Once you get published you don’t suddenly enter a brand new world, with royalties pouring in, kudos and awards. Unless you score a huge contract, life goes on. Writers have families. Families include children. Children need to be fed. (I’ve tried intravenous feeding with the kids, but it doesn’t work long and your reputation as a parent takes a hit.)
For the past nine years I have been doing the two-job shuffle. And both jobs are in the non-profit world. So, guess what? Those royalties are lookin’ real good. No matter unroyal they may be. In Lowell, I work for Community teamwork Inc, which is the local CAP agency. CAP agencies are the local war-against-poverty service organizations. I work on a daily basis with people in crisis. (Hello?) People who are facing eviction, foreclosure, utility shut-offs, domestic violence, you name it. I’m the guy people come to for money. On weekends I work for a wonderful organization called Emmaus Inc. I do overnight shifts for a long-term residents for people with a dual diagnosis. (Drug or alcohol abuse plus schizophrenia or depression or something else) It makes for a busy schedule.
Then there are the kids. My 11-year old daughter Leah is a big time reader. She has been through the entire Harry Potter series at least ten times. But she doesn’t like to write. Or do homework. My nine year old twins, William and Stephen, like doing their homework. But they prefer eating. Stephen is a monster to potatoes. William is a monster to everything.
All in all it makes for a bust life. When do I get to write? Shhh. Don’t tell the bosses. That’s when.
Friday, April 18, 2008
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Molly Speaks
Molly’s Blog
I apologize if I haven’t blogged since my initial entry. My life is always chaotic. I don’t know particularly why. It just is. As a scientist, I pride myself in logic and order. In my own life, I’m like the cat who got into the catnip.
Archaeology is in my blood. Really. I love sifting through time, pulling back of old floorboards and discovering centuries old secrets. I live in an old Victorian in Boston, which suits my personality. It’s big and spacious and I can roam from room to room when I’m in one of my frenetic moods. It’s also cozy with three working fireplaces. Tabby, my six year old cat, and I love to curl up on the couch under a blanket and read together. Not always science. Sometimes a good romance. (Trust me, I’ve had my share of hunks.) I have pried into every wall space in the house, dug up the front and back yards, gained a following of the neighborhood dogs who come sniffing by, to Tabby’s great chagrin, to see what I’m up to. The men in my life understand. At least, they better.
How did I come to archaeology? As I said, it’s in my blood. My mother was an anthropologist. I never knew my father. Mom was the youngest tenured professor at Mt. Auburn College. I was a campus rat. Everybody in the science department knew me. And everybody on campus knew my mom. That was in the 70s. She was a campus radical. Outspoken. Daring. Always smiling. What memories I have of her are dim but pleasant and colorful. Singing. Swinging in this hammock somewhere near a beach. She died when I was four. In a fire. And I still miss her. She was a hippy, a wiccan, a believer in the Earth Mother, which was strange and daring because she was teaching at a respected Jesuit college and had the admiration of a very rigid administration. What they thought when she delivered me out of wedlock I’ll never know. She was fearless.
Me, I was a troublemaker. Still am in some ways, I suppose. The seed not falling far from the tree. Though as I’ve gotten older I’ve tried to rein in my grossest impulses. When she died, (I’m told because I don’t have many memories of that time), I descended into darkness. I was out of control. No amount of medication or therapy could help. People tried. My aunt and uncle raised me. All of my mother’s old colleagues adopted me. Mt. Auburn College became my home, but it took the Church of all things to return me to sanity and to get me into archaeology. I am a scientist. But my loyalty to the Church remains strong for what it did for me in my darkest days.
My aunt Kathy and Uncle Frank are Catholic. Kathy’s a nurse and as devout as St. Paul himself. Frank’s a cop. He likes to dig, too, only his digging usually involves murder. We share war stories. He nods off in church. But he tells me how I used to sit in the front pew, eyes wide, fascinated by the sermons that Fr. Lunt used to preach. I especially loved the stories of the Old Testament. Frank tells me the moment we got home, I’d take a pail and shovel meant for Carson Beach in Southie and start digging up the flower garden. Searching for the remains of Ur or Sodom among Frank’s prized begonias took my mind far from home, far from my mother’s ghost, and into a world that has captivated me ever since.
