Writer's Notebook - James Rafferty Blog

Celebrating the Book - Boston Bookfest 2011

This past Saturday I attended the third Boston Book Festival, which took over Copley Square and environs for the day. We had cooperative weather -- mostly sunny and with temperatures in the sixties -- though the occasional gusts of wind were a reminder that we'd recently slipped into October. This was the place to be for anybody in the Boston area who loves books and thousands joined in.

I began the day by attending a workshop on Navigating the Publishing World. This session was conducted by Alan Rinzler, who has edited numerous well known writers including Tom Robbins and Hunter Thompson.  He's old school, but knows the publishing industry very well and recognizes the massive changes underway. He reviewed statistics from the first half of 2011, noting that ebooks make up about ten percent of the business, but are growing at a phenomenal rate of 163 percent. This compares to a decline in hard copy sales of 22.9 percent during the same period. He summarized the current situation by saying that the publishing industry is in a state of crisis, but couldn't resist saying that in his experience, "this has always been the case".

He confirmed that traditional publishing firms work exclusively via agents and wasn't very encouraging about the prospects for writers to find an effective agent. But he also said that doing well in self publishing is a good way to convince publishers and agents that a writer has both a platform and an audience. It was a good example of how the conventional wisdom on self publishing has changed radically in the past year due to success stories like Amanda Hocking.

After a brief diversion for lunch at the Atantic Fish Company on Boyleston Street -- which offered a delectable crab cake melt -- I returned to the Trinity Church and stepped into the magnificent chapel just in time to attend a session on Frontiers in Science. The three speakers covered very different subjects -- the ancient philosopher poet Lucretius, the current state of cosmological physics and cancer -- but offered a stimulating discussion that took me way out of my normal areas of knowledge, but reminded me of why I'd fallen in love with books in the first place.

The next session I attended took me to more familiar territory. Bob Blumenthal talked about his experiences getting to know jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins and following his work over the past fifty years. He recently collaborated on a book devoted to Rollins with photographer John Abbott. The next speaker was Tim Riley, who's recently been getting quite a bit of attention for his biography of John Lennon. Some of his more interesting comments were about the way that Lennon is viewed very differently by Americans as compared to the British. It seems when John re-located to New York and never came back to the UK, many of his countrymen were upset.

Next, I attended another workshop called Jumpstart Your Writing conducted by author and instructor Lynne Griffin. She had lots of energy and walked us through several warmup strategies.  She likes journals or free writing to warm up the writing muscles and tap the unconscious to write more deeply. After listening to other writers speak during the past several hours, I relished the chance to do a bit of writing myself.

My final session of the day was on learning. I had to leave early to catch my train, but first got to hear Nicolas Negroponte and Sugata Mita of the MIT Media Lab talk about their labor of love in trying to put laptops and tablet PCs into the hands of children within third world countries. Both of them shared numerous success stories on how young childen could quickly learn to use computers and how, with guidance, they could work together to solve complex problems. This was easily the most fascinating session of the day.

The entire day pulled me out of my normal patterns and help me reconnect with my love of books and lifetime learning. This is what weekends are all about.

If you love books, be on the lookout for book related events in your area. There is so much amazing work being published. This is an industry going through turmoil, but the book -- be it electronic or hard copy -- can still evoke the sense of wonder which originally drew me to books in my childhood.

Writer's Notebook: Interview with Boston Writing Careers - Part II

The second part of my interview with Lynette Benton, columnist for Boston Writing Careers at Examiner.com has been posted.  In this part of the interview, we discuss writing groups and blogging.  During the past 2 years, I've been fortunate enough to be part of a great online writing group, the Writing Wombats on Gather.com.  I talk about those experiences and offer a few comments about this blog.  Check it out at James Rafferty interview, Part II. 

Writer's Notebook: Interview with Boston Writing Careers Columnist

I'm pleased to report that I've been interviewed about my writing and blogging by Lynette Benton, who writes a column for Examiner.com entitled Boston Writing Careers.  Lynette posts regularly on a variety of writing topics with a Boston area focus.  She recently commented on one of my blog posts and shortly after that we agreed to do the interview. 

Check it out here at James Rafferty, Boston Area Writer, Part 1.  In this part of the interview, I talk about writing my first novel, Growing Up Single, and about other writing projects.  Part 2 will be posted soon.   

Writer's Notebook: Writer Idol at the Boston Book Festival

In my last post, I talked about my fun experiences attending the Boston Book Festival.  The event brimmed over with sessions that were helpful for writers who are on the path to publication.  

The first of these sessions was called the "Guided Open Mic," with our expert guide being author and investigative TV journalist Hank Phillipi Ryan.  Here's a picture of the Arbor Room of the Boston Public Library, where that session was held. 

