I did admit in my very first signing for this book that the characters were all based on real people, despite the disclaimer on the copyright page saying “any resemblance to real people is completely coincidental,” but the events that take place in the book were – and still are – all fictional.  That being said, two of those people were in the room at the time I announced this, were already aware of this fact before I said it, and also happened to be two close friends of mine who knew I was going to base a character on them some day.  One such friend, who was not present at the signing, actually asked to be in my first book and told me what she wanted her name to be.  I granted her wish!  However, this MySpace stranger who emailed out of concern was not present at this event.  And as I said, I had never met him before, nor after receiving his email.

This humorous tale is not really the reason behind this post, but it raises the question of how much of our true selves or true lives do we put into a story.  It’s all very interesting to ponder the lines between fact and fiction and when and where they become blurred, and what gives readers reasons to think that what they are reading must be based on something true, especially when they happen to know the author.

Those who know me and know my background will certainly recognize specific settings in my books because I tend to use actual places, often businesses where I worked or hang outs I frequented in college. Many know that a park that plays a crucial part in The Other Side of What was based on a photograph I bought at an imports store and which hangs in my dining room still today. Zoe’s store is based on a conversation that a friend and I had often, dreaming of a business we’d open together to cater to artists.  I even used the name we called it: Hands Across the Board. Many people have emailed me over the years to ask if Red Square was indeed the bar that hosted 80s night on Wednesdays where they had danced the night away in college to remixes of Cyndi Lauper or the Safety Dance.  C’mon folks!  That’s an easy one.  I used the old club’s real name and exact description.

Those who have read Stealing Wishes, my second book, often ask me if I’m obsessive compulsive because my main character is.  I admit Blaine and I do have a lot in common: photography enthusiast, coffee shop background, Isherwood fan, sense of humor.  We’ve both broken hearts and had ours broken. And maybe I am a tad bit OCD – not to the extent Blaine is (I don’t sync everything in my life to the number 32), but I am definitely NOT Blaine.

Fellow author R. J. Keller says the same thing about her lead character, in a post on her blog from about a year ago, so aptly titled “I Am Not Tess Dyer.” R. J. says…

Tess and I share some similarities: eye color, short stature, a tendency towards being a smart ass. We’re both avid Red Sox fans and both live in Small Town, Maine. I used my own ‘voice’–so to speak–for the narration. (Tackling the task of writing a first novel was much less daunting that way.) But the actual events of her life were in no way taken from mine. I sat down to write WFS over two-and-a-half-years ago with absolutely no plot in mind. I had no specific axes to grind, no confessions to make, no burdens with anyone’s name stamped in big, block letters to set down. Just thirty-five-and-a-half years of being a human being to sort through and a certainty that I had the talent to make something out of it… So, although I can say that the novel is not factually autobiographical, I will admit that it is, perhaps, emotionally autobiographical. Still…I am not Tess Dyer.

I have always said writing is lonely.  It’s also personal. I’m reminded of a quote from an old retail regional manager I used to report to who said, “Fake it till you can make it!”  This quote was used in reference to being able to spit out your hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly figures such as credit card percentages and conversion rates (all that mumbo jumbo that retailers track and report to stock holders because it sounds important) to your district manager, who already knows your figures anyway but just wants to make you sweat a little.

I think we can apply it to writing as well.  No one has to know we have no idea what we are talking about.  We are writers after all and we are telling a story.  Use your imagination!  Make it up! Be creative! Many authors, including the best selling Dan Brown, create our characters based on our own fantasies or dreams.  Our characters are the perfection we have yet to reach, nor probably ever will. Still, many of us tend to write what we know about just to be safe, and there’s nothing wrong with that either.  While writing, I tend to stop and ask myself, “What will my friends and family think when they read this?”  And then I throw in something off the wall and totally bizarre just to really make them think, “Could this be true? Is this Shannon?” But it’s not just friends and family we are usually writing for, so it is interesting to wonder what makes a complete stranger connect themselves or the author (a complete stranger to them) to something they are reading.

