Is it bad when I admit until Jaime tagged me in a note on Facebook I had forgotten all about National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)?  I’ve participated twice, but I don’t find it an enjoyable exercise. My family and friends say I become a nasty girl when I’m working on achieving that 50,000 mark.

Fall is my busiest time of the year. The kids go back to school, but my volunteer activities increase as a result. In addition, it’s usually the time I begin heavily promoting my book, Little Shepherd, on top of working with a variety of authors to promote their titles through Pump Up Your Book! Combine that with holiday preparations and you have a recipe for failure. While the realistic side of me says any word count I get out of participating is better than the zero words I had before, the driven, goal-minded side of me says, “You didn’t make it, ne-ner, ne-ner, ne-ner.”

Last year, as everyone geared up for NaNoWriMo, I wondered if I was a lazy writer. Everyone was talking about the projects they planned to work on, while I just sat there and said, “Sounds great. Good luck!” What was out there for a children’s writer who knew NaNoWriMo wasn’t her cup of tea?

A bit of research turned up Picture Book Idea Month. Picture Book Idea Month takes place in November, just like NaNoWriMo. It is run by children’s author Tara Lazar. Your goal is to come up with one new picture book idea for every day of November, so by the end of the month you have 30 new picture book ideas to work with. Picture Book Idea Month helped me set my goals for 2011. Out of the 30 ideas I came up with, I committed to working on at least 2 of them in 2011.

Then I heard about Picture Book Writing Week. Run by children’s author Paula Yoo, the first week of May you commit to writing one new picture book each day for seven days. You better believe I ran right over there and signed up.

The result?

I wrote six picture books. One is under consideration with an agent. One—which I might self-publish—is with an illustrator who is drawing up a storyboard. I pitched another one to an agent in October at a writers conference and she suggested ways to make the story better. I guess I’m not such a lazy writer after all.

My tiny piece of advice is to find what works best for you. Maybe it’s NaNoWriMo, maybe it’s not. The important thing is to set goals and work toward achieving them, so you can reap the rewards.

Cheryl Malandrinos is a freelance writer, children’s author and editor. Her first children’s book, Little Shepherd, was released in August 2010 by Guardian Angel Publishing. She is also a member of the SCBWI.

Cheryl is a Tour Coordinator for Pump Up Your Book, a book reviewer, and blogger. Ms. Malandrinos lives in Western Massachusetts with her husband and two children. She also has a son who is married.

Visit Cheryl at her newly redesigned website http://ccmalandrinos.com/ or visit the Little Shepherd book blog at http://littleshepherdchildrensbook.blogspot.com/. 

Writing is one of the greatest passions of my life. When I was eight years old, I wrote a two page short story describing the emotions that I experienced during my parents separation and divorce.  My third grade teacher read the piece and was moved to tears.  She drove to our home, read it to my mother, and insisted that she nurture my writing ability as much as possible. 

We didn’t have much money at the time, but my mother took what she had and purchased a set of World Book Encyclopedias.  Those books were the greatest gift anyone had ever given me.  They opened the world up to me.  I have been under the unending influence of the writing bug ever since.

Writing is one of the most difficult fields in the world.  Most writers never publish a single piece of literature with a major publishing house.  Most of our work never sees an audience wider than a few supportive eyes that love everything we write, even the schlock that we know is bad.

Writing is a force that grabs you by the soul and shakes you until you can’t see yourself living a single moment in this world without it.

So why pursue it?

Writers are the last of an ancient breed.  In ancient times, we created plays and other productions that entertained audiences before the creation of movies, the internet, and dvds. When a writer feels an emotion, we have the capacity to capture it, focus it onto paper, and whittle it down until it shines like new money.  At least on a good day we can do that.  Without writers, movies, magazines, books, the internet, and hundreds of other forms of information and entertainment would cease to exist.  From Shakespeare to Steinbeck, writers capture the spirit of life and preserve it for future generations.  A real writer recognizes the force of the gift that burns within his/her soul, and realizes that every breath drawn in life adds fuel to the fire of the pen.

All of us would love to become New York Times Bestsellers.  All of us would love to make millions, pen the next great movie, and receive all the fruits of success that come with the acclaim and prosperity of a successful writer.  That power and energy fuels the fire to a certain extent, but it is not the reason that all of us put pen to paper.

We pursue the craft because at the end of the day, when we put the kids to bed, the television goes quiet, and your loving mate says good night, we look forward to capturing the thoughts of the day on pen and page.  Ten pages done by midnight equals a good day. If you have experienced it, there is no feeling like it in the world.  To a writer, that is nirvana.

