Writer's Notebook - James Rafferty Blog

Wombat Wisdom and the Borders Affair

During the past several years, I've been active in a writing group called the Writing Wombats.  Our home on the web is on Gather.com.  The wombats love to write, talk about writing and keep in touch with each other.  Recently we started a group blog which focuses on many different aspects of writing and includes posts from several of the wombats, including myself.  

You can find the latest posts of our group at Wombat Wisdom.  

Today, Borders announced it is reorganizing under Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings.  This isn't necessarily the end for Borders, but there are no doubt tough times ahead.  I've put together a few thoughts on what this means for readers and writers in my post entitled:  Notes on the Borders Affair

This is one of these posts where my love of writing and experience in business intertwine.  The wombats have lots of insight on the craft, marketing and publishing sides of writing.  If you like writing and want to know more about how writers view the world, I suggest you include a link to Wombat Wisdom in your RSS reader.  I've learned a lot from hanging with these writers and I suspect you'll soon find yourself wanting to hear more.  

Writer's Notebook: Book Review of Rock Paper Tiger

Several years ago, I finished my first novel and began looking for a way to get it published.   A few months into the process, I heard about a contest for novelists being held by Gather.com, a social network.  I entered the contest by submitting my novel’s first chapter.  By contest’s end, over 2500 entries had joined mine in the contest. 

Many of the writers stayed on Gather to comment on entries and watch the final stages of the contest play out.  Around this time, one of the other contest participants wrote an extended post expressing her frustration with the contest and all of the antics she’d seen to game the system.   A like-minded group of writers joined in and we had a lively exchange on this particular Gather conversation “thread.” In addition to discussion about the pros and cons of the contest, we talked about writing and the various routes to publication.  We were having fun with this, so she was cajoled to write a second post and the “Writin' Wombats” online writing group officially launched under her leadership.  

What does this have to do with the new novel, Rock Paper Tiger, published by Soho Press?   The woman who wrote that first thread on writing and formed the writing group was Lisa Brackmann and Rock Paper Tiger is her first published novel.  I’ve just finished reading the book and have to say that Lisa has written a thriller that really delivers the goods. 

Rock Paper Tiger begins in Beijing and we follow the first person account of Ellie (known to her Chinese friends as Yili), an American whose life is China is beginning to fall apart.   The first thirty pages set the stage well.    Ellie has an artist friend named Lao Zhang who lives in an out of the way suburb called Mati Village.   She takes the subway to see him, but he’s acting strangely.  Along the way, Ellie meets a few of Zhang’s acquaintances – lots of people like to hang around him.   She also begins to hear that some foreigners in suits are looking for her.  

Ellie takes us on a tour of the underside of Beijing as she moves around and it’s not always pretty.  The book is set after the 2008 Olympics have taken place and the city is a mix of the glossy new and much else that is run down.  Ellie loves Beijing, but is a foreigner and is never allowed to forget it.  When the men in the suits start getting nasty and Lao Zhang decides to leave Beijing for a while, Ellie decides to hit the road and visits several other Chinese cities.  

Interwoven within this story are flashbacks to Ellie’s experiences as a medic in Iraq, where she gets involved with a soldier named Trey and gets inadvertently pulled into treating prisoners who’ve been undergoing harsh interrogation.  Eventually we learn how she and Trey ended up in China and the tale cycles forward. 

Ellie is not always a likeable character, but she’s compelling and I found myself wanting to know what would happen to her even when it feels like every step she’s taking is the wrong one. Ellie moves from place to place but never manages to elude the “suits.” The tension mounts and leads toward an intense conclusion which draws together the threads of Ellie’s adventure in a satisfying way.  

Rock Paper Tiger dips into aspects of today’s headlines about China, including ethnic tensions, the aftermath of earthquakes and the censorship of online information, but all of this fits in well within the thriller and Ellie’s quest to make sense out of her life.  Brackmann puts the reader on the ground in China and we go way beyond the headlines and get a sense of what life in China is like -- both for the rising Chinese entrepreneurial class and for the many people who continue to live from day to day in lifestyles that haven’t changed for centuries.    The book feels like an insider’s look at today’s China, but manages to pull this off in the context of a character driven novel and a thriller with lots of bumps and chills along the way.   This is a fine novel and I recommend it to readers who enjoy thrillers, want to learn about today’s life in China or just want to read an offbeat, challenging novel written by a talented new writer.   

Writer's Notebook: Extrapolation and Context Shifts

In my online writing group, the Writing Wombats, we talk about various aspects of writing and sometimes get into chats about various aspects of craft and creativity. 

In a recent thread, we discussed the topic of how your experiences show up in your writing.  I'm currently writing my second novel and have written numerous short stories, so I've had lots of chances to play around with my basket of experiences and continue the exploration in my fiction. 

I write what I know, but often veer into extrapolations that take my characters into situations where they make different choices than I would, which is a lot of the fun of it. I have traveled to a lot of different countries, cities and other locations, and like to use these locations in my writing. I also like to take an experience I have had and then do "what-ifs" to explore those roads not taken.

Engineers generally know that they can't reliably take data from one context and extrapolate to prove a totally different context; but for novelists, those context shifts are fair game as you build a world for your characters to play in.

My first novel, Growing Up Single, was set in locales which included New England, where I grew up, New York, Paris, the Riviera and several cities in Canada.  The settings in my second novel are even more diverse and include stops in Asia, other parts of Europe and the Middle East.  But a setting is just the beginning.  It offers a canvas upon which a story can unfold. 