Author Mark Zero and I recently discussed this in an email.  He said…

I imagine lots of people mistake you for Blaine just because it’s easiest for people to understand fiction in terms of authorial biography, especially first-person fiction. I get that sometimes, too, people trying to guess which of the characters in my books is me. I was at a Book Club party for one of my books, The French Art of Stealing–the main character is a Hitchcockian hero, an innocent man trapped by circumstances in a mystery not of his own making–and I could sense a palpable disappointment among the club members that I wasn’t more like my narrator. The narrator, it’s true, is a war photographer, with a very worldly bravado and lots of experience of harrowing situations in exotic locales, so I understand why they might have been disappointed to get me instead…

Here’s a line also from Mark, from the same email, which I’ve committed to memory because it’s quite brilliant…

…maybe that’s what people want, something concrete they can know, instead of veils of fictive distance.

And that’s why there are nonfiction writers, reporters, and journalists that will give it to them, right? Wrong! We all know that not even the news is concrete fact these days.  The television shows us only what they want us to see, and how do we know it’s not from a swayed point of view?  A certain book called Lies My Teacher Told Me seems to come to mind!  But we’re talking about fiction here.

And I think that’s why I find myself enjoying historical fiction a lot lately.  I like to be entertained with a fictional story that I don’t know anything about, but like it even more when a character or event I do know pops up in the middle of the plot.  Suddenly, the writer and the reader share a connection. In Joel Rose’s The Blackest Bird, we meet up with celebrated author Edgar Allan Poe.  Kim Powers wrote of Harper Lee and Truman Capote in the beautiful Capote in Kansas, displaying several conversations between the two mysterious writers that may or may not have happened in real life. Michael Cunningham used Virginia Wolf in The Hours to set a certain mood and craft part of the story (still one of my favorite books to this day).

Historians probably snub their noses at fiction like this because an author doesn’t necessarily preserve the character of the figure they are writing about, but the key word here is “character.”  Such writing, and use of real people as characters in fiction, serves an entirely different purpose.  Maybe the author feels a certain connection.  Maybe that person is their muse.  Or maybe the author wants to give the reader someone else to connect to for a while.  Sure, I knew who Virginia Wolf was long before I read The Hours.  I did wonder if what Cunningham wrote was true or not, but in the end I didn’t care so much.  All I knew was how the book made me feel when I turned the last page, and that is probably the magic Cunningham cares more about.

Even when an author writes themselves into their story, whose to say we are always going to tell the truth?  Guess what?  We don’t have to!  Even though we may use the traits of ourselves or the threads of lives we’ve witnessed, and whether we stay true to them or not is entirely up to us.  I’ve spent a great deal of time “writing what I know,” and I find that as I age as a writer, I know more.  Does that give me more things to write about?  Absolutely.  But going back to historical fiction, despite History never being a favorite subject of mine, I’ve recently found myself intrigued by a certain tragic event that never graced the pages of our textbooks.  It was a real event that fell to the back pages of the newspapers, buried by stories of a war coming to an end and the death of a president. Readers, already numb from tales of death and destruction, skipped over the news and while a few historians have retold the story, it’s also somehow become fodder in my head for a few characters (there’s that word again) that have a story to tell.

So, in my case, what do you do when you want to write about something you know nothing about.  First, avoid that phrase about writing what you know, and go out and learn about it.  Sure, you can’t go back in time and witness that day and time for yourself, but you don’t have to.  That’s what a writer’s imagination is for.  Let your ink pen to paper or fingers on the keyboard breathe life into the story, taking both you and the readers back. Embellish if you want.  Or stay true to the facts.  But either way, put a little of yourself in the story. It might be the color of your hero’s eyes, or the name of  the leading couples’ baby, or the way the villain walks, or maybe it all takes place on the street you grew up on.  Make it personal, if not for anyone but yourself.

