What About Ordering a Magic Spell instead of a Pizza?
This week I managed (finally) to figure out how to post the cover of my novel on my blog. See, there it is on the sidebar. Now don’t laugh. Sometimes I think writing and editing it was easier than finding out how to use that pesky little image widget. (Just kidding.) And then there was the problem of how to post links to Amazon and Barnes and Noble. I googled and goolged and googled before I got that right. And I’m not sure those links are all pro, but they work. That’s all that counts.
I decided to publish Dance for a Dead Princess myself for several reasons. One, the whole business of finding a literary agent seems to have changed radically. Back in 1995 when I found the lovely lady who represented Summer’s Child, the whole process of agent rejection was more like a stately dance. I sent my book summary and sample chapters off in discreet navy folders, and they came back in my prepaid envelopes with “No Thanks” scrawled on the cover page. Moral of story: a human opened and at least looked a them. Until by and by, a human liked them and represented them.
Summer’s Child came close but did not sell, and another author appropriated my title (without asking me, but never mind), and my agent retired while I built a law practice and raised my children. (No small feat, by the way.) Then, a year or so ago, when I dove into the Literary Agent Ocean once more because I now had two novels I wanted to publish, I was shocked at how things had changed. Just their websites were hostile and uninviting. “Closed to submissions.” “We do not consider unpublished writers.” “We only accept referrals.” Couldn’t they have just written it out, “We are just TOO GRAND to ever read a WORD you’ve written even if it’s only a Cover Letter”? Or “If you’ve NEVER BEEN PUBLISHED we do not consider you LITERATE no matter how many GRADUATE DEGREES you have.” And then, the ones who had a tiny chink in their website armor allowed email submissions to which they promised NEVER TO REPLY. (But logical question: at some point weren’t all now published authors unpublished and didn’t they turn out to be both LITERATE and ENTERTAINING? Doesn’t that sort of squash the Literary Agent view of the Unpublished? Just a thought.)
Now, I am a lawyer, and law is not a profession known for being touchy feely. But I at least tell people when I am not going to represent them. And I do so in very polite lawyerspeak on ivory twenty-pound bond, personally signed by me, which they can cherish for a lifetime along with my highly impressive letterhead. (Don’t laugh. If you are a lawyer, you are selling your brain, so your letterhead has to be IMPRESSIVE to convince the client your brain is worth the fee.) “Dear Ms. XYZ, having considered the facts of your case, I have concluded I am not the right attorney for your file. Best of luck with your matter. Very truly yours, etc.”
Now, I hasten to add, one or two agents wrote me polite and professional turndown letters; and I respected their sincerity. In particular, they acknowledged what a feat it is even to create a novel even if mine was not right for them. But they were the minority, and I just didn’t see the point of beating my head against the closed Literary Agent Door. It reminded me of trying to get into social clubs in high school. The Cool Kids were never going to let you in no matter your merits because they had deemed you unworthy without ever taking time to even talk to you.
Anyway, Literary Agents were a barrier to entering the world of author. But they were no longer insurmountable. And even more importantly, I had seen what traditionally published authors go through. Back in the day, before I found My Agent, a published friend of mine shared her tribulations as her then-agent tried to turn her into Olivia Goldsmith (who was hot at the time; she died during plastic surgery. No comment.) My friend did not want to write the Big Hollywood genre thrillers the agent wanted. So her next move was to Agent Two, who, so far as I know, let her be herself. But I noticed that when her publisher published her books, she had to do all the work of promoting it. And I don’t mean being flown around first class from New York, to Boston, to London, and Paris with appearances on the Today show and GMA. No, my friend had to call the local bookstores, beg for book signing dates, haul her books there, and hope someone would show up to see her and ask her to sign one. In short, she was doing all the work, and it was not glamorous.
Now, I gave up big law firm practice to work for myself. There are upsides and downsides, of course, to that decision but I am my own boss. (And I’m pretty nice to work for, by the way.) So it made sense that if I was going to be a writer (and I’ve been a storyteller since the day I was born and a writer since age 11), I would light out for the Territory on my own. Hence decision: self-publish.
On March 30, 2013, I uploaded Dance For A Dead Princess to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Smashwords, armed only with my favorable Kirkus review and determined to figure out how to tell the world about my book. A great read. Cheaper than a Starbuck’s latte and lasts longer too. In the past month, I have floundered as I learned the ways of promoting a book. Some sites are very straightforward: send us money. Ok, I can handle that. Some sites have RULES that are as complicated as magic spells (and which makes me wonder if it would be easier to order a spell from California Psychics). The RULES go like this: You must have x stars, x reviews no longer than x which were not created under a New or Full Moon. Wow, mind boggling. Worse than the California Rules of Court. (Trust me, those babies are better than sleeping pills!) Of course, my question for those sites – pardon me for being lawyerlike – is how do you get x reviews with x stars under whatever moons your prescribe until you can let the word know your book is out there? Isn’t publicity designed to inform readers you and your book exist so they can create the x reviews, with the x stars under the required moons? Or am I being too logical?
