Amazon Widgets Added

Some Amazon widgets have been added to our blog. They wiggle. Maybe too much. We want to showcase the work of our guest instructors, but too much motion on a blog makes me dizzy. I may have to beg the web master to tone them down.

The website, I am told, is now going to feature the links to our guest instructors books. I encourage everyone to visit misque-writer.com and click through the books and purchase them! Seriously, if you have read any of Robin D. Owens or Jennifer Ashley's books before, you are missing a real treat. You owe it to yourself to take a peek!

How do people become writers?

How do you know you can become a writer? I'd like to share a few stories I've been reading in blogs lately. Barbara Bretton explains how she became an "accidental romance writer":

I wrote about my life. I wrote about make believe lives. I wrote the obligatory last-two-people-left-on-the-planet post-nuclear stories every Baby Boomer claimed as his or her own special territory. I published my first story in Katy Keene Comic Books when I was nine years old and that first taste of the writing life was addictive. I was definitely hooked. I wrote for comic books. I published Letters to the Editor in 'Teen Magazine and Ingenue. I won contests. I dreamed about a life where I'd see my name on the cover of a book but as I grew older I came to believe less and less in its probability. You needed to know somebody, I was told. The publishing world was a closed shop. You needed connections, a patron, or failing that a fascinating life.

Hey, I was a kid from Queens. I wouldn't have known fascinating if it bit me in the--well, you get the picture....
I began to poke around with writing a novel but a little roadblock called cancer brought me up short in January 1980. You want to know the truth? It might have been the best thing that ever happened to me. I learned one of those life lessons that usually take you forty or fifty years to fully understand: Life is short! Life is precious! Don't waste a second of it.

And I didn't. Two years later I sold my first book to Harlequin and my life changed forever. I sent in my manuscript on Thursday February 21, 1982 and four days later the telephone rang and I heard the amazing words, "We want to buy your book."

How I wish you could have seen me. I was standing by the kitchen door of our North Babylon house, the picture of cool sophistication, as I listened to Vivian Stephens explain the terms of the deal to me. You would have thought I'd sold a first book every single day of my life. Yes, I said. Sounds wonderful. Thank you so much for calling. I look forward to our association. That cool sophistication hung on until I hung up the phone, took a deep breath, then promptly threw up on my shoes.

I was thirty-one years old, unagented, unschooled, unfamiliar with anything to do with the business of publishing. To put it mildly, I was in shock. My husband was working in Manhattan at the time (and finishing up his degree at night) so it would be hours until I could break the news to him. This was too exciting to waste on a phone call. I wanted to see his face when I told him that my dream had finally come true -- and came with a $6000 advance!

He pulled into the driveway at midnight. I was waiting in the doorway, holding a bottle of champagne and two glasses. I didn't have to say a word. He knew right away and the look of joy and pride in his eyes warms me now, years later, long after the advance faded into memory.

A lot has happened to me in the years since that first sale. I've learned that this is a difficult and demanding business (it takes a tough writer to write a tender book) and that I am happiest when I am most ignorant. I've also learned that a good friend, a writer and pal who truly understands, is worth her weight in good reviews and royalty checks. I'm lucky enough to have three who know all there is to know and love me anyway.

I'm older now but strangely enough not any wiser. Writing is tougher than it used to be but the love I feel for the process (when it's going well, that is) is indescribable. I'm actually living my childhood dream. It simply doesn't get any better than that.

I guess the question is, do you have to wait for some disaster like cancer to strike before you pursue your dream?

How do people become writers? There are many different paths to publication, but of all the writers I know and have read about, they all have one thing in common. They love to write. Jennifer Ashley, who is going to be one of our guest instructors at Misque this summer, addressed this in her blog today, "http://www.jenniferonwriting.blogspot.com/."

When I start running around with my eyeballs rolling in mad circles, my friends and family tell me "Calm down, and for today, don't write."

Wait. What?

Don't write?

You might as well say "Don't eat." or "Don't breathe."

Because when it comes down to it, I'm a writer because I love to write.

I am a professional writer because I found a way to take doing what I love and turn it into a career. In other words, now I get paid to do what I enjoyed doing anyway.

It simply doesn't get any better than that.

Guest Instructors and New Website

We are thrilled to announce that two RITA winners will be our guest instructors at Misque this year! RITA is the highest award of the Romance genre. It's like the Nobel Prize for Romance.

Their bios and books will eventually be added to the "teachers" page of the new site. In the meantime, check out their websites. Each of these wonderful women also has a lot of experience giving advice to aspiring authors, so I know they are going to be a font of information and inspiration at Misque. Speaking as a rather novice author myself, I am looking forward to learning from them.

