The Beethoven Compendium by Barry Cooper

Not a biography, but an examination of everything Beethoven by four different editors. Not the type of book you would read from cover to cover, but an exhaustive reference to his life, influences, music, writings, portraits, career, students, and so on and so forth. Highly recommended for the serious amateur, music student, or professional.

Link to Amazon: The Beethoven Compendium (A Guide to Beethoven's Life and Music) [UNABRIDGED] (Paperback)

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

What's most amazing about this book is the time that it was written - late 40s, published in the early 50s. Yet it pretty accurately predicts most facets of the civil rights movement for blacks, good and bad. In fact, the first scene in the book, the "battle royale" contains, in miniature, most of what happens later. Black man rewarded by white, reward turns out to be denigrating, blacks fight amongst themselves, whites are pulling the strings, and so on and so forth.

My advice, if you are reading this edition, is to skip the introduction - read it later if you want to. The author does quite a bit of pontificating.

The novel also is somewhat heavy-handed with the symbolism. Everything is a symbol, or can be viewed as a symbol. That gets old quickly, especially when it is so obvious.

Link to Amazon: Invisible Man

Life Portraits - Rejection

I got my latest rejection for my novel Life Portraits yesterday. This particular agent had had a partial manuscript for four months. A typical rejection: she was "intrigued by the premise", thought it had "appeal in today's market", but "just didn't fall in love".

The tally of queries and rejections for 2009 are:

I sent out 56 queries.
I got 26 rejections.
I got an astounding 30 "no response means no". In other words, 30 agents couldn't even be bothered to respond to my query with a simple no.

This is pretty discouraging for a novel that finished in the finals of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. Here's the Publisher's Weekly review that I received as part of the contest:

When a woman inherits a series of nude photographs of an unknown man, it triggers a search for the truth behind her dead mother’s mysterious history in this superb novel. Shifting back and forth between the present and the past, with portraits both metaphorical and literal, the parallels between the lives and personalities of young mother Sally Swain and her own newly-deceased mother, photographer Eva, come into detailed focus. Sally’s search draws her into a quest for her unknown father’s identity as Eva’s tale moves from the 1950s to the 1970s amid the drama of the Civil Rights movement and explores her relationships with two very different men: doctor and budding politician Paul James, and confused, often-depressed artist Isaac Rutherford. The suspense is maintained masterfully throughout, and Sally’s slow maturation as she learns the lessons of the past is handled gently and effectively. Paul, Isaac and their family members are richly portrayed with a complex and realistic balance of virtues and flaws as Sally slowly unravels Eva’s secrets and resolves her own personal challenges in the deeply satisfying conclusion.

What now? I suppose I'll keep plugging away at it. This is not my only novel, of course. I have another that is completed and yet another in progress. But I can't pretend that I am not disappointed.

Time to Regroup - Yet Again

The three finalists in the ABNA contest were supposed to be notified yesterday. My phone didn't ring with any mysterious area codes. Neither did I get any email from Amazon. So it's not me.

Depression set in quickly. It's difficult not to be hopeful and enthusiastic. I made it to the final 100 entries out of 10,000. I had an all-positive Publishers Weekly review - it was effusive in its praise with nothing negative to say. So I got my hopes up. I had a better chance of geting into the top three of ABNA than of winning the lottery.

But it's not to be. Now what? Time to regroup - yet again. I have regrouped so many times after disappointments that I feel like a veteran of strange and foreign wars. Typically the depression doesn't last that long, though. If I were really depressed I wouldn't be writing this - and the act of typing out my thoughts does help. It's not like I base my whole existence on whether I can get published or not. My value as a human being is not determined by whether you can buy my novel in a bookstore.

I will rework my query letter, including the news about ABNA and my PW review. I'll search out more agents to send it to. I'll look through the short stories again and send some more of them out to literary journals. And I'll continue to work on the next novel. Of course, I have another couple of novels that are in the drawer, so to speak, and that is probably where they will remain for the time being.

Always at the back of my mind lurks the fear that I may never get published. I may never attract the attention of an agent or an editor or a publisher. So be it, but it won't be because I didn't try.

Another Tag Cloud for Life Portraits

Tag Cloud of Life Portraits

A tag cloud is a visual representaion of the words (tags) in a document where the size of the font correlates to the frequency of the word. Tagcrowd.com has an easy interface for generating tag clouds from text.

