I'm doing it. Really I am. Honest. Here I go...

Well, I'm really doing it.

Soon.

Kinda.

No, really, I am.

Soon.

I'm talking about writing and finishing the synopsis to my novel and sending that out into the world of agents, so I can become part of the rejected writer's nation.

Let me back up, give those of you not in the world of writing a couple of definitions.

First, the novel. You all know what that is – a book-length work of fiction. I completed my novel, revised, edited, had it read over by some writer acquaintances of mine who tore it to shr—I mean offered some insightful, valuable suggestions. (Okay, no on actually tore it to shreds, but I did get an enormous amount of truly helpful suggestions).

I've had the novel finished, ready to go – at least as ready to go as I know how to make it – for a long time. Months.

I spent time on the query letter. In the world of traditional publishing a writer with a completed manuscript tries to land a literary agent. Most of the large publishing houses won't give the time of day to a would-be writer unless his or her manuscript is submitted by an agent.

Agents get paid on commission. Your work sells, they make money. Your work doesn't sell, they don't get paid. So agents aren't in a position to spend a lot time reading over every novel that comes their way, nor are they going to take too many chances. They understand what books work in what genres, what books might appeal to what publishers, and you have to fit your work inside those parameters, as well as write well and tell an engaging story, and that's what the query letter is for.

It's a brief letter that tells the agent what your story is about, what genre it might fit, names two or three recent novels that appeal to the same readership and why, tells the agent how your learned of him or her and why you've chosen to submit your work to them, as well as tell a bit about yourself, the writer.

All in one page. Agents read the query to weed out most of the slush pile of submissions to save time, progressing to actually reading the synopsis, and hopefully the full novel, afterward. The vast majority of submissions do not make it past the query-reading stage.

I have had what I hope is a fairly decent query letter ready to go for a couple of months.

The big hold-up is the synopsis. This document is roughly 500 to 800 words that gives the nuts and bolts of the novel – introduces the characters and who they are, what they're up against, supporting or significant minor characters, then gives a bit of a blow-by-blow of how the story develops and ultimately ends.

Think of the query as the sales pitch, the jacket copy on the back of a book meant to entice readers to buy. The synopsis is the blueprint, a work document tracing the development of the story to its end.

More than anything, this is the one that scares me. My novel is nearly 76,000 words, a tad over 300 pages. The idea of condensing that to two pages, relying on such a short document to communicate the story in a way that makes an agent not only interested, but believing that publishers and readers will want this too, is more than a bit daunting.

I've spent a good bit of the year putting it off – something else is always more important, or I'm too tired, or I'll get it done tomorrow (or next week) and here we are, the end of summer and I'm still sitting on this thing.

No more.

Yesterday I dove in, reading several guides to synopsis writing, listening to podcasts of literary agents talking about the documents. To take a break, I spent time researching specific agents who take this genre – learning what they want, how they want to receive the submission, as much as I can. Some agents want a query, ten sample pages and a synopsis, others just want a few pages and query, still others want several chapters and a query. Eventually, they all want to see the synopsis, so doing the work is inevitable.

Today I've spent time building the basic outline of the synopsis, and this week I'm going to spend time every day and get at least the first clean draft done and ready to review, so I can get this book out. I've already got the next one ready to write, and quite frankly the two after that as well.

I just have to get this synopsis thing done first.

And I will, This week.

Really, I will.

The End of Things

It's arrived.

Finally.

The end.

Okay, maybe that's a little dramatic, and not entirely accurate.

A view of our garden, shot a couple of weeks ago. The big brown empty spot is where we harvested the potatoes a couple of weeks ago.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 I'm talking about the end of summer. As I publish this, a glance at the calendar will tell you we have another 32 days of summer, according to the Gregorian calendar. (I've read that meteorologists actually consider Sept. 1 the start of autumn, but maybe we'll talk about that another time).

Every year, usually some time in the first half of August, we get a day where the whether feels just a little autumn-like. Maybe it's a breeze that's cooler than typical summer wind; perhaps it's the hint of a chill in the night; or even on a hot day the air feels less humid, crisper, more like a warm day in fall rather than a sweltering summer day.

Whenever that first day comes, it's suddenly as if summer is winding down, that autumn with its changing leaves and cool nights and smoky air from burning leaf and brush piles is about to commence.

Oftentimes after that first day or two of autumn hinting at its arrival, summer comes back with a vengeance – the days grow humid again, the nights don't cool off much, and you find yourself wanting that fall-like weather even more.

