Taming the Online Marketing Animal by Robert W. Walker

Online marketing is an entirely different animal than “real world” marketing. Doing blogs, blog tours, some his and her blog tours with my writer wife, Miranda, and am ever online at all the “usual” places building relationships. And even online, you are seldom successful in selling your book so much as selling a laugh or a philosophical point you wish to make, and engaging in give and take, so in effect you’re selling your self—or rather getting folks to care about you or your point of view or that of your dog, Pongo, in the photo with me, or that photo of me with Will Smith or Captain Jack Sparrow—even if they are cardboard cutouts…. Sad truth is that Pongo sells far more books than I ever could. However, if people like you and what you have to say, they eventually will go find a copy of your book.

Recently, a dear friend I met online named Ann Charles said this to me: “There are some questions I’d love to hear the answer to if we were kicking back at the bar at a writers’ conference and these are: What do you mean that you don’t sell your book so much as sell yourself? I thought that after you have an actual book to promote—something besides just air and a name (which is what I have to try to promote)—that you could focus on selling that book and not worry so much about selling yourself.”

The book jobbers who sell to the bookstores say it best; if they like me, they will buy my stock. If students like and respect their teacher, they will buy what the teacher is selling. Online be as likeable as you can be; use humor, exaggeration, have fun with it and know it takes time to create online relationships.

“But what precisely are you doing to sell yourself online? Are you just trying to be entertaining with fun stories to get the blog readers to like you? Are you throwing cover quotes and details about your books at them? Are you telling how you came up with the idea and talking about what you are currently working on? And what is the impression about Rob W. Walker that you are hoping/trying to leave in your wake online?”

Excellent questions. Short answer is YES to all of the above. Spread it around, have cover art and photos do double and triple duty. Blog on humorous events in your life, childhood moments, any behind the book stories you can safely share. Mix it up and do not always post about your books. Let signature lines do that for you. Give advice, give help, give of yourself and be gracious with your knowledge and humor. Lots of humor. Leave ‘em laughing. Spend time answering the tweets and facebook comments of others. It requires time and commitment but what relationship doesn’t?

Below is a list of exciting links that all writers should be aware of and visit often, so I will slip it across the bar to you.

A Newbie’s Guide To Publishing/ JA Konrath: http://jakonrath.blogspot.com A free download 250,000 words worth of tips, hints, tricks, and advice. Over 750 pages long. And it's free

Book Promotion
http://www.authorsden.com/
http://crimespace.ning.com/
http://www.redroom.com/
http://www.publicityhound.com/
http://www.burryman.com/
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/internet_marketing_for_novel_writers.php
http://www.bauuinstitute.com/Marketing/PressRelease1.html
http://www.author-promotion.com/promotionalresources.html
htp://Facebook.com

Happy Writing and Marketing!
Rob Walker
http://www.robertwalkerbooks.com/

OMG Technology is Making Writing Fools of Us All By Robert W. Walker

We finally manipulate our character into the deep morass that could be her demise…ratchet up the senses, the sound effects, the atmosphere, the creepiness when suddenly she fumbles for but of course drops the cell phone she’s reached for so as to call for backup or help or hubby. Sometimes the darndest things happen at the most inconvenient of moments in the story—just like real life sometimes. There have been grumblings among readers about characters misuse of this, that, or the other gizmo in mysteries of late. Mysteries have always incorporated the latest in technology and sometimes even employ science fiction when the story calls for a device not yet invented but needed to move the story along. Does it make sense? Is it playing fair with the reader? It likely depends on the reader and the number of times a device has not worked or worked to save a protagonist in the nick of time.

I have always worked to incorporate current gadgets, gizmos, and technology in my stories; in one I made a case for any nutcase with a PC can set himself up as a Religion of the ONE—and like facebook and twitter, wow, the nutcase gets followers. What easy prey are our young. I have had serial killers logging in, setting up websites, enticing victims. Technology as a means to evil ends. But I have also kept up with police science, forensics, the cutting edge means to good ends.

In Absolute Instinct for instance, I had Dr. Jessica Coran use a cell phone with a built in live GPS camera pinpoint her whereabouts when the killer and Coran face off in the final scene. But this is nothing new as in my first published novel, SubZero, set in the distant future of 2010 was jam filled with interesting technology like a climate control wall unit to escape the stress of a new Ice Age as well as a nuclear powered building. This was a book published in 1969 and is today an ebook for Kindle readers.

A writer using technological marvels in his or her book must treat them like any other prop; they can’t just pop up and not be put to use, for instance—they should be in the scene for a reason, and that reason may come clear twenty chapters down the road. If you give a character a cane that also acted as a phone for instance, the cane-phone has a reason for being in the story to begin with. Rent the Kevin Bacon horror spoof film TREMORS to see an absolutely perfect use of props from a pogo stick to a pair of pliers and an old Coca Cola machine. Every prop, big and small, is in the “frame” for a reason and is put to use if not then and there then in an upcoming scene. Go see the new Holmes film for use of props introduced – almost to a one, every prop that pops up is put to use either then and there or in the next scene or the last scene, but it gets used and has a reason for being on hand. Some films are so heavily invested in current technology as part of the ongoing story as in Hackers. It had to use technology, but Holmes uses the technology of his day.

Techno gadgets can become a nuisance rather than a help, however, if you spend three, four, five pages discussing their inner workings; this is tedious and unnecessary. It is the downfall of most young people who want to write science fiction, some who write an entire scene just to explain how a machine works. Do any of us know how a microwave works? Do we need to in order to use the machine? If there is a reason for the reader to take a lesson on gamma rays? Ifffff so, by all means explain them but do so in dialogue and with characters engaged and in action. Never allow fat paragraphs to build up; never stop your story to describe a person, place, or thing, no matter what sort of fascination you may find in the gizmo. If it is essential describe it while at the same time keeping your characters in action and in movement. “Rip those copper pipes out and bring them to me, now!” shouted Simone.

“What’re you doing?” he asked.

“The pipes! Now, damn it!”

And for goodness sakes if you have a dog or a cat or an infant in your story, don’t forget the fact; no disappearing animate creatures who come and go only when you need them. As for a cane or a flask of whiskey, be sure they are not forgotten once remarked upon. In my Children of Salem, the 1692 postal system in Early New England is not so reliable, and I pepper in clues to that effect, and it comes back to bite our somewhat naïve character who believes anything he places in the mails is a private matter (nothing like emails of today, eh?).

So watch your props and your technology, no matter the time period you are writing about, and Happy New Year and Happy Writing one and all – and do leave a comment!

Rob

Dead On Writing – paper from http://www.wordclay.com/ and ebook at http://www.thedigital-bookshop.com/

There's Editing & There's Editing...What's Your Process? By Robert W. Walker

The business of editing your story once you’ve got it going is an important consideration, and the first consideration is precisely WHEN do you do your editing; what is your best choice of processing the process? Do you edit as you go, line by line, or afterward altogether at once? I imagine some folks do it scene by scene, chapter by chapter as they go—which I do nowadays, but in my youth, I used to do my serious editing only AFTER the manuscript was completed and entirely out of my head. Some say you can’t do two jobs at once—create and edit—in the same breath as each job requires the opposite side of the brain, but as I have matured as a writer, I have come to discard that notion. I edit much more as I go nowadays than I once did, and I will consciously be editing a line as I write it, a scene as I write it, a chapter as I write it. I will also re-read and edit two or three scenes and chapters before I continue on to the next scenes and chapters, rather working in a parabola fashion, like a wave action, back and forth.

I won’t catch every misplaced modifier or weak metaphor or missing comma or apostrophe, but I know for a fact that I am too close to the trees to see the forest, or too close to the forest to see the trees, or both since like a client in a courtroom who represents himself, I have a fool for an editor. I know it needs a judicious second and even third eye; in fact, better than most, I know I need all the help I can get. To this end, I have cultivated close friends whose advice and editing eye are spot on—folks I can rely on. Such friends can drive you insane as they are so detail conscious, but they are, as I said, spot on.

I have seen errors in my finished books, however, and this after I have written and rewritten the story to exhaustion, and it has been vetted by my readers, and it has had a thorough going over by my editor and a copy editor as well, and guess what – still typos and words like Lamb for Lame filter in or are crammed in by the ink gremlins (creatures that abound in magazines, playbills, brochures, how-to’s, and novels). Still we try and try and try.

No novel in the history of novels has been rewritten more than my Children of Salem and yet my hero, Wakely gets spelled as Wakley at least once, and tomb should have been tome in the first chapter. So it goes, but we must strive to make the version that goes to an editor’s desk as clean and error-free as we can possibly make it, as this is a major part of the job at hand.

TEN items I edit for as I write (in fact both sides of the brain can work in tandem with experience)

1 - Edit for LY words and other modifiers, adjectives, adverbs to hug the word they ‘modify’.

2 - Edit to catch pronouns that are ‘fuzzy’ or confusing for whatever reason and in need of being replaced by naming the person, place, or thing the pronoun is standing in for. Constantly ask who are they…what is it…who is he/she.

3 – Edit out as many prepositions and prepositional phrases as possible as in switch: ‘stood up from the chair’ with ‘stood’ – and such phrases as ‘out of the back of the car’ with ‘from the car’ and excise so many sentences that unnecessarily end with ‘to me’. Anytime you can replace two or three prepositional or directional words with a single word that is a WIN.

4 – Omit as many of the word VERY as you can find along with many another qualifier in the narrative; look up the part of speech that is called a qualifier and avoid them like the plague; they are related to adjectives, adverbs, and modifiers and are often meant to emphasize but instead they manage to de-emphasize the otherwise strong subject and strong verb they qualify or modify.