Going back to Mark’s quote, close the “fictive distance” between you and the reader. And let your readers wonder… Is that me they are writing about?

With writing for children the specific target audience within the children’s arena must be defined in advance. Is the book meant to be a beginning reader book, is it for children who don’t read yet, or is the book targeted for the early middle reader or advanced middle reader? Each one of those categories within children’s books is very specific as to the requirements. The age range for the target can be as limited as one year. For example, a book can be written for the second grade reader. The target audience determines the range of unique words which should be used, the number of syllables of those words on average, as well as the total word count range.

With books aimed at adults, there is a little more lattitude as to target audience. Genres can be combined or crossed and there is more flexibility for experimentation with plot development, point of view, and tense.  Since books for children are necessarily written for developing readers, the rules must be closely adhered to in order not to lose or overwhelm your readers.

So how do you know what the rules are? The internet is a vast repository of information and a few searches will provide an overwhelming amount of detail to read through and digest. One good resource which I have found is Suite101.com under the writing and publishing section. You will find articles for all types of writing which can be used by the novice and experienced writer alike. In particular, there is a series of articles written by Jennifer Jensen which cover the basic rules for the different levels of writing for children and have links to more specific information about those categories, so this is a very good place to start.

Once you have digested the rules for the target audience you are writing for, the next step is to study other books in the target group. By analyzing what works and what doesn’t in the books which have been written for your target audience, you will gain a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t in your own work. This actually applies to writing in general and not just writing for children. Find a hundred books (or more) written for your target audience and read them. Use of the public library helps offset out of pocket expense for this phase.  Then choose the top ten out of those you have read to conduct an in depth analysis of the contents.

In order to thoroughly analyze the books you have selected as being the best in the category, you will need your own copy of these books, either in hard copy or digital format. My own personal preference is to have something in digital format so I can more readily conduct word count or phrase count analysis without having to resort to a manual bean counting method. I also don’t like to mark up hard copy books, but have no such qualms about highlighting, bolding, or adding notes to a digital copy. Determine in advance what writing techniques you will be looking for, so the same criteria applies for all books you are studying. Some of the things to keep in mind are:

• Good opening lines
• Good usage of telling and not showing
• Usage of metaphors and similies – which worked and which didn’t
• Realistic dialogue
• Verb usage – active vs. passive
• What senses are used in the book?
• How is the plot constructed?
• How do the characters develop throughout the book?

When you run across a passage which you feel is awkward or could be written better, take a few moments and rewrite it. This will help to solidfy in your own mind what didn’t work and why. In addition to this, for picture books, retype the words for the picture books and read through story without the pictures. Does the story flow? Is it easily understood? These are but a few ideas to help focus your thoughts and ultimately improve your own work. Writing for children can be very rewarding as you watch the delight in the face of your readers as they turn the pages, but it also can be very hard to get just right.

There will still be 2 more reviews posted in July…one this weekend and one early next week. That will make 6 reviews posted just like we did in June, which closes the Summer Reading focus we had. Wow! Twelve reviews in 2 months. My eyes hurt. However, at the end of this month, we’ll also post 3 mini reviews all in one post, honoring our “Search for America” results.  We only received 2 suggestions for books in our search, so we had to take it upon ourselves to find America in Lulu.  It’s not too late to make a recommendation if you want; just post it as a comment to this entry. Then, stay tuned to learn about our discoveries at the end of this month.

In August, we will go back to posting only about 4 reviews a month.  We’d like two of those to focus on students since it’s Back to School month.  Maybe you’ve written a teenage school soap opera, or a good self-help book for kids.  If so, we want to read it!  Just post about it on the “Pick Me” page and put BACK TO SCHOOL somewhere in your post.

The other two reviews for August will be regular picks from the “Pick Me” page, as will all four reviews in September.  For those of you who have already posted queries, please be patient.  We’ll be sending out requests of PDFs for these upcoming reviews next week.

