TURNING TO FICTION: AN INTERVIEW WITH ANNA MARSH

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I met Anna Marsh at a Yale alumni event where her name tag told me she had received a PhD in psychology there in 1985. I expected to hear stories of a career in academia, musings on current psychological research, and perhaps tales of her illustrious classmates (one of whom currently serves as Yale’s president). We did, in fact, do some reminiscing. But our conversation took an unexpected turn when Anna mentioned being a fiction writer.

I soon learned that Anna had completed a master’s in writing at Johns Hopkins after leaving her career in government.  I wanted to know more, especially about the value of formal writing education in a person with a wealth of learning and life experience.

Book Marketing and Promotion

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On June 1, my novel While You Were Gone was published by C&R Press, which means I should be promoting it. Even though this is my third novel (and fifth book) in my last post, I discussed how, for me at least, writing does not get easier, as each project brings its own challenges for promotion as well.

All of my books have been published by small presses, which means a limited promotion and marketing budget. All of the presses I have published with did send out review copies (from 20 to 100) to a variety of publications; however, I usually only end up with a half dozen reviews best. Part of this is because publications (unless they are specifically geared to small presses) tend to publish reviews of books from larger presses.

Persuasion through Fiction: A Risky Venture

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Using fiction to bring readers around to one’s point of view is not just difficult, it’s also very risky. Even when a novelist is not attempting to sway the reader to a particular viewpoint, plotting a story to reach a certain ending can force the writer to ignore inconvenient facts, portray odd character behavior, or rely on twisted logic.

The Legacy (Bombardier Books, 2018)) is British political commentator Melanie Phillips’ first novel. In it, her protagonist, Russell Woolfe, a British Jewish TV producer, comes to see the flaws in his previous worldview. In particular, as a result a series of unexpected events, he revises his connection, or the lack thereof, to Judaism as well as alters his relationship with his daughter.

INTERVIEW WITH RALPH JOSIAH BARDSLEY ABOUT HIS NOVEL BROTHERS

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In Brothers published by Bold Strokes Books, protagonist Jamus back-burners his gay life to raise his infant brother after their parents die in a car wreck. Intrigued by the concept and by the book as I read it, I wanted to ask author Ralph Josiah Bardsley more about the lives of the very real characters he created.

Question: Main protagonist Jamus puts his limited gay romantic life in the closet to raise his toddler brother after their parents are killed. I might say he made a good decision, a responsible one, regarding raising his brother, but a wasteful one when he put being gay in the closet to do it. To what extent is he responding to his church-going South Boston Irish Catholicism?

On Launching a Book

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Most of us writers want to be published, but more than that, we want validation as a writer. If our book is accepted by an agent and then by a name-brand publisher, we achieve some validation unless the reviewers ring in with a different opinion.

The harsh truth is that agents are confronted by hundreds or thousands of queries a week. They may have a toothache or feel particularly jaded the morning yours arrives, or they might be looking for the latest trendy possibility, a quick sale, a young genius that will have a long life in their stable, or dozens of other reasons that have nothing to do with your book but result in refusal, nonetheless. Agents have been wrong many times—and publishers even more.

Plowing the Field: Something Like an Interview with Writer and Editor Garrison Somers

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Garrison Somers and I have been friends since we met as undergraduates at the College of Charleston (SC) nearly 40 years ago. He was/is a couple of years older than I and soon became a big brother to me in many matters, not the least of which was, and continues to be, literary. After graduation he returned to his childhood home of New Jersey (by the way, his mother was from my home state of SC) and is primarily responsible for my attending Rutgers for my Ph.D. In addition to a writer and (in what I know he will say is by far his most important role) an extraordinary father to two spectacular daughters, he is the editor of The Blotter, a journal like no other, which you can find at  http://www.blotterrag.com/

Ron Cooper: Garry, thanks for hanging out with me today.

Per Petterson, the Writer’s Writer

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10 JUNE 2018 Per Petterson, the Writer’s Writer

I’ve gone bonkers over Per Petterson’s writing. Born in Norway in 1952, Petterson was a librarian and a bookseller before he published his first work in 1987, a volume of short stories. His third novel, Out Stealing Horses, became an international best seller. Since then, he has published three other novels, which have established his reputation as one of Norway’s best fiction writers.

Document38 copyI’ve now read all of his books, and, as a writer, I’ve learned a great deal from him about technique, especially point of view and his use of time. I Refuse, Pettersen’s most recent novel, captures the main characters’ lifetime in a compressed space.

