It's Monday What Are You Reading?

 Happy Lundi Gras!  Parades are all cancelled but this is the year of the house floats.  Instead of standing still watching floats drive by, we are driving by houses made to look like parade floats. 

The characters in the painting all represent facets of Mardi Gras

Each figure represents a marching club

Making the front entrance into a King Float 

Mardi Gras Indians in Costume (an African-American tradition)

The weather has been lousy so I've been reading.  I finished 

 

The heroine of After the Crash is the mother of a grown child--in other words, she's closer to my age than what many heroines are.  Do you ever seek books about people your age?  Do you think people like you (however you identify/define yourself) are well represented in literature?

 

I got some new NetGalleys:

This one intrigued me because it is based on an making friends/connections online.  Luckily, getting pregnant was never difficult for me.

 Not sure what made me push the request button on this one, but it looks like it could be fun.

Join the other book bloggers at Its Monday What Are You Reading and let us know how your week went.  

No book reviews last week but I have several coming up this week.  Enjoy Mardi Gras, stay warm and may you have a blessed season of Lent.  

Monday Memes

This post is linked to Mailbox Monday, and to Its Monday What Are You Reading.  Check out the linked posts to keep your finger on the pulse of the book blogging world.

I got my monthly email from Amazon inviting me to pick my free Prime Reading book for the month.  None of them appealed to me.  However, since I didn't have any "I wants" I decided to try reading outside my comfort zone and selected 

 

 

Black Boy Out of Time 

 

Its a memoir written by a queer black person who uses plural pronouns rather than gendered ones.  I tried, I really did, but the book oozed with pain and seethed with rage and at least in the part I read, the author blamed all of that pain on the carceral (hey, I learned a new word) culture promulgated by white people and the conformity that culture requires.  It takes real talent to write a memoir that doesn't come across as self-absorbed, and unfortunately, Ziyad did not exhibit that talent.  

I got three new NetGalleys this week.  

The only one I've read so far is To Catch a Dream.  It is a romance with vivid bedroom scenes but it is as much about the heroine, Evie, coming to accept that she is loved by others in her life, not just the guy, as is is about him and her.  I'll publish a review in March.  

Last weekend, I interviewed Kathleen Basi, author of A Song for the Road.  We talked for almost an hour so I'm going to write several posts on the topics we covered.  This week I wrote "How to Write a Novel".  

How was your reading and blogging week? 

How to Write a Novel

I wonder if the SEO gods will send all sorts of hits my way with a title like "How to Write a Novel"? Honestly, my answer would be to start with the first page and end with the last one, and then proofread and revise. However, I've come to realize it is much more complicated than that.  

Those who regularly read NetGalleys or other Advanced Reader Copies are familiar with the blurb that tells you not to quote anything without checking with the publisher, as the book is not in its final form.  Sometimes it is pretty obvious the book isn't finished--page numbers are missing from the table of contents and from other places in the book, or there are typos.  Other times the ARC really does seem "done". 

Years ago someone wrote a book about a client of ours and we were gearing up for damage control if necessary.  Then I found the book on NetGalley and my request for it was approved, as are most of my requests.  I spent the next few days at work carefully reading the book and sending my boss copious notes about it.  I had to explain what an ARC was, and how I scored this one, and the PR firm we hired was suitably impressed.  Once the book was published, I got the assignment of reading it, and comparing it to the ARC, and honestly I was surprised at how different it was.  The basic story was the same but one scene we found problematic was no longer there and another section had been moved. There were also changes to paragraphs here and there.  While I am sometimes and curious about how other books move through the revision process, I've never been interested enough to go through that exercise on my own time.  

Lately I've been following Kathleen Basi, whose novel A Song for the Road will be published in May, on Facebook and reading about how she sent in another round of revisions, got a publisher interested in the book and then revised it again.  I had the pleasure of chatting with Kathleen about her book and about writing in general, and I asked her about the writing process.

Here are some of the things she had to say:  (my transcription of a verbal interview)

The process of writing, revision and publication begins with a question--are you a plotter or a pantser? Some people write by the seat of their pants. I like to plot things out. I get completely paralyzed if I don't know where I'm going....I want to have a framework to start. 