Here is the tag cloud for my novel Life Portraits. The names of the characters and several themes of the novel are prominent.

almost anything arm around art asked atlanta away beach bed behind better boys called camera car coffee dark different done door enough eva everything eyes face father felt found front going gone hair hands happened head help home house hub isaac jack job kat kept kids kissed knew life light lisa looked love man married maybe miss mother name nothing opened paper paul people photo pictures portraits pulled really room sally sat school seemed someone something started stay stood surprised talk things think thought together told tom took town tried turned waiting walked wanted watched window woman work years york

created at TagCrowd.com

Publishers Weekly Review of Life Portraits

I received my Publishers Weekly review of my Amazan Breakthrough Novel Award entry, Life Portraits. I couldn't be more pleased with it. Obviously I got their best reviewer. Whoever it is does a better job at summing up my novel than I do:

From Publishers Weekly

When a woman inherits a series of nude photographs of an unknown man, it triggers a search for the truth behind her dead mother’s mysterious history in this superb novel. Shifting back and forth between the present and the past, with portraits both metaphorical and literal, the parallels between the lives and personalities of young mother Sally Swain and her own newly-deceased mother, photographer Eva, come into detailed focus. Sally’s search draws her into a quest for her unknown father’s identity as Eva’s tale moves from the 1950s to the 1970s amid the drama of the Civil Rights movement and explores her relationships with two very different men: doctor and budding politician Paul James, and confused, often-depressed artist Isaac Rutherford. The suspense is maintained masterfully throughout, and Sally’s slow maturation as she learns the lessons of the past is handled gently and effectively. Paul, Isaac and their family members are richly portrayed with a complex and realistic balance of virtues and flaws as Sally slowly unravels Eva’s secrets and resolves her own personal challenges in the deeply satisfying conclusion.

Pardon me for excerpting the high points:

"... superb novel."

"... suspense is maintained masterfully ..."

"... handled gently and effectively."

"... richly portrayed ..."

"... complex and realistic ..."

"... deeply satisfying conclusion."

You can read my entry. Comments are welcome.

Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award - semifinalist!

Hooray for me! I made it the semifinals of the 2009 ABNA contest. That means I survived the initial cut from 10,000 to 2,000, then to 500, and now to 100. So I'm in the top 1% of this contest. I'll take any small victory in the seemingly endless struggle to get published.

You can read and review my excerpt. Please. I gladly accept all feedback, good or bad.

The next hurdle is the elimination to only three finalists. There are some excellent entries, so I'm not exactly optimistic about my chances. I should know by May 15th.

I will also be receiving a review of my entire novel from Publishers Weekly.

Agents - unnecessary intermediaries?

An interesting blog post by Mary Walters on her Militant Writer blog.

She's not fond of literary agents, the gatekeepers between writers and publishers.

Here's the comment I left on her blog:

Speaking from an economics viewpoint, agents are intermediaries in a supply chain. The traditional supply chain is supplier-manufacturer-wholesaler-retailer-buyer.

As I see it, the writer is the supplier, the publisher and the writer working together are the manufacturer. The publisher is the wholesaler, bookstores are the retailers, and readers are the buyers. Intermediaries (agents) are not really necessary in the supply chain. History is full of examples of intermediaries (middlemen) that have been eliminated. You might say that is the natural evolution of the supply chain - to eliminate middlemen.

Recent history is also full of examples of other steps in the supply chain being eliminated or consolidated. Direct marketing via the internet is one example, with Amazon attempting to bypass bookstores.

No one should be surprised if the publishing industry undergoes some radical change as well. What that change will be I cannot guess - I wish I could. There are plenty of ongoing experiments - most of which are designed to eliminate intermediaries such as agents, or even publishers and bookstores. Only time will tell which experiments will succeed and which will fail.

Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award - Quarterfinalist!

I made it to the top 500 in the ABNA contest, out of a reported 10,000 entries. This is for my novel Life Portraits. If you would like to read my excerpt, it is on the Amazon site here: Life Portraits.

The two reviews I received from Amazon were positive. Here are the reviews and the "pitch" for the novel:

Review
I couldn't possibly count the number of novels, poems, autobiographies, paintings and songs which were inspired by the fact that the author felt like they never really knew their own parents. It's a bug question, this one of identity. And how can we possibly know who we are if we never knew where we came from in the first place. It may be an over done idea but the premise behind "Life Portraits" that I picked up from reading the snippet, is a very valid one that leaves a lot of room to play around in. We never really realize it because we spend so much time looking for information that is sensational but people are fascinating. Really they are. Everyone has a story that is amazing and deserves to be told. And so these novels keep popping up, the stories of those we never really got to know and no they're dying maybe or dead and there's all this unfinished business....no, the premise for this isn't very original. But it's written well and the little I read gave me enough mental questions about the characters introduced that if I had the whole thing in front of me I'd probably read on.

