Southwest scenes

Part of the Organ Mountains, within sight of Las Cruces, New Mexico. Nearby, a highway rises through a mountain pass and descends toward the White Sands missile range and the White Sands National Monument. That’s not my house; would that it were.

A few weeks ago, we drove with friends to White Sands to watch a balloon festival. Hundreds of people showed up, only to learn that the wind was too strong—and blowing in the direction of the nearby mountains. The children didn‘t seem to mind the event's cancellation, because they got to climb and slide on the soft gypsum dunes. They often use plastic sleds.



A daisy outside the T or C Public Library, which hosted a book signing for me. T or C is the area's shorthand for Truth or Consequences, which renamed itself in honor of an old television program. T or C used to be known as Hot Springs.



The long, lonely road from Marathon to Fort Stockton, Texas. Most of the road looks just like this: straight and empty. Behind me were a fence, a field, and a small family of longhorns. Dad’s picture is in the previous blog entry.



Crape myrtle in bloom, Austin, Texas.

A drive through south Texas

We recently took the long way from Las Cruces to Austin, heading south to Alpine and Marathon and the Davis Mountains. In Marathon we stayed at the old Gage Hotel, dating back more than a century. Floors creaked, the bedroom door barely closed let alone locked, and the floor had a common bathroom down the hall—unless you paid extra, as we did. We had no television and no telephone, and across the street, freight trains rumbled through the night on an hourly basis.

The next morning, we drove the lonely road up to Fort Stockton. Often we’d see no other humans for long periods. But there were hawks and eagles, deer crossing the road and leaping a fence, and a family of longhorns.

Great review

Didn't win the Author of the Year award given this year by the Friends of the Branigan Memorial Library. Ah, well. But in their awards program, they published this review:

"When Pigs Fly is a fast paced, action-oriented quest. Better still it's funny, laugh out loud funny. Bob Sanchez has created a very humorous tale of mis-adventure, sparkling with unique and believable characters. It is packed with plot twists, humor and a picture of the great Southwest. Once you start reading When Pigs Fly, you will not want to put it down until the last page."

Back yard rose

As I sat in the chaise supposedly intent on reading Bless Me, Ultima, my eyes wandered out the window, past the doves and finches scrabbling for seed around the feeder, and settled on this fine blossom. I read a few more pages and then tucked a bookmark inside the book. On went my shoes, out came my camera, out I trotted. Tonight, Anaya's fine novel waits patiently on the chaise.

The framing effect is thanks to Paint Shop Pro version 8.

Tonight I learned that I didn't win the author of the year award I'd hoped for. That's disappointing, but I'll just have to get on with another project.

A radio interview and more

This week I interviewed on the telephone with Toni Child for The World of Publishing. Toni was subbing for Jeannette Cezanne, aka Dr. J., and we had quite a good time, with the hour of live broadcast just zipping by. Sometime next week the link to the recording will be available, and I will post it. Our conversation ranged over various aspects of the self-publishing process, with some emphasis on my own book.

I'm under consideration for the Doña Ana County Author of the Year award for my novel. This week I received a letter telling me that the committee has decided, but they apparently announce that decision at a September 16 luncheon. This area has some excellent writers, but maybe there is a chance for me. Wouldn't it be sweet irony to win with a novel that a comparable organization (Friends of the Library) in Alamogordo thought unsuitable for a public reading?

There's also a contest sponsored by the El Paso Writer's League for members only, and I am entering 20 pages of an old mystery that I'd slaved over but didn't publish.

Lately I haven't done much new writing. Today we headed up to the mountains of Cloudcroft where the temperature was 72 vs. 96 at home. The first photo shows that we're no longer in the desert!


Couldn't resist this one:


And this is in downtown Cloudcroft:

"Don't let anyone stop you from writing."

One of the nicer venues for selling books in Las Cruces is Coas Books in the downtown pedestrian mall, particularly on a Saturday morning when shoppers wander in from the twice-weekly Farmer's Market. They sell a mix of used and new books, and are hospitable to local authors. The owner, Mike Beckett, sets up a table by the entrance to maximize the author's exposure.

Today I set up shop there for the third time and had a good day chatting with dozens of folks and selling a half dozen copies of When Pigs Fly. Early on, a stranger stopped by to say she'd already read the book, loved it, and planned to read it again. No sale for me this time, but the compliment was satisfying. It took nearly an hour to get my first sale of the day, but business improved. Some people picked up the book, asked about the price, and said they couldn't afford it. Many folks come into Coas looking for bargains and finding them. There were plenty of people saying they'd "think about it," and I'd send them away with a bookmark to remember me by. Maybe I'll meet them again; sometimes, the people who buy from me have heard about the book a few times before.

Plenty of people just walked on by the table, giving me the chance to just watch them. A very large number of folks down here, men and women alike, have tattoos. Young men in shorts with purple art on their calves, arms, necks -- young women with flowers decorating their shoulders or just below their collarbones, sometimes well below. The weather gets warm down here -- mid-90s today -- and maybe the resultant bare skin encourages the body art that seems so common here. It seems generational, though; tats and wrinkles don't go together often.

Getting people's attention required me to be active, though some folks walked right up to my table. Others would look at my display and walk on by. Whether they stopped or not, I'd always try to make eye contact and say hello. If they showed the slightest interest, I'd say, "It's a humorous crime caper." (Pause.) "It's gotten great reviews everywhere except in Alamogordo." That typically raised an eyebrow or two. They'd look at the book and then at me, then ask "Why?" Then we had the makings of a conversation. "Well, I sent chapter one to the Friends of the Library," I'd say, "and it starts out with the villain. They objected that the villain has bad moral character and uses bad language, and that readers in Alamogordo wouldn't like it."

At this point, much eye rolling ensued. Many folks knew about Alamogordo's reputation (though I'm still not sure how to characterize the city myself). Yes, that's Alamogordo, they'd say. One gentleman who bought my book shook my hand and said on his way out the door, "Don't let anyone stop you from writing."

Speaking at SouthWest Writers

Nancy and I drove the 225 miles to Albuquerque Friday in anticipation of my Saturday talk at SouthWest Writers. We treated ourselves to a nice room at the Marriott and took an enjoyable tram ride to the summit of Sandia Peak. This photo from the back of the tram shows the city below:

And here is the tram, which travels 2.7 miles and climbs about 4,000 feet:



The talk the next day seems to have been a success. SouthWest Writers is a large and congenial group with over 600 members, of whom over 100 were there to listen to me. The title of my presentation was "Publishing Your Pride and Joy," which focused on self-publishing and subsidy publishing. Earlier in the week I'd prepared a six-page handout and run off 110 copies, which turned out to be not quite enough. I'd practiced my talk over and over again, and it never came out the same way twice, but the practice got me through the real thing nicely.

BANNED IN ALAMOGORDO!

A while back, I contacted the Friends of the Library in Alamogordo about doing a reading of When Pigs Fly. My initial query was greeted with interest, but then their program chair read the first chapter of the novel on my website. Afterward, I received the following email:

Bob, After reading the first chapter of your book, I do not think the Friends of the Library would be a good sponsor of a reading of your book. Because of Diet Cola's language and lack of moral character, members of the group would not be interested in his "adventures" or "misadventures". I cannot think of any other group who might sponsor a reading and I regret that your book does not fit the criteria for our group. ______, Program Chairman

This is from the city where in 2001 a minister held a public burning of Harry Potter books. Maybe since I missed that event, I can arrange for the good reverend to purchase a couple hundred copies of my book for a special burning. Why should only big-name authors get all the attention? I would happily pay for the gasoline.

I am honored to join the ranks of authors who have written unacceptable works.

Speaking of self-publishing

Twelve days and counting; will it be terror or triumph? Public speaking is one of those great betes noires of human existence. Which do you fear more, a terrorist attack, or standing in front of a group of strangers and giving a talk? For some people, it's a close call. On the last night of one of my business courses many years ago, I had to present my project in front of class. Every molecule in my body felt like it would shake loose in a separate direction-God, the fear.

