A Gift That Keeps On Giving!

 

Larry B. Gildersleeve

Typing – a gift that keeps on giving

The world’s most successful novelist, James Patterson, eschews the use of a computer and writes all his books longhand – in pencil. As did the late Pat Conroy, whose bestselling works of fiction were many times the word-count of Patterson. It’s something that as a relative newcomer (four novels published over the past eight years) I struggle to get my mind around because I learned early-on how essential constant editing and re-writing are in the process.  

I regard my computer’s software as a “comb” at my fingertips to remove the tangles and smooth things out until the finished product looks just the way my editor and I want. Conroy obviously had a different editor relationship than mine, once quoted as saying: “I send her (Nan Telese) the manuscript and she finds the book in it.”  

When I was a junior in high school decades ago, I enrolled in typing class. My mother thought the skill would come in handy in my future, and I anticipated befriending girls in a classroom setting I might assume were otherwise unapproachable. Both of us were right. I still remember the phrase the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog uses every letter in the alphabet, and to this day I remain a fairly fast touch-typist who isn’t slowed down looking at the keyboard.

I owe my mother, a librarian, my love of reading, and my typing. Just wish she’d still been with us to read my books. Her opinion would have meant so much to me, and I think she might’ve been just a little bit proud.

 

Studying authors – as well as their writing

Authors, especially fiction-writers, are constantly encouraged to be avid readers, especially in their genre(s). Sage advice I follow, as well as reading outside my genre to study how other authors, the likes of Robert Parker and Stuart Woods, weave dialogue into their storyline. But over the past few years, I’ve also begun reading about the authors I’ve come to admire, recently and over time.

Stephen King reveals himself in his On Writing – A Memoir of the Craft, for my money, the best book ever written on the subject. I felt I really got to know Pat Conroy in the biography My Exaggerated Life, with which he cooperated, and A Lowcountry Heart, published after his passing. There’s Mockingbird about Harper Lee, published in 2008 while she was still alive and updated following her death. In 2022, James Patterson released his autobiography with his name as the title, and Kurt Vonnegut – The Making of a Writer, was published by one of his longtime friends.

I got a relatively late start in life as a novelist, and I have so much to learn. For me, reading about authors in addition to their work makes it a much richer experience.    

Finalist: Writers Digest 2022 Rhyming Poetry Contest



Bronze Award: Illumination Awards - Romance Fiction Category



Blue by You tells the uniquely romantic story of a man who falls in love with the same woman twice, decades and a thousand miles apart, but is a total stranger to her both times.

Daniel, a former D.C. trial attorney, has fled to Colorado following the cancer death of his young wife, a woman he'd known since their childhood. It's in a rural mountain setting two years later that a chance encounter results in a one-week love affair with Paula, a lifestyle writer from Nashville.

Paula is a person of faith; Daniel was while his wife was alive, but no longer. There is a soft-touch Christian theme throughout the book, especially about the power of prayer and the reality of redemption.

Paula leaves after the seven days, promising to return, but doesn't. And Daniel never hears from her again. They are reunited over twenty years later in Nashville, but a rare illness has deprived Paula of any memory of Daniel.

The two former lovers have been living very different lives over the years before they're brought together again by an up and coming country music singer who might be their daughter.

Daniel struggles with reliving his Colorado memories while falling in love with the same woman again who now can't share those memories with him. Together, they make new memories they can share -- until time runs out.

The book's title is wordplay on the song Blue Bayou, with Blue being an Australian Shepherd Paula comments is often by Daniel's side.

Larry B. Gildersleeve

American by birth and Southern by the Grace of God, Larry was born in Knoxville, TN, and raised and educated in Virginia and Kentucky. A three-decade corporate career took him across the country and around the world before he returned to Kentucky in 2014 to realize his long-deferred dream of becoming a published author. His three Parchment Series novels were released between 2016 and 2019, and his fourth novel, Blue by You, was published in mid-2022. All of Larry's works of fiction will be in the Christian and Inspirational genres. He is a member of the Association of American Christian Fiction Writers, the Academy of American Poets, the Alliance of Independent Authors, the Author's Guild and the Bluegrass Writer's Guild. Larry is married; the father of two and grandfather of four.

https://www.larrygildersleeve.com/

Let’s Turn The Page

Larry B. Gildersleeve

In print and online, 2020 has been referred to as Annus Horribilis, an intentional twist on John Dryden’s 1667 poem Annus Mirabilis (year of miracles). Queen Elizabeth first coined the term in a speech marking her fortieth anniversary as Britain’s monarch when she said: “1992 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure. It has turned out to be an annus horribilis. I suspect that I am not alone in thinking it so.”