If you are a writer, do you mostly rely on your own experiences to shape your fiction or is this foundation really more of a jumping off point to fuel stories that go beyond your experience? 

If you are a reader, can you tell when the writer has really experienced the place or kinds of events that are depicted?  Or would you prefer to be brought into a very different world that takes you away from those touch points with day to day life?  

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: 'Tis the Season

I'm at home after a busy December in the workplace and am feeling grateful for the chance to gather with family and celebrate Christmas and the New Year.  We have visitors and thought we might go out for dinner before attending an evening service, but all three of the restaurants we called were closing by 4:00 pm.   So we'll prepare our own dinner and then I'll tend to my role as a member of the chancel choir for our church service.  

During the past month, I've pushed a new product release out the door at work, but in the nooks and crannies of the evenings, I also wrote the latest chapters of my work in progress, a second novel.  My tools for the latter quest have been simple: a notebook and a pen.  Later on I'll enter this text into my PC, but I do a lot of writing while travelling, so the simplicity of being able to write without concern for power outlets, the vagaries of the Windows OS and the latest instructions from flight attendants has a distinct appeal.   

As I look back on my writing this year, I filled up over half of a three subject notebook that I purchased last summer.  Just a couple of days ago, I stopped in at the local Staples and bought another notebook, the third one for this particular novel.  I'm past the halfway point, so I expect I'll fill this one and perhaps get one more for the final chapters.  

Lest one think I'm strictly old school with respect to my writing tools, I also do a lot of writing on the PC and typically do all of my editing there.  I wrote earlier this year about my favorite new software tool OneNote here and here.  OneNote continues to help me organize the chaos of my active projects both at work and home.  They have a useful password feature, so OneNote is also a fine repository for the hundred or so usercodes and passwords that attend to one's online life.  It's very lightweight compared to Microsoft Word, so I use it to capture notes on my writing, ideas for future stories and even snatches of dialogue for chapters that haven't been written yet. 

Much of the computing buzz this year is about netbooks and tools for online reading such as the Kindle.  As a writer and reader, I'd love to have better tools that combine writing and mobility and I expect I'll go in that direction more and more.  However, in the year of the new normal, with tightened budgets and a son in his first year of college, I'm being much more careful about my financial outlays.  

I'll close this piece with a photo of my writer's library, a set of reference books I can turn to when I want a refresher on editing or want to clarify an arcane point of syntax or punctuation.  I took the time to get organized in this way recently and it feels good to have rescued these books from dusty exile in other parts of our house.  

This is a great time to be a writer as the possibilities for creating prose and bringing it to completion are so much robust than the early days of my business career, when word processors were $10,000 dedicated machines and most writers could only dream of an electronic tool that would collect text as it was written and allow for editing without the pain of re-typing a manuscript.  

If you're a writer, what are your favorite tools of creation?  Have you gone more electronic or mobile recently, and if so, how have you done it?  If you're a reader, are you reading books or checking out magazines online?  

And finally, let me offer my best wishes for the holiday season however you may celebrate it.  I've enjoyed the interaction with readers of the James Rafferty Blog this year and have gotten an excellent response to my re-branding of the blog to focus on writing and travelling.  Thanks for reading and commenting.  I also want to thank my online writing group, The Writin' Wombats who reside on Gather.com and many other places.  The wombats have been an amazing resource as friends, sounding boards, writers, critique partners and readers.  They continue to enrich my writing and personal life. 

Writer's Notebook: The Changing Face of Publishing and the Book

I recently read a very good post by blogger Mike Shatzkin about the future of the agent's job in an era where e-publishing is more common and big agent paychecks become much less common.  We also had the recent fiasco where Harlequin announced a self-publishing venture tied to their brand and immediately got hammered from all directions.  Clearly the publishing industry is going through an evolution and the rules are changing, but where will it go?

I certainly don't pretend to have the answers, but I've spent the past two and one-half years as an aspiring writer with a completed first novel and have looked at a number of different possibilities for getting that novel published.  I'm also past the midpoint in writing the first draft for my second novel.  So I've got some skin in the game and am very interested in seeing how publishing business models will change and how to get my books published in a way that will reach lots of readers. 

I'd prefer to go the traditional route of getting signed by an agent and published by a mainstream publisher, but there are other routes out there.  Just within the confines of my writer's group, the diverse and eclectic Writin' Wombats, we've got several writers who been published using the traditional approach of working through an agent, several who have self-published and built a readership that way, a few who have affiliated with small indy publishers that use POD (Publishing On Demand) techniques and one writer who has turned his self-publishing venture into a publishing company and is signing up other writers.  

The alternatives to the traditional publishers are numerous, but there are issues. In either the self-pubbed or indy publisher route, the writer must be prepared to do a substantial amount of self promotion to establish their personal brand and build a network of potential future readers.  Readers will want to have assurances that the quality of the indy or self-pubbed books is up to snuff, so there needs to be various new types of filters, such as reviewers who offer online book reviews and in essence, act as the first reader. 

What are your thoughts?  If you are a writer, have you gotten your books published?  Would you consider a non-traditional publishing path?  

If you are a reader, have you read self-pubbed books or content published by indy presses?  If you have, how did you find out about them?  Which ways do you think that books will be published in the next few years and will they be successful?   

These topics are fertile ground for discussion and I expect to write several related posts going forward.