Review
This excerpt from "Life Portraits" is especially interesting to me because of the historical references to Atlanta, where I grew up during the same time as Eva would have been there. Incidents Eva, Sally's mother, photographed such as Lester Maddox blocking blacks from his restaurant with an axe-handle in the door were events I lived through and my family talked about, so this makes the portraits literally jump off the page for me. It is the rare writer who can evoke a strong sense of smell from me when I'm reading, twice removed from the experience being described, but this writer did. I can smell those sharp, acrid darkroom chemicals, and that smell completely pulls me into the story in a way that simple visual imaginings cannot do. I can still smell it, half an hour after reading it. The choice of photographs as a means of telling the story--photographs that I imagine mostly in black and white, as a serious newspaper or war photographer might shoot them--is an intriguing hook; a means of opening up a world of secrets and buried history, like the hidden nudes in Eva's locked cabinet drawer. The writing itself is quite good. I enjoy the textures of complex sentences and layered imagery, so this is a writer whose skill commands my interest in the writer as well as the story--much as I am interested in following an excellent actor's career through and transcending the characters he or she plays. Of course, I am curious to know whether Sally's inheritance is scant or somehow deliberately hurtful because of her rift with her mother--it is not money or property, after all--or (as I suspect through the foreshadowing) the greatest treasure a complex woman has to leave a daughter she deeply loved and lost.

Product Description
Imagine Sally Swain's surprise when she inherits from her mother twenty years of nude photographs of a strange man, all taken before Sally was born. Life Portraits tells the story of Eva Swain, photographer, and Isaac Rutherford, painter, as they carry out a twenty-year art project, beginning in 1955, to meet once a year and record each other's portraits. Life Portraits also tells the story of Sally, who left home at seventeen and returned fourteen years later, a single mother, in time for her mother Eva's funeral, to discover that Eva had lied to her about her father. She sets out to solve the mystery surrounding the nude portraits and find the identity of her father, and along the way discovers that she is her mother's daughter. What she learns forces her to examine her relationship with her own daughter - and her daughter's father. Part mystery and part love story, Life Portraits should appeal to readers that love complex characters and family sagas. The story of the twenty-year-long art project is original and captivating, and is spun out in alternating scenes with Sally's search for the mysterious man in the portraits.

Judging is based in part on customer reviews, so if you like what you read in my excerpt, please write a short review for me. Juding for the semifinals is over on April 15th.

One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson

This is a "sequel" to Case Histories, although both novels are fine by themselves. It's a sequel in the sense of the next in a series of mysteries that have the same detective as a protagonist.

Case Histories is a great book. One Good Turn is a good book. This book is about coincidences. As the protagonist says, "A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen." There are plenty to characters all linked by coincidences, with what I'm beginning to recognize as Atkinson's trademark style of tying everything together in unexpected ways.

It's a good read - not as great as Case Histories, but still well worth it.

Link to Amazon: One Good Turn: A Novel

Rejection X 20 = depression

My novel codenamed LP has been rejected twenty times by agents now. My novel codenamed BtC has been rejected once by an agent. I've lost count of the number of times my short stories have been rejected. So depression has set in.

I've been writing seriously for five years now, and what do I have to show for it? One short story published, in an online literary journal. I have written six novels, of which four are "starter" novels that will never be seen by an agent or editor. Two of the novels I am proud of, BtC and LP. I am told this is a very bad time to try to get an agent's attention, so maybe I could take some consolation from that, but twenty rejections for LP is tough to take.

What do I do now? Where do I go from here? I entered LP in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, but I don't have much hope for it - the initial judging is based only on a pitch. I have ideas for four more novels that I have worked on a little. I suppose I will continue to be optimistic and plug away at another novel, probably the one codenamed LL. At this point I have gotten used to writing and creating - I miss it when I am depressed and not writing.

The prospect of never being published is frightening and sobering. It is a very real possibility. Book sales were declining, even before the current financial downturn. And perhaps I am just not good enough. Maybe I will never attract the attention of one of the gatekeepers (the agents) no matter how well I write. It takes a great deal of determination to keep plugging away at it in the face of so much rejection.

Piano Lessons have begun

I had my last piano lesson way back in 1973 - thirty-six years ago. I started playing again, on my own, in January of 2008. This year, Laurie got me a couple of months of piano lessons for Christmas, starting in January of 2009. Well, I've had two lessons now ( I take one every two weeks), and decided I would try recording myself to see what I sounded like. The answer is pretty bad. At least this will give me a starting point from which to judge my progress.

How long will I take lessons? I don't know. It is satisfying a need that I have to express myself, and I'm having fun with it. So, if you are brave, have a listen.

prelude-bwv-846

a-moment-lost

melody-from-album-for-the-young

Books Read 2008

Here is the list of books that I read in 2008. Seventy-three interesting and thought-provoking books. Mostly novels, and those are mostly literary, but also poetry, civil war history, and musical topics. A great year for reading.

