Day…Strictly speaking this is day 12, maybe 13, but…

…alright, yes, I’m still on day 4. Moving on to day 5 later today. This may sound like I’m making excuses, but a few things intervened, like multiple celebrations of my birthday, my editorial work for clients (that’s how I make a living), a trip to the beach and my son Jack’s 21st birthday.

Okay, so I got behind. But there’s something else. And that’s Sarah Domet’s unrealistic time schedule. Yes, Sarah, I’m pinning some of the blame on you. Here’s the deal. Day 3’s assignment was to write character profiles, or as Sarah puts it: “familiarize yourself with a minimum of ten characters.” Ten! And my taskmaster doesn’t just want a paragraph on each character, but everything from physical to personality traits, likes and dislikes, family members and significant others, traumatic life event, favorite childhood memory, kind of music he/she likes, and series of other things. It took me about an hour and a half to do one of these. Don’t get me wrong, they are incredibly helpful, but they take time. Because I work, I can normally spend about three hours each day working on my novel. So you can see that it took me several days to work on these characters. And to be honest I’m still not up to ten. But I am getting familiar with them.

Likewise with Day 4, Plot Happens. This day’s assignment involved not only writing a scene but also writing a 250 word synopsis of the entire book! We’re talking Day 4! Zoom, zoom.

A few things I want to pass along about Plot. Sarah’s thinking is this: On day 3 we write characters, now the characters are going to begin doing things, acting and reacting, and this eventually becomes the story, or the plot. I really like this: “It’s less useful to think about plot as what happens in a novel,” Sarah Domet writes. “Instead it’s more useful to think about it as what happens to a particular character and how she responds to it, thus causing other plot points.

She gives us another example: “E.M. Forster, in Aspects of the Novel, defines plot’s function with the novel as being causal in nature. That is, one event causes another, and this is how plot differs from its more chronological cousin story.” Here’s his example: “The king dies and then the queen died” is not a plot. “The king dies and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. One caused the other.

Unfortunately my time to write this blog post has just run out. I’m on my way to St. Louis to do a reading from Confessions: Fact or Fiction? at Left Bank Books on Euclid Street tomorrow night (6/30) at 7 pm. I grew up in St. Louis, so it’s really fun to go “home” and read at one of my favorite independent book stores in the country.

I’ll be working on Day 5 while flying thousands of feet above the earth.

So, dear writers…I’m discovering that it’s actually liberating to follow someone else’s directions to write a novel, sort of like following the steps of a cake recipe. Only you get to take more liberties with the ingredients.

Today’s assignment involved writing character profiles. I’ve been thinking about my characters, and it’s fun imagining their likes and dislikes, their fears and ambitions, where they live, what their character traits are, how they look, a bit about their past, maybe more than a bit, and so on. Yesterday over lunch with two friends (Missy and Louise), we threw ideas around. Someone suggested that maybe one of the main characters had gotten a “boob job.” That she was just a bit on the white trashy side, but was working her way up. That her husband was a construction worker named Bill. That they’d met in high school. Maybe she was a cheerleader, but Bill got her pregnant a month before school ended…

One of my main characters is Susan Winthrop. She appeared in a short story of mine published about 5 years ago (Perfection), in which she spends the entire story getting her nails done, (”her hands are the best part of her anatomy”

flowers to write by

), thinking and worrying about her teenage daughter, over whom she’s losing control. Susan’s a Washington lawyer, pretty strait-laced, controlling, smart, a bit humorless. Now I’m learning things like what country club she belongs to, which one she’d like to belong to, who she married and how they met (at a press conference…so typical DC!). One by one her family members, and all their foibles and eccentricities, are marching on stage and making an appearance.

I’ve always been an advocate of writing character sketches. They not only help you get a handle on your character, but it’s a great way to brainstorm plot. As I delve deeper into Susan or Sandy or Bill, snippets of plot seem to materialize out of thin air. What ifs emerge. Connections between characters seem to happen.

Quote from Sarah Domet’s 90 Days to Your Novel:

The characters you cast for your novel will be the single most important factor in your book. Why?  Because characters are the driving force of your novel, the lifeblood of fiction, and nearly ever other element of your novel is related to the characters you choose. … Mark Twain reminds us that when we create characters so complete, so fully rounded, they’ll jump off the page and feel so real that the reader just knows them.