5 – Put in as many ‘absolutes’ as you can, often replacing the qualifier with an absolute word or phrase. Instead of VERY replace it with an absolute as in: ‘The swiftly flowing wind roared very loudly’ with ‘A swift bearlike roaring wind peeled its anguish’.

6 – Edit out trivial matter in both narrative and dialogue. Trivial matter is such material as is metaphorically spinning wheels and not moving the story along. That is description that serves no purpose or has no connection to your character(s), and/or dialogue that fails to illuminate character or push the story along.

7 – Make sure that all description of people, places, and things are filtered through the five senses of the characters.

8 – Make sure that all description of people, places, and things come about as thought and speech while your characters are involved in some action or actions. Avoid whole paragraphs of simple passive description or thought or inner monologue.

9 – Edit for whole paragraphs and scenes that fall into telling only and no showing; rewrite these by dialoguing the same information, spreading out these “telling” lines to various characters who may speak them aloud inside quotation marks. In other words: Dialogue dull scenes into walking, talking, doing scenes that involve the five senses of your characters rather than the speechifying of your narrator.

10 – Make certain each character has his/her own speech patterns, mindset, psychology, props, ticks, and anything that sets each apart. The worst thing your novel can do is have every character working in similar tone and attitude. No two can walk or talk alike unless you’re doing twins.

It’s not by any means an exhaustive list but these are major items and issues editors will be dealing with when autopsying your book, and the worst sin of all is the sin of being unclear. All of these steps help me in self-editing even before they are dealt with by your first readers, critique group, agent…editor. I hope the list is helpful; I use it all the time with my own work and when I am acting as an editor for others when wearing my freelance editor’s cap. Bringing this back around full circle, if you are first starting out as a writer, you may well prefer and want to get the entire book out of your head before you begin a serious, all encompassing rewrite – unless you find it easy and fulfilling to edit scene by scene as you go. Find what works for you as we all must find our own working methods.

I welcome your comments and we at ACME have made making comments a walk in the park; it’s that easy, so don’t hesitate. Meanwhile, find me on facebook, at Twitter, on Myspace and for details about my editing service visit me at www.robertwalkerbooks.com

Happy New Year of Writing and Reading,
Rob

Robert Walker, author of Dead On & Children of Salem, the INSTINCT and RANSOM series

http://www.robertwalkerbooks.com/ and find me on Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and Google me!

Waxing Philosophical: Life's Beginnings, Endings & All of That Lies Between by Robert W. Walker

The subject on my mind this day is what happens when we stop to think about the hard face of reality in questioning our birth, our beginning, our personal GO on the Monopoly board of life? Gawd but that is an awful metaphor….life as a monopoly game, and yet had I paid a good deal more attention as a child to the absolute truth of it—how to crush others and become a profit-driven human being in the process, perhaps I would have a good deal more money in the bank today; might own a property or two, charge rent, get that extra income and ignore my renters when they call about the busted widgets.

Can you guess that I was the kid in the family of five who always stank at Monopoly and Parcheesi and other cut throat games like Sorry? That I spent a lot of time in jail? That I loaned money to my little sister when she was completely depleted of the green stuff? I lost a checkers too. I lost at Chess. I was a born loser, and I can recall as a child feeling sorry when watching baseball or tennis or football or Roller Derby Queens because I hated the thought that someone must lose—one player or one side wins, the other loses. The only sport I didn’t feel so bad about was golf as I could see no clear sides; it was every man for himself and amid the ensemble anyone could win but the loser could not be pinpointed so clearly as when two opposing teams hit the field of battle.

I was born with such empathy in fact that when someone—a school bully or gang member—decided to wail on me, I’d pick up the stick with the nail at its end to defend myself yet I couldn’t bring myself to use it, as I could imagine the pain it would inflict. I could feel it and see the blood gush before it gushed. As result, I soon learned the only way I could win a fight was with my mouth, with words. So that was my initiation into the power of words—make ‘em laugh and walk away. Not that I didn’t also learn to ingratiate myself with the biggest kid in class, help him with his homework, and enlist him as my bodyguard. It’s how I survived Skinner Elementary, later Carpenter Junior High, and still later H.G. Wells High as I called Wells High, inner city Chicago.

This was the fifties and sixties, a rough place to be born and raised, but I hadn’t been born in Chicago, so I fought it the entire time growing up. I was born in Corinth, MS and some of my siblings in Tuskegee, AL. Mom from Alabama, Dad from Mississippi. so I learned how to spell these magical faraway places with their strange-sounding names, and I dreamed of escape from Chicago, and a couple of times I tried, once with plans to escape with a friend to his hometown of Hazard, KY. Finally, I got on a train and did escape midway through my high school years, winding up in hardscrabble, tiny Screven, Georgia. I climbed into life with my cousins, my wonderful Aunt Sadie and equally wonderful Uncle John and a lifestyle totally remote. Still, their home was a haven, a place to heal for as long as I wanted. It was a new beginning and in their home, listening daily to my cousin Dennis’ drawl and Deep South accent, I decided to create my first novel using his voice and basing the character on Dennis Hodges. It became Daniel Webster Jackson & The Wrongway Railroad, a mix of homage to my spiritual mentor and hero, Mark Twain, and an historical novel about the Underground Railroad.

Talk about Beginnings…it began as an exercise I set for myself to see if I could write one page and pull off sounding like Mark Twain…but one page evolved into a scene, and soon I realized it was not going to let me off so easily. It became a chapter, and what happens when you write a first chapter? Of course it begs for the second, and the second the third, and so on. Just as Twain’s tale of Huck Finn is episodic, I followed the episodic method I had learned from reading Dumas, Doyle, Dickens, Stevenson, Hawthorn, Poe, and of course The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. In fact, the entire idea came about when I went searching for the third in Twain’s boys’ adventure “series” and learned there was none. Unable to accept or believe it, and armed with the arrogance of youth—what is more powerful? Youth being what it is, I sat down to determine if I could write that third book which Twain had simply failed to produce.

And people wonder why I love writing historical fiction, why I turned from doing serial killers to my Chicago Inspector Alastair Ransom trilogy and more recently Children of Salem, “love in the time of the witch trials”. Here is the answer: From time to time, I remind myself of my reasons for getting into writing fiction—my passion for it, why it sustains me more than winning awards or passing Go or making a bundle of money or hobnobbing with Matt Lauer or Ms. Oprah. I remind myself that “in the beginning” I wrote for the sheer love of putting words, sentences, paragraphs, scenes, and chapters down to see—to literally SEE—on paper what I had already spilled over in my mind. I face it— nothing else I do on the planet pleases me more than the precisely NAILED down images, dialogue, setting, plot, character with all the accoutrements…and to see it all come alive and dance from my head to my fingers to the page or rather the stage which the page represents. I adopted the novel? Well yes, but it also adopted me. Here was something that from the outset I was in charge of; here I rigged the game, made the rules, and won every race, fight! Every Monopoly game I laid out. Here I could be as slick, elusive, and deadly as a James Bond or as filled with as much joy as a Civil War vet who has managed to save one of his legs!

Endings in life and in fiction need be as perfect as we can make them, and while I am not contemplating ever ending my writing career—“You will have to rip my cold dead hand from this computer!”—I do continue to believe that there’s a reason beyond the pettiness of making a “killing” in the “writing game or casino” (it’s hardly a business like you find in Monopoly, this crazy roulette wheel we call publishing with its inherent defibs and heart murmurs and cardiac arrests; it’s only a business if you have a shtick or a TV or film tie-in, then you are welcomed into the board room end of things and only then.).

My own writing middle years have been a roller-coaster to say the least. One step forward, three back, and the “game” is never won-won, and one can never make enough money to satisfy the needs of home and ego if a midlist author. No your life is far closer to Van Gogh’s than the commercial artists whose fifteen minutes of fame net them large dividends. You write for food on table and to feed spirit. In my case, I keep reminding myself again and again what were my passions as a young, starry-eyed wanna-be newbie author, the kid whose first rejection came from Scholastic? What did the kid want? Where is the kid now? Is he worth unearthing to tackle yet another project? Can his passions be revived? Can the curious, easily fascinated kid be got at and the cranky, jaded, cantankerous old veteran be controlled so the kid can get back in the ring to fight another day?

Well sure he can and damn right! The eternal optimist, the eternal seeker. That’s what a writer is despite all his innate and deserved skepticism and cynicism about the playing field in publishing and in the broad world that Shakespeare warns us so often about—the one filled with slings and arrows; the one that overtakes us all at times, and in the end we are left with what? —two dates on a tombstone with a dash between. It is what we do with the time that this dash represents that is most important. Getting back to one’s inner child, one’s roots, one’s early powerful passions, and dealing with where one is at this moment—in the NOW—and determining a good outcome—an ending one can live with…these are all such important and huge questions to ponder and come to terms with. Wax and wane.

When I was at my deepest, darkest depression as a young unpubbed author the fear I would never be a published author controlled me and my work! Finally, I asked myself one question: Will you write if you never see publication ever? Will you continue to write? I answered that question and in doing so I got the monkey off my back and lightened up and soon began publishing even though my answer was YES as a conviction that I would NEVER see publication. Does it make sense? Now I am a goodly bit older and one might imagine wiser, and guess what question I am asking myself nowadays?

Yes, same question, same answer. I am what I am, as Popeye so oft said.

Re-invent yourself as often as necessary to sustain yourself as a writer but never forget why you took up the pen to begin with. I will shut up on that note.

