SMU Reads: an urgent message for our time

For the third year, I’ve attended SMU Reads, an annual summer event to encourage reading and community awareness among Southern Methodist University students. It just keeps getting bigger (and, if possible, better) with this month’s appearance by Matthew Desmond, author of the 2017 SMU Reads book pick, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City.

Evicted had the right pedigree for an “important” book: New York Times bestseller, named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review, Pulitzer Prize winner for nonfiction. But a book about one of the most degrading aspects of poverty, presented to students at a pricey private university sited in some of the priciest suburbs? And in a metropolitan area struggling with populations who are completely homeless? With a city landowner termed a modern-day slumlord for its dismal low-rent houses that often lack such basic amenities as reliably-running water.

How many people would want to hear about that, much less read a book about it?

I was pleasantly surprised to find a standing room only crowd at SMU’s McFarlin Auditorium and lines of questioners following Desmond’s discussion. The Dallas Morning News aided the university by making Evicted the pick for its own summer book club.

Tall, booted, and briefly donning a cowboy hat, Desmond welcomed the student crowd, some worried about their own future ability to find affordable housing, to deal with a problem that requires “so many brilliant young minds around the table.”

“Eviction used to be rare in this country. It used to draw crowds,” he said. Now, it’s become commonplace. And the more evictions, the more families break up, the worse their economic prospects become because they can’t find replacement housing in the places where there are jobs. It’s an issue that cuts across all ethnic groups, because “without stable shelter, everything falls apart.”

He began his research in a place he already had some acquaintance with – Milwaukee. Starting with about five months of life in a trailer park, then 10 months in a rooming house, he followed eight families of the often-evicted, surveys of 100 renters (with 84 responses), tracked 100,000 court cases, and contacted 250 tenants in those cases (with a 66 percent response rate).

Finding that the majority of the families lived in privately-owned rentals, he also formed relationships with landlords doing the evictions. “I at least know more about what makes you tick – (and) what ticks you off if you’re a landlord.”

“For about a hundred years, we’ve had the consensus in America that we should spend no more than 30 percent of our income on housing.”

Instead, he learned that most poor renting families spend more than half of their income on housing. For families with the lowest education, incomes in recent decades have flatlined while housing costs have increased over 70 percent. And present public housing can’t solve the problem, Desmond cautions.

“Three-fourths of renter families below the poverty line receive no housing assistance. The waiting list for public housing in our large cities isn’t counted in years. It’s counted in decades.”

Not that all the news is bad. “We took on the battle of the slums and we won. We’ve made steps in the right direction. When we as a country want to take on big problems, we come up with big solutions.” Including his recommendation of expanding the housing voucher program to everyone below the poverty line.

What’s the cost of such a solution? About $22 billion worth, Desmond said. “Not a small number, but we can totally afford it. Vouchers have already lifted 2.8 million families out of poverty.” If $22 billion sounds overwhelming, consider, he said, that the U.S. currently loses approximately $171 billion yearly on homeowner tax benefits. With home mortgage interest in most cases fully deductible on debt up to $1 million, how much would even reducing that cap by half save?

“That’s just one idea. Let others come.”

And for those who want more ideas, try the Just Shelter site to help at community and national levels.

Review: New kid in school -- science fiction as a guide to life

Review of: Revenge of the Star Survivors

Author: Michael Merschel

Publisher: Holiday House

Source: Purchase, Barnes and Noble

Grade: B

You don’t have to be the new kid in school to understand the protagonist’s plight in Dallas Morning News book page editor turned novelist Michael Merschel’s Revenge of the Star Survivors. If you’ve ever been the new hire, the new parent, the new homeowner, the new -- well, you name it -- you’ll get it.

Unfortunately, hero Clark (“like the explorer”) Sherman, who’s facing the first move, and first major trauma, of his young life, doesn’t get it. His parents think moving from their longtime home in Louisiana to Colorado for a job upgrade is a great idea. To Clark, it’s the end of the world as he knows it. Following the example of his favorite television show, Star Survivors, about a spaceship crew lost in the galaxy, he records his thoughts as entries in an astronaut’s log of a journey to an alien world, Planet Festus, aka Loretta T. Festus Middle School.

“We were hurtling across the planet’s surface, seconds away from the drop zone, when my commander spoke. ‘You really want to do this by yourself? You’re absolutely sure?’ The tiny crease between her eyebrows told me she was as worried as I was. ‘I’ll be fine,’ I replied. By which I meant, ‘No, I don’t want to do this at all. . . Please take me home immediately.’ Unfortunately, I sent that second part via psionic mind blast, forgetting that I was not technically capable of telepathy.”