For this week’s Confessions: Fact or Fiction? featured author, we are proud to present one of the editors of the book, Marian O’Shea Wernicke. I worked closely with Marian to find potential authors for the anthology of short stories and memoir. She was a tremendously helpful partner throughout the process. She also plans to read at the June 30th reading at Left Bank Books. Her piece in the collection is entitled The Tattletale. I invite you to comment about whether it was Fact or Fiction. Enjoy! 

Marian O’Shea Wernicke has been the faculty editor of The Hurricane Review, a national literary magazine published by Pensacola State College, for the past seven years. She is a recently retired professor of English at the college, and participated at the Sewanee Writers Conference in workshop with Maxine Kumin and Mark Jarman. She writes poetry and fiction and is now working on a memoir about her father.

Excerpt from The Tattletale

My cousin Joe has been dead for years now, but I sometimes wish I could talk to him about a certain summer and ask him if I really ruined his life.

Several summers in a row when I was between eight and ten years old, I spent a week at my aunt and uncle’s house in north St. Louis. My two cousins, Nancy and Joe, were much older than I, already out of high school and working. Nancy treated me like a favorite pet, and I relished the spoiling I didn’t get at home from my busy, often pregnant mother. Joe, who mostly ignored me, was a tall, handsome guy in his early twenties, always rushing out to play ball or pick up his fiancee, Sue.

One hot July night during one of these visits, when the locusts were buzzing in the tall elm trees that lined Marcus Avenue, Aunt Helen asked Joe to keep an eye on me while she went to St. Englebert’s to play bingo. Uncle Al was already snoring in their stifling downstairs bedroom. I saw Joe wince, and heard him mutter, “Aw, Mom! Steve and I had plans tonight.”

“Don’t worry,” I piped up. “I’ll sit in the back seat and be quiet as a mouse.” Joe groaned. We dropped Aunt Helen off at church, and soon Joe and I were on our way down the street in his old blue Chevy to pick up Steve. The guys sat in front smoking, their white t-shirts rolled up high on tanned, muscular arms, cigarettes propped rakishly behind their ears. I was in heaven. Only ten and out with two guys who looked and sounded like James Dean!

(Okay, what do you think, readers? Is this fact or fiction? Meet Marian next Thursday 6/30 at Left Bank Books in St. Louis’s Central West End.)

I just had what people refer to as a “major birthday.” So, time is ticking. For the past two years I’ve had a novel rumbling around in my head and though I want to write it, I find all sorts of excuses not to. A few weeks ago I saw an ad for a book titled: 90 Days to Your Novel by Sarah Domet, so I ordered it and began reading. I decided to take the challenge to write my novel, Facebook Murder, in 90 days. Can I do it? That is the question.

The subhead of 90 Days to Your Novel is: A Day-by-Day Plan for Outlining and Writing your Book. The opening 40 or so pages introduce the concept. Page 4 reveals the “four driving philosophies” behind the book’s premise:

1. If you do not write on a daily basis, or a near-daily basis, you are not a writer.
2. Outlining is an essential component of novel writing.
3. Novels are written scene by scene, not character by character or action by action.
4. It’s possible to write a book in months, not years.

I definitely agree with number 1, though lately I’ve fallen off the wagon. As for number 2, I’ve never outlined a novel before (I’ve written one, and finished about one-third of another), but am willing to consider this tool as a way to achieve my goal. I never really thought about number 3, and perhaps she’s right, though for me a character tends to arrive and so does some action, which then leads to the story. However, I’m willing to go along with this notion. Especially because I pray that she’s right about # 4.

I know that Joyce Carol Oates is a prolific writer who has produced more than one novel a year, and not drivel, or frivolous novels. Serious, award-winning novels. Sarah mentions this author, saying she produces two to three novels per year, which must be true since the woman has published 56 novels. (Think about that!) I recently listened to her read (at the AWP conference) and she was awesome.

I’ve chosen my outlining technique–scenes on index cards–and already have some ideas of the book’s characters and content. Sarah Domet (who I will refer to frequently) also reviews Scenes, their importance in telling a story, their structure, and so on. It seems that if you’re able to write up the scenes, then you’ve pretty much got a story. We’ll see.

I’ve finished Assignments 1 and 2. I’ll tell you more about these tomorrow, because right now my husband (Jim) is calling me. We’re going out to dinner to continue celebrating this momentous birthday! And I need to look good. Really look good, because I’m hoping that I don’t look my age. Rather I want people to say, well you know XX is the new 40! wink, wink. Or something like that.