I got a chance to do a reading at that session and had hoped to get my work read at a second session.  This one was across the street at the Old South Church about an hour later. 

Imagine this scene.  The room is packed with about 250 people.  Up on the stage, a panel of four publishing industry veterans is assembled, with representation from the literary agent, editing and publishing communities.  The session was named Writer Idol. 

Now that you've had a chance to visualize the scene, here's a photo of the session as it was about to begin (it's fuzzy, but you'll get the sense of it). 

The ground rules for Writer Idol were:

1. Participants were asked to bring in a 250 word beginning to a novel or piece of non-fiction and state the genre.
2. The entries were put in a box and a woman actor pulled them out and read from them.
3. There were four judges: a couple of agents and two other people from publishers.
4. The entries were read until two of the judges raised their hands to stop.

Depending upon your perspective, this might seem like either a writer's dream or, more ominously, their nightmare. 

 

I would estimate that about 40 entries were read over a one hour period.   My entry didn't get read, but the process was fascinating, a kind of live slush pile. The judges had different perspectives, so sometimes one hand would be raised but the reading would continue. Only a few pieces were read through to the end.

 

The process was anonymous; nobody knew who the writers were. However, there were some passages where the audience totally broke down with laughter, which no doubt was tough for the writers of those pieces.

For example, it turns out the judges REALLY did not like references to certain bodily functions that get activated when a character gets squeamish. TMI, I guess. There were three entries or so that went there; they all got shot down immediately.

Other no-no's included overuse of flowery adjectives, misuse of large words, and overuse of cliches. I'd imagine most writers that participated in a writing group wouldn't be surprised by these things, but seeing the panelists stop the reading because of these gotchas offered powerful reinforcement on these do's and don'ts.

 

My conclusion: Great session.  It's one thing to hear about what agents and editors want to see -- or not see -- but it's quite another to see it all play out in real time.  If you submit your work to an agent, they'll read what you submit and analyze it line by line just as they did here.  So, yes, you want to make your work compelling AND avoid miscues that will take the reader out of the scene and cause them to move on to the next item in the slush pile. 

 

That's it for this post, but I'd like to mention that I'll be having a guest blogger join me later this week on November 19.   Pat Bertram, author of Daughter Am I and two other novels published by Second Wind Publishing is on a whirlwind blog tour this month.  She and I have a lot of fun chatting together online and we've collaborated on an interview where we both talk about our writing and muse about topics such as writing outside of typical genres.  Please join us. 

Writer's Notebook: Boston Book Festival

Saturday I treated myself and took the train into Boston for the first ever Boston Book Festival.  What a great event.  I hope there will be many more which follow.  

I found out about the festival from the excellent folks at Grub Street, who also sponsored several of the sessions. 

Despite a shaky weather forecast, thousands of people were in attendance.  I grabbed a quick lunch, then headed over to one of the main venues, the amazing Boston Public Library.   I headed for the Abbey Room, soon to be the site for a session called "Guided Open Mic." 

On the way, this is what I saw: 

The Abbey Room is in the old part of the library, just across from the outdoor portion of the festival.  I headed out the door and stepped across Dartmouth Street (closed off for the day) and over to the booths of the festival.   Even with the threat of rain, one tent housed the festival stage and a variety of muscians, mostly from the local Berklee School of Music.  For a few minutes, I watched an artist named Liz Longley, who sang original songs, played keyboards and was backed by a tight quartet.  

The Fall colors flourished despite the rain, as seen in the following photo I took near the music tent. 

Time to head back to the library.   Along the way, I spotted this very cool banner advertising the festivities.  

 

Back at the Abbey Room, I signed up for the "Guided Open Mic" session. Our host was the very energetic Hank Phillipi Ryan, who is a TV news journalist on Boston Channel 7 and moonlights as a writer of 3 published novels in the thriller genre.  The event premise was simple.  Writers were invited to read a 3 minute excerpt from their work.  Earlier in the day, I printed out the beginning of a story I'd written earlier this year called "Fifth Season."  Hank offered started the session by offering us her tips on reading in public.  Most of it boiled down to "practice, practice, practice", though she also suggested we be very careful in choosing our selection and read the excerpt in a way which will keep listeners engaged.  

I thought the session worked very well.  It quickly became clear that good writing alone was not enough to carry the day in a reading, but several writers got the attention of the audience and held it.  After each reading, Hank offered a quick constructive critique on what worked and what needed improvement.   I got a chance to read my excerpt about 15 minutes into the event.  I speak a lot at conferences, but definitely had a few butterflies when it came to reading from my own work in front of an audience.  Afterwards, Hank suggested I needed to be more careful in choosing my microphone position in order to be able to look out and engage the audience.   The early part of the story that I read mainly introduces the characters; she suggested the excerpt needed to have more happening.  And more does happen -- later in story.    