The climate of Planet Festus proves hostile from the start, with its unfamiliar frozen ground and frozen precipitation. The inhabitants are equally hostile, particularly the one bearing a disconcerting resemblance to a “big, carnivorous reptile.” And the planet’s communications system is beyond primitive, having consigned Clark’s previous school records to the local equivalent of a black hole. Fortunately, among the few academic options available to him is Independent Study, which takes place in the school library, aka The Academic Resource Center.

There, at last, he begins to find allies – the aptly-named Ms. Beacon (“the commander of this zone”), and one of the school’s few Asian-American students, Ricki Roi (whose last name Clark misunderstands as “Wah”, a misunderstanding that stymies his attempts to communicate with her outside the classroom).

There’s also Les, an elusive, possibly wormhole dwelling student who will reveal dark secrets about Planet Festus and its leaders. The only thing uniting the disparate threesome of Clark, Ricki and Les: their mutual devotion to Star Survivors. Well, that and their resistance to the rest of Planet Festus.

On their journey through the planet they must deal with bullies, racism, and an evil ruling coalition determined to perpetuate its dynasty. The with whom they will clash in a dramatic conclusion. And as all middle schoolers do, the threesome must also deal with parents who seem initially clueless. At least in the case of Clark’s parents, they finally understand in the end.

This is why, as Clark records in his log, “. . . you should ignore anyone who tries to tell you that Star Survivors is an entertainment program. It is so, so much more. It is a guide to orderly behavior in a confusing world.”

(Unknown to Merschel, his mother had arrived from Colorado for his book’s debut. She was warmly supportive. He was slightly embarrassed that she might think the portrayal of the mom, aka commander, in his book was a portrait of her. Perhaps one day his own children, including two who were in middle school during writing, will write their own books about him. It’s the fate of parents and children.)

At his book’s release this spring at the Lincoln Park Barnes and Noble bookstore, Merschel insisted he didn’t even realize he’d written a middle grade book until others in the publishing business informed him who his audience was. Or who they thought it was. As someone who has dipped for the past thirty years into what my daughter and grandkids were reading, I can attest that good books for children have a universal appeal.

With so much good in Revenge of the Star Survivors, my major complaint is that in its determination to root out all evil from Planet Festus it feels over-stuffed, an over-richness that may have led to its too hurried for my taste climax, as if Clark/Merschel was either tiring of his long battle, or perhaps facing pressure from his publisher to get to the end. And although I initially bought the book intending it as a gift for my soon to be middle-schooler grandkids, I’m going to hold off transferring it for a while, for fear it might prove too terrifying for them. But given the state of life on Planet Earth, they may already be all too familiar with the terrain of Clark's world.

(Next week: summer literary events, contests, conferences, and a Dallas visit from internationally-bestselling Australian author, Kate Forsyth.)

Help! How do I find reviewers for my book?

At every writers’ group (and I belong to several), I hear the lament – where to find reviewers for our books? With the rapid disappearance of print media, traditional venues for book reviews are disappearing faster than ice in the Arctic.

Not quite two years ago I blogged about reviews published in my local newspaper, The Dallas Morning News. The bad news, said DMN staff writer Joy Tipping (who has since left the paper), is that the chances of getting a book reviewed in a big circulation newspaper like Dallas’s are also vanishingly small. The paper receives between 300 and 600 books weekly from authors hoping for recognition. How many reviews does it publish out of those hundreds? Perhaps only six to eight in a week.

Writers of independently-published books need not apply. Neither, in most cases, should those whose books were first published in paperback format. That said, preference goes to books by local authors, with local settings, or at least to Texas authors of books about Texas.

image: wikimedia commons

And the “Neighbors Go” community section of the paper? It's now defunct.

But when it’s tough to get paper reviews, tough writers don’t cry. They turn to cyberspace.

Besides Tipping’s list of book review sites (see “To get your book reviewed, take Tipping’s tips,” February 3, 2014, at this site), I found still more sites with review-hungry readers more recently, courtesy of author/blogger Maria Murnane’s “Marketing tip: connect with book bloggers” at She Writes. And you don’t have to be female to subscribe to She Writes, which also has tips for connecting book bloggers to authors and publishers. 

