By Elaine Viets

Feeling discouraged, writers? Tired of papering your walls with rejection slips?
When I feel down, I turn to the good book. Not THE good book, but a good book by Elaine Borish called “Unpublishable! Rejected writers from Jane Austen to Zane Grey.”

If you’ve been rebuffed by a publisher, you’re in good company. So was Agatha Christie. Borish says it took Dame Agatha four years to find a publisher for her first novel, “The Mysterious Affair at Styles” – and then it sat on a desk for another eighteen months. The publisher suggested some changes to the ending, and Agatha made them. Belgian detective Hercule Poirot finally made his debut in 1920.
Agatha Christie wrote more than ninety titles, and “The Mysterious Affair at Styles” is still in print.
Beatrix Potter, the creator of Peter Rabbit and Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail, was a hybrid author. Her “Peter Rabbit” was rejected by six publishers. She used black-and-white sketches, since she was worried that color pictures would make the book too expensive for children. Beatrix finally self-published “Peter Rabbit.” It went through two printings.
In 1901, Beatrix submitted Peter Rabbit again, and the traditional publisher politely rejected it: “As it is too late to produce a book for this season, we think it best to decline your kind offer at any rate for this year.”
The next time Beatrix submitted the book, she had color illustrations. The first edition sold out before the 1902 publication. By 1903, sales were multiplying like, well . . . rabbits. She’d sold 50,000 copies, and lived hoppily ever after.

Dorothy L. Sayers’ books were definitely not for children. “Whose Body?,” the first mystery by the rebellious Oxford scholar, was rejected by several UK publishers for “coarseness” in 1920. Today, the risque parts wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. The novel opened this way:
“Oh, damn!” said Lord Peter Wimsey.
Besides that four-letter word, Dorothy L.’s first book is about the disappearance of a Jewish financier, Sir Reuben Levy. Borish tells us, “When a naked corpse turns up in a bath, Inspector Sugg is eager to identify him as Levy.” Lord Peter says it can’t be “by the evidence of my own eyes.”
And the evidence? The body was (gasp) uncircumcised.
Dorothy L., desperate for money, revised her story, making sure the body could not be mistaken for a rich man. The deceased had “callused hands, blistered feet, decayed teeth” and more. An American publisher bought “Whose Body?” It was published in New York in 1923, and Dorothy was on the way to fame and fortune. Borish writes, rather gleefully, “consider the last words spoken by Lord Peter in the last novel: ‘Oh damn!’”

George Orwell had his masterpiece, “Animal Farm,” turned down by no less than T. S. Eliot, a big deal at UK publishers Faber and Faber. Like many in the upper echelons of publishing, Eliot missed the point when he rejected Orwell: “Your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm . . . What was needed (someone might argue) was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.”
Another publisher, Fredric Warburg, took the book and paid Orwell a hundred pounds. Orwell had the last laugh – Borish says the book sold 25,000 hardcovers in the first five years.
Anthony “A Clockwork Orange” Burgess had a novel about his grammar school experience – “The Worm and the Ring” – rejected because it was “too Catholic and too guilt-ridden.”

Publishers outdid themselves with boneheaded reasons to reject bestsellers. Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes novel, “A Study in Scarlet,” was turned down by the prestigious Cornhill magazine because it was too much like the other “shilling shockers” already on the market. The editor said it was too long “and would require an entire issue” – but it was “too short for a single story.” Another publisher sent the manuscript back unread. A third bought the rights for a measly twenty-five pounds, and let it sit around for year. It was published in 1887, and then brought out as a book, but Conan Doyle didn’t get any money from that because he’d sold the rights. Worse, the book was pirated in the U.S. Doyle wrote a couple of historical fiction works. Then an American editor, looking for UK talent, had dinner with Doyle and Oscar Wilde and signed them both up. Wilde wrote “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and Doyle did “The Sign of the Four.”
These writers endured humiliation, insults, swindles – and in many cases, poverty – and still went on to write books that are read today.
Orwell talked about an embittered Russian who said, “Writing is bosh. There is only one way to make money at writing, and that is to marry the publisher’s daughter.”
Obviously, we writers have to pay attention to rejections sometimes. My agent gave me a good rule of thumb: “If you get the same reason for rejection repeatedly – your plot isn’t twisty enough, or you have too many secondary characters – it’s time to pay attention.”
How many times have you ignored rejections?

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I was listening to a podcast a few years ago that addressed the benefits of handwriting versus typing. The interviewee (I don’t remember her name) was a graduate student who had forgotten to take her laptop to a class one day and had to resort to taking notes by hand. To her surprise, she discovered she had retained more of the lecture information than she normally did. This led to a research project to compare the benefits of the two methods of taking notes.

