How to Alienate Your Worldwide Audience

As a Jewish writer, I had always thought that any book I wrote could possibly have a worldwide audience - anywhere there were Jews there should be readers for me, right? Or, at the very least, in Israel, right? Ignoring my obvious concerns of whether anyone anywhere would ever want to read my book, I thought optimistically that it could always be translated into Hebrew.

Right?

Well, wrong. The first, absolute sinking feeling of my wrongness in this came during my recent trip to Israel. First let me explain: my book makes a bit of merciless fun of my parents for stuffing a family of nine in a three-bedroom house, for most likely potty-training their children under a tree, and for my mother always refusing to utilize dressing rooms when she could just as easily strip our clothes off in the middle of a store. 

So there I was in Israel with sudden culture shock.

First we were in H&M in Tel Aviv and I'm kind of moseying through the men's department with my son when I notice that all around me are men in various stages of deshabille. They're undressing at the sales racks and putting on clothes, in their boxers, completely absorbed, like they're in a Loehmann's dresssing room and I'm invisible. But really we're in the middle of the store near the window.

Next, the tinyness of the spaces there - the beds, the apartments, the streets. It turns out that families of nine readily live in three-bedroom apartments. Maybe even families of fourteen, fifteen.

I'll spare the nitty gritty details of how I found out that my speculation about being potty trained under a tree would fall flat in Israel, but suffice it to say that I had eyewitness evidence that it would.

So I was wrong. And I'm wondering, could this be handled by a translator? Instead of simply a language to language translation, is it possible? A culture to culture one?  

Have you ever traveled and found yourself not only out of your natural element with language, but with cultural rules that you thought were a given? 

Looking Up, Letting Go

There's a lot I've discovered the last four months since my book was published. Really, enough to fill up many, many blogs posts, which I'm determined to write. But here's my topic for today: people buy books and don't read them. Even I do this.

There's, of course, the absolute wonder and amazing fact of people buying a book you've written at all. That I want to express gratitude for. To labor and struggle, buried like a hermit in my office year after year, agonizing over the structure, the stories, the right balance of humor and tragedy, and then to press that awful "publish" button and to have my book find its way into people's homes? That's been amazing.

The vast majority of people buy the book, read the book and finish the book, as far as I can tell. A lot of amazing people have even contacted me about the book. But what I've learned is that some people just own the book, they don't read it. They put it in a pile that's teetering somewhere near their ceiling, blocking out the sun, and every once in a while they reshuffle this great pile, reprioritzing it, or, like me, moving some out of that pile and into the "I'm never going to read this" pile in my actual bookshelves.

And, believe it or not, it's not personal. They have a plan and it involves finishing certain books that have been started or projects that have been started and then dealing with the towering stack of books. Believe me, I understand. I have several piles myself.  

There's this horrible fear I had before my book was published: that no one would ever read my book. Then, little did I know, but there was this horrible fear I had the second it was published: that someone would read it.

My book came out in paperback about a month before its Kindle edition so no one could get it instantly, they had to wait for delivery. Immediately, my most loyal fans ordered it: my blogging buddies, my personal friends, my grown nieces, friends on Facebook. Then I sat in my house on pins and needles wondering what they thought of it. I hoped no one had gotten overnight shipping. I was actually hoping they all had ordered the "covered wagon" shipping option from Amazon, so that it would take months to get to them. I counted off the days for mail time and reading time. I wondered if there was going to be that awful dead silence when people don't want to say anything bad and so say nothing at all? 

Then a nice comment came in. Okay, it was from someone who's related to me by blood, but still. Honestly, it was a relief just to breath again.  

Please visit Kristen over at Motherese this week as she's giving away a copy of Looking Up this week. She posted her review of the book on Monday and will be posting an interview with me on Thursday!

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You can buy Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie on Amazon.com in Kindle or paperback versions, on Barnes & Noble.com, in many libraries and in Changing Hands Book Store in the Phoenix area. 

Frozen Here in Bookland

Oh my gosh, am I sick of this book. I am so sick of spending every day hiding from it, procrastinating working on it, finding a zillion things to do instead of it, and then, at like midnight, wandering in here and then still figuring out something else to do.

There are so many problems. I'm sitting here changing names but the more I change the names the more I worry that I'm turning it into a work of fiction. I worry about the names I'm using - which is true to the person, true to the time period. I have my Jewish book of baby names open to the Bubbe and Zayde names for the people of my mother's generation and the aging baby boomer section for people who were kids when I was. Then there's the Dictionary of Jewish Names from which I'm getting surnames. What a nightmarish hassle. And I can't just use the search option to find and replace the names when I am changing them because my computer is like a comedian: if I'm replacing the name Gale it will also replace the word "regale" and then I'll have a big problem. So what do I have to do after I'm done with this name stuff? Another read through!

