Progress and Poetry

Our Random Acts Books project continues to make progress, and we hope to finalize an arrangement with an editor by the end of the month.  We've had more skype sessions and have enjoyed getting to know a few editors as they've read the stories for our first collection, An Ekphrastic Trio.  We all agree we want to add a more engaging title for each of our miniologies, but we still like the Trio theme as a subtitle.  More on the final selection process once we've reached an agreement with our editor!

In the meantime, I read a marvelous piece on the editorial page of the New York Times this morning, titled "Poetry: Who Needs it?" by William Logan.  Wow, the LEAD editorial--well, in the digital edition, anyway--the one with the engraved illustration!  For poetry!  Is there hope for the world, after all?

And Then There Were Three

In Sci Fi Agonistes III, I chatted about starting on the path toward Indie Publishing for my science fiction novelette, And on the Eighth Day.  As I continued to surf and read more about the process, I found a number of websites and books that have been extremely helpful, and I've mentioned them all in that earlier post.  I'll just say there are many, many, wonderful folks out there blogging and posting and linking great tips and guidelines, and you can really learn from them...so be sure to thank them as well.

So, here I am, exploring and making notes and nodding, "ah ha, didn't realize that," and wondering where to begin--not to mention how I'd be able to accomplish all that new work and still be able to do any writing, oh, and yeah, that other something called a job--when a good friend and fellow member of our fiction workshop, Michael Bloom, says over coffee one day, "How about we team up on doing the Indie thing and start our own boutique publishing company?"  Eureka!  "And let's see if George Evans wants to join us."  Double Bingo!

One by One

Last night, my wife and I were overwhelmed by a performance of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem at the Palladium.  Britten, a pacifist, combined in telling fashion the latin mass for the dead with poems by Wilfred Owen, the poet best known for "Dulce et Decorum est."  Neither of us had heard the complete piece before, but we were excited since one of our daughters sings in the Symphonic Choir, a neighbor is principal flute in the Indianapolis Symphony, and my wife had trained many of the singers in the Indianapolis Children's Choir.  The work, for orchestra, chamber orchestra, chorus of over a hundred with three soloists, plus a children's choir, is a powerful and moving piece with its juxtaposition of the requiem mass and Owen's pacifist poems, and the audience sat in total silence for nearly a minute after the final "amen" died away.

This morning, those lingering motifs and words haunt me as I continue revising my manuscript, To Strike a Single Hour, a civil war novel intended to find a potential truth amid the puffery of P. T. Barnum's "Spy of the Cumberland," Pauline Cushman.  I've draped my narrative over a bare skeleton of the little known "facts" about the brave and steadfast heroine, a woman who, unlike "...the milk-and-water women of the day, whose only thought is of dress and amusement, but one of the women of old, whose soul was in their country's good..." threw herself, according to Barnum's commissioned vanity biography of her by F. L Sarmiento, into the breach with nary a hesitation.

A Guest Post on the Indiana Author Awards Blog

I was honored today to contribute a guest post on the Indiana Author Awards blog at

http://www.indianaauthorsaward.org/the-blog/

Take a look and explore the other guest posts by many Indiana writers, including JL Kato, Poetry Editor for Flying Island, and Ben Winters, recent winner of the Philip K Dick Award for his novel Countdown City.

Keep your eye peeled for the 2014 Indiana Author Awards coming this October.

In His Own Words, GGM

The passing of Gabriel Garcia Marquez last week has been widely noted and his pathbreaking work in creating the spell of Magic Realism justly praised around the world.  Let his words speak:

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."  One Hundred Years of Solitude

“It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.”  Love in the Time of Cholera

“She would defend herself, saying that love, no matter what else it might be, was a natural talent. She would say: You are either born knowing how, or you never know.”  Love in the Time of Cholera

“It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.”  One Hundred Years of Solitude

“The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love.”  Love in the Time of Cholera

"My heart has more rooms in it than a whorehouse."  Love in the Time of Cholera

“To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else's heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.”  Love in the Time of Cholera

"I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid of Him."  Love in the Time of Cholera

“He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.”  Love in the Time of Cholera

“But when a woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root: there is no God worth worrying about.”  Love in the Time of Cholera

“Tell him yes. Even if you are dying of fear, even if you are sorry later, because whatever you do, you will be sorry all the rest of your life if you say no.”  Love in the Time of Cholera

"He recognised her despite the uproar, through his tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her, and he looked at her for the last and final time with eyes more luminous, more grief-stricken, more grateful than she had ever seen them in half a century of a shared life, and he managed to say to her with his last breath: 'Only God knows how much I loved you.'"  Love in the Time of Cholera

Sci Fi Agonistes III

So, once more into the breach...literally.  As noted a while back, the fledgling Sci Fi publisher and I parted ways earlier this year, so I've been focusing on becoming an "authorpreneur" and going the route of indie publishing for the novelette they had solicited, And on the Eighth Day.  I've shared a lot of info with Keith Krulik about this approach and you can check out his recent post about indie publishing at the Fiction Forge Indy blog here.

As I dug into the topic myself, I was struck initially by the difference between the new "indie" approach and the older, often predatory, self-publishing or vanity press approach.  Yes, the vanity press has its place: for those who want to publish something they simply wish to share with family members or a small group, and who have no interest in reaching a broader audience or ever publishing anything else.  A vanity press is perfect for them and, without it, their dream would never be shared.  Bottom line, the key is that the vanity publisher's customers are not the readers of books but, rather, the writers of them.  Their revenues come mainly from the provision of services to writers, not the sale of books.

Turning Pro: A Long and Winding Road in the War of Art

Wonder of wonders:  at a recent business conference, a young fellow spoke about entrepreneurship and the importance of what he called "turning pro" being "greater than being an amateur."  In a few of our early posts last year, we debated the meaning and relevance of taking a professional approach to our writing, but we didn't dig too deeply into exactly what made one a pro instead of an amateur.  (BTW, I like the word "amateur" as opposed to beginner or neophyte or dilettante ...or worse.)

At any rate, the bright young speaker made several links between being an entrepreneur and the arts, and he recommended a number of books, including one that really caught my attention, Turning Pro, by Steven Pressfield, who also wrote The War of Art.  Pressfield tells the story of his journey to become a published author--a long and winding road in his case--and he recognizes a point at which he moved from being an amateur to approaching his writing as a pro.  He lists his discoveries along the way, and comes up with twenty traits of being a pro, among them:

The pro comes to work every day.  Ideally, that means setting and respecting a time and place for writing each day, but even if we can't always do that, at least the pro is thinking about her work, planning, considering, repeating dialogues or running scenes in her head.  Nothing is more important to becoming a pro than making that level of commitment.