Besides listing “100 Best Blogs for Book Reviews” Murnane suggests contacting bloggers with a personalized email explaining why you think your book is a great fit for their site. (Think the kind of email you’d send an agent you’re querying about book representation.) Also, ask if a blogger who reviews your book will also post on Amazon (and I’ll add, Goodreads). I do, routinely.

Yes, you will need an Amazon account to post reviews there, but you don’t necessarily have to buy the book itself from Amazon. (See last Tuesday’s post, “This year’s resolution: read, review, repeat,” for information about reviewing on Amazon.)

And then, check out the bloggers those bloggers follow for even more possibilities. I’m listing the blogs I follow – including several who post reviews – on a separate page at this site.

One final caution before you hyperlink madly to Tipping’s or Murnane’s lists: blogs change. Several I checked are inactive if not outright dead. I’d post an updated list but it would probably be out of date before I finished writing this. Others, however, are more active than I could have imagined, with multiple reviewers, and/or reviewers who read hundreds of books yearly.

There are probably even more popping up as I type these final words. Find, share, write and review!

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Does something look different here? That's because this site is undergoing a major update for 2017. Everything changes, and this isn't the first one for my blog since it debuted in August 2010 with a single post for the month that, I think, found fewer than a dozen readers. Tuesday postings will continue to be a given, as they have for the past several years under the former title "Wordcraft." And although I've ditched the Wordcraft name, the format will continue, including updates on current literary events, with an emphasis on those in my North Texas region, as well as more -- lots more! -- reviews of books both current and classic.

The previous Adventure classics posts that appeared on Fridays saw their final postings in December 2016. Those older posts are still available in the archives, as are the Totally Texas posts of still earlier years, that highlighted kid-friend outings in the state.

So, is there any point in visiting this site now on days other than Tuesday?

Definitely! I'll continue to post during the week as events occur and as I review books. The new, more flexible schedule will let me post more immediately -- and more frequently about literary events, writing advice, contests, and anything else that doesn't fit in Tuesday's slot.

Wishing everybody a year of more reading -- and writing -- in 2017!

Wordcraft – Reading ‘n’ writing ‘n’ fall literary events

School has started in North Texas, and autumn’s literary events are coming as fast as the falling leaves already littering my lawn. The literary leaves are heaped so high, I’ll take two posts to blog about them, starting with today’s events:

August 25: (Yes, that’s today!) This year’s SMU Reads book is Emily St. John Mandel’s bestseller, Station Eleven, dealing with the aftermath of fictional pandemic. Don’t let the subject scare you away from today’s panel discussion about emergency preparedness, followed by book discussions, a pop-up performance of King Lear (yes, there’s a connection), and culminating in the September 9 visit by Mandel at Southern Methodist University. See the Dallas Public Library for events, and be sure to reserve a free seat for Mandel's appearance September 9.

August 25: Monthly script reading by Dallas Screenwriters Association. Only members may have their scripts read by local actors, but anyone’s welcome to drop in for a free listen, at 7 p.m., in the community room of Half Price Books, 5803 East Northwest Highway, Dallas. Event repeats the last Tuesday (usually) of each month.

August 28 - 29: The Tulisoma South Dallas Book Fair and Arts Festival, with most events at the African American Museum at Fair Park, 3536 Grand Avenue, Dallas. Events Friday (August 28), including the Tulisoma Heart and Soul tour, are free but require reservations. Events Saturday (August 29) are free, with no reservation required, beginning with the 10 a.m. Art Smart workshop on preparing children to learn. Author readings, entertainment, and discussions, continue through 4:20 p.m. Saturday. While you’re there, take advantage of the museum’s free admission to check out the galleries on black arts and culture in Dallas.

August 30: Don’t forget to contact points@dallasnews.com to reserve a seat for a free forum 2-4 p.m. at University of Texas at Dallas to discuss the Dallas Morning News Points Summer Book Club. This year's book is Being Mortal: Medicine and what Matters in the End, by Atul Gawande. A blog discussion is currently in progress.

August 31: Tickets for Richardson Reads One Book available at the first floor information desk of the Richardson Public Library, 900 Civic Center Drive, Richardson, beginning at 10:30 a.m. Free tickets are available for Richardson residents, but maybe a friend who lives there can snag you a ticket to hear author Laura McBride discuss this year’s book, We Are Called To Rise. McBride will appear September 15 at 7:30 p.m. at Richardson High School, 1250 Beltline Road.

September 9: For SMU Reads, Emily St. John Mandel discusses her bestseller, Station Eleven, at McFarlin Auditorium, 6405 Boaz Lane, in Dallas. Free, but be sure you’ve RSVP’d for a reservation.

