A Seven Figure Contract for Amanda Hocking

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Thanks to my friend Rosi Hollinbeck for sending me a link to the latest episode in the ongoing eBook “explosion.”  (Be sure to check out Rosi’s excellent blog, The Write Stuff, at:  http://rosihollinbeckthewritestuff.blogspot.com/ ).

Amanda Hocking, the poster-girl for rags to riches in eBook publishing, sold  the rights to an upcoming, four book YA fantasy series to St. Martin’s Press for a reported $2 million dollars.  http://tinyurl.com/4l2kddj

One year ago, Hocking, after repeated rejections by traditional publishers, uploaded two books to Amazon, hoping to make several hundred dollars by October to attend a Jim Henson exhibit in Chicago.

Something in our national character loves pathfinders and likes to see “ordinary people” get ahead, especially when they have Amanda Hocking’s humor and sense of irony.  Too bad Oprah is going off the air; that would have been a fun interview.

Several other points come to mind:

  • This is confirmation of the buzz I’ve been hearing, most recently at a local agent’s workshop, that good ebook sales have become another viable avenue into traditional publishing – arguably with better odds for some kinds of books than the query-an-agent route.
  • A critique group friend who runs her own small press and follows the publishing industry reports that genre fiction does especially well in the ebook format.  I would imagine it has to do with the price spread:  $9.99 these days for a paperback at Barnes&Noble vs. $0.99-2.99 for Indie ebooks.  Are the “official” books better written?  Based on my limited sampling, in general they are, but not in every case.  One nice thing about Smashwords.com is that you can sample half of the text of their ebooks before purchase, so you pretty much know what you are getting.
  • Most surprising to me is that segments of the writing community do not get it either.  Case in point:  I just got a card announcing the 19th annual “Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards,” which completely ignores the world of ebooks.  (Can we say it?  “Hard-copy is sooo last year!”)

A few years ago, I attended one of the better writing conferences.  I booked some appointments with editors and agents, but I wasn’t really trying to sell anything; I wanted feedback on my WIP.  I had several plot ideas and wanted to sound them out, and it was very valuable overall.  Other people were suffering in the job interview mode, all their self-esteem on the line with their manuscripts.

I made a mental note to myself – my manuscript is not my self.  I forget it from time to time but the principle is still valid.

I truly enjoy the brave-new-world of ePublishing because it supports that realization by giving me a look behind the curtain.  Traditional publishers and even Writer’s Digest are run by busy business people who are doing their best but sometimes miss the boat and make mistakes.  I find it refreshing to find we have a thriving alternative that few of us even knew about six months ago.


Throughlines in Novels and Screenplays

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I have posted before on how much I learn from screenwriters.  I would even argue that film has become the groundbreaking medium in the world of storytelling.  Yesterday, for instance, I received a newsletter on writing for children with a front page article entitled, “E-Books Go Hollywood:  Readers Are Ready for Books to Sing & Dance.”

Regardless, I would not want to try to write a novel these days without a grasp of such screenwriting basics as “High Concept,” and “Three Act Structure.”  Another key term from stage and film is, “Throughline.”  Unfortunately, many definitions of the phrase are overly simplistic, like this from dictionary.com:  “a theme or idea that runs from the beginning to the end of a book, film, etc.”

A more useful description is given on Wikipedia, which traces the word back to Constantin Stanislavski, the great proponent of method acting, who:  “believed actors should not only understand what their character was doing, or trying to do…in any given unit, but should also strive to understand the through line which linked these objectives together and thus pushed the character forward through the narrative.”

Even this definition is rather abstract, and we need some examples.  The clearest discussion of Throughlines I know was written by Nancy Lamb in The Writer’s Guide to Crafting Stories for Children (2001). The section of the book dealing with Throughlines is reprinted in the February, 2011 issue of Writer’s Digest, which brought the subject to mind.