Every few days I plan to update you about my progress and also comment on the book–it’s helpfulness, etc. And I hope you’ll write in and make comments or ask questions about the process. Maybe you’ll start writing a novel of your own on the 90 day plan, and we’ll do this together!

So here goes!!

As we said last week, we are very proud of the authors who contributed to the recently published anthology Confessions: Fact or Fiction? Keeping to our promise, we have posted another author feature this week.  We hope you enjoy reading about this talented writer, and again we challenge you to guess whether his piece (excerpt posted below) is fiction or fact…and we’d love to hear why!

**Don’t forget to visit the Confessions website too!**

This week’s featured author is R. Dean Johnson, another Confessions contributor scheduled to read at Left Bank Books in St. Louis, MO on June 30^th.

R. Dean Johnson lives in Kentucky with his wife, the writer Julie Hensley, and their son.  He is an assistant professor in the Brief-Residency MFA Program at Eastern Kentucky University.  His essays and stories have appeared in, among others, Juked, Natural Bridge, New Orleans Review, Slice, and The Southern Review. “Catching Atoms” originally appeared, in a slightly different version, in Ruminate.

CATCHING ATOMS

THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL AND IT’S ONE OF THOSE cold ones where the sky looks like it came right out of a black-and-white movie. We’re still unpacking, and the box with all my jackets is who knows where. So it’s either my winter coat, which even I know would look ridiculous in California, or my dad’s old work jacket—a navy blue, sharp-collared, cut-tight-at-the-bottom-so-it-doesn’t-get-sucked-into machinery, machinist’s jacket. I go with the work jacket even though it fits all saggy in the shoulders and so long in the sleeves I have to cuff them just so my hands can make it out far enough to carry my backpack. And on top of all that, there’s a patch over the heart with my dad’s nickname on it, “Packy.”

My mom says it’ll be okay, that making new friends will be tough for my little brother and sister too. But Brendan and Colleen are still in grade school, and little kids don’t care what you’re wearing or how you do your hair. Not like junior high, where everybody notices everything. Especially when you’re new. That’s why it would be a lot easier if I had my Paterson All-Stars jacket, because then the guys would all see I can play ball, and they’d probably like me right away.

When I get to school, I don’t stuff the jacket in my locker like I would have back home. In southern California, everything is outside. Instead of hallways, there are breezeways, which is a nice way of saying tunnel. And you might not think it can get all that cold in California, but on a cloudy day you can keep ice cream from melting in one of those breezeways.

If you’ve been following the latest news and postings from Chrysalis Editorial, then you will be familiar with our recently published anthology Confessions: Fact or Fiction? We are very proud of the work that went into this collection of short stories and memoir, and we are certainly proud of its contributing authors.

Each week over the next few months we will feature a different author from the anthology here on our blog.  We hope you enjoy learning about these very talented people.  In addition to posting some interesting facts about the authors, we’ll also include an excerpt from each of the pieces they’ve contributed.  We invite you to get into the spirit of the anthology and try to guess whether their stories are true…or not, and tell us why.  Have fun!

Our first blog guest will be part of a group of Confessions: Fact or Fiction? authors (R. Dean Johnson, Herta B. Feely, Marian O’Shea Wernicke, and Nicole Louise Reid) who will be reading from their work at Left Bank Books in St. Louis, MO on June 30th at 7pm.  If any of you out there live nearby or plan to be in the area, we hope you’ll come out to support these great writers.  Visit the venue’s website at http://left-bank.com

This Week’s Featured Author:  Nicole Louise Reid

Nicole Louise Reid is the author of the forthcoming short story collection So There!(Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2011), the novel In the Breeze of Passing Things (MacAdam/Cage, 2003), and a fiction chapbook Girls (RockSaw Press, 2009).  Winner of the 2010 Dana Award in Short Fiction and Burnside Review Fiction Chapbook Competition, her stories and poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Quarterly West, Meridian, Black Warrior Review, Confrontation, Turnrow, New Orleans Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Grain.  She is also the winner of the 2001 Willamette Award in Fiction, and has also won awards from the Pirate’s Alley William Faulkner Short Story Competition, the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Society, and Glimmer Train.  She teaches creative writing at the University of Southern Indiana.