Happy Writing Everyone – see you at the Kindle Store, Digital-Bookshop, Smashwords, Wordclay

Rob Walker

Facebook, Twitter, LinkIn, Plaxo, Myspace, Crimespace, DL., Five Star, HarperCollins

Taming the Beast - Selling Yourself, not Your Book by Robert W. Walker

Recently someone asked what I meant about selling “yourself and not your book” or selling it with a look, a wink, a smile and a nod. We were talking books at a virtual bar, having a virtual drink; she had a martini, I had a Jack Whiskey Sour. I proceeded to explain in more detail; did so over the juke box wailing out “Don’t be Cruel” and Elvis was at his best. We had been discussing what a writer has to do these days to gain attention for his work since there are now in the pool of writers everyone who thinks he can write whether correct or not, everyone who acts on the thought ‘I can write better’n that’, in other words: everyone with half a mind to write a book, unfortunately DOES. Leaping in with both feet.

Almost anyone and more people can afford to self publish nowadays, and anyone can digitally publish at NO cost to the author, and besides more people can afford the huge mistake of publishing with some major vanity presses that do nothing in the way of screening or editing even when paid to edit. In fact, there are far more publishing outlets and possibilities now than in the history of publishing EVER. So… while competition for shelf space in bookstores in the real world has always been difficult and tight, nowadays, it appears even greater competition for space in the mushrooming “Digital Stores” where shelf space is also stiff as stiff can get stiff.

So what’s a writer to do? Nothing? A Dan Brown, Stephen King, Patricia Cornwell need do nothing as their books are bestsellers even before the book sees print (preorders). No one apparently needs to read said books to know that they are “worthy” of becoming bestsellers. (It’s about numbers, not quality of writing). Go figure. That aside, ninety nine percent of authors are without a budget and are told by their publishers: (1) ads for books do not sell books, so we’re not going to advertise your book like we do Dan’s or Steve’s or Patti’s (they do not explain this much to the Dan Browns, to Stephen King or Patricia Cornwell as they probably would gasp and insist that their publisher stop this practice and instead advertise all their titles using their budgets—Disney said if you can imagine it, you can do it…).

Number 2 remark mid-list authors hear always: You have to commit to selling your book on your own in any way you can, anywhere you can, anyhow you can at all hours of the day and night. 3) You need to create an online presence. Some publishers will even create a Myspace or a Facebook page for the fledgling author to get her or him started.

And so I have been creating my online personae (my juggling act; on unicycle juggling ten plates at once from the edge of a diving boad) and doing for something in the neighborhood of five years now. I began with various chat groups like DorothyL.com, and I added others as I found them; I began with Myspace where I blog and try to keep up and place bulletins; I added Facebook, Crimespace, LinkedIn, Plaxo, and Twitter. All in an effort to build a fan base, and to sell not myself but my books, but a strange thing happened on the way to selling a million copies. I have learned that people respond less and less to the overwhelming number of appeals to “read my book” and “buy my book” and “you gotta really read this, my book!” and far more to other things like a smile, a wink, a nod.

Being online as much as I am nowadays, I have come to a full arc from hawking my book to hawking interest in my dull life! HA, to THERE! There you have it…or rather there my eyes were opened. I have always considered my personal life a total BORE, but NOT SO….apparently. It has been quite a metamorphosis within my brain pan, and it has not come easily or quickly but that look….that wink…that smile…the shot of me and Pongo up on my profile page, my jokes, my picture with the cardboard Capt. Jack Sparrow with Miranda flanking his other side, my photo with a similar Will Smith, my having had to neuter Clark Kent—SuperCat—my cat….now that’s what people respond to. Leave ‘em laughing has always been my watchword at conferences and speaking engagments, and it is twice as true on Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, and elsewhere. But it took me a loooooong time to figure this out. Call me thick.

I am convinced that going direct to a sales pitch is never a good idea, not even at a book signing where it is expected, right? No ask the potential customer what he does for a living, make a remark about the cute grandchild, remark on apparel, the weather, point out when a lady comes into the store with three children that perhaps she needs the “relief” offered by a good story to escape into—then speak of your story, of course.

And the same appears to be true of the internet social networking connections we make. I want to spend some time making responses to the potential reader or fan online by answering their tweets, replying to their Facebook remarks—whether on the weather or about the kitchen fire they’re recovering from or the loss of a pet, or Or OR…. And while the progress appears slow….hey I have been at this for years—it is a way to gain new readers, all of whom have access to others and to review sites and their favorite chat rooms.

I don’t sneak up on people with the wink and the nod and the smile; I am quite up front with the fact I am a writer with books in the trunk of my virtual car as I drive on through what’s being said by whom on Facebook and elsewhere. I still often make direct appeals as when I have had a review or when someone has interviewed me, and I often continue to make an appeal to “read this book!” but the lion’s share of my posts nowadays—as the arc has arrived—go to social remarks, political rants, personal tales of terror as when my stepson broke his nose (talk about bloody), and what’s the deal with Miranda’s deciding to rip up the carpeting and strip the floor, and on and on. What I have learned, which so surprises me, is that people in general love to hear about the mundane backdrop in a writer’s life as much as they might a photographer’s life, a sculptor’s life, a CPA’s life, or a teacher’s life….nurse, doctor, lawyer, candlestick maker. Not to mention a puppeteer or marionette operator. These online sites are like an insatiable unquenchable WE or US magazine only the stars are, well, us’ns.

And so we finish our drinks, and I explain to the stunning beauty on the bar stool beside me, my wife, that it is worthwhile to continue to focus on meeting folks all across America and overseas online and to meet them with a smile, a nod, and a wink. We toast to the brilliance of just being ourselves and know we needn’t be working so hard as we have in the past. We have come of age in the virtual world, old enough to down our virtual drinks where you don’t have to reveal your age.

By the way, there’s been a great review posted regarding my how-to for the disorganized writer in you, a book entitled DEAD ON WRITING at a terrific eZine begun by several young ladies who believe in the power of educating oneself to becoming a writer, folks who believe in craft before marketing. This is at 1stTurningPoints.com – locate the review under articles. The book itself can be found in all eFormats from the Kindle Store, the Digital Store, Smashwords, and in paper format from Wordclay.com. That’s Dead On Writing!

Happy Writing Everyone,
Rob Walker
http://www.robertwalkerbooks.com/
http://acmeauthorslink.blogspot.com/
www.myspace.com/robertwwalkerbooks.com

"Dead On takes the reader's capacity for the imagination of horror to stomach turning depths, and then gives it more twists than a Georgia backroad that paves an Indian trail." - Nash Black

10 Reasons Why We Keep On Writing by Robert W. Walker

#1. We are driven; it is an addiction hardly controllable. Some call it a gift, others call it a curse.

#2 . We are creators. We get to play God. We craft the good, the bad, and the ugly characters; furthermore, we get to decide on their FATEs, their LIVEs, and if they should live or die. It is a rush.

#3. We novelist, playwrights, script writers get to play all the parts, whereas actors typically are held to one part and one role only. So it is like what we did as kids – play. Writing is play and should be a playful “art” and “science”.


#4. We can tell people we are “Working” while we are “Playing” and no one is any the wiser.


#5. We get to create metaphors for what we do and metaphor creation for your “work” is in and of itself a fun activity as in “Writing is easy, like picking a scab until it bleeds, and when it stops bleeding, you pick at it for the next scene.” Or Writing is easy, all you have to do is open a vein….like lifting a raw egg of a linoleum floor….your turn to play.

#6. We write for our first reader – ourselves – which includes the guy who loves everything we spout, and the harsh critic within that detests everything we spout. We stiff arm both and somehow continue writing only by not settling for self-hype or mean-spirited criticism from that side of the brain that dislikes everything.

#7. Because we are “supposed” to….as in now I gotta get this blog outta my head an onto paper…or I have a deadline to meet with a story….or a self-imposed deadline.

#8. Because we love language and anything to do with language, and we love working in the “materials” of language and using the “tools” of language to craft “Kodak moments” and memorable scenes that move people to feel one emotion or another; in other words to wield the most powerful weapon on earth – Words. That which is mightier than the sword.

#9. Because we have a pack of lies (fiction/ficciones) inside us that have to get outside of us in order to “prove” a truth, quite often a truth surrounding the human condition. We are observers of the parade…the floating opera of life and we feel put here to make observations on same and pass them along to unsuspecting readers who think we are just entertainers.

#10. We write for money as well; we pray to be able to make a living at this “work” that we are passionate about, and if we can’t make a living at it, we spend a lifetime in another job to support the “habit”.

I write for craft and for money, and I have taught writing for over thirty years to support the addiction and the “need”. When I teach a creative writing class, I see two kinds of “writers come through the door – he who sees it as a glamorous thing to be recognized and called a writer or novelist or screenwriter (and most of these fail), and he or she who MUST write in order to breathe more easily, to get the stories and voices out of their heads and off their chests before the panic and pain of NOT writing these things out gets to them. In other words, a poet’s got to write poetry despite the fact there is no money in poetry and no poetry in money. And a woodworker has to work in wood, and a sculptor in stone….so a writer in words.

See if I live up to the ten reasons by picking up a copy of my latest work, DEAD ON. My wife, Miranda’s The WELL MEANING KILLER displays the same NEED to be written on every page.
Happy Writing and please feel free to leave a #11 or #12 etc. as a comment. Would love to hear from you.

Rob Walker
http://www.robertwalkerbooks.com/

PERILS OF PAULINE - CREATING COMPELLING FEMALE LEADS IN MYSTERY FICTION - BY ROBERT W. WALKER

To pull off the so-called “impossible” – getting into the head of the opposite sex and understanding from this point of view, surprisingly enough, surrounds elemental, fundamental reliance on a “woman of substance” inside the VOICE.

