NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) – A New York children’s author who used a curse word in exasperation during a plane delay at a U.S. airport was ejected from the aircraft for disruptive behavior.
Robert Sayegh, 37, said Atlantic Southeast Airlines overreacted to his salty language when it summoned police aboard to escort him off the Sunday evening flight at Detroit Metro Airport.

I get it. Most of us get exasperated and drop the F bomb, but not on planes. Flying is hard enough without upsetting flight attendants. Times have changed. They don’t fly terrorists, obvious madmen, drunks, or dirty mouths. If old Bob there hadn’t been a kiddie-book author it would not have been news. Kids don’t read papers, so the publicity won’t help his sales. It got me thinking about the times my mouth has thrown me into a bear stew. Roald Dahl proved you don’t have to be an angel, or even a nice person, to write great and classic kids books. But I’m sure Robert is a great guy once you’ve had a drink with him. Maybe the author was late for a conference. I bet the bar at a kiddie authors conference is Lamp Shade City.

On occasion, my social filters fail. One example of hundreds: I was in a restaurant in New York a few years ago sitting with another author and our conversation rolled around to some example of violence and gore. Conversation was purely technical, as I recall––heads of shotgun suicides that looked like day lilies, or perhaps what high-velocity rounds do to a human body. I was blissfully unaware of my surroundings until a woman at an adjoining table interrupted us to say, “Could you please change your conversation, we’re trying to eat here.” I don’t get that. I’ve been at an autopsy where the ME and an assistant were talking about cooking various venison dishes while the ME was popping out a brain, and weighing it. You get inured to what exposure to such subjects do to other people when you are always thinking and writing about it.

Most authors are curious about a wide variety of things, and they will go to amazing lengths to learn something potentially useful. Instead of having knowledge in a concentrated area, their knowledge tends to be as wide-ranging as that of a Jeopardy Champion. I once sat through an hour-long story that had no punch line at all. It was riding in a ox-drawn cart five miles across a desert only to ride off a cliff. Conversations with most of the authors I’ve met (especially in a bar) are almost always interesting, entertaining, and enlightening. It’s no surprise that authors tend to find each other’s company pleasurable. You sit having drinks, listening to people who know how to tell a good story with maximum impact¬, and it is never boring.

I’ve never decided if conferences were profitable, but they are worth the investment simply for entertainment value and being in contact with peers. It can be expensive to attend Bouchercon, Thrillerfest, Magna Cum Murder, or any one of a hundred national, regional or local writers conferences. If you’ve never been or can’t afford $1500.00 on a weekend, what you should do, if you’ve never done one, is drive to the closest one and go to the closest bar to the conference rooms (Usually in the venue hotel), get a table, order a drink to nurse, and just sit there. When the authors start walking in and the place starts filling up, offer one a place at your table. Soon the table will be crowded with authors because they are social animals, especially after a drink or two. The later it gets the better the stories. Don’t be shy. Most authors are approachable. This will never fail, and you can decide if you want to sign up for the next one and spend the money. You don’t have to be a published author. You can be a fan of a conference’s genre, a librarian, or an accountant. It doesn’t matter at all. If you have questions, you’ll get real answers and unguarded ones at that. And you will laugh. That in itself is worth the effort and the expense.

I am a fan of interesting conversations over drinks in a quiet bar or on my deck. I am not very comfortable in crowds, but I’m okay in crowded bars filled with good people. You don’t have to be a drinker for this at a conference. A quarter of the authors in the room will be drinking soda with a bit of lime in the glass, which is, of course, a fictionalized drink.

John Ramsey Miller

Drinking with Authors and Other Scraps

NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) – A New York children’s author who used a curse word in exasperation during a plane delay at a U.S. airport was ejected from the aircraft for disruptive behavior.

Robert Sayegh, 37, said Atlantic Southeast Airlines overreacted to his salty language when it summoned police aboard to escort him off the Sunday evening flight at Detroit Metro Airport.

I get it. Most of us get exasperated and drop the F bomb, but not on planes. Flying is hard enough without upsetting flight attendants. Times have changed. They don’t fly terrorists, obvious madmen, drunks, or dirty mouths. If old Bob there hadn’t been a kiddie-book author it would not have been news. Kids don’t read papers, so the publicity won’t help his sales. It got me thinking about the times my mouth has thrown me into a bear stew. Roal Dahl proved you don’t have to be an angel, or even a nice person, to write great and classic kids books. But I’m sure Robert is a great guy once you’ve had a drink with him.

On occasion, my social filters fail. One example of hundreds: I was in a restaurant in New York a few years ago sitting with another author and our conversation rolled around to some example of violence and gore. Conversation was purely technical, as I recall––heads of shotgun suicides that looked like day lilies, or perhaps what high-velocity rounds do to a human body. I was blissfully unaware of my surroundings until a woman at an adjoining table interrupted us to say, “Could you please change your conversation, we’re trying to eat here.” I don’t get that. I’ve been at an autopsy where the ME and an assistant were talking about cooking various venison dishes while the ME was popping out a brain, and weighing it. You get inured to what exposure to such subjects do to other people when you are always thinking and writing about it.

Most authors are curious about a wide variety of things, and they will go to amazing lengths to learn something potentially useful. Instead of having knowledge in a concentrated area, their knowledge tends to be as wide-ranging as that of a Jeopardy Champion. I once sat through an hour-long story that had no punch line at all. It was riding in a ox-drawn cart five miles across a desert only to ride off a cliff. Conversations with most of the authors I’ve met (especially in a bar) are almost always interesting, entertaining, and enlightening. It’s no surprise that authors tend to find each other’s company pleasurable. You sit having drinks, listening to people who know how to tell a good story with maximum impact­, and it is never boring.

