Writing with relish

A month ago, the Chicago Writers Association cooked up an idea to write a serialized novel, with each chapter being written by a different member.

Cool idea, right?

Yeah, unless you draw the short straw and get stuck with the unenviable task of writing the first chapter.

That job, as fate would have it, fell upon me.

In conceptualizing the opening to this story, I set out to accomplish three things:

1. Make it a story that other writers could relate to;
2. Make it ooze Chicago; and
3. Make it fun.

        CHAR DOGI hope that I achieved all of those goals. Read it and decide for yourself. The first five chapters of Char Dog are now online exclusively at chicagowrites.org. The author of Chapter 1 is, of course, me. Let me know what you think? Tasty? Undigestable?

While stopping in at chicagowrites, also check out part 1 of my interview with the fabulous Chicagoland mystery author Libby Fischer Hellman.

Best-seller? No. Author? Yes

Hard to believe, but a year ago this week Lost in the Ivy hit the major online retailers. Not by storm. More like a drizzle, I suppose. 

But it was sure fun dancing naked even in that light rain back then.

You can see for yourself the roller-coaster ride my book has taken on Amazon.com in this nifty little graph courtesy of Title-Z, which gives a snapshot picture of the book's Amazon sales rankings over the course of the last year. Although a liftetime sales ranking of 413,452 doesn't sound all that impressive, or impressive at all, keep in mind that there are well over 3 million books ranked by Amazon. 

I must confess, though, it's been a little depressing watching that Amazon sales ranking for my book grow like a weed over the last six months. What that obviously means is that hardly anyone is buying my book these days. Sure, every now and then there's a little bump in its ranking but then a week later it's back up in the 700,000 range again.

Should I be surprised that sales of the book have bottomed out? No. Most books have about a three- to six-month shelf life before sales start to slow and eventually become stagnant. And the reality is that I gave up on the book about six months ago when I stopped pumping money and time into marketing it.

The question is, do sales matter? Of course they do, if you want to make money and make your publisher happy and have any hope of getting other books published. And of course sales equates with readers and you want people to read what you wrote or you wouldn't have put it out there in the first place.

Perhaps a better question, though, is should sales matter? And I guess my answer to that is, it depends. It depends on what you want. If you want nothing more than to be a best-selling author, then the answer is, without question, yes. But if you just want to be an author, and you remove "best-selling" from the equation, the answer is, in my mind, no. You should be happy just to have accomplished what few have accomplished: writing a book and seeing it published, no matter how you got it published.

I can't deny that there is a certain part of me that would want to trade places with Stephen King of John Grisham. But there's another part of me that is content just to be what I am: an author. 

D-Day is coming!

Okay, so a couple weeks ago I signed up for D-Day, an event sponsored by my friends at the Chicago Writers Association. The "D" is for deadline, and the concept behind the event is that you, as a writer, set a goal to complete a writing project that you've either been thinking about doing or have already started but have stalled out on and need a jump start.

This, I thought, is just the kick in the ass that I needed. For too long I'd been dragging my feet on that next novel. Always, it seemed, there was something else more pressing. So there were stops and starts and the stops were always longer than the starts.

If I couldn't get my own rear in gear, perhaps a little peer pressure would do the trick.

And it would be cool to tell you that it has worked, that the keyboard is steaming from all the activity. But that would be fiction, which is what I'm supposed to be writing instead of this, which is non-fiction. 

Since I signed up for D-day, I haven't so much as opened the Word document that one day is supposed to be that next novel.

Today this reality hit extra hard because it is June 12, which is two short months before August 12, the day designated as D-Day, the day on which I am supposed to stand with my fellow writers and celebrate in the glory of having accomplished what I set out to do.

So what does that mean? It means that in the next 60 days, the novel that is in my head has to start coming out. My D-Day goal was 20,000 words. That's 10,000 words for each of the next two months. Or 333 words for each of the next 60 days.

