Musings Of A New Southern Man

I have to do this again because the song fits my writing life so well. I think almost every novelist feels the same way. Thank you, as always, Paul Simon.

I started talking about the need for a powerful query letter when I started this blog. I said I could not tell you exactly what a perfect query letter is. What can I tell you several months later? Same thing. Writing query letters is an inexact science. It becomes exact science only when you hit the right agent with the right words at the right time. Do you want evidence to show just how important that query letter is? It is the method by which most writers get to enter the kingdom of the publishing houses. It is a very exclusive kingdom, by the way. Forget the scores of books you see on the shelves of a Barnes and Noble or any other bookstore you enter. Those scores of books hide millions of queries that authors fastidiously crafted but ended up being kicked to the curb. What main things have I learned? Let's try these: Know your material. Be so in tune with what you have written that you can detail it and give a glimpse at the reasons you wrote it. That in turn casts ligh...

I have not been bad about writing lately. I have been absolutely terrible about blogging. So, here goes a quick update. I have stepped back from sending out queries about my second novel, at least for a couple of weeks. I saw two agents post items on Twitter or their blogs that changed my thinking. One agent, Evan Gregory, said the number of agents who actually work in August is usually down. It's a big vacation period, and even agents need vacations. Fancy that!!! Agent Kristin Nelson in Denver gave a short note in a recent blog about loving to tackle that big workload in the winter. Summer brings thoughts of good things to do -- other than dive through queries, read manuscripts, etc. Heck, I understand that. Give me swimming pools and barbecue grills over streams of unedited copy every day of the week. So, take those two agents' comments together and I made a decision to wait. My writing has been going great. I am tweaking former works here and there. I am...

I am among the Coloradans who woke up Friday morning and faced the news of the shootings at the Aurora theater. We sat there stunned as we heard radio reports, or saw the first videos, or scanned the Internet accounts on DenverPost.com and other venues. We ached. We wondered why. We hurt. We wondered why some more. We worried about those still in critical condition. We prayed for families who lost someone in the shootings. We prayed for ... what? ... a hand of guidance so things like this won't happen again, knowing fully that they will. Why does it take something like this to shake us awake? Why do we need multiple deaths to make us feel the heartbreak of loss? I don't want to sound like some morose thinker, but I have wondered about these questions. I put some of those into a small part of my first novel. My protagonist, Sean McNabb, is dogged by those questions. He says we see evidence of death every day, from obituaries to stories about murders, suicides and fatal accid...

I am on a roll with the third novel. Maybe it's because this writing process is kicking into gear, or I'm simply learning HOW to write better. Maybe those are the same thing. Anyway, I am having a blast right now. I just can't tell you much about it. Here's one thing: I have made a tweak on my story line. Remember my post about selecting Moonlight Beach in Encinitas as the setting for my first chapter? I decided to move farther down the road to Swami's Beach. There are reasons I can't go into here. I want to get back to that area for a visit soon. It is such a beautiful part of the country, and it's been too long since I've been there. Walking through a neighborhood on The Strand south of Coronado or serving as part of the crew for a yacht race on San Diego Bay are among some of my greatest memories ever. What I am reading: The Reversal by Michael Connolly. I love the fact he's a former journalist. I also love the fact he can write a crime/cour...

It took awhile for all the dust from the carnage of my job loss to quiet down. Now that it has, I have settled back into the routine I love, the one in which I spend several hours a day being an author. It is good to have a certain degree of normalcy in my life. No author will give details about what he or she is writing, but I will give a brief overview. I am a West Coast guy, so I focus my plot in familiar surroundings. There is not a single place I write about I have not visited or been exposed to by stories of people who have lived there. Part of that is because of one of the central tenets in my writing -- make the settings so familiar to readers that they can easily identify with them. I am a fan of Stephen Spielberg's early films, movies like "Duel" and "E.T.", because they take average folks in average surroundings and make them face amazing circumstances. The viewer then is taken along for the ride. I owe part of that tenet to writers such as Harlan...

I did it. The urge finally got too strong, and I had to do it. I sat down and wrote two chapters in my third novel!!!! Maybe that doesn't sound like much, but it's a pretty good achievement considering the rest of my schedule lately. Losing your job puts a considerable crimp in a normal writing routine. I have been feeling like a juggler who gets tossed a new task every day. Sending out queries for my second novel. Job applications. Questions about a new job at The Post. Sending out resumes. Using my reporter skills to get a good handle on what exactly happened at The Post in those maddening days when the company needed to collect severed heads in a basket and call them "voluntary resignations." It's not a pretty story in some instances ... but that's to be saved for another time. Why wait? Because I'm back to writing the stuff I love to write. I will forge on with another chapter or two today, then I will get back to continuing the outline for my stor...