On August 4, Southwest Writers will allow me, the world's leading authority on nothing at all, to speak to an estimated assemblage of 100 to 110 of their members in Albuquerque. The topic will be "Publishing Your Pride and Joy," and here's the pitch:

"When should you consider self-publishing, and what does the term mean, anyway? In this talk you will learn about print on demand (POD), self-publishing versus subsidy publishing, and the advantages and pitfalls of the do-it-yourself approach. The speaker will use his own experience with iUniverse as a case study, freely sharing the lessons he has learned."

The schedule says it'll last two hours, though the talk itself will likely be less than half that, with the floor open to questions thereafter. In my nightmares, the first question will be, "Why are you wasting my valuable Saturday morning?"

My scant experience in public speaking is mixed, really. Somewhat unexpectedly, I am comfortable with public readings and answering questions about my book. My tentative conclusion is that a high comfort level with the material is the key to reducing anxiety about public speaking. It is (fingers crossed here) all in the preparation.

So how to prepare? This week I'll be working on an outline and practicing sections of my talk. My wife knows well after lo, our forty-two years together, that I tend to go off and talk to myself, and she will hear lots of that in the next week or so. I'm counting on lots of mini-rehearsals to carry the day.

Ideally, it would be nice to speak without notes, but that might be a tad ambitious. I hope to have some solid handouts - "Don't worry about taking notes, folks, 'cause it's all in the handouts." We'll see.

By the way, they'll not only sell my book for me (for a $1 commission) but they'll pay a small honorarium. How cool!

Remembering Larry

My brother Larry died ten years ago tomorrow, July 21, 1997. I no longer think of him every day, but his birth month of March and death month of July always bring back memories. Every year on March 1, he used to breeze over to Mom's house and recite, "The stormy March is come at last!" He loved to make people laugh, and he did it with ease. He would phone me to chat, and then when we were through talking, he would invariably say, "Hey, thanks for calling." He loved to read but had little use for formal education. Most of his jobs consisted of manual labor, and he did tree work for many years, generally freelance work without the highest regard for safety standards. One time in the 70s he nearly dropped an enormous pine tree on me; if I hadn't dived out of the way at the last second, it would have killed me. On another occasion, one of his co-workers allowed a large tree branch to hit him in the head. It was one of the few times I'd known Larry to wear a safety helmet; I saw him in his hospital bed that evening. His entire head was purple, and he had a hairline fracture in his face.

One of his safer jobs, and probably his favorite, was working as a guard at the county house of correction. I liked asking him, "How's life in the can?" He lost his job once because an inmate accused him of brutality during a scuffle. I never learned what really happened, but the Lowell Sun covered the incident with a banner headline, mentioned Larry by name in the opening graf, and declared him guilty. Months later, the county reinstated him, but he never forgave the newspaper, which he henceforth called the Lowell Scum.

Larry and his wife took on the burden of raising several of their grandchildren. He loved hiking and fishing, and did his best to instill those interests in his grandkids. On the evening before he died, Larry reminded me that he was taking two grandsons, 8 and 10 if I recall correctly, with him to climb the 5,000-foot Mount Lafayette in New Hampshire. They made it to a high ridge a short distance from the summit and and close to an AMC hut. Larry stopped to take in the splendid view while the boys walked on a few yards. When they looked back, he had collapsed.

That evening, the telephone woke me. I had an unlisted number at the time, and the operator was calling to say that someone was trying to reach me and claimed it was an emergency. Trudy had forgotten my number and couldn't get it from the phone company. But when we finally spoke, her sobbing message hit me like a sledgehammer to the chest. Nancy held me for hours after that as I struggled to breathe normally again.

At the wake, I met one of Larry's former supervisors at the jail, a tall, strapping fellow in uniform with lots of dignity and bearing--I wish I could remember his name. He recalled a night shift where he walked in on Larry, who had fallen asleep on the job, his head on his duty desk. "Larry!" the boss said. "What the hell are you doing?" Larry sat right up, opened his eyes, and said, "Oh, I was just praying." That was typical Larry; no one could stay mad at him, and he even caused us to laugh at his wake.

Years later, his eldest daughter Lisa went to work at her job as a department store supervisor. She said she felt ill, went into a back room to rest, and was shortly found on the floor in a coma from which she never recovered. She was 39.

Larry would have been 70 now. Our mom, who outlived him by six years, liked to tell me, "I miss that rascal." So do I.

Self-Publishing - Ten Great Tips to Make Your Book Shine

We self-publishers fight a lonely battle, finding readers for our wit and wisdom. We write alone, and now we sell alone and search for ways to market our work. How do we entice readers to open their wallets?

Those questions are often premature. Before asking how you’re going to cope with all those book orders, you need to make sure you have a quality product. So here are ten tips to make your book, fiction or non-fiction, the best it can be.

#1 Use a spell-checker, but only as a first line of defense. Then you look for misspellings the spell-checker won’t catch, such as then/than, to/too/two, tail/tale, or its/it’s.

#2 Read your manuscript critically, as though you weren’t the author. Some things to check include complete chapters, well-organized paragraphs, complete sentences, and accurate punctuation.

#3 Be consistent. If you capitalize a word once in the text, chances are you always want to capitalize it. Decide whether you want one space or two at the end of a sentence, and stick with it. Never change your font or type size without good reason. If your work consists of more than one file, be sure that every file is formatted identically.

#4 Get honest, competent critiques. Leave your mother and spouse alone; your family has better things to do than fawn over your work. Avoid critiques from anyone who has an emotional stake in making you happy, because that isn’t what you need. The Internet Writing Workshop (http://internetwritingworkshop.org) is an excellent source of constructive, informed criticism.

#5 Use your judgment. Even good critiquers may give you conflicting advice. Remember that it’s your project, so the final decision is always yours.

#6 Refer to a style manual such as the Chicago Manual of Style, which is the most widely accepted guide for standard writing.

#7 Make a style sheet. A novel or other large manuscript can involve lots of small stylistic decisions by the author. Keep a pad of paper with a running list things you don’t want to have to keep looking up. For example, a cartoon I liked showed a bank robber writing a note and asking the teller, “Is holdup one word or two?” Think of words you often misspell or don’t know how to capitalize, and write them correctly on the list.

#8 Follow your publisher’s guidelines religiously even if they don’t insist.

#9 Repeat tip #2.

#10 Review the publisher’s proof carefully. When you receive the publisher’s proof isn’t the time to look for typos; you should have done that already. At this stage, the publisher may even charge you if you fix many of your own mistakes at this stage. Instead, look for their errors. Are illustrations in their proper places? Are pages and chapters numbered properly? Look at every page’s overall appearance. Is each one properly aligned? Is any text missing?

If you follow these simple (but not always easy) tips, I can’t guarantee best-sellerdom for your book, but I can promise you this: Your book will be far superior to the vast majority of self-published books. You will have a quality product.

(This article originally appeared in EZineArticles.)

Back by popular demand...

My fan base, Ruth Douillette, has challenged me to get off my lazy butt and blog again. She and Carter roped me into joining them as admins on the Practice section of the Internet Writing Workshop, which if you are a writer and haven't seen it, you must visit. I've made all the predictable jokes about the pay scale--my pay doubles daily and all that--but it's an honor to join a doughty band of volunteers who help make the list run smoothly, productively, and flame-free.

Ruth asks that I not use my IWW duties as an axcuse for failure to blog. I won't. A bad cold is my alibi du jour, and I am milking the sucker. All my book-marketing tasks I have put off 'til next week, when my telephone voice has been restored--who the hell wants a phone call from a frog?

My laryngeal discomfort did not prevent my appearance at a book fair 0n Saturday, sponsored by the wonderful people of the El Paso Writer's League. My friend Maria Kruse took the photo below of me reading from When Pigs Fly to the assembled throng, which is something of a lie. I was scheduled to read, but it was getting late, the vendors were beginning to pack up, and my voice box wasn't up to the task anyway. So Maria consented to take some photos of what I'd like to have happened: me wowing the literati.