Thanks again to Peter for giving me this opportunity to speak to you guys. It’s therapeutic in some ways. I know Peter knows something about therapy as he works with homeless folks. A good man. Check out his web site at http://www.peterclenott.com and remember to blog me at http://gospelofhannaniah.bolgspot.com.
Next time.
I apologize if I haven’t blogged since my initial entry. My life is always chaotic. I don’t know particularly why. It just is. As a scientist, I pride myself in logic and order. In my own life, I’m like the cat who got into the catnip.
Archaeology is in my blood. Really. I love sifting through time, pulling back of old floorboards and discovering centuries old secrets. I live in an old Victorian in Boston, which suits my personality. It’s big and spacious and I can roam from room to room when I’m in one of my frenetic moods. It’s also cozy with three working fireplaces. Tabby, my six year old cat, and I love to curl up on the couch under a blanket and read together. Not always science. Sometimes a good romance. (Trust me, I’ve had my share of hunks.) I have pried into every wall space in the house, dug up the front and back yards, gained a following of the neighborhood dogs who come sniffing by, to Tabby’s great chagrin, to see what I’m up to. The men in my life understand. At least, they better.
How did I come to archaeology? As I said, it’s in my blood. My mother was an anthropologist. I never knew my father. Mom was the youngest tenured professor at Mt. Auburn College. I was a campus rat. Everybody in the science department knew me. And everybody on campus knew my mom. That was in the 70s. She was a campus radical. Outspoken. Daring. Always smiling. What memories I have of her are dim but pleasant and colorful. Singing. Swinging in this hammock somewhere near a beach. She died when I was four. In a fire. And I still miss her. She was a hippy, a wiccan, a believer in the Earth Mother, which was strange and daring because she was teaching at a respected Jesuit college and had the admiration of a very rigid administration. What they thought when she delivered me out of wedlock I’ll never know. She was fearless.
Me, I was a troublemaker. Still am in some ways, I suppose. The seed not falling far from the tree. Though as I’ve gotten older I’ve tried to rein in my grossest impulses. When she died, (I’m told because I don’t have many memories of that time), I descended into darkness. I was out of control. No amount of medication or therapy could help. People tried. My aunt and uncle raised me. All of my mother’s old colleagues adopted me. Mt. Auburn College became my home, but it took the Church of all things to return me to sanity and to get me into archaeology. I am a scientist. But my loyalty to the Church remains strong for what it did for me in my darkest days.
My aunt Kathy and Uncle Frank are Catholic. Kathy’s a nurse and as devout as St. Paul himself. Frank’s a cop. He likes to dig, too, only his digging usually involves murder. We share war stories. He nods off in church. But he tells me how I used to sit in the front pew, eyes wide, fascinated by the sermons that Fr. Lunt used to preach. I especially loved the stories of the Old Testament. Frank tells me the moment we got home, I’d take a pail and shovel meant for Carson Beach in Southie and start digging up the flower garden. Searching for the remains of Ur or Sodom among Frank’s prized begonias took my mind far from home, far from my mother’s ghost, and into a world that has captivated me ever since.
Thanks again to Peter for giving me this opportunity to speak to you guys. It’s therapeutic in some ways. I know Peter knows something about therapy as he works with homeless folks. A good man. Check out his web site at http://www.peterclenott.com and remember to blog me at http://gospelofhannaniah.bolgspot.com.
Next time.
Saturday, April 5, 2008
What to Write
MURDER BY 4
Submission
What to Write? What to Write? What to Write?
Surely this is a question that has gone through most unpublished writers’ minds when they are in pursuit of an agent or a publisher. Do I write a mystery? Should I throw down the gauntlet at Stephen King and write a horror tale? How about science fiction or the next Harry Potter?