VOICE in any dramatic, commercial fiction relies on strong Active Voice over weak passive textbook, WAS/WERE-riddled voices (leave the qualifying voice to the politicians). These basic grammatical decisions (word choice, exorcising qualifiers for absolutes, using active verbs over passives and cripplingly slow helping verbs, and exorcising the verb to be) are the crucibles of language about which E.B. White wrote in The Elements of Style and supported by the fine book Writing Shapely Fiction by Jerome Stern. Style comes out of extremely small elements you choose to make work for you—like a plug in the wall. Or items you fail to utilize.

As small as the choice difference between say the word before and ago, maybe and perhaps, this is “shaping” voice. This “becomes you”--BECOMEs your style. If you choose a folksy or shoddy or simplistic or complex or formal or informal voice, your reader will know it from the outset and is normally willing to follow it so long as this voice remains consistent and consistently believable.

So is VOICE the single most important element of your story? Absolutely, and yet it is created of all the other elements and choices you make, from setting to dialect to no dialect to the difference between between and betwixt, leaped and leapt, or using a comma for a dash. I personally make a habit of using contractions, dashes, and mixing sentence types from simple to compound to complex to compound-complex. All my choices…all lessons we continually need to relearn with each book.

All good writing relies on the reader ‘falling for’ your Feminine or Male authorial\narrative voice, the point of view speaker, the mind you set your reader down into comfortably or awkwardly. If it is an ill fit, little wonder. The holy all of it is this: an author is a trick cyclist on the unicycle juggling twenty four plates in the air, spinning each ‘choice and decision and element’ at the end of long sticks all at once! Each plate, each stick, each prop is an important element, but they all culminate in the overall greatest EFFECT or illusion we writers create. The effect that your story has on the reader’s ear and mind’s eye. (A story is only as good as the effect it has on a reader.)
If I had said the writer is LIKE a trick cyclist rather than stating it as a fact, it rings a different bell, sends a different and less powerful blow. The use of LIKE and AS is terribly overdone in some “voices” in female-lead crime fiction. As are adjectives. As are adverbs. As is the use of passives, especially the WAS/WERE verb—a major killer of action and visualization. These mistaken choices riddle even a great deal of published fiction, and especially in the first person narrative along with the personal pronoun references to the narrator: I, me, my, mine, myself, often using the personal pronoun three and four times in a given sentence.

What a reader hears and pictures comes about as result of our giving him a believable SOUND in his head—along with images. The author’s voice, or the narrative voice (not always the same) or the character’s voice creates that sound. A “qualifying” character’s voice can be filled with qualifiers, but you are damned if your narrator or main character’s voice is riddled with qualifying, iffy, wishy-washiness. An absolute gives the same sentence the mental Kodak moments that look, feel, taste, smell, and sound like IMAGES. Images are made of this; they are not made of lines like: He was standing as if in a trance, and was soon climbing through a reddish fog that seemed to be lifting amid the treeline that almost acted as a filter to the sunlit Georgia hills. But rather: In a trance, Mick stood and climbed through a coppery red fog filtering through the Georgia treeline.


Robert W. Walker
www.myspace.com/robertwwalkerbooks
http://www.robertwalkerbooks.com/
htp://acmeauthorslink.blogspot.com
"Dead On takes the reader's capacity for the imagination of horror to stomach turning depths, and then gives it more twists than a Georgia backroad that paves an Indian trail." - Nash Black

10 Solutions to Top 10 Reasons Your Book was REJECTED by Robert W. Walker

As both a writing professor and an editor with my Knife Services, I see all manner of writing from the best and greatest writing to the worst and most unfortunate. When an autopsy for your story or book is necessary, it may require a scalpel. In fact a Stryker saw may be needed to cut it to the bone. When I speak to other writers and editors, what I hear again and again about a book’s rejection is that it failed in one or more of the Ten Deadly Sins of writing and here they are:

10. No sense of play/fun comes through on the page—that the author is not passionate over his/her story to the degree that it shines through. Solution—rewrite with a smile.

9. No sense of specific audience the author is writing to excite. Difficult to determine the genre and thus audience. Solution—rewrite with a cold eye as to what category your story falls into.

8. No sense of forward-moving plot/action in the story. Solution—work with the word compelling tattooed on your brain or taped over your computer along with a list of and how all five senses can be placed in a scene.

7. Pronoun references are weak; pronouns proliferating to exclusion of naming people, places, and things. There are many errors that involve pronouns. Solution—name names and repeat names of people, places, and things. Triangulate character’s five senses and sometimes his/her sixth sense into each scene.

6. Cluttered sentences; overblown sentences and paragraphs. A given character or characters are blowhards—going on in paragraph-length dialogue segments. Solution—break into lengthy dialogue segments with “action” lines or “interruptions” from other characters.

5. Action stops cold with description of a person, place, or thing. Does not involve action in the descriptive segments. Solution—strive to sift everything through the mind and five senses of your characters, especially your main characters.

4. Passive Voice takes over throughout the story; Active Voice is dead or nonexistent. Helping, linking, and verb to be proliferation. Twelve WASes in a single paragraph. Solution—wrestle the verb to be and helping verbs to the mat and replace them with active verbs; takes work but can be done.

3. Sentences are filled with qualifiers—words that qualify otherwise strong nouns and verbs. Sentences riddled with qualifying remarks that undercut otherwise strong sentences. Solution—when in doubt, strike it out; when a word like Very or Maybe or Sometimes does not had power or allow the power to fall on the subject noun or verb, then excise this qualifier.

2. Dialogue is wooden; dialogue is perfect English but imperfect pitch. Too formal dialogue reads like bad lines for the Native American character in a western.

1. Failure to wring drama and conflict out of situations and characters. Solution—No guts, no glory; no conflict, no story. A story is a war (or should be), and a story without a war is a snippet. Each chapter should set up obstacles to one’s character. Character plus conflict equals drama.


In addition -- do not stop your ACTION to describe a person, place or thing. Place the thing, the setting, the other character into the perceptions of your main character. It is of little interest that “authorities” suspect the victim is already dead, but it is of huge interest to the reader that “Marcus” or “Katrina” suspects this.

I hope these comments are of use and helpful to you in rewriting and finishing your novel or story. To locate direct help from me and my Knife Services at inkwalk@sbcglobal.net

Rob Walker
www.robertwalkerbooks.com

Light In the Belfry by Robert W. Walker

There are times as a teacher when you want to run screaming from the classroom as when a student tells you he or she does not know who Teddy Kennedy is; orrrrrrr when a student hands in a paper not only handwritten but done so with such a small script and a light pencil that it is impossible to read. Or when a student tells you, "History?? I hate history; it's done nothing for me--has nothing to do with me or my life!" That's about as good as when someone tells the awful gov't'ment to keep its awful hands off "my mdicare!"

It is rather frightful to find students enrolled in college who have not the vaguest idea of anything beyond their immediate needs - and all else can go to Perdition.
Still, the rare gems are found among the students. Those who have somehow come through our current system of education unscathed, unscarred, un-scared to speak up and who can write a complete essay with a minimum of errors and actually have something to say, have a point of view, and know the differnece between irony and sarcasm.

I keep teaching in order to get out of the house (certainly can't be the money, right?), and I enjoy seeing an aha moment manifest itself in a student's eyes. Today I pulled out the comic strip assignment, a Walker special for studnets to learn how to balance narrative with dialogue as I teach imaginative use of writers' tools even in what is supposed to be an essay (dry, dull thing unless doen well) or nonfiction which is supposed by many to have no imaginative techniques embedded whatsoever (ever face off against a board of directors?); of course, I totally disagree; I believe the writer of nonfiction and the essay can and should know all the tricks at the disposal of a fictionalist--to dramatize an issue and to argue an issue and to tug at the heart strings. And so I teach my 101 and 102 English introductory classes as production shops, workshops, hands-on, finger exercises, you name it with many a sample taken from fiction to point to what makesfor good essay and good nonfiction as well. Use of quotes, dialogue, dramatic moment can greatly enhance any issue-orientated essay or research paper so far as I am concerned and in fact all the essays--including student essays--that make it into the textbooks are chock full of the techniques and tools of fiction.

Have a great day of writing and or teaching and or both! Catch Children of Salem on Kindle!
http://www.robertwalkerbooks.com/

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www.myspace.com/robertwwalkerbooks.com

"Dead On takes the reader's capacity for the imagination of horror to stomach turning depths, and then gives it more twists than a Georgia backroad that paves an Indian trail." - Nash Black

Get Away by Robert W. Walker

Sometimes you are damed -- as in blocked, damed up...and the creative flow is gone or off somewhere else; at such times stop belaboring the muse and go off someplace yourself to allow your subconsicous to do its work on its own time clock.

This may seem a simple answer to a terribly complext problem -- Writer's Block -- but sometimes it takes a vacation, a trip, a conference, or going to your kid's soccer game, or some recital you'd have missed had you been feverishly writing. Sometimes stop and breath and smell the oleander bushes.

Sometimes it takes far less than getting on a plane to make a trip of it to find that thing we call our muse--the elusive one. Sometimes it just requires a few hours off and working in the dirt, say your garden or cutting your lawn. OR simply taking a relaxing moment in a pool or hot tub or shower. Amzing as it seems, such "get aways" can evoke the muse as she is a jealous wench to be sure.

Serendipity happens when our minds are at peace with what we are doing in the moment, and if you are at odds with your writing at the moment, you must need step back and get off stage and get your fevered mind in check!

Sorry...didn't mean to raise my voice there. But you get the point. I have had some of my best "stuff" come to me while raking leaves.