We all know what October brings!  Witches, goblins, ghosts, and bumps in the night.  We’ll be highlighting horror and scary stuff all month long, so if you’ve written a chiller or a thriller, let us know!  Keep us awake all night!

So, that’s three months, 12 to 14 book reviews,  and lots of reading (and writing) to do.  Grab some No. 2 pencils and get busy!

Eve Paludan is a busy woman: writer, photographer, editor, web designer, and artist. Just check out her CV on her MySpace page. It’s a hefty list of accomplishments of which anyone should be proud of. She should also be quite proud of a lil Ebook she’s written and made available through Lulu called Letters from David.

Thanks to email and the rising price of stamps, I’ve often wondered if the art of letter writing is dead. We’ve even given it the sluggish nickname “Snail Mail,” adopting our eager fascination with having things so immediate thanks to our ever growing lack of patience. And yet the ending highlight of each of my workdays is coming home and checking the mailbox.

On birthdays as a child, my eyes bulged with excitement over bright colored envelopes addressed to me with a funny Hallmark card and a crisp one dollar bill on the inside. My mother, with her “chicken scratch” cursive, penned letters on notepad paper to me while I was in college. Christmas cards with a quick signature still adorn my doorway in December. What would we have to say without sentiments printed by the greeting card company? Eve Paludan’s book says plenty.

Here’s the blurb from her Lulu page, which also happens to be the first paragraph of the story:

Claire Mead didn’t have her husband anymore, her children lived abroad, her income was shrinking and she hadn’t shaved her legs all winter. She hadn’t had recreational sex with herself, or laughed, truly laughed, for months. She was going broke and still cried much too easily since David, a.k.a. “The Saint,” had died, but suddenly, she realized she had something she had never once had before in her life — her freedom.

You have to admire the preservation of someone’s old journal or diary found behind glass in a museum somewhere for you to learn history or study their penmanship, or perhaps it’s passed down from generation to generation amongst family members. I tried for years to keep a journal of my personal thoughts, but writing it down went down the drain once I learned to type. Literature and Theatre has celebrated the power of the written word for a long time. I immediately think of James Patterson’s recent book about letters, and a play I saw once called “Love Letters.” It was just two chairs on the stage, back to back, with a guy and a girl sitting there and recalling letters they’d written to each other. They were miles apart now in life, but their letters always brought them back together. It was so powerful and captivating.

Eve Paludan’s book is NOT another collection of letters allowing us that glimpse into someone else’s life for a while. Yes, Dear _____, letters in italic are placed throughout the manuscript, but it is what comes between them that makes up the essence of her story. Her central character, Clare Mead, is a widow with a son away at war and a daughter in Paris, but she’s determined not to let loneliness be an illness. She refuses to succumb to it and is trying to adapt to the new emptiness in her life – this freedom. She seeks out the advice of other women like her, but soon ends up in a bit of an odd situation with her husband’s best friend, Tucker, who was also responsible for his death. A tornado is coming and the two end up taking cover in her basement, and begin to reminisce of the old days and the way it could have been.

Secrets begin to unravel as you discover Tucker was once her lover and they had a child together, but their roads in life went in opposite directions. Tucker beats himself up over the death of his friend, while Clare refuses to mourn anymore. Together, they relive the memories they shared with David, a best friend and a husband. Just as you think Tucker and Clare’s time together is building to the climactic arrival of the tornado, no weather alarm will prepare you for the secrets that are revealed in the letter than begins the next chapter! It’s a letter from David, Clare’s husband, which Tucker had been saving to give to her at a later time.

My only criticism of the story comes into play in the letters themselves. Although Paludan has used them sparingly to push the story forward, be warned that they are heavy in content that is crucial to the plot and backbone of her characters. Therefore, they can seem a bit melodramatic and even soap opera-ish at times, but they do not distract from the overall point the author wants to make.