The Throughline, says Lamb, is “the central plot point that propels the hero from beginning to end, from one scene to the next, from one act to the next.” A key point she makes is the frequent breakdown of the initial, conscious motivation of the protagonist near the middle of the story:  “What he wants is denied him,either by his choice or by the force of outside circumstances.  The breakdown exposes a deeper motivation that propels the character forward, a motivation he was originally unaware of.” (emphasis added).

Lamb cites the classic Bridge to Terabithia as an example.  Jess Aarons wants to be the fastest runner in the fifth grade.  This motivation breaks down when he meets Leslie Burke, the new girl in school, who is a tomboy and a faster runner then he is.  The two become best friends and build a world of imagination together, and the Troughline deepens.  Not a single minded goal, but “Jess’ multi-faceted desire for self-realization becomes the primary Throughline that runs through the story.”

A third Throughline becomes central when Leslie dies in a tragic accident:  “Jess must learn to cope with his grief and believe in himself.  Until that point, he was convinced he needed Leslie to ‘make the magic.’  Now Jess is alone and must learn to call upon his own creative spirit without the help of his friend.”

Lamb uses the analogy of a train to to demonstrate that the Throughline may “change tracks,” but it is always there, and always moving toward the destination.  It lends force and cohesion to a story, and ties together what might otherwise be  a series of disparate episodes.

“From beginning to end, the Throughline is a constant in your story.  You can have any number of other things happen in the book.  But the matter of what drives the hero and compels him to act is never in question because the Throughline is there to maintain your readers’ attentions and pull them through the story.”

Lamb calls the Throughline the “spine” of a story, a good analogy, because the spine of people and animals is hidden.  As long as everything is working, we don’t give it much thought.  It is instructive to try to identify the Throughline in your favorite tales.

In Fellowship of the Ring, Frodo agrees to carry the Ring of Power to Rivendell, a task which is heroic enough; it almost costs him his life, but that is just the beginning.  Sam is ready to return to the Shire, but Frodo cannot.  Grasping the danger to Middle Earth, he reluctantly says, “I will carry the ring to Mordor, though I do not know the way.”  It is like the ground opening under the hobbit’s feet, dropping him into a far more dangerous world.

The initial Throughline in The Da Vinci Code is Robert Langdon’s need to prove himself innocent of a murder he did not commit.  The simple imperative to survive is gradually eclipsed by his desire uncover a hidden mystery that is central to western culture and religion.

The Throughline is one of those elements it is fun to watch for in books and movies – fun and valuable, for it is a tool that can only make our own writing stronger.


Notes on T.S. Eliot

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Here is what the man I consider the greatest english language poet of the 20th century had to say about his own work:

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years-
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres-
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. (The Four Quartets)

 

Thomas Stearns Eliot, 1888-1965

Eliot was a modernist who believed that a new poetic language was needed to address the complexities of a new century.  It takes a bit of effort now to understand that he offended the literary establishment of his day the way Picasso offended the art establishment.  The first poem in his first published book, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” (1917) begins:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;

The literary world was still immersed in the 19th century sensibility; to describe the sky with such a simile was as shocking as a cubist landscape.   At the same time, Eliot alienated the bohemian crowd:  he became a devout Anglican, wore three-piece suits, worked in a bank, and spoke in the most precise possible manner.  He went his own way in everything but kept enough humor to describe himself in this way:

How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!
With his features of clerical cut,
And his brow so grim
And his mouth so prim
And his conversation, so nicely
Restricted to What Precisely
And If and Perhaps and But.
…………………………………….
How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!
(Whether his mouth be open or shut).

I read poems like “Prufrock” and “The Wasteland” in high school.  They were cool enough that as a sophomore in college, I signed up for a class called, “Yeats and Eliot.”  It probably had a more lasting effect than any other college class, since forty years later I still read T.S. Eliot often, usually from “The Four Quartets,” the capstone of his poetic career.  The four sections were written and released separately over six years, and first published together in 1943.  After the Quartets, he wrote, “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,” which inspired the musical, “Cats,” and spent the rest of his life writing plays and literary criticism.  Eliot was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1948.

