledge. The biggest mistake I've seen in the eight or ten thousand query letters I've read is "trying too hard."
Becca: Did you find writing It Happened One Night easier or more difficult than your first book? What's it like working under a deadline for a publisher?
Lisa: I have a feeling that every book is going to prove difficult in its own unique way--and that's how I like it. If I started getting too good at what I was doing--if the stories came too easily--I'd probably suspect myself of relying too much on formula and losing my passion for what I'm doing. As for working under deadline, it hasn't proved to be a problem--knock on wood!
Becca: Good point! Sometimes the effort is what makes it fun, as well.
Lastly, if you could go back in time and give Past Lisa any advice, what would it be? Are there any pearls of wisdom you've gained through experience that you'd want to share with yourself?
Lisa: I love that you said "Past Lisa." I say "Past Lisa" and "Future Lisa" to myself all the time. :-) If I could go back and tell myself something, it would be to stay positive and also to go more slowly. To listen harder to the quietest part of my own voice and to hold on to that whisper even when everything else in life gets loud. It's easy to get distracted and sidetracked--but then again, I don't know. Maybe that's part of it, too--all the detours on the way to finding the right path.
So much for my sage wisdom. Obviously, I'm still learning as I go!
A big THANK YOU to Lisa Dale for sharing her insight with us :).
Please go check out her books, IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT and SIMPLE WISHES, or visit her at http://www.lisadalebooks.com/.
EXTRA, EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT!(don't those newsies look like they want to beat you up?)
Anyway, I have exciting news for all of you fellow wanna-be authors out there :). There's a *new* and exciting place to hear about publishing news, interact with a cool agent, and get query critiques!
This week, beloved agent Nathan Bransford added FORUMS to his agent website and blog. Yes, now we can cyber stalk him in style, and on his own turf, too! (Restraining order sold separately.)
I went over there today to start helping out w/ the queries, and there are some cool and talented people there already. Go! Sign up! Strangely enough, my user name is RebeccaKnight. Let's hang out :).
In other news, I'll be posting and interview I did with author Lisa Dale on Monday! I read and loved her most recent book, IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT (women's fiction/contemporary romance), and now have her debut, SIMPLE WISHES on my Christmas list.
Also, don't forget to enter your ideas for my Deal With the Universe contest by midnight this Friday! I'll pick my favorite three and let you guys vote on what I'll have to do *when* (fingers crossed) I get my first book deal.
Any news to share on your end? :)
There's a new craze sweeping the blogosphere! What is it you ask?
Today, I'd like to share a real-life story of how an online presence/platform can lead to book sales!
Phrases like "An author to keep an eye on" and "A haunting debut" pop out from her book blurbs. At this point, I'm totally excited. I feel like I know this person from my interactions with her online--I follow her blog and Twitter account, and am emotionally invested in her being successful.