…but it ain’t all sunshine and kittens either. I’m talking about my soon-to-be self-published e-book, Me and You: A Collection of Shorts. The book consists of ten short shorts, the longest being just shy of 7,000 words and the shortest checking in at just over 100. I like to write until I’ve said what I’ve wanted to say. I don’t add fluff for fluff’s sake (of course, my critics may disagree). But back to the main point: many (most?) of the stories in the book have a serious tone, but I mix it up with some funny shorts, a little sarcasm, a little humor. I don’t want to summarize each of the stories (where’s the fun in that?), but in my book trailer below, I have left a few hints for my readers to ponder until publication.
Book Trailer on YouTube
Interest piqued? You bet it is. Confused? You won’t be after reading the book.
When asked, “Whadya write?”, people expect me to reply with a genre. Or, most annoyingly, they will supply an answer before I can reply: “Romances ‘n’ stuff?” No, no. A woman is capable of writing something other than romance novels. “Vampires? Witchcraft?” No, no. Although I greatly admire J.K. Rowling’s writing, I do not have the imagination required of fantasy or sci-fi writers. That’s not to say I have no imagination. On the contrary, imagination is key to writing. I like to take the mundane and twist it into a what-if situation that becomes funny or sad or disturbing. I imagine ordinary people who do ordinary things then force them to change, if only in a small way. I think of my stories as being character-driven. I aspire to write literary stories, but my goal may be too lofty. I don’t pretend to be as good as The Greats. I may simply be a writer of general fiction, and that’s just fine. The most important thing for a writer is to not only write, but to share.
I like to write alone, at my desk. Even knowing someone else is in the house is distracting. I write longhand, with No. 2 pencils encased in imitation wood. In recent years I’ve tried to be more linear with my notebooks writings. I try to write one page into the next instead of slamming the notebook down and scribbling on a random page, but I’m still not above writing on whatever is handy. In fact, I’ve kept nearly everything I’ve ever written — ideas, journals, unfinished letters, my very first story about an abandoned doll in an old house.
Transferring my lovely, handwritten pages to the computer is laborious: I’m just a step or two above hunt-and-peck typing. Sitting at the keyboard pounding out words, scenes, chapters is certainly more efficient. But that method lacks the sense of having written something that belongs to me. The physical act of putting pencil to paper and watching my hand form words makes the story real for me, confirms that it sprang from my head. One of my favorite quotations is “Without the heart, there can be no understanding between hand and mind,” which, I admit, I first saw in Madonna’s “Express Yourself” video. However, that quotation is actually a rather more romantic rephrasing from Thea von Harbou’s 1920′s novella, Metropolis: “The mediator between brain and muscle must be the Heart.” (Sidenote: Metropolis is both an excellent read and a great film.) I find my heart refuses to mediate when I attempt to plug my brain straight into the computer.
My writing desk holds a stack of notebooks, a pile of favorite books (currently The Great Gatsby and William Stafford’s poetry book, Passwords), and some writerly reference books, books with exercises and tips on how to write yourself out of a slump. There’s usually a Diet Coke among the paper as well and music blaring from one source or other. Funny, music is one of the few things that distract me…
No, I have not fallen off the face of the earth. I have been busy writing and editing, and I’ve decided to publish a collection of short stories. The e-book will be available through the Kindle store at amazon.com; but you don’t need a Kindle to read it (although I absolutely love mine!). Kindle apps are available across many platforms, and with the new Kindle Cloud Reader, you can even read your books using your Web browser. More details to come once I have published my book, hopefully sometime next month.
True to my word, I have been reading more than I have been writing this year. I read Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres for the thousandth time, but this time I studied it, marking each scene. Then I paid my friendly neighborhood library a visit. It’s noisier there than I would like, but the deeper you get into the fiction section the noise fades to a distant drone. I wandered the aisles, pausing to grin at the placement of author Virgin next to author Virtue. I walked more and more slowly until I stopped altogether and surveyed the spines. Most of them were dusty. Many were faded. I wondered how many of them had been checked out recently, or ever. Most of the authors were foreign to me. I wondered when the Library would come though and weed out the underused books, the old and out-of-date books. What treasures would remain locked inside those books, hidden from the patrons, because some newly published writer (me?) had displaced them with their own shining jewels. It’s sad, really, the life cycle of a book. So few burn steadily into the literary canon; most are supernovas, blazing out all at once.
What will I be? Does it matter? Because I will still mourn the unloved books hiding on the shelves, hoping that they are not the weeds that will be pulled.