See that lady? She's wondering what I'm doing, talking with the microphone off.

So my natural sloth finally has just cause, and for the next few days I shall take full advantage. I have my wife, our cats, our chaise, and my Robitussin. Life is good, misery notwithstanding.

Here's a photo of George on the chaise with a book I'm reviewing.

Checking in from Indy

We arrived tonight in Indianapolis from Buffalo, having logged around 5,000 miles on our trip so far. Much of what we saw is lovely farm country, like southern Indiana; no pix, since we've been single-minded about covering lots of ground, and our cameras are probably buried under a ton of junk in the car anyway. We're anxious to be home now, and will be there on the 4th if we keep up this pace.

Here's a photo from the other day when I met with Carter Jefferson (the handsome fellow on the right) and Ruth Douillette.

Meeting friends and heading home

Not often does a person get to meet the folks he corresponds with online, but I recently had the pleasure of meeting Carter Jefferson and Ruth Douillette near the end of my vacation in Massachusetts. They are—surprise! just as nice in person as they are in their emails in the IWW.

Writing habits don’t change easily. My new novel is not writing itself, alas, nor have I put more than a couple thousand new words into it during this family vacation. Tomorrow we leave Cape Cod for Vermont, the home of Nancy’s 101-year-old grandmother. Barbara is tiny, blind and frail now, but her mind is as strong as ever. We have known each other for well over 40 years, and I can attest that she is a genuine lady. When she heard about my novel, she had a friend order a copy from her local bookstore; she wouldn’t hear of accepting a copy as a gift if she could boost my sales instead.

After a day visiting her, we’ll begin our trip home in earnest. Our plan is to skirt the Great Lakes, pass through Kansas and Colorado, and drop into New Mexico from the north. We expect to arrive home on July 5, or July 6 if we get lazy. It’s been a fine vacation, but Nancy and I are both ready to have it done now. I suspect that our travel companions, George and Gracie, will also be happy for familiar turf. When Nancy started cleaning the big carrier the cats travel in, G & G hot-pawed it out of sight. Gracie quickly forgot her worries and wandered back to greet us, but not George. We began to worry that he might have slipped out, which would have been serious, but we eventually we found him hiding under the bed.

Here is an old photo of the cats who rule our lives (Gracie is on the left):



Once we’re home, I have to figure out how to improve book sales. I’ve had a couple of radio interviews, have been featured on the cover of a (small) literary magazine, received glowing book reviews, and so on. My online sales are insignificant. At book signings, my sales to date have ranged from two to six copies. I do have a couple of upcoming events where I expect to sell a good deal more, but hand-selling won’t move copies quickly.

Wow. What a whiner. The fact is, having a book in print—a good book, one that makes people laugh, is a lot of fun.

A month on old Cape Cod

We’re on Cape Cod in Massachusetts for the month of June, 2500 miles and a week’s drive from our New Mexico home. Our rented cottage sits on quiet Buzzard’s Bay, where we could hide undiscovered for a very long time. There are no superhighways, no police sirens, no pimped-up hot rods with thundering stereos. But there is peace, and there is time to write. On many days, a stiff northerly breeze creates whitecaps on the bay, which I can see from where I sit. Now and then, a small recreational boat putts past.



We are in an old carriage house next door to the lovely Federal-style home that our landlord and her husband live in. Our place is comfortable, although the dimensions are such that I’ve bumped into shelves and cabinets more than once. The sharp pain has taught me to shuffle around the house with more care. Our Bengal cats, George and Gracie, walk through the fireplace and then leave gray paw prints on the white bookshelves. Nancy cleans up behind them, but initially she worried about the damage the cats would do to the assortment of knickknacks on the shelves. Our landlord, a nice lady, assures us that nothing is valuable.




Rhododendrons are in bloom, and some of the bushes in the neighborhood appear to be ten feet high. This is also a friendly environment for roses, especially the wild ragusa that I have always associated with Cape Cod.



Our landlord’s advertisement specified Internet access, but they only have it in their house. The wireless is kaput until her son can come and fix it; perhaps I could troubleshoot the problem—maybe it’s as simple as a loose connection—but I don’t intend to. Nancy and I bring our laptops to the Falmouth Public Library now and then, and we check our emails. Yesterday, we showed up when the library was closed, so we sat in our car and used the library’s wireless signal. It worked fine.

We had lived in Massachusetts for nearly 60 of our years (over 40 of them together), so our trip back here from New Mexico is a good test of how much homesickness we feel. So it may sound odd to say that while I have always liked Massachusetts and been proud to live here, I don’t miss it at all. Today the skies are blue, but for twelve of our first 14 days in this cottage we had heavy, dismal clouds and harsh winds. Our landlord’s elderly husband told the tired joke about New England weather, that if you don’t like it, just wait a minute, it will change. (He told it three times in a half hour the other night, because his memory seems to be slipping.) Anyway, the weather can change quickly around here, but not necessarily for the better.

Crossing the Mississippi

Today was much better, with the sun shining and the cats not caterwauling. We drove to East Memphis, Arkansas and then north into Missouri, where we stopped in New Madrid for a close look at the Mississippi. The view was hazy, but here is one photo:

We passed through mile after mile of flat farmland, and it looked to me as though they were growing crops enough to feed the world. We crossed the river over a single-lane bridge at the point where the Ohio flows into it. There was no place to photograph the confluence of the two rivers, but my, it was impressive. Kentucky lay on the other side, and the landscape promptly goes from flat to gently rolling.

Now we're beyond Hope

We woke up to heavy rains in Dallas this morning. Parts of the city had ten inches overnight, and I read tonight that floods washed an SUV into the Pedernales River and drowned six people. By the time we were underway, the rains were off and on, and conditions gradually improved as we very carefully drove east about 20-30 mph under the speed limit.

The closer we got to Arkansas, the taller and denser were the trees. A portion of our ride reminded us of the old Route 3 heading towards New Hampshire, which used to have a heavily wooded median strip. It's very green down here.

I wanted to see President Clinton's birthplace in Hope, Arkansas, so we took Route 67 off the main highway. Hope is larger than I expected, about 10,000 people. Here is his first home:

All in all, our drive to Little Rock was dull. In the evening I'm trying to keep up with my fiction writing.

Texas wildflowers

We woke up to fog and rain in Midland, with 60-degree temps, not the kind of weather we normally associate with Texas. Our destination for the day was Dallas, which we made easily. The countryside has turned green, with plenty of trees and a slightly rolling landscape.

Texas highways display wildflowers in abundance this time of year. We stopped to take some photos, and here is a sampling:

Are we there yet?

Today, we (two humans and two cats) got into our jam-packed car and departed from Las Cruces to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, a roughly 2500-mile trek. George, our male Bengal, protested from inside his carrier, and I presume he was also speaking on behalf of his more mild-mannered sister Gracie. We made it across West Texas hill country, land of Texas limestone, mesas and buttes, 80-mph speed limits, and lots and lots of nothing much. We'd had rain for a couple of hours, which brought out the strong smell of the creosote bushes. There is something clean and appealing about that smell, even though it reminds me of telephone poles and railroad ties.

Here is a Texaco station where we'd contemplated a quick rest stop. Frankly, their offerings were limited.




Somewhere past Van Horn, the land flattens out into a plain. The land has no trees to speak of, but lots of smaller bushes, and in the towns we begin to see lawns, small but lush. Oil wells begin to dot the countryside, small rigs that bob slowly up and down and look like praying mantises devouring their mates. Then the cities of Odessa and Midland appear, apparently so closely linked that billboards refer to Midessa.

So we are spending our first night in Midland, which proclaims itself "the home of President George W. and Laura Bush." Lacking an invitation to join them, we are staying in a La Quinta Inn.

Toni Causey's very (very, very, very) good debut

I just posted this review of Bobbie Faye's Very (Very, Very, Very) Bad Day on Amazon. The author is Toni McGee Causey, and it's published by St. Martin's Griffin.