The memory of that podcast recently prompted a question in my mind: outside of taking notes in class, does anyone write in long hand anymore? If so, what kind of writing lends itself to longhand vs. typing. I found some interesting information online.

*** 

In a 2021 article on whenyouwrite.com, Jessica Majewski summarized several benefits which I’ve paraphrased here:

Writing by hand is more focused. There are fewer distractions than using a laptop where there are constant temptations to check email or read the latest news story. Also, there are no word processing limitations when writing by hand. The author can draw a mind map, jot side notes, or doodle images without having to open another app.

But typing has its advantages, too. Doing research is a breeze if you’re on your laptop. Just hop over to another app to search out the information you need. Copy and paste articles into your research folder and keep going. But the primary advantage to typing is speed. And sooner or later everything you write is going to have to be typed into a word processor, so unless you’re fortunate enough to have a secretary to do the transition, you’ll have to do the additional work yourself.

But how do the different methods affect creativity? Majewski makes the following case in her article:

“When you are writing by hand, your cognitive processes are more involved than when you type and this can lead to some random springs of ideas. And at the pace of handwriting, you’re not worried about your hands outpacing your brain.”

In a 2017 article on qz.com, Ephrat Livni makes the following statement:

“Brain scans during the two activities also show that forming words by hand as opposed to on a keyboard leads to increased brain activity. Scientific studies of children and adults show that wielding a pen when taking notes, rather than typing, is associated with improved long-term information retention, better thought organization, and increased ability to generate ideas.”

That all sounds good, but does anybody actually write the first draft of a novel by hand? Well, yes. Here are a few authors you may have heard of who have written one or more novels by hand:

• Joyce Carol Oates
• Stephen King
• J. K. Rowling
• Quentin Tarantino

***

As an experiment, I wrote this blog post in long hand. My thoughts flowed as I was writing, and there was a sense of freedom in the process that was different from typing. Fortunately, I was able to read my own handwriting when I finished, and I transferred it to a Word doc.

Well, I’m almost out of paper, so I’ll stop now. We haven’t touched on another creative method: Speech to Text. Maybe we can cover that in a later post.

***

So TKZers – Do you ever write in long hand? What advantages or disadvantages have you noticed using handwriting vs. typing? Has this article convinced you to give handwriting another go?

Celebrating our success is a must. A little reward for a job well done is vital to keep motivated (and happy and healthy) in this difficult writing business. It doesn’t have to be much—just enough of a kickback to make it worthwhile.

It’s one thing to celebrate our personal achievement. It’s a whole other level to get satisfaction from celebrating others’ success. And it’s something we, as a collective writer community, should do more of. Celebrate others’ success.

What brought-on this post is Sue Coletta’s most recent success. Sue was the top-selling author at her publishing house in September. I can think of no other person who is as dedicated to their craft as Sue. And it paid off. Well done, Sue!

Recognizing success doesn’t have to be in the writing world. My friend just celebrated a blue ribbon at the fall fair won by her huge butternut squash. It weighed-in at 37.25 lbs. Sure, it’s a long way off the world record of 65.5 lbs., but it’s an impressive big gourd. Totally organic, to boot. It was grown through her neighbor’s organically-fed hens’ manure.

Our 34-year-old daughter’s success is impressive, as well. Emily recently packed up and moved to Ecuador where she’ll continue her online writing business as a digital nomad. So, congrats on your courage and adventuresome spirit, Em. OPD’s proud of you, and I celebrate your successful move! (BTW—OPD stands for Over Protective Dad which she nicknamed me in her teens.)

No. it isn’t only writing, moving, or squash growing success to celebrate. On a large scale, I celebrate NASA for bulls-eyeing an asteroid some zillion miles away. I celebrate the Ukrainian people’s resolve to repel an invader. And I celebrate Aaron Judge for hitting 62 homers this season.

On a smaller scale, I celebrate someone else’s success. That was the couple in my home town who stood up to City Hall and won the court-approved right to keep a noisy rooster in their backyard coop. That rooster services the organically-fed hens in my friend’s neighbor’s yard whose poop helped her score the blue ribbon.

What about you Kill Zoners? Tell us how you’ve celebrated others’ success.

by John Gilstrap

Full disclosure: I’m cheating again. I owe a book to my publisher on October 15, and it gets all my attention for a while. So, I decided I’d test everyone’s patience by recycling a post from January, 2017, in which I wrote about one of my favorite topics, which is things that go boom. I’m confident that the laws of physics and chemistry have not changed in the past five years, so the content should still be reliable. Here we go . . .