Robin D. Owens

Jennifer Ashley

We also have the draft of the new website up! It's a work in progress. Better than what we had before, but still with a few kinks to iron out.

SFWA Snafu

Never the US presidential race. Some folks are rather riled up about upcoming SFWA elections.

Look: SFWA is in the hole, people. Not just in a general sense, but to the people who SFWA needs if it wants to survive: New writers. How do we get out of the hole?

An amusing take on the matter can be found here, and here.

I don't know enough about the internal politics of the situation to have an intelligent opinion on the matter, and my unintelligent opinions don't matter. However, I know Charles Coleman Finley (author of The Prodigal Troll) in a distant way from OWW. Which is to say, he made extremely useful, and also rather nice, comments about some of my entries, so he must be a good guy. :P Seriously, he is a man with integrity, so lacking any other info, I would be inclined to trust his opinion.

I'm not a member of SFWA, and I fear that Scalzi is right. This debacle is just another in a series of issues which make me wonder if I would even want to be. That's sad.

Guy Writes Novel on His Cell Phone

Here's another great news story about a novelist who persevered even in the face of a one-inch screen.

Talk about some serious work, and forget shooting video and photos from your phone. This Italian guy wrote a 384-page science fiction novel on his mobile phone while commuting back and forth to work over 17 weeks. Robert Bernocco wrote it in short paragraphs on his Nokia 6630, using T9 of course, and saved them on the phone. Then he downloaded the text to his computer to proofread and edit. It’s just proof of what you can do when you use your time wisely. His book is called Compagni di Viaggo (or Fellow Travelers *how appropriate* in English), and is now self-published on Lulu.com.

If you have any questions, or think you would like to apply to the Misque Writer's Retreat, email the Misque coordinator at misque-writer@misque-writer.com

For scheduling information and specific submission guidelines, check out the website: http://misque-writer.com

And You Thought You Had Trouble Getting Published

Have you ever worried that you're too old to publish your first novel? That time and opportunity are slipping away from you, while snot-nosed twenty-somethings get six figure advances as much for their pretty faces as for their writing?

Well, I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Age doesn't matter to the page. And if you think you've had to go through hell to get published, just look at what Martha Blum had to endure before she was published.

Mrs. Blum was born in 1913 in Czernowitz, Austria (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine). With the defeat of Germany and Austria at the end of the First World War, the city became part of Romania and remained so while Mrs. Blum was growing up....

Mrs. Blum wanted to be a doctor, but her father pressured her to study pharmacy and sent her to be schooled in Prague and later Paris. It was while she was in university in 1935 that she married a young mathematician named Richard Blum, who was also from Czernowitz.

They would have only a few happy years together before the outbreak of the Second World War. By that time, the couple had returned to Czernowitz and, being Jewish, it wasn't long before they were rounded up by the Nazis and isolated in a ghetto. Life was miserable. Sanitation was poor and many people died of disease. Those not fit for work did not receive food coupons and were left to starve.

The Blums were luckier than most. As pharmacologists, their profession was considered an essential service and they were made to work as slaves, filling the prescriptions of German soldiers.

It was this work that kept them out of the concentration camps. Even so, Mrs. Blum couldn't tolerate life in the ghetto. She and her family shared a room with 17 other families. Fed up, she marched over to the SS officer in command and refused to work unless her family was allowed to return home to Czernowitz.

Although she won the concession, they still were not safe. One day, while out walking, her husband was picked up by soldiers and sent to a work camp.

In 1944, fighting between the Soviet Union and the Germans intensified around Czernowitz and she decided to move to Bucharest, the capital of Romania. She hid aboard a train, but not before sending her husband a message. She wrote a note in the margin of a newspaper. "I'll be waiting for you," it said.

The newspaper got passed from person to person until it finally reached him at the work camp. Not long after that, the work camp was ordered closed and the officer in charge was told to shoot all the inmates. Fortunately, the officer could not bring himself to do it. Instead, he opened the gates in the middle of the night and set the men free.

Months later, after travelling all the way on foot, her husband arrived in Bucharest. It was there that Mrs. Blum started life over. She opened her own pharmacy and later gave birth to the only child she would have, Irene.

After the war, Romania was absorbed into the Soviet sphere of Communist countries. Mrs. Blum, coming from an entrepreneurial family, opposed the values of communism. In 1950, her pharmacy was confiscated and her husband made some anti-Communist statements that placed the couple on a list of undesirables. At that point, they knew they must leave the country.

She and her family escaped to Israel, where she wrote in secret. "Mrs. Blum wrote all three of her books long-hand in bed. As a result, her duvet cover was stained with ink." She didn't publish her first novel until she was 86! "The novel went on to be a finalist for the Canadian Booksellers Association's Ex Libris Award but lost to Alistair Macleod's masterpiece, No Great Mischief."