As I write this it's been nine days since those first hints of fall crept into the air-- it was a Sunday, my wife and I had just returned from our bi-weekly torture march through the grocery store loading up a fortnight's worth food and stuff, and after unloading all the groceries I just stood outside for a while, enjoying the feel of the air. Later that evening we spent an hour or so sitting outside as the sun set and the day faded into night.

I generally say autumn is my favorite time of year. I love the feel of the air, the cool of the nights, the colors – yes, even the brown colors of the dead leaves once they begin falling to the ground. And Halloween is one of my favorite holidays even though, I suppose, it's not an official holiday.

But this year I'm not so sure I'm ready.

As I grow older, I can't help but see summer winding down as the first steps toward winter, when the world is cold and dead and occasionally a bit dreary. There are all sorts of poems and stories and essays likening the autumn to the final years of middle age for people, with the cold hard winter of one's final years just around the corner, so I won't try to say the same thing here.

What I will say is my reticence to welcome fall is far more practical.

My wife and I enjoy gardening, and we have for years done the usual fare – tomatoes, peppers, zucchini and squash, along with decorative gourds and even a few pumpkins. Some years we try a few cantaloupes or watermelons.

Last year, we experimented a little bit. We grew some kale, a few carrots, cauliflower, Swiss chard, and late in the summer we planted some lettuce and spinach, along with a few turnips and rutabagas.

They were great. Stephanie, my wife (better described as The Chief, the Household CEO, or Head Honcho) wasn't so fond of the cauliflower, so we dumped that from this year's garden plans, but we decided to try a few new items this year.

We scrapped the gourds and pumpkins, cut back a bit on the tomatoes, peppers, and vining plants, and went hog wild with lettuce, kale, arugula, and Swiss chard. We put most of those in raised bed gardens this year. For the main portion of the garden, to give the soil a break from the usual plants, we sowed black beans, white Cannellini beans, corn (that was a bit of an accident), some peas, and on a last-minute lark, some potatoes, along with a half-dozen purple cabbage plants.

The corn we had no intention of growing, but a seed company accidentally sent those to us (and didn't want them back once I told them), so we squared off a corner of the garden and put those in.

Three days ago, we realized some of those corn plants were ready – we ended up with nearly three dozen full, thick ears of super-sweet corn, and nearly that much still growing.

Earlier this summer we pulled nearly 40 pounds of potatoes from the ground, the harvest from about 9 pounds of seed potatoes. I've since read that's not necessarily a great yield, but we bought them on a spur of the moment decision, threw them in the ground and didn't do any feeding or fertilizing. So I'm happy with that yield and hopefully we can do better next year.

We're still a few weeks away from harvesting the beans.

All of this brings me back to my point of not necessarily being ready for autumn to set in. What we learned last year is there's plenty of late-season plants to put in the garden in August. I've put out turnips and rutabagas, Stephanie pulled up the old dying vine plants and has replaced them with new cucumber and zucchini seeds. We've also done a second planting for lettuce and spinach and peas.

And that's what brings me back around to saying I'm not so sure I'm ready for autumn to kick in just yet. I'd like a little more summer-weather growing season. Turns out, even here in the mountains of Southwest Virginia, with its short growing season, you can still get two full plantings in – one for summer harvest and another for fall harvest, if you just switch things up a bit, if you're willing to try new things and work a little longer into the autumn, you can pack a lot more plants into the same little plot of land. And some of those fall crops will store up a lot longer through the winter than the more fragile summer plants.

I suppose that could almost be a metaphor for life. Autumn might very well be the final years of middle age and the first glimpse into the geezer years, but if you're willing to try new things, slip outside your comfort zone, could be the autumn years just might be the best of all.

Confession time

 I have a confession.

Two actually.

Let's deal with the second, smaller one first. For those who know me, this hardly qualifies as a confession -- some might say it's been painfully evident for years.

I'm not all that tech-savvy.

It's been a tad more than six weeks since my last blog posting, and it's entirely because I thought I had lost access to my blog. I logged on one day, went to the dashboard, and my blog -- at least this one, my Dark Scribblings, was not there. I could see the blog on the front end, like you do, as a reader, but when I went to the dashboard, it wasn't there. A few older blogs I haven't used in years were there, but no Dark Scribblings. 

I poked around, closed it out and re-opened, tried to look up trouble-shooting guidelines, but nothing. For two or three weeks I tried multiple times, to no avail.

This past weekend I made one more attempt, with the idea I'd just have to scrap Dark Scribblings and start an entirely new blog, and it still didn't work. Then I clicked on my profile, then clicked on my picture and voila! I was in.

It's still not right -- when I go to the dashboard like I should there's no option to open the back end of my blog, but at least for now this double-clicking of other links seem to work. So for now, I'll keep blogging.

