By John Gilstrap

We all know the drill by now.  A brave author has taken a big risk that we all respect.  First, the submission, and I’ll join you on the flip side:

Endless Tomorrow (TITLE)

The message from the Consul arrived before breakfast. Agnes had just wiped the last of the shaving lather from his face when Congressman John Paul opened the embossed and sealed envelope. He stared for far longer than it took to read the few words on the short scrap of paper.

“Well, what is it now?” asked Agnes.

Not the reserve a housekeeper should show to an employer but his momentary flash of irritation was soon forgotten. His fingers slid numbly over still tingling cheeks. “They know how to make guns.”

“Guns?” Her disbelief was evident. “Who’s got guns?”

John might as well have told her he could do magic. Guns were a relic of the past and long since gone from the world. “Strangers from behind the Eastern Mountains. We got word of them yesterday at the Ministers’ Meeting but there was no talk of guns.” He stared absently ahead. “A messenger must have come in the night.”

She laughed dismissively. “No one has guns anymore. Not for hundreds of years.” Agnes gently slapped powder on his cheeks and untied the barber cloth.

“Don’t be so sure, Agnes. I learned about them once in school. They are not complicated—at least in theory.”

“Oh, goodness. What else does the Consul’s note say about these people? They have rocket planes too?”

John had the feeling that rockets and planes were two different devices but his memory was fuzzy on the subject of the Moderns’ technology. He read the Consul’s note aloud. That was what Agnes wanted anyway. She was never satisfied until she knew everything.

Dozens of strangers from east now camped in field by Beaker’s Farm. Requesting our presence. Tech and crops unclear. Claim to have guns!? Ministers meeting at eleven. Then we ride. Richard.

Her voice was scolding. “Guns! Don’t believe those people—telling whatever lies they think might impress us. They’ll be wanting to settle here in the valley, just like every wanderer coming from the east. We both know it!” Her fingers moved adeptly over the contents of his shaving kit, brushing the blades clean, packing everything.

He folded the note away and regarded the woman beside him as she busily tidied his dressing room. Short in stature with a curvy figure slowly going plump, long dark hair done up in a bun, sharp gray eyes that never hesitated to meet his own. Clever she was, a bit of a schemer, a good source of town gossip—useful in every way but she had spent her whole life in the quiet town of Newhaven. Can she imagine the violence and slave-taking that reign outside our valley? Maybe none of us can. 

John shook his head and wished suddenly that he had heard fewer stories from terrified refugees who had fled from over the mountains. The era of the great seed traders was over. Only the wretched came now.

It’s Gilstrap again.

First the full disclosure: This piece is not from any genre that I care to read.  I don’t even know what genre it is.  And Author, that was not an insult, merely a confession.  That said, storytelling is storytelling, and from that perspective, this piece is troubled.  First, some general observations, and then I’ll dig a little deeper.

Adverbs.  Goodness gracious, there are a lot of them, and none are necessary. At a glance, I got numbly, absently, dismissively, gently, adeptly, busily, slowly, and suddenly. It’s a mistake to believe that -ly adverbs clarify meaning, because they never do. Either the modified verb will do the job on its own, or the writer has chosen the wrong verb in the first place.  There are exceptions, but I can’t think of one as I write this.  And yes, we’re all guilty of it.

Point of view.  The piece doesn’t have one.  I don’t know whose story we’re telling here.  The head-hopping detracts from the narrative pull of the story.

Setting.  Clearly, we are hundreds of years into the future, but the technology clock has for some reason spun the other way.  I don’t buy it.  This could very well be my unfamiliarity with the genre.

You started your story in the wrong place.  Getting a shave and receiving a note are not barn-burners of crises.  As it’s currently written, the opening is mainly a framework on which to hang backstory that we don’t yet need.  Assuming that guns are a big part of the McGuffin, I suggest starting with a holy-crap reaction that those new strangers have them.

Now, let’s get picky . . .

Endless Tomorrow (TITLE) JG: Years ago, I was told by an editor never to make a title an easy target for a snarky reviewer.  Casting no aspersions on this piece, Endless Tomorrow invites something like, “Endless Story” in the review. Just a thought.

The message from the Consul [Why capitalized?] arrived before breakfast. Agnes had just wiped the last of the shaving lather from his face [gramatically, the “his” here refers to Agnes] when Congressman John Paul opened the embossed and sealed envelope. [What did it look like? Thick, thin? How did it arrive?] He stared for far longer than it took to read the few words on the short scrap of paper. [So? what does Agnes think about that?]