I thought A Song for the Road would write itself because it was a road trip and had this built in structure.

The rough draft came out pretty quickly. But the revision process was long and painful on this book. Well, I shouldn't say painful. I actually enjoy revision. Drafting is difficult for me, but once the dough is mixed, and you get to get in there and knead and shape it—that's the part that I really enjoy. I think I spent six or seven months writing the draft of this book, and then another year and a half revising it.

When I started getting requests from agents, I did two more revisions for two agents who were interested in it, and ended up signing with one of them. And then did another revision after that before my agents felt like it was ready to go on submission. When it sold, then there was another major revision. It wasn't terrible, but it was it was big. I took out a major plotline that that had been sort of central at the beginning, but by that time, the book had matured into something else. We did another more minor round of revisions in the fall before I sent it in final manuscript.

Then I asked her:  "What was the difference? Without recounting the four different versions,  I mean, was Miriam always been the same person?"

Miriam has always been the same person. By the time A Song for the Road went out to agents and all of that, her character was pretty well set.

But in my initial concept for this book, this was a road trip that was structured around social media. She became an internet sensation. And while she was trying to have this private trip, she was also dealing with trolls, and people showing up wherever she was going to be.

I thought that gave her an extra layer of conflict: she was trying to do this intensely private this thing in public. But in the later stages of revision, editors and agents said this book doesn't need that. So most of it went away. In earlier versions of the book, at the end of every section, I had Facebook and Twitter interactions, stuff about her followers and how she was going viral. All of that went away in order to streamline and focus on what Miriam was going through.

Since Kathleen is also a composer and writes non-fiction, I asked her "So you're a composer, and you're a writer, and you write long fiction novels, you've also written a lot of magazine articles, you've written short books dealing with the liturgical seasons and so forth. How is writing a novel the same or different than writing music or writing shorter forms?

The challenge is different for each one. With nonfiction the structure sort of takes care of itself. You figure out, “Here’s the topic, and here's how I'm going to break it down.” You get to use headings and subheadings.  It's short pieces, and then you just have to tie them together. What's hard about writing nonfiction is making it so that somebody would actually want to read it.  It can't just be dry recitation of facts. So that's what's challenging.

In fiction, it's a lot harder to come up with the structure that propels it forward. You don't have those subheadings to guide you. Which was why the road trip was so nice, because it kind of gave me that structure. But with fiction, you have a lot more freedom to play with language, to pause and stop and really  dig into the moments and things that would just not be appropriate in nonfiction. 

With music, I'm writing texts for use in worship, and that I find much, much more difficult, actually. Because the syllables have to fall just right, and you have very few syllables to get a message across. It’s more accessible to congregational singing if it's consistent from one verse to the next, and that imposes a huge, huge amount of work on the composer to come up with texts that are that are appropriate theology, and which have the same number of syllables in the same stress pattern in every verse, and where accent syllables fall in the right place.  So yeah, that's hard, hard work.

Fiction is incredibly freeing compared to that. I'm not constrained in the same way. But I would imagine all of that text work means that I'm thinking about sentence cadence in a different way than I would if I just wrote fiction.

So, how do you write a novel? With lots of hard work, that's how. As a reader I'm glad there are people who are willing and able to write novels because I for one could never put that much work into one project.

I'd like to thank Kathleen for granting me an interview.  Stay tuned to this blog--we talked for almost an hour and I'm hoping to get a couple of other posts out of the interview.  You can learn more about Kathleen, her writing, her music and her beautiful family at her website. 

 

Addendum:  Kathleen wrote about this topic on her blog.

Monday Memes

 Welcome to my blog.  This post is linked to Mailbox Monday, where book bloggers brag about all the books that arrived this week and to Its Monday, What Are You Reading, where book bloggers recount their reading week.   

This week I read and reviewed a book on prayer.

My Review

I used my Kindle Unlimited subscription to read

I'm not going to review it, but I enjoyed it, as I have the other books in the series. 

This afternoon I had an hour-long Zoom call with Kathleen Basi, author of A Song for the Road. I haven't decided how I am going to "package" it for this blog, but you will be hearing more from her and about her book.  We talked about her book and characters, her setting and whole writing process.  

A Song for the Road