Gretchen Jones

It’s your first day as a novelist, the day you put down that novel you’ve been reading and say to yourself “I can do better than that”.  You decide that you can fly.  So you step to the edge of the cliff and look over the edge, but the clouds below look so soft and fluffy that you forget about gravity.  You look above and see an eagle soaring overhead.  It’s close enough to see individual feathers flex and part where the thermals caress the trailing edge of the graceful predator’s wingspan.  By now you’re sure it is meant to be.  You are convinced that as soon as you step off the edge you will be lifted and soar along your words to some place high above mere mortals. 

You are convinced that this is the moment, the place where your life changes forever.  Slowly you lean forward nudging your toes toward the edge of the earth and prepare to lift yourself into the skies unfettered by ties to the soil beneath. You begin to gain momentum, that sense of falling you that will carry you into the stratosphere and you raise your face to the greet the sun.  One moment away one step into the chasm and you are away, off to meet your destiny.  

A hand from behind you grabs you by the collar and yanks you back from the edge.  A flutter of activity rattles around you as other authors chatter and rumble as they begin to strap you and clothe you and check to see all your catches are caught.  Someone tells you you’re so lucky to have been saved.  They turn you back to the edge and show you a space where the clouds have parted in the canyon below, revealing rocks, trees and hundreds of feet below an icy river hidden in the shadows.  ”See…See…” they say. You feel rescued and terrified all at the same time as you process the separate and conflicting instructions that pass in front of you like a parade.

Someone hands you a helmet, an axe and a book of survival skills.  They fill your pack with snacks, a thermos of coffee, maybe chocolate, a length of rope sufficient to hang yourself or lash yourself to a raft if things got desperate.   A tiny jar of commas goes into the duffle containing the tools of your trade, which magically appears at your side.  In one pocket is a gift certificate to an office supply store, another holds a map.  You are offered a hundred titles from Strunk and White, Sol Stein, and a chorus of published heavy weights touting “on writing”, “for dummies”, with themes of dialog, characterization and pace.  All the while the others beside you are gearing up for the same adventure. 

Now you can approach the precipice with the tools and knowledge to take that step.  Reach up, tighten your straps, check your watch for the time and place a finger into the wind to see which way it blows.  Once again you step to the edge, this time aware of all the pitfalls that may await you as you reach up to touch the sky.  Left and right, beside you are the others.  You look from expectant face to confident eyes and on three… 

That she was a beautiful baby there could be no doubt. After all, I was a beautiful infant they tell me, so it must be true. I take after her in so many ways, there is little doubt in my mind that she must have led the way in infant-astic beauty too.  Unfortunately, times were hard for this family of thirteen in Fargo North Dakota in the spring of 1925.  So her baby book is missing a few pages.  Ok, all of them.

There are two photographs of grandmother that stand out in my memories.  One is as a young girl near the time of her marriage.  Hair piled high on her head, beautiful clear skin and eyes.  As much a vision of loveliness as any Victorian young lady.  She may have been born slightly beyond Victoria’s reign, but clocks run slow in the Dakota’s and that’s the image that sticks.

In a later photo she was rounded and soft from almost twenty years of pregnancy. In the image the details of her face are worn away by time.  To muted shadows on the grainy film taken by an imprecisely focused lens.  

For me, my grandmother only exists in the monochrome image in my mind.  She’s an echo from my mother’s heart, but she must have once been real and warm.  Soft with laughing eyes and gentle words or matter of fact with features punctuated by dark circles and sallow skin and a carelessly careful way of handling an infant.  The way only a woman who had birthed twelve children knows how to do.  How many of those came in a sod house in the middle of the night I cannot say, though I know it was more than one.  

