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I have been working on my book for FOUR YEARS. Four years. God, I hate to say it.
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Please watch Neil Himself, and Make Good Art. I hope this inspires you as much as it did me.http://vimeo.com/42372767?utm_source=Ypulse+Updates&utm_campaign=ba9e633306-YDU5_25_2012&utm_medium=email
Online Art Gallery
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Read MoreMeet the Writer - Virginia Nosky
An author interview on the craft of writing.
Featured Writer: Virginia Nosky
Books: The Fall from Paradise Valley; Blue Turquoise, White Shell; Ring of Fire; Pima Road; Kachina
Coming Soon: To a Certain Degree; White River
Buy Virginia's books:
Intro, from Heidi:
Virginia is an award-winning author, and one of my earliest cheerleaders from my beginning days at the library critique group. I have to say, she intimidated me at first, being one of those no-nonsense types who would put a huge "X" over an unnecessary paragraph, scratch corrections over my manuscripts, and has a take-no-prisoners attitude when it comes to punctuation and grammatical errors.I learned a great deal from Virginia. She gives amazing feedback, and I knew I was getting better at this writing thing when I started to see that she drew a star in areas of my work. That was a sign that she liked what I wrote. And if I got a star on the front page—whoa! Look out! A star from Virginia is like a nod of approval from the Queen.If any of you are interested in writing romance, take a cue from Virginia. This lady may look polite and proper, but, man can she steam up some pages! And she writes a hundred times better than E.L.James, so if 50 Shades of Grey left you wanting more, pick up a copy of one of Virginia's books—you won't be disappointed!
Virginia Nosky:
On craft:
How old were you when you began to write?All mixed up in my mind are these little plays my sister and I would put together with neighbor kids. There was very little written down, but these little dramas were full-blown affairs, with beginnings, middle and ends. They were also fully costumed with whatever our fevered imaginations could come up with. I remember playing a Maria Montez role—she was a popular sultry movie star—always, it seemed, in harem type costume. I wore my mother’s tin measuring cups as my bra, over my nonexistent chest. There was a little woods beside our house and once we even built a little fire in a clearing—to dance around. We had a lot of freedom back then. My point is that I spent a great deal of my play time in a world of glamour and exotic situations. My imagination was engaged constantly in other worlds. Making up stuff has always been with me, and I can’t really remember when I started writing it down. I majored in Communication at Ohio State, worked in broadcasting and advertising. Writing is just there, in my life.Where do you write?When my sons went off to college, my husband took one of their bedrooms for an office, and I took the other one. It didn’t happen suddenly…we just sort of moved their stuff out…like squatters.What helps to inspire you? Music, maps, journals.I have never liked background music. Total quiet is best, but I can tune out ambient household noise when I really get into something. Sometimes I would like to screech at interruptions by my sweet family…but I don’t. I can’t come out with “Do you realize I’m trying to get this woman in bed with the guy and now, NOW”…etc. But that scene will be different for the interruption. That’s true of any artist whose train of thought is broken. The piece will change. You can only hope it will be as good or better.What stands in your way? Logistically/creatively?Not much. A busy schedule is the most disruptive. Or some kind of emergency that requires your attention. It’s hard to be creative when you’re troubled about something.What do you do when you hit a wall?Just going back to reread what I’ve already written just gets everything going. The worst thing is to get into a corner, where something doesn’t work. But I find those insomniac hours at night can come up with some amazing solutions. “Sleeping on it” is really good advice.Do you outline? Know how the story will develop?Outline? No. Never. I know how the story begins, how it will end, and there is usually a dramatic scene somewhere in the middle that triggered the whole idea. That’s not to say the story will end like you thought. Stories develop lives of their own, and sometimes the end will be different than you started out. A character will assert herself or himself. But it’s important to know where you’re going when you start out. For that matter the beginning might change a bit. The best advice I ever read was from Tony Hillerman. Don’t spend so much time polishing and polishing the beginning. You’ll make some changes when you’ve finished. He said when he started out, he did that. He wrote the most perfect first chapter in the universe. It was lapidary in its brilliance and it still nestled unread in a dusty drawer. That has stayed with me and saved a lot of grief.How do you revise and edit?I edit as I go. I get ideas as I go along and work with them. Then when the book is finished I go back and do it some more. And, as I mentioned, if I’m stalled, it’s a good way to get going again.Do you have any special tools?I work on a desk top and I have an extensive library. I have books on birds, astronomy, flowers, history, physics, geography, wildlife, minerals, weather, sports, games, food, wine, native plants, survival, Native American healing. I have maps and word