Bobbie Faye Sumrall is the type of gal a guy could really be attracted to--in the same way a moth is attracted to a flame. This tart-tongued Cajun's day starts out with the destruction of her trailer and with her accidental parcticipation in a bank robbery, and this is before things start going downhill. Bobbie Faye is Contraband Days queen, and at the center of this insane romp of kidnapping, intrigue, suspicion, threats, car chases, gunfire, voodoo and a string of utter disasters is Bobby Faye's homely tiara. Bad guys want it and will kill to get it, even though it seems to be worthless; Bobbie Faye won't give it up because it represents her family's highest achievement.

Toni Causey's achievement is to pack so much disaster (and laughter) into a single day. Bobbie Faye's Very (Very, Very, Very) Bad Day is a lively, thoroughly enjoyable summer read.

Amazonitis

Recently, online sales of my novel have been slow. I check my Amazon rankings frequently—too frequently for my mental health, probably—and have watched my Amazon sales rankings sink, sink, sink from a high of 125,000 to a low of over 1,000,000. I haven’t shared this pain with my wife, because I know she’ll say what she always says: “Relax. You're supposed to be having fun!” (Nancy has this annoying habit of telling me what I need to know.)

Anyway, during that whole dismal slide, the Amazon message on my book's page said, “Only 4 left in stock—order soon.” That “4” never changed for a couple of weeks. Then tonight after watching a movie I sat down and acted on one of my more harmless compulsions and checked my Amazon ranking. Well, lordamercy, my book had risen to 76,000! The Amazon message said “Only 3 left in stock—order soon.” THEY SOLD ONE BOOK and my ranking rose by about 935,000 places. That's the highest ranking the book's ever had. So I thought at that rate I'll be #1 if only somebody else will buy my book. So, compulsive person that I am, I refreshed the screen and learned that I'd dropped 40,000 places.

Is there a pill to cure my Amazonitis? Don't tell me that I'm supposed to be having fun. I AM having fun, damn it. I AM!

Joel Frey's new book

The other day, I met Joel Frey and his fiancee at an El Paso Writer's League meeting. Joel has written a memoir of his not-so-distant college days, entitled Two Sides of a Cypress Wall. I'm looking forward to buying and reading the book when it's published this summer.

Deming book signing

Here is a nice photo published today in the Deming (NM) Headlight. The caption reads:

'When Pigs Fly'
Bob Sanchez, author of "When Pigs Fly," signs a copy of his book on Friday at the Marshall Memorial Library. Sanchez is a Las Cruces resident and first-time publisher of the crime caper set in the Sonoran Desert. (Matt Robinson/Headlight Photo)

This Li’l Porker Goes to Market

For years, the idea of self-publishing was anathema to me, all tangled up in my mind with vanity publishing. Serious Writers Don’t Go There, I thought. We are supposed to write our novel and then beg perfect strangers for approval.

But life is too short—and in my family that’s more than a simple cliché. Why waste it chasing after agents and publishers? I decided to make my latest novel, When Pigs Fly, a test case for self-publishing. My friends called my book “the li’l porker,” and it was time to go to market.

Granted, some self-publishing companies give off a bad odor. But research showed that iUniverse has a good combination of quality, reputation and price, so I signed up with them.

For the most part, they’ve done well by me. They have an orderly and businesslike publication process requiring input from the author; in fact, they leave most decisions to the author, the biggest exception being the pricing. For my 300+ page book they selected $18.95. That’s high for a paperback, but apparently not for one printed with print-on-demand (POD) technology.

Is the $18.95 a gating factor for buyers? I think so, but some people are buying it at full price. For a while, Amazon offered it at a 30% discount, but not anymore. iUniverse sells it at full price and always has. I keep a stock in the back of my car for readings I do in the Las Cruces area, and those copies generally go for $15, a price that leaves me a little margin. My goal is not to maximize income, but to maximize readership while recouping the bulk of my expenses.

Before you join me on the self-publishing path, you need to decide on your goals and evaluate companies with those goals in mind. My own goal is to gain a wide readership while earning back my investment. I no longer care about agents or traditional publishing houses, and will almost certainly self-publish any subsequent novels. On the other hand, credibility for my work is important.

Oops. Do "credibility" and "self-publishing" belong in the same paragraph? A lot of people turn up their noses at the whole business as though they were passing a pig sty. Just try to get your book reviewed. Very few people will review your book. Kirkus Discoveries reviewed mine, but I paid them for it. Midwest Book Review specializes in reviewing self-published and small-press books, so they reviewed mine. A couple of other reviews are in the works, and I actively sought out all of them.

Anyway, when my book came out in November 2006 I sent an email to all of my friends and some of my old neighbors and acquaintances. I tried to use a light tone in keeping with that of the book, so I made silly but true statements along the lines of "It'll make you laugh, but won't improve your love life." It was a reasonably effective launch to my most likely market niche, and sales got off to a good start.

Also, I converted my personal website into a platform for promoting WPF, though driving traffic to that site is an ongoing conundrum. An inexpensive Google ad seems to make a small difference.

It's not clear how much help Amazon reviews are for sales, but I solicited friends to post reviews if they liked the book. Right now I have 14 reviews, 12 of which are there because I asked for them. Mind you, not everyone values Amazon reviews, because they are assumed to be biased.

It's hard to gauge my online sales in the short term, as iUniverse reporting lags two months behind (they have to wait for reports from Amazon, etc.). So sales reporting is one area where I'm not completely satisfied with iUniverse.

Selling books directly is quite satisfying. So far, my sales in signing events have averaged five books-modest, but the interaction is fun. The other day I even turned down a sale, because a lady who hadn't heard me read wanted a copy for her 13-year-old granddaughter. I explained about the profanity ("only a little") and adult situations, and we agreed my book was a bad choice for a child. The nice lady was probably thinking it was like Charlotte's Web. But then other customers give me a big smile and say how much they're looking forward to the read, and that personal interaction I'd miss if only bookstores and websites carried the li’l porker.

(The above article appeared in the May 2007 issue of The SouthWest Sage, published by SouthWest Writers.)

On the road in Deming, New Mexico

Yesterday I drove to a book signing in Deming, New Mexico, an hour west of Las Cruces across desolate desert landscape. The Marshall Library hosted my quiet little event, which despite local publicity and a large outdoor marquee that read, "Bob Sanchez -- Author Book Signing May 11," attracted only two librarians and a local newspaper photographer. So I sat and read the first chapter of When Pigs Fly to a pair of very nice ladies, and I sold two books. I also donated one copy, so the event was a financial loss. Big deal. It was fun.

According to a local resident, Deming is a city with no "nice" neighborhoods, only those that are tolerable and those that aren't. Methamphetamines and housebreakings are apparently a big problem there, and there is some spillover of violence from Palomas, Mexico, about 30 miles to the south. (In Palomas this week, five people were murdered, including one person who arrived at U.S. Customs in a bullet-riddled car.) Well, this all came as a surprise to me, as I'd pictured Deming as just a sleepy little burg.

So my novel travels ever so slowly toward immortality, one lonely copy at a time.

(Oh, by the way, the Marshall Library has a display of YA books, which prominently includes copies of The Killing Sea by Richard Lewis, my online acquaintance who lives in Bali, Indonesia--which, if it isn't paradise, it's the next island over.)

My Pig Squadron

Here are flying pigs friends have given me since my novel came out. These winged wonders occupy a place of honor on my desk.

The power of advertising

…or not. iUniverse has a cooperative advertising program where you pay a certain amount of money to share an ad in a publication having wide circulation. When I asked them about the efficacy of the ads, they said they had no idea. So I thought I’d do a quick little study of my own. This is unscientific for all kinds of reasons, but it may provide an interesting glimpse into what your ad money might buy.

One of the companies providing co-op ads through iUniverse is The New York Review of Books. For $250, you can purchase advertising for your book, and it will appear in a single larger ad identified as promoting independently published books.

On March 29, I looked at their most recent and relevant ad, which had 13 titles in a single large display. Of course, independent books sell by various means, but the only information I had access to was the Amazon ranking, which only indicates their own sales relative to all other books they sell. They don’t divulge hard sales numbers.

