Category Archives: Uncategorized

On Writing “Just for Fun”

Leave a reply

On Writing “Just for Fun”

I was talking just the other day with a fellow who, upon hearing that I write, happily told me that he writes, too. “Great,” I said. “Where are you selling? Amazon.com? Amazon Kindle? Nook?”

“Oh, no. I do it just for fun.”

So, I asked him what he had written, and/or was writing. His answer? Six documentary books and working on his first novel. Yikes!!! Six books, all unpublished? Who does he think he is? J.D Salinger?

Maybe it’s just my own bias, but I can’t imagine writing six books of any kind and not publishing. Ever. Anything. Long before I published Spacebraid and Other Tales of a Dystopian Universe, I had tested the waters with articles for magazines, letters to the editors of newspapers, and lots of articles for organization newsletters. OK, I certainly received my share of rejection notices, some from the finest of publications, but I kept writing and submitting, eventually building up a nice portfolio of published work and, in the process, polishing my writing style. Was I, then, a great writer when I published Spacebraid…? Sadly, no, but I’m still proud of it and of the mostly positive reviews and feedback I received when it first appeared. And when I published Zendoscopy? A realy good review from Kirkus and lots of positive feedback, as well as better early sales.

There is, to be sure, both effort and expense associated with self-publication, but there is also great satisfaction that comes with seeing one’s hard work born into real life on the page, whether as hard copy or electronic text.

Six unpublished books? Jeez, guy! Get your work proofread and edited and get it into print. What are you waiting for?

Speech That Drives Me Crazy

Leave a reply

   The smiling young waiter was taking our order. “I’ll have the veggie burger with cheddar and mushrooms.”
  “Awesome!”
   What I want to say at this point is, “No, that’s not awesome. Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon is awesome. The Grand Canyon is awesome. And in a different way, the threat of nuclear war is awesome. A veggie burger, even with cheddar and mushrooms, is most definitely not awesome.” Instead, I grit my teeth and say nothing.
   We seem to be in an era when hyperbole has become king and when the original meanings of words are getting lost.
Then, other words are losing meaning entirely. A good example of this is “basically”, which seems to be used ever more frequently and with ever decreasing relevance to the subject at hand. It’s “basically this,” and “basically that,” and “basically I,” and on and on.
   Then, there’s just plain misuse. People say “literally” when they mean “figuratively”. “Mitigate” when they mean “militate”. (Yes, I’ve harped on the mitigate/militate confusion in a past posting.)
   There is a difference between dynamic evolution of language and simple unthinking and ignorant usage, and there’s little excuse for the stuff we’re increasingly hearing. Call me a curmudgeon, but I still find beauty in a well executed phrase and correct English usage. Moreover, I doubt sincerely that I’ll ever think of a veggie burger as awesome.

On Writing What You Know

Leave a reply

Traditional advice to new writers is to “write what you know”. This is sometimes much easier said than done. For instance, if you’re set on writing the Great American Novel, and if that novel is going to be about living with polar bears in barren arctic wastes, knowing nothing about polar bears or the arctic may prove somewhat of a hindrance.

In my own case, there are several things I know a lot about: medicine (I’m a retired physician), amateur radio (I’m a long time “ham” radio operator), radio controlled model airplanes, computers, playing the guitar… In other words, I know a lot about stuff that, perhaps other than medicine, doesn’t lend itself very well to writing the GAN. And medicine has, in a manner of speaking, been done to death in novels. Everything from Love Story to The Andromeda Strain. It’s hard to be original these days.

So, what’s the writer to do? Should the polar bear be a guitar player in a rock band? Probably not, but working what you know into your plot in some basic way can often be useful.

In my book, Zendoscopy, I tell the story of Sherman, a square peg sort of kid whose character is somewhat elaborated upon by showing his involvement in ham radio, something I know about. I also used ham radio in my story, Spacebraid, the anchor story in Spacebraid and Other Tales of a Dystopian Universe. Neither story is about ham radio, but using it as a device to illustrate character or upon which to hang a plot turn was very useful.

Overall, as a generalist by nature (some would say dilettante), I know a little about a lot more than a lot about a little, except in a few areas. Those few areas in which I do have pretty deep knowledge mostly (except for medicine) don’t lend themselves to anchoring a whole novel, but as a generalist, I find strength in writing about broader issues. Thus, the coming of age story in Zendoscopy, or the ecologic catastrophe in Spacebraid. In other words, I took my general world view and knowledge, hung the plot on it, and then spiced it up with the smaller specifics about which I know a lot and which would likely ring true to the reader.