The title of this blog came from an opening line in “The Four Quartets:”  Through the first gate, Into our first world, shall we follow the deception of the thrush?

As I said, I have been reading this poem for forty years, always finding something new in Eliot’s rendering of the human longing for the ineffable (among many other themes).  George Orwell dismissed the poem for it’s “religiosity,” though I find that a shallow reading.  A passage like the following uses religious symbols, not in the service of preachiness, but to invoke an experience that is perhaps as common as it is difficult to name:

I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant –
Among other things-or one way of putting the same thing:
That the future is a faded song, a Royal Rose or a lavender spray
Of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret,
Pressed between the yellow leaves of a book that has never been opened.

Here is another such passage which I still see quoted from time to time by spiritual authors:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

No single blog post could be more than an introduction to the life and work of a poet like T.S. Eliot, but if these notes inspire anyone to read “The Four Quartets,”  http://www.ubriaco.com/fq.html I will be more than satisfied.

Let me end with the end of the passage I began with.  After the poet tells us “success” is forever out of reach, he says:

And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate-but there is no competition-
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again:  and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Three New Writing Contests

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Here are several new contests I spotted:

The Writer 2011 short story contest:

“We’re looking for original fiction on any theme that is brilliant, bold, and concise (2000 word limit).”
Finalist judge: Michelle Wildgen – novelist and executive editor at Tin House.
Prizes:  $1000, $300, $200.  Entry fee, $10.  Deadline April 30, 2011.  Notification by Aug. 30.

http://tinyurl.com/4ea4bqn

The Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting competition:

Up to five, $30,000 fellowships for the year to be awarded to entrants who have not made more than $5000 writing for film or television.  Looks like stiff competition (typically more than 3500 entries each year).  Deadline, May 2.  That’s obviously not enough time to start from scratch, but if you want to get a jump on next year, have a look.  http://www.oscars.org/awards/nicholl/about/index.html

And finally, both last and least, here is the The ‘Write’ of Spring Tweet Writing Contest:

140 characters max, due April 24.  Prizes include a year’s subscription to The Writer, a 10 week writing workshop, a $25 Barnes and Noble gift card, and as the notice says, bragging rights.  The sample given, by Ana Maria Shua is really quite clever:

I have nothing against fried eggs. They’re the ones who look at me with amazement, terrified, wide-eyed.

http://tinyurl.com/66mf3lj

Good luck, rev your engines, etc.

My 100th Post

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Trying to find something appropriate to say on the occasion of a fairly incredible milestone like this is about as hopeless as trying to really comprehend one of those big birthdays, like turning 30 or 50.  Experientially, it feels pretty much like the day before, just as this feels pretty much like post 99 or post 17 for that matter.

What I can very truthfully say is how much I appreciate all my readers, all the comments I have received, and all the links I have followed to find kindred spirits sharing their own ideas.  There is no longer any doubt that community can exist in cyberspace.  Earlier this morning, in regard to something else, Mary reminded me of a detail from Peter S. Beagle’s, The Last Unicorn: unicorns don’t have to be in each other’s immediate company – as long as they know there are other unicorns in the world, they do not feel lonely.  Thanks to all of you.

***

I started this post the way I started many others:  with an idea and the hope that it leads somewhere.  Very appropriately, I think, for such a significant milestone, the idea led me to Alfred E. Neuman.

This is because Jen left a comment on my “Deja Vue All Over Again” post, regarding the school bomb drills.  “I couldn’t imagine how afraid they all must have been,” she said.  That triggered several vivid memories of photos and caricatures in Mad Magazine.  Mad parodied Kennedy and Kruschev.  The editors didn’t shy away from pictures of mushroom clouds.  In a way, they taught us the same technique that Harry Potter and his friends learned when faced with a boggart, those magical creatures that take the shape of your greatest fear.  When faced with a boggart, you have to look it in the eye and say the magic word, “Riddikulus!”