Today, April 8, I looked at the rankings again.

Here is a summary:
—Six of the titles had no significant change in sales ranking.
—Two of the titles fell significantly (from 70,000 to 900,000 and from 500,000 to 1,000,000).
—Five improved significantly, the biggest change being from 1,800,000 to
80,000)

It will take more than this to know for sure, but this quick look suggests to me that authors should be careful about how they spend their ad dollars.

Some new articles

El Paso Magazine just published two of my articles in their April issue, so that has made my week! One article is about the Border Book Festival being held in Mesilla, NM on April 20-22. (Sadly, the magazine doesn't link to their content.) The accompanying photos were supplied to me by some of the participants, such as Sandra Cisneros. The other article is entitled Trekking to the Copper Canyon, and all the pictures are mine. I'm very pleased with how everything came out. This weekend I'm working on a short article on self-publishing for The SouthWest Sage, a publication of SouthWest Writers.

My WPF isn't for kids

One day, it was bound to happen. A lovely lady on the staff of a local retirement home had missed my reading of When Pigs Fly in their library yesterday, and she sent word to me that she'd like to buy a copy. Her friend's email passed along a request that I inscribe the copy "to Darian." So today I swung by with a copy for her, then asked her who Darian is. "My thirteen-year-old granddaughter," she said. I replied that this is an adult novel with some profanity and adult situations, and didn't think it was an appropriate gift. She completely agreed, and I lost the sale.

This has been a concern of mine, that some people might mistake WPF for a children's book. Even before its publication I wondered if there were a better title, but the one I chose seemed best to fit the story line.

Of course sales are important, but so is being remembered well.

An honor from iUniverse

Well, iUniverse just awarded When Pigs Fly its "Editor's Choice" designation, based on a couple of good reviews from Kirkus Discoveries and Midwest Book Review. The icon thingy on the right will start appearing on the back cover of
my books. Cool!

Spitting nails

Stand back whilst I spit virtual nails.

I’d wondered why several people had come up to me and said they’d visited Barnes & Noble to see me at a December book signing only to be told B&N didn’t know anything about it. The signing was elsewhere. I’d never realized until yesterday that the Sun-News entertainment writer had run an article about me and several other authors. I had personally delivered to the newspaper a copy of my news release (which didn’t mention the signing), my business card with contact info, and a complimentary copy of the book. So this morning I went the Sun-News website and paid $2.95 for the full article so I could post it on my own website. Here is the relevant portion of the
article:

Tis the season to get a book signed from a local author

S. Derrickson Moore Sun-News reporter LAS CRUCES — A signed first edition is a rare gift that can be easy to give ? [one of several declarative sentences ending with a question mark, but maybe that's only in the online version.]

[snip]

Just out is "When Pigs Fly" by new Las Crucen Bob Sanchez, (iUniverse, paper, $18.95) a recently retired technical writer who also writes short stories, book review [should be plural] and magazine articles.

He chronicles the adventures of retired Massachusetts policeman Mack Dugan [NO! It's DURGIN! That's right on first line of the back cover!], who is asked to scatter his friend's ashes over the Grand Canyon. In his quest to fulfill his friend's request, he encounters colorful characters that include "a pair of loony housebreakers, a bald Elvis impersonator and a dopehead with an outline of his brain tattooed on his skull."

A winning lottery ticket and a javelina are also involved.

Critic David Daniel calls the book "part road trip, part crime caper, part love story? 'When Pigs Fly' reads like it was written with an ice pick, and he drives it right into the heart of the American dream of the Golden Years."

He [No! Misplaced pronoun. It should say Sanchez.] will sign books at 7 p.m.
Wednesday at Barnes & Noble at the Mesilla Valley Mall [NO! I never told her this. It was held at the library].

**Then in a sidebar she repeats the incorrect location and gives my website instead of my email address as a source of more information—and she gets my website URL wrong.**

Shoddy work. Just shoddy work. Grr.

Internet Writing Workshop

So I don't post for a month, and nobody notices? What's up with that? Well, never mind. No offense taken. Meanwhile, may I commend you to the Internet Writing Workshop, a superb online venue where writers critique each others' work in a safe and friendly environment. They have a variety of mailing lists where you can submit your work for critique. It's open to writers of all skill levels, and it's quite well run by dedicated volunteers. No flamers allowed.

A public reading

Last night was my first public event, a book reading and signing at the Branigan Library in Las Cruces. In addition to Mike from Coas Bookstore, there were nine folks in the audience, and they bought five copies of my book. It was great--I felt comfortable with a friendly audience, and they reacted quite well to chapter 1.

Check out Moni's Nook

My friend Moni from India asked me to send her remarks about When Pigs Fly so she could post them on her blog, Moni's Nook. She has interesting insights into life and writing, and you may enjoy checking them out.

An unexpected reader

I tend to be quiet among relatives and non-writing friends about my passion for writing. So when my former neighbors in Massachusetts heard that I'd published a novel, they seemed quite surprised. My wife's 101-year-old grandmother just called the other day, expressing delight and saying she intends to buy the book. We'll just send her a copy as a gift, my wife said. No, no, she said, she wants to buy it. Barbara and I have been acquainted for about 45 years, and she said she had no idea that I wrote fiction. If you write, you may know that squeamish feeling you get when you tell someone that you write novels but haven't been published yet. Oh, folks are nice about it, but no one ever seems surprised that I'm not fighting for bookstore shelf space with King and Grisham.

Barbara is a wonderful lady, a Holyoke College Phi Beta Kappa from the 1920s who recently told us she's surrounded by too many old people at her assisted living facility in Vermont. She is blind now, and one of her many friends will have to read the book aloud to her. This leaves me a little apprehensive; of course she has never heard me swear or utter anything inappropriate, so I hope my book doesn't shock her.

That is what happens when you put your work out for the world to see, though, isn't it?

Notes from a writer's conference, part 3

The final session of the Pitch, Publish and Promote conference covered promotion, and Jerry Simmons of WritersReaders gave a fine presentation. Jerry is not a writer, but has been in the publishing and promotion business for a lot of years.

Publishing is a business. Think of it that way, and you'll succeed as a writer.

Key concept: Sell-through. This is the ratio of books sold versus books shipped, so if the publisher ships 1000 copies to retailers and 400 copies are returned unsold, the sell-through is 60%. A minimum acceptable ratio is 60%; a lower rate is very bad.

If the publisher ships 500,000 copies of your book, that sounds fantastic. But if you sell only 200,000 copies, your book is a disaster. You are far better off as a writer if only 50,000 copies ship and 30,000 sell. It may sound counterintuitive, but the sell-through rate is critical. A 50% sell-through will doom a writer's future, no matter how many copies actually sell. What a writer should want is a low initial ship rate. It's much better if the book requires a second printing.

Writers need to know this type of thing, because many publishers will cynically screw over the writers. But if you can speak the language of the publishing business, they are much more likely to treat you with respect.

You need to separate yourself and your book from everything else being published.

90% of revenue is generated from 10% of the titles.

At least 500 titles are published daily.

Develop relationships with decision makers who can help you sell your book. It helps to know someone in the publishing business.

If you are a self-published author, you will be sure to get publishers' attention by selling a few thousand copies.

Publishers also want to be able to sell your earlier published titles--this is the back list.

Visit and observe what's in book stores.

Write on a schedule.

Use small focus groups to evaluate what works in your writing.

Ingram and Baker & Taylor are big jobbers, or distributors.

Writers should look at these independents for possible distribution:

• Powells
• Tattered Cover
• Page One

The market for audio books hasn't grown in 10 years, but the market still exists.

Best opportunities to focus:

• Tap into online sales.
• Specialty groups--organizations, groups, book clubs (Google this). This is bigger than the traditional marketplace. You might sell quantities of your book to an organization at a discount, and let them sell at list.

But don't neglect traditional bookstores.

Jerry Simmons has a free newsletter. See his website for this.

