Dogs behaving, well, like dogs

I’ve spent my entire adult life watching my dogs act like idiots at the vet’s office. Relatively well-trained idiots who wouldn’t make the tech’s lives a living hell, but idiots nonetheless. Five generations of dogs (we'll talk about the sixth generation later) couldn’t make it through the front door of the clinic before the shaking started. Followed by the panting. Eye rolling. Fur shedding. Acting like the world was ending accompanied by vast sighs of canine angst.  

Through the years, my vets and the techs who help them have been, without fail, some of the kindest, gentlest people my dogs ever encountered. 

 

Keep in mind, these dogs were trained for the show ring and had been exposed to all the madness of the human world from day one. Semi tractor-trailer air brakes. Screaming toddlers. PA systems. Live fire. Slick floors, bicycles, errant wildlife, other dogs being jerks and once, a hot air balloon lifting off about fifty yards from where we were training (okay, that was kind of a surprise to everyone). Meh. They’d been handled from nose to tail by me, my family, my friends and complete strangers. Almost without exception, this interaction was met by patient tolerance or enthusiastic reciprocation. (The latter being Raider. He is a firm believer in reciprocation.)

 

But take them to the vet? Dramatics ensued.

 

Sheltie Jess buried his head under my arm and pretended the vet didn’t exist if he couldn't see her. I’m not sure he actually saw any of his veterinary caregivers in his fifteen years on this planet. 

 

Sheltie Connor was a little more chill. He pulled some kind of Jedi mind trick where he slowed all his vital signs at the vet's because he was pretty sure death was coming for him and he was going to meet it halfway. His blood pressure was so low at the vet’s office, techs couldn’t draw from a vein in his leg and had to draw from his neck.

Connor, Phoenix and Jamie

Tervuren Jamie was the undisputed high royalty of drama at the vet. Poor guy. He kinda liked going to the vet until he got neutered. What should have been a straightforward procedure turned into abdominal surgery to find a retained testicle, and that was the end of any positive association with the vet's office. When I went to pick him up after his neuter, his opinion of the situation echoed through the whole building. The tech who went to get him soon returned, pale and counting her fingers, and suggested it would be in everyone’s best interest if I were to go and fetch my own dog.

 

Malinois Phoenix was stoic about the whole vet scene. He played the “Yeah, whatever” attitude card during routine exams and blood draws. Keep in mind, this is the dog who once chased a cat through a rotary hoe. Sort of. Cats can run through rotary hoes. Malinois can not. He abandoned the cat and trotted back to me with an eight-inch laceration across his ribs. He was wagging his tail. Off we went to the vet to get stitched back together. He didn't hold it against her. 

This is what a rotary hoe looks like, in case you were wondering.
It was not in use when the cat-chasing occurred.

 

I think Phoenix liked going to the vet more than he let on. He liked to lick faces, and veterinary care meant there were lots of faces in lickable proximity. The problem was, he usually bared his teeth before he licked. I suspect he took a few years off the life of several techs when he looked at them, pulled his lips back to show a little fang, then gave them a fast tongue swipe.

 

Aussie Banner, who generally likes everyone, gave it the ol’ college try when it came to the vet’s office, but he just couldn't manage it. The dog who will happily let a complete stranger pet him takes a dim view of being poked and prodded in the name of health. He carries on, shaking and panting, but is willing to negotiate for treats. He does not, however, think the number of treats he receives at the vet’s is fair compensation for the indignities he has to endure there. He would like more. As in, all of them. He can see the full container on the counter. He is nobody’s fool.

You will give me the cookies. All of them. Now.

 

Then Raider arrived. The dog who likes everything. All the time. All at once. 24/7/365. When we go to the vet, the wiggling starts the second his paws hit the ground outside the office. Granted, this dog also wiggles at the mannequins in stores. His delight accelerates as we go through the doors. Unlike my shelties, who started trying to leave the minute they arrived, Raider starts looking for people to wiggle at.

 

He is delighted to see the front office gals. Ditto for the techs, his vet, other vets, drug salesmen, clients trying to pay their bills and on more than one occasion, a very annoyed cat in a cat carrier.

Raider at about 5 weeks old.
This is still how he does everything, including vet visits.
Go now, go fast.

When Raid was a puppy, the ecstasy of meeting all these wonderful people often triggered the waterworks. He leaked. If Jamie was the Drama King, Raider was the Peeing King. He didn’t mean to. He was just so happy he couldn’t stand it. P*ss on being reserved and aloof. There were people to meet!