Anyway, my novel and I have emerged into the new world of Novel Promotion where right now I feel as if I’m standing under a dark sky watching all the tiny little stars of all the books in the world shine down at me. But I believe in Dance or I wouldn’t have come this far. So I’ve just got to figure out how to help it shine a little brighter so readers who would love it will find it. This is a new journey, and I’m up for it.
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Kirkus Reviews
Heroes are Always Remembered
This has been a tough week for all of us. First the heartbreaking images from the Boston Marathon on Monday and then last night and today the death of one perpetrator and the capture of the other. Monday’s blast not only shattered the world around the marathon’s finish line, it shook all of us to our emotional core. How to believe in the essential goodness of humanity in the face of three young lives extinguished in seconds and hundreds maimed and injured? This is the place where we want to shake our fists at God and demand, “Are You There?”
The heroes who step forward in times like these are the ones who bring us redemption. Because they are willing to be selfless in the face of danger and even death, they let us go on believing that the essence of life is goodness and love. Boston and the sight of so many law enforcement officers, as well as civilians, stepping forward as heroes reminds me of a hero whom I never met and who died when I was two years younger than Martin Richard, but whose story has become an important part of my family lore. In the family I grew up in, the word “Boston” is synonymous with “Dick Horan.” Here’s why.
My father was an FBI agent. He was a very good FBI agent. That meant when something happened in the world – like Boston on Monday – our phone would ring in the middle of the night, and he would be whisked away on “indefinite assignment.” We never knew when he would be back. And once in a great while we would also admit the awful corollary: we never knew if he would be back – although it is exceedingly rare for an agent to be killed in the line of duty.
On January 17, 1950, a gang led by Joseph “Big Joe” McGinnis and Joseph “Spec” O’Keefe robbed the Brinks bank on the north end of Prince Street and Commercial Street in Boston. They arrived in Brinks’ guard uniforms and masks, went to the trouble of duplicating the bank’s keys, and made off with $1,218,211.29 in cash, and $1,557,183.83 in checks, money orders, and other securities. They divided an initial cut of the loot and put the rest away to wait for the six-year statute of limitations to run while they squabbled and fell out with each other. The FBI investigated the Great Brinks Robbery for many years and finally made arrests in January 12, 1956, just five days before the statute of limitations expired.
But my father had no inkling of that outcome when he got “the call” late one night in the winter of 1951. I was heading toward my second birthday in the coming August, and my mother was pregnant. In the 1950’s married women had children because everyone expected them to. But a more unmaternal person was never born than my mother. So she was not delighted to be left alone, although she knew it came with the territory of being my father’s wife.
Six months later, my father was still in Boston and had no idea when he would be back. It was hot, hot, southern summer in Tennessee; and my mother was uncomfortably pregnant and stuck with me, the charming child who neither napped nor slept. One particularly miserable day in mid-July, a scruffy man came to the door and asked to borrow the ladder he had seen in our open garage. Now, of course, my law enforcement wife mother should have known not to leave the door open or to say yes; but we were home, and it was hot, and she did. The man used the ladder, put it back, and then returned in the wee hours of the night and broke into garage.
Nearly eight months pregnant, my terrified mother summoned the police, who responded at once and frightened the man away. Later, Mother speculated he had seen the country ham she had brought from her father’s farm and the jars of canned goods my grandmother hand contributed and had returned to steal the food.
Calls to my father in Boston did not produce his return. I’m not sure if she asked him to come home, but I bet she did. However, the Bureau was not going to yank a top agent from a special assignment because of a domestic burglary.
Then, a week later, the doctor informed my mother my sister was going to be a breech birth. Now she really burned up the phone lines to Boston.
FBI agents work in pairs. My father’s partner was an agent named Dick Horan, then of the Boston office. Although my father did not strike up many friendships, he and Dick hit it off. That night after my mother’s call, Dick could tell my father was upset, and he insisted the two go to a movie. Now, my father hated two things in the world: sweets and movies. But he went because Dick insisted and eventually told him about my mother’s call.
In the family legend, it is Dick who went to the Special Agent in Charge and asked for the Bureau to send my father home. I suspect that is true, since I can’t picture my father, hat in hand, asking to leave. But not long after Dick dragged Dad to the movies, the SAC called him into his office and told him he was going home. To this day, I remember (and I was less than two mind you) going to the airport to get him that hot July afternoon in my best dress and hair bow. Then a few weeks after his return, my ever fickle sister turned herself around and was born head first.
