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.

Press release

**FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE**

EDITORS: For review copies or interview requests, contact:

Promotional Services Department

Tel: 1-800-AUTHORS

Fax: 812-355-4078

Email: promotions@iuniverse.com

(When requesting a review copy, please provide a street address.)

Comic crime caper leaves readers laughing!

Sanchez’s motley misfits make for a merry read.

"Bob Sanchez is an exceptional, gifted writer...You can open this book at any page and find something delightful.” —Kaye Trout’s book reviews

LAS CRUCES, NEW MEXICO – When Pigs Fly (published by iUniverse) by Bob Sanchez highlights the life of retired cop Mack Durgin, who encounters one eccentric character after another in his quest to fulfill his promise to his friend George Ashe—to spread Ashe’s ashes across the Grand Canyon upon his death.

Sanchez shapes a cast of misfits who pursue Mack, the reluctant hero. Diet Cola loses the stolen lottery ticket he’s hidden in an urn (the one with Ashe’s ashes) and will do anything to get it back. Ace and Frosty, who like to save money by shoplifting where there is no sales tax and who think “urn” is a byproduct of a bodily function, attach themselves to Diet Cola and add chaos to everyone’s lives. Zippy attacks Mack because of woman issues. And Poindexter, a pet javelina released into the desert, proves that pigs really can fly.

On his journey through the desert, Mack befriends the entrancing Calliope, a former waitress in a bar that holds Elvis impersonation contests. Mack’s 80-year-old parents visit Mack and quickly stumble into criminal hands, only to prove themselves tough hostages indeed.

But it’s with the crazy group of “hooligans” that Sanchez’s writing style shines. The criminals pursue Mack from the east coast in pursuit of their prize, and the misbegotten caper leaves readers laughing.

“It’s a fast-moving comic crime caper played purely for laughs,” Sanchez says, but there is also a cohesive, entertaining, and captivating story beneath the high jinks.

About the Author

Bob Sanchez retired in Las Cruces, New Mexico after working in Massachusetts as a senior technical writer. He is active in several writers' groups, writes reviews for The Internet Review of Books, and has a local column and radio program. He is also the author of Getting Lucky. Bob and his wife love to travel the West in their RV. When Pigs Fly has received iUniverse’s Editor’s Choice and Star Awards. Read the first chapter online at http://tinyurl.com/whenpigsfly-sample.

iUniverse is the premier book publisher for emerging self-published authors. For more information, please visit www.iuniverse.com.

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