CARELESS FISH

THERE WAS A BOY, ONCE, who dove into our lake. I didn’t know him. No one did. It was years before we ever moved here. Still, he is a boy. He dove from shore, like we all know not to do, and careened into a sunken trashcan lying on its side. The board of directors still pays the lawyers and he still is a stuck boy—smashed and limp, I imagine, in his chair or bed.

Lake water is green with all the algae my father says means it’s healthy. Slimy, tangly, tickly. There’s no way to see bottom beyond the first foot from shore. There may be sunken cans everywhere. In the two weeks of enough cold—end of January and beginning February—the water freezes silver and grey: every ripple of water reluctant to freeze, every layer paints the walls of hundreds of trashcans. In winter, I swear never to swim again. In winter, I tell my brother he’s never to dive again. He doesn’t listen. He loves the row of thick pilings along the inlet wall. All summer, he climbs them, then stands straight as they do, and in one breath he’s in the air, a fairy tern finding krill. I watch his splash, smaller, smaller, until I can’t stand it anymore. Until I’m sure he’s lying smashed on the silty floor. But then finally is his surface explosion for air.

Welcome back!

We apologize for our absence, but a lot happened in the past five months that kept me from posting a blog somewhat regularly. I won’t bore you with the details, but if you’re dying to find out what occupied me, it’s at the end of this blog entry.   *Before you jump down there, read this:

For me, last year (2010, for those of you with short memories) ended with the publication of Confessions: Fact or Fiction?, an anthology of short fiction and memoir by 22 highly entertaining writers, some more famous than others. Confessions is unique in that the genre of each story (fiction or memoir) is not revealed until the end of the book. It’s a bit of a game. And I guarantee that as you read many of these stories you will be dying to find out whether they are true or not. Have you ever wondered why you want to know if something really happened or not? Read the book and find out.  Order a copy (paperback or ebook) at http://booklocker.com/books/5144.html.  Confessions is also available at Amazon.com and other major retailers’ websites. Also, check out the book’s website at www.confessionsanthology.com and see our blog post on this page.

On publishing:

We decided to publish the book under the independent label Chrysalis, rather than spending time trying to rustle up a trade publisher (Random House, Simon & Schuster, etc).  We ended up with a very professionally produced book, and are now learning the ropes of book promotion.

As many of you know, it’s tough selling a book no matter who publishes it. Authors these days are expected to write and market their books. At a recent writers’ workshop, I mentioned to an agent a just completed memoir project of a client of mine (she escaped from Hungary in 1949 with the help of an American diplomat—a harrowing escape I might add), and the first thing the agent asked: “What’s her marketing plan?” Well, the woman is 82 and hasn’t got a marketing plan. Yet.

In any case, we are developing a marketing and promotion plan for Confessions, which of course includes social networking. How that and other efforts will spur sales, we’ll let you know. Clearly, we should have had the marketing plan in place before we published the book, but I don’t think it’s too late. Or is it? We have a terrific book, and now, hopefully, we’ll create the buzz.

We’d love to hear from those of you who have published (either self-published or gone through traditional channels). What war stories do you have? Which marketing efforts worked? And which didn’t?

Readings? E-mail blasts? Facebook announcements? Twitter?  Book trailers? What else?

Here’s what I did this spring: Suffice it to say that I place at least half the blame for my lack of blogging on spending many weekends (March thru May) at our son Max’s lacrosse games. (I know, I know for most of you that’s no excuse. You not only blog from sports events, but tweet and text too. Please, have a little compassion for those of us who suffer pttdsd – post-traumatic techno disability stress syndrome! We are challenged by cell phone functions, let alone blogging and tweeting from remote locations!) Back to my excuse, which (moving forward) I will no longer be able to hide behind: Max just graduated this past weekend from Cornell.

Kudos to him for graduating, for having a job awaiting him, and for being named a 2011 Lacrosse All American. (What does that have to do with anything you might well ask? Mom brag!)

