For Your Listening Pleasure

I picked up my youngest son, who is four and a half years old, from preschool the other day and the first thing he asked when he got in the car was if he could listen to the music on my Kindle “on the big radio.” My car has an auxiliary connector that lets me plug in an mp3, iPod or Kindle so that I can listen to music or audio books while I drive. Since I have an hour commute each way to work every night, I listen to A LOT of books. Both of my sons have become more adept at navigating the games and music files that I keep for them. My youngest enjoys a wide range of music by default, because he can only listen to the songs I’ve put on the device. He likes to listen to the first four seconds of every song.

Only the first four seconds.

Every once in a while, he’ll forget to skip a song, or he’ll deign to finish a song that his older brother or I want to hear.

This particular day was no different from any other, except he wanted to listen to one specific song. He can’t read yet, so he doesn't know the titles of the songs. He couldn’t remember what the picture of the album cover looked like. Then I asked him to sing a little bit of the song for me.

“It’s the song about the leg,” he said, kicking his leg out in case I hadn’t heard him right.

“The leg?” I clarified.

“The man who lost his leg climbing the sail.”

The mental Rolodex hit high gear as I tried to place the lyric he remembered with the songs in my library. After a minute, it came to me.

“I know,” I said to him. “You want “Shipping up to Boston” by the Dropkick Murphys.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he shouted with glee. “Murphys!”

I found the song for him and he happily listened to the first four seconds. About eight times or nine times in a row. I became numb to the bagpipes, bass, guitars and drums after the second go-round. Then he moved on to scanning the rest of the songs. I marveled at his ability to remember a specific line from a song that really didn’t have anything to do with the title.

But it got me to thinking about other songs where one particular lyric sticks in my brain and becomes the only way I can identify the song.

O.A.R. sings “Turn the car around” eight times, “Shattered” just six times, yet for months I thought the title of their song really was “Turn the car around.” It doesn’t count that they put “turn the car around” in parentheses in the title.

And what about songs where the title is not mentioned ANYWHERE in the songs? Here is a perfect example...

Nowhere in the song do you hear the words Baba O’Riley. In fact, if you’re a second generation The Who listener like me, meaning I only hear them when I listen to a classic rock station, you’d think the name of the song was “Teenage Wasteland” by the sheer number of times Roger Daltrey sings those words.

I guess it doesn’t really matter what the title of a song is, or how many times a particular lyric is repeated, (Eddie Vedder, this is for you), as long as the song rocks it's going to get listened to.

Or at least the first four seconds, if my youngest has any control over the music.

Finding the twist in the tale

Jeffrey Archer is an international best-selling author with over 250 million books sold. His writing is masterful, complex and engaging. He creates such multifaceted characters that you want to buy them a beer in their local pub. But it is not just his plots and characters and descriptions that propel his stories to their tumultuous endings.

It is the twist in each tale.

Archer admits in the clip that, "I never know more than three pages ahead; six would be a miracle. The twists and turns come on the day."

And his twists are always doozies. 

When you read a novel by Archer, what you expect to happen often doesn't. When you get to that moment, you will spend several minutes reading and rereading to figure out exactly where you went wrong in your thinking. 

It's like getting schooled by an omnipotent being who slaps your hand with a ruler when you fail to discern the true path of his plot. 

It leaves you breathless and wanting more. 

This video piqued my interest for two reasons. First, it touched upon the three pieces of the writer's platform that I am creating. Archer speaks about the publicity for his book Kane and Abel, published in 1979; "I had to do 17 cities in 21 days. You don't do that nowadays. You do tweet, blog, Facebook. And you don't even have to go to the United States of America." Authors have embraced the new tools of social media and this statement is the proof.

The second reason I posted this video was because of the last thing Archer said. In a quote attributed to J.D. Salinger and relayed to Salinger's longtime editor, "Paint yourself into a corner because the reader will never be able to work out how to get out, and if you take three or four days getting out, it doesn't matter because they'll be on to the next page." Archer agrees this is shrewd advice and I have taken it to heart with my own writing. 

I can only outline and plan my stories so far, but I need to relax a bit when it comes to making the story follow the path I want it to. I can only hope to master the twists and turns that make Jeffrey Archer's novels such compelling reads.

 

Using Social Media - From One Writer to Another

Opportunities abound for writers looking to connect with readers and promote their work. Social media sites have the ability to reach large audiences, and those who follow a writer are more likely to share interesting news with their friends if it is in an electronic format. Social media also gives the writers more control over how they present their professional selves to their public; they no longer have to fit the image their publisher wants. They can choose to share as much, or as little, of their personal life as they want. A writer’s platform would be incomplete without some kind of social media presence.

Maintaining that presence on social media can be done by the author or by an assistant. Janet Evanovich, who writes the best-selling Stephanie Plum series, maintains both an active Facebook account and a Twitter account. It is pretty evident that someone else is posting on her behalf, though. There are no first-person entries on either site. The majority of the posts on Facebook are quotes from the nineteen published Plum books, notifications of merchandise and contests, pictures of reader’s pets and announcements for new books. Evanovich is co-writing a new book with Lee Goldberg that will be released on June 18. Her Facebook is also promoting an e-book release that is prequel to The Heist. Almost every post directs the reader back to Evanovich’s own website for more content. She violates the first best practice for social networking, Be Social, by not responding to reader comments. I’d like to believe it’s because she is not the primary user and not because of lack of interest.