September 10: Deadline for the Young Author’s short story contest of fantasy/science fiction convention FenCon. No fee to enter, for authors in grades 3-12.

September 13: Dallas Arts & Letters Live continues its 2015 season with R.L.Stine and Marc Brown, author/illustrators of The Little Shop of Monsters, September 13 at 4 p.m. Horchow Auditorium, Dallas Museum of Art, 1717 North Harwood, Dallas. Tickets for the presentation are $20 for the public, $15 for DMA members, $10 for students and children (under age 5).

September 15: Richardson Reads One Book: We Are Called to Rise, by Laura McBride. Author reading 7:30 p.m. at Richardson High School, 1250 Belt Line Road in Richardson. Did you remember to get your free tickets?

(Next Tuesday: Wordcraft continues its preview of autumn 2015’s literary events in North Texas)

Wordcraft -- Raising your book above the crowd

The bad news, Dallas Morning News writer Joy Tipping told this month’s meeting of the local Mystery Writers of America, is that a writer’s chances of getting publicity for her novel through reviews is vanishingly small.

The good news is that there is a far better method than reviews for raising awareness about our books. Last week I wrote about the many ways of getting reviews. This week it’s how to get the word out without reviews. And it doesn’t require bundles of bucks for full page ads in the New York Times Review of Books.

In preparation for the day my Great American Novel (currently in version about 4.0) gets published, heaven only knows how many books, blogs, websites, you name its, I’ve read or had recommended to me about how to promote a book. I hate them. I hate the gimmicks. Just reading about them makes me tired.

Gimmicks, in Tipping’s opinion, aren’t the point. The way of attracting readers to our books is through simple word of mouth, the most ancient form of networking.

Last Monday I wrote that Tipping told writers not to pin their hopes on getting reviewed in big newspapers. Today I’ll tell you she says, “don’t pin your hopes on reviews in any publication.” Instead, get the word out about your writing in social media. “I want you to get rid of the word ‘reviews’. . . Get people to comment on Facebook posts. Or ask them to write min-reviews on Facebook. It really is all about knowing people.”

And if socializing by introverts sounds contradictory, the answer, thanks to the Internet is that it doesn’t have to be.

“In high school I was really shy,” Tipping says. “If you’d told me my career would be
networking with people, I’d have crawled under the table.” (She says she’s now gotten over her shyness.)

“Social media is where it’s at,” Tipping says. “I send two to three hours of every day blogging, on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and so on.” (She also uses Google + and Pinterest). “It’s so important that you have those accounts--that’s your platform.”

Don’t have a book to offer yet? “Start putting your opinions on Twitter when you start writing your novel, and when you finish your book, you can tweet about it.”

For those of us still feeing too private to put opinions out on the Internet for the whole world to see, let me just say I’m always amazed by the number of writers who show up in workshops proclaiming themselves too shy to divulge their writing to outsiders. Yet they yearn to become bestselling authors. It’s as if we don’t understand that selling books means displaying our opinions for the whole world.

Oh, and give back. In her discussion of reviews (yes, I know you’re still interested in them), she told us one of the best ways to get reviewed was to write reviews of others. The same degree of support for others, I believe, applies to networking. I see more
“likes” on Facebook for writer friends who promote other friends’ writings than for those who only promote themselves.

Although Tipping advocates treating social media as our personal cable channel, she cautions that we need to treat it as we would a broadcast.  "Don’t tweet anything you wouldn’t want to see on the CNN news crawl.”

And no matter what your Facebook privacy settings are, there is nothing, she warns, that her twenty-something year old son couldn’t hack in minutes. “There is nothing on social media that is private.”

She also cautions users to consider the differences between various social media audiences. “Don’t set your Facebook settings to send everything to Twitter. They’re completely different platforms, completely different readers.”

And for more about Tipping, her books (yes, she’s written travel books), and opinions, see twitter.com/JoyTipping/.

Wordcraft -- To get your book reviewed, take Tipping’s tips

Joy Tipping

“I have the best job in the world,” Joy Tipping tells Saturday’s meeting of the Mystery Writers of America’s Southwest-Dallas chapter. As the woman who’s written, by a by-line count, six hundred reviews, she’s arrived to tell a roomful of writers how to get the word out about their books. And, surprise--it’s not always by getting a review in a major newspaper.