 

It got to the point where we’d enter the office and I’d ask the staff not to talk to him, look at him or pet him, unless they wanted to clean up after him. Life was hard for a few years.

 

I’d like to think he’s finally outgrown this expression of delight in being able to interact with his medical providers. It only took four years—four years during which I think he peed in reception, up and down the hall, on the scale and in every exam room in our clinic. I don’t know how much vet techs get paid. It’s not enough.

 

After the sprinkles, Raider was a cooperative patient. He didn’t care what part required examination, he would happily comply. You want to see a paw? Wonderful! Check teeth? Absolutely! Palpate nether regions? A little weird but knock yourself out. He wiggled his way through routine exams and vaccinations with inexhaustible joie de vivre.

 

The only time he did NOT appreciate going to the vet was an emergency trip when he was young. He came out of his crate in the morning on three legs and went tri-podding around the yard like he’d never had four legs in his life. Off to the emergency clinic we went, where I summarily handed him over and went to sit in the waiting room where I listened to someone’s noisy dog screaming at the top of his lungs for at least thirty minutes.

 

Thirty-one minutes later, a vet appeared and said, “He’s a little excitable, isn’t he?” I decided the “If you’d let me stay with him he would have been quiet” argument wasn’t a hill I wanted to die on. Clinics have their protocols and many pets are, indeed, easier to handle when anxious owners aren’t hovering and raising everyone’s anxiety. Within twenty-four hours, Raider re-discovered his fourth leg and everything was fine. Except my wallet.

 

This fall, my local veterinary practice added a chiropractor, and I began taking Raider for routine appointments. This would be right up his alley, I thought. He was going to love going to the vet’s office for the express purpose of having someone put their hands on him. No needles or probes, just fingers.

 

It took about five seconds for Raid to fall in love with his new provider. She’d just come back from a farm call, and he thought her coverall smelled divine. He was all about the touching until he realized this was touching with a purpose beyond his own selfish gratification. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Getting him to simply hold still was asking quite a lot since he is a graduate of the school of “Pet me and I will pet you back.”

Raid does have "indoor enthusiasm" and
"outdoor enthusiasm." He just has "enthusiasm."

 When the restraint and manipulation got to be too much, Raid would break free, ricochet around the room like a demented rabbit, then settle back down to focus on bits of cheese while the appointment commenced. These breaks came to be known as “Raider minutes.” It is now commonplace for his chiro to address a troublesome area, then release him, saying, “He needs a Raider minute.” I think this is a concept we could all get behind. 

THE BOOK

I am soooooo close to being able to share the cover design. But I can't. Not yet. The final tweaks are taking an agonizing amount of time, as these things do.

Still no release date. Thank you for hanging in there and believing me while I keep chanting, "It's getting closer!" I promise!

Shut the bedroom door. Please.

Since Halloween is drawing near, I chose a scary topic this week.

Let’s talk about sex in books.

 

Coming from the viewpoint of someone born in the previous century, I’m fine with it. A little spice is fine. But like garlic and tequila, a little goes a long way. 

 

We’ve never been further from the social constraints of our Victorian predecessors who were scandalized by the accidental reveal of a booted ankle. Sex is pretty much everywhere, and we’re pretty much blasé about it. Things that would have given my grandparents heart attacks barely earn a raised eyebrow in today’s society.

 

But I am a graduate of the School of Less Is More. 

 

As I sat at my keyboard, telling the story of two old-enough-to-know-better, young-enough-to-do-it-anyway, slightly messed-up people who fall into friendship before realizing they want to be more than friends, I drank a lot of coffee while trying to decide how much more-than-friendly they were going to get on the page. I concluded that I enjoyed developing their relationship more than spying on them while they consummated it. Click. That's the bedroom door closing.

 

Avid readers encounter couples coupling in genres from romance to mystery. Good for them (the characters). They can do whatever they want to one another, as many times as they want, in as many places as they want. But after they make their intention clear, please, someone shut the door. I’m perfectly happy knowing they are enjoying one another to their mutual satisfaction without explicit descriptions of things that are bulging, throbbing, thrusting, or doing anything else that ends with -ing. I wonder if those authors’ grandmothers read their books. I am this many years old, but the thought of writing explicit, intimate scenes that my family members would read gives me the heebie-jeebies. Christmas dinner would never be the same.