Ways to sell your book:

• Advertising
• Promotion--drawing attention to your book.
• Publicity--by far the most effective--any attention you can get for free. This can be about the author as well as about the book. Find some kind of newsworthy tie-in.

The five biggest weaknesses of publishers:

• They don't think outside the mainstream, so the specialty book market is growing at their expense.
• They don't gather information on who is buying their books. Writers should do this--know who is buying their books.
• They sell to the masses and miss the niche markets.
• They don't sell on the Internet, because they are afraid of alienating Amazon and Barnes and Noble. The Internet is the next big platform for writers.
• They tend to hit only the 30 biggest media markets.

Self-published authors should stay away from competition in the major markets.

An author should expect to make $0.60 or $0.70 profit from each sale of a book published by a NY publisher.

Publishers tend to dislike working with writers who write in multiple genres. If you do it, you should consider using a pen name.

Marketing success depends on persistence. 99.9% of authors don't know this stuff.

Notes from a writer's conference, part 2

Here are more of my notes from the Pitch, Publish and Promote conference. I've made no attempt to put these into a narrative, but I think they'll still convey worthwhile information.

The second part featured Bob Sanders, CEO of Mundania Press, which he co-founded to republish the works of Piers Anthony. They publish paranormal fiction. He says that to check the process, he has anonymously submitted work to his own company and been rejected.

It's critical for you as a writer to know your audience. What are their reading tastes? (Genre is a starting point.) What else does the market read? What kind of disposable income do they have? It's not enough to say your audience consists of adult males over 25.

A writer needs a business plan and a marketing plan. The business plan can be brief. Try to write it before finishing your novel.

A publisher looks for a reason to say no. The quickest way to get rejected at Mundania is to not follow submission guidelines.

You should have a critique partner, someone who knows the genre you're writing in.

Market like it's your last day on earth.

The publisher sells the book to book buyers.

The author has to market the book to the reading public.

Use Yahoo groups to set up a small focus group to test your work.

An author's business plan should encompass not just one book, but your writing career. Who will sell your books? Who is your fan base? What media will you use to reach them? What is your vision for your writing career? Answer the Who, What, Where, When, Why, How.

Set your expectations for a given time frame. How much time do you realistically have to write?
Think about why the audience should care about your books? Why should they enjoy them?

Your marketing plan deals with the individual books.

Set objectives--what do you want to accomplish? Three objectives you want to accomplish within a year, for example. Share this plan with friends and family.

Need to set measureable goals--describe the activity required, what will happen and when, and what is the expected financial impact.

An author needs visibility and mystique (referring to how the person appears to the public). Look the part for the type of author you are and the type of business personality that's appropriate for the kind of writing you do.

Where to find customers:

• Workshops/associations
• Newspapers/publishers/coalitions
• Referrals
• Internet/TV/radio
• Trade journals

Considerations in thinking about your potential customers:

• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Income/occupation/education
• Purchasing loyalty
• Hobbies
• Social class/lifestyle

Think about how you'll promote to the top three categories of readers.

A question he posed over and over: "Is the juice worth the squeeze?" Always consider whether any given effort is worth the expected result.

Make use of Google and Yahoo. Leverage your resources.

List the problems you're facing:

• What's the root cause?
• What needs to change?
• How will I measure results?

Hold online writing workshops, as does paranormal author Michele Bardsley.

Authors can coordinate group ads.

Find and develop a niche.

Planning

Plan on the specific actions you intend to accomplish, then do it. ("Plan the work, work the plan.") Say how you'll do something and why--specific tasks that will affect the bottom line.

Think about where your time and attention are going.

Regularly re-evaluate your plans. Treat your writing like a business.

Don't give the public too much information about yourself.

Mentioned: Fictionwise

Notes from a writer's conference, part 1

I just came back from the Pitch, Publish and Promote conference in Albuquerque, which lasted a day and a half and was organized by SouthWest Writers. Over the next few days, I will post some of my notes.

The pitching segment featured a talk by Katharine Sands, a New York literary agent who offered plenty of advice on how to approach agents. She tossed around lots of arcane-sounding terms such as "dysfiction," which I didn't find all that useful, so I didn't write them all down.

She distinguishes between a writer and an author; the latter is a published writer. Writing is solitary, while publishing is collaborative.

A manuscript does not become a book until it is published. Never refer to your manuscript as "complete."

When querying agents for non-fiction (I think she meant for fiction as well), don't just give the facts of your story. You should show your voice and provide a lens that lets us see into the book.

Don't pitch multiple ideas at once. Just one at a time.

A query is a one-page pitch. Nobody reads two pages. The query must "infotain," provide a spark, give the agent a memorable takeaway nugget.

In your query, lead with what is the most interesting. Don't waste your first paragraph.

Elevator pitch: about 25 words to grab the agent's attention.

Your pitchcraft becomes your jacket copy, your hook.

Agents are looking for voice, elements, alchemy.

Good news/bad news: The good news is that talent comes from everywhere, and agents are always on the lookout. The bad news is that the agents are flooded with queries.

Talk about your platform in your query letter, if warranted. If you are a recognized expert in the field you're writing about, for example, be sure to let the agent know. Also, tell how your other writing has been noticed, how you will get readers, or anything that makes your work interesting or different.

Agents do not log submissions. If you don't get a reply, sometimes you can get away with waiting a while and querying again.

Radio sells more books than television.

Categories of published books:
Front List: Books by the very top authors, whose work automatically stands out in the market place.
Mid List: Where most work ends up. This is a very wide range.
Back List: Books that are not ordinarily marketed in bookstores except under special circumstances. They might be specialty books, or they might be earlier books in a series. So if the latest Harry Potter book comes out, bookstores might also trot out all of Rowling's earlier titles to try selling those at the same time. Those earlier titles have been back listed.

Booksellers don't buy books. They take them on consignment.

Book buyers frequently get to retitle a book if they think the original title won't sell.

A good query might wind up becoming the catalog description.

As an author, you must be an impassioned ambassador for your work.

Generally okay to query multiple agents at once.

You can often find the names of literary agents on the acknowledgement pages of recently published books.

The Preditors & Editors website is a good place to learn what some of the shadier folks in the business may not want you to know.

My novel is published!

My comic novel, When Pigs Fly, is published and available through my website, iUniverse and Amazon. Exciting stuff! I noticed that Powells has it as well, but their price looks too high, three bucks over list. Also, B&N doesn't seem to have the title yet.

Meanwhile, my friend Bev tells me she just received her copy in the mail. That makes it seem more real.

Free bookmark

Here's a promotional bookmark I created, now that I know the price and page count of the book. If you would like to have a free bookmark, send me an email (bobsanchez1@comcast.net) with your name and address. I will gladly send you one, wherever you are in the world.

iUniverse ran into a couple of production delays recently, but they are working hard to get back on track. I'm still hoping for the book to be available by early December. We shall see.

A reflection on duct tape

The online pub Laughter Loaf just accepted my short piece, You Can't Be Too Careful, a reflection on the importance of duct tape. It's on their docket for May 15, 2007, so we'll all have to hold our collective breaths until then.

Ready? Take a deep breath and hold it...

Seriously, I'm pleased.

An endorsement

The other day, well-known author Leslie Meier (The Lucy Stone Mystery Series) offered this praise of When Pigs Fly:

"Bob Sanchez hits all the right notes in this zany comedy that will keep you turning the pages -- and laughing out loud!"

Thanks, Leslie!

Poetic lament

I entered a haiku contest sponsored by a Japanese organization, and months later received the sad news that they saw through my lack of poetic talent. Herewith my lament:

Rejected haiku
Seven hundred others won
Hara kiri looms.

The cover

My cover design came in today, and I'm quite pleased with it! Here is what it looks like. People do just books by their covers, and I think this one conveys a sense of humor without appearing to be a children's book.

The next step in the process is to review a proof, which I hope to get soon. I've already gone over the text time and again, so there shouldn't be (m)any typos.

Proofread your work!