Mad taught members of my generation to say “Riddiculus” to much more than just the cold war.  Nothing was out of reach of the parodies.  Mad took special aim at Madison Avenue, popular culture, politics, education – in fact most all the artifacts of the “normal” world of adults.  Appropriately, I learned about beatniks from Mad. I seem to remember a picture of William Gaines, the founder, sporting a goatee.

One day my mother caught me coming home with a copy of Mad.  “Let me see that!” she said.  She snatched it out of my hand and flipped through it, thinking, I guess, that it was some new kind of Playboy. She chuckled once or twice and handed the magazine back.  “I guess this is all right,” she said.  Yes and no.  In many ways, Mad was far more more subversive for a grade school kid than Playboy could every have been.

More than once over the years, I have seen articles on Mad Magazine’s influence on the ’60’s counterculture, for it taught a whole generation to laugh at the world they were going to inherit.  Few sacred cows escaped Mad’s satire.  I assumed there would be lots of dissertations on that subject by now, but when I did I a search, I could not find any.  What I did find – and this would have made Gaines laugh out loud – was a term paper on Mad for sale, that had its basic facts wrong in the synopsis.

Mad has, however, made a significant contribution to the field of computer science through the work of Donald Knuth, Professor Emeritus of Computer Programming at Stanford.  Knuth is:

Author of the seminal multi-volume work The Art of Computer Programming, [and] has been called the “father” of the analysis of algorithms, contributing to the development of, and systematizing formal mathematical techniques for, the rigorous analysis of the computational complexity of algorithms. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth

Knuth’s first scientific article, “The Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures,” was published in a school magazine in 1957.  In it, he defined the basic unit of length as the thickness of Mad issue #26, and named the fundamental unit of force, the “whatmeworry.”  Mad bought the article and published it in issue #33, in June, 1957.

Remember that fun PBS show called, “Connections?”  The host, James Burke, loved to show how events, separated by centuries and thousands of miles, influenced each other.  So here, for this weighty and significant 100th post, is a brand new connection!   Think of it:  the influence of Mad Magazine on the man who taught us to analyze the sort of programming algorithms that make blogging possible.  Now if that’s not a happy thought, I don’t know what is!

Footnote on Plotting, and Tolkien’s Method

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In a post here on March 13, “Between a Plot and a Hard Place,” I talked of the two poles of plotting a novel – letting it unfold vs. planning everything in advance.  I said I had seen one of Tolkien’s letters indicating that he leaned toward the former approach, but I found confirmation yesterday, while reviewing his essay, “On Fairy Stories,” in the Tolkien Reader. In the author’s introduction, he says the essay was written in 1938 or 1939 and mentions he was working on The Lord of the Rings at the same time.  He says the story was:

…beginning to unroll itself and to unfold prospects of labour and exploration in yet unknown country as daunting to me as to the hobbits.  At about that time we had reached Bree, and I had then no more notion than they had of what had become of Gandalf or who Strider was; and I had begun to despair of surviving to find out.

The image that came to mind (thought it did not literally enter the story until later) was the light of Galadriel illuminating his way.  What do you do when you find yourself in the dark like that?

On Fairy-Stories by J.R.R Tolkien

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Once in a while, I worry that I have said everything I have to say, that I have nothing left to blog about.  The mood hit yesterday, after I hit the “Publish” button, and it lasted a good 20 minutes.

Then I remembered that for the last three years or so, my battered and yellowing copy of The Tolkien Reader has been stashed in the software cabinet, along with CD’s for Office, Photo-Shop, and Quicken.  I have no idea why I put it there, but that’s where it stayed because I knew where it is was and it seemed as good a place as any.

When I say yellowing, I mean the pages of this book are really yellow:  it must be at least twenty-five years since I opened it, but I remembered Tolkien’s essay, “On Fairy-Stories” and had a look.

It was downright eerie to see how certain passages I had underlined decades ago are relevant to my present writing interests and concerns.  For instance, those who followed this blog in February will remember a three-part series I wrote on shape-shifters.  “The trouble with the real folk of Faerie is that they do not always look like what they are,” says Tolkien.