 

 Color me old-fashioned. Romances, by their very nature, are about two people falling in love and a natural extension of that means they end up in the bedroom (or shower or on the kitchen counter or beach or whatever surface is handy). I don’t care where they go. But I’m over having it described in detail. Page after page. Multiple times. We’re all adults here. We understand the mechanics. 

 

I chose this topic because I’ve encountered a run of audiobooks lately that had well-developed characters and interesting storylines but waaaaaaaaay too much shagging. There was so much sex in one book, I was like, “We’re doing this again? I thought we just did this. Can't you keep it in your pants?”

 

No judgement, honestly (she said, while judging). A little consensual something-something can create a whole lot of conflict between characters who something-something’d with the wrong person and now their lives are total chaos OR took a tumble with the right person and now their lives are a different kind of chaos.

 

There’s a market for stories that embrace, well, embracing and a whole lot more. I just felt a little blindsided by all the panting, moaning, grinding, etc. that have popped up, unsuspected, in a couple of books marketed generically as romances. These are not the sort of thing you want to be listening to when your husband is in the car with you. After a few of those, I’ve wised up and started avoiding books described as steamy, spicy or sizzling. That translates to “clothes are coming off and body parts are going to do things that I suspect are not physically possible in real life but the author is determined to prove me wrong.” It's just not my gig. If it's yours, you're welcome to it.

 

Sometimes those R rated scenes are important to the story’s progress but hey, I heard you the first time. I also nearly drove into a ditch so please, you’ve made your point. Can we move on? How many times are you going to describe decadent cupcakes in a book that isn’t about cupcakes? 

 

 As I wrote “Ghost,” I struggled constantly to juggle character development, plot advancement, conflict building and all those other writerly priorities. There were lots of scenes (not involving sex) that I wrote just because they were fun—until I realized they did nothing to move the story forward, and they got cut in the name of word count. 

 

With that in mind, when I read/listen to a book with a seemingly gratuitous amount of time spent getting nekkid, I wonder if the author felt it was really necessary or just word candy? Done well, intimate scenes are, um, well done. Diana Gabaldon’s “Outlander” series is a five-star example of putting sex on the page and making it an integral part of the storyline. Done badly, the cringe potential is staggering and makes me avoid that author in the future. 

 

IN OTHER NEWS

 

My designer sent me the initial cover mock-up for “Ghost” this week! It’s still a work in progress, but I’m excited to have a foundation to build from as he and I fine-tune art concepts. 

Cover design is not for the faint of heart. Think about a favorite book—now think about what you’d want on the cover if you’d written that book—then think about how you’d convey those ideas to an artist who hasn’t read the book. That’s kinda where we are right now.

 

As always, I invite you to follow me at my author’s page: https://www.facebook.com/melinda.wichmann.author. 

Casseroles and farm wife GPS

I’ve spent the last two weeks as chief cook and bottle washer, farm Uber driver, agrarian Door Dasher, vehicle ferry pilot, meteorological consultant and occasional finder-of-lost things (the Gator wasn’t actually lost, it just wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Or maybe I wasn’t where I was supposed to be. It’s hard to tell sometimes.) In other words, harvest in the Midwest is in full swing.

Finding the Gator is a popular activity. 
It is usually followed by the four-legged passenger screaming 
all the way home because Gator rides are the Most. Fun. Thing. Ever.
(Photo by Melinda Wichmann)

 

My job is simple: keep everyone fed and drive things from Point A to Point B, with or without passengers. This is no small undertaking since farmers and their partners often operate in different dimensions of time and space.

 

Me: Do you need any help this morning?

 

Farmer: Yeah, but first I have to unload the semi at the other farm, then I’ve got to move the grain cart to that other field and fix a tire on the combine, and I’ll need a ride back to get the other pickup, but I have to check the dryer first.

 

Me: 

 

Farmer:

 

Me: Just call me.

Moving from one field to another.
Iowa Township, Iowa County, Iowa.
(Photo by Melinda Wichmann)

 Food is a big deal this time of year. The bucolic scene of a harvest meal in the field is one of the iconic images of the American farm family. Everyone is clean and smiling while they enjoy a spread that looks like it was catered by a five-star chef. The combine in the background is polished to a high gloss and the pickups parked strategically to accommodate the photo shoot could have just rolled off the showroom floor.

