Writerly Wednesday ~~ Laura Martone Interview

This week's interesting tidbits and nuggets before we get to the Q&A:

You've GOTTA see what C-R-A-Z-Y Kat's up to now with her pending second book's release. Join the insanity -- enter her contest and mine (scroll down) for a chance to win prizes and signed copies of SECRET GRACES! First KAT READ NEKKID....NOW WHAT?

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Our Brit blogging friend and Ms. Twit UK Rebecca Woodhead has entered the world of indie publishing. Check out the trailer she's working on! And consider joining her Word Nerd Army.

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From a mommy writing group I joined ten years ago comes this announcement which I haven't investigated, but sounds interesting:

If you're stuck with your novel here's a great, new seven day novel writing course. It gently leads you through the whole novel writing process offering tips and tricks designed to make the whole writing process a joy, not a drudge!
Based on the author's experiences of running a write-a-novel-in-a-day workshop for an arts festival, the course is delivered by daily email and is completely free.

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Of Local interest~~

The annual Friends of the LSU Libraries Book Bazaar is right around the corner! Publicity Coordinator Madeline Mocan says:

We've got a great selection of books -- over 60,000 volumes, including 2,500 cookbooks, tons of literature and poetry, southern fiction and history, and a mountain of contemporary trade fiction. Our cookbook section is loaded with books about Louisiana and Southern cooking.

Friends of the LSU Libraries 2010 Book Bazaar
Thursday, March 4 and Friday, March 5 - 9AM to 7PM
Saturday, March 6 - 9AM to 5PM
On the LSU Campus at the 4-H Mini-Barn and Nelson Memorial Buildings (just south of the Parker Coliseum)
Free admission. Cash or check only. Ample free parking.
For more information, call the Book Barn at 578-5925 or email bbfriends@lsu.edu.

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Poet powerhouse Ava Haymon has a new book of poetry out! Ava will be reading and signing copies of her WHY THE HOUSE IS MADE OF GINGERBREAD (LSU Press) on Sunday, February 28 at 4:00. Come and meet her at the Baton Rouge Gallery. 

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Now, it's my pleasure to introduce blogging friend Laura Martone to y'all. (You can find out all about her and her busy writing life at her blogs/websites here, here, here, here, here and here!)

1.) What has your writing journey been like so far? It's been a bumpy journey, to say the least. I grew up an only child, surrounded by books and movies, so literature and cinema fascinated me at an early age. I enjoyed both writing and filmmaking in high school - even won a few writing awards and attended a radio/TV/film program at Northwestern University between my junior and senior years. By the time I was ready for college, I knew I wanted to focus on three kinds of writing: fiction, screenwriting, and travel journalism. So, I returned to Northwestern for two undergraduate degrees - a B.A. in English and a B.S. in Radio/TV/Film. While there, I was accepted into two two-year writing programs: The Theory and Practice of Fiction and Creative Writing in the Media. That was my first foray into critique groups, and boy, those college kids were harsh.

I landed a technical writing job (ick!) at a now-defunct educational multimedia company near Chicago, and I wrote a few online articles for Sidewalk Chicago (the precursor to Citysearch). Although my technical writing job was somewhat awful, I did meet my future husband there. Soon afterward, we both quit our jobs and moved to England, where I started (but didn't finish) a novel. When we returned to Chicago, we both found lucrative marketing jobs at the kind of Internet start-ups that tempted us to work long hours in exchange for beanbag chairs, free bagels and ice cream, and pool tables. Not long afterward, we both decided we'd had enough of the corporate life, so we sold all our furniture and hit the road in an RV, our kitty in tow.

I wrote an online ecotourism column for The Ecotourism Observer and sent queries to travel magazines. My first magazine article was a piece about South Padre Island, Texas, in MotorHome magazine. After writing a few more articles (for MotorHome, RV Journal, and Route 66 Magazine), I started updating travel guides for Insight Guides. Eventually, I started working for Avalon Travel until I finally had the chance to write my own guide. Since then, I've written the first edition of Moon Baja RV Camping and the third edition of Moon Michigan, joined the Society of American Travel Writers, and started work on the first edition of Moon Florida Keys.

When I'm not doing the travel thing, keeping up with my blogs, beta-reading my friends' novels, or helping my husband with our two film festivals, I try to squeeze in time to work on my current novel - which is technically my second one (the first being the one I started in England). After working on it, I finally thought it was ready for the querying stage this past spring, but the invaluable beta-reading process taught me otherwise. So, as soon as I've finished my latest travel guide, I'll be hard at work on the revision. In the meantime, I'll keep learning what I can from the ever-informative blogosphere.

