An Intelligent Mess?

by Janis Patterson

Someone once said that a messy desk was the sign of superior intelligence. If that is indeed true, I must be sublimely smart. If the theorem extends to the entire house, I am indubitably a freaking genius.

The good housekeeping gene is said to skip generations, and I believe that. While my mother was a nacky-poo housekeeper who even dusted the ivy leaves and off whose floor you could eat if you were ever so inclined to do such a peculiar thing (a saying I have never really understood), her mother was a certifiable disaster. Given that she had a houseful of daughters to raise, a huge garden (which sometimes fed not only the extended family but some of the neighbors as well) to tend, canning and preserving to do, sewing to clothe the family and all the other duties of a poor farmer's wife, some can charitably believe that she would have done better with more time and energy and maybe some help. Nope. I don't believe it. She was like me, someone who regards housework as pretty much a waste of time, as it is unappreciated and gives no permanent reward, besides taking precious resources away from more pleasurable, lasting and permanent things.

Those things are, in my case, my books and doing things with my husband. (Never, in my wildest dreams, did I ever think that I would end up as the neater half of a couple. Neither did anyone else.) We don't have to deal with the preparations for or cleanup from a party, because there's no way we'll let anyone see the state of our house. We don't have to worry about overnight guests, because we don't have a guest room. Titularly our house has three bedrooms - but in name only! One is ours, the middle one was turned into the new library (we have three and are discussing another), with shelves on every wall and over every door and window, and the smallest morphed into my office.  (The Husband's office is the small room off the sunroom where the heating unit lived until we remodeled.) I would love to add a large room over the garage to house our tsunami of as-yet-unshelved books, but as that would cost approximately three times what the house cost to build originally, we've decided that we're at the wrong end of our lives to take on such an expense.

So what does this shameful confession have to do with writing? Not much, save that it is a constant source of wonderment to my friends (and utter astonishment to me!) that in the middle of such chaos I am meticulous and as nacky-poo as my mother ever was about my books. I know every character, every motivation, every red herring and misdirection, and very, very rarely put a foot wrong in my stories.

Some unwise persons have ventured reasons for this, such as writing can be done sitting down, which pampers my long-injured and toucheous back and surgery-facing foot, or - according to the braver/more foolish ones - I am bone-lazy. I don't see how they can say that anyone who has written five novels so far this year is lazy, but then I don't see the necessity for moving your refrigerator two or more times a year to wash under it either.

As with so many things in this sound-bite world, I think I found the answer to my situation on a refrigerator magnet. Mine is pillowed beige calico, surrounded by a beige eyelet ruffle, and on it is written in a delicate script, "Dull women have immaculate homes." It was given to me by my sister-by-choice, a wonderful woman who has known me (foibles and all) for over 40 years. Like me, she regards dullness as the eighth deadly sin, but if the refrigerator magnet is right, I don't have to worry.

BIRTHDAYS AND CHARACTER

by Janis Patterson

Today is August 23. It’s the birthday of two of the most important people in my life. Unfortunately we all live far apart, so our celebrations are now confined to postal, electronic and telephonic mediums, but we have the memories of more exuberant parties in the past. Happy Birthday, my dear ones.

Which – since I am first and foremost a writer all the way down to my bones – started me thinking about how birthdays affect character. It is a fact that everyone has a birthday. It’s a given of being a human being, along with the fact that someday everyone will die. However, everything else is different for every person, and it is those differences that give your character depth and personality.

Does the character even know his birthday? Did he have fantastic parties with mountains of presents, bounce houses and pony rides? A family dinner with a few presents and a homemade cake? Just a cupcake and a song? Or no celebration at all? Whatever the character had affects what he is presently and what he regards as normal, for good or bad.

No, you don’t have to put the history of his birthdays in your story, but that history affects the way he behaves, and you have to know it, just as you know his history of school and everything else in his prior life. Was he a straight A student or a sullen dropout? Did he date a lot, or not at all? Did he have an allowance or work for pocket money or did he have to work to support the family? All these affect what he (or she) is now.