“Well, what is it now?” asked Agnes.

Not the reserve a housekeeper should show to an employer [according to whom? Whose POV are we in?] but his momentary flash of irritation was soon forgotten [by whom?]. His fingers slid numbly [Why are his fingers numb?] over still tingling cheeks. “They know how to make guns.”

“Guns?” Her disbelief was evident [How? In what way?]. “Who’s got guns?”

John might as well have told her he could do magic. [POV?] Guns were a relic of the past and long since gone from the world. “Strangers from behind the Eastern Mountains. We got word of them yesterday at the Ministers’ Meeting but there was no talk of guns.” He stared absently ahead. “A messenger must have come in the night.”

[She laughed dismissively. “No one has guns anymore. Not for hundreds of years.” Agnes gently slapped powder on his cheeks and untied the barber cloth.

“Don’t be so sure, Agnes. I learned about them once in school. They are not complicated—at least in theory.”

“Oh, goodness. What else does the Consul’s note say about these people? They have rocket planes too?”

John had the feeling that rockets and planes were two different devices but his memory was fuzzy on the subject of the Moderns’ technology. He read the Consul’s note aloud. That was what Agnes wanted anyway. She was never satisfied until she knew everything.] The bracketed and underlined section is unnecessary backstory, and mostly redundant.  Recommend deleting it.

Dozens of strangers from east now camped in field by Beaker’s Farm. Requesting our presence. Tech and crops unclear. Claim to have guns!? Ministers meeting at eleven. Then we ride. Richard.

Her voice was scolding [What is a scolding voice? Tone, maybe?]. “Guns! Don’t believe those people—telling whatever lies they think might impress us. They’ll be wanting to settle here in the valley, just like every wanderer coming from the east. We both know it!” Her fingers moved adeptly over the contents of his shaving kit, brushing the blades clean, packing everything.

He folded the note away [What does “folded away” mean? Where did he put it?] and regarded the woman beside him as she busily tidied his dressing room. Short in stature with a curvy figure slowly going plump, long dark hair done up in a bun, sharp gray eyes that never hesitated to meet his own. Clever she was,[this structure sounds like Yoda] a bit of a schemer, a good source of town gossip—useful in every way but she had spent her whole life in the quiet town of Newhaven. Can [Could?–keep it in past tense] she imagine the violence and slave-taking that reign outside our valley? Maybe none of us can [Could?]. 

John shook his head and wished suddenly that he had heard fewer stories from terrified refugees who had fled from over the mountains. The era of the great seed traders was over. Only the wretched came now.

Overall, this piece feels like a very early draft to me.  Okay, TKZers, what say you?

Write hard and clear about what hurts. – Ernest Hemingway

By PJ Parrish

Years back, I had the pleasure to hear David Morrell speak as luncheon guest of honor at a writer’s conference. Now, if you’ve ever been lucky enough to hear David or better yet, talk to him, you know he’s a fount of fabulous advice for a writer, no matter where you are on the food chain.

That day I heard him speak, I was well into my own career, so I was munching away on my carrot cake, listening but also mind-wandering. Then he said something that made the hairs stand up on my neck.

“Write about what you fear most.”

I sat there stunned. Tears threatened. Because David had poked a wound in me as a writer. I had been struggling with a short story. It felt artificial and too cool. And I realized, sitting in that ballroom fork in mid-air why. I had been unwilling – or unable – to confront my demons.

I knew the demons were there. That was why I had chosen the story I did. (Or did it chose me?) But I was holding the demons at arm’s length. Or maybe hiding from them. The next day, I went back and started over. It was a hard story to write. But I finished it. I didn’t publish it, but I finished it. And it taught me a great hard lesson.

You have to be willing to open a vein.

David Morrell talks often about a book called The Gift of Fear. The author Gavin de Becker says we should all learn to trust our gut instincts to protect us from life’s traumas and, ultimately violence. But David suggests the book has lessons for writers:

As de Becker says, we have all these signals coming at us all the time, and some people choose to ignore them, and get mugged, or have their car stolen, or terrible stuff, because they say, “I kind of knew there was something wrong there, but I thought, oh heck, it doesn’t matter.” Well, when you feel that, it, it does matter, and basically that’s what my books are about: the gift of fear.

David speaks from experience, and is not shy about sharing this. After his father died in WWII, his mother was forced to put him in an orphanage for a time. When she remarried, his step-father was a brute who hated kids and there was constant fighting in the house. From an interview:

I was in fear for much of my early years. And in my fear, I told myself stories. I was at the time, four years, five years, six years old, and I told myself stories in which I was the hero, and rescuing people or whatever—in effect, rescuing myself.