 

The reality of field meals is trying to park the pickup upwind of the moving dustball that is the combine chewing through dry stalks and releasing a choking cloud of field dust, grain dust, bugs and chaff so thick you can’t see through it. 

Sometimes, the first reality of meal delivery is finding the right place, but once I get in the general vicinity, it’s easy to locate the field crew by the dust cloud. And just forget about anything being clean or shiny. It’s not. Get over it. I call it a success if the paper plates don’t blow away and I remember to bring a serving spoon for the sloppy joes.

 

When the Farmer and I were first married, I lived in terror of delivering food to the wrong farm. It took several seasons to cement in my mind exactly where he meant when tossed out the farm and section names that he’d grown up with but had no meaning to me. There were a few initial hiccups, but we reached an agreement that directions like “east of the pond at the Maas farm” or “west past Immanuel Church and south at the first stop sign” was more likely to yield good results than “down by the creek” or “north of Dad’s 80.” Figuring those locations out was a skill that came with time. By the way, there are multiple fields “down by the creek.” They are in no way, shape, or form close to one another. Ask me how I know. We’re still married.

 

Ditto when it comes to needing a ride. The problem isn’t so much poor directions by either the giver or the receiver, it’s that trying to locate farmers can be like herding cats. Plans change, paths get diverted, and “be there in ten minutes” is a rather liquid interpretation of time. The sense of relief I feel when a rig pops over the hill is palpable, especially when I’ve started second-guessing whether I was supposed to go to the north gate on the east road or the east gate on the north road. Farm wives develop their own GPS after years on the job.

(Photo by Melinda Wichmann)

 

In terms of food, I’m not of the generation that delivered fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, homemade dinner rolls and pie to the field. (I know ya’ll are out there and I’m seriously awed by the magnitude of your skill, but that’s not me.) Field dining is about convenience and speed for both cook and diner. The food has to taste good and be transportable in a way that ensures it’s still hot when it gets where it's going, or if it has to wait a while when it gets there. My Crockpots are still my go-to favorite kitchen gadget.

 

Best case scenario: hot casserole. The skinny end of things: cold meat sandwiches. Dessert: always. I love this time of year because I get to bake some favorite recipes I’ve put on the back shelf because they’re too much for just the Farmer and I, but work great for field meals. It’s amazing how fast a big pan of brownies or an entire sheet cake disappears.

 

IN OTHER NEWS

 

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, things ARE moving forward with “Ghost.” The text is in the hands of the second-to-last proofreader, and my cover designer said he’d have an initial design concept for me this week. I feel like a kid on Christmas Eve!

 

And I’ve had some great authors who were generous enough to write blurbs for me—those little marketing devices on the cover of books that say delicious things like, “This stunning debut novel is a haunting, sensual blend of friendship, love and danger.” Well, okay, none of mine actually say that, but you get the idea.

Thanks for reading!

Time, OCD and waiting for Christmas

Salvador Dali's "The Persistence of Memory"
I think we've all felt like this once or twice.

 

It my six decades on this spinning galactic dust ball, I’ve experienced time in multiple dimensions. Before you suggest I step away from the coffee and whatever I’m splashing into it, let me explain. 

Time is an established measure, right? Sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour, twenty-four fours in a day, etc. You can’t change it or control it. Some folks are really good at managing chronometry. Others take a different approach. For thirty-five years, I worked with both in a job that lived and died on coffee and deadlines. There was real time and there was reporter time, which is kinda like farmer time. Example—Reporter, “I’ll have that story done by noon.” Um . . . you do mean noon today, right? Farmer, “I’ll be in for supper by 7.” Um . . . is that Central or Pacific Time?

 

When you retire, time takes on a whole new meaning. At first, it feels like there’s more of it than you know what to do with as you explore the concept of having at least forty more hours a week to call your own.

 

As you relax and pursue the interests that you previously had to carve out of barely existent spare time while you worked, you start to wonder, “How did I do all of that—hobbies, volunteering, housework, family stuff—when I was working full time?” It’s a mystery. Perhaps the space/time continuum shifts to accommodate those years so we don’t go completely insane.

 

Time stretches and contracts like a rubber band. Remember when you were seven years old and waiting for Christmas? For many of us "old folks," it wasn’t even mentioned until the Thanksgiving leftovers were cleared away, then December lasted at least three months. Now, Mariah Carey starts singing “All I Want for Christmas” three weeks before Halloween. You can buy trick-or-treat candy and candy canes at the same time. 

