Today we welcome Michael R. French, author of Ghost with Two Hearts, on his third stop of his WOW! Women on Writing book tour. We also thank Michael for his guest post, "Helping or Hurting," about a young engineer's travels to Japan as he looks for a better life. Here's Michael: HELPING OR HURTING by Michael R. French, Author of Ghost with Two Hearts A young software engineer travels to Japan on a personal mission to return a ceremonial sword his grandfather stole from a Japanese captain in a World War II. Adrian knows little of the circumstances of the theft but believes returning the sword to its rightful heir is the morally correct thing. The good deed, he hopes, will also make him feel better about his own life, which is emotionally and spiritually unfulfilling. In Japan, he is soon immersed in a seductive culture that is a welcome escape from the West. Renting a house from a retired Shinto priest, he’s befriended by a female kami, a ghost named Emiko, … [Read more...]
Sport fishing with a feminist twist
I usually post a photo of my guest author's book first. But today I have to post the author's photo first - it is so amazing. Thank you, Sarah Stonich, for this great pose and for agreeing to visit while on your Wow! Women on Writing tour and write such an interesting post for Choices. Drumroll, Please! Here's Sarah Stonich! Sarah is the author of Fishing, the first installment in a trilogy filled with hilarity and heartbreak that approaches the essential question.....when should life be steered by the heart, not the rules? Here's what Sarah has to say about inviting authors to your book group. Invite a writer to your book group? Absolutely. Writing is a solitary business, so getting out to meet readers can be a treat for authors. In these days of social distancing I really miss physically attending book clubs and meeting readers. Thankfully, there’s Zoom, Skype and other platforms, so my schedule of bookclub visits hasn’t slowed down much. Now more that ever, it … [Read more...]
What it takes to write a book
Getting my first novel published just over a year ago is undoubtedly the thing I’m most grateful for. That it wasn’t hard to find a publisher for it and that I found a wonderful illustrator to do the cover art also were part of that mix. However, the work leading up to it was hard and long. I started writing the novel in 2010 at a UCLA four-day workshop called How to Write Your First Novel. I decided to take that class to get away from the frustrations of trying to get my memoir published. I was querying like mad but nothing was working, so a change in pace was necessary. I already had an idea – taken from the life story my aunt wrote not long before she died. She wrote about a young man – actually a teacher – who took her to school plays and concerts when she was a senior in high school. When her brother – actually my father – found out he wasn’t Jewish, he made his family move to Chicago from their small town in mid Illinois so that she could find a nice Jewish man to … [Read more...]
Linda Lee Kane is our Choices guest today
Linda Lee Kane, author of fantasies, thrillers, and contemporary fiction works, joins us today while on her WOW! Women on Writing virtual book tour to celebrate the re-release of The Black Madonna A Pope's Deadly Obsession. Before discussing her intriguing book, Linda shares about her life as a writer and some advice about how to publish our writing. Life as a Writer by Linda Lee Kane The same commitment you brought to writing your novel will be critical when facing the publishing world. For beginning writers, the publication can be a difficult path. The steps to publication involve finding an agent, working with an agent to sell your novel to a publisher, working with a publisher to prepare your book for launch, and marketing your book. This process can take years. Self-publishing is another option. You’ll cut out the agent and publisher, and produce and sell a book on your own. It may be a quicker route to publication, but it still requires a lot of work. In either case, … [Read more...]
My novel cover! Voila!
Here it is. What do you think? Cover art by Jen Jenkins Dohner … [Read more...]
Progress report
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about all the products I need to complete and get to my new publisher, Aberdeen Bay so my novel, Papa's Shoes can be published. And I'm definitely closing in on it. The list included the following: 1. Author photo 2. Author bio 3. Cover art 4. Reviews for back cover 5. Book synopsis (short and long version) 6. Dedication 7. Acknowledgement 8. Book cover and synopsis for your previously published books And as of today I've finished all but two - the cover art and all the reviews for the back cover. I've found several photos that I think could work for the cover but I don't know their source for getting permission to use them. To combat that problem I'm going to meet with an artist friend of mine and maybe she can reinvent one of these photos so I don't have to worry about getting permission at all. I'm very excited to work with her because I love her very creative and unique work. Here's one of the … [Read more...]