Eighty years later, my mother’s memories of her are well diluted.  Overlaid by stories others told her and the time blurred etchings of childish disbelief and grief.  In 1929 my grandmother died.  No one really knows the cause of death.  She was hospitalized and the story goes that she had a surgery followed by an infection that only antibiotics would have cured.  Unfortunately penicillin wouldn’t be widely available for fifteen years or more. So my four year old mother rode to the cemetery in the family pickup truck and saw her mother buried.  A memory infused with the cloying scent of gladiolas that to this day fail to elicit gladness for her.

I am known as a gadget girl I’ll give you that one.  But as much as an early adopter as I like to think myself, I have been sort of a curmudgeon about this whole social networking thing.  I did the thing.  You know the one, where you say I’ll never go on facebook.  I’m just not interested.  Well, then someone guilted me into it and now I’ve reconnected with a mass of people I thought I’d left behind.  Not intentionally you understand but left behind regardless.

So I finally got curious about this twitter thing.  It was different enough that I think if I hadn’t already acquiesced to facebook I might have missed the boat altogether.  I’m still not exactly sure how to use it but then I’m not at all sure that very many people do.  So I decided to dip my toe in the water.  To find out exactly what all the fuss is about. 

First of all I have to say it is a very egotistical thing to think that anyone is really that interested in whatever 140 character glop of insight I think I have to share.  (Ok, I admit the blog is pretty much the same thing.  You got me there.)

But it does seem to make a pretty good promotional medium.  Assuming of course you can find the people to follow that say interesting things, or convince people who you think may be interested in what you have to say, to follow you.  It’s a bit of a mind bender as well as a tongue twister.

So I signed up for an account.  Yes, one more in a string of accounts.  Last time I checked I had about 75,000 of them out there.  Sorry, that’s a rant for a different day.  So I signed up and began looking around for things that interested me. The trick for me was to do a search on terms that I was interested in.  Writing and writers, crime etc.  So now I follow Harlan Coban and the Boston PD.  Sweet.  

These important bits of information came across today:

VEHICLE v BUILDING: Andrew Square - A car has crashed into Dunkin Donuts, avoid the area. (from the Boston PD)  Ironic no?  The cops HAD to go to the donut shop.  I’m just saying…looks a little bit like a set up to me.

elmoreleonard Live at Border’s B’ham. Peter Leonard to Elmore: Any advice to budding writers? Elmore: Write.

and one after my own heart:

SmartBitchesHave wireless internet, yet am tempted away from 300+ messages by issue of Corn and Soybean Digest magazine. Edamame popularity = good.

Oh, those are the snarky bits I love to roll around on my tongue.

I have to admit I did secretly preen just a little bit when thirty minutes into my twitter account I was being followed.  And not by creepy old guys but by publishers and agents.  So what if I “followed” them first and they retaliated in the unlikely event that I would prove to be clever and witty on the tweet.  Still I felt a kinship to Sally Field at that moment.  

The thing I have enjoyed the most about twitter is the huge amount of interesting blogs I’ve come across because of tweets publicizing their existence.  Sites I would likely have missed without it.  Here are a few of my favorites:

http://nathanbransford.blogspot.com/ He has a pretty large following and an entertaining community.  Reading through the comments on his blog the other day made me wonder how much traffic twitter has generated for him.

Another one I found by following Allison Brennan is Murderati where she and some other authors blog.  http://www.murderati.com/  

http://bitchmagazine.org/post/you-read-harlequin-me-too

I can’t remember who I followed for this one but I’ve seen some interesting posts on Jane Friedman’s blog at Writers Digest http://blog.writersdigest.com/norules/  I subscribe to Writers Digest and never saw it.

And some people are just twits with wit.  DanKennedy_NYC for example.  He tweets funny things.

Lee Loflan and Daniel S. Baum are a few others that I latched onto early and have followed with interest.    So follow me on twitter?  You can if you want.  Gretchenjones is my code name.  But you’ll get more out of finding out who I follow than by following me alone.

In 1986 or so I bought my first pc.  A 386sx I believe from Northgate, on the monthly plan.  Northgate has long since gone the way of the albatross, and the 386 it sold me for that matter. 