People in the know advise to look at what’s on the best-seller lists, what’s hot, what’s in. The problem for me has always been that, by the time I tried to write what was hot or in, the subject was no longer hot or in. I’m still on Shakespeare while the rest of the world has gone on to Diablo What’s-her-name. I figured, as well, every other budding author is doing the same thing I am. Looking at Dean Koontz’s success or John Grisham’s and trying to follow down their golden paths. But you can’t. Because everyone else is going down that same well-worn path. How do you separate yourself from the crowd? How do you make yourself stand out so that an agent or publisher will choose you over the multitude? Not without a great deal of difficulty, obviously.
Other people suggest, ‘Write what you know.’ Well, okay. Except, what I knew bored me. Why do I want to write about things in my life? That’s why I write. To get away from those things.
Having dispensed with that thoughtful bit of advice, I chose to go my own way. Write whatever interests me at the moment. No matter what. If it’s not best-seller material, so what? If I’m talented enough, surely some agent or publisher will recognize my genius and scoop me up in a chariot filled with royalty checks.
So, here’s what I wrote about:
PAN DORA ISLAND: Chimps in the wild taught how to use sign language by a madman. When the madman commits suicide, the chimpanzees are left to evolve with this newfound skill of communicating with words.
LIGEIA: A studious slave teams up with her favorite author, Edgar Allan Poe, to uncover the killer of president Zachary Taylor.
GOSPEL OF HANNANIAH: The ‘autobiography” of Jesus’ illegitimate daughter.
PRETTY IN PINSK: Two CIA operatives start a dating service in post Cold War Russia.
You get the idea. Eclectic. Don’t pin me down to any genre. Distinctive. And this is only the tip of the creative iceberg.
Where did it get me? Back to looking up what was on the best seller lists.
Ultimately, I drew this conclusion: you have to write what gives you joy, no matter what the consequences. You have to love the characters you give life to and the worlds they inhabit. Writing has to give you pleasure. You have to long to be in the places where your writing takes you. If it’s not good enough for publishing houses or agencies, so be it. I don’t think you can write a good publishable novel if you are not enjoying the experience. Many published authors who write series or stay within a particular genre run out of juice, and their novels, while published, even successful, are no longer particularly good.
So, I went back to the drawing board, which in the old days was a lined notebook and a portable typewriter. In the early 1990s I read an article in the Boston Globe in which a prelate of the Catholic church stated he had the right and power to deny congregants access to God if they belonged to organizations he disapproved of. In other words, he was going to deny members of the Church access to the sacraments, the rites and rituals of the Church if they were pro-choice. That was when I decided to write TRACES OF A LIFE, the precursor to my debut novel, HUNTING THE KING.
TRACES concerns an archaeologist, Molly O’Dwyer, who is a passionate seeker of knowledge but who remains at the same time a loyal observant Catholic. Her mother had been a pagan but died when Molly was a child. Molly was then practically raised on the campus of the Jesuit institution where her mother had taught. Her conflict throughout both TRACES and HUNTING is that of an intelligent being who questions her organized religion when it comes into conflict with her own morality. In TRACES, Molly is assigned to a dig on a Boston harbor island and there, coincidentally, begins to uncover the truth about her own past and what her mother was doing in defiance of the Church and common law. In short, I decided to write a mystery with an important moral spine. I wanted to challenge the Church and the arrogant position of those who felt they could deny people God because they had a degree in theology and a position of political power within the Church.
At the time, by coincidence, I had an agent. And she wasn’t from Arkansas either. Not that there’s anything wrong with Arkansas. I had an agent from there once, too. In fact, at one time or another I’ve had four agents, all from different states. This particular agent was a New York agent, so I was excited for the first time in many years that my novel, TRACES, might actually be sold. Only it wasn’t. My agent quit. She was so frustrated by the publishing business that she decided she wasn’t going to represent fiction anymore.
Bereft and alone again naturally, I returned in my own frustration to the Best Seller list. DA VINCI CODE happened to be the hot thing at the time, so I took my lovely red-haired archaeologist Molly O’Dwyer and sent her on an expedition into war-torn Iraq in search of the remains of Jesus. I figured, surely this can’t miss.