Yes, seventy is fabulous!
I’ve been seeing in the news that “seventy is the new fabulous.” For example this article in the Los Angeles Times on February 5, names so many over seventy women who are still with it and productive and in a word, fabulous. Nancy Pelosi, Glenn Close, Judi Dench, Betty Buckley, Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen, and Bette Midler to name a few. And we mustn’t leave out eighty-five-year-old Ruth Bader Ginsberg who is still on the Supreme Court bench even after recent cancer surgery. She is my all-time hero. That gets me to my success after the age of seventy. I had lunch with a cousin yesterday who congratulated me on writing a novel Papa's Shoes that will come out this spring by Aberdeen Bay publishers. Look what you did and at your age, she commented. Yes, that’s right. Though I don’t work a full-time job anymore I still work every day in my home office, beginning to market my novel and writing my new memoir (coincidentally about healthy aging), blog posts, poems, and … [Read more...]
My novel, Papa’s Shoes, has a publishing contract
I'm very excited to announce that I've signed a book publishing contract with Aberdeen Bay to publish my historical/romance/immigration story novel, Papa's Shoes. They've given me a lot things to provide to get it ready, including: 1. Author photo 2. Author bio 3. Cover art 4. Reviews for back cover 5. Book synopsis (short and long version) 6. Dedication 7. Acknowledgement 8. Book cover and synopsis for your previously published books And Aberdeen Bay's next steps are to do the design, layout, and production of the book so it is ready for publication this coming spring - April or May 2019. WOW! that's fast! I'm also pleased to say that Aberdeen Bay found my book just about ready to go. I guess it helped to revise, revise, revise and give it to a professional copy/line editor for a last editing shot. I'm forever indebted to my editor Pat Zylius - a very meticulous person. Here's a bit of information about Aberdeen Bay, taken from their … [Read more...]
David Myles Robinson has returned
I'm pleased to welcome David Myles Robinson back to Choices, while he's on his WOW! Women on Writing virtual book tour for his new book, Son of Saigon. I couldn't resist reading another one of his mystery thrillers after the great time I had reading The Pinochet Plot. See my post about that book and my review here. His latest book is called Son of Saigon, and it doesn't disappoint. Here's a brief synopsis: Hank and Norm were living the good life: two friends with plenty of money, homes in a lovely California retirement town, and no problems except for the boredom that felt almost fatal. Then Mai came into the picture, the love of Hank’s life during his CIA days in Saigon, desperately needing his help to save the son he’d never known he had. Boredom was over, as Hank and Norm hit the road, following the few clues Mai could give them in search of a man who desperately wants not to be found. What they find is a slew of lies and hidden truths, strange characters, improbable … [Read more...]
My thoughts about the film The Wife (spoiler alert!)
The new film, The Wife, with Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce, brought up a lot of memories of my writing career. Early on in her studies, Joan Castleman, the character Glenn Close plays in the film, was told she could get nowhere as a female author. It was the year 1958 – the same year I started college as a journalism major. Castleman, already recognized for her writing skills, says she couldn’t live without writing. I too was hell-bent on having a career in writing though I was discouraged as well. My father made it clear I should study to be a teacher – after all that’s what girls in my generation did – or skip college altogether and become a secretary. Of course, the Castleman character in the movie and I were on totally different paths in our writing. My forte was journalism; hers was fiction. I persisted and got a job right after graduating from college at a fashion trade magazine, which I quit after three weeks because my male boss verbally abused and harassed me. A … [Read more...]
What’s next to write?
Now that my novel is going through a final professional edit and hopefully getting ready to shop around. I’ve been thinking about what’s next for my writing life. For a long time, I’ve thought that there isn’t another book in me, but now I’m not so sure. Could I write another memoir? I’m at that stage in my life when I have almost all of it to look back on, so I could write a memoir from an old wise woman’s approach to turning eighty. I could write about the secrets of staying married to the same man for over forty-eight years and living in the same house for thirty-nine years. Really where have all those years gone? And really that brings up another big question – how much time do my husband and I have left anyway, and what are we doing to prepare for our last years? Or better yet, how we’re handling our lives right now as we age – at different paces. Yes, another memoir or even two are a real possibility. The options are endless: how we're still working at surviving the loss of … [Read more...]
