Jean Ryan2 Comments

The Problem of “Previously Published”

photoAs many writers know, most editors disallow previously published submissions, including personal blog entries. There doesn’t seem to be much sense in this, given that the majority of bloggers have a modest number of followers, and the internet is not rife with their work. As for those canny bloggers with several thousand fans, well they are probably less interested in placing their work in a journal.

Once or twice a week, largely by chance, I discover a blogger whose writing moves me. I often leave comments on their blogs; occasionally I’ll use their contact forms to share my thanks or praise.

As an author, I craft my posts with care, knowing they represent my writing ability. I also try to choose topics I find compelling and important; I want my words to matter. From what I’ve seen, many other bloggers feel the same way. Their excellent posts deserve a wider readership.

Of course the dilemma of previously published material can be bypassed. Writers can forego their blogs and submit their best work to publishers instead. This approach is sound but frustrating. For one thing, most writers wait months for responses to their submissions, which makes for a lot of blog downtime. Bloggers, just to keep their site alive, are compelled to post other things in the interim, usually pieces in which they have less stake. Also, the content of some submissions is time-sensitive; a long wait can dilute their impact. In either case, the posts an author is most proud of, has worked hardest on, are not available.

I think it’s fair to require that posts submitted to journals be first removed from blogs, but refusing to consider any blog entry, however brief its appearance, seems excessive.

What do you think?

Jean RyanLeave a comment

A Few Of My Favorite Books

This is a guest post I wrote for Carla Sarett’s inspiring blog:  carlasarett.blogspot.com

This list includes some of my all-time favorite books.

There is another book I’d like to mention, one that is especially appropriate as a gift from mothers to daughters. Veterans Day reminded me of this illuminating and fascinating read.

Our Mothers’ War: American Women at Home and at the Front During World War II by Emily Yellin

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The Story Prize Blog

For those who are not yet aware of this, Larry Dark, director of the Story Prize, hosts a lively blog, an ongoing series of Q&As with authors who have submitted their collections to The Story Prize. http://thestoryprize.blogspot.com/

These are interesting reads, and I hope you enjoy them. Here is the link to my own Q&A. Thank you for stopping by.

http://thestoryprize.blogspot.com/2013/07/jean-ryan-and-abandoned-story.html

Jean Ryan3 Comments

The Tipping Point

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At what point do you take your writing seriously? When do you start believing you’re a writer?

Certainly passion is a criterion. You can’t be much of a writer without an irrepressible urge to put ideas into words. You may resist this urge, resenting the time it takes you away from other activities, other people, but eventually it wins, and you find yourself once again opening your toolbox of words in hopes of revealing what is obscured. These words will never be precise enough, will always fall short of perfection, but you can’t be dissuaded from trying.  In your desire to find meaning, in your focus on the page, you will miss out on many wondrous things. You know this. You write anyway.

But passion isn’t all, is it? There must be something else: a growing suspicion, a fear almost, that what you’re creating has merit. I don’t know precisely when this happened for me, only that it did.

I don’t think it has much to with publishing credits, or the occasional encouraging comment from an editor. That’s like being told you’re pretty—a nice thing to hear, but unless you believe it yourself, you remain unconvinced. You can write a bestseller and still feel like a fake. The tipping point must be different for every writer. Some never find it, while others acknowledge their gift early on.

I was dubious of my talent for a very long time, discouraged by the genius and productivity of so many superior authors. Eventually it dawned on me that these writers were not my competition but my comrades, and I could acknowledge their excellence and still proceed with my own work. I didn’t have to be a prodigy, didn’t have to produce a book a year or win the Nobel prize, I just had recognize my own skills so that I could start measuring up to…myself. Once I saw what I might do, my efforts gained momentum.

What do I think of my work? Enough to make it better.

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An excerpt from “The Side Bar”

I’ve always been fascinated by people who can endure the stark realities of desert life. Here is an excerpt from “The Side Bar,” one of the stories in my collection SURVIVAL SKILLS. Set in the Nevada desert, this story concerns a handful of characters who work in a hotel casino.