Well, surely it can and surely it did. For two years, during which time I wrote two more novels, all the while sending out that all too familiar deluge of letters to agents around the globe. I wrote an anti-war novel aimed at Bush/Cheney, THEY WERE CALLED TO DUTY, and a sure-to-reach Oprah novel called ALBERTVILLE.
Letters went out. Letters went unanswered. Same old story. No one wanted anything that I wrote, no matter what genre I wrote in. Finally, luck stepped in like a swaggering pimp in a Blaxploitation flick. I found Kunati Books on a web site called FirstWriter. Sick and tired of agents, cynical about the book business in the US, I searched for a publisher or an agent in Canada that might be more amenable to what I was trying to do. I hit on Kunati. They were looking for cutting edge fiction, page-turners that had the feel of a Hollywood film to them. I knew right away what I was going to send them. Molly O’Dwyer in Iraq. This happened in late March of 2007. In August Kunati’s publisher Derek Armstrong contacted me by email and offered me a contract. I had been writing for 34 years.
So, what to write? My experience may be unusual. At least, I hope it is. Maybe I did things all wrong, I don’t know. I still say you have to write what is in you to write. Not what you know, but what matters to you. If I hadn’t stumbled upon Kunati Books, I would still be floundering to this day. I’m convinced of it. But if HUNTING THE KING doesn’t do well and Kunati doesn’t offer me a contract on a second novel, I will persevere. I always have. And I will continue to write what matters to me.
Next up: COMRADE LOLITA. Via con dios.
Submission
What to Write? What to Write? What to Write?
Surely this is a question that has gone through most unpublished writers’ minds when they are in pursuit of an agent or a publisher. Do I write a mystery? Should I throw down the gauntlet at Stephen King and write a horror tale? How about science fiction or the next Harry Potter?
People in the know advise to look at what’s on the best-seller lists, what’s hot, what’s in. The problem for me has always been that, by the time I tried to write what was hot or in, the subject was no longer hot or in. I’m still on Shakespeare while the rest of the world has gone on to Diablo What’s-her-name. I figured, as well, every other budding author is doing the same thing I am. Looking at Dean Koontz’s success or John Grisham’s and trying to follow down their golden paths. But you can’t. Because everyone else is going down that same well-worn path. How do you separate yourself from the crowd? How do you make yourself stand out so that an agent or publisher will choose you over the multitude? Not without a great deal of difficulty, obviously.
Other people suggest, ‘Write what you know.’ Well, okay. Except, what I knew bored me. Why do I want to write about things in my life? That’s why I write. To get away from those things.
Having dispensed with that thoughtful bit of advice, I chose to go my own way. Write whatever interests me at the moment. No matter what. If it’s not best-seller material, so what? If I’m talented enough, surely some agent or publisher will recognize my genius and scoop me up in a chariot filled with royalty checks.
So, here’s what I wrote about:
PAN DORA ISLAND: Chimps in the wild taught how to use sign language by a madman. When the madman commits suicide, the chimpanzees are left to evolve with this newfound skill of communicating with words.
LIGEIA: A studious slave teams up with her favorite author, Edgar Allan Poe, to uncover the killer of president Zachary Taylor.
GOSPEL OF HANNANIAH: The ‘autobiography” of Jesus’ illegitimate daughter.
PRETTY IN PINSK: Two CIA operatives start a dating service in post Cold War Russia.
You get the idea. Eclectic. Don’t pin me down to any genre. Distinctive. And this is only the tip of the creative iceberg.
Where did it get me? Back to looking up what was on the best seller lists.
Ultimately, I drew this conclusion: you have to write what gives you joy, no matter what the consequences. You have to love the characters you give life to and the worlds they inhabit. Writing has to give you pleasure. You have to long to be in the places where your writing takes you. If it’s not good enough for publishing houses or agencies, so be it. I don’t think you can write a good publishable novel if you are not enjoying the experience. Many published authors who write series or stay within a particular genre run out of juice, and their novels, while published, even successful, are no longer particularly good.