Then I started looking up the PDF conversion process again tonight and can't remember how and so I went on the Amazon discussion boards and it's like, guess what Linda? You're never going to be able to figure this out! Really I just need to choose one of the midline pricey options they offer and let someone do it for me. I have to accept my stupidness. I'll end up with pages half printed and a book numbered from the highest number to the lowest, from beginning to end backwards!

So I'm frozen here in book land. I can't blog (this one's a diary, right? Right?) I can't write for salon right now. I can barely write an email. I'm keeping up with Poetica. I'm managing to cruise Facebook at all hours of the day and night and, I have to say, my desk and workspace area looks wonderful since I procrastinated writing all day today and reorganized it!

Onto tomorrow. A committment then: I will finish these name changes. Monday read through the entirety. Tuesday reset the margins and chapter spacing and write the back of book blurb. I will not think of anything but the task before me.

Beware the Procrastinator

I'm not going to go into all the reasons I'm self-publishing my book, and soon. I won't bore anyone who actually might read this with the blah blah blah of the breakdown of the publishing industry, the control over my book, the fact that it just needs to get its butt out into the world. Oh yeah, and I guess I had some pretty well-timed psychotherapy that convinced me that what I was seeing as a pile of negatives maybe was actually all good. I have a book. Agents wanted it. It's still mine.

So I'm doing a once-over to check that the whole thing complies with my "do no harm" motto. I've heard before that I should always try to judge my words by whether they are kind and necessary and true. Also, since there won't be a major publisher behind me, guess who would get sued if I didn't? Right.

So I'm doing that, right? Well, it's 12:08, like midnight, here right now and I haven't done it yet today. And I'm tired. And it's just sitting, minimized on my computer IN FRONT OF ME waiting for me to click on it. But what am I doing instead? Blogging (on a blog I haven't been on for nearly 11 months), measuring the chair I'm sitting on because I'm sure that if I got a better chair I'd be able to write more comfortably, I'm on Facebook, I'm on hotmail, I'm googling stuff. I'm not doing my edit. And I think I know why. After the last pages I have to go through, I have no idea how to self-publish!

I mean, I'm on CreateSpace and everything and so far, so good, but still. I have to embed images and "make them flat." I have to make a firm decision about the book cover, not to mention the subtitle. I have to write the back cover blurb. How can someone like me, who wants to fly into every possible brain that could read the book and anticipate their reaction, do this?

I'll tell you, or tell me, how I'm going to do it. I'll remember that I have two main goals in publishing my book: first to get it the hell out of my head so I don't have to think about it anymore and have it following me around and tormenting every minute of my life and, second, so that I can print off one single copy of it and hand it to my mother and tell her, "Here is your story." My Holocaust Survivor mother, who asked all the days of her life for someone, anyone, to write her story, will finally have her wish.

And when those two things are accomplished, I will, indeed, be accomplished too.

Work Well Done

I can't believe I haven't written a post since March 13th. Well, at least I've been writing.

Here's what I did: I printed out my whole book, all 300 pages in hard copy, and I did two hard edits on it. The first one I just went through and added dialogue and scenes but the second one I actually cut and pasted things in different order. I really started looking at the book as a integrated whole and physically cut - like with scissors - sections to move them around. I think it's work well done.

Now I'm ready to input this mess into the word document version of the manuscript, which is fine, except that the minute I make the first change my page numbers will be off and the only way I'll find any sections will be by searching for words or phrases. It's going to be tough but I know I'll end up with a better book.

As far as submissions, I haven't done any since those two that I mentioned on the 13th. I know I was supposed to submit the other More query and the Lilith Churches piece, but I have to say that somehow that church piece is too rough to do anything with, and I haven't gotten around to writing a proper query for the More piece.

The real problem is that my other blog takes up all my time. And not just the blog either. It's the commenting on everyone else's blogs, then commenting on my comments, then writing new posts, then finding new art. It's exhausting. I have to remember why I'm doing all this because sometimes, for the life of me, I can't remember. I believe it was connected to writing, right? Something like creating a Internet presence and an audience for my work? Eh. I don't even know if that's happening. I do know that I have what I consider to be some genuine friendships here among my fellow bloggers but that my real life marriage is suffering.