Back in the early days of home computing we dialed up the internet determined to exchange bits and bytes with other stalwart interweb users.  We waited for hours and hours to download things like e-mail and bulletin board messages, at blazing speeds of 1200… 2400… wait for it…4800 baud.  I’m not sure I remember what a baud is anymore, my bachelors degree is in IT so that tells you how irrelevant they are now (or how bad my memory is, or how little I care).   I’ll add ‘baud’ to the above list of the expired and fading.

So today (my fifth day observing Twitter) I came across a post from Daniel S. Baum.  He pretty regularly amuses me with his tweets.  This one in particular caught my eye.  I approximate how to retweet it properly here. 

RT @danielsbaum The techno-fix to internet distraction to which I was directed is http://macfreedom.com/
I imagine there’s a PC solution as well

 

 
That took me to a website that touted:

Freedom is an application that disables networking on an Apple computer for up to eight hours at a time. Freedom will free you from the distractions of the internet, allowing you time to code, write, or create. At the end of your selected offline period, Freedom re-enables your network, restoring everything as normal.

This just about sent me into an apoplexy. 

Enter (CUE SOUND TRACK - CHOIR OF ANGELS VOICES) macfreedom.com who will disconnect you and force you to get some work done. 

Er…maybe.

Shoot, this ability to make you disconnect from the network is half the reason I quit PC’s and bought a Mac. 

TO OVERCOME INTERNET CONNECTIVITY ISSUES!

Just in case you’re wondering, I don’t live in a cave. I am aware of the chatter of my writer friends and acquaintences who bemoan their inability to keep the tempting distraction of the internet at bay. They mysteriously lack the ability to keep their mouse-burdened appendages away from their desktop browser’s start button.  More power to them if they avail themselves of this tool.   I too suffer from a browser addiction.  However, I think it unlikely I will ever give in to the extremely minor temptation to pay someone to enforce my parole to the state of incommunicado. 

Hmmm… macfreedom doesn’t disable solitaire now does it?

At retreat last month - geeze is it already last month?  I made a new writing goal to hit page 100 in Lone Survivor by the end of May.  Fortunately the MARA meeting is on the 30th this month so I’ve got an extra week to pull it off.  

I had a rough start.  A quick burst got me from page 58 to 68 where I stalled for several weeks.  It was a combination of not being able to see where to go next and general malaise.  Oh, and I had a tooth pulled in the middle of it, so that was a really good excuse.  Medical.  A medical excuse is always good.

But it was an excuse.  To not write and not mind not writing, makes me question whether I have the burning desire necessary in order to be a professional writer.  Everyone I know who is published (and many who are pre-published) sit down and write whether they feel like it or not.  It’s a discipline thing they say.  You have to commit yourself to the end game in order to make it work.  But then I have never in my life been like the other people I know.  I don’t react to pressure in the same way, I don’t respond to the same stimulation.

So, is it a character flaw that my word counts ebb and flow with my motivation?  I don’t think so.  After my experience with Maxine (my previous WIP now languishing under the bed) I wanted to do things differently.  I laid aside the self guilt for those days when I did not write and let my need and desire to write drive my output instead of the need to have something for critique group for the following week.  Once the pressure to perform was off I addressed my other problem, dishonesty.  I had been dishonest in my writing and I knew it.  It was time to come clean.   

For my new manuscript I threw away all the pratfalls and slapstick that I had relied on to get me from one scene to another. I decided to go serious and dark.  Once I did that, the plot came crawling to me on a monkey’s paw.  It felt almost too easy.

Several weeks later I hit my first major bump in the road. And as usual it was all resistance in my head. Instead of trying to fight my way through, I let the story sit for almost two months, until I came to terms with the direction I really wanted to go. Not the direction that my friends wanted me to go, or that my strangled sense of self preservation wanted me to go, but the way that felt natural.  The way that didn’t feel like fighting a bar brawl every time I turned on my computer.