I recently read a mystery published by a small press--let's keep names and titles out of this gripe. The writing was fine in many respects; the chapters were short, the pacing was excellent, the characters were sympathetic. The plot and dialogue worked well.

So why mention it? Because apparently no one proofread the manuscript. Wouldn't you think that if a novel is about a kidnapping, that someone would notice that there are supposed to be two p's in kidnapped? It's spelled wrong dozens of times, because no one thought to look up the word. Frequently the author is too close to catch these errors, but someone should catch them before the reader does. Running a spell-check program would have caught "kidnaped" or "kidnaping." Even the spell-checker is not sufficient, but it should be a writer's first line of defense.

Typos--at least typos in quantity--distract from my enjoyment of a book and from my appreciation of its author.

The cover in progress

This week, an iUniverse graphic artist is designing the cover for When Pigs Fly. My idea had been to show a silhouette of a pig or javelina flying over Arizona's Sonoran Desert at sunset. There are several children's books by the same name, so I stressed the importance of designing the cover to appeal to adults. They referred me to several stock photographs that they could work with.

I didn't much care for the pig they found, which looked vaguely creepy. So I found a more suitable one and superimposed it on the sunset. The graphic artist should be using something like the image on the right. They plan to use a Nueva font with a drop shadow for the title and my byline. This doesn't look like a children's book to my friends who've seen it, so that's a relief.

It's done!

Glory, hallelujah, I've declared my manuscript complete and sent it to iUniverse. For the last week I've been going over the story, picking out the nits. Did you know that heaven and hell aren't initial-capped? Nor are pronouns referring to deities. So I had to change "God sure took His time, didn't He?" to "God sure took his time, didn't he?" The estimable editors at iUniverse referred me to the Chicago Manual of Style, and sure enough, they were right. I've been making little changes like that 'til my eyes were about to fall out, so the copy should be clean.

I've often heard stated as a truism that a writer can't edit his own writing. Well, I just did it, though it helped a lot that iUniverse sent me a report telling me the types of issues to look for.

Soon I hope to hear from iUniverse graphics folks about the cover art.

The Pig's Progress

Right now I'm going line by line through When Pigs Fly, and that's a slow process. Sixty-eight pages in three days, and only 150 pages to go. Then I'll ship my edits off to iUniverse and move on to the next step. They have to put the book into the production queue, and they owe me a cover design, which I am eager to see.

Advance praise for When Pigs Fly

Here is what a couple of well-regarded published authors have to say about my upcoming novel:

Bob Sanchez’s When Pigs Fly reads like it was written with an ice pick, and he drives it right into the heart of the American dream of the Golden Years. A big pay-out lottery ticket, a 300-pound bad guy named Diet Cola, an Elvis Impersonator, and a javelina that flies? No one looking for a smooth Southwestern retirement should have to face what Mack Durgin faces. Part road trip, part crime caper, part love story, this is one cool debut. If you like the dark comedy of Hiaasen and Leonard, you’re going to love this one.

David Daniel, award-winning author of The Marble Kite and Reunion

When Pigs Fly is a masterpiece of comic writing combined with a touching story. Quirky doesn’t begin to describe the characters—they’re sometimes terrifying, often hilarious, and always unique. Robert Sanchez has the perfect touch for comedy, delivering a riotous good time while giving us a well-developed protagonist we’ll want to follow for many books to come.

Kathryn Mackel, author of The Hidden

Great news! Pigs really fly!

We're finally settled in Las Cruces and don't have a moment's regret. New Mexico is flat-out beautiful. I haven't begun any new projects, but am thrilled that my comic novel When Pigs Fly will be published by iUniverse this fall. As most folks probably know, iUniverse is a print-on-demand proposition where virtually all of the marketing effort is the responsibility of the author. So if I don't work hard to promote my precious pig, he sinks like a bucket of lard. However, I've heard good things about iUniverse from folks who know what to expect of them.

Since I took the plunge yesterday, I've reserved the domain www.bobsanchez.com, which forwards to my existing personal home page. Once there is decent artwork and a publication schedule, I'll change that page to advertise the book.

I've also solicited several published writers for cover blurbs and have arranged for a Kirkus Discoveries review. The deal is that for a fee, Kirkus reviews a book they wouldn't ordinarily review, such as a POD. They stress caveat emptor, meaning what you pay for is an honest review. It's worth taking the chance, as a review from them means increased visibility.

The whole idea of Kirkus charging money for reviews raises questions in some people's minds, my own included. Will they go easy in reviews that writers pay for? If you're curious, check out some of the Kirkus Discovery reviews on the link I provided above. It's unclear whether they will carry the same cachet as the traditional Kirkus reviews, but I certainly hope so.

Homeless in our Volvo

We close on our house sale this coming Monday, but mentally we've already closed; in fact, we are 900 miles away in our Volvo stuffed with luggage, laptops, a camera, and two cats with all the attendant paraphernalia that implies.

This is day 2 of our trip from Massachusetts to our new home in New Mexico, where we close in a couple of weeks. So break out the violins--we'll be homeless in our Volvo.

We won't do much sightseeing because of our cats, but we did go through the Shenandoah Valley today, which was wonderful even with the cloud cover. This graceful doe posed for us along Skyline Drive.

Getting ready to move

Time is hurrying along, and we're eight days from moving out of our house, nine days from heading to New Mexico for a radical shift in climate. No more sharp, cold March winds blowing in our faces; no more ice storms coating trees and windshields; no more blizzard warnings as Dick Albert on Channel 5 tells us to bundle up against the co-o-o-o-ld. But also we'll have no more gentle snows with heavy, wet flakes falling as we sing Christmas carols with our neighbors in our community clubhouse; no more red and gold autumn leaves; no more tulips and daffodils heralding spring.

The movers arrive next Wednesday, and we ready as much as we can to minimize expenses. In the basement today, I pitched printouts of old manuscripts I had written with so much enthusiasm and hope. Merciless, I let go of those old dreams. The stories are all safely stored on my computer and backed up on my hard drive in case some day I choose to cannibalize my old work. But now, on paper inside old three-ring binders, those old dreams would cost me seventy cents per pound to transport in the eighteen-wheeler that will pull up in front of my house.

The last time we moved, we did so quickly, with little time to weed through the thousands of reminders of our past. This time the real estate market had turned to favor buyers, and we were slow to sell our house, leaving us with plenty of time to sell, donate, or discard our used-up belongings and ill-considered purchases of the past. The house is emptying, but there is still plenty to do.

Next Thursday, we will drive with our two cats from Massachusetts to New Mexico. Our route will take us through western Virginia and Skyline Drive in the Appalachians. I wish we could stop at a few of the many Civil War battle sites such as Gettysburg and Antietam, but our cats George and Gracie will be restless, asking if we're there yet.

So I am looking forward to the trip, but much more so to the destination, and most of all to settling down again, making new friends, and writing.

So long to a great writer's group

Last night Nancy and I said goodbye to the excellent friends in my writer’s group after close to 16 years of twice-monthly meetings. Patty and her husband Craig hosted the evening of dinner and conversation, and this time there were none of the usual critiques. If Patty isn’t the best cook in New England, and she might be, she must be the best who also writes horror fiction and works as a bank VP. Dave and his wife Stephanie were there—Dave’s a fine mystery writer and teacher who can quote Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman as though it were the most natural thing in the world. Bev and I have carpooled to writer’s group meetings dozens of times. Her Peace Corps background has given her grist for some of the marvelous essays she’s written. Marj hasn’t made it to many meetings lately, because life can be a handful, but she showed up last night with a plateful of chocolate, the elixir of the gods and panacea for whatever ails you. Kathy and Lee, spouses who sit next to each other and finish each other’s sentences at writer’s group meetings, presented me with a delightful poem they’d written and framed. It will hang in my new office.

And there were other great friends who couldn’t make it: another Kathy, a couple more Daves—our group is replete with Kathies and Daves—and Judy and Kristi, who have already moved away.

Love of writing is what brought us all together. Some of us have substantial publishing credits, some are still working toward publication, and some, like Kristi, have decided to pursue other interests. Every one is a good to excellent writer and critic, and I’ve learned from them all. Thank goodness for e-mail, which will keep us all in frequent touch.