It's never too late to launch your first novel. It's really not.


If you have any questions, or think you would like to apply to the Misque Writer's Retreat, email the Misque coordinator at misque-writer@misque-writer.com

For scheduling information and specific submission guidelines, check out the website: http://misque-writer.com

The Importance of a Deadline

While writing my Amazon review for Baty's book, No Plot, No Problem, I re-read the book again. (I first read it more than a year ago.) It was as funny as I remembered it, but I was also struck anew by the core wisdom of Nanowrimo. Maybe because it's the logic behind Misque.

"The biggest thing separating people from their artistic ambitions is not a lack of talent. It's the lack of a deadline. Give someone an enormous task, a supportive community, and a friendly-yet-firm due date, and miracles will happen." (p. 14)

He actually names three things here, but this is also why Misque works. Big Task. Community. Deadline.

The task you have at Misque is, in some sense, a sequel to the task of Nanowrimo. It is to edit and package your novel -- to take it from that rough, "this is crap" draft you forced yourself to finish to a polished jewel you'll be proud to send out. During Nanowrimo, you worry about quantity rather than quality. At Misque, it's time to look at quality rather than quantity.

Ok, the fact is, if you're a perfectionist like me, and like almost every other writer I know, your manuscript will never be as polished as you like. A part of your mind will always nag, But what if it's still crap? And since you're playing for keeps now -- preparing your novel to be sent to an agent, editor or perhaps for self-publication -- you have to make sure your novel is the best it can be.

Definitely a Big Task.

In fact, I've been told it's impossible to do in a week. Among my annoying habits is reading writers' blogs and inviting the authors of blogs I like to come to Misque. It's meant to be a compliment; I only invite people I think probably have a good chance of qualifying, not to mention who's books I'd like to read. But some people find it annoying to have a stranger write a comment on their blog, saying, "Hey, come to my writer's retreat!" (If you were one of those thus annoyed, please accept my heartfelt apology.) Some people are piqued because they can't afford Misque and assume I must be making a fortune from being the Misque coordinator. (I'm not -- most of the cost goes to paying the bill of the luxury resort and the yummy food.)

Oddly, some people object to the goal of the retreat itself. One writer wrote back to me, full of bluster and outrage, telling me that a draft could not be revised in one week!

True. It would be ludicrous to think you could revise your manuscript in an ordinary week -- a week where you also perform your job; spend time with your family; plan, shop for and cook meals; watch tv and surf the net; attend to a million other tasks and worries.

Fortunately, a week of Misque is not a week of ordinary time. Your meals are delivered to you; your day job is set aside for a while; you family may be with you in Hawaii or maybe not, but they understand you're busy for most of the day doing something else. You and your fellow authors concentrate on nothing else but writing for a week. They have the same big task as you. And a strange thing happens. The magic of many minds working together to achieve a big task in a limited amount of time unleashes powers of clarity and creativity you didn't know you posessed. Problems which held you up for months now dissolve in days. The perfect opening sentence flows from your fingertips! The twist at the end comes to you in a flash! You suddenly figure out what to do with that scene in Chapter 19 which just didn't make sense before!

I'll be honest. Sometimes, what you discover in that week is the gigantic hole in your plot, which no simple plot-band-aid can fix. It means a total reworking of the novel. Of course, it is heartbreaking to discover that your novel is no more ready to embark across the ether to an agent than the Titanic was to cross the ocean. But really, isn't it better to discover this weakness, now, while still at port, so to speak, than after you've set sail, hit the iceberg of rejection and lost all hands to icy, shark-infested waters? You might have gone years still trying to make a broken novel work, never knowing what's wrong. This way, you know in one week, and furthermore, you'll probably have a pretty good idea how to fix it. That's a huge difference.

There's also another phenomenon. Sometimes a writer is as blind to the strengths of a novel as to its weaknesses. You might come to Misque with a draft you think is pure dross, only to be told it's already gold. Maybe it doesn't need any more polishing, but in your perfectionism, you've never allowed yourself to see that. Admitting your novel is ready to send out means you have no more excuse not to send it out -- and risk rejection. The trick is, if you avoid rejection, you avoid success. The support of your fellow Misqueans can give you the confidence you need to make it past the first rejection letter -- and the second -- and the tenth -- and the fiftieth -- and the hundredth (and you know many a novel know regarded as classic has been rejected that many times!) if need be, to succeed.



If you have any questions, or think you would like to apply to the Misque Writer's Retreat, email the Misque coordinator at misque-writer@misque-writer.com

For scheduling information and specific submission guidelines, check out the website: http://misque-writer.com