I don’t know whether the story will be marketable when I’m done with it.  I vascillate between thinking my writing has great promise and that it can’t possibly be any good. But one thing I have determined is that I am unable to make the distinction.  I cannot possibly know whether another person will enjoy reading what I write.  I just have to do my best and assume there’s a reader out there with my name on him/her.

I have an idea that I could turn this story into a series if I make it through this first manuscript alive.  It has that potential and I’m writing it with that in mind.  But nothing is certain and I’m leaving the pressure to succeed to those who need that particular emotion to motivate them.  I’m not one of them.  I’m only just now learning to set goals and keep them.  Thank,s Carla, for laying down the line.  Now I’m trying to get serious about writing and I think it’s working for me.

When I said before that I threw away all the pratfalls and the slapstick, it wasn’t my first time abandoning that approach.  I have always used humor as a shield against the world.  My armor of gags and word play honed to an art form from years of dodging the darts and spears of others who would vote me off the island.   I vividly remember being the class clown at riding school and having the instructor stop and lecture me on taking my craft seriously.  I took it to heart and focused on technique.  And I never forgot that lesson.  Now I’m doing it all over again.   I will never be a great rider, my days as an equestrienne are long past, but perhaps with a lot of work and a sense of humor rather than a gag and a whoopie cushion, I may someday become a published writer.  And that would be greatness enough for me.

I’ve been trying not to write for a couple of weeks so last night I finally broke down and put some words on the page.  To celebrate this morning I let myself have a little fun on facebook.  Inspired by former co-taco (it’s a long story) Dave Williams. 

Since I hadn’t posted anything in awhile I decided this would be a fun distraction:

So here’s my fake album.

I did cheat and use the last five instead of the last four words. The picture and the title went so well together I couldn’t help myself.

Easter Sunday, as I wandered aimlessly around New York exploring, I happened along Madison Avenue just around the corner from Grand Central Station and our hotel.  It was a bit after 7am cool but sunny.  There is so much to absorb here in NYC. Everything from architecture, to the traffic, to the unending sea of humanity that seems to ebb and flow with the rhythm of the ever changing don’t walk signs.  I noticed a bronze (brass?) plate embedded in the sidewalk describing the street as Library Way.  It was a surprise that made me think of finding an easter egg when you thought all you’d find were acorns.  Nothing wrong with acorns, they’re perfectly fine nuts, but an Easter egg is not a naturally occurring entity, just as these plaques sprang from the concrete defying my expectations.  

Literary quotes of famous, infamous, and unknown authors.

First plate in the series

Quote from Kazin

Quote from Gu Cheng

Quote: Remarks are not literature

Dialog from Waiting for Godot

And finally something whimsical from the easter parade…

Cover for Invading Britain book

I’ve been threatening for two years to create a travel book from the blog we did when we went to Scotland and England in 2007.  Finally I got the right combination of software and hardware to pull it off.  Aperture 2 is the Apple application used to manage photographs on my Mac - it’s a step up from Iphoto.  The book template process was fairly easy with the exception of crashes that occurred frequently toward the end.  Mostly the crashes were around editing a single caption or “meta-data box” that was placed under a map of Alnwick that I inserted into the document.  I finally decided folks would just have to figure out that it was a photograph of a map and leave it to that.

 I have a really low powered Macbook so it may be related to lack of memory. 

After inserting photographs in photo frames and text in text boxes I finally figured out how to do columns and alignment of text in the text boxes and the result was really nice.  I used the PDF producing capabilities to generate a PDF file for the preview and finally when I was satisfied I couldn’t make it much better I clicked on the buy book button.  

The books arrived about two weeks later and were fabulous.  Afterwards I wished I’d used the large format template and purchased the hard bound books with the dust jackets but I would have had to start from scratch to do that.  I also wished I’d used a larger font and was a little more careful moving the text away from the center so that it wasn’t wedged into the binding quite so much.  But other than that I’m delighted with the result and am posting it here for your viewing pleasure.