It’s not just the people here who have stories, it’s the land. In Elko County there’s a town that was built on a blizzard-whipped mountaintop where someone found gold in the 1860s. The elevation was 10,000 feet and nearly everything the townsfolk needed had to be hauled up the icy slopes—whiskey was cheaper than water.

Every month or so I drive to a ghost town I haven’t been to before. I’ve walked into listing, cobwebbed shacks, found tin cups and plates still on the tables. Today I’m in Rosamund, about two hours east of White Horse. There isn’t much left: stone foundations, a roofless drugstore, parts of the sagging saloon. Dealers and collectors have picked the place clean, but roughing up the dirt I find two unbroken bottles: “Hamlin’s Wizard Oil Liniment” and “SOS Vermin Killer.”

While April is usually a cool month in the high desert, the temperature today is over eighty, so I hike up a stony slope and eat lunch in the scant shade of a juniper. The sky is blue, the mountains brown, just two colors taking care of everything. There is no sound, no chirping birds, no babbling brooks, no car engines, just a huge silence to slip into. I could be the last person on earth.

I take a bite of my ham sandwich and ponder the crumbling square of a house where people once ate, slept, fought, made love, had children, got sick and died. Looking at the drugstore, I have no trouble envisioning the miners, dirty, coughing, walking in and out of the door. I conjure up an old yellow dog lying in the shade, a couple of prostitutes leaning up against the posts, laughter and piano music coming from the saloon. It doesn’t take much imagination to evoke those days. Nevada has more ghosts than living people and the land is strewn with what’s left of their dreams.

It’s dark by the time I got to the outskirts of White Horse and there’s a gorgeous pink line in the west, just above the black horizon. I stop the car and roll down the window, let the night air wash over my face. It smells of sage and silver, of mica and cold clean bone. Out there, all around me, are creatures I can’t see, small desperate animals darting over the rocks. What I can see are the neon lights of town and, even from this distance, the White Horse Casino sign: a tall smiling cowboy holding the ace of hearts.

The coyotes are howling. They do this almost every night, launch their plaintive chorus into the starry heavens. Are they joining forces, organizing a hunt?  Or do they just need to know they’re not alone?

Last month a chef in Reno pricked his thumb on a contaminated chicken bone and died ten days later. A friend of mine was struck and killed by a falling eucalyptus tree while she was jogging. Take all the precautions you want, staying alive is a stroke of luck.

I think that’s why I like the desert so much—all this terrifying space, this nothingness, and me just a dot in the middle of it.

Okay. Here I am. Come get me.

Sunset south of Boulder

 

 

Jean Ryan2 Comments

The Ready Feast

This post originally appeared on a terrific review site, Booklover Book Reviews  http://www.bookloverbookreviews.com/

Why do most readers avoid short stories? I’ve posed this question to several people, who have offered a small range of reasons. Some say that short stories end too abruptly, or that they often have no resolution at all. Others mention a lack of plot, claiming that writers of this genre are more concerned with style than story. But the most common complaint is that short stories are simply too short. When it comes to reading material, people favor long-term investments and will not consider other options, even with the possibility of greater returns. “I make friends with the characters,” someone told me yesterday. “I want them to stick around.”

I find this both odd and poignant, basing the value of something on how long it keeps us company. You don’t see this more-is-better mentality applied to other art forms. A symphony does not trump a song, nor is a portrait less important than a mural, or a statue more impressive than a figurine. And poetry—no one accuses poems of being too short. I wish I could write poetry; the audience is small but ferociously loyal.

I understand the preference for novels only in theory. Being a writer, maybe my own characters edge out the competition, but I don’t think of characters as company—entertainers, yes;  companions, no. I ask other things of the people I meet in books. They must be credible, first of all, and informative, and interesting. No matter how scant the time I spend with them, if the author has succeeded, if the characters are well done, I will remember them, and their troubles, all my life.