2.) How far along on the WIP trail are you, what's it about, and what comes next? My work-in-progress is actually done, but it's way too long at the moment - so I'm in the midst of the revision process. During the summer, I summoned the aid of several different beta readers to help me see what I clearly cannot…which characters, scenes, and other tidbits are simply not necessary.

The WIP is tentatively called Hollow Souls. The premise is pretty simple: A woman longs to return to her childhood home, a secret underground village in southern Kentucky, where her first love lives, but she's reluctant to abandon her husband and daughters back in New Orleans.

Once I'm finished with what I hope will be the final revision of Hollow Souls, I plan to query potential agents. And while I'm querying, I intend to work on my second novel, the coming-of-age, road-trip tale titled Red Road Crossing that I started in England.

3.) Do you find it hard to build your blog and author platform while writing and thinking about the next step -- querying? Most writers have to juggle multiple tasks these days - besides family, friends, hobbies, perhaps a day job, maybe even classes, and, of course, the works-in-progress, there's now the added pressure of building an author platform before, during, and after a book is published. Like others I know, I definitely find it challenging to squeeze so much into a single day. For several years, I locked myself away (so to speak) and focused on my fiction writing - when I wasn't working a full-time job or spending quality time with the hubby. Earlier this year, I finally decided to come out of hiding and explore the big, bad world of publishing - and goodness, I was in for a shock. Although I'd already created a temporary website for my novel, I had yet to take the blogging plunge. Now, however, in addition to my "real" work as a travel guidebook author and film festival co-director, I'm juggling four blogs - one about my novel, one about travel, one that gets the creative juices flowing, and one about all of that and more.

Here's the funny part, though: I haven't found it hard to build my blog and author platform while writing and querying. I've found it hard to write and query while I'm building my blog and author platform. In other words, I'm having so much fun blogging that I'm finding it difficult to work on my revision - which is obviously a necessary step before querying. I've found the blogosphere incredibly rewarding. I've met so many wonderfully generous writers - some of whom have even been willing to help me with my novel - and I've learned so much about the craft of writing and the state of publishing. I know that I'll soon have to minimize my blogging activity - a fact that honestly makes me a little sad.

4.) Tell us what it's like living in THREE different states! Yes, it's true. The hubby and I have trouble keeping still for long. After we left Chicago in an RV, we roamed around the country for about a year before settling down in Los Angeles, where we run the Beverly Hills Shorts Festival. But after about five years, we grew a little weary of the southern California vibe - and decided to hit the road again. So, for the past four years, we've divided our time between New Orleans (my hometown and site of our other film fest), where we spend the spring and fall; Los Angeles, where we spend the winter; and northern Michigan, where we spend the summer.

Obviously, we avoid extreme heat and extreme cold by traveling this way - and getting to know three distinct places has definitely helped with my travel writing career. Of course, we appreciate the uniqueness of each locale, but part of why we travel so often is that neither of us has found the perfect place yet. We both like the vitality of urban areas like New Orleans and the peace of isolated rural areas like northern Michigan - so our current nomadic existence fulfills us in a way that staying in one spot wouldn't. When we tire of the city, we move on to the country - and when the quiet begins to drive us mad, we return to the people (and the traffic) of the city.

It's certainly not the life for everyone, but it works for us. It would be a different situation if we had children - which we don't. And luckily, our kitty doesn't mind traveling around the country with us. Honestly, the only drawback is the frequent packing (and unpacking). That part I could do without.

5.) What's the best pieces of writing and blogging advice you've gotten? Wow. This is probably the hardest question. Since April, when I first entered the blogosphere and discovered how helpful blogs and beta readers could be, I've learned so many wonderful tips for writing, revising, and blogging. Some bloggers, in particular, have been most helpful - namely Nathan Bransford (who provides invaluable information about agents and publishing in general) and Susan Mills (who helps to navigate her fellow writers through the ins and outs of writing, revising, and preparing for the professionals).

But perhaps the best pieces of advice I've received have come from my beta readers. Regarding writing, all of them are in agreement that I need to scale back on descriptions, let the reader's imagination fill in the details, and start "showing" what I keep trying to "tell" - so that readers live, feel, and think through my characters, instead of just being told what they're experiencing. It might sound like obvious advice to most writers, but for me, it's been a hard lesson to learn. After all, one of my favorite authors is Charles Dickens, and he was definitely a "tell versus show" kind of guy.