He carried this into his career as a bestselling thriller writer. If you’ve lived under a rock, you might not know that he is the father of Rambo. He has produced a long, stellar, bestselling list of other novels that range from spy novels to Victorian mysteries. But his theme is always human fear, and his characters’ struggle to suppress it or else give in to it.

He’s not afraid of fear.

In 1987, his teenage son died from complications from a rare bone cancer. David took his panic attacks, despair, grief and deepest fears and turned them into a memoir, Fire Flies. Stephen King wrote of it: “I found myself almost speechless…It left me feeling shaken, uplifted, and terribly moved.”

Many other writers have found their voices in what they fear. John Green, author of The Fault Is In Our Stars, was stricken with severe anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder, unable to escape “the spiral of my own thoughts,” as he put it. With therapy and medication, he recovered and wrote Turtles All the Way Down, a wrenching novel about what it is like to live in constant fear of your own mind.

“Coming out of that, it was difficult to write about anything else,” he told an interviewer. “The topic demanded itself.”

One of my favorite early reads, The Bell Jar, is irrevocably associated with Sylvia Plath’s experience with depression, with the character Esther Greenwood’s mental breakdown mirroring Plath’s own. On the Road is based on Jack Kerouac’s real life drugged out road trip with his friend Neal Cassady. Amy Tan’s brilliant novel Joy Luck Club is based on her immigrant childhood in San Francisco. In an interview, Tan talked about how writing the novel moved her to connect with her difficult mother:

When I was writing, it was so much for my mother and myself…I wanted her to know what I thought about China and what I thought about growing up in this country. And I wanted those words to almost fall off the page, so that she could just see the story, that the language would be simple enough, almost like a little curtain would fall away.”

The story I like most on this subject involves Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Of course.

Fitzgerald, flush from his success with The Great Gatsby, started working on his next novel. It was about a glamorous couple living in the South of France. By this point, his wife Zelda was hospitalized with schizophrenia and Fitzgerald was broke, borrowing money from his editor, and drowning in alcohol. The novel, Tender is the Night, told the sad tale of the self-destructive Dick and Nicole Diver.

A month after it came out, Fitzgerald wrote to Hemingway to ask his friend’s honest opinion of the book. Hemingway wrote back: “Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it—don’t cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist—but don’t think anything is of any importance because it happens to you or anyone belonging to you.”

There’s a lesson in that for us mortal writers. Yes, write what you fear most. Plumb your life experiences. Use your pain. Write what you know.  But there’s a trick.

I have a writer friend named Jessica Lourey. Jess writes two terrific mystery series, kids books, women’s fiction and fantasy. But her non-fiction book Rewrite Your Life, is what I’d like you to take a look at for our purposes today. Jess writes about how writing fiction can help you heal the wounds in your life. She gives TED talks to non-writers about the power of memoir writing. But her book is full of good advice for novelists:

When writers base fiction too closely on their own experiences, they can sometimes lose the ability to truly play with the story. I think this is because they are not consciously making as many decisions as a writer of “pure” fiction. They can be tempted to simply record what happened in real life (and to skip inventing material to fill in the gaps of their own knowledge about other people’s motivations or bits of the experience that they didn’t notice), instead of pondering how to best tell a good story. I’ve known writers whose story details should have been changed or expanded to better support their theme or create atmosphere, but who resisted the suggestion that they do so because “this is how it really happened.”

Most of us have encountered folks who say, “Boy, do I have a story to tell.” Or “my life would make a great novel.”  Instinctively, all fiction writers know the problem with this. Yes, every human walking the earth has a unique story to tell. But few have the ability to tell it in a way that emotionally touches others.

That’s the trick.

The trick is to face your fear and turn it inside out and upside down. Your own true experiences – be it the horror of war, the loneliness of childhood or the terror of domestic violence – is only fodder. If you spill it out too raw on the page, it can feel strangely trite and, in the case of my short story, artificial. The trick is to take your specific and deeply personal emotions and experiences and make them feel universal. Your pain has to become something bigger.

Your story begins inside you. But in the end, it belongs to your reader.

Photo (c) Kerrie Kelly via Pinterest

Happy Saturday! Please join me in welcoming Anon du jour for our irregularly featured presentation known as First Page Critique. Our First Page today introduces a work in progress titled Tatrice, so without further ado let’s take a look:

“Donna, get to this address for an interview.”