The bad news, she says, is that chances of getting reviews in a newspaper with the circulation of the Dallas Morning News are vanishingly small. The News receives between 300 and 600 books weekly. From those, it publishes only six to eight full-length reviews each week..

“We give preference to local authors, local settings, Texas authors and Texas books,” Tipping says.

It won’t consider reviewing self-published books, “although,” Tipping says, “I think at some point we're going to have to revisit that policy. That doesn't mean we can't do a feature story about an author.” The News also doesn’t usually review books first published in paperback, although it sometimes makes exceptions for exceptional books.

The good news, though, is that there are more ways than ever of getting reviews in less traditional venues.

Her mantra for anyone seeking publicity is to think local, research newspapers in your region at www.listofnewspapers.com/. 

If your hometown is Dallas, contact the News Neighbors Go community sections, community@neighborsgo.com/, “a great place for feature stories.” Other avenues interested in local writers include Chamber of Commerce publications, alumni newsletters and magazines, society publications, and magazines aimed at particular genres of writing or reading.

And, she says, don’t overlook independent book reviewers, such as the nearly 325 listed in www.theindieview.com/.  (Just when I think I've checked everything, I find something I haven't.  This site was originally reported as "indie review," not "indie view," which is indeed up and running.)

And check book review blogs. Her choices out of the hundreds available on the Internet are:
http://101books.net
http://bookslut.com
http://bookaliciousbabe.blogspot.com 
http://deliberatereader.com
http://bookfetish.org
http://whimpulsive.net/.

For book blogs specializing in mysteries and thrillers, she likes:
http://bookgasm.com
http://drowningmachine.blogspot.com
http://kittlingbooks.com
http://jensbookthoughts.com/.

With so many choices, “how do you find a book reviewer that has your specialty and really gets you?” she asks. “Read reviews” to learn the reviewers preferences. (She admits preferring contemporary and historical fiction by women writers, thrillers and horror.)

Once you’re ready to approach potential reviewers, she recommends making first contact by email, with a good subject line that mentions what you’re seeking, and any local or other connection to distinguish it from the dozens (or hundreds) of other emails the reviewer gets daily.

Even if you get turned down for a full length review, ask the publication if it will consider a mini review on its own blog, Tipping says.

And even more important for writers than reviews, Tipping says, is social media. Next Monday, her suggestions for harnessing its potential--and avoiding its pitfalls.

Wordcraft -- Soldiers who can't find their way home

Was it part of the problem that everybody was just so darned nice? That we were too afraid of sounding like ranting talk show shock jocks or worse, prudes, to make any sound except occasional muffled, embarrassed laughter while Ben Fountain read aloud last Thursday from his National Book Awards finalist novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, a volume filled with the “baroque obscenity and transcendental profanity” he used to capture the “jazz riffs” of soldiers speaking to each other.

I was late for Fountain’s reading at the Dallas Arboretum, the finale of the Dallas Morning News Points Summer Book Club because, running through my pre-event checklist -- notebook, pens, backup pens, camera, confirmation email -- I realized I’d misplaced the print out of my confirmation and stopped to reprint. I didn’t need to have worried. A gracious woman at the door asked my last name and directed me to the proper entrance, where I saw notebooks and pens waiting on every vacant chair. Not that there were many vacant chairs. The crowd, although not as dense as that greeting glass artist Dale Chihuly last year, was still impressive. They were all very nice.

To summarize Fountain’s story, a group of soldiers is touring the United States following a minor skirmish whose footage from embedded Fox reporters gave them a fling at fame. Fountain wisely declines to describe the battle where “Shroom” -- Sergeant Breem -- best friend and mentor of Spec. William Lynn, dies in his arms, except to say the news magazine coverage and video “bears no relation to any battle that Billy remembers.”

As the finale of Bravo’s “Victory Tour” they participate in the most disastrous halftime show ever during a football game, a Thanksgiving Day debacle that will see the Dallas Cowboys routed from the field, and the Bravos mugged alternately by those who profess to love them and those who hate them.

Billy will end up marveling at the cluelessness of his “fellow Americans” over the war. 
But Billy himself is only a recent immigrant from the land of the clueless. A high school dropout, he only joined the Army because a judge offered him the option of military or jail after he destroyed the car of a man who deserted his beloved sister. Now, despite the Bravos reception as heroes, they’re on their way back to Iraq to complete their tour of duty.

(As a literary aside, Fountain’s accomplishment in writing a significant novel entirely in present tense, with a single first person point of view and action taking place in a single day and single location, is amazing.)

