Lighting Fires

My apologies for the long lapse in posting. It's because . . . well, because I've had trouble keeping my writing fire lit. The ordeal with VDM Verlag drags on, hard-earned money disappears into contest coffers, and things generally seem to be unfavorable as far as writing goes. Wah, wah, wah. Now that winter's in full swing here in the Rockies (first snow to speak of on December 8th), I'm keeping a hot fire lit in the house while wishing I could do the same on the writing front. And I can, I know. Here are a few things that have helped so far:

1. I am still doing what I want to do--write--instead of a myriad of other jobs I'd rather not do. This, in itself, is a good thing. (My office has a nice fireplace, a fully stocked kitchen, and fantatstic views, too.)

2. Things take time. Writing is, by its nature, a difficult occupation. If I thought (even in the back-back of my mind) that things were suddenly going to magically fall into place just because I did what all the conference attendees warn against ("Don't quit your day job!") well, lets just say I've had an attitude adjustment. I've been paying dues for about 25 years. Apparently, I'm nowhere near paid up.

3. I still have lots of ideas in the hopper. Some of these include a screenplay for Milton's Paradise Lost and I'm well on my way into the next novel, Fearless. There's work to be done, whether I feel like it will amount to anything or not. And if I thought the work would leave me be, I'd ignore it. But it won't, so therefore, it must be worth doing all by itself. In the end, I've got to look at my face in the mirror and account for my time as a writer. How I mine or squander these ideas is up to me.

4. I believe in what I have to say. That sounds a bit ridiculous, perhaps, but it's really my main M.O. No one can say it but me. I also think someone can use it, somewhere. Others have told me so already. So, I'm pressing on.

Keeping the fire lit is a lonely job (wah, wah again), one that any serious writer will attest to. And any serious writer will keep it lit no matter what. Wintertime helps.

Misadventures in POD Publishing

So Depending on the Light has been out a few weeks now. How many copies have sold? I'd venture none, even though one seller on Amazon claims to have 3 "used" copies (which are still selling for the now-even HIGHER price of $93. VDM Verlag, it turns out, may not have been the best choice, but it was the only one, for getting this book done. I still wonder what exactly God has in mind. My hands are tied as far as marketing goes. Here's why.

Price. The publisher has set the initial cost of the book so high that I cannot in good conscience announce the book or refer individuals to the online sites to buy it. Who would? At $93, the book is priced at 4 times the current competitive price. When and if the price comes down, I will feel better about announcing the book, but who knows when that will be?

Review Copies. The author info I received about review copies states, "If we receive requests from the press for review copies, we send free copies to the appropriate person." Turns out those review copies are electronic copies. While I understand this makes sense from a pricing standpoint, very few outlets review electronic copies at this point. And though I haven't fully investigated it yet, I believe that knocks out the "big 6" book reviewers in the States.

Customer Reviews. Though the publisher recommends having customers review the book on the online sites, again, who can afford to purchase a copy to review it?

Discount Copies. So, I thought, okay, I'll wait for a price drop (about the time Hell freezes over) and then buy some with the author discount. Nope. Right now, of course, my $93 title would cost me $55.80 each--if I ordered 25 or more copies. Let's see ... doing the math ... that comes to a whopping $1,395 + shipping from Germany. That's what the publisher calls a "generous" discount. The only discount I see here is my change of heart regarding VDM. In order for the book to really be discounted and affordable to me, the price needs to drop to around $25. That might take a long, long time.

My attempts to contact VDM and inquire about their ridiculous pricing have so far netted me nothing helpful. The first person merely copied the author info, which I'd already read. See what you think: "The binding selling price determined by the publisher depends on various factors, including the estimation of the marketable circulation, the specification and evaluation of the respective audiences, the variable production costs depending on the text volume, the project-related fixed costs, the anticipated marketing measures and the distribution channels and, more than anything, our experience and a pinch of ‘publishing feeling’. For these reasons, the price is only determined at the end of the production phase. You will receive a notification regarding the final selling price together with your free copies." Make sense? You got that? (For the sake of vitriol, I'll not take that passage apart. But I certainly could.)