Besides, we don't do our BEST work until we turn at least fifty anyhow. Now for me that number is long past but for you kids out there, cool it and enjoy it or else stop doing it! If it hurts in the joints, stay out of them joints.

Rob Walker
WWW.RobertWalkerbooks.com
http://acmeauthorslink.blogspot.com
www.myspace.com/robertwwalkerbooks.com
"Dead On takes the reader's capacity for the imagination of horror to stomach turning depths, and then gives it more twists than a Georgia backroad that paves an Indian trail." - Nash Black

What Makes a Good Book GREAT & Read, Read, Read to Your Kids! by Robert W. Walker

Not a week ago this question came up on Facebook—“What makes a book a great read for you? What makes a book not just good but GREAT? My reply on Facebook got a lot of interest and add on responses, so I then took it to KindleKorner, and as I got more and more folks responding extremely positively to my response, I placed it elsewhere, and one such place was DorothyL where I hang out a lot. I thought that was that as days passed by but then I heard from Cathy Strasser, who wrote me the response this blog will end with. Here is my post and Cathy’s responses – as she responded twice with moving emotion and a great story.

My definition of a truly great book may also be the same definition as what constitutes a classic--hold on, stay with me now. It's like this. A book or story is only as good as the lasting effect it has on a reader's mind--for instance, I can visualize in my mind’s eye just about every scene in To Kill a Mockingbird, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and many of the most powerful and poignant moments in James Herriots' All Creatuers Great and Small, and all his works. In fact, Herriot, for my money is the closest thing we have in literature to Mark Twain since Twain, a writer who can move you to tears and laughter within the space of a single heart beat. When James Clavell was opened up to me--King Rat was my first Clavell and onward to Shogun, I was swept away by the compelling storytelling of this master. Anything by Leon Uris as well. But in effect that is what is for me great reading, when the images an author posits in the mind have a powerful and lasting effect, so strong as to leave an indelible imprint in the mind. I can see Ahab as he strides the deck in Moby Dick any time I wish to conjure him up, and I can hear Huck's voice in my head any time I choose to hear him speak. In the final analysis, a story is only as great as the level of impact it makes on a reader.
Cathy’s response to this:

I was in 7th grade social studies (as they called it then) and reading gothic romance under the desk. Mr. Athanis (the teacher and I'll never forget his name) discovered me and told me that if I was going to read in his class, I should read something worthwhile and he gave me Battle Cry by Leon Uris. From there I went on to read everything Uris wrote then moved on to Clavell. They are still some of my favorite reads. Talk about immediately catapulted into the story! I went on to read extensively on the Holocaust and Asian cultures - inspired by the need to learn more about the worlds I'd read about.

Additionally, Cathy added:
I'm a huge believer in reading to children from an early age - any language exposure from a human voice will improve a child's auditory comprehension level, an essential tool in our mainly verbal school systems. And the really interesting fact is that it needs to be a human voice - a TV/tape recorder doesn't stimulate the brain in the right pattern for improved comprehension. Go for the rhyme-y /sing-song-y books - there's a reason "Jack be nimble" has been around so long!

Cathy
I might add to that to look at the success, popularity, and timelessness of Dr. Zeuss’ books. With my son, his mother and I read to him before we left the hospital with him and every day when he was an infant in the cradle and knew naught language a word! Today he is a voracious reader and operates his own business and is a world traveler and is fascinated with all cultures of the world; and has a huge library; he is in fact a “citizen of the world” and does not limit himself in any way, shape, or form. He called me out of the blue one evening and over the phone said, “Dad, I just want to thank you and mom for not raising me in any strict form of organized or petrified or codified manner. You gave me the gift of freedom of thought.” I thanked him for saying so and we hung up. I was at a party with friends in some Chicago spot that night—with Joe Konrath in fact, and I could tell that Stephen was in a restaurant, probably his favorite—The Five Seasons in Atlanta where he lives—and it occurred to me that he’d just gotten away from a heated debate, one in which he had faced off against someone with a turgid mindset. At any rate, the value of young people reading early pays great dividends for a healthy and happy future. What always scared me in my creative writing classes were the rare students who proudly announced, “Reading (or substitute History or Psychology or Sociology or Science)…Reading? I don’t read. I just want to write (or substitute spout off).”

Rob d'Author Walker
WWW.RobertWalkerbooks.com
www.myspace.com/robertwwalkerbooks.com
"Dead On takes the reader's capacity for the imagination of horror to stomach turning depths, and then gives it more twists than a Georgia backroad that paves an Indian trail." - Nash Black, Bird’s Eye Views

Ye Old Wicked on the Web Scavenger Hunt – brought ye by Rob d’Author Walker

Today on ACME AUTHORS LINK, I’m doing something new, FRESH, unusual, UNIQUE…okay bizarre in offering up the first ever Rob d’Author Challenge – a Virtual Scavenger Hunt.

First one to get back to me with ten of thirteen answers (thirteen questions posed) wins a FREE autographed copy of DEAD ON – a Kat Holley, Marcus Rydell PI Mystery from award-winning Five Star Books – a $25.95 value that features lovely and gripping cover art and a pretty good story as well, my lords and ladies.

The answers need to come in as a complete comment at Acme, not direct to me or at my website or elsewhere but at ACME. Second, leave your email address with the comment at Acme, so I can later get a mailing address where to send the book. Third, not restricted to continental USA.

Within this scroll are the starting points for what ye seek:

1. Find What 11-book series features Dr. Jessica Coran?
2. Locate the number of genres that Rob has written in (Horror being only one)?
3. Discover and list 3 of eight writers who share rotation with me at Acme.
4. Determine Name of Rob’s wife’s mystery novel (title)
5. Reveal title and full name of Rob’s main character in City for Ransom.
6. Uncover the mystery of the SETTING in Rob’s novel Dead On.
7. Disclose the name of the dog in Rob’s novel Dead On.
8. Seek Out Rob’s middle name. Robert W. Walker and one of his four pen names.
9. Follow the trail to Rob’s ebooks – name his single nonfiction work, a how-to at the Kindle Store.
10. Unmask the name of Rob’s collaborator on his kindle title Cuba Blue.
11. Check Out Rob and Miranda’s His & Her blog tour and bring back one Question posed anywhere.
12. Disclose In whose backyard was the photo of Pongo and Rob taken (photo used extensively on books and blogs of Rob and Dalmatian)
13. Reveal the favorite drink of one Dr. Jessica Coran, ME FBI, Rob’s most memorable character.

Hear ye, hear ye…. For ye who take this formidable challenge to unearth the truth, to find that which is beneath the rock or entombed in mausoleums of this virtual world, using steeds and unicorns to traverse blogs, websites, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, url’s and dark forests, I commend the thy bravery and expect chivalry in the games from one and all. Good luck ye knights, knaves, and damsels one and all; take all due care, but let it be known—anyone with good body armor can win! Only but need answer ten of thirteen.



Rob d’Author Walker

rob

www.RobertWalkerbooks.com
http://acmeauthorslink.blogspot.com
www.myspace.com/robertwwalkerbooks.com

"Dead On takes the reader's capacity for the imagination of horror to stomach turning depths, and then gives it more twists than a Georgia backroad that paves an Indian trail." - Nash Black