***

Dr. Mitchell Gibson is one of the world’s leading authorities on the interface of science and the frontiers of human consciousness. He is the best-selling author of Your Immortal Body of Light, Signs of Mental Illness, Signs of Psychic and Spiritual Ability, The Living Soul, Nine Insights For A Happy and Successful Life, and Ancient Teaching Stories.

He has delivered addresses to many of the world’s largest conferences related to science and consciousness. These include, The International Science and Consciousness Conference, The Sivananda Ashram Annual Symposium, International Institute of Integral Human Sciences, The SSGRR-IT Conference on Advances in Electronic Medicine in Italy, The Southeast Regional Unity Ministers Conference, The Northwest Astrological Association, The American Federation of Astrologers and many others.

Dr. Gibson has been a consultant for Fortune 500 companies, Hollywood celebrities, professional athletes, A&E Network, NBC, ABC, and CBS regional affiliate television stations, newspapers, radio stations.

www.tybro.com

Chamed is not the registry office name of the author, yet it is not a pseudonym. She lives in Tuscany, she works mostly abroad, as a painter on canvas and porcelain. Some of her porcelain works are displayed in exhibitions in Italy, Sweden and Poland, France, Portugal and Brazil. My Heart Stopped Beating is her first novel. A second novel by her is forthcoming.

***

You should trust yourself. Trust your talent and value because if there is talent and value, sooner or later it shows.

I advise to persevere and never give up, in spite of all. In spite of indifference, of the silences and the criticism, in spite of difficulties and obstacles to overcome. At the same time, you should cultivate humility and self-doubt. In writing you should be perfectly confident, but you should also be doubtful and sceptical when re-writing and revising your work.

You should also look for other people who could read your work before publication. Possibly not your friends, who might give you biased opinions.

Don’t be afraid to write. Don’t be afraid to rewrite either. And persevere without haste. When you get to look for an agent, think twice about your proposal. When you are going to print your query letter think twice and wait for another day and another night, rewrite, and do it again. The same with your manuscript. After your tenth rejection letter, you can rejoice and celebrate: so many great writers saw their manuscripts rejected so many times.

After you find a publisher, be ready to roll up your sleeves months in advance of the publication date.

But in the end, the best advice I can give you is to always remain yourself and cultivate your authenticity, integrity, idealism and humanity, so that you can express it and manifest it through words.

The book trailer of My Heart Stopped Beating can be viewed at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYhOBmDJkdU

The Facebook page of My Heart Stopped Beating:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/My-Heart-Stopped-Beating/231869093494435

Imagine working a second job scrubbing the floor of a filthy aircraft hangar.  It sounds daunting, but I’m not finished yet. Inside the hangar are thousands of people just like you. Your task is to clean the small area of floor under your shoes, and then get the attention of a handful of people way the hell on the other side of the hangar. Pretty damned frustrating already, but to top things off, you notice your shoes are covered in mud and pebbles and other crud. So then you clean them and redo the floor.

You cry out, “Look! I’m finished!”

A few heads turn in the crowd– but they aren’t the people you really want to take notice. Still, it’s nice to be appreciated. One of these jokers says, “Great job my man. I’ll give you nothing for it, but I’ll let everybody here know how well you did.” Then another says, “Hey, I’ll give you enough to buy a movie ticket. No popcorn though, buckaroo!”

You yell again at the sacred group of well dressed people in the distance. Squinting, you notice something peculiar. These people have no faces. You squint some more. Oh no, wait, it isn’t that they’re faceless after all; they merely have their backs turned. You shrug and sell your polished floor for a movie ticket. By the time you return to the hangar to start a new job, many more people amble about the hangar now.

You find a space again. Your shoes aren’t as dirty this time, so the process goes more quickly. Now you yell and several people recognize you. They pass it on to others. You begin a process of cleaning newer, larger areas of the floor, with more people glancing down at your work, some huffing and some humming with appreciation. You’ve even had a few paychecks now– nothing too big, not like its going to pay your rent or anything, but it’s something.

Now you tidy up a floor with only a couple strokes of a broom. Immediately, your network of clean spaces create a pathway to those distinguished New York type individuals at the far end.  You’re standing behind one now, you’re glancing down at your shoes (are they dirty again?), and you’re poking him in the shoulder. He’s deep into a conversation about money with the others. It sounds shallow and fascinating all at the same time. You poke others. They don’t turn around. Poke again. Nothing.

So it’s come to this. My advice, new writers, is to goose publishers as hard as possible. Do something to break them out of that discussion of money, if only for a moment. They might not address you at all, but someone might look over her shoulder to a beautiful clean floor and say, “Wow, who did all that?”

