The Writing Show 2006 Archives

In August 2004, a new word was added to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary: "bookcrossing." Bookcrossing is the practice of leaving a book in a public place to be picked up and read by others, who then do likewise.

For Ron Hornbaker, who had conceived of and launched BookCrossing in just one month in 2001, the addition was the gift of a lifetime.

BookCrossing is a lively community of more than half a million book lovers who release books into the wild to be found by others. The site's goal is to make the whole world a library.

This New Year's, we celebrate BookCrossing with founder Ron Hornbaker and three BookCrossers, including an author who has released his own books into the wild.

Join us for this exciting celebration of books and booklovers as Ron, Steve, Vikki, and Clive discuss:

* What BookCrossing is

* How it came about

* How it works

* What places are best and worst for releasing books

* What types of released books are the most popular

* What some of the strangest release locations are

* How long books travel

* What proportion of released books end up being caught

* How Clive has fared releasing his own books, and what he's learned in the process

* What cool things you can do with BookCrossing.

In 2003, Paula Berinstein and her husband did a really stupid thing: they started an online bookstore. In 2004, humiliated and a great deal poorer (but wiser), they closed it.

In episode 7 of "How Not to Run an Online Bookstore," Paula talks about the crazy branding workshop she thought might help save her business, including:

* How she ended up going to the workshop in the first place

* Why branding is important

* What sorts of people attended, and why she had trouble talking to them

* What she found helpful about the workshop, and what almost made her run screaming

* What she discovered about herself at the workshop

* What her final branding statement looked like

* What was helpful about the experience, and what ultimately didn't matter.

Join Paula for this multi-part series that will be aired a little at a time. And for heaven's sake, don't do what she did!

Charles John Huffam Dickens is the author of such classics as A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, and the beloved A Christmas Carol. Some of his characters are the most famous in all of literature: Ebenezer Scrooge, Miss Havisham, Fagin, Little Nell, Madame DeFarge, Uriah Heep. He was born in 1812 in Portsmouth, England.

Join Mr. Dickens and host Paula B. as they discuss all things Dickens, including:

* How and where he works

* What it's like to write in installments

* How A Christmas Carol came about

* What his "Carol philosophy" is

* How Carol was received

* What he keeps in his notebook Memoranda

* How he prepares for his public readings, and how Mark Twain felt about one of them

* How he's fought the piracy of his intellectual property

* What his influences are

* How he approaches his characters.

In episode 3 of "Getting Published, with Mark Leslie," we catch up with Mark post NaNoWriMo and find out how he did. We also discuss an extensive crit from Writing Show guest host Mick Halpin, and Mark tells us about a detour he's about to take.

You can read a new scene from the novel on our Web site, writingshow.com.

We invite you to offer your feedback on Mark's story and egg him on by commenting on our blog and/or writing to Paula B. at paula at writingshow dot com. You can also send your feedback to Mark at mark at markleslie.ca. You can even send him an ecard!

If you haven't sampled the outstanding blog Starting Write Now, I suggest you skedaddle on over there and check it out. The project chronicles the efforts of five writers in various stages of their careers as they struggle with the same issues so many of us face: finding time to write, planning their work, building great characters, writing believable dialog, getting published, and more.

Today we have the pleasure of their company.

Join us as we discuss the writer's life, including:

* Why Sean started the Starting Write Now blog and what its mission is

* What types of writing the guys do, and what their goals are

* What challenges and issues they're facing at this point in their writing

* How they're approaching NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), in which they're all participating this year

* Why Rich shut down his freelance writing business

* Why Yves and Aaron are working on their outlining skills

* What surprising effect on Mike's writing came from mailing his manuscript to a publisher

* How a short attention span seems to be plaguing (some of) them

* How some of the guys see mostly the trees and some of them see mostly the forest when writing

* How they feel about the challenge of writing material that's both fun to write and to read

* Why Rich feels that his English degree has been an impediment to his writing

* How they feel about using "he said" and "she said" in their dialog

* What they think makes for good dialog

* How Mike, Sean, and Yves feel about telling people they're writing

* How the guys define success

* How Aaron feels about hooking readers and pacing his stories

* How their supporting each other has affected their writing

* Why they write.

Imagine finding 100-year-old butter that's still salty and white in, of all places, an Irish bog. Then imagine discovering a centuries-old perfectly preserved body in that same bog.

Believe it or not, a bog can harbor archaeological treasures. And leave it to mystery writer Erin Hart to dive right in, well, dig right in, and dredge up something else: murder.

Before straying serendipitously into crime fiction, Erin Hart trained to become a theater director, and has been variously employed as a stage manager, propmaster, editor and copywriter, writing teacher, journalist and theater critic. Born in Crawfordsville, Indiana, and raised in Rochester, Minnesota, Erin was educated at Saint Olaf College and the University of Minnesota.

While visiting friends in Ireland one summer, Erin heard an intriguing tale about a beautiful red-haired girl whose perfectly preserved severed head was discovered in a desolate Irish bog. That true story was the inspiration for her debut novel, Haunted Ground, the first in a planned series of crime novels set mostly in Ireland, revolving around archaeology, forensics, history, traditional music and folklore. Haunted Ground has been translated into ten foreign languages; the second novel in the series, Lake of Sorrows, was published in October 2004.