My second attempt to contact a different person suggested by the original copy-paster at VDM has so far gotten me only silence. In the meantime, the book sits right where it was shipped. And I sit here fuming.

Moral of the story: I wish I had one. I do not understand POD publishing, and though I did some research, it apparently wasn't enough. I'd suggest we change the acronym's meaning from "print on demand" to "publishing or dementia."

Trusting the Subconscious

Writer and American academic Robert Grudin says, "Metaphor evokes both conscious and subconscious responses and produces, more fully than do logic and common sense, an awareness of the implicit connectedness of things." In this power-packed, insightful sentence, Grudin illuminates why it is that metaphor--saying one thing in terms of another--carries the inherent power it does: it engages the conscious thought processes, yes, but even more importantly, the unconscious mind. It is in that often-hidden realm where ideas spring forth and then fit themselves together, often with no seeming effort of our own. Suddenly, things just "work," or make sense in a way that before drove us crazy. Then, as Grudin points out, we see "the implicit connectedness of things."

I've been working on revisions to a completed novel, Resistance, and this morning, over coffee and a not-so-clear mind, a troublesome set of ideas and events suddenly came clear. But just before then, I'd been thinking about frost, and sky, and sunrise, and the other projects I needed to get done today. And here comes part of my problem, solved easily in the subconscious mind.

Resistance works on a simple premise: suppose what we commonly call attraction between two people, "chemistry" or "sparks," if you will, is actually electricity--real electricity, felt by the main character, Carrie, a teenage girl, who has an affinity for learning electrical concepts. What starts for her as a pleasurable set of experiences first endangers her life, then takes it over in her teen years, culminating finally in her desperate attempt to "short circuit" or end its control over her. In the meantime, though, she comes to see everyone and everything as electronic components on a circuit board--and her life takes on a very real metaphorical link to the voltage that pulses through her and between everyone else. Carrie even sees herself as the most common electrical component, a resistor, which takes voltage in and modifies it in some way (usually stepping it down) for use elsewhere in the circuit. In the meantime, though, resistors get hot--sometimes very hot--yet another use of metaphor to engage my subconscious mind.

I hope to send this one out the door again after a close brush with an agent earlier this year. In the meantime, I'm reaping Grudin's harvest, a growing "awareness of the implicit connectedness of things." And when it comes to dealing in the metaphor of electricity, "connectedness" is all there really is.

Empathy from the Impossible

I interviewed award-winning novelist Julia Glass (to read that interveiw, scroll down to "Writing on the Web"), and among the many illuminating things she said about writing, one thing in particular has stuck with me: "To my mind, this is the greatest power of fiction: to teach us empathy where we could not have dreamed it possible."

Naturally, that set me thinking about the books I've read in which this magical transformation happens. Patrick Suskind's Perfume (Knopf, 1986) was the first to come to mind. Suskind paints a dark and utterly sympathetic picture of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a man born with an "exquisite nose," and "phenomenal memory," a man who is so utterly controlled by his sense of smell that he goes about murdering women for their scent, alone. Sounds diabolical, doesn't it?

But we get glimpses into Grenouille's tortured infancy in a fetid 17th-century world--a world where the stench of decay is constantly assaulting the faculties of normal people--but not his. And already, he is hated for being different.

And there's this, from the book, just after he murders his first young woman: "He had found the compass for his future life. And like all gifted aboninations, for whom some external event makes straight the way down into the vortex of their chaotic souls, Grenouille never again departed from what he believed was the direction fate had pointed him. It was clear to him now why he had clung to life so tenaciously, so savagely. He must become a creator of scents. And not just an average one. But, rather, the greatest perfumer of all time."

From these few words and what came before, the reader is already helplessly sympathetic to this man, this murderer. Suskind has done his work well (as did John E. Woods, who translated this novel from the German). This is more than "loving evil." It's seeing past the evil into the motivations of it. This is where understanding begins to germinate. And in a world like 17th-century Paris--or 21st-century America--the need for understanding each other better cannot be underrated.