Now for my main confession.

I'm not a very good reader.

Well, that's not entirely accurate. Let's say I'm a lazy reader.

No, that's not right, either. Maybe we can just say I've not been a diligent reader.

Two of the main tenets of being a writer are to write a lot (as in every day), and to read even more. Read voraciously -- in the genre you're writing, in other genres, non-genre fiction, even non-fiction work, just anything you can get your hands on.

I was once that voracious reader. All during my childhood years, well, at least since third grade, I loved reading. I'd always get the maximum number of books allowed on weekly trips to the school library. I thought the public library was the most magical place on Earth. I'd read novels, non-fiction, short stories, magazines (Reader's Digest was a particular favorite in our household), cereal boxes, clothing tags, anything I could get my hands on. 

My reading appetite continued well into adulthood. I remember once, and I guess it's safe to say this now, 30 years after the fact, but I once called out of work "sick" because I was so engrossed in reading a novel.

Well, okay, maybe twice.

In recent years it's been a struggle to read at night, or in the morning. Or most any time.

I suppose a little context might be in order. I'm a daily newspaper editor, in a world of shrinking newsroom staffs and higher demands on newsrooms. I edit, revise, and rewrite somewhere between 10 and 30 articles and press releases a day. Sometimes more. I peruse wire stories, look over work from other editors in the company, read other papers and make my way through close to 100 emails a day (that doesn't count the ones I trash on sight or after glancing over the first couple of lines). 

Some days, the word count of all my reading might equal close to half a novel's worth of words, not to mention the time I spend editing and rewriting.

When I come home most nights the last thing I want to do is read.

I don't mean to suggest I've totally sworn off of reading fiction. Over the past eight months or so I've reread a couple of old Robert B. Parker mysteries, read THE LOOK-A-LIKE by Erica Spindler (an enjoyable murder mystery), devoured THE HOLLOW KIND by Andy Davidson (one of the better horror novels I've read in a long time), made my way through Eric LaRocca's novella and short story collection THINGS HAVE ONLY GOTTEN WORSE SINCE WE LAST SPOKE, and I just finished the paranormal romance DO YOUR WORST by Rosie Danan, which was a fun read.

But that's only a half-dozen novels or novel-length works in eight months. My wife, who might be accurately described as the MAD READER, can devour nearly that many in a week, while holding a full-time teaching position.

Truth is, I miss reading a lot. There's nothing quite like getting wrapped up in a good story, losing a half-hour (or more) of sleep simply because you can't put down the book, or pausing just to think "wow" and then going back to reread a page because the writing is so sterling.

Not to mention I should be reading more to sharpen my writing skills.

So here's my plan -- starting this week, I'm going to  spend at least 30 minutes a day, at least five days a week, reading from a novel or short story collection. For now it doesn't matter much about genre, just so I'm doing the work. 

My first selection will be the one pictured a little higher in this blog -- the anthology DEATHREALM SPIRITS. I bought this last October, when it was first published, because I loved the old Deathrealm magazine. It w as quite possibly my favorite, or at least among my two favorite, magazines from back in the day.

Yet it's set on my desk since last autumn, cracked only long enough for me to read the introduction by editor extraordinaire Stephen Mark Rainey, and to look over a most promising table of comments. 

Tonight, that ends, and I'll be diving in to the first tale of the collection, GHOST IN THE CELLS by Joe R. Lansdale.

I'll keep you all posted on how the reading goes. For now, thanks for stopping by!

Who controls the media? Look in the mirror

While my blog primarily is a chance for me to talk about my wanna-be career, writing fiction for a living, occasionally I blog about my long-time career as a newspaper man.

Today is one of those times.

I recently came across a Facebook posting by a writer sort-of friend of mine. I call him that because he's a genuinely good guy, well-respected, a fantastic writer, not to mention a Dark Shadows man; we've exchanged Facebook posts, a few emails and I even interviewed him once years ago for my blog, but I've never met him in person. In his post he is low-key decrying the state of the modern news media. Rather than rant about the media, he linked to a column by Ben R. Williams, a journalist living and working in Southside Virginia. 

I don't really know Ben, and he most certainly doesn't know me, although back when I was managing editor of The Martinsville Bulletin I knew his dad, who was a General District judge in our community. My wife remembers Ben – she was his kindergarten teacher, and perhaps one of his first crushes, according to his dad.

I do occasionally read Ben's column in the Henry County Enterprise – he is a good writer, with a way of cutting to the truth of most subjects he discusses with concise, sometimes funny, sometimes biting, prose. His work is both enjoyable and thought-provoking.