Having said this, I would add that there’s nothing wrong with writing about just what you know, as long as you are targeting it for a similarly oriented audience. So, I’ve written about radio controlled aircraft for a modeling magazine targeted to people who fly radio controlled airplanes. And I’ve written about ham radio for publications aimed at amateur radio operators. But those pieces were not novels.

So, what’s the bottom line? It’s that if you’re writing a novel, after settling on your overall plot, there’s every reason to sprinkle it with what you know to add color and depth to your characterizations or unexpected twists in the story line. Of course, unless you’re writing fantasy, keep it believable. You may not get far if your gritty detective story has a scene with a polar bear playing “Light My Fire” on a ukulele in Maui.

Zendoscopy Featured at Book Soup!

Leave a reply

For those in the L.A. area, my collection of funny, sad, and outrageous stories, Zendoscopy, is now a featured “local authors” selection at Book Soup in West Hollywood, at 8818 Sunset Blvd. Here’s a link to the store and my book:

http://www.booksoup.com/Local-Authors

If you’re in West L.A., you can also find it in the UCLA BookZone in the Ackerman Student Union on campus.

And, of course, it’s available from many online booksellers, including Amazon.com, Amazon Kindle, Barnes and Noble, and others.

Book Review: Spelled, by Kate St. Clair

Leave a reply

Back in prehistoric times, when I was a kid, my parents wanted me to become an enthusiastic reader. Toward that end, they took the position that it didn’t really matter what I read, as long as I was reading. This led to my accumulating a large collection of comic books and checking out every science fiction novel I could find from the L.A. public library’s “bookmobile” that regularly visited my elementary school. (I can still remember the first sci-fi book I ever read: The Red Planet, by Robert A. Heinlein.) My parents’ approach worked, and I became an avid reader.

With this in mind, and after meeting writer Kate St. Clair at a local authors’ “meet and greet” at a nearby bookstore on California Bookstore Day (where I was also one of the participating authors), I decided to check out her young adult targeted novella, Spelled, published by Black Hill Press this past February.

In the course of her short book, St. Clair tells the story of the Sayers family through the voice of Georgia Sayers, the eldest of five siblings. We quickly learn that the children live with their stepfather, their mother being deceased and their biological father being someone whose critical role will become evident later in the story. As the tale progresses, we learn that Georgia and her sibs have an unusual and supernatural heritage that sets them apart from all but one other fellow student, a boy older than Georgia but one whom she begins to tutor in English. As Georgia, her three sisters, and her brother come to grips with their previously unknown family legacy, they face unexpected stresses and risks, and ultimately learn much about themselves that will finally bring them closer together than they have ever been in the past.

The book seems aimed at an audience of adolescent girls in roughly the 12 to 16 age range, and one can easily imagine it as the start of a series of stories about the family. It also contains precisely the kind of youth-oriented setup that could provide the seed for a series on “The CW”. By the time I had finished reading the book, it had occurred to me that it would be an excellent “stocking stuffer” for parents wanting to encourage their kids as readers.

In Spelled, Ms. St. Clair has nicely captured adolescent behavior, including especially some of Georgia’s uncertainties and angst over how to deal with life’s challenges and relate interpersonally with those around her. She tells a story that involves the supernatural while grounding it in real world decision making and the stresses that come with it.

My only criticism of the book is that I came across a few proofing glitches, but these were relatively minor and did not detract from the overall reading experience. In an age when books are no longer traditionally typeset but, rather, are uploaded from word processed files, proofreading can suffer. In this regard, Spelled isn’t unique, but the potential for inadvertent retention of typographic errors mandates special care before approving final galleys.

Recommended for the younger end of the YA audience

California Bookstore Day

Leave a reply

This Saturday, from 3 to 5 PM, in celebration of the first annual California Bookstore Day, I’ll be participating in a Local Authors’ Meet and Greet at the Mysterious Galaxy bookstore, located at 2810 Artesia Blvd. in Redondo Beach. There will be over 20 authors present, selling and signing books. I’ll have copies of both Zendoscopy and Spacebraid and Other Tales of a Dystopian Universe for sale so, if you’re anywhere near Mysterious Galaxy (2 blocks west of Hawthorne Blvd. on Artesia Blvd., near the South Bay Galleria, please stop in, at least to say hello. Should be a lot of fun.