Because the Dallas Morning News engaged eight essayists to expound on the meaning of Fountain’s novel in its Sunday commentary section, I won’t attempt to tell you what Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk means. Instead, I’ll tell you what it was like to be in the room with Fountain and so many nice people who all seemed opposed to war but had no more idea what to do about it than the Bravos had to make sense of the America they were estranged from.

Fountain’s immediate interest lay in the plight of those who, like Billy Lynn, are already bearing the brunt of war. He had found meaning, he said, in Ezra Pound’s analysis of Homer’s work, the Odyssey in particular, as the story of soldiers who spend ten years wandering, losing their way after the Trojan War -- “soldiers who can’t find their way home.”

“We see this myth in the First World War -- Pound calls it the Great War,” Fountain said, with new names for the malady in World War II (“battle fatigue”) and later, as post-traumatic stress syndrome or disorder.

In a society where “one out of three homeless people in America are veterans” -- people who literally can’t come home -- in a society where the Bravos ultimately beg to be taken “someplace safe -- back to the war,” because they can’t bear a life so separated from the reality of the world they know, where is home?

Fountain said he had hoped to be challenged, as Billy did, wondering why nobody called the Bravos “baby killers” -- but in vain. Everybody agreed, everybody wrung hands, everybody was on his side.

Near the end of the program, an audience member asked what it takes to make the routine “thank you for your service” to veterans meaningful.

Fountain said, “A sacrifice of a serious nature -- raising taxes, a draft, not being numb, being aware of what’s going on in our world. Doing our own thinking and then acting on it.”

Fountain’s work is, of course, available on Amazon. For more opinions, see www.dallasmorningnews>opinion/.

Adventure classics -- So rich, brash and Texan

Giant

by Edna Ferber

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Does anybody but me read the text that serves as filler between advertisements and social register photos in the Dallas Morning News’ FD Luxe Sunday magazine? I flipped through the glossy this week, looking more at the pictures than the words, but went into a fit of giggling at the final essay, proposing initiation rituals for would-be Texans newly arrived from other states. Number 1 on the initiation list -- “Read Edna Ferber’s Giant.”

The novel is the story of Eastern intellectual Leslie Lynnton and her marriage to Jordan “Bick” Benedict, owner of the multimillion acre Reata Ranch. Mutually swept off their feet, Leslie and Bick return to Texas in the 1920’s. Leslie applies her brand of civilization to her husband while he applies twentieth century technology to his family’s nineteenth century brand of ranching. The resulting cultural and social clashes will tear their marriage and family apart.

Hey, I’ve lived in this state most of my life and I still can’t figure out whether Texans regard Ferber’s 1952 muckraking story about our super-rich as satire, gospel truth, or simply one helluva page turner. Whatever we think of it, it’s now as much part of our lore as the Alamo, cattle drives, and oilfields.

But it wasn’t always so.

The subject of Texas, “improbable; brash, overwhelming, hospitable, larger than life,” had fascinated Ferber for at least a decade before she wrote her bestselling novel’s depictions of the fantastically rich alongside descriptions of grotesque poverty, oppression and racism.

“Whenever Ferber was repelled by something, she was also fascinated,” was the verdict of 
of a Ferber biography written by her great-niece, Julie Goldsmith Gilbert.

Texans, on the other hand, were at first more repelled than fascinated by Ferber. “To say that in 1952 the impact of Giant created a tumult not only in the book world but in the real world of the United States would not be an exaggeration,” Gilbert wrote. “The entire state of Texas felt impugned by it, and it created in displaced Texans a surge of nationalistic nastiness.”

By the time the movie version of Giant appeared in 1956, the state’s attitude had begun to change. Admittedly, the movie was less intent on muckracking than Ferber’s novel. And it starred incredibly handsome (and not yet out of the closet) Rock Hudson as Bick Benedict; incredibly beautiful young Elizabeth Taylor as Leslie; and incredibly young, beautiful and sexy James Dean in his swan song performance as Jett Rink, the villainous oilman everybody loved to hate.

Is it any wonder that when the new Texas legend of TV’s Dallas appeared a few decades later, the villain who romped away with the show boasted the initials “J.R.”? Forget earnest Leslie and Bick. Greed, power and J.R. Ewing were in.

A few more decades (and a revivial of Dallas) later, Texas politicians recycle the brash Texas image, forgetting it was ever reviled. And a glossy Sunday magazine whose front cover celebrates the lipsticks of cosmetic queen Mary Kay Ash can end with a 
tongue in cheek recommendation for Ferber’s long-ago Giant.