Story Web Structure by Robert W. Walker

When is a story going to get unwieldy and out of your control? When you begin multiplying; as in multiplying the number of characters to beyond the limit; as in multiplying the time shifts, geographical shifts, settings, and of course threads. Not always easy to tell where to draw the line, and every story makes its own demands but a recent call from a client I am doing editing and ghost writing work for brings one sure point home – any time too much of anything takes the reader out of the story or the flow as it were, it’s a bad choice. Now Steve was just talking about three pages wherein he feared he had unconsciously done alliteration atop alliteration. So let’s take that as an example of what not to do and how to recognize it when you see it.
Too much drinking water can’t be a bad thing right? But too much forced down your system at once becomes a poison. Too much of anything in real life is poisonous—yes, even chocolate or milk shakes, my friends. Take the same common sense approach to your number of themes your book is covering—main storyline with six sub-sets of storylines? Come on. Maybe you are trying to write two books in one, so separate them out and write two books and not one. Too many characters? We hear a lot of readers moaning and complaining about this, and if it happens in your story that you have creating too many storylines and threads, it is most likely you have also latched on to too many characters to carry the weight of so many themes and plots.
The danger is in not seeing when a novel is “all over the place” and not just with settings and the timeline but with the sheer number of characters we ask a reader to pay attention to—especially in a multiple viewpoint novel. We need to think Chief Characters keep to a minimum as in you can count them on one hand, and if not, if we are getting into two hands, that’s when readers then look for and want a flow chart or a listing of “principle characters” and maybe some idea of how they are related by blood or circumstance. Ever open a play and gasp at the cast of characters? I generally feel that when I open a novel, I don’t want to see a family tree on the inside cover directing me to where little Nel falls on the tree branch near the bottom. Once when I went off on a tangent about a character’s grandfather’s story within the pages of my main character’s “action” and “thoughts”, my then editor, a wise fellow indeed, said of this tangent, this five page flashback, “Write the grandfather’s story some other time in some other book but not here.” That stuck with me.
Being brief in a novel is like saying military intelligence, an oxymoron…so how do we stay the course of the main character and objective or thread of the book, sticking to the main storyline and allowing for a controlled one or two sub-sets of characters and storylines?
Think of the Soppranos TV program wherein many, many storylines evolved over the years of the show, and many, many characters came and went, and often went out—as in dead. That’s complicated long term but it is over years. Fast-forward to today’s hot show Trueblood based on Charlaine Harris’ series surrounding Sookie Stackhouse—and again you see a successful story with many many sub-sets of storyline and characters “fleshing” out those storylines, and as these are so successful whatever can Rob Walker be talking about! However, even in these stories that appear to go hither, thither, and yon guess what—all the separate storylines encircle like the spokes of a wheel ONE character and always come back to the magic number one: How does it relate to and affect one Tony Sopprano as it is HIS story, not anyone else’s. How does it relate to and affect one Sookie Stackhouse as it is not her boss’s story, although he figures in her story, and it is not even her vampire lover’s story, although he figures quite heavily into her story. No Trueblood is all about Sookie.
Picture Sookie’s face at the center of a universe of her making, and surrounding her are all those she surrounds herself with – friends, family, loved ones, necessary ones, and add the world she lives in—the setting—and those who come at her. All those secondary characters are encircling her – her brother, her grandma’s ghost, her shape-shifting boss, her friends at the bar, her enemies, and they are all only in the story as foils for her. Every divergent storyline, no matter how tangential, comes back to her and the story always reaffirms that this is not the cook at the diner’s story but Sookie’s story. All others in the tale are satellites that impinge and impact Sookie.
We flip the channel to House and guess what?
We switch to Grey’s anatomy and it gets confusing whose story it is, I grant you, but in the end Grey has her name in the title!
Mobey Dick, okay, it’s not so much about the whale as it is Ahab’s story but Ismael is telling the story…but truly this surprisingly poorly organized story with hundreds of pages of nonfiction on the whaling industry embedded proves my point. For all of Melville’s talent, he didn’t follow the simplest of precepts of organizing a novel so as to not allow it to get out of hand. Ever read Moby Dick in its original entirely? War and Peace for that matter? Classics are made of this—books no one can take for long and many of our greatest classics are flawed as in the ending for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn wherein Twain loses sight of the fact that this is and was and should have remained Huck’s story and should never have been turned back over to Tom Sawyer!
A novel that shifts sets needs connective tissue between settings, shifting time needs connective tissue to let the reader know you are shifting, shifting point of view needs carefully placed connective tissue embedded, but turning over your novel to a secondary character begs the question why don’t you write HIS or HER story then? Keep asking yourself as you work through your novel “Whose story is it anyway?” And especially if you are crafting a multiple POV tale, “How soon can I get back to my #1 character and in his/her POV and out of #2’s head?”
Picture the character web on a page or in your head – your main guy or girl is at the center of this web, closest confidants, relatives, lovers, friends close in to the center of the web (picture their smiling faces) then an outer web of associates, fellow crime solvers, bullies, bosses, jerks (picture these) and at the outer edge dangerous types and enemies of one sort or another and especially the antagonist(s) and picture these wanting to get to her through her closest allies. No matter how far your story roams, she remains at the center of the story web.
I have been doing some updating of early stories and putting some original work up at the Kindle store, acting as my own publisher, but these details discussed here have been bandied about on some chat groups I belong to, so this is my take on them, and I follow this practice, and it makes for a far tighter, stronger story. If you were doing short stories this is even TRUER still.
Rob Walker
Dead On Writing at the Kindle Store
Dead On the novel is available now (herein a two-star lead, female and male, share the center of the web)

Writerly Musings on Writers and Writing by Robert W. Walker

For some occupations, most in fact, not knowin’ where you’re goin’ from the outset of a project is the kiss of death. Organize, outline, plan, storyboard it…all necessary for many forms of writing as well but a novel? Not entirely true, no, and in fact even now, writing this blog, I dunno where I’m going until I get there. An old saying has it that “I don’t know what I think until I see what I say.” With writers in general, I suspect that is true.
Another thing about writers, as with any artistic types, there’s constant self-analysis and self-criticisms of our work; if reviewers only knew. They don’t have to tear us down; we do a fine job of doing that number on ourselves.
Another issue about writers is the notion that for money, even fast money without any hope of returns on that money, as in pay for hire, we will never say no. In general, I subscribe to the never say no to a writing job or an editing job or any job that pays you for putting words on paper or helping someone else to do so as in ghost writing. But there are limits after all. The term pay for hire is a circumstance wherein an editor or publisher wishes to pay you a flat say one or two thousand for a writing job and you are never to darken their door again. You have no rights to the work. You were hired to write it for another. Yet it is to be a book on shelves in bookstores. It may or may not have your name on it. Most of the Idiot Books, those reference works like The Fool’s Guide to whatever are done as pay per hire. I say if you really need the money, go for it, but as a general rule, try to avoid such deals.
When you are hired to do a ghost writing job, it’s about take the money and don’t expect or pursue any additional funds. When you edit someone else’s work it remains their work, not yours, and you should expect no more funds accruing to you unless you have worked out a contract that stipulates this down to the percentages. Else all you can expect if that is a mention in the acknowledgments.
Now getting down to when an editor gives you a green light on a spec manuscript. If you are given a go-ahead based on a spec script (speculation), the nature of the beast is no money changes hands until which time spec becomes contracted script. If you are lucky enough to have a correspondence or any sort of relationship with an editor and you are talking about ideas with said editor, you don’t own ideas, and anyone can take up that idea and run with it, so you want to do your best to convince an editor that this idea is not only great but that you are the perfect person to write it. When an editor in a publishing house asks you if you can write such and such a book, THEN I go by you never say no to an editor.
Once way back in early 80s, I was turned down by an editor I had worked with on a previous couple of books. I was amazed at the rejection of this work. I got on the phone and got Jane, and I pushed her on giving me some real reasons as to why it was rejected, something other than the vague generalities in the letter. She said, “It’s too short; we’ve moved from doing 60 thousand words to 80 thousand, and we’re up to our eyeballs in mysteries. We are in need of horror.”
I shot back without hesitation, “Give me a contract and I’ll add a monster and 20.000 words!”
Jane said, over the phone, “Yes, okay, I’ll put the contract in the mail. Go to work!”
That is the exception but I have also had editors contact me to ask if I could run with an idea the house was kicking over for a series. After two or three sentences on the idea, I stop listening and say, “I can do it, sure!” My four-book Decoy Series came of that. My Instinct Series came about the opposite way—I proposed it as a series idea to an editor who fell in love with the concept. Same with my Ransom series.
I’ll leave it at that this week as am quite busy working on bringing out more work on Kindle. Thus far, I have Children of Salem, Cuba Blue, Deja Blue, FleshWars, a how-to that could have been entitled 20,000 words and a Monster…but I instead call it Dead On Writing, and a short story collection entitled Thrice-Told Tales. Working on Abaddon (horror) and The Serpent Fire (horror-thriller).
Rob Walker
www.robertwalkerbooks.com
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Challenging Writing -- Challenge Your Initial Assumptions, Then Write! -- by Robert W. Walker

We hear all sorts of advice about a writer should do this and should do that with regard to point of view. Have you heard that you should keep to a point of view that is “close” to precisely who you are? That is the ultimate in saying “Write about what you know” since you know your point of view. It says if you are male, write from a male POV, if female then a female POV. If black, if white, if green…if Christian, if Muslim, if your faith is Heavy Metal…etc., then you should stick like glue to what you are; that your narrative voice and the tense you choose, and the choice of vocabulary and whether to use first, second, or third person--all of it ought to reflect who you are and keep safely to your world view and psychology and nature. All very comfy advice.

However, serious writing involves and demands you get OUT of your comfort zones. Did Mark Twain remain of one voice in all his writings? Steinbeck? Great authors challenge themselves and sometimes go down in flames, but out of the challenge comes some fantastic work.

Let’s slow this down and back up a moment:

Present Tense first person is not the same as present tense third person, no more so than past tense first person is the same as third person past tense. Nor is second person present tense the same as second past tense. Tense refers to the time clock (verb tense is verb time). In short, the action and sometimes the first person speech is happening NOW or THEN. Present is now, first person is use of “I-me-my-mine” as your narrator. Past is then, third person is use of a third party as your narrator. Often the story dictates which is best to take on for THIS story. Often a chapter in, you have some idea which dictate is stronger, and often it has to do with your comfort zone.

When I began writing police procedurals and crime novels, I decided early on that a cop-like VOICE would narrate my medical examiner serial killer chase books, and the voice would have an edge to it yes, but it would also be intelligent. This meant a good vocabulary and not a “gumshoe voice” but rather one in keeping with a medical examiner for instance who would of necessity be highly educated. A voice that reflected the complexity of the character and life itself; a voice with a literary flare in fact.

Early on I demanded of myself to write from various POVs in a multiple POV novel, that when needed I could be flexible enough to enter the mind of a Latino working on the back of a garbage truck and a black executive who worked on Wall Street. A Cuban detective in Havana, a Hawaiian newspaperman in Maui, a Hindu ship’s captain in India, a Catholic minister in London. In every case, it was a challenge. In every case, it was worth the effort to rise to the challenge. Cuba Blue is a great example -- a female Havana cop working with hands tied by her own governmental bosses in a Communist world and all she wants is to resolve a triple-murder case. Setting and character were a challenge--talk about writing to your opposite. But that is the challenge I throw at the feet of my students who claim they want to write: Write to your Opposite. You don’t always have to do so, but you very well should stretch and challenge the ultimate writer inside. Those students who come to my classes and write about their safe little worlds and their safe friends and their safe cozy zones are not challenging themselves. The student who sits down and writes a short story from the POV of a child in a Third World Country is going to have to work. A student who sits down and takes on the challenge of another time zone takes a great risk, but the results are spectacular for her personally. A student who takes on another time zone is better off than one who remains in his time zone. A student who makes the effort to predict the future and set a story in a future world is--even in the worst of writing--at least posing a challenge to himself. Telling the story from the opposite gender, another race, another culture, another world view. These are students who will go on to continue learning and writing.