Here’s a link with more information about the event and the bookstore:

http://www.mystgalaxy.com/Event/Local-Author-Meet-and-Greet-RB-050314

I hope to see you there.

cover_fronte-book front cover reduced (422x640)

What? Another blog?

2 January 2014

Welcome to Seductive Peach! I know what you’re thinking.

It’s just what the world needs –  another blog. And, worse, an eclectic blog with literary aspirations. Well, to be honest, I’ve been ambivalent, myself, about doing this for quite some time. But with publication of my second book, Zendoscopy, due in March, I thought I’d give it a whirl and see what happens.

To get things started, a bit of background about, er, me might be in order. In the late 1980s, I finished writing my first book, a novel entitled Panope’s Pride. With brutal honesty, I’ll admit that it wasn’t very good and, in truth, I wasn’t overly happy with it. Nevertheless, I had put a fair bit of sweat equity into its creation and so I did try to get it published. It didn’t happen, and the lesson I learned at the time was that I’d never get a big name publisher to take on my work if I didn’t have an agent pushing it, and I’d never get an agent because I had no track record of having my fiction previously published. It was the true embodiment of Catch-22. Stuck in a dead end with a not very well written novel and not knowing at that point what to do with it, yet unwilling to bear the pain of burning the manuscript in my living room fireplace, I stuffed it into a box and squirreled it away, out of sight and mind.

While working on Panope’s Pride, I was simultaneously tinkering with the sci-fi/horror/fantasy realm, and I wrote a story called “Spacebraid” about a group of people who time travel from the near future and environmental disaster to a better time, when the earth has healed. The story was briefly pulled out of the slush pile at a major Hollywood studio and considered for optioning as a film project. Ultimately and to my great disappointment, the studio decided to pass. Although disheartened, I really liked “Spacebraid” and so I went back and revised sections of it that, I thought, improved it considerably as a novella. Then, with seven other short stories, I made it the lead story in a collection called Spacebraid and Other Tales of a Dystopian Universe. Still unable to get an agent, I self-published it.

That was when I learned my second big lesson about publishing, namely, that getting one’s work into print is not the same as selling it. And marketing is both critical and expensive. I took ads and managed to sell a few copies, but my lack of a truly substantial budget for marketing resulted in distressingly few copies soaring out the door despite a couple of nice reviews in niche publications. The book is currently available in both hard and soft copy from Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble online, and from many other online sellers including Xlibris (the publisher), and it’s also available on Kindle. With no professional marketing campaign, though, sales continue to languish. (Shameless plea: If you like sci-fi/fantasy/horror stories, please buy a copy. Or two.)

Sometime ago, I pulled Panope’s Pride out of its hiding place and tapped some of its episodes for a new book. With much new material and revisions through some thirteen drafts, I’ve now completed my second “real” book, Zendoscopy, which is scheduled for publication in March of this year by Inkwater Press. The obvious question, of course, is how to market it. Which, finally, brings me to the proximate and driving reason for starting this blog.

At some point, it occurred to me that a writer’s blog might help not only me but others, as well, to gain a little name recognition. The purpose of the blog, then, is not only to promote my own writing but, periodically, to direct some attention to other writers’ works that might warrant broader attention. Finally, it’s my intention that the site will not shy from the publication of stimulating opinion pieces voicing a range of viewpoints, although I freely admit that the blog will manifest a decidedly liberal and secular editorial bias. And, for the record, flaming will have no place here. All opinion entries will be either fact-based or built on a foundation of solid reasoning and judgment.

So, whether you’re a writer or a reader, consider following The Seductive Peach as it develops over the next few months. And tell your friends. New postings will occur on a regular, if somewhat unpredictable basis. I’ll try to send up a flare on Facebook each time there’s a new entry. With some luck, the effort will be worthwhile for all of us.

And now, this entry’s featured annoyance: “Breaking news!”

Have you noticed that every news program seems to begin with someone announcing, “Breaking news!” Most of the time it’s some lame car chase, a traffic accident, or another murder in downtown wherever. It’s not “breaking”, and usually it shouldn’t even be news. In truth, most of the time it’s a waste of time, and after reporting whatever it is, the newscaster goes on to tell you repeatedly throughout the broadcast what he/she is going to report on “next” instead of actually reporting whatever it is. I watch these programs for the weather report, which is really stupid, since I live in southern California, where there is no weather.