I can do it. No, scratch that.

I've got to do it. No, scratch that.

I'll do it. There, that's it.

And this blog entry is 333 words exactly to this period. That's my daily measuring stick.

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By the way, today I posted to ChicagoWrites my interview with Alice Maggio, who wears hats as librarian, online columnist, book club moderator and blogger. Please do take a look at Alice's many adventures in Chicagoland. And then if you haven't done so already, check out my interviews with thriller writer J.A. Konrath and with Sharon Woodhouse, founder of Chicago's own Lake Claremont Press.

Writing with kids

Writing with kids. It may not be perilous like running with scissors. But it's a much more formidable task.

I still haven't figured out how to do it. Stephen King has three children, all grown now but he somehow managed to write prodigiously all through the time that they were being raised. John Grisham? Two children. John Irving? Three children. How, I wonder, do they do it?

The Toddler has become both my greatest inspiration for writing as well as my biggest obstruction. Each year I tell myself it's got to get easier. But The Toddler is about to enter year No. 3 and I'm still not finding it any easier to make time for writing my next novel.

This evening I started pecking away on the keyboard around 8:30. I was in a bit of a groove. The muse was working. I was feeling good. Then, about fifteen minutes later, Mommy and The Toddler walk into the office. The Toddler wants Daddy to go potty with him and to put him to sleep.

We used to have this agreement worked out in our family wherein Mommy and Daddy took turns each night putting The Toddler to sleep. This gave the parental units every other night off. The Toddler, however, has found a way to breach this agreement. He now wants one of us to read and the other to put him to sleep, so he gets the best of both worlds while there's no rest for Mommy and Daddy.

So I lead The Toddler into the loo and he begins to sing our nighttime song, "Hush Little Baby." It's been our lullaby since the time he was old enough to be cradled in my arms, though he still stumbles on the lyrics. He makes a halfhearted attempt at going pee. "I did it," he says heroically.

"That was it?" I say.

"Uh-huh."

"Uh-huh." I lead him into the bedroom and he crawls into bed and I situate myself in my spot next to the bed and commence to rubbing his back while serenading him with "Hush Little Baby."

"Again", he demands after my first rendition.

Three encores later he has finally settled down so that I can stop singing and lay my body down on the floor. Another fifteen minutes pass before he is in full snooze mode.

I exit his room at 9:45 p.m. Mommy is crashed. The muse I had for my novel is gone, replaced with the inspiration The Toddler has given me to write all that you have just read.

It is now 10:30 and time for me to go to bed. Tomorrow perhaps I'll find time to write that next novel. There's always tomorrow.

Writer Protection Program

Is there a Writer Protection Program?

If there isn't, there should be. It would be modeled after the Federal Witness Protection Program and would allow writers to relocate and change their identities when they do something that they know will embarrass if not humiliate them and subject them to endless ridicule.

Like consenting to having a photograph published in a parental magazine. A photograph in which the writer is pretending to be a knight and is using a cardboard tube left over from wrapping paper as a lance.

If you're a parent and live in Chicagoland, the likelihood is that you have at some point in your life picked up a copy of Chicago Parent. It's a freebie and it's found pretty much everywhere in Chicagoland. You can find stacks of them at my son's daycare.

Well, the editors at Chicago Parent apPARENTy liked an essay I submitted to them about my son (aka The Toddler) and his love of jousting. So much so that it looks like the essay will be published in next month's issue. That's all pretty cool. Anytime you get published it makes you feel good. The part that has me squirming a bit is that the editors didn't want to publish the essay without a photograph. And not just your average, ordinary author mugshot. They wanted an action photograph, something that would lift the words from the essay and bring it to life. They wanted a picture of me jousting with my son. 

Oh, dear. The price we as writers pay to see our words in print. 

So next month you will likely see this writer seeking a place to bury his head in shame. A knight without courage, dignity or honor.