Why did she think she’d had a horrible year back then? In March, her second son Andrew separated from his wife, Sarah Ferguson. In April, Elizabeth’s only daughter, Anne, separated from her husband, Mark Phillips. In May, the book Diana: Her True Story in Her Words documented for a voyeuristic world her fractured marriage to Charles, the queen’s oldest son and future king. In succeeding months, the tabloid press recounted in excruciating detail the alleged infidelities of both Charles and Diana. On November 20th, four days before the queen’s speech, a fire destroyed a portion of Windsor Castle, the historic royal residence in London.

A Word …About Words

By Larry Gildersleeve

When I began writing fiction five years ago, I read that readers, agents and publishers all required 80,000 to 100,000 words for me to have any chance at success. 50,000 would be a minimum; anything less was somewhat disparagingly referred to as a novella. My first two novels are 65,000 each. My about-to-be-released third is 53,000, and I’m happily heading toward Novella Land. 

Since it ranked #1 on the NY Times bestseller list for over a year, and sold more than 50 million copies worldwide, I doubt the late singer/songwriter/author James Robert Waller agonized much over The Bridges of Madison County being a novella. 

Stephen King has published 58 books, including several under his nom de plume Richard Bachman, yet a reviewer of his 2018 novella Elevation derided it as “A mere slip of a book.” Really? That critic likely never authored a book and forgot or never read Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Of Mice and Men or Hemmingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.  

I understand James Patterson, arguably the world’s most prolific successful writer at work today, has said his future releases will be around 125 pages. His reason? The shrinking time people are willing to devote to reading, as well as the proliferation and popularity of reading on electronic devices like Nook and Kindle, even cell phones.

The best-selling book of all time is the Bible. In it, the account of creation in Genesis is told in only 400 words. The Ten Commandments needed just 179 words; the Lord’s Prayer a mere 66 words.

I believe country music songwriters, especially those in years gone by, are some of the world’s greatest poets and storytellers. Their few words capture a listener in seconds, and unfold an entire story of wonderous joy or painful heartbreak in less than three minutes. Oh, and the brief lyrics of Bob Dylan’s songs won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Literature.

Just sayin’.

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Larry B. Gildersleeve is a father of two and grandfather of four who turned to writing after a four-decade career as a corporate executive. He lives in Kentucky and is the author of Dancing Alone Without Music and Follow Your Dreams. His third novel, entitled The Girl on the Bench, is scheduled for release in mid-2019.www.larrygildersleeve.com

A Dream Realized

By Larry B. Gildersleeve

Being a published author had been a dream of mine since my high school days, but it took about fifty years to begin that journey.

My first two self-published novels using CreateSpace (now Kindle Direct Publishing) received favorable reviews in newspapers and magazines. My third novel and my first non-fiction work, both self-published, will be released later this year, and I’ve begun an aggressive search for an agent to hopefully gain access to a mainstream publisher.

I’ve never taken a creative writing course or other formal instruction. I learned to write fiction through exchanges of emails and iterations of my manuscripts with Lynda McDaniel, my outstanding writing coach and editor. Since I live in Kentucky and Lynda is in California, we’ve never met, but that hasn’t diminished the process in any way.

Because I had so much to learn, I wrote, and Lynda edited, six versions of my first novel before finally publishing the seventh in 2016. My second, released in 2017, began with a detailed chapter-by-chapter outline to aid me in focusing on development of my characters, as well as aligning the story line and timeline. The outline was critical to planting seeds of tension and conflict, and then harvesting them.

I wrote my first novel without thinking about things like genre or writing style. I had a story in mind, and just began to write. I’ve since focused my writing in two genres, Christian and Inspirational, yet striving to appeal to a broader secular audience. The more I wrote, the more my style evolved -- short, fast-paced chapters with page-turning endings and hopefully believable and memorable characters. And fewer characters. My first two novels had fifteen and eighteen characters respectively; the third has only four.

The biggest change in writing the second book came with following the chapter outline. With the third, in addition to the outline I’ve adopted the approach of going back to re-read all that I’ve previously written before continuing on a different day. Laborious and time-consuming, yes. But it keeps me immersed in the evolving story and the characters, as well as ferreting out repetitions of words and phrases, sometimes from one paragraph to the next. I liken it to repeatedly passing a comb through tangled hair, getting a smoother and smoother pathway to my desired outcome.

My research revealed the two most important considerations for marketing a book by a new author are the title and the cover, so I’ve given very careful consideration to both. It’s what will catch a reader’s eye when they see the title in print, or a picture of the cover on Amazon.com or other online marketing channels.

My long-deferred dream has finally come true. As another author once said, I write for pleasure and publish for profit. There’s been some profit, but more important is the pleasure I find every day that I write.    

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Larry B. Gildersleeve is a father of two and grandfather of four who turned to writing after a four-decade career as a corporate executive. He lives in Kentucky and is the author of Dancing Alone Without Music and Follow Your Dreams. His third novel, entitled The Girl on the Bench, is scheduled for release in mid-2019. www.larrygildersleeve.com