books: Roget’s, Word Menu, Synonyms, Reverse Dictionary. I have several grammar books: The Chicago Book of Style; the Oxford Book of Grammar; Strunk & White. I have a French Dictionary, and Spanish, Italian, a Japanese, Navajo, Portuguese. I have books of quotations. One book I love is the Book of Everything. Everything has a name and this book has every screw, spark plug, beam, anchor, sail, knot…well, you name it. And it’s there. I have dozens of books on writing. Then I’ve collected a number of books on Arizona Indian culture, mostly Navajo. If I don’t have an answer in those books, Google is my friend.Do you belong to a critique group?Yes. I belonged for years to the Scottsdale Writers Group at Mustang Library. That’s where I met you. And many lovely people. My most valuable group is an offshoot of that. There are five of us and we read much longer excerpts from each other. Take them home and write serious criticism. I love them. Every serious writer needs readers to bounce their work off of. We all write different things, but that isn’t a problem, and sometimes it’s invaluable.What kind of research do you do?A lot. One thing leads to another. You read that something happened. Then you find you have to know why it happened. I’m working on a sequel to Blue Turquoise, White Shell called White River. But in writing about an important incident in the Navajo history, it took place during the Civil War. And I had to get into that, which I hadn’t meant to. That’s the trouble with history. Nothing happens in a vacuum.Did something surprise you? Not really. Particularly with White River. Oh, fascinating details crop up, but I had immersed myself so much in the first book, I pretty much knew what was going to happen.How does it feel to write the last line?With Kachina, my first book, there was a huge surge of pride that I had done it. But I face the last line now with a sense of uncertainty. Is this the right ending? Also a sense of regret. You do get into the lives of your characters and you can’t stop thinking about them. But you do have to send that baby out into the world. A book isn’t truly finished until somebody reads it. I always sense that it’s the same with an artist. When to lay down the brush.
On the business of publishing:
How did you find an agent?I don’t have one now. But it was endless queries, endless sending out mss. Two of my books I’ve used a Canadian publisher that I met at a conference. Conferences are a great place to meet editors and agents. They’re sort of obligated to look at a little bit of your stuff.Has self-publishing shaped your career?I’ve had all my books come out with traditional publishers. I don’t have a problem with self-publishing and I’ve thought about using it to publish my poetry and short stories. These have been in anthologies, but I may get to it one of these days as the rights devolve to me. One has all that nice control when you do it all yourself.What can you share about marketing? What didn’t work?It’s ongoing, it’s time-consuming and most writers hate it. I do. But publishers don’t do it anymore. Oh, maybe if you’re ever so famous. I’ve tried a bunch of stuff, even hired a publicist, but it was pretty much a waste of money. I have a great gal who helps me with computer things and we’ve become great friends. But it’s just getting your name and work in front of the public on and on and on. Speaking to groups is great, and you can hope that the more you write the more your name will become familiar. All the social media is a must.
About You:
Tricks to make writing easier.It’s not supposed to be easy, but it’s fun most of the time. When you get a good scene going, you soar.What writers inspire you? Updike, because he notices the smallest things. Maybe all the good writers do. Don Delillo, Pat Conroy, T.C.Boyle, Chrisopher Moore, Richard Russo, Barabara Kingsolver. David Sedaris is hilarious, Christopher Buckley. Tony Hillerman, Elmore Leonard so simple…well, on and on.What do you read for enjoyment?All of the above. I’m really all over the map in what I read. I sort of lean to literary, but well- written trash is fun, too.What’s next for you?As I mentioned above, White River has gone off to the publisher. It will probably be out the first of the year. I’ve done some short stories, and have put together some contest work. I’m relaxing doing a little romance that’s been around in my drawer for awhile.Where can we find you? My website is www.virginianosky.com. I have a trailer on YouTube for The Fall From Paradise Valley. I just did a long interview on web radio with Al Cole, a broadcaster out of Boston. All my books are on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, ChampagneBooks.com/store. Some of them are in libraries around town, but they can always be ordered. Poisoned Pen book store has several.Thanks Virginia!For those of you in the Phoenix area, Virginia will be giving a Workshop:"Writing Romantic Scenes" for the Scottsdale Society of Womens Writers on October 31, 5:30-7:30, at the Chaparral Suites Resort in Scottsdale.Blue Turquoise, White Shell is a contemporary multicultural romance mixed with historical fiction. It has won three First Place Glyph Awards from the Arizona Book Publishing Association.When a privileged east-coast Med school student agrees to work on the Navajo reservation in exchange for getting her Harvard education paid in full, the last thing she expects is to fall for the tribe's newest congressional Golden Boy, Nicholas Nakai. But what is in her secretive grandfather's past that makes him send Lily to the Rez? You'll have to read to find out!
