Trying to figure it out

Last Saturday one of my fellow Writers in my Writing Group took me to a lecture given by a friend of hers, in a library in SE Tucson.  It took us a half-hour to drive there, which showed me how much Tucson has expanded since I first came here in the fifties, when we were living in Phoenix.  Tucson sure spread out, not up.

The lecture was about how to get published. The lecturer had good experience: she has published children's books, fiction, non-fiction, paperbacks, hard covers, Kindle, self-publishing, with agents and without. She had good handout material giving us a lot of links to consult.

We ended up with each of us (seven attendees) being asked to write out a Query Letter to a publisher that would get their attention and make them want to read our submission and consider it for publication. Everyone there had something they wanted to publish, but five of them were fiction, and I was the only one doing Memoirs. Then all of us had to critique the letters.  This is exactly what four of us there do every week at our own writers group.  But the leader gave us some interesting guidelines to follow so that critiquing didn't take on an unkind tendency (something our own group should consider).  Then, following all the suggestions we had to take the Query letter home, rewrite it and email it to her.  She promised to read each one and make more suggestions.  I did that the next day and am awaiting her final analysis.

It sounds like I will go with my own personal choices for Copy Editor, Graphics Editor, and a cartoonist to design the cover.  I already have three offers for Beta readers, all experienced, and my neighbor two doors down worked for MacMillan's for twenty-five years, so I couldn't get better advice.  The Graphics Editor is the daughter of the lady who bought my house when I moved to this one and she has also taken jewelry classes with me.  And HER daughter just completed a summer course in cartooning at the University of Toronto, so she can draw a humorous cover that will be eye-catching.  And I'm sure that all those nice connections won't charge me an arm and a leg for their work. Then if I self-publish with Amazon I keep control of the content, cover, etc.  On the other hand, if I decide to give an agent the commission, I avoid all that time-consuming work, but lose the right of control of content.

So a lot to ponder.  Guess I'd better stop here and start reading all those links.

Till next week,  Janice

AWT IV

AWT IV

This week I am presenting a part of one of the four chapters I have written about our Around the World Trip that we made in 1987 on a chartered 747 with Air Canada. The first chapters tell about how we decided to take this extraordinary trip, and then described the details about the itinerary and the care and feeding of the passengers on a 21-day trip around the world.  In the previous chapters, we had already visited Fiji, Perth, Bali, Kuala Lumpur and are about to take off for Kathmandu, high in the Himalayas where a Jumbo 747 had never landed before our flight.  This is just a little excerpt from the chapter leading up to our being given an audience with the Living Goddess, a tiny seven-year-old girl living in the palace.

The last night in Kuala Lumpur we attended cocktails before the outdoor banquet and entertainment. We were chatting with the Captain about how wonderful everything had been so far, and just out of curiosity I mentioned that as the next stop would be Kathmandu, with the notoriously short runway and the Himalayas blocking the end of it, that it was the first time a Jumbo had landed there, I supposed the crew had made a trial run with the 747? Don looked serious and said, “Well, no, not exactly. What we did was to have our arts department take several sheets of plexiglas, layer them to the precise miniature height of the mountains at the end of the runway, and carve out the shapes.” When I raised my eyebrows, he went on, “Then we calculated the weight of the plane, the approximate weight of the passengers, the amount of fuel needed, and the amount of thrust needed to propel us down the runway, and the degree of banking we would need to lift off and immediately turn left, to avoid the mountains. But our flight is actually the first time a 747 has landed and taken off in Kathmandu.” As he listed the possible danger points, he saw my eyes getting bigger and bigger. Then he said reassuringly, “But, not to worry, Janice; we practiced it dozens of times in the control room back in Toronto.”

I smiled half-heartedly and wryly asked, “With toy airplanes?”