Glass is oh-so-right.

It's a Go!

German academic publisher VDM Verlag has agreed to pick up my 2003 masters thesis project Depending on the Light: Writing My Change in Sexual Orientation. I am excited about this news, as I mentioned earlier. For one, I believe there's a significant audience for it, and two, I am hoping it will lead to a U.S. release. The climate in Europe, so far as I can tell, has been increasingly secular over the last 50 years, even moreso than here in the States, so VDM Verlag's decision to acquire this project still strikes me as odd, but fortuitous. I will update a few sources before I submit the manuscript to them late next week.

I make no bones that God was the primary agent in my drift out of lesbianism, and in fact dared Him to change me, since I had no desire (or resources) to do so. That's the crux of the project: the documenting of my process through journal entries, poetry, fiction, and essays, along with a somewhat fictionalized narrative that spans adolescence through my college years. I also add the voices of other women who have experienced this same drift, either with or without God, writer Jan Clausen among them. I do not know what the future holds for this work, but it has languished since its completion in 2003 despite my efforts to place it with numerous houses. Good news comes from the strangest places.

Too Much on the Bone

I sent the masters thesis project off the VDM Verlag on Tuesday. Thanks to revsions and reformatting, I cut 43 pages and nearly 1,000 words out. Now I'm in a waiting game (How else do writers get through life?) Having combined the poetry, fiction, and essays into the narrative feels more "reader friendly," and it is this version I hope VDM will take. I may need to do some updating on the "gay gene" issue and in the APA and NARTH sections, too, but that's all assuming the manuscript is picked up.

Revising Depending on the Light accomplished another thing I had hoped: it's given me the impetus I need to get back to more revisions on the novel Resistance. Passive voice, dead words, etc.

Which brings me to another musing. Language seems, by its nature, to tend toward verbosity. We want to communicate, so we use more words. Problem: they take away from the communication. So we must pare down. It's a never-ending fight with writers. If we all pared down exactly the same way, would we end up with essentially the same writing voice? And what about matters of style? I've been thinking about these things in my own revising process, and how easily dead words and passive voice creep into the text. (I'm sure there are some instances here, like this last sentence.) Like slowing metabolism, language tends toward the "extra" on the bone, the roll of fat against the day of famine.

Watching the Horizon

It's always a new thing to have an editor seek out my writing instead of beating the bushes, and that's what happened--at least in theory--yesterday. The acquisitions editor at the German publisher VDM Verlag contacted me about possibly publishing my master's thesis from 2003, Depending on the Light: Writing My Change in Sexual Orientation. I am still not sure how he/she found the work, except as a reference somewhere on the Web; I tried to search and found nothing. Anyway, VDM Verlag publishes about 4,000 titles a year (yes, you read right--4,000), mostly academic monographs. I am currently making revision to the thesis courtesy of writer Laurie Wagner Buyer's editing suggestions, which are slow going. My hope is to send the project off to VDM by the end of the week. We'll see how far I get.

What will it bring me? If they take it, mostly a larger audience for Depending on the Light, which focuses on my drift into and out of lesbianism set against my Christianity. I believe there are many women who have been through or are going through these same struggles, and that audience, wherever it is, does exist.

It's never easy to document an inner healing--especially one that seems to be ongoing--but I can honestly say it's the real deal. It should be--Jesus Christ has been central to the work. I know it's not popular or believeable by most of the public. But that's beside the point.

So, God willing, VDM Verlag will pick up the project. I'll keep you posted.

Finally!

Well, after more than two years of work, Building the Successful Online Course is out. We're excited about the book because we worked hard to make it truly practical for those either seasoned in distance ed or those new to the field. We also wanted to make the principles somewhat "timeless"; for instance, there's no substituting good and frequent communication with distance ed students, and there's nothing better than keeping things simple and streamlined, too. We hope this book will be used as a development text for any institution desiring to branch into distance education. The need for distance education courses--in all their many forms--will continue to grow. It just makes sense, we believe, to share some basic yet effective "how-to" techniques to help get these institutions, their instructors--and most importantly, their students--on board.