South Carolina Writers Workshop Complaint

I attended the SCWW in 2007 and had a good time. I received an excellent manuscript critique and met some authors and agents that I liked and respected. So I decided to go back in 2008, and convinced my wife to go with me.

Unfortunately my brother passed away just two days before the conference, at age fifty-nine, from complications related to colon cancer. The three months prior to that were spent traveling back and forth to see him when I could and thinking about him the rest of the time. Not much writing got done. Missing the conference was of little consequence in the big picture at the time. Now that I've had a couple of weeks to recover, it has left a very bad impression.

They give no refunds on such short notice, so the money is gone. The Hilton also required a one night cancellation fee. Since my wife was accompanying me this year, we are out about a thousand dollars. My wife appealed to the SCWW, to no avail.

I had also paid one hundred dollars extra for an extended critique. They said there was no way they would arrange for the critique by phone or email, or even tell me who was doing the critique. Both my wife and I appealed via email. Yesterday I got a five line email that contained my extended critique. I won't name who gave the critique, but my impression is simple carelessness. Even though I paid extra, I am just not worth the time or effort because I was unable to attend in person.

So this is my rant against the South Carolina Writers Workshop. If I had been able to attend, no doubt I would have had a very different impression, but the careless and callous treatment I have received will probably prevent me from ever attending again.

Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee

Despair would be a better title, since that is the tone of this novel. And it sums up how I felt when I finished reading it.

I loathe the protagonist. He is selfish, hypocritical, melodramatic, and unrepentant. He is worse than the characters who commit violent acts in the novel.

So it's tough for me to get past my dislike for the protagonist and the overall feeling of despair I get when reading this. Is the author a good writer? Yes. Would I recommend this book? No.

Last Orders by Graham Swift

An outstanding novel. Obviously a homage to Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. The narration is the same - first person serial, with seven of the characters sharing the duties of narration, all in first person. The chapter titles are the names of the characters who narrate, except for the chapters which are named for locations, which serve to advance the action.

The story is similar to Faulkner also. A man has died, and wishes his friends and family to make a trip to throw his ashes off a pier. Sound similar?

And it shares some of the black humor of Faulkner as well, although not as dramatic. With Faulkner, I shook my head in disbelief at the actions of the characters, while actually believing what had occurred. Swift does not evoke that same reaction, but portions of the character's "quest" are wryly humorous.

So an outstanding effort. I admire anyone who can plan and execute a novel of this much precision.

The Ghost Road by Pat Barker

An interesting novel of WWI. An English doctor compares and contrasts the customs and beliefs of Polynesian headhunters with the conduct of soldiers in the war.

This is the third book in a series, and I read it because it won the Booker prize, without reading the previous novels. It was tough to get started because of that. The author didn't waste any time recapping what had happened before, so I had to guess and piece together the characters as best I could. I have to say it is not intended to be read without the preceding novels, but I managed.

"It's not worth it" is the basic message here, referring to the war. There are also graphic descriptions of homosexual sex too. One of the soldiers is bisexual, engaged to be married, and has sex with female prostitutes, his fiance, and various men. I believe his character may be explained better in the previous novels, or at least the author may give some background.

So it's interesting, just not that effective standing alone.

How I spent my summer vacation

Actually, how I have been spending my summer. Several highlights:

- Signed up for the South Carolina Writer's Conference in October. Polished up the beginning of the latest novel and sent it off to be critiqued. Laurie will be going with me this time - that's good news, because I can be a painfully-shy wallflower when alone.

- Spent our vacation at the John C. Campbell Folk School. We both took a memoir writing class from Vicki Hunt. That was a great time, and she's an excellent and insightful teacher. The class sessions were very "Oprahesque", as we all shared episodes from our past. I'm not really very keen on writing a memoir, but writing is writing, and I had a good time. Came away with a version of my "Broken Keys" story that everybody liked. We had a reading on the last night, and I got so choked up reading it that I had to stop and try to recover. Very embarrassing, but everyone was very nice about it. I guess that episode of the broken piano afected me more than I realized.

- So I converted the first person memoir about the broken piano to a 3rd person short story - added some scenes, narrativem and dialog, rearraged things, etc. Sent it off to Glimmer Train for the "Family Matters" contest they have every so often. Should hear back from them fairly soon - they are very good at reviewing submissions.

So the summer has been productive. I know I made the resolution to let the novel rest and work on shorter pieces and I have done that. We'll see what happens...

Ipod touch test post

A test of posting from my iPod touch. A cute trick, but too tedious for a substantive post.