Working Titlez

by Krissy Hawkins
Author Maralys Wills recently chatted with Gregory Kompes, the man responsible for “The Fabulist Flash, A Newsletter for Writers”, to partake in some Q&A. Read some of the author’s revelations below – from discovering one’s writing style to self-marketing tips and of course, the most important lesson for writers – perseverance.

When did you ‘know’ you were a writer?
Long before I sold my first article, (about our sons’ adventures in hang gliding), I saw myself as a writer. As I collected 129 rejection slips for poems, essays, stories, and first-hand accounts, I wondered how many rejection slips it would take to sell something. In my mind it was always “when,” never “if.” Still, writing for money altered my title. Now I was an author. Before, I’d been a mother with a typewriter.

How would you describe your style of writing?
Straightforward. Vivid. Full of scenes and vignettes. Often humorous. A story-teller’s quest for the unusual, the humorous, the dramatic, the ironic. But securely anchored in the real world.

What is your writing process?
Except for publicity chores (which are all too time-consuming), I write whenever I can find the time. Sometimes I push things away to “make” time. When I’m deeply involved in a project, I let ordinary “living” go by the board. Laundry, shopping, cooking—they all wait. I have no schedule. Every stolen hour in front of the computer becomes my “schedule.”

What was your path to publication?
No special path. At first I simply sent things out (129 things), until United Airlines Mainliner magazine “bit.” From then on, every published book was achieved a different way. I was agented for my first nine books, yet for five of them the sale would not have occurred except for something I did myself. Even with an agent, you have to be part of the process.

What is your favorite self-marketing idea?
Speeches. There is no second choice. I have searched high and low for something that works as well as giving speeches, but have yet to find it.

8. What are the biggest surprises you’ve encountered as a writer?
Read the whole interview here.

When it comes to audio books, the narrator can make or break the experience. So how to choose the right one? The author is always an ideal candidate – for who else knows the story or characters so intimately. When it comes to a memoir this rings even more true. But very few authors have the skill to narrate their own work. Author Betty Auchard is one of those rare few.
On a current trip to Las Vegas, Betty wasn’t in town to gamble or play, she was here to work. Putting in the hours at the Dog and Pony Studios recording the forthcoming audio edition of her book Dancing in My Nightgown: The Rhythms of Widowhood.
“It was very hard work,” recalls Auchard. “Recording required lots of concentration and breath-control, but I got the hang of it.” After three days, countless cups of hot tea and a dairy hiatus, the recording was complete.
Betty’s bright attitude, and the knowledgeable crew at Dog and Pony Studios, made all the hard work enjoyable. “They were such a wonderful crew – bright and funny, I truly enjoyed them.” said Auchard.
Betty summed up the week as “a terrific experience.” In fact, it went so well, she is contemplating a second career as a narrator!

Betty and crew

Reading Las Vegas to offer few frills but many thrills

By MAGGIE LILLIS
VIEW STAFF WRITER

Author Carolyn Schneider will be sharing memories of her Uncle Bing on April 28th.

 The month of April will make you laugh all the way to the library, if Reading Las Vegas: A Sure Bet organizers get their way.

The ninth annual adult reading incentive program will include authors known to spin a phrase while tickling the funny bone, program co-chairwoman Leah Ciminelli said.

The monthlong program also will include writing workshops, a murder mystery event and a book festival. Absent from this year’s festivities will be prizes, giveaways and the popular Reading Las Vegas tote bag due to budget cuts within the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District.

Jennifer Schember, adult services coordinator, said this year’s theme, For the Love of Reading, emphasizes getting back to the basics of reading, without the frills of prizes and other incentives.

Read entire article

By Stacey Fott

Stephens Press donates books to a variety of charities throughout the year. However our largest yearly donation in terms of books, advertising, and author involvement is Library Tree Lane which benefits the Friends of the Henderson Libraries. Stephens Press has been a partner since the event began in 2005. Held each December at the Paseo Verde Library, guests mix, mingle, bid on auction items and meet SP authors. Over the years, many authors from our own R-J family have participated, including Jorge Betancourt, Norm Clarke, Heidi Knapp Rinella, Geoff Schumacher, and Joan Whitley. We just learned that the 2009 event raised a total of $21,000. Funds will go towards the purchase of books for the early-reader collection of the Henderson Libraries. Thirty-five of the books purchased will have a special label recognizing Stephens Press, LLC. I have had the honor of working with the event committee for the past five years and it is really a wonderful event for a very worthwhile cause.

Author appearances and readings aren’t always the laid-back affairs they seem to be. Just as there is much anticipation felt by audience members, there is also pressure on the author’s part. These masters of the written word are expected to be as captivating in person as they are on the page.

To help ensure an enjoyable experience for all involved Chuck Thompson, author and bookstore-appearance veteran, recently shared with ShelfAwareness his tried and true “Six Rules for Better Readings.”