 

Everyone knows time goes super fast when you’re working through a training problem with your performance dog and you've entered a bunch of upcoming trials. Three weeks off from the show ring seems like a reasonable amount of time to get back on track, except it sails past in a snap, and suddenly you’re back in the ring with that troublesome exercise that may or may not be new and improved. Where did the time go?

 

Privately, I think people who train and show dogs possess the ability to manipulate some aspects of time in a way normal people don’t. Don’t be offended if you consider yourself normal. If you’re one of my “dog friends,” you’re not, so don’t worry about it.

 

Dog people can look at a judging schedule and immediately start doing math in their head that would escape them if presented in any other way: if I’m the fifth dog in the ring at 9 a.m. and I need to get there by 8 a.m. at the absolute latest, it’s an hour and a half drive to the show site, plus a ten minute stop to grab drive-through breakfast, then factor in construction zones, add a cushion of fifteen minutes so I can get out of the garage and off the farm ahead of the morning implement-moving, grain-hauling, cattle chores mayhem going up and down the lane, how many aliens does it take to make pancakes? This is why sometimes I consider just arriving at a show reason enough to raise the win flag.

 

A number of years ago, I traveled to an out-of-state dog show with a friend. We each planned to drive separately but would go together. I arrived at her house on the day we were to leave, very pleased to be early. I was excited because we were already ahead of the game and winning at the eternal human vs. time battle. I anticipated my friend ready to go, her vehicle idling at the curb in front of her house, and we would sweep out of town like warriors riding into battle.

 

My friend did not share my world view. For some folks, leaving at a specific time means actually leaving at that time. For others, it means it’s time to start getting ready to go. These two types of people should never, under any circumstances, ever travel together.

 

At the appointed time to leave, my travel partner began packing her cooler in the kitchen. This was followed by loading her van with crates, chair, gear bags, article bags, food bags, extra bags, bags containing mystery items, and finally, dogs. Then we had to drive through town to the bank so she could stop at the ATM, followed by a side trip to buy gas. We were an hour late before we ever started.

 

Being the slightly (ahem—cough, cough) OCD person I am, I had done all those things the night before. Well, except for packing the dogs and the cooler. Any obedience exhibitor will tell you the latter takes a stupid amount of time because it’s vital to get the proper balance of water, soda, dog treats and human lunch with ice or freezer packs because nobody wants food poisoning from warm tuna salad. Coolers are always too small or too big to accommodate our needs, but that is a topic for another day.

 

So yeah. OCD me. 

 

A number of years ago, I was hospitalized with a wildly racing heartbeat. Apparently a heart rate of nearly two hundred beats per minute is only acceptable if you are a lumberjack or a fetus. I was neither.

 

The attending ER physician lacked any kind of empathy, along with medical training. He informed me there was nothing wrong with me and I was a Type A personality having a panic attack. (He was partly right – after being hauled to the ER in ambulance complete with lights and sirens and my heart going whacko, I admitted to feeling just a tiny bit panicky.) It turned out I have a form of atrial fibrillation that is hard to detect on a traditional EKG but can accelerate my heart rate and knock it out of rhythm like nobody’s business. In any event, the doctor didn’t believe me when I told him I wasn’t a Type A personality and I’d never had a panic attack in my life.

 

But . . . I am often frighteningly well organized because being organized is my ticket to getting things done on time. We OCD folks are like that. When I plan to leave for a dog show at six a.m., that means the dogs and I are in the car, going down the lane at 5:59 p.m. Not everyone else works that way. I have friends whose approach to most things in life is “I’ll get there when I get there.” And you know what, that’s absolutely fine. I kinda envy them. There’s a lot to be said for refusing to play by the universe’s demands.

 

I’m telling you all this because I’m anxiously waiting the final proof copy of “How to Live with a Ghost,” which is the next-to-the-last step in production before it becomes a real live book. I’m also waiting on cover art, and let me tell you, it is like being a seven-year-old waiting for Christmas.

 

Random ramblings

 Good morning! It’s a short post this week due to the Gypsy experiencing issues with chronology (translation: I forgot what day it was.)

Last weekend I attended the All-Iowa Writers’ Conference sponsored by Our Front Porch Books Publishing Company. The event was held in Montezuma, Iowa, and a panel of speakers shared highlights of their writing and publishing journeys. It’s always fun to emerge from my hobbit hole and enjoy the company of other people who create with words. Except it meant I had to step out of my comfort zone and talk to strangers. I did. No one got hurt.

