Category Archives: Writing

Out of Joint

Posted on by

Out-of-Joint-by-Belea-Keeney

About the book

Mitchell Tanner, an ex-convict struggling to get his life back on track hasn’t faced his family in year. Not since his conviction, not since his move to Indiana, not since moving in with his half-sister. When he attends an uncles’ funeral in Tampa, old hurts come back to slap him in the face. Take a journey to a tropical paradise … where sometimes paradise is just an illusion.

This story was a finalist for the 2010 Florida Review’s Editor Choice Award and an Honorable Mention at the 2007 Writers in Paradise competition. It appears in the author’s print collection, Out of Joint and Other Stories.

Purchase at JMS books or at Amazon

An excerpt from the book

Mitchell Tanner steered his twelve-year-old Altima into the funeral home parking lot, found a spot beneath a dying magnolia tree, and lit a joint. His frayed shirt sleeves pulled back to reveal barbed wire tattoos curled around each wrist. He left the lugging engine on and ran the AC against a Tampa October that pressed down solid as a slab.

Florida. Fuck.

In his rearview mirror, groups of people quick-stepped over steaming asphalt. The rain had made his final miles down from Indiana a maddening octopus of slow traffic, back-tracking, three fender-benders, and one street closed because of a sinkhole. Tampa’s northern outskirts had mutated into a clean, shiny exitworld suburbia of Wal-Marts and Starbucks and McDonald’s. But the city’s inner core along Florida Avenue was the same. Peeling paint in vivid shades of turquoise, mustard, and tangerine flaked off shotgun bungalows. Black burglar bars guarded every window; a half dozen kids screamed in yards; old men on front porches smoked home-grown.

On the street corners lurked the young men: black, Hispanic, mixed, not a blond in sight. Bandanas on their heads, gold grills on their teeth, and cell phones in their hands. Tanner let his gaze drift over them, their chests puffed in their muscle tees. They glared at him as he drove through his old neighborhood, and Tanner wondered if he knew any of them from before.

Probably not. Five years in Raiford and three years in Indiana had wiped away Tanner’s Tampa. These guys were in elementary school when he was last arrested.

Tanner crushed out the joint. He grabbed a pack of Big Red gum from the eight in the center console and stepped into wet air. Sweat popped on his neck and chest. He spent a few seconds struggling with the three-sizes-too-small sports jacket his sister had lent him. “Tim won’t care. He left it here so it’s mine now.” The navy polyester was darker than his best-kept khakis; it was no suit but it would have to do.

He tugged down his shirt sleeves, trying to cover the prison-blue tattoos. Tanner wasn’t sure about his shirt collar; should he leave it open or button it all the way up even though he had no tie? He glanced at the people filing into the funeral home. All the other men wore ties.

The shirt collar was too tight around his neck; his hours on the weight bench had sculpted his body. He unbuttoned the collar and walked inside

Selling Your Books at a Booth, Part Two

Posted on by

As part of your marketing plan for your book(s), you may have the chance to do some hands-on selling at a festival or event with a booth vendor slot. In the last issue, we discussed how to locate appropriate festivals, make contact, and arrange to set up a book booth. Now that you’ve done that, what next?

Having sold books at dozens of events over the past decade, I’ve developed a recipe for success and working a booth to your advantage. With some basic ingredients and a generous dash of high spirits, try mixing up these tactics at your next event and see your sales go up.

1: Make eye contact and break the ice.

Your first goal is to simply get people to stop walking and look at your booth and your books. A simple “good morning or hello, how are you?” is one way to start. If you’re at festival of some sort, ask how they’re enjoying it. Say it with a smile and try to be genuine. Vary your greeting — you’ll get sick of saying the same thing all day long, so try variations. When you do get someone to stop, ask an open-ended question that can’t be answered with a “yes” or “no”. “What do you like to read?” is much better than “Do you like to read?”