A recently overheard remark at some writers get-together had a panelist telling her audience that a writer can’t do justice to his or her opposite. This is NONSENSE and pure garbage and not useful advice at all. A writer has to be flexible and capable of playing all the parts, especially in a multiple POV novel. There are single POV novels that are genius and wonderful--such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Catcher in the Rye and are a challenge in that the author must create a first person voice that a reader will wish to listen to for some 300 pages or more--same voice! What a challenge! Third person multiple POV presents its own challenges (more attention than ever needed in transitions between pov shifts, time shifts, geography shifts).

What is not challenging is writing about characters all from the same cookie-cutter corner of a single place as in the worst writing I find of young people who zero in on telling stories only of their small cosmos and handful of acquaintances. Certainly, I had a leg up on writing outside my skin just by growing up in Chicago, but Steinbeck was not a Mexican and yet he crafted wonderful Mexican characters. Twain was not all of his characters but rather drew from the incredible array of characters he found from his childhood and through the Gilded Age. Hemmingway believed in living life and writing from experiences one had. I concur, but there’s also research and learning and interviewing.

There are many ways to step out of that comfy zone and dare to challenge yourself as a writer, as a learner, as an artist. I challenge you to do so.
Cuba Blue is a Kindle book. Find it on Amazon.com This is my only collaborative effort and my co-author is a fantastic lady named Lyn Polkabla of Atlanta, Georgia where I set my next book DEAD ON due out July and on preorder now at Amazon.

Rob Walker
www.robertwalkerbooks.com
http://acmeauthorslink.blogspt.comwww.myspace.com/robertwwalkerbooks.com

Your SALES SHEET/NEWS RELEASE is CRUCIAL TO BOOK SALES by Robert W. Walker

Your SALES SHEET-/NEWS RELEASE is CRUCIAL TO BOOK SALES

by Robert W. Walker


Once you have a book on the way—that is during this long, pregnant period between signing a contract and seeing an actual baby book born, there are limited activities an author can take advantage of save talking about the book’s “evolving” and “coming” --and you can go to conferences, get involved online, give away chapter(s) on your website, talk it up and use a signature line. However, once the baby has developed to the point of having an ISBN# and a NEWS RELEASE and a SALES SHEET (which is often done by a publisher in a single business letter format), now you can introduce your child to the world. But why send out a separate and different invitation to all the different aunts, uncles, godparents, grandparents, family and friends? After asking yourself the key questions: Who are those interested in the birth of a newborn book? Who would be interested? And what do they need to know about the child? Have they a special interest as in they are the Society for Whatever, you want to provide them with Sales Info and News of the baby book. A logo would be nice; a photo might be nice—cover art if available (a sonogram?) —but most important at this stage: the Sales Sheet-News Release.

The family of interested folks in the case of a newborn novel will be reviewers, feature news reporters, special interest groups, bookstore managers, e-Zine and hardcopy magazines, and library acquisition people, and anyone interested in the “platform” or threads in your novel that you feel comfortable in sending news and information to—as in your local Friends of the Library or perhaps the Chamber of Commerce or every local coffee shop or bowling alley depending of course on the nature of your baby story. Of curse, a single sheet, ONE-invitation for all may not work for ALL the family interested in this baby, so some individualizing (fresh angles) of the material may be necessary in sending out the baby invites and the book launch invites or blog tour invites.

The single-sheet News Release/Sales Sheet is a great way to reach a lot of people with the information you want to convey—and the info that they need for their reviews, articles, invitations, orders, orders, and more book orders. In order to convey how very useful a Sales Sheet combined with a News Release can be of help to you when the time comes I am attaching the Sales Sheet/Release put together by Five Star/Tekno Books for my upcoming Dead On. Notice the sales information needed by everyone is at the forefront, a brief description of the book (synopsis) and a blurb follows the salutation. This one runs slightly over a page as I modified it to send out Advance Reader Copies directly from my location, but in its original, the Sales Sheet Release was a single business letter size. If you put one together for your title, try to keep it to a single sheet.

Here is the Example/Sample for your perusal, and if it helps to organize your own Sales Sheet Release steal it! Then I have done my job in helping you get underway in the most difficult and frustrating activity writers gotta do these days – promote. Many complaints I hear is “how do we know what works” in the way of promo? This works! Trust me!




FIVE STAR™
An Imprint of Gale


May 28, 2009


Title & Author: Dead On: A Marcus Rydell, Kat Holley PI Thriller by Robert W. Walker
Publication Date: July 17, 2009
Format & Price: Hardcover, $25.95
Genre: Thriller
ISBN 13: 978-1-59414-781-4

Dear Reviewer:

Five Star™ and Chicago author Robert W. Walker are pleased to enclose an advance reading copy of this title for your review consideration. This is one of FS’s lead titles for July – a little dark summer reading; or summer reading with an edge!

“Walker’s whip-smart dialogue, vivid characters, and ever-building tension make
Dead On a terrifically compelling read.”
—Tess Gerritsen, bestselling author of The Keepsake

PI Marcus Rydell is out to reclaim his hold on life. Dr. Kat Holley seeks a fiery revenge on a maniac who has destroyed both their lives. Together, hero and heroine hunters come to respect and understand one another, and to share a bond that colors this suspenseful thriller filled as it is with bright touches of romance, light banter, and laugh-out-loud humor alongside terror. And as in any good noir thriller, there figures a black dog; this one’s named Paco.
Just when disgraced Atlanta cop-turned-PI Marcus Rydell prepares to eat his gun, a kid in trouble, a call to duty, and a dirty blonde named Kat Holley stop him cold. Kat Holley pulls Marcus from a suicidal depression, and his soon-to-be demolished apartment building—only to make him face a past he cannot come to terms with without her. But not before she leads him on a deadly hunt deep into the blackest forests of the Red Earth State. Near the Georgia–Tennessee border in the breathtaking Blue Ridge Lake countryside, the pair witness a safe paradise become their death trap, as their prey is no ordinary man. They seek to destroy a local legend, a cave-dwelling ex-marine who happens to be a multiple murderer. In fact, their prey is a monster whose instincts and military training have allowed him to survive in the wilderness for four years, eluding the Feds as well as the Atlanta PD.
However, the hunt for the evil torturer and executioner, Iden Cantu, pivots. And now Cantu comes for them, leaving the dead in his wake. In the end, they must duel with this psychotic deviant, who is equipped with night-vision, a high-powered Bushman and a cruel intent to kill by means of mental and physical pain.

Robert W. Walker, Chicagoan, now resides in West Virginia.

We appreciate your review consideration of this title, and invite you to contact us if you have any questions. To learn more about Five Star, you can visit our website at http://gale.cengage.com/fivestar/ . Thanks again!

Sincerely,

Tiffany Schofield
Acquisition Editor, Email: Tiffany.Schofield@cengage.com

Robert W. Walker

Robert W. Walker, author of City for Ransom, Dead On, phone: 304-419-3550
inkwalk@sbcglobal.net
www.robertwalkerbooks.com

The Fully Realized, Completely Materialized Character by Robert W. Walker

THE FULLY REALIZED, COMPLETELY MATERIALIZED CHARCTER (finally steps up and onto the stage) by Robert W. Walker


You hit on an idea, and it surrounds a character, right? Something in his swagger, his manner, his appearance, his carriage, his stage presence…or something in the way she talks or walks or balks—something undeniable in the sense she will not be denied as the one character that insists on being fleshed out, fully realized, completely materialized. The one of many “character” voices that claims the LEAD role in your next story or novel. She steps up and onto the stage of your mind—right smack dab at the frontal lobe, and when you either wish her away or try to put her off, or go off and do various chores to put her out of your mind, because you had other plans for the story or a life to live, she is still there, lurking—if not in the frontal lobe, someplace else in there, and you know it because she isn’t going anywhere until you pay her the attention she demands and claims of you. She may flatter you, call you her creator, her God, or she may bedevil you and claim she is your creator, your God. Either way, she or he or it has a stranglehold on you.

I know it sounds weird, especially to those who do not write but it’s oh so true. When you listen to a psychic like John Edwards speak of those “spirits” who are all rushing in at him at once, all of them demanding attention and shouting, “Take me! Take me!” –you understand where he’s coming from even if you don’t understand where the “spirits” are coming from. Picture Whoppie Goldberg in the film Ghost—channeling. Writing can and does often feel like channeling spectral voices out of the past or out of the psyche or out of the collective psyche, but that’s too deep to go into here. But…well it is a lot like that when an author is fishing around for a new lead character to cast in his next novel or story. And sometimes the casting couch gets extremely crowded, but always one voice, one powerful character drowns out the rest for the duration of a story or in the case of The Root Mon from the Root Heaven Store – a poem crafted around such a truly noisy, irritating character that not only demanded to be heard but demanded it at the oddest of times and over a long, long period of time that I NOT shut him out try as I may….

In fact, I wrote the poem many long years ago just in order to get The Root Mon out of my line of vision and out of my head, so that I could go on and live a normal writerly life, if there is such an existence. But before I banished him, it would take months and many return engagements, and just recently he mysteriously returned when I picked the poem up again and read it, enjoyed it, and was suddenly smacked on the back of the head by none other than the Root Mon. He had yet two more stanzas to add to the piece! After all these years! He’d been lurking in the dark recesses of my mind all this time, awaiting the day that I revisited the poem and in a sense revisited him, and bada-bing, he jumps out at me and claims my frontal lobe again and makes me come to terms with two stanzas that needed adding. All this and I have not cracked up in the F. Scott Fitzgerald fashion of the term.