I’ve never decided if conferences were profitable, but they are worth the investment simply for entertainment value and being in contact with peers. It can be expensive to attend Bouchercon, Thrillerfest, Magna Cum Murder, or any one of a hundred national, regional or local writers conferences. If you’ve never been or can’t afford $1500.00 on a weekend, what you should do, if you’ve never done one, is drive to the closest one and go to the closest bar to the conference rooms (Usually in the venue hotel), get a table, order a drink to nurse, and just sit there. When the authors start walking in and the place starts filling up, offer one a place at your table. Soon the table will be crowded with authors because they are social animals, especially after a drink or two. The later it gets the better the stories. Don’t be shy. Most authors are approachable. This will never fail, and you can decide if you want to sign up for the next one and spend the money. You don’t have to be a published author. You can be a fan of a conference’s genre, a librarian, or an accountant. It doesn’t matter at all. If you have questions, you’ll get real answers and unguarded ones at that. And you will laugh. That in itself is worth the effort and the expense.

I am a fan of interesting conversations over drinks in a quiet bar or on my deck. I am not very comfortable in crowds, but I’m okay in crowded bars filled with good people. You don’t have to be a drinker for this at a conference. A quarter of the authors in the room will be drinking soda with a bit of lime in the glass, which is, of course, a fictionalized drink.

John Ramsey Miller from Paradise

Note: Like Clare, I’m in a topsy-turvy environment this week–a beloved family member has come to live with us (my father-in-law, who is 93 years old). I’m entering a brave new world, trying to make sure we can successfully manage his needs in our hectic household. I’m not sure our rambunctious Lab puppy has gotten the memo–he’s already torn up a pair of Dad’s slippers.

Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what rejection means to writers. At the writer’s groups I attend, people frequently talk about rejection. Someone will mention that an editor, agent, or magazine has rejected a submission. When this happens, everyone at the table nods in sympathy. They make encouraging comments like, “Keep sending it out. You have to go through a lot of rejection to get published.”

I’ve been sitting silently during some of these morale-boosting sessions. In these cases, I know that the submitted work wasn’t  publishable quality. Yet I’ve watched the writer toil over it in our group  sessions, rewriting and revising the work, sometimes for years. And it just hasn’t gotten to the level it needs to be.

Recently a member came to a meeting in tears. She’s been working on a novel for years. After laboring over the story with us, she showed it to a friend who is a published author. The friend went ballistic in her comments.

“She sounded so angry about the writing,” the woman said at our meeting. “Outraged, like how could I have been so stupid to think this was good?”

This woman felt blind-sided and abused by her friend, but I couldn’t help agreeing with the critique. The novel isn’t ready to submit–it’s nowhere close. And yet in our group sessions, we have this polite way of focusing on the good, while regretfully, almost as a postscript, mentioning things that need  to be fixed.

I think we let each other down by doing that. We have let this writer spend years on her novel,  thinking that it’s getting better, thinking that it’s going to be published, when there’s no chance whatsoever of that happening.

I don’t know what the best approach is in these cases. What do you do when someone’s writing doesn’t improve no matter how hard they work at it? Should you continue to encourage, or hit them over the head with a sledgehammer like this woman’s friend did? In the end, I think it was our group that let her down, not her critical friend (to whom she’s no longer speaking, by the way). We should have been more honest with her all along.  The problem is, you can lose a lot of friends and critique group members that way.

If you’ve made every suggestion you can think of and the writing hasn’t measurably improved, do you simply say, “This needs a page one rewrite–I’m afraid it’s not working at all.” I honestly don’t know what the right approach is.

What do you think?

I truly believe that I would not have achieved anything I consider worthwhile in this life without my wife, Susan. I have never loved anyone or anything with the sincerity and intensity that I feel for her. She had a birthday on the 20th of May. I bought her this set of very expensive wheels, which she looks great in. She looks great in anything.

I know it’s like giving pots and pans for Mother’s Day, but wait… Here was my thinking. We have a large place. A small house, but a large garden, which is hers entirely, and she likes to move things like wood, stones, dirt, mulch, and other heavy things around on the property. We have a regular wheelbarrow with one wheel, which is hard to hold straight when its loaded. I have a five-horsepower motorized wheelbarrow that carts 1,000 lbs and dumps its load, but Susan has a hard time cranking it. I have to start it. This is a wheelbarrow that will allow her the independence to do more of what she enjoys without needing anyone’s help.

Susan is the most unselfish person I have ever known. She wants everything for others and only what she needs for herself. She has never once expressed any doubts that I would succeed at whatever I attempted. And she worked a job, made the meals, and raised my children while I sat in our bedroom day after day for several years typing. She never got discouraged as the 161 rejections stacked up, because she liked my manuscripts and honestly believed I would sell a book and then several more, which I did. My biggest regret is that she is still working while I sit and type day after day. I always wanted to give her the best the world has to offer, but she has always been satisfied with simple things. I have heard her say more than a few times, that our life together has been a lot of things, but never dull.

I know that if it were not for her I never would have found the author in me. And I would never have been happy, which I truly am. Every good female character I write is mostly made up of Susan, so strong, independent women are easy for me to write. Knowing how hard she works is what drives me to work as hard as I can. The world disappoints, but she never does.

My youngest son is getting married on June 4th and I have not been writing at all for the past few weeks. I’ve got too much on my plate to think about any story but our own. I hope each of you has a muse, an inspiration, and a reason to sit day after day and pound out your soul and take the blows we all have to take.

John Ramsey Miller

by Clare Langley-Hawthorne