You’ll be standing there, grinning proudly.

Oh and when you do this, please let me how it all goes. I’m still pulling gum out of my shoe.

***
Benjamin Kane Ethridge is the Bram Stoker Award winning author of the novel Black & Orange. His official web presence is www.bkethridge.com and you can Facebook him here, www.facebook.com/benjamin.kane.ethridge and Tweet him here, www.twitter.com/#!/bkethridge. He’s also on Goodreads: www.goodreads.com/benjaminkaneethridge

I suppose giving advice to aspiring writers is subjective on my part. No one really knows what the next bestseller is going to be. Sometimes it’s just the right book at the right time. If it had come out ten years earlier would it have had the same success? So, it seems to me that holding up a wet finger to the wind will help aspiring writers. In other words look at what is going on in the world. What is the spirit of the age? What’s the prevailing philosophy out there? Where are the people at? Usually there is a flurry of books and movies in a certain genre because that’s what the folks are into.

I long for the return to the old-style western where everything was black and white, good guys wear white hats, bad guys black hats! Good and evil was identified. I can’t stand the uncertainty of today’s Postmodernism and Existentialism! People used to be asked what they thought. Now it’s all shifted to how you feel! That’s the kind of thing that’s going on today. Any insight into this will help you better understand your audience.

As well as having a handle on the signs of the times an aspiring writer needs to know his or her own limitations. In other words, start with and stick to what you know and what you’re good at. I love the way, e.g., Dan Brown comes up with all that brilliant stuff about anti-matter and what have you, or some of the elaborate detail you get in some of the historical novels, but could I be bothered doing all the research needed to write about these things? Therefore, if you stick to what you know you’ll still find yourself deeply immersed in research, but you will discover that you are researching the things you love! Then you’ll be rushing to write it all down and share what you’ve learned!

Read widely around your topic to see how others do it and get to ideas. If you find yourself not liking a writer’s work, then ask yourself why not, and then try avoid doing yourself what you don’t like in others. I think it’s best to develop your own style of writing rather than trying to emulate some successful author or other. That successful author is already married to their readership. Therefore, find your own spouse!

Becoming a writer is starting down the road to self-discovery. Therefore, it is good for you yourself to know who you are. Otherwise you’ll simply get lost under the piles of leaves from other writer’s books!

In summary and in conclusion, if you know where you yourself fit into current thinking, if you know the subjects you yourself love, if you know a lot of other writers’ material on the same subjects, and if you know yourself, then it seems to me that there is no apparent reason why your “masterpiece manuscript” may not be the next bestseller!

Next you’ll need to convince a publisher…

***

Neil Cullan McKinlay is the author of From Mason To Minister: Through the Lattice. Born to Scottish parents Neil came into the world in 1956 on the northern shore of Lake Ontario. When Neil was three his mother and father took the “high road” to the southern bank of Loch Lomond, Scotland where he grew up. With Scottish accent well-rehearsed he moved back to Canada just before his twenty-first birthday. Sick of shovelling snow he then migrated to sunny Australia some thirteen years later. Neil is married and has three married daughters. He is a Presbyterian minister and a part time Army Chaplain.

Please visit his “Snow On the Ben” website: http://web.mac.com/macfhionn/Site/HOME.html

Or his “Snow Off the Ben” Blog: http://snowofftheben.blogspot.com/

Ignore the people who say it’s too hard to get published! Forget about the people who tell which genera to write for! Don’t pay any attention except to that little voice inside you that says write, write, write!

Pour out your soul, your emotions, your knowledge, your guts! Let rivers of words flow across the screen, notes stuffed in pocket, bedside scribbling from your dreams. Babble into recorders, whisper ideas into your lover’s ear, sneeze vowels and consonants across pages of clean white paper, rearranging them later.

Grab the thesaurus and dictionary and hug it like your only child! Open them everywhere in the bathrooms, subways and roller coasters! Seek and find that one word that fits, but may not, but try it again!

Don’t listen to anything but the pounding of your heart, grab the ideas that try and slip away and jot, jot jot…..burger wrappers, windshield adverts and junk mail…all are golden sheets of your essence!

Then when it’s all done and neatly stacked in front of you…rip, rip, rip, attack with a red pencil, blue ink, highlighter, pricked blood finger, scissors, tape, delete, restore, delete and restore again. restore, delete, restore delete, thesaurus, dictionary, cut paste boom!