 

As I listened to the speakers, I realized there is no right or wrong way to write, no matter what your genre. It’s easy to commit writing. All you need is a laptop. Or a pen and paper, if you’re kicking it old school. I’m not sure which is more dangerous in terms of losing your work. You can delete entire chapters with the errant push of a button, then frantically pound Command Z while making desperate promises to the deity of your choice, or you can dump coffee all over your hard copy, which doesn’t come with a backup no matter who you pray to.

 

A fast Wi-Fi connection is handy, too, but unless you’re into a heavy research mode, sometimes it’s more productive not to have internet access. If your Wi-Fi has gone dark, you can’t tumble down a rabbit hole, only to emerge two hours later from a quick check of Facebook (fun fact: there is no such thing), to discover that while now you’re up-to-date on everyone’s latest dramas, your protagonist and her love interest are still stuck in a blazing barn with no escape except to launch themselves out the open loft door in a leap that mirrors Luke Skywalker’s iconic swing across the chasm on the Death Star. Except you haven’t written a word of it.

 

I read a bit of advice that went as far as suggesting writers disable their internet connection before sitting down to work so they won’t be tempted to wander off into the fairyland of cyberspace and return 20 years later, only to find that same damn cursor blinking on a blank Word document. Not a chance. My W-Fi connection is sketchy enough out here in my cornfield without deliberately taking it offline. It’s already looking for an excuse not to work. I'm not about to give it permission.

 

The top five things I find useful as I write are, in no specific order:

 

1. A quiet place. I spent more than three decades writing news stories in a busy newspaper office with phones ringing, customers at the front counter, co-workers causing all manner of chaos and a vast off-set press rumbling on the other side of the wall. My career was nearly over before work-from-home became a thing, and the final years when I carved out a home office from a spare bedroom were a welcome change. Left to my own devices, I am a solitary creature. I love my office at the back of our house, even though it’s about as organized as your average broom closet most of the time. 

 

2. A solid idea/scene/dialogue to pursue. I love to step into the momentum of a story in progress and pick up where I left off. Natural progression builds momentum and makes writing easy. Easier. Okay, not as hard. With that in mind, when I quit writing on the previous day, I try to stop at a point that will be easy to pick up and immediately move forward. Starting from a standstill is do-able but harder. Which means that's what happens 97 percent of the time.

 

3. Sticky notes. So. Many. Sticky notes. You have no idea. They’re everywhere. On my desk. In my purse. In my car. On my end table. On the dog. I’m constantly scribbling ideas on sticky notes. Yeah, I confess to looking at some of them later and having zero idea what I was thinking when I wrote them, but when a story-related idea pops into my head, I know better than to think “Oh, I’ll remember that.” I know from experience that I will not, in fact, remember that.

 

4. Coffee. I’m a morning person. I’m a coffee person. I’m a writing in the morning with my coffee leave me alone person.

 

 

5. Possession of time. Not simply time, but time I possess by wrangling it away from all the other daily demands. It’s easy to say, “I’ll sit down and write when I have time.” Guess what? You’re never going to have time. Work, family obligations, household chores, appointments, prying dead squirrels out of your dog’s jaws (don’t laugh, it was in the dark, before coffee, I was in my pajamas and I assure you it was not funny, not one little bit) will cheerfully occupy every waking moment if you let it. I’ve gotten better at carving out time to write. The rest of the world can just get along without me for a bit. Possessing time is a constant wrestling match that pits a fantasy world against the real one, but the more you work at it, the better you get. It's a helpful skill for whatever hobby you choose.

 

 

Thanks for reading, and again, I invite you to follow me at my author’s page: https://www.facebook.com/melinda.wichmann.author. 

Another stepping stone

 This week’s topic is cover design, which I know nothing about so you should be able to get on with whatever you were doing in short order.

When you go to the book store, what makes you pick up a book? The cover! 

 

Covers are a marketing device. Like the headline on a news story in the papers (geez, am I dating myself? Anyone still read newspapers?) a cover’s purpose is to make you pick up the book. And let's be honest people, once you have a book in your hand, it can be really hard to put it back on the shelf.