    I took the note and asked my boss, JJ, about my current assignment. He made a throat cutting gesture and I gritted my teeth. Two weeks research shot.

           “When is the appointment?”

           “Now. Get going.”

           “Excuse me, JJ. Who am I meeting?”                                    

           “It’s all there.” He flapped his hand toward the scrap of paper.

           The address was a magnificent Craftsman on the west edge of town. A tall, well-dressed man answered the doorbell.

           “Mr. Bonfig…”

           “Silent g. Bon-feel-ee-oh. Please come in Ms. Burdett.”

           My day went downhill from there.

     Mr. Bonfiglio and I had an unproductive first meeting. He claimed the only chair in the room sized for a lady so I sat on a leather ottoman rather than sink into the matching overstuffed armchair. I didn’t fancy him looking up my skirt. My strategy backfired. Now I found myself in imminent danger of sliding off the slick footstool. The muscles in my calf spasmed into a charley horse and I feared I would sprawl on the floor if my high heel broke. Nevertheless, my precarious seat was an improvement over getting sucked into quicksand cushions.

Since JJ failed to provide the nature of the assignment, I decided to jump right in. I would either stay at the edge of the pool testing the temperature or swim laps with this man.

“What can I do for you, Sir?” Thanks, JJ , for sending me here with nothing to go on. Was I supposed to write a piece on this fabulous house? My fingers itched to click away at the prospect. I flexed my ankle to relieve the cramp and slipped lower on the side of the footstool.

While I uneasily treaded water, he studied me as carefully as a prospective car buyer looking under the hood. Did he wonder why I didn’t take the chair he offered? We silently contemplated one another as I speculated on his marital status. My post graduation goals were to establish my career, get married and start a family before I turned thirty.

Thus far, except for my job, my time had been wasted on warm up exercises. Inexplicably, I was seldom asked for a second date. At age twenty-eight I saw myself as a speed swimmer poised on the starting platform. The finish line painted with that magic number loomed closer each week.

*                                *                              *

 Let’s start with the good, Anon. You do a terrific job in establishing that JJ, Donna’s boss, is a dou…um, jerk in just a couple of lines of dialogue. Donna’s interior dialogue tells us quite a bit about her as well, though perhaps a little early in the game.

Now for the rest. Let us begin with a few typos and then get to the meat of things:

— “Two weeks research shot.”

Either “Two weeks’ research shot” or “Two weeks of research were shot” will fix that up.

— Also…”throat cutting,”  “room sized,” “post graduation,” and “warm up” should all be hyphenated. And…

— “Thanks, JJ ,“…let’s get that comma after “JJ” one space over to the left.

As to the meat of things, as it were:

— The address was a magnificent Craftsman on the west edge of town. A tall, well-dressed man answered the doorbell.

I visualize a great big space between those two sentences, Anon, and you can help your story by filling it in. So the house where Donna is going is on the west edge of town. What town? How long does it take her to drive there? On the way, maybe Donna in her internal dialogue could tell the reader about the name of the company she works for, the nature of her job, whether JJ treats all of his employees so abruptly, and where she is in the company hierarchy. Perhaps she will be at her destination by the time she gives the reader that information. Donna at that point can give us more of a description of what she sees as she pulls up to Mr. Bonfiglio’s house. What is the neighborhood like? Does the house stick out or blend in? What is magnificent about it? Show us through Donna.

— Now I found myself…

Drop the “Now” and begin with “I.” Your narrative is in the first person past so there is no “Now,” only “Then,” and you don’t really need “Then” here, either.

— Mr. Bonfiglio and I had an unproductive first meeting.  

Whoops. You’re telling the reader this at the beginning of the meeting. Accordingly, the reader already knows what is going to happen.  Show your audience that rather than telling them. Leave that sentence out, and show the reader throughout the meeting that it is going bottoms up, instead of saying so at the beginning. Let the reader share Donna’s agony as the meeting unfolds, and establish empathy with her. After the interview, you can have Donna thinking about it as she is driving away, something to the effect of,”

“Well, THAT went well!” I thought, as I drove back to the office (or home, or to her favorite tavern, or whatever).

Which brings us to:

— My post graduation goals were to establish my career, get married and start a family before I turned thirty.

Thus far, except for my job, my time had been wasted on warm up exercises. Inexplicably, I was seldom asked for a second date. At age twenty-eight I saw myself as a speed swimmer poised on the starting platform. The finish line painted with that magic number loomed closer each week.

