New Writer's and Reader's Website

As all of you aspiring authors know, few publishers accept direct submissions from authors anymore. Such direct submissions used to go to a place that editors called the “slush pile.” Readers “mined” these slush piles, hoping to find the next great author. A talent-spotting reader discovered author Philip Roth this way when part of his slush pile submission grew into Goodbye, Columbus.

Because of copyright infringement fears, slush piles are largely gone. Publishers now rely on agents to act as go-betweens. As every author that has ever tried to secure an agent knows, it is all but impossible to do so and the lack of an agent prevents many wonderful writers from ever being published. A new website founded by editors from the publisher Harper Collins seeks to remedy this industry shortcoming.

The new site is Authonomy and it brings together talented, undiscovered writers and avid readers. Authors upload entire books that are free to read and comment on. Harper Collins has even published some of the books discovered in the site’s “slush pile.

I uploaded my novel Prairie Sunset to the site. If you are either writer, reader or - like me - both, I urge you to check out the site. While you are there, please take a look at Prairie Sunset.

Eric'sWeb

Dream Writing

I recently finished the screenplay adaptation for my novel Big Easy. Even though I removed several subplots, I still ended up with one-hundred-sixty pages - forty pages too many.

I called my business and writing partner, r.r. bryan and asked him what I should do. My friend just finished adapting his novel, All the Angels and Saints, for the movies and he knows much more than I do about the intricacies of screenwriting.

“Just cut every fourth page,” he advised.

He was just joking and after he quit laughing, he promised to look at my script and see if he could find a way to fix it. Humbled, I realized that penning a novel doesn’t qualify you as a screenwriter. It also made me realize why so many movies are so very different from the book that originally spawned the story.

It’s a cold night in central Oklahoma so I think I’ll go to bed early. Maybe the solution to my writing problem will come to me in a dream.

Fiction South

Just Keep Writing

People often ask how I came to write my first novel. My wife Anne and I had a little oil company caught up in the eighties oil bust. Angry creditors threw the company into involuntary bankruptcy on the day before Thanksgiving in 1983, soon tossing us as debtors-in-possession and appointing a trustee. What ensued in our lives was total chaos.

Anne was devastated and I was incensed. We had an IBM AT (one of the first personal computers) and a DOS-based word processing program called Framework. With self-righteous adrenaline coursing through my veins, I began writing a novel loosely based on our company’s bankruptcy.

That finished novel still resides in a box somewhere in my garage. Yes, I made all the freshman errors that a new writer experiences (bad plot, skewed point of view, too much description, screwball dialogue, etc.) but I learned one thing for sure - I love to write. I began checking books about writing out of the library and I began haunting local writer’s gatherings (you may remember my story about attending a romance writer’s conference).

I also learned that there are more new books published every year than there are readers to read all of them, and since a writer only makes a buck or so for every volume they sell, there’s often little profit in the endeavor unless you are John Grisham or Clive Cussler.

With that in mind, here is my advice to every one of you that thinks you have a book lodged deep within you. First, find the motivation and then write it as fast as you can. That’s right, don’t edit a thing, just regurgitate it, and get it on paper (or in a computer file) as quickly as you possibly can.

Don’t even start if you’re doing it for the wrong reasons. Don’t do it for the money, but because you love the tactile feel of a pen or pencil in your hand, and adore the mental vision of blue ink forming beautiful patterns on a blank sheet of paper.

Do it because you love creating fantastical worlds and plots, and because there’s a story in your head that needs extracting before your brain bursts from the pressure, and above all keep writing, even if your own mother laughs when she reads your magnum opus.

Gondwana Press