September 2006 reunites Tommy and Jim, devoted friends in their youth, after they’ve been separated for 35 years.

Thinking of Ireland and Edna O’Brien

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In May, as Ireland voted to end its ban on abortion, I thought back to the Ireland of my youth and to Edna O’Brien, the Irish-born novelist whose vivid and unself-conscious description of sexuality shocked her native land.

When I was twenty-one, I traveled from New York to Europe with a college friend. The last week of the trip was the most exciting and the most terrifying for her. We were to visit her extended family in Ireland and meet her boyfriend from home, who was on vacation with his family. She worried that the garda, the Irish police, would somehow find the birth control pills she’d hidden in her purse, or the hotel wardens would catch her and her boyfriend sharing a bed.

LIBRARIES IN MALLS? WHY NOT?

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Last January in the midst of a blizzard, my toddler grandson and I found the only safe space near Burlington, VT area: an indoor mall. Pushing his stroller through the corridors, zigzagging through clacking toys, overpriced kiddie togs, and alluring fast food, I remembered the many hours I’d spent walking mall floors with my own children. I actually think my older daughter’s first word may have been “mall.”Indoor shopping mall

And then, after exhausting the commericial clatter, we saw it: a library!

Three Bad Ways to Judge a Book, and Two Better Ones

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The recent demise of the Nobel Prize for Literature, whether it turns out to be temporary or permanent, may lead us to consider what criteria are taken into consideration for literary prizes, and indeed for judging works of literature at all.

A perusal of the list of winners of the Nobel from 1901 onwards makes it clear that the prize has often been awarded for political reasons—the clearest example is Winston Churchill’s winning it after the Second World War—and often for quasi-political reasons, such as the understandable and in itself laudable desire to recognise the work of writers working in lesser-known languages like Hungarian, Greek or Swedish. (Sweden has eight winners of the prize, perhaps unsurprisingly, which makes it the best represented country of all, proportionate to its population.) I am not suggesting that the Swedes have done worse than anyone else would have.

What I’m reading and why

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Does anyone care what someone else is reading? Possibly not, but other than serendipity, choices are usually meaningful and those meanings might prove informative. “So here goes nothing.”

  • Dennis Lehane, Coronado (2006). Lehane is one of my favorite contemporary authors. In addition to being best sellers and earning critical acclaim, his novels Mystic River and Shutter Island were made into excellent movies. Coronado consists of five novella length stories and a two-act play. In this thin volume, Lehane demonstrates why his stories are so compelling. The characters are those we don’t often meet, but yet link back to American culture and tell us something about ourselves.
  • Rick Ollerman, Hardboiled, Noir and Gold Medals (2017). An analysis of a particular subset of mystery novels from the 1950s through the 1990s, Hardboiled, Noir and Gold Medals consists of inside baseball.
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Little Town, Big Exposure: A Visit to the 9th Annual Gaithersburg Book Festival

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Bad Weather Doesn’t Stop Book Lovers

In the opening hours of the Ninth Annual Gaithersburg Book Festival, the skies were an ugly steel gray and the precipitation shifted across mist, sprinkle, drizzle, and steady rain — and still the book lovers came out in force. Sporting umbrellas and rain ponchos, they were ready to hear their favorite authors read from and discuss books at the different literary tents, browse the new and used bookstores and independent booksellers, get their books signed while chatting with those favorite authors, grab something tasty from the food vendors, and go back again for more.

Of the many book festivals that the Baltimore-Washington area now enjoys, Gaithersburg is my personal favorite. Though it often draws over twenty thousand attendees and attracts many nationally known authors, it still has a very intimate feeling.

MYSTERY GENRES HAVE MANY FACES

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In April I attended the 30th anniversary of Malice Domestic, an annual conference of mystery authors and fans held in Bethesda, MD. I’ve liked mysteries ever since I discovered Nancy Drew and realized there were books out there that dealt with hidden clues and buried treasure and lost diamonds and deadly secrets. Nancy Drew was always learning new things that played into the mystery to be solved. This planted the seed for lifelong learning in me. Mysteries also offer the adventure of exploring interesting jobs. Archaeologist, forensic anthropologist, B&B owner, apple farmer, bookstore owner, you name it, there’s a mystery series featuring someone in the job, often written by someone who held that job. When I’ve tried to give up reading mysteries for more “serious” literature, my life lost that special spark.