The event continued for over an hour and lots of writers got a chance to read their work.  I felt I learned a lot from this and feel I'll be better prepared the next time I do a reading.  

Later that day, I attended another writer event, this one called "Writer Idol."   I'll write about that in my next post.   

RTF Returns

What happens when legends re-unite? 

In the case of the members of Return to Forever, the answer was presented last night in Boston.   The fabled band, last seen together in 1977, played a set of music that was unique and powerful, a summation of all they had done before but also much more than that.  

The band's leader, Chick Corea, is a living jazz legend and wrote most of the songs which RTF performed.  He would be famous even if he'd never played with this group, but only in RTF did he take the jazz fusion vocabulary and greatly expand its pallete.   Last night, he was a dervish at the keyboard, playing guitar-like synthesizer lead lines, lyrical electric piano and a diverse array of other sounds that he somehow coaxed out of his instrument array.  Chick seems endlessly inventive and the group continues to revolve around his musical vision and leadership.     

Stanley Clarke was like a big bear on electric and upright bass.   He hung back a lot and anchored the rhythm section, but also stepped forward and played bass chords, impossibly fast lead lines and a robust vocabulary of whacks and thacks that always fit (or set) the mood.  

Back in the seventies, Al DiMeola was an instant flash guitar legend in his early years with the band.  On the band's last album, Romantic Warrior, he began to add emotion to the flash.  By the time I saw him again at the Montreal Jazz Festival around 1990, DiMeola had become the compleat musician: soulful, intense and generous.  With this group, Al is just a star among stars, but he seemed to revel in this role last night.   On the electric music, he began the night playing legato lines of distorted guitar, that would morph during his solos into a McLaughlin-esque fury, then slip perfectly back into place when his solos were over.  But as the evening progressed, he switched guitars and mixed in lines that were quiet, thoughtful and full of soul, paying attention to each note.  

Lenny White is perhaps the least famous of the group, but holds his own just fine with his musicality and consistent drumming.  Last night the band featured one of his compositions, Sorceress.  He also got a rise out of the crowd when he said they were not just another "boy band", but a "man band".  He can bang out a beat on the tom-toms when the music calls for it, but I was most impressed with his tight cymbal work he joined Clarke and Corea  to play a few minutes of acoustic jazz.   

My favorite pieces last night were from their final album together, Romantic Warrior.  The final piece of the regular set was the title track from that album, where the band proved it can light up the arena with intensity just using their acoustic instruments.  

The song begins with Stanley Clarke bowing out a low pitched set of chords on his upright bass, soon joined by Chick trilling high notes on his piano, sounding like birds getting ready to take flight.  DiMeola began with faint notes on his Ovation guitar and White showed a deft touch on light cymbals and snare.    The music built up and each musician got a chance to play solos against Chick's harmonic structure.   On acoustic, DiMeola played his share of fast licks, but it was more like a mesh of sound than a virtuouso turn.  Then, he turned to comping chords, while Clarke showed his mastery of acoustic bass, in music that at times moved me to tears.  The man played so well -- it felt like he was calling me home.  Then Al stepped away for awhile and Chick played his main instrument, acoustic piano, playing with variation upon variation on the song's themes, alternative delicate and percussive.  This morphed into the trio jazz moment I described earlier, then Lenny White had a chance to play his own solo.   I find drum solos get old fast, but White was tasteful and played with the timbres of his full kit, interspersed with occasional percussive bursts from Clarke or Corea.  As the solo finished, DiMeola rejoined the group and they re-stated the song's fast paced melody time and again, before building to a crescendo and a final thundering group chord.     

By now, it was after 10:30, but we called the band back after they took their bows.   They finished with another tune from Romantic Warrior, Duel Of The Jester And The Tyrant.  This tune is electric and features a whole series of fast runs, where DiMeola's electric lines morph into Chick's synthesized leads in looping fashion.   it was a romp, one more fine ensemble piece from the band that had already given us so much.  

I attended the concert with my son, who has adventurous tastes in music, but had never heard the band before.  He was amazed by the variety of music they played, but had a really hard time hearing the structure in the music, since RTF has advanced far beyond the normal jazz routine of starting with the melody, improvising against chords and then re-stating the melody.  Yes, they did that in a way, but the songs owed a lot to the free jazz of the Sixties, while accented by Chick's lyricism.  

This is music to listen to again and again.   I've played my copy of Romantic Warrior a lot, though not much in recent years.  This concert was a reminder of just how good this band can be.  I must say that I'd love to hear them work on new compositions, since the musicians have all evolved since they did this special thing with RTF during the Seventies.  We got a taste of where that might lead, on a cloudy night in Boston, as their music rang out and brought us, their audience, to a special place for a few hours.