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The Price of Art

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I’m friends with a musician (not Vince Gill) who is considering throwing in the towel or at least going on strike, until he can find a way to support himself through his art. This isn’t a debut; he’s been playing and touring for thirty years. He’s had no illusions about his chances of hitting it big, but he’s persevered for a very long time by working hard, growing his talent, and creating a following.

But it’s not enough.

He’s sick of social media, he’s sick of planning his life out 16 weeks, he’s tired of having to do online shows for Paypal “tips”…in short, he’d like to pursue his art, entertain some people, and not starve doing it.

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Book Reviewing: Fight Writers Block and Make Friends At the Same Time

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I don’t have the writers block of popular imagination, the blank white screen and blinking cursor that keeps me paralyzed for hours. But I do have a “writers reluctance,” which in some ways might be even more insidious. This is a familiar syndrome for most of you, where the distractions of meta-writing—research, outlining, emailing, formatting an e-book, reading industry news, and, uh, writing blogs—get in the way of actually writing, even though all of this activity feels like you’re making progress.

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Writers on Writing: I Guest Blog on Kathleen Valentine’s Site

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I’m excited to let you know I’m today’s guest blogger on novelist Kathleen Valentine’s site Parlez-Moi.

Kathleen has a wonderful thematic blog going where she asks writers to comment on writing, especially the authors that have influenced and guided them. I chose to ruminate on Tobias Wolff’s amazing short story “Bullet in the Brain,” a stunning short work from his collection Our Story Begins that will have you thinking LONG after you’ve read it. Please check out Kathleen’s blog and tell your friends! (And for Pete’s sake, read more of  Wolff’s stuff!)

In Other News
I apologize for not  updating the blog nearly enough lately, but I’ve been hard at work on my debut crime fiction novel, A Reason to Live, featuring retired Washington DC homicide detective Marty Singer. It will be available in Kindle and print within the week.

The sequel, Blueblood, is finished and going to the editor later this month. And the third, Signs, is 1/3 finished and I’m looking forward to a scribbling marathon over the next five days where I hope to reach a goal of 20,000 – 25,000 words (hey, if David Gaughran can do 40,000 words in a month, I’m game).

I also have a non-fiction guidebook on how to write a novel (Telling the Tale: The Complete Guide to Writing Your Novel) coming out soon and I hope to offer it through Amazon as well as this site via Oronjo.com, a free site that facilitates file download-for-payment and empowers writers everywhere. Lastly, I’ve been committed to cultivating a presence on Goodreads.com, where I think the future of e-authoring is going to occur. If you hang out there, please friend me!

Shine on, you crazy diamonds. 🙂

My sister, consummate reader, gets angry at Penguin

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My sister is a voracious reader and book-aholic. I have her and my mother to thank for the reading–and, later, the writing–bug that bit me early.

Reading, along with horses and dogs, is an absolute passion for her. She routinely buys whole series of authors she likes, often multiple times (her dogs think of them as chew toys), often in hard cover, often in the Kindle edition.

One of the authors she would follow anywhere on the planet, if asked, is Charlaine Harris. She specifically loves the Sookie Stackhouse series and would trade pints of blood for them if that were the going currency.

But not this time. When the latest Sookie Stackhouse book came out in Kindle format just 16 cents less than the hard cover, she lost it.

I’ll let her tell the story in her blog post, Hey Penguin, Bite Me.

Self-publishing as Meaningful Work

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There is a passage in Malcolm Gladwell’s amazing book Outliers that, at its heart, speaks volumes about why writers should self-publish.

[T]hree things—autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward—are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It’s whether our works fulfills us. …Work that fulfills those three criteria is meaningful.

Over and over again on websites and in personal correspondence, I hear writers who have chosen to self-publish talk about how energized (or re-energized) they are. While there’s the inevitable grousing about low-sales numbers or promotions gone haywire, rarely are there complaints about the work itself. I know I find myself ready to write every day, eager to get to the page and get my latest words down.

That’s because, according to Gladwell’s definition, self-publishing is meaningful work.

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