Interview With Author Frank E. Hopkins

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And the winner is… Abandoned Homes: Vietnam Revenge Murders by Frank E. Hopkins was recently named best book of the year in the mystery/thriller genre by the Maryland Writers’ Association.  It’s a tale of murder discovered thirty-five years after the crime, and the novel allows Hopkins to reach back to the Vietnam War era to explore the anger and division that tore America apart.  Frank, who is also the author of two other novels—Unplanned Choices and The Opportunity—was kind enough to talk with us about his work.

Frank, I’d like to start with a question I sometimes ask myself. You and I both started writing seriously – or at least started publishing – after we retired. Do you have any regrets that you didn’t begin much earlier?

AMAZON BOOKS IS COMING FOR YOU

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 The other day I passed the beginnings of a new Amazon Books in Bethesda Row, a place where Barnes & Noble recently shut down. I still remember the days when Barnes & Noble and Borders (remember Borders?) were blamed for shoving out the independent booksellers. Now Amazon has come for them.

The Ebony Tower

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‘The only writer in English who has the power, range, knowledge, and wisdom of Tolstoy or James’, according to John Gardner. Whether you agree or not, it’s hard to think of a more prodigiously talented, or more thought-provoking, contemporary fiction writer in English than John Fowles. Having just re-read (for the third time?) his collection of novellas, The Ebony Tower, and having found it masterful yet again, I thought I might say something about the title novella, which for me is the standout piece, and one of Fowles’ best works.

The action takes place in Brittany—a Celtic land, significantly in view of the fact that the novellas are all, in Fowles’ view, variations on a Celtic theme. A young, successful abstract painter, David Williams, goes to interview a much older, even more successful one, in his manor house, where he lives with two ‘nymphs’, young Englishwomen in their twenties, both artists of a kind.

How to Run a Successful Book Club

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Book clubs are popular places for book readers, but running a successful book club is not as easy is it may seem. Here are some tips for starting and running a club that meets the needs of its members.

1. Set a limit of no more than 12 people. Why? You want the group to remain small enough so that each member feels comfortable expressing his/her views. Big groups can become impersonal or be dominated by a few people.
2. Set a regular meeting schedule. Once a month should work in most cases.
3. Find non-public meeting places. A group I belong to met in the lounge area of a supermarket for a while. Sometimes it was so noisy we couldn’t hear each other.

INTERVIEW WITH DANIEL OLIVER, AUTHOR OF THE LONG ROAD

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Published by Black Rose Writing on 2/8/18 The Long Road follows a young man, sometimes in mental turmoil, as he doggedly prepares for his dream career in aerospace engineering.  I’m pleased to have first read this work in manuscript form and now to see it available for the world to read.

Question: What are a few of your all-time favorite novels, and what makes them so? Is there a type of fiction that you read most often?

Answer: My all-time favorite is Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. I gravitate toward stories that are realistic and that include characters who take a long time to overcome their problems but are victorious in the end.(Dickens wrote two separate endings, one of which has Pip “victorious.”) I admire these characters more than those in thrillers.

Interview With A.L. Kaplan, SciFI Author

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A. L. Kaplan’s debut novel, Star Touched, is about Tatiana, a young woman seeking to survive in a world devastated by a meteor eight years before. As a “star-touched” person with special powers, she flees the persecution of those like her and seeks refuge in a small town she once visited. It had been a haven before, but it is now oppressed by powerful thugs that rule and exploit the townspeople.

Kaplan’s stories and poems have been included in several anthologies and magazines, and her novel, Star Touched, was published last October. She is a board member of the Maryland Writers’ Association and its Howard County Chapter. She holds an MFA in sculpture from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and works as props manager for a local theater.

Let’s Talk: Some Dialogue Do’s and Don’ts

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13 APRIL 2018 Let’s Talk: Some Dialogue Do’s and Don’ts

Dialogue is notoriously difficult. You have to make each character distinctive. The speech needs to sound natural. Unlike you, characters can’t deliberate about word choice. Here are some tips that may help.

DON’T have characters speak grammatically correctly. Dialogue reveals much about your characters, and when they talk like scholars giving lectures, their speech sounds contrived. Even college professors don’t got to follow no rules when chatting with friends. Vary grammatical mistakes for distinctive voices. One character can’t use the right prepositions for save his life. Another get subject-verb agreement wrong. Even if characters speak proper English . . .

DO have them speak in sentence fragments. Ordinarily we take pride in well-crafted sentences, and perhaps a character, say an academic, needs to be erudite or pompous.