Tag: writing

NEW ADVENTURE!

I finished my first draft of Looking for Home at some point between Thanksgiving and December 1, 2024 (I went back and looked), After January 1, I reread it and did a revision. In February 2025 I sent to beta readers, then a line editor worked it over, and then I swapped work with another professional writer, and she made some very good notes.

All of that feedback needed to be factored in and folded into the narrative, straightening out the chronology and cleaning up finer plot points. As well as cutting the wordcount down a bit. And today I restyled the first few paragraphs to clean up the last of those wordcount cuts, and I am DONE with Looking for Home, and I think it’s ready to query!

It has been quite the journey. I was not as driven writing this book, and it took twice as long to complete. I froze up on the regular, wondering how I could pull such a feat off again. I fought through the grief of losing my mom and quitting my job. And these last couple of weeks, the revisions just seemed too overwhelming to take on.

My writing buddy Shannon told me, “Just work on one page. That’s all. Then try to revise another page tomorrow.”

That did the trick. I got my confidence back, and it was off to the races. I just finished writing the last revised paragraph a few hours ago.

Next is drawing up the first list of publishers to query and seeing what happens!

But that will be tomorrow. Today I will celebrate that Carlton and Merrilyn and Cassie got their happy ending. As they should have. Stay tuned!

I Need Gas in the Tank

My creative imagination for Looking for Home is just about exhausted.

I have line-edits to work through still. And another reader I hope to hear from by the end of July. So I’m waiting on the edits (which I can probably knock out in a day or so) until I hear from her.

I’m already moving my thoughts to the query materials and compiling a list of who to send it to. I’m going to follow a similar procedure to make those decisions that I used with Hurricane Baby–presses that are interested in Southern stories. I don’t think I’m going to send to university presses this time, though. This book, while historical, isn’t about a real historical event like Hurricane Baby was. So i’m not sure what would be the angle for a university press. I may send to those in Tennessee, where the book is set. But I’m going to have to think about that.

Ten days and I head into my very busy month for Hurricane Baby. I’m looking forward to everything, especially my trip upstate to Starkville and Columbus for a signing and for the Possumtown Book Fest, now in its second year. Hopefully I get to meet some people in person that I only know by reputation as well as catch up with friends and colleagues from MUW.

Going to continue thinking ahead and try to organize myself for all of this. Hope some of you can make the events and enjoy yourselves!

My Take on Generative AI

I documented on this blog back in February 2023 my experience with the earliest model of ChatGPT shortly after it had been released and nobody knew very much about it. I asked it to write blog posts in the voices of Anne Lamott and John Grisham, then tried to see if it could write like me. All responses were like reading corporate boilerplate–exactly how you’d expect a soulless machine to sound.

Then word came out that students were using to write papers–reports showed that kids all the way from middle school to PHD candidates were using it to write their papers. The schools tried to stamp it out as soon as they discovered it–but got pushback from parents saying that it didn’t matter that it wasn’t the students’ own work and that everyone else was doing it so why can’t my kid?

I counted myself lucky that I’d gotten out of teaching when I had because WHAT?

Then The Atlantic started digging into how exactly ChatGPT was created–and discovered that just about the entire internet’s caches of knowledge–websites, blogs, social media, online publications, Wikipedia–had been fed into the application’s programming. Even my blog, Not Quite Right: Living with Bipolar Disorder, had been scraped. My words, offered to encourage and help others who suffered from my illness, had been taken without my consent–or any renumeration.

Later The Atlantic came out with another bombshell–Meta, who owns Facebook and Instagram, had bought LibGen–a well-known pirated books site hosting around seven million books–and used all that literary excellence to train its own AI program. Authors new and old–such as William Faulkner, Mary Miller, Willie Morris, Lee Durkee, and Beth Kander, to name a very few–had their works pillaged for this. The article also noted that Meta had considered buying the books as required under copyright law but decided against it for profit reasons.

Listen to that again–Meta purchased a book site that was already breaking the law, used its assets to break the law again, and did so with a brazen disregard for the rights of the creators of those works.

And now Amazon refuses to promise to remove AI-generated books from its online bookstore. With AI’s expansion into images and animation, creatives from all sectors of the entertainment business are losing their jobs. And a book, widely regarded as having been created by a publisher using AI with no input from a human author, currently sits at #1 in the science fiction romance category.

Where does it end?