You don’t even need to ask, do you, whether Giant is available on Amazon, in both book and movie versions?

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics continues a June of books about Texas and the Southwest with Kiowa author N. Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, House Made of Dawn.)

Wordcraft -- Publishing's imperfect storm

I leafed through Sunday’s Dallas Morning News, luxuriating in the extra hour of sleep from going off daylight savings time. And there it was, an article headlined “How to Become a Published Author,” with “published” printed in red ink. I began hyperventilating.

The next to last paragraph said, “All told, you may want to self-publish this first book.”

The hypothetical question opening the article was from a person who wrote a first book -- “a steamy romance novel” -- and asked whether she needed an agent to publish it. The answer began sensibly with “not necessarily.” Unfortunately, it didn’t stop there.

The article’s writers are from a company that distributes comic strips and syndicated advice columns. They mentioned, correctly, that agents want first-time authors to provide not only a quality manuscript, but a “platform” -- a fan base or other forms of name recognition. So far, so good. But after describing how tough it is for agents and publishing houses to sell books, the article’s writers suggested that authors may want to have a go at selling their own books.

Seriously, if people who make their living selling books can’t sell yours, how do you hope to do it yourself?

Sure, you can publish books on www.amazon.com or www.smashwords.com/. But publishing is not the same as selling books. (As I know by reading emails from editors whose anthologies I’ve sold to, and who published on one or the other of these formats.)

Of course, the article referenced the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon.

We’ve all heard the stories about people who sold thousands or millions of their self-
published books online or out of the trunks of their cars. I’ll add a couple of cautions. Whatever you may think about Grey author E.L. (Erika) James’ books, she built a formidable writing platform from her works of fan fiction based on the world of Stephanie Meyers’ Twilight series. This was not an inexperienced or unknown author.

(Interestingly, the Los Angeles Times reported earlier this year that the original fan fiction pages have been deleted from the internet. See
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2012/05/index.html/.)

Here’s a second caution. I used to be a professional journalist. And not to deprecate my former method of making a living, but I know why stories make the news -- they’re exceptions to the normal course of events. That’s why tropical Hurricane Sandy devastating the Jersey Shore at Halloween is news. And why the beautiful late autumn weather I’m enjoying here in Dallas isn’t.

The aim of this blog is to bring you accurate information about writing, such as last Monday’s post (“Publishing perils and pitfalls,” October 29, 2012) about people who write books for a living and sell over and over, think about the business.

Want to sell your book? In a quotation I didn’t use last week but will now, “write a book worth buying.” Write, rewrite, consult your critique groups, learn all you can. And keep writing.

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In the interest of learning all I can, in this case about writing steamy romance novels, I’m heading to the Readers & ‘ritas Gathering this coming weekend. Of course, I’ll tell all. To join the gathering, see www.eventbrite.com/org/771389189?s=6028956/.

Wordcraft -- Being there, déjà vu

During his recent appearance in Dallas, Stephen King bemoaned the fine points of a setting you can’t know until you live in a place. He visited Dallas during the course of extensive research for his book about President Kennedy’s assassination, “11/22/63.” And still there were a couple of items, both minor, that he said had gotten by him.

One was the local pronunciation of Oak Cliff radio station KLIF. Another was the spelling of the town of Killeen. Two l’s, not one as in King’s book, although he said not even his fact-checker caught the tiny omission.

His visit reminded me, on this last day of 2011’s NaNoWriMo (national novel writing month), of the importance to your novel’s setting of your presence in that setting.

I love researching in libraries, online or off. But writing stories and this blog has prompted me to go places I wouldn’t have gone to otherwise. And the experience of being there gives me a feel for the subject I can’t get otherwise.

How would I have known how King responded to Dallas journalist Lee Cullum’s quip about his greatest fear if I hadn’t been in the audience? How would I know how blue the lights are at a strip club if I hadn’t seen them with my own eyes? Or how dragonflies hover over the rain pools of a paupers’ cemetery?

Those of us who write fiction are, by definition, professional liars. But we have to tell really good lies. Lies that can stand up to the utmost grilling our readers can give us.

Journalist Bill Marvel wrote this month in the Dallas Morning News about the perils of photography in public places. I complimented him, confessing that I carry my camera everywhere, photographing such unlikely spots as Dallas Rapid Transit stations and the surroundings of the county hospital without incident. (FYI -- a portable toilet at one station looks like a great spot for my antagonist to dump a body.)