Weronika Janczuk, one of my beta readers, has offered a treasure trove of information over the past several months - from hints about book covers to tips for getting the most out of beta-reading. In a three-part series entitled "A Blogger's Life," she offered some invaluable advice about improving the look of one's blog - by doing things like adding photos and breaking up the content - advice that definitely informs one of my own blogs.

6.) Do you write in any other genres? At the moment, literary/mainstream fiction seems to come most naturally to me, but I once sold an erotic short story and a horror screenplay that I co-wrote with my husband, and I intend to complete my horror, mystery, and fantasy WIPs in the future. I must admit, too, that I've always wanted to write Westerns - I think it's the rugged landscape that inspires me most.

7.) Fill in the blank: "I wish I'd have known __________ before I started seriously working on my novel." This might sound a little too simplistic, but I wish I would've known the acceptable word count ranges for a debut novel before I started seriously working on Hollow Souls, which is currently way too long for most agents and publishers. When you've written, revised, proofread, and repeated said process more times than is sane - and found it harder to see the story clearly each time - that's when beta readers and their varying perspectives become invaluable. Without them, I'd have found it difficult to attempt yet another revision - no matter how necessary it is.

8.) Tell me something about yourself or your writing life that I didn't know to ask. Nothing's too strange or crazy for Gumbo Writer readers. Well, when I was little, I was obsessed with knives - collected them every chance I got. I never used them, mind you - I just found them amazing. Even my high school boyfriend participated in the mania, giving me several knives over the years. Of course, this was also the boyfriend who let me play with his pet tarantula, scorpion, iguana, and pythons.
As for my writing life, well, music inspires me when I write, but for the most part, I can only listen to classical music and movie scores - nothing with lyrics, which only confuse me while I'm writing. Strangely enough, though, I can listen to Willie Nelson and Tracy Chapman - neither of whom disturbs the flow of my writing. I'm still not sure why their music resonates with me and doesn't interfere with my creative energy, but if it ain't broke, don't fix it, righ?

Thanks for interviewing me, Angie. I enjoy gabbing with a fellow Louisianian!

You can also find Laura on Twitter and Facebook: http://twitter.com/lauramartone 
http://www.facebook.com/martonelaura

Interview with Rebecca Woodhead, Haiku Hoedown Winner and Other Good Stuff!

Photo by Rob Enslin

Whooo boy -- our Wednesday Writings bag is chock full of good stuff today!

Ever wonder if your writing is infected with overused phrases or trite cliches? Check out Cliche' Cleaner where you can run sections of your work by the magic oracle and get that question answered.

Wanna know why writers should have websites? Read this blog post by a new Twitterville friend, Deborah Riley-Magnus, Writerholic. You'll get her "point."

And before we begin our interview with Rebecca Woodhead, it's time to announce the winner of Gumbo Writer's latest haiku contest. I agonized. I debated with my poet/editor friend over the finalists among some 36 entries. I sweated blood in this photo finish competition, but, yes Virginia, there is a winner...

Paul Carroll, the young lad from Ireland! Paul's haiku expressed both the writer's angst and the writer's dream -- hard to do in just a few lines and syllables. Congratulations! (Please get me your mailing address so I can send you the Cajun goody package.) In case you missed his entry, here it is again:

Voices in my head

Whisper of my fantasies,

Calling me away.

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REBECCA WOODHEAD ON THE WRITING LIFE

1.) What do you write?
I am writing a novel series called The Cotswold Chronicles are set in a place called The Cotswolds – an idyllic and largely rural part of England. It is also the area where I grew up and to which I have returned. From Shakespeare to JK Rowling, the area within an hour’s drive from where I sit has formed writers with ruthless efficiency for centuries. Natives of the area are sent down the literary mines from an early age. Newcomers are similarly implicated in the whole sordid literary business. There is something in the water. Resistance is futile. There is so much to write about for a start. Every quaint English cliché you can imagine plays out within its borders. You can’t swing a polo mallet without knocking out a member of the royal family or a major celebrity. All is not as it seems, however, and it’s that not-as-it-seems-ness that I like to play with in my novels.

2.) Do you have definite writing goals?
Absolutely! The deadline I set myself for my annual first draft is Valentine’s Day morning. The romance in my novels is important so Valentine’s Day seems appropriate. It also means that I go into Valentine’s Day with a sense of accomplishment, so my husband doesn’t have to try too hard to make me smile – a cheap card and a nice cup of tea and I am a happy woman. If nothing else, it is a useful budgetary exercise. The day before, or morning of, Valentine’s Day I finish my first draft, type ‘the end’ (just to confirm it for myself) and, before rushing off to hug my hubby, I sketch out the plan for the next book. It always buzzes the loudest at that point so I make sure to get that buzz on paper.