 

Someone once told me she bought a certain brand of dog food because the bag was pretty. See what I mean—marketing. The product on the shelf caught her eye and when her brain started making positive associations between the sparkly pink bag (like seriously sparkly, like a five-year-old's princess-themed birthday party sparkly), it automatically formed a positive association about the quality of food inside. She couldn’t get out her money fast enough. (Forty years of reading dog food labels later, I think we’ve moved past that method of decision making but still, case in point.)

 

When I shop for books by a specific author, I don’t care what’s on the cover design. It’s just icing on the cake. I know John Sandford and Diana Gabaldon and AJ Pearce are going to deliver. But when I wander off into the misty regions of unknown (to me) authors, my hands pick up what my eyes like. 

 

The cover for “Ghost” is currently in the hands of a designer who has not read the book. Don’t panic (says the woman who is routinely panicking about everything connected to publishing this book). This is normal. She doesn’t NEED to read the book. The publisher told her what it was about. Her job is to make YOU want to read the book.

 

To date, I’ve seen one initial mockup for the cover. I liked the type font for the title. Then I went off and quietly had a panic attack. Not to worry. It’s early days. I need more emotional support coffee.

 

Book covers represent the genre of the pages between them. A cover showing a couple walking hand-in-hand along a rainy boulevard in Paris is not likely to be a story about an axe murderer. (Well, it could. But it probably won't.) A cover showing a woman drinking a latte from a to-go cup and talking on her phone as she walks under a ladder with a guy balanced precariously atop is probably not going to be high courtroom drama. 

 

The cover’s sole purpose is to catch the reader’s eye, along with giving you an idea of what to expect inside. And to display the title and the author’s name, but honestly, if you’re a visual person like me, you see the picture first: the cat in the window, silhouetted against a fireplace, or the long, desolate farm lane leading to a house and barn in the distance. Those images make me want to read the book. They are also responsible for my current TBR pile, which I had to recently re-engineer because someone was going to get hurt when (not if) it fell over.

 

There is a caveat. I remember a book I read and loved a number of years ago. The cover showed a young woman wearing an old-fashioned nightgown looking over her shoulder with an expression of terror as she fled barefoot from a castle in the night. I read the entire book, waiting for that scene to take place. It never did. Namely because there was no castle in the story. And the setting was in the 1980s so not many young women were wearing old-fashioned white nightgowns. I suspect the book had been subjected to a stock cover, something slapped on by a publisher who thought—like horseshoes and hand grenades—it was close enough to count. 

 But the point of the cover was to make me get out my wallet. And it worked.

 

Thanks for sharing this journey with me. No idea what’s on deck for next week. I’m headed to the All-Iowa Writers Conference this weekend, harvest is inching ever closer and Raider and I are taking a few weeks off from the show ring to work through some training issues. If Raider wrote a book, I have no doubt the cover art would show a dog frolicking merrily about the ring while the handler throws up her hands in defeat and the judge wonders WTH is going on.

Literary agents and unicorns

Please allow me a bit of self-promotion to kick off this week’s post. It would make me giddy with delight if you would follow me at my newly launched author’s page: https://www.facebook.com/melinda.wichmann.author. This will be the central clearing house for all things “Ghost,” including release date, cover art, pre-order info, etc. when it becomes available. 

“How to Live with a Ghost” is my Novice A book. All my dog training friends are nodding in total comprehension. For the three readers of this blog who are not part of the competitive dog obedience scene, Novice A is the entry level class every American Kennel Club dog obedience trainer enters when they start their trialing career.  Once you’ve titled in that class, you can never enter it again with any of your successive dogs. You only get one Novice A dog and you never forget them. My Novice A dog was a beagle.

 

Setting out to get my Novice A book published was only marginally more difficult than convincing a beagle not to sniff. One does not simply send a completed manuscript to one of the Big Five publishers (Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Simon and Schuster) and say, “Here’s my fabulous manuscript that is destined to be a best-seller. Call me and we’ll talk.”

 

Well. You can. It’s a free country. But doing so will get you exactly nowhere because your fabulous manuscript will get tossed into a heap of other unsolicited manuscripts called the slush pile. Someone might look at it before dumping it in the digital trash. But they probably won't.

 

 

To get the Big Five to even spare you a passing glance, you need to hire a literary agent. Such a person is well-versed in the machinations of the book publishing industry. Their job is to pitch your book to the people who might want to publish and sell it.

 

How does one obtain a literary agent? I am the last person you should ask because I am an epic fail in this department. I do not have an agent. Or perhaps I am my agent. Does that make me a free agent? I should refrain from sports analogies since I have never played any variety of sports-ball.