Also to blame was the earthquake in Christchurch, well, sort of. What I should say is that my husband Jim and I spent 2.5 weeks in New Zealand (bucket list vacation), and survived the earthquake which occurred on day 4 of our trip. It was a Hollywood style disaster from which we were spared by the grace of the gods who stuck us inside the Christchurch Art Museum at the moment of the hemorrhage. The museum being a brand new glass and steel structure that survived with minimal damage, while many other buildings collapsed. The events of that day and the images I have stored in my brain will eventually make it into my writing…will let you know when that happens. Meantime, stay tuned for more blog posts! J

In the weeks to come, we’ll be exploring:

• Blogging—to blog or not to blog
• Book promotion—do’s and don’t’s

And we’ll be featuring:

• authors of Confessions’ stories
• writing advice and tips
• other fascinating topics (feel free to make requests)

It’s become increasingly difficult for writers to find reviewers for their published work. So as writers yourselves, contributing reviews is one of the greatest services you can provide.

Launched just last fall, the Los Angeles Review of Books is dedicated to this cause. They will publish criticism, comparisons (multiple reviews of the same book), and opinion of new-releases, old-releases, and classics–both in print in on the web.

Whether you’re a writer looking for more venues to push your published work, or simply an avid reader, this is sure to be an excellent resource!

Confessions: Fact or Fiction? a collection of memoir and short fiction written by award-winning authors from around the country. These 22 stories of love, lies, loss and betrayal explore the fragile boundary between truth and fiction.

Stories run the gamut: A priest sleeps with a parishioner.  A girl ruins her cousin’s marriage.  A man is imprisoned with frog woman.  A boy loses faith in his father.  A young woman betrays her best friend over a man.  A love story is written in the style of Kafka.

So often we read a story and wonder: is this fiction or did this really happen?  Or, events are so unbelievable they couldn’t possibly be real?  Or, you might think, of course this is based on the author’s life. Do you ever find yourself hoping that a story that’s sexy, gritty or revealing will turn out to be true?  In this unique anthology we invite you to test your literary sleuthing skills and discover which were “made up” and which actually happened.

The stories’ genres appear in a key at the back of the book, so don’t cheat.  Along with the key, authors discuss the genesis of their stories and their thoughts on the issue of fact vs. fiction, allowing you to gain insight into the author’s writing and your responses to their stories, and also to examine the accuracy of your insights and guesses.

The anthology is available in both paperback and in Kindle/Nook format for purchase at: www.amazon.com, www.barnesandnoble.com or http://booklocker.com/books/5144.html, and other major retailers’ websites.

Visit us at: www.confessionsanthology.com The official Confessions: Fact or Fiction? website, where you can also buy the book, read excerpts, meet the authors.

View of Dubrovnik from the ancient city wall

Visiting family, most of whom you haven’t seen in 40 years, was, in a word, moving. It was a feast of food, love, and a trek down memory lane. My father, Fritz Burbach (1922-2001), was the oldest of 9 siblings, and beloved by his 5 brothers and 3 sisters, as they told me again and again. There’s so much I could say about him, and I know how much he would have enjoyed being there, but this isn’t about Fritz, it’s just a bit about my journey.

If you haven’t made a pilgrimage to your place of origin, I highly recommend it. I couldn’t believe how welcoming and gracious they were. How different their lives are, and how much the same. We are after all humans first, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, fathers and mothers, second. We connected, re-connected, and our love for one another was renewed. In my honor each sibling (5 still live in Serbia) prepared a table groaning with platters of meat, salads, and side dishes. They prepared the most delicious food–fresh and out of the garden–and served the best wine–made from their own grapes–and created cakes and fruit delicacies that were finger-licking good. I ate and ate, yet somehow avoided gaining a pound, which I attribute to eating the main meal at about 3 o’clock in the afternoon!

The final delight was a visit to Dubrovnik, the “pearl of the Adriatic,” according to a famous British author (I can’t remember who). And that it was. The red-tiled houses rose into the hills and overlooked an incredibly dramatic view of the sea. The ancient city center hugs the water, and its protective wall features a walkway soaring above the structures’ roofs and is open to the public. It’s the most fantastic place from which to see the city, old and new.

Not that it matters, but John Malkovich stayed at “my” hotel and I happened to see him after dinner on the terrace. I realized with a name like that his roots must emanate from here or somewhere within the former Yugoslavia. It would be written Malkovic (without the “h” and a little accent over the “c”). So I wondered if he was visiting or making a film, or just enjoying this enchanting place.

Places that allow us to dream, get lost in the views, experience something new, give us ammunition to keep the quills scribbling. So, here’s to travel! Do it!

Dubrovnik--that's me in the Hotel Neptune restaurant.