Now mind you, when he first showed up, it was just to do three stanzas and boom, I was to be done with The Root Mon and poetry! How very often had I been warned off the writing of poetry as anything I attempted stank to high heaven. Warned off it as a tone deaf person is warned to stay away from any attempt at music or song. So after those few stanzas, I felt confident that The Root Mon’s visit had come and gone, and that bye-bye meant bye-bye. That I could write something I was somewhat good at now—a novel. The next in my Instinct Series. Besides, I wasn’t terribly impressed by The Root Mon’s poem anyway. But like a horror film, I found him in my head again while I was trying to sleep, while I was trying to shower, and while trying to dress! This crude guy demanded another stanza at every turn of my day. Done—give it to him. Go away now! Again I was done with him. Went out to hoe the garden out back and wham, he came again with yet another stanza. Standing in the check out line at Wal-mart, bam, another stanza. Just demanding as hell.

This went on. At breakfast another stanza, at lunch, on the job, at the dentist office, in the library while researching a medical mystery point of fact for Dr. Jessica Coran, my true love (main character in my Instinct titles). At the beach…in the ocean…no pen at hand! Again and again he came back at me, always demanding: “You gotta do dis one, mon? Dis gotta be in de Root Heaven mix somewhere!”

My wife was beginning to become suspicious. I was distracted to be sure. I was living with this wild and crazy Root Mon in my head, and he was telling me that I had not “fully realized” who he was or just how much “ju-ju” he possessed, and that he wanted to “completely materialize” on the page I prayed, so I had to put up with him until he was fully fleshed out (on the page). And that meant another stanza, and another, and even now years later, he has COME BACK! Scary, yes. Exhausting yes, but in the end I am proud to present The Rootin’ Tootin’ Root Mon of Root Heaven below and you tell me if “living with your characters” for a time does or does not pay off. I think this is a great example of what is meant by the “fully realized, completely materialized” character in something of a nutshell, something we authors strive for in our prose as well. Here is the Root Mon in his own words and on the stage that he built:



The ROOT HEAVEN Store

by Anton “Mystic Ruler” Dupree a.k.a The Root Mon, a.k.a. Robert W. Walker

(*to be read to the sound of Reggie music playing in you head)



You carrying a curse?
Got urgent pain?
Can’t make de water?
Head a bustin’? wife a-fussin’?
Jus’ you come to Root Heaven…
the famous Root Mon’s Store
Here’s a broth,
here’s a stew
you want both
for what you gotta do.
You got needs?
Plannin-a-big sacr-o-fice?
We god seeds
and chickens on ice!

We got bugs, scrubs, and herbs,
and all ll kinna spice!
Need dem magic words?
Have a dose-a-crawlin’ lice.
Eat a canna magic rice,
a-pinch of snuff
for dat ol’ wart
to kick-start the heart.

Toad sweat’ll get you up’n’fit
wid no shivers, shingles, or sneeze,
so get whatever you please
wid heavenly-heavenly ease
at the Toot-ah-Root Mon’s store—
Root Heaven.

We got fat slugs
and tobacco plugs.
Got fuzzy cut worms
for cuts, scrapes’n’burns.
for fever it’s the poltice
and the crucifix cross.
Got many things for stings:
herbs, toots, roots’n’things.

Go-head, make my day
wid dat bottle
of turtle-nip-spray.
Toss a snake rattle
o’er your left shoulder
onto a big boulder
beside a flowin’ river
at the midnight hour.

So get whatever you need—
no talk, guilt, or greed.
Join de Root Mon’s club!
Special on de belly rub,
and on de herb’n’potion.
Jus’ whisper who gets
Dis notion, dat lotion.
Hex on/off as you please.

Get stalks and stone,
min’rals and bones,
cat tails in pails
Wid good’n’plenty snails!
Got a clip of royal bangs,
eyelashes from de King,
Bob Marley’s gol’ ring!
All’s at Root Heaven!

Take dat magic tobacco,
Wrap it in calico and
file it wid cat gut.
Find a cemetery,
dig a deep rut,
and bury it up.
Prescription filled!
Got de enemy killed!

Fix you up wid a hex sign,
Tack it to de nearest pine.
Throw a magic lotion
into the nearest ocean.
Chew eyes of black raven
Whenever your cravin’
the really big ol’ cure.
All at your Root Mon’s Store!

Swallow de snail slime!
Ain’t no crime
to be fit and prime,
and in self-help
there’s protection
and at once
you be sheddin’ dat
godawful middle-section.
In de health we trust.

Guard your fleas
Curses come in threes!
Get even however you can,
And glory-be, mon
If’n you want
To regain health,
Joy, and prosperity
Then you lis’n to me!

Forget dat ol’ 7-Eleven!
Get y’self to my Root Heaven!


THAT’S my story and I’m sticking to it. Happy Writing and Reading
Rob Walker
www.robertwalkerbooks.com

Writing Lessons Learned Under Fire by Robert W. Walker

After 30 some ODD years in teaching, I have to cringe when I hear the old nonsense that writing can’t be taught. If that’s the case, I have been a lunatic for a long, long time. But rather than rant at a ranter, let me give out with several writing exercises that have served me and my students over the years well—so well in fact that I have seen whole novels come out of such exercises from struggling students.

After writing a story in first person, sit down and rewrite the entire thing in third person. It’s a great, freeing exercise. Conversely, rewrite a story you did in third person to first!

After writing a story from one point of view, take another entirely different tact by rewriting it from another character’s point of view.

After writing a story in single point of view, rewrite it to multiple point of view. Or visa versa.
Take a multiple viewpoint story and rewrite it to a single POV.

After writing a story set in a safe, comfy place you know only too well, rewrite it to have a far more exotic setting—challenging yourself to create a setting that requires some research and digging.

After writing a story from your own gender’s point of view and voice, rewrite it to the voice and point of view of the opposite gender.

Challenge yourself to write a story from your opposite—whatever that may be. A man, woman, black soldier, female nurse—creating roles/characters far different from yourself.
Write a story from inside the mind of a child.

Write a story from inside the mind of an abused child, or a misunderstood Downs Syndrome patient.

Write a story from inside the mind of someone considered the lowest form of humanity on the street.

Write a story in imitation and admiration of one (or more) of your favorite authors, doing all you can to mirror his/her style and voice. See if you can craft the “lost” pages of Alexander Dumas or Mark Twain or John Steinbeck, Hemmingway or Stephen King.


Any one of these “finger” exercises will make you a better writer overnight, and like any art form or communication skill, writing is learned. I ought to know. I taught myself.

Robert W. Walker
Visit me at www.robertwalkerbooks.com - get your FREE pdf download, an eBook ARC of DEAD ON.

There Was an Old Man...When the Student is Ready...by Robert W. Walker

Anyone who has ever tried to learn something and has given up, has, at one time or another, blamed the textbook (too thick, too turgid, too thin, too simplistic), or the setting (too many distracting windows in the room, not enough windows in the room), or the teacher (monotone, cranky, doesn’t like me, talks another language) —and perhaps that is human nature at its willy-nilly-est. The last one to blame is oneself, right? But eventually, and especially looking back from the comfort of time, it becomes clear—if not downright apparent—that the student was simply not ready. Not in a “good place” either physically, emotionally, or psychologically, and so how could he be expected to GET IT—whatever that IT happens to be?

If I could have it to do over again, sitting here today and looking back on high school and my time at the university, I would have done a few things differently, as might anyone and not just academically! But at the time, I hadn’t the maturity and emotional stability and psychological cool and “moxie” to learn say Paradise Lost or the nuances of Physical Geography or Interpersonal Dynamics or whatever. From Hamlet to anthropological and sociological truths, I was lost (but it did help tremendously to discover that you check out a book on the subject written by an expert on the subject and you crack it).

As a teacher now, I see so very many students who are not prepared—and I don’t mean simply missing books or note-taking skills, No, I am speaking of their not having yet arrived at that mental station necessary. You know, the station wherein the “master” might actually be of use to him or her? The old Chinese proverb is what I am talking about, the one I suspect comes from Confucius that says: “The master will appear when the student is ready.”

Prior to the student being ready, the mentor or teacher or master is pretty much an idiot who is going about blathering to himself -- most of the time. It puts me in memory of Mark Twain’s remarks about his parents. To paraphrase: “When I was seventeen, my parents were the worst sort of backwater simpletons and fools, and yet how amazed I was when he turned twenty-four to discover how very much they had learned!” The parents had in fact miraculously become geniuses.

When the student is ready (mentally, emotionally, physically), the master appears. It’s so true. Currently, I am teaching writing classes at West Virginia State University, and perhaps seventy-five percent or more of my students are not prepared for college, let alone truly “ready” to drink of the trough. This for whatever reason has them unable or unwilling to pick up the “pearls” cast before them. Some are too young, too naïve; some are jaded from years of school and school rules; others are busy raising children of their own, and holding down jobs, and showing up at class without being ready in the sense I am speaking of here.

This holds true for writers and finding a mentor writer as well, and when I edit the works of others some are so, so, so very prepared and ready, and these drink it in and soak it up and move on to remarkable accomplishments, whereas others pout, scream, shout, and call me a butcher. These are not students prepared and ready.

Just an observation, and sorry if I sound pedantic, professorial, or worse—a pontificating old man, but then that’s who I am. If you are as ready as ready can be and are looking for a mentor to guide you through the turbulent writing waters, contact me via my website, via my Knife Services but only if you are ready to be sliced and diced—and to extrapolate and learn from the “butcher”.

Fast Writing is confident writing! Move it along!

Rob Walker
www.robertwalkerbooks.com
-- come for your free ebook ARC of Dead On; only a keystroke away!