Join guest host Mick Halpin and Erin as they explore bogs, mystery writing, and things Irish, including:

* Where she came up with the idea of writing a bog mystery

* How she feels about writing dark characters

* How she approaches research

* How she ties together the ancient past and the present and entices the reader to care about both

* What's going on in bog-based archaeology

* How she weaves music and culture into her stories

* What she learned from writing her first book that helped her with her second

* Why the mystery "formula" remains popular.

In episode 2 of "Getting Published, with Jean Tennant," Jean explained how she was going about her search for an agent and shared her query letter with us.

In episode 3 of "Getting Published, with Jean Tennant," Jean reports back after having sent out several queries, and we share some listener feedback. Join Jean and Paula B. as we discuss:

* What's happened with the agent queries she's sent out

* Why she's tweaking her agent query letter, and how

* Why she's leery of overpolishing her work

* How she feels about following "the rules" writing experts lay down.

Jean also reads more excerpts from her work, which we discuss, and she releases chapter 2 for us to look at.

We invite you to offer your feedback on Jean's work by commenting on our blog or writing to Paula B. at paula at writingshow dot com. Or, stop by Jean's Web site and give her an atta girl.

Take one part rhyme, one part gorgeous illustration, one hand-produced slipcase, one red ribbon bookmark, and one great story. Voila! You've got Leni the Pug: The Comet Christmas Caper, a new children's Christmas book destined to become a classic. Join us for a look inside the production of this lavish volume.

Author Keith Fiore is a New York City writer and entrepreneur. He began to write Leni the Pug: The Comet Christmas Caper in 2003, shortly after he left his job at a large media and advertising company to start his own business, 2aTEE Golf. After completing an early version in 2004 and unable to find anything like it on bookshelves, he decided not to search for a publisher. Instead, he looked for an illustrator. In 2005, he connected with Alexandru Sacui.

Artist Alexandru Sacui lives in Asheville, North Carolina. He freelances as an illustrator, designer and animator between his own projects. In 2005 and 2006, Alex illustrated the holiday tale, Leni the Pug: The Comet Christmas Caper, and designed and animated the book's Web site. He brought the book to life in glorious color and fine detail, spending up to 80 hours on each illustration. Alex studied graphic design at the University of Cincinnati, and counts Terry Gilliam, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Antoni Gaudi as his chief creative influences.

Join Keith, Alex, and Writing Show host Paula B. for a fun discussion about the production of Leni the Pug, including:

* Why Keith chose Christmas as the focus of his first book

* Why he went to an illustrator rather than a publisher

* How they came to produce such a lavish book

* What designing the book entailed

* How they decided what aspects of the story to illustrate

* How the illustration was done

* Why the camera angles are so unusual

* How long it took to do each drawing

* Why Keith decided to include "grown-up" words in his poetry

* How Keith approached the writing of his rhyme (and worked hard to get the meter just right)

* How they designed and produced the slip case, and the issues they had to deal with

* How they disagreed over the logo and the font (and who won the debate)

* How they found their printer

* How they're marketing and selling the book

* Why they've given their lavish book such a reasonable price.

If you've managed to complete your manuscript, congratulations! That's a major achievement, and you deserve to celebrate.

Once you've finished the champagne, it's time to switch hats and convert your opus into a product. Don't know where to start? Freelance editor and typographer Dick Margulis can help.

Dick's first editing job was chief copy editor for his junior high school newspaper (unpaid, of course)46 years ago. But his interest in typography predates that by a couple of years. He got serious about it in seventh grade.

In the intervening decades, Dick has been a butcher, a baker, and a candlestick maker (yes, all three) and, along the way, has had paying gigs as an advertising copywriter, a magazine columnist, a book editor, a technical writer, a marketing writer, an herbarist [sic], a Web designer, a compositor, a lithographer, and a few other things he's already forgotten. But through it all, he has remained true to his passion of clear communication through careful editing and appropriate typographic design.

Join Dick and Writing Show host Paula B. for a most enjoyable discussion about post-writing tasks, including:

* What you need to do after you've finished writing your book

* How a manuscript and a product differ

* Why you should get someone to edit your work

* What an editor does

* Why writers shouldn't take suggestions about their work personally

* What writers and editors should expect from each other

* How editing fiction differs from editing nonfiction

* Why you should ignore what your English teachers told you

* What book design is and why it's important

* How graphic designers and book designers differ

* What factors book designers have to consider

* How books are printed

* What it costs to print books

* What the lead time for getting your book produced is

* When the busiest times for printers are

* What a proofreader does.

Last time, we introduced horror writer Mark Leslie and learned that Mark was going to attempt to finish his novel A Canadian Werewolf in New York during this year's National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).

In episode 2 of Getting Published, with Mark Leslie, we catch up with Mark during NaNoWriMo and find out how the writing is going. We also discuss:

* Why publishers seem to eschew horror fiction

* What some horror writers do to try to get around the stigma surrounding horror fiction

* What types of NaNoWriMo activities he's been participating in (and avoiding)

* What type of music he listens to while writing

* What things about Mark's story Paula particularly likes

* How he came up with the notion of a "coppery taste" for blood

* How he loses ideas because he can't always write them down

* How he works out some of his plotting challenges

* How horror writers spend Halloween.

We invite you to offer your feedback on Mark's story and egg him on by commenting on our blog and/or writing to Paula B. at paula at writingshow dot com. You can also send your feedback to Mark at mark at markleslie.ca. You can even send him an ecard!