Tolkien asks what a fairy story really is and notes that it is not just a story about fairies.  It is also not a story for children, a connection he dismisses as a cultural quirk.  Fairy stories are, he says, “stories about…Faerie, the realm or state in which fairies have their being.”

Faerie lies beyond this world, in an intermediate realm, between the extremes of heaven and hell.  Tolkien quotes the ballad of “Thomas the Rhymer (Child #37) where the Fairy Queen shows Thomas three paths.  They will take the third, which winds into the unknown hills:

O see ye not yon narrow road,
So thick beset wi’ thorns and briers?
That is the Path of Righteousness,
Though after it but few inquires.

‘And see ye not yon braid, braid road,
That lies across the lily leven?
That is the Path of Wickedness,
Though some call it the Road to Heaven.

‘And see ye not yon bonny road
That winds about the fernie brae?
That is the Road to fair Elfland,
Where thou and I this night maun gae.

Analogies jump to mind:  the imaginal realm of Archetypal Psychology, the place of soul, between the physical world and the formless world of transcendent spirit.  The astral world of Hindu cosmology, described in detail in Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi, which is far more subtle than physical reality, and far more dense than the realm of spirit.  I am not just being scholarly here, but trying to point to a key fact:  Faerie is analogous to the place of dreams and nightmares, of angels and demons, in old and new traditions around the world.  I could cite a lot more examples.

According to Tolkien, some our most primal desires lie in our fascination with tales of Faerie:  the desire for “the realization, independent of the conceiving mind, of imagined wonder.”  Another is “the desire of men to hold communion with other living things.”  And finally, we look to “the land of the ever young” in our longing to escape death.  And though we can’t pull that off in physical reality, Tolkien says that “fully realized” or “complete” fairy tales end with “imaginative satisfaction” of some of our deep desires.  They give us “a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.”

I’d recommend this essay, written in 1939, especially to writers of fantasy literature, but to writers in general, for Tolkien has much to say about another primal desire, the desire to be a creator of worlds – “sub-creator” is the phrase he uses.

***

And finally I will end with some unexpected good news for Tolkien fans.  Today’s Sacramento Bee reported that filming of The Hobbit has started after numerous delays.  This will be a two year, two film project, directed by Peter Jackson, staring Martin Freeman as Bilbo, and also featuring Elijah Wood, Ian McKellan, Cate Blanchett, and Orlando Bloom.   Release of film number one is expected in late 2012.  Something else to look forward to for those who love to explore the world that Tolkien created.

The Tassajara Bread Book

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Three decades ago, I stumbled into a three year period in my working life where I had time to pursue all the extra-cirricular activities I desired.  Through a spectacular right place/right time moment, I landed a part time teaching job.  We lived in a small but cozy and affordable house in Chico, California where we could walk to the market and downtown.  We got by with one car, a Beetle that I maintained with the help of the Idiot’s Volkswagen book.  We grew veggies, and somewhere along the line, I started making bread, not just to save a few pennies, but because I found it satisfying and delicious.  That was one of several things that went by the wayside when I joined the high-tech workforce – until two days ago.

In a recent post I wrote of attending a retreat with Edward Brown, a long-time Zen student, teacher, chef, and the author of The Tassajara Cookbook and The Tassajara Bread Book.  I purchased both books.  This was not an impulse buy – I attended a workshop with Edward a year ago and almost bought the books then, but worried that I didn’t have enough time.  This year I decided to make time, with the results you can see above.  The loaves taste as good as they look.

I’d show you the Orange Whole Wheat Pancakes, but unlike the bread, they did not have to cool before eating, so they didn’t last long enough for snapshots.

The directions in the Breadbook are clear and lively.  Brown takes the time to explain why you do things this way and not that, a feature lacking in many cookbooks.  There is something elementally satisfying in baking one’s “daily bread,” and I cannot think of a better book on how to do it.