Letters from David turned out to be a “whirl wind” of a story that I totally was not expecting. At first, based on the author’s previous work, I predicted a much heavier romance and cliche collection of predictable love letters. Not so! The story continues to build with David, the son, writing to his half sister in Paris. Although their story is told completely in letters, reading it as if you were a person in another room over hearing a conversation is quite intriguing. Paludan has written a magnificent tale of love and loss which anyone can enjoy. So, grab a box of tissues and your high school yearbooks, because this book will take you down a path off memory lane where you never expected to go!

I can’t resist a good short story anthology. I love being able to sit down with a collection and read two or three stories, and be able to walk away from it for a few days if I choose and not feel like I’m missing out on something. I’ve got closure in a matter of a few pages. For me, writing a short story is a nice way to get a character out of my head who I’ve been thinking about, to expel some creative energy that’s dying to get onto the white page. Novel writing is a long slow journey, and just as prosperous, but sometimes we need that quick fix. A short story is a cup of coffee in the early morning, and Matthew Kerry’s book of shorts is a whole pot!

Footsteps in the Darkness is a collection of stories each playing on a variety of themes which surprisingly relate. I was quickly reminded of Will Entrekin or Paul Ciccone, both authors who have been reviewed here at LLBR. We all know that short story collections and poetry make difficult books to get attention to in the traditional markets. Just visit your local Barnes and Noble and peruse these sections. Chances are there aren’t very many shelves devoted to them and if there are, they are stocked loosely and with older well-known short story writers such as Flannery O’Connor or poets like Emily Dickinson.

But it can happen. Stephen King has been very successful with his short story collections such as The Night Shift, and take a look at what makes up most of the erotica and GLBT market these days. Entrekin, Ciccone, and now Matthew Kerry all prove that the art of the short story is alive and well. And it is indeed an honor to find such outstanding writing among us at Lulu.com.

Matthew begins his collection with a story called “The Bigger Picture.” It’s the story of an awkward meeting between a newspaper photographer and his chief editor. The author’s vivid attention to detail is what makes this story work.

The Editor stormed through the room. Eyes peered up fearfully from shimmering computer screens and watched him stride past the desks from which loose papers fluttered and whispered to the ground in his wake. The door slammed behind him, causing the windows to shudder with the vibration and cups of
coffee to ripple and shimmer. The reporters, columnists and sub-editors exchanged long, raised eyebrow glances full of relief that it was not their turn.

Next is a piece called “Hard Copy,” which deals with plagiarism and which any writer can appreciate. It begins with the description of a nameless female taking time to enjoy nature and her surroundings outside a bustling city while making her own paper to bind into homemade books which she has written. Oddly enough, there’s a few lines about photography which resonates the meaning behind the first short story previously mentioned.

Similarly, photographs do not give a true depiction of life. They are convenient and useful but life is never fixed, people never stand posing with fake smiles glued to their faces and birds are never stopped midflight, hanging in midair. Attempting to pin these things down to something so one-dimensional and motionless as postcards and photographs means that they lose the pulsing vibrancy of life and transiency that makes them so special to begin with.

The story turns to a man in the city who has obviously acquired one of the woman’s self-published books. It’s a classic, and he intends on retyping it into an acceptable 8×11 Times New Roman formatted manuscript which he can sell to a traditional publisher as his own. But what he soon finds out is that it’s not always the words on the page that give a story it’s value. It’s how they are written.

Four more brilliant stories follow which are just as good, if not better, than the ones I’ve chosen to tell you about here so far. The last story is the one for which the book also takes its name. It is the story of four travelers seeking shelter from a violent storm. They come upon a church where an elderly priest offers them refuge. They repay the priest for his hospitality by doing odd chores the next day to aid the priest and fix up the church. The next day, more visitors arrive revealing the four earlier travelers may not have been as courteous as the priest mistakened them to be.