On April 18, 1957, Dick Horan was killed by a fugitive on parole whom he and a team of agents were trying to arrest in Suffield, Connecticut. The rest of the agents went to the back door of the house. As Dick went down the basement steps alone, Francis Kolakowski shot him to death. I was just shy of my seventh birthday. After that, my father was ever-bitter about the subject of parole and would tell Dick’s story if the word was spoken in his presence. Understandable.
So, you see, heroes live on. I cannot count the nights my father sat around the dinner table, and in the tradition of true Southern storytellers, told Dick’s story. And today, all these years later, I am telling it to you. In the same way, night after night, someone will tell the stories of the heroes of Boston. And they, like Dick, will live in the lore of uncounted families from generation to generation. I never met Dick Horan, but I always felt as if I had. He meant a lot to my dad, who was close to few people in his life. Dick was a good man and a hero. And this week, the good men and women of Boston became heroes and redeemed us all. They gave us the hope and the courage to believe that evil is the exception and goodness is the rule.
Richard P. Horan, a hero
Drip, Drip, the Ceiling is Falling
It all began on Wednesday morning when I found a large water spot in front of the vanity in the bathroom just off my bedroom. After sticking my head into the dark depths of the vanity (and living to tell the tale), I discovered a leaking cold water valve under the sink. Another piece of original 1978 hardware had failed in my condo.
About that time my son called from downstairs, “Mom, did you know water is dripping onto the living room floor?” Soaking wet myself from my shower, I dashed down to see the sodden ceiling just under the dripping sink. I grabbed a bucket and old towels and summoned the plumber.
Two hours and two hundred dollars later, the leaking valve was a thing of the past. But the fun was just beginning with the ceiling. The “Restoration” service attached to the plumber called to schedule an appointment and cheerfully announced they were going to tear out my wet ceiling “just in case.” Of what, I wondered. I suppose their theory was an absent ceiling can’t grow mold. But an absent ceiling isn’t much to look at. And how does tearing out my ceiling qualify as “Restoration”? I quietly and firmly informed them that, although I had telephoned my claim in to my insurance company and they agreed I was covered sans deductible, the Nuclear Option was not going to happen that afternoon. Couldn’t they just bring over some big fans, please?
Not long after that, a cocky “Restoration” specialist arrived to tell me they would bring fans, but the fans would sound like 747’s taking off, and they would run 24 hours a day. Mind you this is the area where I compose my unbrief briefs 24/7. Appellate work is a quiet scholarly activity. You do it in libraries, not on airport runways. And Mr. Cocky Specialist also informed me that if the errant ceiling didn’t dry out (and he fully expected it wouldn’t) they’d arrive on Monday to tear it out. I said, No thanks. And summoned someone associated with my insurance company for a Second Opinion.
Mr. Second Opinion was a very nice, quiet Hispanic gentleman who spoke a soft waterfall of Spanish to his female assistant. His peaceful demeanor was reassuring. He and the assistant measured and studied and figured and eventually informed me the upstairs wall between my bedroom and the bathroom was also wet. Mr. Cocky in his fixation on demolition had missed that. They said the 747 fans were unavoidable, but they didn’t think they needed to tear anything out.
I surveyed my options. Only I didn’t have any options. Large noisy equipment was going to have to take over my bedroom and living room, including where I work, until Monday. And I had deadlines in the Court of Appeal and I couldn’t just go on “Water Vacay” while I waited for it to be over. Plus my Golden Retrievers, who hate loud noise, and my son’s cat would never last two minutes with the 747’s in the house. Not me mention me, who hates loud repetitive noises.
So here I am on Saturday morning evacuated to a hotel that allows pets while the fans have rendered the house uninhabitable. The hotel is actually quite nice, but I would rather have skipped the ordeal of packing and taking everything down in the condo that the 747’s could damage. I was up really late on Wednesday night.
And then, too, there is the problem of uprooting dogs who never go anywhere except the vets and the groomers. You can explain to a toddler that the family is going to stay in a hotel for a few days while the house is fixed, but you can’t take two Golden Retrievers into a hotel room, turn on TV, and plug them into Cartoon Network for the duration. Melody and Rhythm are better today, but on Thursday they would not let me out of their sight.
This morning thoughtful Mr. Second Opinion informed me we can go home tomorrow. And he installed Hepa filters yesterday because I mentioned I was having trouble breathing from the dust the fans are blowing around. What a change from Demolition Man!