This should all go somewhere else, such as after Donna’s meeting. You’re dropping it right at the beginning of her conversation with Bonfiglio and it brings everything to a halt instead of advancing things. The trip back to the office/home/wherever may also be a good place for Donna to review the current state of her life. When you do that, drop the word “(I)nexplicably.” Instead, why don’t you take a couple of sentences to have Donna describe her first dates and why she thinks they go well — shared interests with the person across the table, lots of shared laughs, the other party seemed interested and complimented her frequently — and then end the internal dialogue with Donna talking about waiting for the call that never comes. Communicate Donna’s befuddlement but drop a couple of hints that might indicate why she never gets a callback. Maybe it has something to do with her job, like constant complaints about her boss. 

Also, the metaphor that you used for the state of Donna’s life isn’t quite appropriate. What you are describing — Donna’s goals, and time running out — would more appropriately be described by a ticking clock, or a fuse burning, or, to use your swimming metaphor, the lane getting longer, not shorter, since Donna doesn’t seem to be getting any closer to her goal. I also notice that you like to use a lot of swimming metaphors, Anon. I hope that you are going to connect those to Donna’s life in some way. Maybe Donna was on the swim team in high school or college, or maybe it is her favorite form of exercise of recreation. Either way, it makes for a minor but interesting element of her personality, one that would make her feel more relatable to the reader and could perhaps tie into the main plot later in Tatrice.

Just in closing…I’m having a bit of trouble getting a handle on what sort of novel Tatrice is. I’m not being critical. If I were browsing either in a bookstore or online and saw Tatrice there would be a cover, the inside front jacket flap, or a RIYL hint to help me along before I skimmed the first page. That said, I  am fairly certain that Tatrice is not a thriller, hard-boiled detective novel, or science fiction. I’m guessing that it’s a cozy, cutesy, chicklit, or romance assuming that, on page three, Donna doesn’t look down the street and see the Zombie Apocalypse approaching.  Since I rarely read the latter genres, please accept my comments concerning the substance of the book with that in mind.

I shall now move out of the way and attempt to be uncharacteristically silent while our friends out there offer their own thoughts. Thank you again, Anon, for submitting your work to TKZ’s First Page Critique!

Today, algorithms determine the most minute details of our buying habits, down to the finer points of the dental floss we prefer (waxed or unwaxed, plain or minty). Advertising is a constant blitzkrieg of spam, pop-ups, and phone alerts. Those ads are specific, focused, targeted…and totally impersonal.

For all the information that Google, Facebook, and Amazon collect about us, Alexa’s robotic voice will never replace that of a trusted friend who enthusiastically says, “You’ve got to read this book I just finished!”

In bygone days of the last century, the friendly clerk at the neighborhood bookstore introduced customers to new authors s/he knew they’d love. Back then, it was called “hand-selling.” Such word-of-mouth recommendations launched many unknown books that went on to become bestsellers. I, for one, miss those days.

Today, with a billion books competing for attention, how does an author make a personal connection with readers?

Book clubs provide that opportunity.

Serendipity led to my first appearance as the featured author at a book club. While on vacation in Florida, I reconnected with a Zumba class I hadn’t seen for a year. In catch-up conversation, I mentioned my novel had been published. Joan said, “I’m in a book club. Would you like to speak to us in two weeks?”

Would I??!!

In another bit of luck, Amazon had put the Kindle version of my novel Instrument of the Devil on special for 99 cents during that month. Thanks to the upcoming meeting and people talking about it at Zumba classes, sales experienced a nice spike.

On a Friday afternoon, over drinks and snacks, I met eleven accomplished, professional women from their mid-50s to mid-70s. I knew several from Zumba but most were strangers.

Here in front of me sat the exact people I had in mind as I wrote the story.

And, better yet, they were excited to talk with the author whose book they’d just read.

Book club feedback is solid gold. These are real customers who buy books, not just looky-loos. They constantly browse for new works. They know what catches their interest and keeps them up late, as well as what bores them or turns them off. Most of all, they know what makes them click the “Buy Now” button.

These readers were willing to share their reactions with me—a priceless gift for a writer building a fan base.

If you’re an author in search of book clubs, how do you find them?

A Zumba class might not be the first place you’d think to look, but that’s where I’ve gained followers in Florida, Canada, and Montana. Serious readers can be found at work, on the golf course, at your children’s school activities, at Bible study, while volunteering at the animal shelter. At the next gathering or party you attend, ask if anyone participates in a book club. Chances are the answer will be yes.

In my little Montana town, a local microbrewery hosts a regular reading group–Books and Brews. Why not?