I repeat, none of these facts have to appear in your story. The character doesn’t have to sit and remember on the page how Ella Sue turned him down when he asked her to senior prom, engendering in him a life-long hatred of blondes who wear glasses. On the other hand, he can – just remember it’s your story and you must write it the way that is best for that story. I’m just saying everything that happened to your character in all of his life before the story starts makes him the person that he is, and you must know it. Our past affects our present. Our past makes us what we are now, and that goes for fictional characters too.

Publicity – Boon, Bane or Just Dratted Distraction?

by Janis Patterson

Whether you self-publish or go with a traditional publisher, the burden of publicity falls on you. Yes, even with a traditional publisher you are responsible for getting your name out there – unless, that is, you are already a household name, in which case you needn’t read any further.

Publicity is one of the banes of a writer’s existence. At least it is for me. I’m gregarious in public. I have a lot of friends and I enjoy talking. Seems I would be a natural for doing publicity, doesn’t it?

Wrong. I was raised in an old-fashioned manner, where it was considered crude and vulgar to push oneself forward, which is just about what publicity amounts to. Plus, I love the ‘aloneness’ of writing. I love sitting in a room, playing with my computer as I invent populations and worlds and events. (Some call it a god-complex; I call it fun.)

Whatever one calls it, to me that is what writing is about. The publicity circus is something else. I don’t see where adding my voice to the cacophony of “Buy My Book!” out there is good for me, people in general or my book. A couple of announcements upon release or winning a prize I can tolerate, or a couple of discretely placed ads, but not this constant “Here’s an excerpt – you’re going to love it so much you’ll want to buy my book!”, even though there are loops devoted to nothing else. I cannot help but wonder how anyone has time to buy any of these books if they read all the excerpts posted.

On one of these excerpt loops there are two women (whose names I am not going to reveal) who post two or three excerpts every day. Every single day. They must be faster writers than I, because with doing so much publicity how do they have time to write or have any kind of a life?

We won’t even talk about the tsunami of free books out there, which have to be promoted just as much as a full-price one, let alone the problems and frustrations of getting a book out there for free. I’m not allowed to use that kind of language.

I had an interesting call from one of the minions in one of my publishers – yes, I’m a hybrid, and no, I’m not going to name names here, either – chiding me for not doing enough publicity for my books with them. If I would only push my books more, she said, like holding giveaways and engaging with my readers through social media and buying ads I would be selling so much more. Needless to say, this is a big publishing house – one with which I do not intend to publish again, for this and several other reasons.

I was polite to her (my mother raised me to always be polite) but basically told her I was waiting out my contract to get my rights back – if I can get them back. Big publishers are becoming notorious about not giving rights back at all through one dodge or another. She was horrified. Didn’t I want to sell books and make money?

Well, duh! Of course I want to sell books, but making money with them is problematic. On my self-published ebooks I make between $2-$4 dollars each sale. On the books through that big publishing company I make less than a dollar – and sometimes as little as six or seven cents, depending on how much of a ‘sale’ they’re having. If I’m going to go to the time and trouble of doing all that publicity stuff it’s going to be for the books where I make money instead of small change.

Somehow some of these publishing companies can’t get it through their collective heads that most writers write for money, not for the perceived glory of being published by them!

As for social media and interacting with my readers, it’s a time sink. I really don’t care about interacting with my readers. I’m sure there are some very nice people out there, and I might like them, but between my writing and my life I am very limited on time. Surely sensible readers who like my work would rather me be writing another book instead of being on-line comparing gardening techniques or swapping recipes or telling them how I write a book or whatever else we’re supposed to do to ‘engage’ our readers.

So what are we to do? Some writers can juggle all this and jobs and families and whatever else – my hat is off to them. I can’t, but that doesn’t make my books any less interesting. Some people hire assistants and publicity agents – I can’t afford to, at least not until my books start to sell better. It’s a vicious circle – you can’t afford not to get your name out there, but getting your name out there takes money and time, two things which far too many of us don’t have a lot of.

I ask again, what are we to do? I don’t know. I believe that writers should write and readers should read. I should not have to mortgage my time or my house to sell books. If anyone comes up with a workable solution, I wish they would share it.