The abrupt ending, a foundation for all of Kerry’s tales here, leaves the reader to ultimately decide what comes next. Like the photograph theme in the first story, it’s only a snapshot of life which the reader gets to be a part of for a short while. And you will want to be a part of it. Treat yourself to the free download or support this Lulu author by purchasing the paperback edition of Footsteps in the Darkness. Either way, you will not be disappointed!

Last year, I completed my second novel which I am currently working on publishing with Lulu.  I decided to record my experience which can hopefully be used as a resource for other writers, or be read as a boring soap opera as I work on polishing my book for publication.  However you choose to see it. 

Right now I’m in the editing and book cover creation stages and have invested just over $200 dollars of my own money.  I hope you will check out this new tab and feel free to ask questions or offer feedback as I go through this process.

Thanks, Mark!

Here are some other announcements from around the www concerning POD which I’d like to bring to your attention if you haven’t heard or read about them already…

iUniverse and Authorhouse are getting married on April 1st. Susan Driscoll’s most recent post promises publishing will never be the same.

iUBR is opening its review submissions to a wider range of POD publishers instead of just reviewing books from iU. More news to follow on that, although Floyd has informed me via email that he’s leaving the Lulu’s to me. Good luck to Floyd and his review staff. We look forward to the reviews to come.

None May Say, another POD review site, is back after almost a ten month hiatus. Welcome back Devon Kappa!

Veinglory over at PODPeep was recently approached by a traditional publishing company seeking reviews. This post inspired some thoughtful commentary. Some seem to be in favor of blurring the lines between POD and Traditional. Some weren’t. I’m torn myself. I’d like to think this could be the beginning of something beautiful for the POD world. The snobby writer in me says, “Let them eat my query drafts and rejection letters!”

PODdy Mouth II is entertaining us with some boring basketball-like championship game where all the POD publishers are the players. It’s all drab skits of marketing information, publication packages, and pricing but fun to read in the voice of Howard Cosell. There’s a sports bracket and everything. Commentary recently compared it to the large amount of U.S. credit card debt. No wonder I fell asleep in Economics class. My teacher was also a basketball coach. Loads of information as always though for the writer overwhelmed with the POD possibilities. Check it out!

That’s about it!  I have two reviews lined up for early April, so check back soon.  I’d love to see the “Pick Me!” page grow even more.  Lulu authors, let’s hear from you!

Read the complete results here!

But here is a rundown…

• Lulu was represented in the survey, although 39% of the authors had used iUniverse.
• 58% thought the cost of service was reasonable.
• 53% were satisfied with layout and printing.
• 36% were very satisfied with customer service from the POD company.
• 89% did NOT purchase a marketing package.
• 19% reported sales of over 500 copies.  1 person reported says over 12,000 (WHAT BOOK WAS THIS?).
• 74% had received at least 1 book review.
• 56.6% had their book offered in physical bookstores.
• 44% said they would use POD service again.
• Only 22% had made a profit from their book.

Conclusions. The authors who responded to this survey paint neither a rosy nor an ugly picture of subsidy publishing. While many were dissatisfied with some aspects of their experience, overall more were satisfied than dissatisfied. The majority thought the costs were reasonable, were satisfied with the layout and printing of their book, and with the customer service they received. The majority also said that the level of promotional support they received from the publishing company met their expectations. The majority did get their book reviewed and were able to get it into a bricks-and-mortar bookstore. However, the majority have sold 200 or fewer copies of their book, and fewer than half have recovered their costs.Although a few authors’ comments indicated that they were naïve going in to the process, this survey does not support the belief that most unwittingly sign on with predatory companies and later regret their choices. Overall, they appear to have a realistic, if mixed, view of subsidy publishing. Only about a third of the authors said they definitely would not use the same subsidy publisher again, and only a fifth said they would definitely not recommend the company to another author. The authors who responded to this survey seem to see this method of publishing as a more complex and varied option than its critics describe.