Google: “book clubs near me.” Meetup.com is a great clearing house of specific interest groups. Narrow the search by geographical area, genre, and age range. In the greater Tampa area, I located at least two dozen clubs within twenty miles of our vacation spot.

Many more groups exist under the radar of the internet or meet privately.

Visit the library, colleges, and book stores (if you can find one!). Mention you’re an author who’d like to meet with book clubs. Leave business cards with them so groups can contact you.

Once you hook up with a book club, how do you prepare?

Generally, members read your book before you meet them. If they haven’t, practice your fascinating story summary on them, but don’t give away the ending.

Many readers use Kindles or devices, but some still prefer a print edition, which I offer to groups at my cost. At this point in my career, I’d rather build a foundation of loyal readers than worry about a few bucks. Check your contract to make sure that’s permissible.

Expect FAQs: How long did it take to write? What sparked the idea? Did you make up the characters or are they based on real people? Are the sex scenes autobiographical? Here’s your cue to joke about diligent research.

The question you hope they’ll ask: What’s your next book about? If they enjoyed your first book, they’ll be eager customers for your next one.

Readers love insider knowledge. Give them a sneak preview. They might even agree to be your focus group.

Before meeting with the Florida club, I’d been toiling over loglines and blurbs for Death by Proxy, the unpublished second book in my series. Those can be tougher to write than the novel because the author is too close to his/her own story. Input from your critique group or beta readers, while valuable, is limited because they already know the plot.

You want to seek  out the spontaneous reaction of random customers skimming through book descriptions on Amazon.

I asked the ladies if they’d be interested in hearing my proposed blurbs.

Unanimous answer: “Sure!”

They listened to several choices then voted for the one they liked best. Of course, that’s the one I’ll use.

I also read them the opening pages of the story and gauged their reactions. Was it clear and understandable? Did they get lost? Did they laugh in the right places? Were they intrigued enough to continue?

If their reactions are less than enthusiastic, seize that opportunity to ask what specifically turned them off. Were they confused? Bored? Did they find a character dull, flat, or unlikeable? Ask their opinions about your cover. You might find it’s time to freshen the design.

This is not the time to get defensive. Even if you disagree, give their opinions serious consideration.

After all, they are your readers, the most important people in your writing career.

An author has no way to determine why an anonymous browser on Amazon skipped over one book and bought another. But the book club will tell you. Listen carefully because they’ll give valuable feedback that’s impossible to get otherwise. 

What to bring when you meet a book club:

A smile and a friendly manner so they feel comfortable asking questions. If you’re shy or nervous, learn to overcome that. A stand-offish, aloof author makes a poor impression.

Business cards and swag if you have it–bookmarks, pens, etc.

A sign-up sheet to collect contact information to notify them of upcoming books, appearances, etc.

A signed print copy for the host if you meet at a home.

Do a giveaway. Hold a drawing or contest where the prize is the print edition of your book, or a gift certificate for your next book. Make your guest appearance fun and they’ll remember you.

If you can’t meet in person, try other options:

Skype or Facetime allows an author to speak to book clubs anywhere there’s an internet connection.

Include reading group discussion guides at the end of your books. Here are some samples.

Include a special book club link on your website. Engage readers as described in this article from the Alliance of Independent Authors.

As I bid the Florida book club goodbye, Mary, the Zumba instructor, hugged me and said, “I can’t believe I met a real author.” I assured her that she’d earned far more money from Zumba than I ever would as a writer.

But Mary’s comment made me think about how readers view authors. As we toil at our computers, enduring years of frustration and rejection, our lives don’t feel very glamorous.

But the club taught me that readers are excited to meet the person behind the book they just read. They’re interested in the journey, the setbacks, and the triumphs. They like knowing the inside scoop. If their input helps shape your next book, they’re invested in it.

In an impersonal world, humans still crave connection. Book clubs give writers and readers the chance to make that connection.

As Bruce Springsteen sings:

I just want someone to talk to and a little of that human touch.

TKZers:

If you belong to a book club, have authors made personal appearances at meetings? Did that influence you positively or negatively?

If you’re an author, have you spoken to book clubs? What was their response?

I’d love to talk about Instrument of the Devil with your book club, whether in person, by phone, or Skype. Contact me here.

Another offering from a brave Anonymous Author. See you on the other side.

Topher And Lucy

ONE

You lunge, and strike. Three rapid-fire hits. Splintering wood. Three dents in the bathroom door. Your mother’s voice, coming from the living room, shrills in your ears. You move into the hallway. Muscles taut, nostrils flaring and collapsing with your sucked-in-pushed-out breaths, your hands are curled, the knuckles of the right starting to swell. Your eyes lock on the hall wall just as she steps between it, and you.