Novels run the opposite risk, often drowning in their own excess. Sometimes, reading a novel, I get the feeling that the author is figuring things out bit by bit and I am wading through his thoughts, bumping into the clutter. While I’ve read many wonderful novels, I am in greater awe of the spare clean rooms, the potent distillation, of a good short story. There is a bounty of them, from the deliciously chilling tales of Edgar Allen Poe to the devastating brilliance of Annie Proulx’s Wyoming stories. At least once a year I reread Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” just to remind myself what a writer is capable of, and I am no less stunned by the short works of Jean Thompson, Antonya Nelson, Lorrie Moore, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, Alice Munro and so many others.

Despite these masters of the genre, the popularity of short stories has been declining for decades, and rare is the author who can make a living off them. Who would guess that in this age of texts and tweets, the short form would be struggling for attention? Maybe this techno world we live in is just the point. People need to escape, to lose themselves in more tantalizing realms, in which case, a short story can be the quickest route, the ideal restorative, the ready feast.

In their heyday, short stories appeared every month in popular magazines. Later they were found only in published collections or literary journals. Today, with increasing frequency, they are popping up in e-readers. Now that readers have an instant and inexpensive way to access short stories, I am hoping the genre will enjoy a renaissance, that people will set aside their fat beach reads, at least occasionally, and try something more slimming. Maybe even delicious.

Jean Ryan7 Comments

Betting on Books

Next month is the long-awaited launch of my short story collection, SURVIVAL SKILLS. Soon I’ll be joining the ranks of all the other authors who are hoping their newly published books will find an audience.

In the past several months, many of us have been doing what we can to get the word out, mostly through social media: Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, Pinterest. How successful these marketing venues have been for us remains to be seen. All we know is that exposure is key, and the more we like and follow, tweet and retweet, post and share, the greater our chances for recognition. For those of us who were not brought up in the electronic age, learning the tricks involved in setting up blogs and author pages is challenging to say the least, and it doesn’t help that technology is constantly jumping ahead of itself. Writers of any age would rather be writing than cyber networking, but we enter the fray and do our best.

The most daunting reality I’ve experienced thus far is the sheer number of us. Racing toward the same goal, we are teammates competing with each other. After all, there is only so much recognition to go around, only so much money to spend on books. It’s a selling frenzy and a buyer’s market, with books selling for less than a dollar, or being given away, by the thousands, in hopes of actual sales. Publishers in this country, electronic and otherwise, churn out 800 books a day. In this galaxy of productivity, what sort of odds does one book, my book, have?

And where do buyers begin? With self-publishing having eclipsed conventional forms, how do readers determine quality? Can we trust bloggers and reviewers? Stars and likes? Considering the many ways a web presence can be manipulated, does 15,000 Twitter followers mean anything at all? The internet is a monstrous game of chance and everyone is placing bets.

I’ve no idea how one separates the wheat from the chaff. And of course, one man’s chaff is another man’s wheat. I have zero interest in vampire novels, however well written, but who can dispute their  popularity? I like literary short fiction, a genre not known for blockbuster sales (which is ironic when you consider our tight schedules and short attention spans). I’ve asked people about this and they tell me that short stories don’t deliver, that they just don’t have enough meat on the bone. Well, I think there are plenty of meaty stories out there, stories that amuse and amaze, stories that will break your heart. You just need to know where to look.

So what can I say about SURVIVAL SKILLS? What bare truths can I give you? I can tell you that this an honest offering, that these stories evolved over several years and required my best effort. I can tell you that most of them originally appeared in reputable journals. I can tell you that my publisher, Ashland Creek Press, is committed to promoting quality literature that explores our connections with the natural world.

The characters in SURVIVAL SKILLS are not heroes. Like you and me, they are just trying to outlast the perils that surround them, taking what comfort they can on the way and often acquiring some strange companions. You won’t come across any vampires in these tales, but I’m betting you’ll enjoy them anyway.

http://www.ashlandcreekpress.com/books/survivalskills.html

Survival Skills Cover