I am Leo Hear Me Roar (or) Why I Quit My Job
I am a Leo. I totally connect with it. I've always loved cats, the color yellow, and the warmth of the sun on my face. And a big fluffy mane.I'm super-creative, super sensitive, I love being the center of attention. The biggest compliment you could give me is to appreciate something I've made or laugh at something funny I've said. It makes me happy to make others happy. And recognition. Just say,
Hey, Heidi, you did a great job.
In other words: I do it for the applause.
The biggest insult you could give me is to assume that I can't do something. In which case I will most likely treat it as a challenge to prove you wrong.I also have a cat named Leo.In this, my birthday month, a lot of changes have been taking place. First of all, I left my job as a magazine merchandiser. I have to say, it has been a great job for me the past three and a half years. The hours were flexible & the pay decent. I will miss the people at my two stores, the employees as well as the customers. Even though I worked for an outside vendor, the people at the store always made me feel I was part of the team. I absolutely LOVED making sure all of the magazines looked JUST SO: perfectly spaced, stacked evenly, and easy for the customer to browse, and appealing to buy. It helps to be crazy-detail-oriented and slightly OCD when making a magazine rack look so AWESOME.But my greatest pleasure of the job was helping a customer finding something to read. I love selling books.My biggest frustration with my job is that I had absolutely no control over what books we stocked. They came pre-ordered, shipped in cardboard boxes every week. Most were your big-name sellers: James Patterson, Nora Roberts and the like. We did get a few literary treasures, and I did my best to help guide people to new and noteworthy authors, and try new genres (like YA! - see my little YA section in the front there?)But every week, I'd have folks asking for something that we didn't carry. And I'd read Publisher's Weekly, hear about all of these great new titles out there, and on our shelves, in pre-plan-o-grammed slots, stood the same sorry old titles, month after month, collecting dust. Why? Is it someone meeting a sales quota? Does Nora Roberts have evil geniuses hitting the "buy" button at distributing warehouses? Who knows. All I know is, in the great scheme of things, I was simply the schlub unpacking the box in the backroom, and getting merchandise out to the sales floor. And then I'd walk into Barnes & Noble or even (shudder) Costco, and see the titles that PW wrote about that week. I mean, even the book page in People magazine had better titles than we had a t the store. Ugh.Once I had a customer ask me:
Are you the book BUYER?
I wish.Besides my frustration at my limited amount of input, I began to have physical problems. Today, in fact, I am going in for an MRI so the doctor can see a nice pretty picture of the disk in my neck that has bulged out enough to pinch a nerve, causing numbness and tingling through my arm to my fingertips, and a baseball-sized knot in my shoulder. Ouch.Thanks, in part, to:This is how magazines come shipped to the store. Each of those bundles* weighs approximately 25 lbs. They get delivered in these red plastic totes, and each tote weighs 40-50 lbs each. A typical delivery at my biggest store averaged 25-30 totes. I figured on a good day, unpacking new magazines, lifting and stacking the totes, and carrying stacks and stacks of magazines to the checkouts and the main aisle and then packing up all of the old magazines, for about 6+ hours, I would move about 1,500 lbs of merchandise in a day.So, while it is a very good workout, it's also a little hard on the ol' bod. And when my company announced that they were no longer going to have the accounts of the stores I serviced, I figured the timing was just as well. So I decided to move on. But I am very grateful for the experience. I learned so much in the past three years—not only about work, but about people, and a lot about myself.I do have a couple of ideas in mind about where I want my future to go, career-wise, but for the immediate future, I'm going to concentrate on some yoga & physical therapy, get back to nesting, being a mom, playing with my horses and writing a lot. (Insert happy face here)Which brings me to the last thing I wanted to share with you: pictures of our latest outing. You may recognize one of our favorite get-away spots in the mountains.
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*BTW: Shame on Oprah. For some reason, her magazines are some of the heaviest. I like Oprah, I think she does some really great stuff. But for someone who preaches how to make everything better all the time, she should really be printing her magazine on recycled paper. REAL SIMPLE is printed on recycled paper, AND they don't use that heavy-duty plastic wrapping either, and they are the lightest weight magazine I have stocked. THANK YOU, REAL SIMPLE! Rachael Ray also prints on recycled paper. Oprah, your magazine needs to get in shape.
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P.S. In brief: In recognition of one of the true pioneers of the feminist movement, and the founder of Cosmopolitan magazine, Helen Gurley Brown, who passed away this week at the age of 90.Here's a piece from NPR.
Meet the Writer - Deborah J. Ledford
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