 

You can do an online search for literary agents and find literary services staffed by agents representing all kinds of genres. But be aware, book publishing is a fickle field.

When I was in search of an agent to represent “Ghost,” BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People Of Color) books were all the rage. Agents were screaming for stories with BIPOC characters overcoming adversity. It was also the year of the Me Too movement, and LGBTQ issues were in the spotlight, so if you could combine all three elements, you were an agent’s dream. It honestly felt like those were the only topics they were interested in.

 

I sat at my laptop and looked at my Novice A novel, set in rural eastern Iowa, which is not exactly a seething mass of racial upheaval. I looked at my characters, who are, for the most part, white, straight and untraumatized by sexual assault. Even the agents specializing in the paranormal genre, which was more forgiving than represent-the-world-today general fiction, were looking for sexy vampires and dark shapeshifters. A plain old ghost in a traditional haunting scenario didn’t have them blowing up my phone. But I’d had a lot of fun writing “Ghost.” I wasn’t trying to expose social injustice or create some bizarre new paranormal world. I just wanted to share a story that would let people escape from their day-to-day crazy. 

 

 Literary agents are the gatekeepers of the book publishing industry. So how does one get the attention of a gatekeeper?

 

One writes a query letter. This soul-ripping document boils down the essence of your manuscript into a single page that presents the “elevator pitch” of the story in a style that escalates the drama of the storyline without revealing the ending. It should leave the agent absolutely dying to read the whole thing and share it with the world. What usually happens is, you send it off and if you’re lucky, you get a polite response six weeks later saying “Thanks but no thanks.”

 

As frustrating as that sounds, it’s actually worse.

 

Some agents represent cozy mysteries, cookbooks and young adult novels. Others specialize in historical fiction, Christian fiction and poetry. They have specific areas of expertise and specific themes in the material they are seeking because they know what sells in the current market and what doesn’t.

 

Agents post what they are looking for on their websites. For example: Agent Sue Brown with XYZ Literary Agency is, “Especially seeking stories with female protagonists who run pet rescues by day and ride black unicorns across the countryside by night, turning puppy mill owners into toads with spells brewed by the fairies in her garden.”

 

Oh, yay! You fire off a query letter, extolling the virtues of your female pet-rescuing, black-unicorn-riding protagonist, her spell-brewing fairies and the warty creatures she leaves in her wake. You include the requested first chapter and a synopsis. And then you wait. For. A. Very. Long. Time. Eventually, you receive a painfully polite reply with the inevitable “So sorry. Just not quite what we’re looking for.” 

 

It is my theory the reason you often see authors wearing hats in their publicity photos is because they have gone bald from tearing their hair out while querying. We present agents with exactly what they are looking for, only to be told that’s not what they’re looking for.

 

 I queried. I queried a lot. I got rejected a lot. I also got a few nibbles, with agents asking for a “full,” which meant they want to read the entire manuscript before stomping on my heart with hobnailed boots and the inevitable, “So sorry. Just not a good fit for us at the moment or ever.”

 

Now let’s be honest. Just because you’ve got all the elements the agent is looking for doesn’t mean you have them assembled properly. And that’s a legit point. In the business world time is money, and no one wants to take on a time-consuming project that has to be restructured from the ground up, no matter how wonderful the material is, when another author presents a manuscript that contains the requisite unicorns in the requisite order and actually looks like it’s been through a few serious edits. Looking back, I know my manuscript wasn’t gleaming in full-polish mode.

 

 My querying phase began and ended in 2020. I can honestly say 99 percent of the rejections I received were perfectly polite and ended with the generic but optimistic sentiment, “Good luck with your project.” The final one, however, stood out because it was so truly nasty, I put “Ghost” on the shelf and got on with my life until last fall, when the universe conspired to hit me over the head with the manuscript and whisper, “Do something with this.”

 

I did, and stumbled into a publishing contract in the most wonderful of ways, even though they involved talking to strangers, which terrifies me to this day.

Thanks for reading! Please follow me on Facebook! My publisher assures me Things Are Going To Happen Soon. Please also understand book publishing exists in its own space-time continuum, where hours and days spin endlessly without any visible result, then everything happens at once and needs to get done at the speed of yesterday. Which is exactly like showing dogs.

 

My boy Raider at USASA Nationals in 2024. Go fast!
(Photo by Aaron Gold Photography)