The miserable thing is that George Orwell predicted this in his dystopian novel 1984, published in 1949. The protagonist of the novel, Winston, had a girlfriend named Julia who worked in the literature department of the Ministry of Truth, running a tricky machine that created books for mass consumption without human input. Winston says this about the process: “Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.”

Is this future what we want literature to turn into? Because barring a miracle, that’s where we’re heading.

New Idea!

So I’ve settled what I’m going to work on for my next writing project.

I wrote out a thought experiment in the late 2000s–could you call a extramarital relationship cheating if the pair never actually had physical relations? What would such a relationship look like? And what would be the fallout if the relationship was revealed?

Now as a society, we have a term for this kind of relationship–an emotional affair–and many writers have explored the ramifications of such relationships in both fiction and nonfiction. So even though it’s tightly written and tightly plotted, I don’t think this story would work for today’s readers.

So I got to thinking. How could I change it to make it more interesting? I knew I didn’t want to do a romance manuscript–that’s not really where my interests lie. The story was dual point-of-view; I could choose to center the male main character, Steven Burr, or the female main character, Melissa Benedict.

As I reread the work, I realized that Steven experienced no growth during the story as I had it, while Melissa did. So I decided to center Melissa’s story as one of her own transformation as she got older and more experienced at life.

But that would be kind of a plain story, too–a lot of that kind of work is out in the world as well. What kind of spin could I put on it to make it more mine and more Southern Gothic?

I’ve always been fascinated by the Cassandra myth–the prophetess blessed with knowledge of the future but cursed to always have her pronunciations ignored by the people around her. What if Melissa encountered such a person–and her life was upended? Would Melissa passively accept what’s happening to her–or would she seize what control she could muster over her life?

So. The die is cast. I’ll start in September, God willing and the creek don’t rise.

Looking Ahead; Looking Back

So my activities are slowing down at this point. I have one event left in June and only one Zoom event scheduled for all of July. I am hoping to get my latest manuscript back from my other two readers by mid-July and plan to take that open time of no events to do whatever other edits need doing on it. I know I want to look very carefully at the word count, at the pacing of the actual beginning pages, and at making sure the continuities are right. We will see if anything else comes up.

August will be important for three reasons: the book will be a year old, the twentieth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is that month, and to that end, I have a lot of events scheduled. the first is an online “Talk To Me Day” on Mastodon on August 3, then there’s a Book Mart signing in Starkville on August 15 and the Possumtown Book Fest in Columbus the next day, August 16. Then another shot at a signing at B&N on August 23, another Zoom event on August 26, and finally a podcast recording with fellow author Rod Davis and my friend Shannon Evans on August 29, the actual date the storm hit Mississippi in 2005.

I am making such a big push because first-year sales are so important to the life of a book. I am probably going to stop hustling for events, press, etc. once the first year is over. The good news is I already have several possibilities for events in the next year; I just have to wait and see how those possibilities pan out. And anything else I am invited to I will need to be very judicious about whether to attend or not.

But I could never have anticipated what all has happened for my book this year–the reception by readers, the accolades from various quarters, the support from other authors, the support I’ve gotten from my publisher, my family, and my work–all amazing and humbling for the little book that could.

Rest

Rest. That’s what I tried doing this week after I finished this third draft. I mostly succeeded.

I read. Some nights I went to bed early. Other nights I participated in chats with friends.

One night I wrote out a very basic note on the plot of the chapter that I’m adding to the middle section. I plan to start on that tomorrow night and hopefully finish a good draft within a week.

But I can tell I’m getting close to done with the writing of this book.

How do I know? I’m not thinking about the characters all the time. The impetus to rush to the computer and type on the draft has lessened. I’m starting to turn my mind to what comes next–another go-around of edits, perfecting a few more places I already know need work, making sure all the little details get cleaned up in preparation for going out to the wide world of querying.

Hopefully I can have a few days to sit with the manuscript at the end of July and marvel that I managed to do it again. A whole other book. YAY!

Better Late Than Never!

And except for some scraps of dialogue here and there, my next revision is in the books. I do have one more scene I am tinkering with including–but it’s not a make-or-break thing if it doesn’t get in–I think the story would be better with it, but it’s fine without it, too.

It’s long. Like 345 pages long–much longer than Hurricane Baby. I may concentrate in the next revision on slimming it back down to 80,000 words. I can ask my next readers to look at repetitious passages, etc. We will see how it goes.