In this particular column, he takes to task the sensationalist tendencies of the media, using recent reporting on the Joro spider as a prime example. If you've been online for any length of time in recent weeks, you've no doubt seen article after article about this supposedly dangerous, venomous, wolf-sized spider that's about to descend on the Eastern Seaboard, perhaps wiping out life as we know it.

Okay, that's not exactly what has been reported, but when reports of this spider first came out, a couple of years ago, I got the idea I was going to walk out of my house every morning to find the sky filled with these several-inch-long colorful spiders, floating through the air under little spun-web parachutes. We'd have to be dodging these eight-legged paratroopers whenever going outdoors, cover ourselves with gloves and long sleeves and pants to protect from venomous attacks while working in the garden, and always have the car's gasoline tank full so we can speed to the hospital if bitten by one.

Things didn't play out that way. In truth, they never were going to, but the headlines and some articles certainly made it seem this was our fate. More than two years later I have yet to see a single Joro spider.

For some reason the web is abuzz with fresh new articles about their imminent arrival, with the same headlines, the same sensational headlines, which I suspect will lead to the same big fat nothing.

Ben, in his column, calls this practice fear mongering by the media, and he's not wrong.

Yet, I would say that assigns far too much thought and planning to this monolithic creature known as “the media,” and, much like voters ultimately get the political leaders they deserve, the general public gets the media it demands.

The truth is, today's media is just trying to make a buck. It's always been that way, but more so in recent years. Ever since the advent of television, and to a lesser degree radio, the news media has morphed into entertainment media, a process that's kicked into overdrive as the internet has grown to maturity. It's a business, and the first rule of business is to make money (perhaps that is the real problem, that the supposedly independent press is largely made up of for-profit businesses, but that's a discussion for a different time).

Even Fox News, which has rightfully been labeled little more than right-wing propaganda, truthfully has no particular ax to grind nor cause to push. That outfit simply has found a niche – a large group of people who swallow that ideology hook, line and sinker without regard for truth or accuracy – and then sold access to that audience to advertisers willing to pay ungodly sums of money to reach it.

The founding of the network, if one does a deep dive into the facts, shows it was always about making money off of this segment of society, not about offering alternative, conservative-based news. Even today, a number of documented, undisputed reports show some – at times most – of the people working there don't believe a word they're saying, but they're rolling in money by saying it, and that's really the name of the game.

The rest of the news media, regardless of political or social affiliation, is largely the same. There's an old adage in newsrooms – if it bleeds, it leads – which perfectly illustrates this.

Essentially, that means if we have a hot story about a fatal wreck, a deadly shoot-out, or some other violent event, that's the lead story. Television news shows will make that the first, and often longest, story of the night. Newspapers will splash that across the front page, or put flashy red banners around it online.

Such stories aren't generally the most important stories – the tax rates your local government is imposing, how it's spending the money, regulations letting governmental control creep into our lives, how well local schools are educating – those are among the critical stories. But no one cares.

As a long-time newspaper guy, I can tell you back in the day papers with headlines about commissioner and supervisor meetings, changes in school curriculum, how local political parties are consolidating power with changes to candidate selection processes, and similar stories, sat in newsstands largely ignored. But splash a scandal or shooting or fatal wreck or minor drug arrest across the top of page one and the newsstands quickly emptied, even if we upped the press run that day.

In our more modern world where reader interest is measured in story clicks and average time on a page, it's the same. Important news stories go largely unread, while sensational headlines and world-is-ending tales can see their read count quickly surge into the thousands or tens of thousands, even on small community news sites.

As an industry, we in the news world should be better, we should demand serious stories be given their due, and we cannot escape blame when that doesn't happen.

But in a world where virtually all forms of media – news, entertainment, and otherwise – are owned by profit-seeking corporations, what sells is what is published.

Ultimately, that leaves final control over news content with readers – giving them the news media they demand. And the only person who can help change that is staring at you in the mirror.

I'm no longer blogging, I'm platforming (and other tidbits on where I've been)

Nearly 11 months ago, I restarted this here blog -- it had been somewhere around 8 or 9 years prior to that when I had last blogged.

At the time, in 2023, I wrote a bit about getting back to some old dreams and hopes – you know, the kind that get pushed to the back burner as life takes center stage, then get pushed off the stove top completely, then maybe get pushed into that funny little drawer under the stove never to be seen again, as one gets further into a career, raising kids, taking care of all the stuff that comes along.

My dream, my hope, of course, was to do far more during my life with writing. For those of you who know me, you know I have spent most of my adult life as a writer. Most of that time I've been a newspaper reporter and editor, interspersed among a few dalliances with the business side of the industry as a general manager and publisher. I've sold a number of freelance articles over the years, and have more than a handful of short story publications in the horror field to my name.

