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)

Say cheese

Earlier this week I had a professional head shot taken to include in the book. Horrors. Having my picture taken ranks up there with going to the dentist in terms of anxiety-inducing experiences. It’s awkward. It’s tense. And it often produces an unpleasant outcome.

 

My last “professional” photo experience was back in the day when I worked in a corporate-owned newspaper. The higher-ups decreed everyone on staff would provide a head shot to be included in promotional material, and we were to take said pictures of one another. You would think an office full of newspaper photographers could handle the assignment of taking one another’s picture, but you might as well have given a camera to a monkey.

 

 

Collectively, we had photographed town festivals, high school sports, car wrecks, house fires, political candidates stumping through Iowa County, two-headed calves, the 30,000 people on bicycles phenomenon that is RAGBRAI and pretty much anything that can happen at a county fair. But when tasked with taking photos of one another, we approached it with about as much enthusiasm as convicts being prodded along to the gallows.

 

The corporate office, in typical corporate office style, announced the deadline for submitting the photos  was approximately two hours before we knew anything about them, so there was no time to obsess about wardrobe or hair or makeup. That was probably a good thing. We took each other’s pictures in a mechanical, git-er-done approach that produced predictable results. In other words, our head shots all looked like booking photos at the county jail. 

 

Flash forward 15 years and even the thought of someone taking my picture taken sent me into a panic. You're dealing with someone whose social media profile picture is of her dog. I toyed with the idea of just doing a selfie and calling it good, but experience has taught me I am the world’s worst selfie-taker. I would put the pressure of making me look decent on someone else’s shoulders.

 

Exhibit A: Not a good selfie-er. But I love this pic because Phoenix.

 A friend recommended a local studio photographer, and I made the appointment. Then I spent the next two weeks losing my mind. What to wear? What to do with my hair? Makeup, yes? Makeup, no? Should I buy a new outfit? What kind of outfit? Maybe I should have my hair done. Maybe I should wear a hat. I tore my closet apart and reached the conclusion I had nothing to wear. That is not entirely true. I have plenty to wear. Plenty of hoodies and flannels and graphic T-shirts emblazoned with cartoon dogs and clever sayings like “Haulin’ Auss” and “Total Sit Show.” 

 

I didn’t have a particular “look” in mind, mostly because my natural “look” is jeans with a T-shirt or jeans with a hoodie. I wasn’t about to try re-inventing myself for a picture. So back I went to the closet. I barely had anything resembling a professional wardrobe left from my years at the newspapers. My last five years with the papers were work-from-home, and I’ve been retired for two years so any semblance of dress clothes had long gone out the window. I have the requisite black funeral/wedding pants, a few pair of decent brown slacks for showing Raider and more jeans, cargo pants and hiking pants that should probably be allowed.

 

After much agonizing, I settled on a long-sleeved, button-down teal blouse. Simple. Classic. Also, it fit and it didn’t need fussy ironing.

 

The next problem — um, project — was my hair. About six months ago, I decided to let my very short, very layered, very no-nonsense cut grow out. And it did. It’s kinda fun. It’s also curly. In the summer, with humidity, it’s very curly in a self-styling kind of way that is borderline defiant. I’m okay with that. I did both high school and college in the 1980s. I spent more time conquering my then-long hair with blow dryers, mousse, gel, curling irons and Aqua Net than I did going to class. I’ve paid my hair dues and have reached the point in life where my hair can do as it pleases. That is not a hill I want to die on.

 

 

Except I thought perhaps I should care just a little because this picture was going to be seen by (hopefully) a lot of people, and I didn’t want their first impression to be “Whoa. How did this woman write a book when she can’t even style her hair?”

 

Accessorizing was minimal, although I had nightmares about the earrings I’d chosen. I dreamed I showed up at the photography studio wearing earrings the size of Buick hubcaps, and the photographer found absolutely nothing wrong with that and proceeded to do the shoot, never questioning why I had barrel hoops in my ears.

 

So, off I went on Tuesday morning, feeling nervous and starched in my button-down shirt, my hair more-or-less behaving itself and the proper earrings in my ears, to have my picture made. That’s what my grandmother always called it — having your picture made. 

 

The photographer was wonderful, in the way good photographers can get you to relax while simultaneously asking you to stand and turn and cross your arms and tip your head left (no, your other left), chin down, shoulders back, weight on your right leg, lean in, smile, smile bigger. In some ways, it was akin to having a mammogram. Ladies, if you know, you know. I kept waiting for her to tell me to hold my breath and not move.

 

The only thing she didn’t ask was for me to put my ears up. Dog show folks know what I’m talking about. If a friend had been standing behind her with a squeaky or shaking a bag of treats (i.e., cupcakes), I would have relaxed into the process even more.

 

I haven’t seen the edited shots yet, but she showed me the raw images when we were done. They looked like me, my hair was not totally out of control and I did not appear to be a candidate for Cell Block A. Really, that’s all I can ask.