Time for Some Cleaning

Well, friends, I haven’t been tending to my Squarespace garden very much in recent months. But I have reasons. Plenty of reasons.

Reason 1: This fall, Ruby Violet Publishers will publish my novel A Walker in the Evening, an English-style gothic story tied to a Ukrainian village in the early 1900s. I am so thrilled and honored that this is happening!

Reason 2: I’ve been hard at work with the creation of my account on Medium, where I’m regularly posting about books, the writing life, and my experiences on the road to publishing the novel. Check it out here.

Reason 3: I also wrote the introduction to the forthcoming Last Days of Summer by Hugh Holland from Chronicle Books. It’s a wonderful archive of old skateboard photography that gave me a chance to wax nostalgically on being a kid with a cheap skateboard growing up in the 1970s. Check it out here.

Reason 4: My day job.

Reason 5: Life in general.

Reason 6: Need time to watch A Gentleman in Moscow, The Boys, and House of the Dragon.

So … for anyone out there who is keeping track, this modest post is just to announce that I’ll be returning to more regular posts here in the weeks and months ahead. I’ve also got plenty of website sweeping, dusting, and mopping to do since some of the professional information that you see is a tad bit dated.

That’s all for now. More to come soon.

Surprise!!: Your Draft is a Zero

Hold on a minute. I didn't say the draft was terrible. I just said it was a "zero."

That is totally different ... and useful to understand.

I found this idea in the pages of the late great Peter Drucker, venerable founder of modern management, in his essay "Know Your Time."

That essay is about effective management, especially when it comes to how people manage themselves. At one point Drucker says that managers spend time writing "zero drafts" as part of the writing process ... and that idea is helpful for any writer to understand.

Very often (I am speaking from total experience here) what happens during the writing process is this: You come to the end of a draft, think you're done, and realize you're dissatisfied with the whole thing ... except for a few sentences near the end where things really started to fuse together and get interesting.

Instead of being done with the process, you realize, you're actually getting started. It just took 15,000-20,000 fricken words to get there.

That, my beloved friends, is your zero draft.

It doesn't mean the material is useless or valueless. On the contrary, it has IMMENSE value. It has helped you dump all those expectations and preconceived notions so that you're ready to produce something truly in your voice. (And plenty of that draft material will probably crop up again in your finished draft somewhere anyways-- you'll just use it in a different way).

On the road to finishing my first novel Sorry For The Interruptions, I probably created three zero drafts (maybe more, it's all a blur now). It was a long, painful apprenticeship. But I learned a lot. If you aren't sure if you're working with a zero draft or not, let me know. I can help.

The most important thing, don’t get frustrated or doubt yourself. You're on the right path. The result is going to be amazing ... and worth the extra sweat.

Keep going. You can do it.

Amirite? Has the Digital Age Killed Good Writing?

It doesn't matter if you're posting something only for your friends or advertising your skills to an employer, good writing in the digital age still matters.

Amirite?

(My auto-correct is fighting me on that word.  It keeps telling me that what I really want to say is "emirate.")

BuzzFeed's Emmy Favilla published a book a few years ago that is ... no exaggeration here ... a declaration of war on old grammar rules in the glittering digital age, A World Without 'Whom': The Essential Guide to Language in the BuzzFeed Age.  (Read Tom Rachman's TLS review here.)

I like shorthand speech as much as she does, and I get where she is coming from.  (I don't even mind ending a sentence with a preposition.)  But I can't help rolling my eyes when she says:

"Today everyone is a writer - a bad, unedited, unapologetic writer. There's no hiding our collective incompetence anymore."

It's not that I disagree with her.  I just think we should do a better job of hiding that fact on our personal websites, Facebook posts, other social media platforms, etc.  The world is watching us.  Constantly.  Always.  Once we hit "publish" on a post, our thoughts will continue on -- bad, unedited, unapologetic -- in some weird, cached immortality for as long as the internet exists.

So here's a poetic thought: One day, long after I'm dead and gone, it might be nice for my middle-aged kids to discover some frazzled post I wrote while I was trapped in a midlife crisis.  Maybe it will comfort them.  But I sure don't want any potential employers, readers, and other supporters to find that stuff ... not unless I really want them to.  (Again: I don't mind a dangling preposition now and then.)

That is why we all need to struggle against the easy slide into bad writing online, even though Emmy Favilla does her level best in her book to show us how to embrace it and move on.

Onward, my beloved friends.

Would chopping 400 pages make it a better book?

By page 300 of Hideo Yokoyama's novel Six Four, I was getting weary.  "Where's the editor?" I kept thinking. "Didn't someone have the courage to tell this guy his story isn't working?

The questions of a book critic and a manuscript editor are sometimes the same ones.  It was true as I prepared my review of Yokoyama's big bestseller for the pages of the Los Angeles Review of Books.  You can read my review by going here.

I found myself shifting gears and thinking of Yokoyama's book as I would about my clients. ( To find out about my editing services, visit here for more information.)

The normal reaction of many manuscript editors -- confronted by 500+ pages -- is a simple one:  Cut, cut, cut.   Any novel that crosses the 300-page threshold is liable to sell poorly (that's what some think, at any rate) unless it happens to have been written by J.K. Rowling or E.L. James.

I thought the same way when I first started Six Four, but the deeper I went into Yokoyama's story, the more I realized how essential everything was.  There's a purpose to every page, and it takes time to unfold what he has in mind.  I would have LOVED to have served as his editor and supported him in bringing this portrait of a Japanese police media relations officer to life.  (Obviously he already had that person!)  That's the type of editor you want (if I do say so myself!) for your work -- someone patient enough to wait and look for patterns and meanings.

I won't say more about that novel here, my beloved friends.  I'll instead encourage you to read about it at the LARB, which richly deserves all of our attention and support.

Onward, my friends.

Getting published … an author's stats on herself

Everyone has an opinion about the ordeal of book publishing, but who can you really trust? Only the writers who have actually experienced it.

And that applies to Yi Shun Lai, author of the new novel Not A Self-Help Book: The Misadventures of Marty Wu (Shade Mountain Press), although "new" is a misleading term …. Lai is perfectly transparent on her blog about how long it's taken - agents queried,  months spent querying, etc. - to usher her engaging, funny, charming fictional memoir into print.

At The Good Dirt, Lai provides us with the numbers that every writer wants to know about, as well as the lessons that she's learned in her post "How I Landed My Publisher."

One of her best lessons, for me, has to do with balancing your book project with the rest of your life … and that means not letting it consume the rest of your life.

As Lai says, "if you really want to make this a part of your life, get on it."

Visit The Good Dirt for more of Lai's insights into finding that balance in your own writing life … and to learn more about the writer behind the one and only Marty.  She's a wonderful creation ... so funny and wise as she navigates between obstacles and her own soaring aspirations, advertising quotas and office tedium, and the steady nagging of an unforgettable Taiwanese tiger mom.  You'll want to get your hands on a copy of this book.

My beloveds, you'll be so glad you did.