So, I went back to the drawing board, which in the old days was a lined notebook and a portable typewriter. In the early 1990s I read an article in the Boston Globe in which a prelate of the Catholic church stated he had the right and power to deny congregants access to God if they belonged to organizations he disapproved of. In other words, he was going to deny members of the Church access to the sacraments, the rites and rituals of the Church if they were pro-choice. That was when I decided to write TRACES OF A LIFE, the precursor to my debut novel, HUNTING THE KING.
TRACES concerns an archaeologist, Molly O’Dwyer, who is a passionate seeker of knowledge but who remains at the same time a loyal observant Catholic. Her mother had been a pagan but died when Molly was a child. Molly was then practically raised on the campus of the Jesuit institution where her mother had taught. Her conflict throughout both TRACES and HUNTING is that of an intelligent being who questions her organized religion when it comes into conflict with her own morality. In TRACES, Molly is assigned to a dig on a Boston harbor island and there, coincidentally, begins to uncover the truth about her own past and what her mother was doing in defiance of the Church and common law. In short, I decided to write a mystery with an important moral spine. I wanted to challenge the Church and the arrogant position of those who felt they could deny people God because they had a degree in theology and a position of political power within the Church.
At the time, by coincidence, I had an agent. And she wasn’t from Arkansas either. Not that there’s anything wrong with Arkansas. I had an agent from there once, too. In fact, at one time or another I’ve had four agents, all from different states. This particular agent was a New York agent, so I was excited for the first time in many years that my novel, TRACES, might actually be sold. Only it wasn’t. My agent quit. She was so frustrated by the publishing business that she decided she wasn’t going to represent fiction anymore.
Bereft and alone again naturally, I returned in my own frustration to the Best Seller list. DA VINCI CODE happened to be the hot thing at the time, so I took my lovely red-haired archaeologist Molly O’Dwyer and sent her on an expedition into war-torn Iraq in search of the remains of Jesus. I figured, surely this can’t miss.
Well, surely it can and surely it did. For two years, during which time I wrote two more novels, all the while sending out that all too familiar deluge of letters to agents around the globe. I wrote an anti-war novel aimed at Bush/Cheney, THEY WERE CALLED TO DUTY, and a sure-to-reach Oprah novel called ALBERTVILLE.
Letters went out. Letters went unanswered. Same old story. No one wanted anything that I wrote, no matter what genre I wrote in. Finally, luck stepped in like a swaggering pimp in a Blaxploitation flick. I found Kunati Books on a web site called FirstWriter. Sick and tired of agents, cynical about the book business in the US, I searched for a publisher or an agent in Canada that might be more amenable to what I was trying to do. I hit on Kunati. They were looking for cutting edge fiction, page-turners that had the feel of a Hollywood film to them. I knew right away what I was going to send them. Molly O’Dwyer in Iraq. This happened in late March of 2007. In August Kunati’s publisher Derek Armstrong contacted me by email and offered me a contract. I had been writing for 34 years.
So, what to write? My experience may be unusual. At least, I hope it is. Maybe I did things all wrong, I don’t know. I still say you have to write what is in you to write. Not what you know, but what matters to you. If I hadn’t stumbled upon Kunati Books, I would still be floundering to this day. I’m convinced of it. But if HUNTING THE KING doesn’t do well and Kunati doesn’t offer me a contract on a second novel, I will persevere. I always have. And I will continue to write what matters to me.
Next up: COMRADE LOLITA. Via con dios.
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Hunting the King
HUNTING THE KING is the controversial novel that follows archaeologist Molly O'Dwyer into war-torn Iraq in search of the remains of Jesus of Nazareth and his illegitimate daughter Hannaniah. As war implodes and desperation takes hold among the population and among he soldiers fighting to save the nation, O'Dwyer's international team of archaeologists sneak into Iraq, following ancient clues to a burial mound lying beneath the sands of ancient Babylon. Who lies in it, and what will the consequences be for Molly, the loyal Catholic who can not resist the hunt? Coming in the spring of 2008 from Kunati Books.
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