Quivering, you balance on the balls of your feet. Like a prize-fighter, itching to dance that half step forward and smash your balled fist into the flesh and bone of the face in front of you. You could put that head through the gyproc. One quick, hard punch. She’s daring you to do it. Just like she dares you all the time. Step out of line so I can throw you out. That’s not what she says, but it’s what she means. Breathe! You won’t hit her. Hurt her, you’ll have the cops to answer to, and you’re already way out of line. How did that happen? You in bed, her face over yours, screaming, Where were you last night? I don’t care if your head hurts. Get up! Then she dumped water on you.

Her mouth moves; sound rings in your ears. Get out! she says.

Fuck! You knew she’d do that. You shout, If I go I’m never comin’ back.

I won’t live with this kind of temper, this kind of threat, she says.

You’re gone, cursing her, shaking your bruised hand. Fuck you, mom. You don’t know a thing! Do you hear me? Fuck You!

Lucy leans against the wall beside the door, hearing Topher rant. Then, the crack of more wood breaking—the garage, or the barn, she thinks. It is not an unexpected sound. In a few minutes there may be tears on her part, self-recriminations, regret. Right now she’s numb. Then, relieved. He’s out the door. He’s cost her so much lately, more than she can pay.

Minutes later, her mind wakes up. The earthquake fund. He’s taken it before.

She runs out to the feed shed, checks the freezer where they store the earthquake kit. The shed’s never locked, the freezer’s not locked when they’re home. If an earthquake hit, keys could get lost. The cash-box key’s inside the zippered pillow-pouch of Harvey’s sleeping bag. The money’s gone. Of course.

***

Today’s Anonymous Author leads with a hard right jab. You certainly grabbed my attention with an explosive, violent character who’s a half-breath away from knocking his mother through a wall. The action is fast and vivid. The conflict is immediately laid out—an out-of-control raging young man (I’m presuming he’s young) and an at-her-wit’s-end mother throwing him out of the house.

In 400 words, you’ve tackled an ambitious task of introducing two clashing characters, each in their own POV.

You’ve further challenged yourself by writing Topher in the unusual second person POV, always a risky proposition. However, I think you pull it off well in the first page. This angry young man is dangerous, barely maintaining control. By using “you” instead of “he” or “I,” you’ve showcased his alienated, fractured personality. He thinks of himself as “you,” an entity separate from himself. I’m curious if Topher remains in second person POV throughout the story.

You carry his psychological quirks even further. He disconnects from the horrific act of wanting to punch his mother by instead referring to the flesh and bone of the face in front of you. You could put that head through the gyproc. He’s objectified her into detached body parts: the face, that head. Chilling.

Another scary aspect is his ability to justify his violent rage by claiming She’s daring you to do it. Just like she dares you all the time. Her peril is real and terrifying.

Yet, he’s oddly fearful of being thrown out of the house, which suggests Lucy has a higher level of power over him. That sets up an interesting dichotomy—his physical strength vs. her superior position. I’m guessing he’s a juvenile who’s still under parental control. While he chafes at that, he’s also scared of being out on his own.

Then you flip into Lucy’s head. You say she’s numb but she has enough presence of mind to know she will have a delayed reaction in the near future. This seems realistic for someone who’s lived under ongoing violence for quite a while—just get through it, get the crazy kid out, and break down later. But she is worried about him stealing her stash of money, which he does. That suggests the family has serious financial problems if she’s so dependent on that.

The earthquake fund introduces another layer of instability (sorry, couldn’t help myself). Where do they live that they find it necessary to set aside money and leave the shed unlocked in case the key gets lost in an earthquake? Although my husband and I used to live near a major fault line in California, we never had an earthquake fund. I want to learn where this scary place is but I’m willing to wait a little longer.

Gyproc was not a familiar term so I Googled it. It’s a gypsum board/drywall material that’s used in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, but apparently not common in the U.S.

Another clue this story might be set outside the U.S. was the lack of quotation marks around dialogue. Depending on where you market this, you might consider using American-English conventions of grammar and punctuation.

For example:

“Get out!” she says.

You shout, “If I go [add comma], I’m never comin’ back.”

“I won’t live with this kind of temper, this kind of threat,” she says.

Here are some small nits:

Is the title Topher And Lucy? If so, you can do better. At first glance, from the whimsical-sounding name of Topher, I thought it might be a children’s story, which obviously it didn’t turn out to be.