I still feel really accomplished. I want to be able to start shopping it in August 2025, and it looks like I’m on track to hit that goal. I have put a lot of words down on paper in this story. And these characters have really stuck with me for a long time. I just hope I keep doing the story justice.

In other news, I was at a lovely event in a small town in Alabama this past Saturday; I signed books and was in a good Q&A with the Friends of the Library organization there. I made a comment on how sometimes you can work on a project if you remind yourself that they characters aren’t real people and that it’s okay to kill them off. The moderator told me that for many of us, the characters become real people in our minds, and we get really upset when you kill one off. So lots of opinions were had and a lively discussion ensued.

So tonight I’m going to clean up loose threads and put this version of Looking for Home to bed. Wishing you all the best!

Book Magic!

This week, I had another surprise pop up about Hurricane Baby: Stories–it’s now available online from Target.com! I was so STUNNED. I immediately wrote my publisher asking HOW she pulled this one off. She said it was likely because it was available at the wholesaler Ingram and that I had done such a good job collating my metadata. That was flattering, as was her comment that I should write something about metadata and its role in publishing.

Now, some readers may be wondering what metadata is and with good reason; I didn’t know anything about it until I started working for my job at a publisher. Metadata is information sent to online retailers such as Amazon, Barners & Noble, Ingram, etc. that makes use of search engine optimization (SEO) to enable readers to find a certain book.

Much metadata has to do with information the publisher will determine and supply–ISBN, title, cover image, shelving headers, BISAC codes, dimensions of the book. Other items of metadata that can be entered into your book’s electronic record are comparison titles, excerpts, and keywords.

Comparison titles are where the author indicates the book sits in the marketplace–books with similar themes, audiences, and writing styles. I used Amazon to search out mine for Hurricane Baby–I typed “Hurricane Katrina fiction” in the search bar and found several titles I thought would work. I then read the summaries and decided what books would match mine most closely. Other considerations include the amount of sales, the number of reviews the book had, and what format the book was published in; they needed to be as similar to the format as the book I was working on as possible.

Excerpts are important to give everyone reading the metadata the flavor of the book. I took a scene from the middle of my first story, “Still Waters”, where the hurricane hits Hattiesburg, Mississippi full force. It summed up the serious issues from the storm and showed the style of my writing.

Keywords are search terms for the book–a word or phrase that is electronically attached to the book as it goes out into the world. My keywords for Hurricane Baby were: 2005, climate change, destruction of the Gulf Coast, hurricane baby, Hurricane Katrina, loss of faith, post-traumatic stress disorder, Southern literature. The keywords can be a set of phrases or single words that someone might use as a search terms when looking for information/books on my topic. The key player in this case is Amazon–it has a fifteen-keyword limit for how many search terms you can attach.

So that’s a quick rundown of what I know about metadata and how I used it for my book. Hope the information can be helpful to someone else. And may it work in your favor as it seems to have done in mine! Happy writing!

An Interesting Problem

One of my favorite writers is Alexandra Stoddard, who writes a great deal about home decoration, the art of living, architecture, beauty, and philosophy. She was mentored in the interior design business by Eleanor McMillen Brown, owner of a very fashionable decorating house in Manhattan, New York. In one of her books, Stoddard quotes Mrs. Brown as telling her, “If you change one thing, you will have to rethink and change everything.”

Such words not only apply to interior design, but for this manuscript, I’m discovering they apply to my writing journey at the moment as well.

I thought when I started editing based on the feedback I got that I would drop a new “chapter” in each section and make various other editing changes throughout, mostly deepening character motivations for minor characters.

So I wrote one of those new parts and dropped it into the first section that’s from Carlton’s point of view. And immediately realized that I needed to add several new pages to the ending of Carlton’s narration because of this new scene. It raised the stakes exponentially in that particular situation.

I’m starting to draft the new section for Cassie’s narration, and I’ve already figured out how it’s going to cause a huge ripple effect that will reverberate through the ending not only of Cassie’s section but of all the other characters’ narrative arcs.

And I haven’t given enough thought to the third new section I’m going to write, but I can imagine that Merrilyn’s narration will be altered as well.

But this is the best part–all of these changes are improving the story immeasurably. And I am having the time of my life drafting them and making the puzzle pieces fit to make it look like the story has always existed in this form and events could not happen in any other way.

So remember changing just one thing has the power to change everything. What change have you been afraid of making in your work-in-progress? What are you afraid of? Overcome the fear and make the change–and surprise yourself!