1. Don’t Read for More Than Five Minutes at a Time. Ever!

For the book I’m promoting now, To Hellholes and Back, I usually spend 10 minutes giving a little behind-the-scenes background on the book, then read two segments from different chapters. The first segment takes three minutes to read. The second takes four or five, depending on the audience member dragooned into service for Rule 2.

2. Get the Crowd Involved

Q&As are nice, but events are much more lively when you find creative ways of engaging the audience.

For Hellholes I’ve been doing a couple different bits. Often I recruit someone from the audience (there’s always an itchy extrovert at these things) to read a piece of dialogue with me from a section about haggling with street vendors in India. I have my ad hoc confederate take the part of wily merchant and read from a script with their lines in bold-face. I make sure they get the best lines–jokes often come off funnier when someone from the audience reads them for the first time.

I also occasionally ask for a die-hard soccer fanatic in the crowd to offer a rebuttal to a two-page screed in which I delicately point out that soccer is evil, stupid and anti-American, a corrosive influence on our nation’s vulnerable young. Soccer fans get extremely uppity when you criticize the lamest sport in the world, so this gambit also tends to yield superb emotional results.

3. Easy on the Visuals

More than 15 travel slides and it starts to look like you’re bragging, not edifying. Any PowerPoint feels like a business presentation.

4. Hand Out Gift Certificates

The first thing I do when I walk into a bookstore is buy two or three $20 gift certificates. This is a good way of conveying appreciation to the store for hosting me and a way to thank audience members brave enough to pretend to be sleazy merchants or debate soccer with me. Anyone who gets on stage with me gets a gift card.

When promoting a book called Smile When You’re Lying a couple years ago, I passed out index cards and had people write questions for me on the cards. I told them to be sure to include their names on the cards for a gift-certificate drawing at the end of the Q&A. This kept people around and interested until the end of the event.

5. Cut Off the Q&A Early

Don’t mistake a few questions for mass interest. Some blowhard or aspiring writer will always hang around asking questions until the lights are turned out. Most people get fidgety after 35 or 40 minutes. By that time, they expect to be getting their books signed and on their ways to the 20 other things they have to do before the night is out. If your mother never told you, I will: it’s always better to leave a party 30 minutes early than 30 minutes late.

6. Don’t Be Afraid to Say Something Stupid

Writers are expected to be smart, which can make getting in front of an audience intimidating. The typical writer reflex is to become overly thoughtful or cautious when speaking off the cuff. At readings, this makes them about as appealing as a damp sock.

I try to speak at readings the way I do with friends over drinks. Even if I wind up saying something dumb, audiences are generally forgiving, and it rarely makes them like my book less. If all that people wanted was what’s in the book, they’d just stay home and read, so I’ve never seen the point of giving them more of the same when they’ve come out to see me.

By following these rules I’ve managed to have, if not always good crowds, at least a good time at readings.

Read the full article here.
Excerpt from ShelfAwareness 2/10/10

by Krissy Hawkins
Each year, the Vegas Valley Book Festival (VVBF) presents its Crystal Book Mark Award to an individual who has significantly advanced the cause of literature in the Vegas Valley. This year Jim Frey, chairperson of Nevada Humanities, presented popular columnist and author, John L. Smith, with the award in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the advancement of literature in the Vegas Valley.

Smith carries the distinction of being a fourth-generation Nevadan, an award-winning columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the author of a dozen nonfiction books, including Sharks in the Desert and Bluegrass Days, Neon Nights, as well as a contributing author to Restless City, the serial novel project of the book festival.

This event marked the second annual presentation of the Crystal Book Mark Award. The first went to Kris Darnall, one of the originators of the Vegas Valley Book Festival and a colleague at Nevada Humanities. The rules dictate that the award cannot go to anyone currently on the planning or literary committee of the VVBF and that the recipient must have made a major contribution to the encouragement of reading in the community through service or through a body of work that enriches, clarifies, or encourages reading and writing in and about the Vegas Valley.

This year’s presentation took place at the Clark County Library at a panel led by Smith entitled “Amelia’s Long Journey: The Challenge of Writing What You Know.” In Amelia’s Long Journey (Stephens Press) Smith tells of the joys of becoming a parent and raising a beautiful little girl, and the terror of almost losing her. With the skill of a journalist and the heart of a father, Smith lovingly chronicles Amelia’s life: her early carefree years, the diagnosis of a cancerous brain tumor, the surgeries, the treatments, the remissions, the relapse, the recovery, as well as the courage, humor, and optimism she showed throughout.

Amelia’s Long Journey is not only a story about a brave girl’s fight against cancer, but a story about a precious little girl’s love for life. Proceeds of the book benefit Candlelighters Childhood Cancer Foundation, Make-A-Wish Foundation of Southern Nevada, Nevada Childhood Cancer Foundation, and St. Baldrick’s Foundation.