3.) What does Rebecca Woodhead's writing life look like?
It depends on the season. After Valentine’s Day I take some time off, have a birthday and chill out. My writing year starts in March. The spring and summer are about preparation, editing and ‘business.’ I focus on things like editing the first draft of the last novel; planning the next novel; researching agents and publishers and, of course, platform building. Over the last couple of months that has translated to a lot of time online! During this part of the writing process, little ‘brain elves’ are throwing ideas I came up with in February backwards and forwards. As summer moves into autumn, they invade my sleep and I start to dream about my characters. That is when I know the story is ripe enough to be written down.

The actual writing process for me is just letting the story out of my brain. I learnt the importance of this at University, where I studied English. One lecturer spoke to us about the gaps in our timetable and explained that we were given a lot of time between lectures and seminars for a reason. The reason, it turned out, was not so that we could go to parties but so that we could think. He said that literature needed to be mulled over and that as much of the comprehension of literature took place in the mulling over of it as happened in the reading and learning about it. Although my course was about the academic comprehension of literature that had already been created, I think the same is true when you are the one doing the creating. The oft-quoted ‘writing is re-writing’ is fair enough but I would take it one step further and say that much of writing is mulling.

When I write, however, I write like a thing possessed. I am at my desk – or at my computer in my bed if I am not well – by eight in the morning and I write for as long as I have energy to, every day. I take the odd Sunday off from the actual process of writing but the brain elves are still tapping away. Real life does not exist while I write. The world of my characters is my reality until the first draft is finished. Typically, I light a Yankee Candle – usually coffee or some take on the coffee idea – switch on my computer and disappear into the story. I load my MP3 player with all kinds of different music and play the music relevant to each part of the emotional arc. A couple of candles later I have a first draft.

4.) Your recent HUGE win as Ms. Twitter UK took a lot of concentrated work and effort. Can you tell us about that experience, and the platform(s) you incorporated to get votes?
It was exhausting! Ms Twitter UK is a contest to find the most popular female user of Twitter in the UK. In one of the guest blogs I did for Booktrust (the people who administer the Orange Prize for Fiction) I described it as ‘X Factor with avatars.’ The trickiest thing about the competition is that you don’t merely compete against ‘normal’ people; you compete against celebrities with fan clubs and PR machines.

As I didn’t have celebrity credentials, and was a good decade older than most of the finalists, I played to my strengths and did ‘literary stand-up’ for votes. This involved writing haiku, six word stories etc – and translating medieval poetry – to demand and against the clock. I had no idea how taxing it would be but it was also great fun. Before long, I had a slogan -- ‘The pen is mightier than the pin-up’ and a large following of literary types - readers, authors, publishers, librarians etc – supporting my bid.

During all the chats we had about literature, a number of issues emerged and I decided to focus my campaign on these issues rather than me as a person. To cut a long story short, as I termed myself a ‘word nerd,’ the collective noun for my followers became the ‘Word Nerd Army.’ This ‘army’ was not only on Twitter. Some members were on Blogger, others were on FaceBook, others still were people who stumbled upon the Ms Twitter contest and liked what I stood for.

When I won, I set up WordNerdArmy for everyone who voted for me as a place for the issues on which they voted. It is also for anyone unconnected with the competition who agrees with the need to do something positive about issues such as: literacy, healthy self-image, and library funding.

5.) Tells us a few things about the importance of social networking.
Many years ago, I ran a networking club in the ‘real world.’ I was fed up with the networking clubs where you wore a badge and desperately launched attacks on people who might help you, so my club was about having fun. If you did business as a consequence that was great but if you didn’t then at least you met some interesting people. I was amazed at the amount of business that was achieved by people just having fun. It made much more sense to me than the endless, fruitless meetings I was forced to attend.

Social networking online works the same way. It works on the basis that people are just people. You end up speaking to people you ‘click’ with and after a while you forget their job title. Some of my best online friends are publishers or celebrities but I forget this. I think the best way to approach ‘social networking’ is to start out with an idea of who you’d like to meet (publishers etc); follow them and then forget who they are. Give yourself a good few months to become friends with people just because they interest you. Ignore the extent to which they may be able to help you.

After that, draw up a plan and go through your new chums, re-acquainting yourself with their job titles, to find out which of them actually could help. At that point you will know where it would be appropriate to ask and where it would not. Some of your new friends won’t be able to help or won’t be interested in helping at this time – just as in real life – but that doesn’t mean they are not friends. You can still have fun with them and swap stories. There is an agent online, for example, that rejected me last year but who still follows me and I send writers across to this agent because the agent is a great person. The fact that my work didn’t fit with their list is no reason for me to get all cross. The process of being turned down by them was actually quite pleasant, with lots of positive feedback and encouragement. We aspiring authors need more agents who turn down that well!