What’s next in my writing life
Since I’ve finished – at least in my estimation– revision ten of my novel, it’s on hold. I want to hire a professional editor it go through it, but I haven’t made that happen yet. I’ve asked a young woman who worked with me on my memoir, but her life is so busy with children, she hasn’t given me a yes or no yet. I’ll wait another week or two and then go on to Plan B. In the meantime, I’ve gone back to writing small stones – I’ll post a couple that I’ve written this month below And I’m working on my poetry. I completed the April poem a day challenge put out by Robert Lee Brewer over at Writer’s Digest. I also write to his weekly Wednesday prompts. And this not usual for me – I’m editing some of my existing poems, getting them ready for submittal. (I’ve heard somewhere that if we haven’t received at least 100 rejections in a year, we haven’t submitted enough. That I’m editing poems is the unusual part for me. I usually write them, and then only with quick word or two changes … [Read more...]
I’ve become a revision fiend
I’m sure you’ve heard this before. But I need to tell it to you again. Book revision and editing will be harder and will take longer than the actual writing of your book. So be prepared to stay with it for the long haul before you start. In other words: Make the Decision to Do the Hard Work Before You Start to Write a Book. Here’s a true story. After I wrote the first draft of my memoir I hired an editor who helped me prepare it for submittal to interested agents and presses. This took about a year. Then once I had a book contract, my publisher requested an enormous amount of revisions to that draft. So I spent another six months revising and editing my manuscript with the help of three writing friends who checked my work for repetition, inconsistencies, chapter organization, wording, and typos. Afterward, the publisher’s editor worked another month doing a final review and edit before producing the first hardback edition. After my memoir’s release in May 2011 many readers … [Read more...]
Now, there’s a poem
If you've been here a time or two, you know I’ve always believed there is a poem out there everywhere. So many of my ideas for poems come from people I see and places I go that I’m really never at a loss for something to write about. I’m constantly saying, “Now, there’s a poem.” Still I like to work with prompts. I keep a list of them that I get from the Writer’s Digest’s poetry editor, Robert Lee Brewer and his Poetic Asides blog. He posts a prompt every Wednesday. Sometimes he’ll combine it with a request that we write in a specific poetry form, e.g., Haiku, Nonet, Luc Bat, Tanka, Ekphrastic, Quatern, Tritina. So I get a prompt, but a poetry lesson as well. Robert writes about things he knows and loves. The words are simple, homey, about his wife and children. I relate to that. He also conducts two poem-a-day challenges a year in April and November. I’ve participated for the last several years. At the end of the month he asks us to submit a chapbook of our best few poems … [Read more...]
Should we let a family member read our drafts?
When I finished revision nine of my novel, I decided to let my husband read it. He'd been asking for a long time, and I always held back from letting him. I had heard early on that asking family members especially such close ones and good friends to read our work could be a problem. It they hate the work they would be reluctant to tell the truth, and if they love it, they may have a subjective rather than objective point of view. Well, I decided to risk it anyway, and considering how hard he worked on reviewing, I'm not sorry. He saved a copy and renamed it with his initials and started going through it marking edits and/or typos in red font and inserting questions and comments along the way highlighted in yellow. He also created a separate timeline in a Word table. That is really his forte he's a numbers guy. And, he found a lot of inconsistencies in my dates (my novel is divided in three parts each starting with a date in story's history) and inconsistencies in the birth … [Read more...]
Traditional or self-publishing: that is the question
It's time to report back about the status of my novel. First of all, I'm happy to say I've completed revision nine. The purpose was to cut out unnecessary words and bring my word count more in keeping with the number agents and publishers suggest. After I added a lot of needed new material, as suggested by my critical assessment editor, my word count grew from 85,000 to 103, 052 words. So, my goal was to cut at least 5,000 of them. I'm happy to say I exceeded my goal, and cut 5,675 words. Hopefully I didn't cut anything that I'll have to put back later. My next job is to break up several long chapters into smaller ones. That is an easy fix. And now I feel I'm at a point to think about getting my book published. The question is, should I shop around for an agent or publisher or should I self-publish? That's a question I never thought I'd be asking. I've always said I didn't want to self-publish. I didn't self-publish my memoir, so why go that route with my … [Read more...]