You should be warned the file is about 83mb (HUGE) but it’s 86 pages and has over two hundred photographs in it so the size couldn’t be helped.  Click on the cover photograph above to download the PDF file.

Enjoy…

It’s the last day of February here in Sugar Creek and winter just couldn’t leave us without a last blast of the white.  So far we have about three to four inches of snow and it’s not done yet.  Yes, the snowplows have been trudging up and down our hill all morning and I think Steve has shoveled the walk twice already.  Our MARA meeting was cancelled and I’m debating the wisdom of heading out to Springhill for the Wii hula-hoop battle royale Meg challenged me to.   I’ll probably go but what I should be doing instead is curling up with a good book all comfy and warm in my cave.  

Last day of February (color photograph by the way)

Cozying up with a book would be particularly appropriate since I received my new Kindle2 this week.  I still have my original Kindle but somehow the glass in the cursor window broke a couple of months ago and though it still works,  I’ve been afraid it would quit  on me.  Besides I’m a gadget girl and can’t pass up a new gizmo.  The Kindle2 is definitely that.

As advertised Kindle2 is lighter, thinner and sexier than the previous version.  Here’s two of them side by side.

Kindle2 and Kindle

Kindle and Kindle2 side by side

You can see that they are approximately the same size from the front, but are a completely different user experience.  The new Kindle2 is considerably thinner than the old version. I didn’t notice a real difference in weight but the battery life is supposed to be much better on the new device.  

There are of course new features with the kindle2.  The one that has garnered the most attention recently is the text to speech reader that is built in to the new version.  The author community is up in arms about it because they see it as an infringement on audiobook rights.    Specifically the Authors Guild says: “What the guild is asserting is that authors have a right to a fair share of the value that audio adds to Kindle 2’s version of books.” - ROY BLOUNT Jr. President of the Authors Guild. (Quote from the NYT Opinion page - Feb 24, 2009 - see link).  

So one of the first things I did when I unpacked my new device (after plugging it in of course) was activate the Text to Speech feature.  I have a sample of it so you can see what all the fuss is about.

Kindle2 Speaks, Demo of Text to Speech feature from Gretchen Jones on Vimeo.

So now that you’ve had a chance to take a listen - you tell me - is this more audiobook or robotic recitation of words on page?

Next task is to identify what is the relative added value of the addition of this functionality?  Yes, it will allow me to continue “reading” the book in the car without risking life and limb.  Is it something that I would use instead of an audio book on a long car trip.  That’s unlikely I think.  It’s just not easy enough on the ears.  It’s not Stephen Hawkings reading me a bedtime story, but I’m not going to be having any fantasies about the “man” behind the voice that’s reciting it to me either.

Earlier in the week I participated in an e-mail thread that covered a lot of this debate and the thing I really fouled up on was not taking into account the true “value” of audio rights to the author.  Apparently this is quite the money-maker.  I wouldn’t know being unpublished, and you know that contract details are generally held close.  I would expect that the additional overhead associated with production costs, fees to talent etc. would make the margins tight.  Perhaps they’re priced high enough to absorb the extra costs and add a cushion of profit as well.  I really don’t know.

In fact I think that most of the books I read don’t have audiobook versions available on them.  I guess that says something about the genres I read.  No apologies.  

Even so, I don’t think you can argue that this is anything near the same experience as an audiobook.  In fact, I would argue that the audio would be a poor substitute for the printed word. This is an interesting advance in technology and it may very well push us to think about how we license and market publications, but I don’t think right now text-to-speech on the kindle2 is the “killer app” that some would like to believe.

Let me know what you think.

–UPDATE–
Apparently Amazon is crumbling under the pressure. They have decided to modify the feature so that publishers and authors can determine whether the kindle will read their book aloud or not. See link for details.  Amazon Backs Off Text-to-Speech Feature in Kindle