This whole experience has stirred up the homebody in me who loves to live peacefully surrounded by her little treasures. I see why I dream about traveling and then just stay home.
What looks like a fan and sounds like a 747
Red and Yellow, Black and White
Jimmy Carter left the Southern Baptist Conference after more than sixty years. He had been a deacon and a Sunday School teacher, and he is a profoundly and sincerely religious man. But his reason for leaving the Southern Baptists: the church’s increasing rigidity over the equality of women. Relying on certain passages of scripture, the Southern Baptists insist upon a wife’s subjugation to her husband. And they no longer allow women in the ministry.
Southern Baptists are the United States’ largest Protestant denomination, with 15.9 million members. I doubt that people who have not lived in the South understand what a powerful presence they are in Southern society and culture. My own grandfather was a rigid Southern Baptist who believed in eternal damnation for setting foot in any other church. As a child, I was bundled off to Sunday School and kindergarten at the Southern Baptist church that literally sat on our doorstep. (Eventually they would buy the house I grew up in and turn it into a parking lot, an act of destruction that has always left me profoundly sad.)
I was lucky that my early contact with the mighty Southern Baptist conference had nothing to do with doctrine and everything to do with my parents not wanting to go to church themselves. They shuffled me across the street, Sunday after Sunday, and then went home to put their feet up, read the paper, and drink coffee until it was time to pick me up. The perfect example of “Do as I say, not as I do.”
Eventually, though, being Southern parents, mine were forced to decide about their children’s Religious Affiliation. Southerners have to have some sort of Religious Affiliation to use on Easter and Christmas. And to get married and buried.
Since I had not been baptized as an infant – a practice my Southern Baptist father would never have agreed to and my Methodist mother had no opinion about – I necessarily would have to be baptized as a pre-teen or teen. But the point was, I was a daughter of the South and so I had to be baptized somehow, to avoid going to hell, of course. (Hell at that point was thought to be populated by Northerners, at least unreconstructed Southerners thought so. I didn’t give it much thought since I never planned to wind up there. And it did seem to me that the Civil War had been over for quite some time.)
My parents eventually lit upon a sect of Presbyterians who conducted services as if they were Episcopalians minus kneeling, the sign of the cross, and robes on the minister. For some reason, these Presbys were taken with the beauty of the Anglican liturgy (me, too, by the way) and they adopted it as their own. My father quit being a Southern Baptist and my mother quit being a Methodist, and I got baptized and turned into a Presbyterian by having a red carnation dipped into a bowl of water and squashed on top of my head. Whew! Eternal Damnation avoided! (I fully believe God has a sense of humor because He gave me one.)
By and by, to the absolute horror of my parents, I became an Episcopalian. This required yet another baptism for technical Episcopalian reasons. In their world, water on top of the head doesn’t save you. It has to cross your forehead. So to make absolutely sure I was good and baptized for all time, the priest poured water from a silver shell over my forehead. Killed the hairdo, but now Nothing stood between me, Saint Peter, and those Pearly Gates.
At first, I wanted to be an Episcopalian so that I could walk into any Anglican communion anywhere and hear the beautiful words of the liturgy. I loved that feeling of community when the priest intoned that gorgeous subjunctive phase, “The Lord be with you.” And we answered, “And also with you.” If I went to a Presbyterian church, other than the one I grew up in, I would not hear the liturgy. Then, by and by, my first child turned out to be a daughter. And I wanted her to grow up in a church where women could be priests if they wanted to be. I couldn’t see the point of a religion that told women from the get-go, you’re not good enough.
I have admired Mr. Carter always. He is a man of integrity in a world where integrity is in short supply. And I know what a hard decision he had to make. A Southern Baptist heritage is like being bound by tentacles.
For me, I chose well. You can be anything, anyone, anybody and be an Episcopalian. We have women priests, men priests, gay priests, lesbian priests, and yes, married priests, hetero and gay. Oh, and Bishops, too, come in all varieties. We are the ones the Catholics come to when divorce makes them ineligible to be Catholics anymore. We don’t have to stand on street corners and preach (Southern Baptists did this when I was growing up) and we don’t condemn anyone else’s religion. We are pretty sure God doesn’t either. And we are absolutely sure that women are equal in this world and the next. Back in the day, the Baptist Sunday School taught me to sing this song, which doesn’t say anything about having to be a male child to gain the All Access Pass to Heaven.
Jesus loves the little children
All the children of the world
Black and yellow, red and white
They’re all precious in His sight
Jesus loves the little children of the world.
Love Comes in All Shapes and Colors
Finalist, Beverly Hills International Book Awards, 2014
Finalist, Foreword Reviews Book of the Year, 2013
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