My Leg of the Blog Tour in Progress

First and foremost, my genuine THANKS to Nancy Coats Posey for inviting me to join this Blog Tour. 

A word about Nancy:

Nancy is a lot like me, having so many interests, she needs to be twins and even some days, triplets. Nancy is an Alabama native who has lived in North Carolina since 1995, an English instructor, poetess, wife, mother, and grandmother, a photographer, and a perpetual beginner mandolin player. She has a couple blogs she floats in and out of for poetry, general information, and art projects. Her regular blog "Discriminating Reader" is devoted to her lifelong love of books. She reviews her recent (and excessive) reading and sometimes just chats about books and reading in general. Check her out at whenthepenbleeds,blogspot You’ll be happy you did.

The tour is comprised of questions starting with

       1.  What am I currently working on?

I HAD A BOY, my latest novel about Robin Dockery, a pregnant teenage runaway in Los Angeles, during the music explosion of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s. Robin gives her baby up for adoption but gets him back when she marries a handsome British lad so he can get his Green Card and stay in the USA with his boy friend, the son of a Venezuelan diplomat.

I completed writing BOY last year and had some interest, mainly from Anderson Literary in NY, who send me the kindest, most informative rejection letter a person could ever hope to receive.

BOY is a unique story because it is mine… I lived it and felt all the pain and joy that’s transferred onto the pages. The music scene in LA was a magical one and music really was everywhere. I take great liberties with facts and plot twists, giving cameos to the quick and the dead.

As she moves up and down the coast, over a couple decades, between Southern California and a small town in rural Washington, Robin is continually torn between her self-made family and the gnarly nest of her religious and mildly demented mother, her browbeaten father and redneck siblings with whom she has never been able to relate. I’m happy to report these characters are not based on my own personal family.

Robin’s story is important because she represents a generation of females whose choices were limited. Birth control was not quite impossible to get, but it was a challenge. Pharmacists kept condoms, (which were known by the objectionable name rubbers) behind counters so they had to be asked for. If a girl purchased a condom, she was considered nothing less than a slut and usually underwent interrogation by some white-coated pervert. Boys inquiring about prophylactics were shamed with stupid questions like “What size? You want extra large or extra small?” by the chuckling jokesters.  Roe v. Wade was on the horizon, but aborting a pregnancy was way too expensive for the majority, whether they could have the procedure legally or not. I've knew girls who found surgical solutions. They went through horror and humiliation. Some never fully recovered.

So… what happened to Robin and others like her, when their children realized they could've had a different life with someone else, someone not related to them? They might have grown up in a fantasy family, chosen and adopted. or maybe with that completely uninterested father.  

What about the mothers who didn't know who was the father of their baby? That was more common than most want to admit. Or those who barely knew him; their sperm donor, as we have semi-fondly referred to those guys who showed up for maybe a night or two, then disappeared down the road, taking responsibility and their last name with them.

How does it feel to have men come back into a mom’s life, who previously insisted she illegally abort her baby, but now want to play the role of father, grandfather, cuddly best friend and confidante?

My goal with BOY, at this point, is to re-edit… once more, and make it just a bit rawer than the original. Ms. Anderson, the literary agent, gave me some recommendations that I do believe it would be wise to pursue.

2.  How does my work differ from others of its genre?

I HAD A BOY and my previous novel SING, AND DON’T CRY are about my personal adventures, turned upside down with fictionalization. Not that it hasn't been done before, but no one has ever told my story. 

I weave a certain amount of lessons in my tales, without being moralistic. John Irving wrote about the morality of abortion without ever being political or didactic. The same could be said about Mark Twain and racism; he didn't beat you over the head with it. Stephen King told stories about the death penalty and the mortification of prison life but it wasn't his intention to make his reader be shamed or feel guilty. Good teachers and I aim to emulate them.

3.   Why do I write/create what I do?

4.   How does your writing/creating process work?

I say this with a grand heaving sigh: I don’t have a choice in the matter. Words flow out of me, and like many artists, I wonder whom I’m channeling. I've stories to tell and if I try to do it through spoken word, I’m likely to be whacked over the head with a 2X4 until I shut up. So writing seems like a healthier alternative. More than once I've been told “you should write a book.” It seems like the things that have happened to me over the course of six decades are not your ordinary life. Everyone has a story to tell. My position is that some of them really neeeed to be shared. Point is, I know I like to read a good book and my aim is to give others the same pleasure.  

I work best in the mornings, which is odd, since I always used to consider myself a night owl. I’m not; I just have a hard time getting out of bed in the mornings on some days.

I like background music when I’m writing and if I want to get super inspired, I put CD’s on like soundtracks from Chocolat, The Mission or Amélie.

I can write in chaos or tranquility. There are boxes in drawers and closets with reams that attest to the fact. I possess notes written in darkened hallways, adjacent to deathbeds; bright glaring hospital rooms where my own personal cot was tucked in the corner of the patient room; boats pitching on the open sea leaving no resemblance of proper penmanship; humid jungles where cicadas screamed so loud, writing was more conducive than talking.