The second best practice of social networking is to Be Natural. Evanovich succeeds here by default. She presents herself as the writer of best sellers, but without any interaction with her readers, she is withholding the most intriguing aspect of social media; a personal connection between the writer and their audience. In contrast to Evanovich, Gena Showalter’s Facebook page is full of first-person accounts of revisions and consultations for cover art. Showalter even includes her “Typo of the Day” posts to show that even writers are plagued by fat finger syndrome.

Be Consistent is one best practice that Evanovich excels at through both Twitter and Facebook. Posts are done every day with special features such as the Reader’s Pets being updated once a week. Most of the posts are quotes from the Plum books, or information about new merchandise and contests, yet it is in the content that Evanovich fails at the last best practice, Be Diverse. There is no diversity in her social media. She only promotes her own work. There are no links to other writers’ pages or blogs. It is all Evanovich, all the time. With over five-hundred sixty-thousand likes on Evanovich’s page, compared to just thirty-nine thousand for Showalter, Evanovich’s readers don’t seem to mind.

Social media is an ever-changing medium without a clearly written rule book. It falls to each writer to find what works best for them and to keep their presence alive. If the writer pursues an audience via Facebook, Twitter or any of the other networking sites, keeping these best practices in mind will definitely help. Janet Evanovich maintains her social network through consistency and by being herself, but there is a lot of room for improvement. If she chose one day a week to respond to commenters on one particular post, she would go along way towards creating a more dynamic social presence. 

Playing Writer Catch-up: starting a series from the beginning

A friend posted a blog today about a book series by author Kate Wilhelm that she recently found. Which got me to thinking about authors that have made it onto my reading list simply because they write a series. Janet Evanovich is the first that comes to mind. There is also Nelson DeMille  and his John Corey series: Debbie Macomber writes about the residents of Cedar Cove, WA.; Catherine Coulter writes both a contemporary FBI series as well as a historical set, and Suzanne Brockmann pays tribute to the Navy with her Seal Team Sixteen and Troubleshooters, Inc series.

I could go on and on and on. I just started a new series this Memorial Day weekend after finding a bag of books I had picked up at my town library's annual book sale a few years ago. Since I switched to a Kindle two years ago, I've hardly ever hold an actual book in my hand, but I was cleaning out my closet and found this bag. Not only did I fortuitously buy the first six books of the Sookie Stackhouse series by Charlaine Harris, which I look forward to reading since she is ending the series with #8, but I found two books by Lara Adrian, Kiss of Midnight and Kiss of Crimson.

Adrian invites her readers into the world of the Midnight Breed, a race of vampires that are descended from ancient aliens. The main characters of the series are warrior vampires known as The Order who are tasked with eliminating the Rogue vampires who have become addicted to blood and threaten the entire race's secret existence. Each book deals with a member of the Order and how they found their Breedmates, specially marked human females that hold the key to unlock their warrior hearts. 

I enjoy reading a book series because it gives me a chance to really get to know the characters; to see them learn and grow as they overcome obstacles and deal with everyday lift. There are the inside jokes that make me laugh out loud. Sure, one book can have the same things, but a series allows the writer to flesh out the characters and make them realistic.

These are just some of the series that I enjoy. What about you?

Searching for discipline

Blogging scares me. 

There, I've said it. Can I give any rational reasons for my fear? Probably not, but then I've never really thought about it before now.

I think the fear stems from the fact that blogging is such a personal endeavor, almost like writing in a diary, which you share with anyone who happens upon your words. I was never very good at keeping a diary when I was younger. Except in fifth grade, when Mrs. Willman handed out those black and white composition books on the third day of class and informed us that we would be writing in them every week. The kicker was, she would respond to us. It would be like having a pen pal but saving a boatload of money on postage stamps.

I remember the first thing I wrote, an embellished story of my summer vacation spent at my aunt's house. The embellishment: her house was a mansion on the coast with a private beach and a speedboat. The reality: the house was a goldenrod yellow Cape with an in-ground pool and an awesome cabana. My cousin Amanda and I spent so much time in the pool her normally shiny blonde hair turned wicked-witch green. 

My journaling for the rest of the year followed the same routine. I don't know if Mrs. Willman believed everything I wrote, or if she suspected that I wasn't nearly as cool as I wanted her to think and just didn't say anything. I do know that I never journaled again after fifth grade, even though I would create characters and story lines in my head.

Losing the scant discipline that journaling instilled in me has affected me to this day. I have a difficult time getting the stories out of my head. I can tell you, from start to finish, exactly what my story is about, but once I get ten or fifteen pages written, I fizzle.

Then, when I go back to the project, I’m too worked up about what has already been created that I have to perfect it before I can move on. I end up changing things too much that it no longer resembles my original thoughts.

This is my downfall. I get stuck on perfecting each little piece instead of waiting for the whole project to take shape.

I hope that I can use this blog to create some discipline in my writing life. If that discipline wants to help me elsewhere, so be it. But I need to find it and hang on tight.

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