Musings Of A New Southern Man

I got up at 5:20 a.m. yesterday, and I had to do it. I had an idea for a short story rattling around my creative center. It had been there for a few days, going from the germ of a story line to a full-blown tangle of problems. I spent the next three to four hours putting everything on paper. I will spend time today making little changes to strengthen wording and flow. This isn't anything surprising to anyone who works to be an author. This time my format was the short story. I often wake up in the middle of the night and have wording flowing through my mind. It could be a new section of a novel I am working on, or a revision of a section I worked on recently. It's part of an author's life. We live on our creativity after all. That creativity doesn't stop because the clock says it's time for sleep. Yesterday my focus was on a middle-aged woman in a small Colorado town. Later today I will go back to the sequel of the novel I am pitching to agents these days, and S...

I met author John Hart at a Pikes Peak Writers Conference, and I had a question I had to ask: What is the first thing an author needs to learn? His reply: "Have a thick skin." Hart knows how difficult it can be to get that first offer of representation from a literary agent. His first novel, King of Lies , was rejected numerous times, and this book ended up on the NY Times best sellers list once an agent and publishing house took him under their wings. I have a thick skin from my journalism days. A reporter or editor is harangued at times by readers or story subjects for certain things that are disagreeable to them. Well, readers are much more prone to being stinging with their criticism than story subjects, and journalists learn to live with that fact. I also have learned to have that thick skin in trying to sell my literary efforts. I have known rejection on numerous occasions. For every book you see on the shelves or an online list, there are tens of thousands of rejecte...