Skip the comma in the first sentence: You lunge and strike.

Splintering wood doesn’t match dents in the door. When wood splinters, it generally leaves sharp, ragged edges because of the grain. Dent seems more appropriate to metal or a surface that, when struck, remains largely intact but with an indentation.

The image of nostrils flaring and collapsing and sucked-in-pushed-out breaths is a fresh way to describe hard breathing. Nicely done.

Your eyes lock on the hall wall just as she steps between it, and you. Even though eyeballs can’t literally lock, that usage is common, although incorrect. However, if you still choose to go with it, consider that eyes usually lock with other eyes, not with an inanimate object, like a wall. Maybe instead: Your stare drills into the wall.

Hall wall is an accidental rhyme that doesn’t read well. Also it seems odd that he would be looking at the wall rather than Lucy. If it’s because he can’t bear to face her, maybe rewrite to show that. Your stare drills into the wall so intently that you almost expect to see two round holes in the plasterboard. Instead, your mother’s face appears, right in the line of your aim.

Step out of line so I can throw you out. That’s not what she says, but it’s what she means. These sentences capture the skewed communication between mother and son. Consider putting Step out of line so I can throw you out in italics to emphasize that’s what he imagines she is thinking.

In the following, I added a clearer attribution and changed dumped to dumps to keep tense consistent. Also suggest you rework the paragraphing:

Breathe! You won’t hit her. Hurt her, you’ll have the cops to answer to, and you’re already way out of line.

How did that happen? You in bed, her face over yours, [added] and she’s screaming, “Where were you last night? I don’t care if your head hurts. Get up!” Then she dumps water on you.

Semicolons belong in nonfiction, not fiction. Replace with a period.

Again, if you’re writing for an American audience, adopt quotation marks around dialogue. And fix the capitalization in the following:

“Fuck you, Mom. You don’t know a thing! Do you hear me? Fuck you!” Mom is used as a proper name, therefore capitalized. You might be attempting to show emphasis by capitalizing You, but the epithet followed by an exclamation mark makes the point.

Lucy leans against the wall beside the door, hearing Topher rant. Use this opportunity to ground the reader a little more in the setting. Lucy leans against the kitchen wall beside the back door, listening to Topher rant.

Minutes later, her mind wakes up. I think she’d remain aware of where Topher is until he leaves and the danger is past. Then she can zone out.

Maybe instead:

It is not an unexpected sound. Neither is the too-high revving of the motorcycle’s engine and the crunch and ping of gravel as he pops a wheelie out the driveway, down the road.

After the engine noise fades away, she allows herself a normal breath, a few moments of silence. Peace.

Then her muscles tense again.

The earthquake fund.
He’s taken it before.

For dramatic impact, suggest you make the last two sentences their own paragraphs.

The money’s gone.

Of course.

Anonymous Author, you’ve done an admirable job on your first page. You dug deep into the heads of two troubled characters, hinted at a threatening setting, and kicked off a chilling conflict that promises future violence. This story appears to fall into the Domestic Suspense or YA genre, with two narrators who may be both unreliable and unsympathetic. I don’t have an emotional connection yet with either one, except to feel sorry for Lucy. But I am curious to learn if Topher’s hatred toward his mother is justified.

TKZers, what do you think about Topher and Lucy? Would you turn the page? Are you engaged with these characters? Where do you think this story is going?

The first page of Instrument of the Devil went through TKZ‘s grinder and came out much improved from readers’ insightful comments. It became page 2 instead!

I highly recommend writers embrace this opportunity for honest, constructive feedback.

Photo purchased from Shutterstock

Recently the dynamics on commercial social media have become…a tad weird. So yesterday, after one too many hacking episodes, privacy scares, and encounters with online trolls, I took the plunge and deactivated my Facebook account. I’ll miss the ease of staying in touch with certain folks (and of course I’ll miss “Yoga with Baby Goats” and other video gems), but it was long past time to cut my ties with advertising-supported social media.

I started feeling conflicted about commercial social media as far back as 2013, when I wrote “Is Social Media Developing a Personality Disorder?” Five years later, the answer (for me, anyway) is an emphatic “Yes.”

Here at TKZ we made a firm decision at the outset not to go down the commercial advertising route. It’s wonderful that out little corner of the cyber sphere continues to serve as a little oasis of calm amidst the winds of the social media Furies.

I’ll miss seeing everyone on Facebook, of course. And I’ll really miss getting my daily dose of baby goats.

How about you? Is anyone else rethinking their relationship to social media these days?