What happens when a parent’s perfectly normal day turns into every parent’s worst nightmare?

For the Smith family, life was good. John, most known to R-J readers as Nevada’s best-read newspaper columnist, and wife Tricia, were the parents of a beautiful little girl, Amelia, then eight-years-old.

That perfect and perfectly normal life was shattered with the terrifying diagnosis of a brain tumor. Little Amelia was whisked to specialists in Phoenix on an medical flight for life-saving emergency surgery. Then the worst-day-in-their-life got worse yet with the news the tumor was cancerous. The next days, months, years were dizzying rounds of doctors and hospitals, chemotherapy and radiation, recoveries and replapses.

As the Smith family went through this terrible ordeal, John pondered the old adage — write what you know. Should he write about Amelia’s health crisis? In the ensuing five years, John did write about his brave and stalwart daughter as she endured the relentless pain and suffering that comes with modern medical treatments for cancer.

AMELIA’S LONG JOURNEY will debut at the Vegas Valley Book Festival. John will present the keynote address, “The Challenge of Writing What You Know” this Saturday at the Flamingo branch of the Clark County Library. John and Amelia will sign books together.

Amelia’s favorite childhood cancer charities will benefit from sales of the book. They include:

• Candlelighters Childhood Cancer Foundation of Nevada
• Make-A-Wish Foundation
• Nevada Childhood Cancer Foundation
• St. Baldrick’s Foundation

The book acknowldeges the crucial supportive role these charities provide to the families of children with cancer.

When: Saturday, November 7, 7:00 PM
Where: Clark County Library Theater, 1401 E. Flamingo
Web: www.ameliaslongjourney.com

Writing is a solitary endeavor, and save for some tweaking by an editor, the storyline and characters are the author’s own. The author is in charge of what happens when, what each character does, says, and even looks like. So how did seven of the region’s best authors, all tremendously accomplished in their own right, deal with having to share?

John L. Smith said, “In school I often got into trouble for failing to work well with others, so I wasn’t optimistic that I could cooperate on a story with six  writers. Collaborating on a writing project was pretty new for me. But it was intriguing to participate in a collective creative writing project. And I think the story works.”

RESTLESS CITY will debut at this year’s Vegas Valley Book Festival. A signature project of the festival organizers, editor Geoff Schumacher invited seven of the area’s best-known authors to each write a sequential chapter in a yet-untitled book. The only provisions were it had to be set in Las Vegas, be fiction, and each chapter was limited to 3,000 to 4,000 words. Oh, and they’d have a short couple of weeks to write their chapter.

H. Lee Barnes. John Irsfeld, Brian Rouff, Leah Bailly, John L. Smith, Constance Ford and Vu Tran were game for this admittedly experimental project. Barnes set a high standard with the first chapter, and introduced his colleagues to a story we’ve come to label Vegas Noir. By the time John Irsfeld added his contribution, the title RESTLESS CITY was coined by editor Geoff Schumacher.

The concept of a serial novel was recently a bestseller in THE CHOPIN MANUSCRIPT by thriller-master Jeffery Deaver and a team of likewise bestselling mystery and suspense writers. I read THE CHOPIN MANUSCRIPT with great curiousity, wondering if I could sense the different voices from chapter to chapter. Yes, I could.

As I can in RESTLESS CITY. But not in a negative way. It is more of an undercurrent that something has shifted as the story moves on. Too, there was a greater anticipation as to where the story would go next as each new author took the reins.

According to author Brian Rouff, RESTLESS CITY required him to “step up my game”. Rouff said “Chapter three was a great opportunity because I got to delve into back story. John Irsfeld gave me a lot to work with. In turn, I finished my chapter with an old-fashioned cliffhanger for the next author. I hope the readers had as much fun as I did.”

THE CHOPIN MANUSCRIPT was such a success, that Deaver and his colleagues have produced THE COPPER BRACELET. Deaver was fascinted to “see how a group of authors with vastly varied writing styles and approaches to creativity produced such a cohesive thriller with a relentlessly fast-paced narrative”.

Vu Tran, the final chapter author said, “Writing the last chapter and trying to tie up everyone else’s plot and character threads was in turns a unique, infuriating, and fun experience. Complementing and resolving other people’s ideas was even more difficult than I thought it would be, but I ultimately found it very satisfying and educational.”

RESTLESS CITY is available at www.RestlessCity.com and will be available on Amazon and in local bookstores shortly. Both a print and eBook formats are being published. The book will debut at the Vegas Valley Book Festival with a reading by final author Vu Tran on Saturday, November 7 at 4:00 PM at the Historic Fifth Street School (on Fourth Street). Authors will be available to sign books.