Read more here …

Selling Your Books at a Booth, Part One

Posted on by

Selling books directly to readers via an event booth is a very personal, hands-on approach to marketing your titles. It can give you instant feedback on what readers are looking for, like, and buy. It can earn you some cash sales. And it lets potential readers meet and feel invested in you as a person as well as an author. After several years of selling books at a variety of events, I’ve developed some tips for making booth sales work for you:

1 – Evaluate your genre and market, then decide which events will be right for you and your book. For example, if you write Westerns, consider rodeos, Western horse shows, cattle drives, and cowboy reunions. If you’ve written a historical, think about Civil War festivals and re-enactments, meetings of the local historical society, and the like. If you written a nonfiction title, find out where people interested in your topic gather. A book about beekeeping could be sold at a beekeepers conference, gardening festivals, and home shows. In short, think outside the narrow box of I-must-sell-my-book-at-a-book-festival. That’s not necessarily true.

Also, at a book festival you’re competing with dozens of other authors. Sure, the attendees are readers, but do they necessarily read about your book topic? Consider the novelty factor when selling at niche market events. A book about cats may do better at a cat show than at a book festival. A romance about a dressage rider and thoroughbred racing owner may do better at a dressage show. Sometimes a narrowed, rifle approach to your audience works better than a general, shotgun method of targeting buyers.

Read more here…

Belea’s Seven Tips for Writing

Posted on by

(not for the uber-sensitive)

  1. Turn off the damn television! You can’t feed the muse if your mind is cluttered with the Meaningless Acquisitive Crap that is most television. Develop the inner resources to entertain yourself without the outside stimulus of someone talking at you, preaching to you, or trying to sell you something. There’s nothing wrong with contemplative introspection in moderation.
  2. Learn the basics: grammar, spelling, mechanics, POV, correct dialogue tags. If you screw these up on the first page of your story, editors won’t even get to page two—I mean it.
  3. Study the writers you admire, really analyze how their stories work. Is it an immediate grab-for-the-throat action scene? Is it the proportion of dialogue to narrative (think James Patterson and Jonathan Kellerman vs. Annie Proulx and Jane Smiley). All four can write compelling stories but they hook the reader in a different way. Learn how Thomas Harris is different from Stephen King (both doing suspense/horror), who is different from Maggie Estep who is different from Sara Gruen (both doing first-person horsey tales).
  4. It’s worthwhile to join a critique group, a writer’s organization and attend conferences and workshops. Just remember—writers write. Over the last decade I’ve met scads of folks who love to talk about writing and publishing and selling fiction but not all of them actually Do The Writing. If you’re serious about publishing professionally, at a certain point in time, you’ve got to shit or get off the pot. Either finish something and submit it or shut up.
  5. Once you’re happy with what you’ve written and are ready to sub, study the market. This can mean buying a copy of Cemetery Dance, reviewing The Pedestal online, and perusing the many market listings available online (Ralan.com, ERWA.com), and in print. Don’t waste your time subbing something wrong for the market: Alyson Publications ain’t gonna take a traditional heterosexual romance, and Carnifex Press isn’t remotely interested in Westerns. Do your homework!
  6. Once you do complete a work, honor it by celebrating in whatever way makes you feel as though you’ve accomplished something. Whether it’s a bottle of champagne, a box of Fannie May turtles (just speaking for myself), or a massage, take the time to acknowledge your hard work. Done celebrating? Okay, sit your ass back down in the chair and write something else.
  7. The books I’ve used most in writing and revising:
    a.  The Weekend Novelist by Robert Jay Ray. I cannot recommend this book enough. It really focuses on the nitty-gritty details of background material, plot, structure and character development. And all developed with the idea that you have that pesky full-time job to eat and limited time to write. When my first novel is published, Ray’s getting a copy with a note of sincere thanks from meb.  Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King. The bible, truly. Chapters to help you with cleaning up the mechanics, POV, narrative vs. scene, etc. Terrific stuff.c.  Fiction First Aid by Raymond Obstfeld. Another fixer-upper style book that has chapters on punching up settings, twisting off plotlines and growing rounded characters.d.  The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron and her Right to Write. I’m not much for touchy-feely writing books but these two are the exception. Focuses on the process of creativity and treating yourself well in order to nurture the muse.

    e.  The First Five Pages by Noah Lukeman. Stellar. He explains how little time you have as a writer to get an agent or editor’s attention and that you must have your writing shit together to impress these folks. Based on his premise, they are looking for reasons (a typo, pink paper, a coffee stain) to get your story off their desk and into the trash.

    8 - Turn off the damn television!