Taking this approach on Twitter was an odd experience at first, because I discovered a number of my ‘dream people’ – those I thought would be of most use to my career – annoyed me. I found them arrogant, boring, unprofessional and rude. I imagined a world in which they represented my work and I shuddered. Had I not attempted to get to know them I would never have discovered this. Of course, the opposite is also true. I now have lists of publishers, for example, with whose marketing departments I am already on great terms, and others who don’t publish my genre but are happy to give me advice on dealing with agents or publishers, or just general advice on writing. I have done the groundwork to make the job of whichever agent eventually takes me on much easier than would otherwise be the case.

6.) Advice for new writers?
My advice to new writers would be of limited use, as I’m not yet published, so I will borrow the advice of a good chum of mine – Jamie Ford. He is a New York Times best-selling author so I trust his judgement. When I interviewed him recently (interview is on my blog) he said:

“Enjoy the struggle. Don’t be discouraged––it’s part of the process of growing as a writer...”

I like that advice. As a coma survivor who had to learn to speak and write from scratch at age eleven, I understand the struggle to have your voice heard more than most. For me, the triumph is there in the words. The acknowledgement of my accomplishment comes from inside. Praise from the outside world is a bonus. Everyone who manages to struggle through a first draft and type the words ‘the end’ is already a triumphant writer and should take pride in that huge accomplishment.

The challenge for all of us beyond that point is to become the best writers that we can and to find a market for that writing. My advice would be to take Jamie’s words to heart and also to take your writing seriously enough to put in the other work – research and platform building for example – that improve your chances of getting that work seen. Mr Ford is already a New York Times best-selling author but does he close his door on the world with a smug grin and write or does he break his back promoting his work? What do you think? By the way, if anyone knows of a good chiropractor, I’m sure Jamie would appreciate their number.

In short: writers read; mull; write; re-write; promote, and enjoy the struggle. Some writers also get published but that’s the icing on the literary cake.

7.) How do you stay motivated to work on your ms and other projects?
It matters to me too much not to stay motivated. I think most fiction writers are good at staying motivated because we like a good story.

‘Coma survivor becomes poor and starves to death in misery without anyone seeing her work,’ doesn’t sound as good to me as: ‘Coma survivor laughs in face of poverty, becomes best-selling author, and inspires others to do likewise.’

I am motivated to make my own story as good as I can. I can handle ambiguity in fiction but I’m a sucker for a ‘happily ever after’ in real life.

8.) The biggest writing mistake you ever made?
Trying too hard to be clever. My first attempt at a novel had such a convoluted narrative structure that I had to plot it out on sheets of taped together A4 with different coloured pens and explanatory notes. I took it to an English professor who confirmed I may have invented a new genre – so it was a triumph for my cleverness – but one look at him and I knew he was holding back the words: “…that nobody will ever read.”

With the novels I have written over the last couple of years, I still put in little nuggets for English graduates to pick up if they feel so inclined but these are not crucial to understanding the plot. The most important thing for me with these books is that they tell great stories and that people love the characters.

9.) I know you're gonna thump me, but please tell us about your Pennies for Ink & Postage fund.
Grr! Well, I am currently utterly impoverished due to ill health and can’t afford ink and postage. In England, this is a problem. Agents only accept hard copy. After much badgering from followers, I set up a ‘Pennies for Ink and Postage’ fund so that I stand a better chance of being published. All pennies donated will go towards ink and postage and I will take the buttons down once I have enough. There is a button on my blog and there is also one on the Word Nerd Army blog. I don’t have far to go now until I can send off my manuscript.

10.) What didn't I ask that you want blogging reader/writers to know?
The only thing I can think of is that The Word Nerd Army is brand new and a bit follower-poor at the moment, which is a shame as publishers and journalists are very excited by it. I would love a few more bloggers to follow the blog and get involved by picking one or more of the issues and blogging about them. I plan to send out letters to politicians about these issues so the more blog posts about them; the more comments on the Word Nerd Army blog, and the more followers there are the better chance of getting policy changed. At the moment I am looking for a new ‘Word Nerd Knight of the Month’ for next month – you can nominate yourself or a friend and either gender can become a knight. All the details are on the blog.

Thanks for taking time out to do the interview Rebecca!

Thanks for interviewing me Angie.

Twitter: http://twitter.com/rebeccawoodhead
Blogs and social networks: http://rebeccawoodhead.com/