Marvel told me a lot of writers use their cameras this way. But be careful of the old pump house at White Rock Lake (a former city water source), he said. One of his readers was hassled by police for photographing it. Makes me want to go there!

In these last few hours of NaNoWriMo, consider stretching your word count by incorporating a description of your favorite site. Port-a-potties and all.

　

(For Stephen King’s answer to Lee Cullum, see my post for November 16, “Stephen King on changing history.” For Bill Marvel’s article, see http://www.dallasnews.com and search “opinion, Sunday Commentary.” The article title is “The illegal assault on photographers.” For my previous post on settings, see November 10, 2010, “Nothing beats being there.”)

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Market update: Julia Carpenter, the go-to person for a book reading group I attend, found a new outlet for fiction and nonfiction at www.dallaswritersjournal.com/ A paying market for a wide range of material. Thanks Julia!

Wordcraft -- Is it still reading if it's on the internet?

Nicholas Carr had trouble adjusting his microphone during Saturday’s appearance at the Dallas Arboretum. “I often have a problem with technology when I speak because the technology doesn’t like me,” he said.

The audience laughed because Carr has written about technology since the 1990s. And because his recent book -- Pulitzer Prize finalist The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains -- describes in eerie detail how the use of technology trains its users. Particularly, how the internet molds users, through methods reminiscent of a rehabilitation camp, into its own image.

The discussion’s host was the Points Summer Book Club of the Dallas Morning News. A book club conducted online. The irony was not lost on Carr.

He’s the first to admit that he had a long term love affair with computers as a nonfiction writer who finds research much easier and faster with the internet. And then, in 2007, he said, “I seemed to lose my ability to concentrate, to make my mind stay focused on one
thing.”

At first, he told the audience, most of them fellow members of the boomer generation, he attributed his problem to “middle age mind rot.” But he found that “it felt as if my mind wanted to behave the way it behaves when I was online. My brain seemed to not want to behave in that attentive way.”

That was troubling enough to lead him down two lines of research. One led him to the structure of the brain. The other research avenue led to the past, “to see if there were other examples of tools that changed the way people thought -- examples of what I called intellectual technology.”

Who knew until Carr told them, that technology as simple as maps and mechanical clocks would alter the anatomical structure of our brains, opening doors to new ways of thinking while closing doors on our previous mental landscapes. Alternations in structure validated by research dating back to the late 1960’s on the evidence of neuroplasticity of primate brains.

As Carr relates in The Shallows, “It’s 1968. . . 2001 is having its first theatrical run, leaving moviegoers befuddled, bemused or just plain annoyed. And in a quiet laboratory
at the University of Wisconsin, Michael Merzenich is cutting a hole in a monkey’s skull.”

What neuroscientist Merzenich found was that, in response to his experiments, the monkeys’ brains reorganized themselves to a degree formerly believed impossible once an animal or a human being reached adulthood.

In a similar manner, Carr believes today’s degree of immersion in the internet and the  repetitive activities it generates can cause the reorganization of its human users' brains. A reorganization at the expense of the deep attentiveness that has characterized innovative human thought since the advent of mass printing more than five hundred years ago. 

There is hope for our minds amid the total immersion of the internet in which our culture swims, he said, but it will require increased mindfulness of the effects, especially the unintended effects of technology.

“While researching and writing The Shallows, I sometimes felt as though I were paddling a very small and very empty rowboat against a very strong tide. That impression, I was happy to discover when the first edition of the book appeared in early 2010, was mistaken. The boat may have been small, but I was not the only one manning the oars. . . There’s still plenty of room inside. Feel free to grab an oar.”

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Ann Weisgarber, author of The Personal History of Rachel DuPree, will be the featured writer at the fifth annual Do the Write Thing writing workshop at Tarrant County College’s Northeast Campus this Saturday, August 13. The college is located at 828 W. Harwood in Hurst. Online registration is available for previously-registered students of Tarrant County College. Others may bring the form to the workshop or fax it to 817-515-0683, attn Brenna. Conference sponsor Brenna Saunders of TCC- Northeast Campus-Continuing Education must receive the form before Saturday for a reduced cost of $50 to apply. On site registration is available Saturday for $75. Download registration form and a list of speakers and workshop at www.thewritethingworkshop.com or call 972-533-3543.

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Bedford Library Friends announce their annual short story contest through September 3.  See
www.bedfordlibrary.org/ for details.