Sleep, quietly, let it rest, slumber, willow trees, swans, then to a friend, a good one,

Sucks, stinks, it’s okay great fantastic a true friend will tell you.

Shelf or rewrite?

***

Science teacher Tom McLaughlin battled a rare neurological disease to a stand still, packed up his life and moved to Malaysian Borneo from a Washington D.C. suburb.

Landing in Kuching, he quickly learned the Malay language and involved himself in projects which includes orangutan rehabilitation and research about the famed naturalist, Alfred Wallace, whose thunder was stolen by Charles Darwin.

The advent of cheap air travel to many destinations in Southeast Asia transported him to many adventures. From dancing naked in an earthquake in Sumatra, to getting lost in a warren of World War II Japanese caves to walking the rim of a volcano with poisonous gas, he has jumped with foolhardiness into everything wild and wonderful, all related in his book Borneo Tom.

Reuniting with his Peace Corps family of thirty five years ago, sharing adventures with one daughter, then reconciling with another after a divorce, marriage with full kampung ceremony and then taking both daughters on his honeymoon to Bali are a few of the highlights of his remarkable personal life. Oh, but we can’t forget? His vasectomy coupled with a wife diagnosed as barren has reproduced a son, Dzul Patrick, now a few months old.

Tom teaches at the Lodge International School in Kuching, Malaysian Borneo while writing about his adventures as a US expat living in Borneo.

You can find him at:

BorneoTom.com
On Twitter
On Facebook
On Kindle!

The Story Behind The Bone Trail

Last fall, while reviewing my lead list for my online equestrian magazine, I came across a highly unusual blog entry by a colleague of mine. In the blog he told a story of a wild horse preservation advocate who made a startling discovery while investigating a secretive wild horse roundup (gather) conducted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at the Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge, located in an extremely isolated area in northern Nevada. During the course of her investigation she stumbled onto something completely unexpected and disturbing. In a pursuant court document she made the following statement:

“…I headed toward the refuge station office …to see if I could find someone with information on this Sheldon gather. There was no one at the office. So I continued down the road to find a place to take my dog …for a walk. <> I began noticing numerous bones, particularly horse bones on the ground. As I looked farther, horse bones became more numerous. I followed this trail of horse bones which led me to even more bones and to a denser distribution of horse skeletal remains. I then found a large pit dug into the ground. It was freshly dug….There were horse bones scattered everywhere.”

Several other disturbing incidents happened to this woman after this discovery; she was harassed and pursued by a helicopter (federal government contractor). She was also told she had to stop taking pictures of the activities surrounding the gather by USFWS Security personnel, even though she was on public land.

Things you would never think would happen in this country. I had so much admiration for this woman, alone, out in such an isolated area, but determined in her efforts to find the truth.

Within a couple of weeks, again, while looking through my lead list, I ran across another news story about a legal battle in Federal Court between the Western Shoshone Indian Tribe and Barrick Gold, the largest gold mining company in the world. The Shoshone had petitioned the court for an injunction to stop Barrick Gold’s plan to begin excavation of a 2000 foot deep open pit mine on Mt. Tenabo, also in Nevada, which is a sacred to the Western Shoshone people. What struck me was that in 2009 while the injunction was granted by the court, and Barrick Gold was back at work, digging up Mt. Tenabo, the next day.

As I pondered these two divergent issues, I began to see a connection.

The wild horses are in the way of ‘progress.’ The Native traditions are in the way of ‘progress.’ Wild horses being wiped out by the U.S. Government – Native Americans losing more and more of their land and heritage.

And, the plot to The Bone Trail was born.

***

Nell Walton is an avid horsewoman and also owns two wild horses, both of which came from a herd near Elko, NV. She is also the founder and managing editor of the online equestrian news magazine, The AllHorses Post (www.allpetspost.org/allhorsespost). She has degrees in journalism and biology from the University of Arkansas, spent many years as a professional journalist and worked as an intern for former President Bill Clinton when he was governor of Arkansas. She lives in East Tennessee on a small horse farm with her husband, four horses, one donkey, two cats and two dogs. The Bone Trail is her first novel.

www.allpetspost.org/AllHorsesPost
www.allpetspost.org/TheBoneTrail
Twitter: nellwal
Facebook: AllHorses Post (user name)
http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Bone-Trail/177304412309524

I am a boring writer. I wish I could tell you something fancy about how I write but I am an old-fashioned writing from an outline kind of gal. It keeps me organized. When I start to write a story I have the story mostly finished in my head. I know all the main points and how they will unfold. I then take that information and put it in an outline format and this process helps me keep my thoughts organized and more often than not gives me many other secondary ideas to put in my book. I spend quite a bit of time on the outline but the first pass is all about scenes for me. Not details. So once I have the outline done I begin the writing process starting at the beginning and work my way to the end without stopping and going back. I know I can always fix things later and I want to get as much done as I can without trying too hard.