What's the Net coming to?

I subbed a flash fiction piece to a couple of zines and received quick rejections--not the replies I wanted, but I appreciate the speed of their responses. It appears that my humorous piece was too risque, and they wanted clean humor. So I cleaned the story up, sent it back, and was told that without the "dirty" part, there was nothing left. The editor kindly sent me a critique almost as long as my sub, which was more attention than the piece deserved. Gosh, here I'm being told the Internet is a vast swamp, and I have to run into a pair of editors with standards. What's the Net coming to?

You can find a number of good markets (all with standards) at: http://www.duotrope.com/digest/. The nice thing about this site is that it groups markets by speed of response and percentage of rejections, based on readers' input.

Never mind the house...

My friend advised me the other day that I should bury a statue of St. Joseph upside down in my front yard so that my house will sell faster. Well, never mind the house. Where do I bury St. Joseph to sell my novel?

Separations and friendships

This June we'll be packing up our laptops and our cats, and we'll drive across country from Massachusetts to New Mexico. We need the change of scenery, the change of climate, the lower cost of living. Will we stay? Who knows? We'll probably give it a year to test the strength of New England's gravitational pull. Meanwhile, the mere prospect of uprooting our lives leaves my writing less focused, and it engenders a sense of impending loss of the regular company of my writer's group of 15 years. It's times like these that make me happy to live in the Internet and e-mail age, because it will be so easy to stay in touch with everyone.

We talked about friendship at my writer's group meeting last night. Can you really make friends on the Internet? We all agreed you can use it to maintain already-existing friendships over wide distances, but what about friendships where the initial contact is on the Internet? One person thought no, because it's so easy to disguise one's identity. I'm more sanguine; while it's easier to accumulate a lot of pleasant acquaintances by using only a keyboard, I suspect it's also possible to find good friends here and there. As with traditional friendships, they take time and common sense to develop, and recognition of the limitations of thinking you know someone you'll probably never meet.

A conundrum

A conundrum. I'm in a writer's group with people I've known and whose opinions I've valued for many years. So now I am reading segments of a work in progress where a young girl has been kidnapped and her captors talk between themselves about how best to make money from her: ransom or kiddie porn? When I got to that point in my reading, my friend made it clear that she would stop reading. Fair comment. Good and decent people have different thresholds for this type of fiction, though, and I wonder if it isn't better to stay with my original direction and see what happens.

I've read and thoroughly enjoyed several books in Lawrence Sanders' hilarious McNally series, so I was quite surprised when I delved into his The First Deadly Sin, which is about as dark and unfunny a story as I've read in a long time. Sections of the book with the point of view of the killer are so hard to take that I've nearly stopped reading. A whole book of that would be far too much. What keeps me going are the terrific writing and the anticipation that I'll soon get to read about the very sympathetic and human protagonist. No doubt my good friend would never tolerate the book, yet in its own way it is excellent.

So I'm inclined to go where I'm inclined to go.

Write what you know

Many years ago a cartoon appeared in Writer’s Digest. A fellow sits at a typewriter (remember them?) and stares at the blank sheet of paper. The thought balloon says, “Write what you know…Write what you know…”

As the Internet age clearly shows, ignorance doesn’t stop us from writing. It used to be that writers wrote on yellow lined pads or hunted and pecked on ancient Royals. They always had to be careful near the end of a page so that the last line didn’t slant away. I used to painfully type a complete page of what was supposed to be clean copy only to look back in horror at a typo on the first line—and then of course my eraser always left a smudge. Or my carbon paper would be in backwards on an otherwise perfect page.

So who wants to keep piles of handwritten or poorly typed work, be it inspiration or dreck? Every few years I threw out piles of my pale efforts, unread and unlamented. Today, through the miracle of modern technology, I never have to throw any of my precious words again. It can stay on hard drive, on CD, or, God bless us, in cyberspace for everyone to enjoy.

But if word processing gives us the means to produce typo-free dreck, and the Internet gives us the means to assault the world with it, we also have the means to learn what we don’t know and to verify the rest.

Talented writer bursts onto cyberspace scene

This just in: The good folks at www.wordriot.org have accepted my short story, Write a Book in 14 Days. They say they'll publish it on March 15. I feel so--so validated!

Missing groove

There's a groove out there, a writer's groove I seem to have misplaced. In recent weeks we've been preoccupied with the prospect of a move from New England to New Mexico, even though the move isn't imminent. First we have to sell our over-55 condo in a crummy real estate market, and then we'll have the independence to move on.

Distractions have always come easy to me, so daily-life experiences like lighting fires under real estate agents provide the perfect excuse not to snuggle my butt into my chair and finish my current novel, or, for that matter, to market a completed one to agents.

I've been better than this. I had a groove that produced a modest but steady output of pages over the years. Now my story has a dark plot line involving a child's kidnapping that a trusted friend in my writer's group says would be too dark for her to read. That's actually good news, because even though my writer friends have talked me out of the darkest of the story line, I've discovered that I can write some fairly creepy stuff. So now to go back and add some balance, which may mean giving the villains at least some minimal touches of humanity so they don't come across as cartoon bad guys. I have a lot of notes from our Saturday meeting--and from previous meetings--which will help me a lot in fixing story problems. I'll work on it later, because first I have to find my groove. If you have any information as to its whereabouts, I'd like to hear from you. I will accept its return with no questions asked.

Writing from a child's point of view

Today I'm working on a scene from the point of view of a kidnapped four-year-old girl. Other scenes in my crime novel contain adults' povs, which is relatively easy. But it feels like a challenge to depict what's going on through the child's eyes. She hears adults talk but doesn't understand them, nor does she quite understand what's happened to her. I want to write all of the characters in a close third-person, so in any given scene we only know what the pov character hears, sees, experiences or thinks.

Well, I've never been a little girl, so I'll have to read the scene to my writer's group, which consists mostly of women. They will set me straight on the blunders I will certainly make, and then my second draft will be on the right track.

When writers don't hurt anymore

A good friend stopped writing a couple of years ago. The guy is talented, and his crime novel deserves to be published. When I'd met him about 10 years ago, he was still trying to recover from a bitter divorce. He wrote plenty of high-quality (in my opinion) noir fiction and participated actively in our writer's group. Over time he showed up less and less frequently at our group, and eventually stopped almost altogether.

So what happened? He found a girlfriend who made him happy, that's what. Life pulled him in a different direction, but love and work still left him with time to write if he wanted to. But one day he explained to me that he no longer had enough pain in his life to make him write. Anger and despair were part of his motivation to write in the first place, he said--in his novels he exacted plenty of fictional revenge on his wife, and now he feels much better.

Maybe that explains why I don't write more than I do. There is largely an absence of pain in my life. Doesn't unhappiness drive most creative writing?

Why keep writing?

Okay, my life isn't turned upside-down, but our attempts to sell our Massachusetts house and move to New Mexico have added a distraction. Several completed, unpublished novels languish on my hard drive, and my drive to complete my current tale has flagged of late. It's easy to get discouraged in the current publishing market, with ever greater numbers of writers chasing agents.

So why keep writing? Well, for me it's the challenge of putting my reluctant brain to work. It's the association and friendships formed with like-minded souls. It's the ego massage that results from seeing my work in print. Once a co-worker showed me what he called a great magazine article and asked if I had seen it. "I wrote it," I said, pointing to my byline. Then he went around the office, bragging for me. An inflated ego and a nice check too--how much better can life get? And yes, the occasional check is nice.

A couple of useful bromides: The key to finishing a novel is "ass in chair," according (possibly) to the most excellent Lawrence Block. And it's easier to fix a bad page than a blank one (source unknown).

Not long ago, I set a modest goal of writing 500 new words of fiction daily, and actually met or exceeded that quota for about a month. Now my enthusiasm for that novel has waned, which I hope is a temporary malady. Maybe the best approach is to just sit down and do it, just as one would treat a job.