I can't afford to grow the other blog is growing it means that I have to follow and comment on more and more other blogs. There just is no time for that. As a matter of fact, I've decided that I have exactly 5 minutes each per day to devote to the blogs I read. I can't read other peoples' comments. And then I can get 20 done in an hour. Sick, scheduling that like this.

Anyway, to do list. Input all changes to manuscript into the word document for the ms. See how it reads. Does it have an arc, themes, characters, villains, heroes, a plot, a climax, dialogue and scenes? If it looks good, then we'll move onto the next step: querying agents and see what happens from there.

Is blogging working for you? Is it enhancing your life or destroying it? Can you handle becoming a popular blogger or will the responsibilities of being a good blogger buddy kill off your own work?

Living in the State of Inertia

Thank god for best friends. My best friend and I serve many purposes in each other's lives. Lately it's occurred to me that we're also each other's managers.

She got downsized out of her job last month and so, despite the fact that I haven't worked full-time for 6 years, I've been her consultant, marketer, and, hopefully, her idea person, though she's pretty darn good at it herself.

And here's what she did for me yesterday when we had lunch. She was checking up with me on the status of my various article proposals when I had to admit that I have a lot of ideas but no sent queries lately. I tend to have too much knocking around in my head all the time and then when it comes to execution I'm flying here and there and never get anything done. Should I edit my book? Should I send a query to Brain Child, More Magazine, Lilith, should I be local or national? What's the best for the writing career, for the book? And then what happens? I get so wrought up with everything I should be doing, I get the exactly opposite. A feeling of inertia comes over me and I do nothing.

Well, best friend got me pinned down. I was going to ship off a proposal to a certain magazine to be their blog editor, mainly because I've been the blog editor for Poetica for a year and it doesn't take much work and I'd like to increase my name recognition with a bigger market. So she started talking about compensation and I realized that, because of my life situation, the money's not the thing, the question is the time. Can I handle a very demanding editor job? And what exactly is going to have to give to fit that in because right now I can barely find time to breathe.

So, right now it's no on the editor query. But because of her I sent a query to Brain Child today for the Debate section, and a query to More Magazine for either an essay or the Front of Book. Also, I got my Holocaust Anthology from Poetica yesterday with my work in it and it's really lovely - gave my mom a copy with the dedication to her and she was thrilled. And Sandra Hurtes, who is hosting my work this month, has decided to have the pages with her writers be permanent so that my work will stay on there and she's going to invite agents to view the work of her friends.

Now I just have to remember what I'm supposed to do tomorrow. Um. How about this: Other More Magazine query (on 50 in longterm marriage) and Lilith Church piece? Also respond to editor at Jewish News asking for info on the special sections.

I can't believe I finally moved on something. I feel like a mountain that just had its facade crack a little. The good thing is that my inertia didn't last that long. Hopefully if I get in another immobile state, it will go by even more quickly.

Do you have a friend who can organize you and pull you together? Do you tend towards states of inertia?

March is for Marching Orders

Thank goodness I wrote that To Do list on here since I didn't do it and totally forgot what the items were. Instead I guest blogged for a friend and got a bunch of new readers (on my other, more public, blog), had an excerpt from my (unpublished) book appear on another friend's website who is a New York writer with impressive freelance writing credentials, and I did withdraw my gaming piece from the Jewish news. Or let's put it this way: I wrote to the editor who's my contact person and, as usual, she didn't write back to me. So I'll just go with that and consider it withdrawn.

Then, like an idiot, I started a new, completely anonymous blog for my twelve-step eating program because I really want to do my writing online. And I mean anonymous, folks. Anonymous email address, pseudonym for a name. So, obviously, I can't link to it here. I'm just glad that I'm finally going to have a place where I can write about the amazing things that I hear in the meeting rooms and obey the traditions of the program which tell me I should remain anonymous at the level of press, radio, film and other media. Great news - a writer who can't be known for her writing. That's progress for sure.

So, to do list for March:
1) submit kids and gaming to parents or parenting or, at the very least, to RAK.
2) More Magazine: submit the 50-yr-old inhabited marriage (at the intersection of V and P)
3) Lilith Church and Jews
4) Per Betsy Lerner blog challenge, get that stupid manuscript edited by April 1st. Use notecards then reshuffle. If it requires a rewrite just do it.
5) Write three sample columns for Literary Mama to pitch column to them.

Do you set more goals than you can reasonably achieve in the hopes that you'll achieve some if not all?