My goal is to write between 3000-5000 per chapter I have outlined. This forces me sometimes to write what I sometimes feel is a bunch of yuck and I do sometimes delete a lot of it on the next pass but what it does for me is add to the word count and that motivates me. Once I have go to the end and I have 50,000 words I feel like I have accomplished so much it makes it much easier to go back and start the much more difficult process of cleaning the mess I just wrote up.

Like I mentioned the hard work starts on the second pass. That is when I need to make sure that is makes sense. That I didn’t kill someone in chapter 3 who then shows up in chapter 7 (yes that happened). I also start adding details about the setting and characters. AS I add these details I keep a log of the details and what chapter they are located in so I can quickly refer back to them later on. I used to think I would remember I mean I wrote it I should, shouldn’t I? Trust me it doesn’t work that way. At least for me.

When I get frustrated or get writers block I make myself trust the process. I know it has worked in the past so I know it will work now. I just need to let it.

***

Laina Turner-Molaski is a businesswoman, mom, author, Professor, and a major supporter of shopping. She has an undying love for shoes and coffee, which is why she created her main character and alter-ego Presley Thurman.

With a lot of letters after her name and a ton of student loan debt, she is always working to pay the bills. While she enjoys her day job, her passion is writing, and she uses a lot of company time writing her fiction or working on her social website for women, Chiczofrenic.com. She is hoping to sell her book before she gets fired from her day job for goofing off.

Laina is currently living in Indiana, with her family, and is always writing something, whether it’s blogs, articles, business journals and books or ideas for her next novel. She is continuously doing what she loves which is writing or drinking coffee.

www.lainaturner.com

Okay, so your last project didn’t make the best seller list.  You had such hopes, those of a parent hoping for your child’s gold medal.  You are absolutely certain that you can produce an Olympic decathlete, so you keep getting pregnant and with each new issue you get a ballet dancer, a poet, a quite brilliant painter and a beautifully built, but completely uncoordinated brick layer.  You love them all, but none of them got you to the Olympic Village.  Still… the next one pops out with the same fervent hope for that gold medal.  And, yes, that’s part of what keeps us in front of our computers, but it’s certainly not all.

There are breakthroughs, and breakthroughs.   How about the one where you learn something from one of your characters?  There have been many times when developing characters, that I have learned something about myself through my characters’ relationships.  Why did I have her divorce him?  Why did he throw that brick down the street?  Each answer lies somewhere within and each exploration of those answers sheds a little more light the enigma that is me.

Even plotting itself can lead to a personal breakthrough.  I’m sure that much of my story telling is like a dream: an attempt to unravel the world and put it back so that it makes sense.

How about a breakthrough that you might have experienced when you were researching some small aspect of a piece and you discovered something that changed the way you thought about politics or religion?  I had been inquiring about Hassidic dress, but asked the rabbi how he reconciled Genesis and evolution since he said he believed in both.  He explained that, in his view, God had created everything in seven days and that in the perfection of His design, he built evolution into what he created.  “He did not create an infant.  He created man in his entirety which included his past.”  I’ll never view Genesis and evolution as irreconcilable again.

***

Before Jeanne C. Davis seriously entertained writing a novel, she wrote for radio and television including staff jobs on DR. QUINN, MEDICINE WOMAN and the modern prequel to the BONANZA series, THE PONDEROSA. Between the numerous drafts of SHEETROCK ANGEL, she wrote, produced and directed the independent feature THE UNIFORM MOTION OF FOLLY. Her early career had little to do with writing – other than in her journal – and everything to do with living. She was a Pan Am purser.

As with most authors, she has stolen a couple of incidents directly from her own life, but SHEETROCK ANGEL is not autobiographical. She did marry actor Ben Murphy, but he is not to be confused with the actor character in the book. Ben and she remain dear friends.

She is currently working on a novel based on her experiences with Pan Am while in preproduction on another independent feature with niece, Morgan Davis, called LIP SERVICE. She is also continuing work on a documentary about her family with editor Charlene Huston. Her great-grandfather brought one of the first carousels to California and merry-go-rounds were a family business until her father retired in the 1980s.

You can visit Jeanne’s website at Bricolage-Arts.com or you can go directly to Sheetrockangel.com

Sheetrock Angel is available at Amazon.com in paperback and through Kindle.