I’m going to continue my quest to help writers understand some of the technical aspects of weaponry so that their action scenes can be more realistic.  Today, we’re going to talk about some practical applications for high explosives.  It’s been a while since we last got into the weeds of things that go boom, so if you want a quick refresher, feel free to click here.  We’ll wait for you.

Welcome back.

When I was a kid, the whole point of playing with cherry bombs and lady fingers and M80s was to make a big bang.  Or, maybe to launch a galvanized bucket into the air.  (By the way, if you’re ever tempted to light a cherry bomb and flush it down the toilet, be sure you’re at a friend’s house, not your own.  Just sayin’.  And you’re welcome.)  As I got older and more sophisticated in my knowledge of such things, I realized that while making craters for craters’ sake was deeply satisfying, the real-life application of explosives is more nuanced.

Since TKZ is about writing thrillers and suspense fiction, I’m going to limit what follows to explosives used as weapons–to kill people and break things.  Of course, there are many more constructive uses for highly energetic materials, and while the principles are universal, the applications are very different.

Hand grenades are simple, lethal and un-artful bits of destructive weaponry.  Containing only 6-7 ounces of explosive (usually Composition B, or “Comp B”), they are designed to wreak havoc in relatively small spaces.  The M67 grenade that is commonly used by US forces has a fatality radius of 5 meters and an injury radius of 15 meters. Within those ranges, the primary mechanisms of injury are pressure and fragmentation.

For the most part, all hand grenades work on the same principles. By pulling the safety pin and releasing the striker lever (the “spoon”), the operator releases a striker–think of it as a firing pin–that strikes a percussion cap which ignites a pyrotechnic fuse that will burn for four or five seconds before it initiates the detonator and the grenade goes bang.  It’s important to note that once that spoon flies, there’s no going back.

Claymore mines operate on the same tactical principle as a shotgun, in the sense that it is designed to send a massive jet of pellets downrange, to devastating effect.  Invented by a guy named Norman MacLeod, the mine is named after a Scottish sword used in Medieval times. Unlike the hand grenade, which sends its fragments out in all directions, the Claymore is directional by design.  (I’ve always been amused by the embossed letters on the front of every Claymore mine, which read, “front toward enemy.”  As Peter Venkman famously said while hunting ghosts, “Important safety tip. Thanks,Egon.”)

The guts of a Claymore consist of a 1.5-pound slab of C-4 explosive and about 700 3.2 millimeter steel balls. When the mine is detonated by remote control, those steel balls launch downrange at over 3,900 feet per second in a 60-degree pattern that is six and a half feet tall and 55 yards wide at a spot that is 50 meters down range.

The fatality range of a Claymore mine is 50 meters, and the injury range is 100 meters.  (Note that because of the directional nature of the Claymore, we’re noting ranges, whereas with the omnidirectional hand grenade, we noted radii.)

Both the hand grenade and the Claymore mine are considered to be anti-personnel weapons.  While they’ll certainly leave an ugly dent in a car and would punch through the walls of standard construction, they would do little more than scratch the paint on an armored vehicle like a tank. To kill a tank, we need to pierce that heavy armor, and to do that, we put the laws of physics to work for us.

Shaped charges are designed to direct a detonation wave in a way that focuses tremendous energy on a single spot, thus piercing even heavy armor.  The principle is simple and enormously effective.

The illustration on the left shows a cutaway view of a classic shaped charge munition. You’re looking at a cross-section of a hollow cone of explosives. Imagine that you’re looking into an empty martini glass where the inside of the glass is made of cast explosive that is then covered with a thin layer of metal.  The explosive is essentially sandwiched between external and internal conical walls.  The open end of the cone is the front of the munition.

The initiator/detonator is seated at the pointy end of the cone (the rear of the munition), and when it goes off, a lot happens in the next few microseconds.  As the charge detonates, the blast waves that are directed toward the center of the cone combine and multiply while reducing that center liner into a molten jet that is propelled by enormous energy.  When that jet impacts a tank’s armor, its energy transforms the armor to molten steel which is then propelled into the confines of the vehicle, which becomes a very unpleasant place to be. The photo of the big disk with the hole in the middle bears the classic look of a hit by a shaped charge.

Now you understand why rocket-propelled grenades like the one in the picture have such a distinctive shape. The nose cone is there for stability in flight, and it also houses the triggering mechanisms.

The picture on the right is a single frame from a demonstration video in which somebody shot a travel trailer with an RPG.  The arrow shows the direction of the munition’s flight. There was no armor to pierce so the videographer was able to capture the raw power of that supersonic jet of energy from the shaped charge.

Looming deadline notwithstanding, I will do my best to answer any and all questions, but I warn you all that I might be a bit slow on the keyboard.