Most might say I've done okay, in terms of making a living in some form as a writer. I recall way back in my younger days when my dream was to be a fulltime writing, penning fiction and freelance articles. To me, for a writer, that was it -- there was no higher achievement or way of life. Then I came across a stringer who covered county government news for her local weekly, getting perhaps two or three articles a week for low pay. Her real job was writing novels -- she was regularly publishing two science fiction novels a year, through one of the major publishing houses, yet she needed the stringer work to have anything above absolute basic bills paid. She once told me that I, as a full-time reporter, had the dream job every writer wanted.

I never fully bought into that, but there is something to be said for a regular, albeit relatively small, paycheck, health insurance, and a handful of other benefits, all things full-time freelancers rarely see. With a family, those are all must-haves, so the novels and short stories eventually get put away and forgotten.

In those handful of blogs I published last summer, I told you all I had seen a few things recently, experienced a few events that got me to thinking that if I'm ever going to chase those old dreams, there's nothing like the present.

 And then I disappeared from the blogging world.

But I didn't just fade away. I have been writing. And writing. A lot of that has been for my full-time job as a daily newspaper editor, but I've managed to eek out a few words of fiction now and again.

I've penned a handful of short stories, sending two out to publishers. One was rejected, but the other was accepted for the anthology WRITER'S RETREAT: TALES OF WRITING AND MADNESS. I have a few others I hope to send out soon.

What I'm really excited about is my other writing. I now have a full-length adult novel completed, along with first drafts of two children's novels. Full disclaimer here -- the novel is actually a novella I wrote years ago, but over the past year I rewrote and revised, built that from about 35,000 words to 75,000 words. It's best categorized as a romantic supernatural thriller, with a few murders, some mystical evil and a bit of light humor. The two protagonists are a high-profile police detective and a reporter, each relentless in their pursuit of what is behind the murders, while finding themselves drawn toward one another despite their best efforts otherwise.

I've written, revised, edited, and rewritten that thing, and I'm ready to start querying literary agents, to see if I can get any bites on that. From everything I've read and listened to on podcasts, landing an agent is nearly impossible. Most of the ones who are accepting queries get anywhere from 20 to 100 queries a day, and many of them might take on four or five new clients a year. Not great odds.

But, as I told a writer the other day, you will never land an agent if you don't send those queries out. At present, I've more or less finished the query letter -- an arduous task in itself, trying to tell what my novel is about in less than 300 words -- and now I'm slogging through the evil synopsis. Once that's done, I will begin submitting those queries. I've set a goal to start that within two weeks -- by June 16.

After that, I plan to spend the following 10 to 12 weeks on the children's novels. To be more precise, they are aimed at the lower middle grade market, meaning I'm shooting for kids in the age 9 to 10 range. Both works are spooky children's horror novels. I've got the complete bones of the stories -- one clocks in at 18,000 words, while the other is around 21,000. I need to rewrite, revise, and build them out to the range of 30,000 to 35,000.

Hopefully, I can have them both written, polished, and be sending them out to prospective agents by the end of the summer.

Then, I'll be turning my attention to a straight-up adult horror novel I've already more or less outlined. Actually, it's from a short story I wrote years ago called The Dark Secret of Warren House, which was published in the Canadian magazine Dark Recesses. That story was about 3,000 words, but I'm hoping to build it into a 75,000 to 80,000 word novel.

And, I'll be blogging. Really I will.

Seems agents, and most book publishers, like the idea of their writers engaging with the public via social media. I guess that's no surprise. For non-fiction, it's a must -- you have 20 million engaged followers, you're getting a book deal. No followers? Crickets.

It's not quite the same in the world of fiction. A large following -- any following -- is a nice bonus, but it's ultimately the story which has to sell. But the following doesn't hurt. I suppose that means I'm going to have to start engaging a little more on Facebook, get busy on the dreaded X (formerly Twitter), and dive into Tik Tok (assuming the GOP -- the supposed party of individual freedom and the free market -- doesn't follow through and ban it).

It's called building a social media platform. You know, where you can go if you get a book published and shout from the digital mountaintop that everyone should go buy your book.

I also read that blogging is passé, that blogging has been passé for about a decade. We all know all trends eventually come back around, generally with new cool-sounding names. This is my push to bring bring about blogging's return, but we'll keep it hip and trendy by christening its new name --  platforming.

I'm officially platforming now.

Hopefully, I'll have more platforming for you all soon. For now, that's where I've been spending some of my time lately.

Thanks for reading!