I've trained to perform in a circus; single-handedly midwived a baby into the world, with no training; marched, sat and sang for equal and civil rights; worked with famous people in theater summer stock and held lead and minor roles in plays and musicals; sang in a rock band; moved to a foreign country where I had to teach myself the language and then owned and ran, not one, but two businesses;. That’s just the tip of my literary iceberg. 

I end my blogs by saying “Thanks for reading” and what I mean by that is thank you for reading my blog; thank you for reading and buying books from first and second hand stores; thank you for reading poetry, mine and everyone else’s; thank you for reading newspapers and the internet; thank you for reading to your children; thank you for reading billboards; thank you for reading graffiti (because it's often someone’s creation meant to be shared); thank you for reading your emails; thank you for reading recipes; thank you for reading report cards and progress reports; thank you for reading your homework; thank you  for reading famous authors and not so famous authors; thank your for reading directions, the manual, the map and instructions; thank you for reading cereal boxes; thank you for reading The Magna Carta, The Constitution, the Bible, the Koran and the Talmud; thank you for reading... you know… Thank You for Reading.

REJECTING REJECTION

After asking why didn't I self-publish, a friend recently wanted to know how long I would continue to promote my books. There was no hesitation in my response.

“I will always continue to promote my books.”

My first, Nothing Gold, is a memoir. It’s totally on the shelf now and if I ever have time to devote to such narcissism, I’ll pull it down and put it through a re-write. Nothing Gold is about my husband, how he got sick, almost died, recovered and turned our world upside down. We’re not married anymore and to me he's dead, because the person we knew vanished, replaced by a stranger whose brain was deprived of oxygen for sixteen days.

I completed Mozo in February 2007. I was busy at the time doing other writing and didn't put the effort into querying that it deserved (and I was over confident, the plague of all first time novelists). But that was okay, because it desperately required a complete re-write, which I finished in 2009 and proceeded to have properly edited. I changed the name to Seven Waves and in 2011, received some serious interest from a couple agents, one who hung on to it until all the tequila had evaporated from my query battery. I have changed the name once again to Sing, and Don’t Cry and my heart is buried somewhere within the pages of that book. I’m counting on it to be a great follow up to my first publication.

In November of 2011, I decided to participate in NaNoWriMo; the once yearly effort of many crazed and sleep deprived writers who, with a minimum of 1667 words a day, turn out a 50,000 word novel in one short month. Not, Actually was born. I came up with the name from some late night thread where a writer was asked if she knew what she was writing for NaNoWriMo and said “Not, actually.” It struck a chord and I headed into the future with my past. I wrote a book about a nineteen year old naïve farm girl, who ends up in Los Angeles, pregnant and directionless. Her mother arranges for her to place her baby with an adoption agency but Robin, the protagonist, proceeds to marry a cute British boy, who happens to be gay and in need of a green card to stay in the country so he can continue his relationship with a South American. With their financial help, she is able to take care of her baby, whom she miraculously retrieves from the adoption agency. That was my own personal history and I started to pound it out on the keyboard early in the mornings, before I took off to work at a snobby little boutique in the University Village. Those were long days.

After I got my NaNoWriMo badge, I kept going and ended up with over 90,000 words. Then I went back and did a complete re-write and after much consternation, came up with a more workable title: The Story of Robin Dockery and Her Songs. This book is partly cathartic, because it lets me end things much better than they have actually (there’s that word again), plus I have been able to get a story out there that begs to be told, regarding the 60’s/70’s and what it was like to be an innocent pregnant teenager, without any guidance. There were many of us, believe me.

I began sending Robin out on July 26, and have thirteen total queries submitted, as of date, with four form rejections received and eight messages floating in the ethernet. On August 6, I had an amazing turnaround of twenty minutes when Kathleen Anderson of Anderson Literary Management responded and asked me to send a FULL HARD COPY. I dropped everything and went about getting a new flash drive, making a full copy and sending it via FedEx. The clerk at Kinko’s backed off a bit when I kissed the manuscript and slid it into the envelope. It cost me an unsightly $67.69, which is a lot of money for someone who has taken the year off to finish writing a book. If I get another request like that, I may have to wander down to the local 7-11 with my paper gun.

Now is limbo. FedEx left Robin at the front door of Anderson Lit on August 13 and I’ve heard nothing since. I’ve preoccupied myself with things like the KPLU Haiku contest (link below), reviving my blog and polishing old silver platters that haven’t seen the light of day since last century.

I’m also working on Carlos at the Broken Arms, another novel. At dusk last night, on my walk, when deciding who I would dedicate my first book to (ah, perchance to dream), I realized the ideal name for Carlos’s dear aunt, whose death sets his new life in motion. Authors manage to find ways to literally bestow honor, assign heroes, villains and misanthropes. That’s why we write.

And that’s why we continue to sell ourselves so we can share what we write.

So… until the cold front warms up, the land of rejection decides to no longer embrace me, and the warm meadow of acceptance, contracts and undivided attention to honing my craft opens up like a reluctant clam shell, yes.

I will keep promoting and querying and hoping and praying. Always. 

Thanks for reading.

To vote for me in the KPLU contest, use this link. I thank you ecstatically. 

http://www.kplu.org/post/food-thought-haiku-contest