A Few Fast How-Tos and a Book by a Pal

Zestful Blog Post #287

How to deal with not having read the authors you meet.

First of all, nobody reads everybody. Upon meeting another author whom you haven't read, say, "So wonderful to meet you! I've heard great things about your work!" That's it. Don't overdo it.

If you need to make convo with someone for an extended period, such as being seated together at a lunch or dinner, you can say, "You know, I'm afraid I really don't know your work, but I've love to hear how you got started."

If it’s a trad-published author, you can ask, “Do you like your agent?” Every author who has representation is curious about every other author's agent. 

How to be a happy tyrant.

Demand the utmost from your characters. You are both composer and conductor! Sometimes, during a demanding passage under an exacting baton, musicians strain so hard to deliver the effects asked for that they snap a string or blow their lips out of shape.

Only by going to the limit, and risking going past it, and suffering whatever damage might be the penalty, will we find out if what we thought was our limit is really that.

We can only discover new strengths by exhausting the old ones.

How to avoid a headbanging mistake.

If you have an opportunity to do a live event like a booksigning and they want to know good dates for you, look ahead on line and find when the next Olympics and major sporting events are going to be. Try not to schedule anything during the Olympics, the Super Bowl, Presidential election night, or, come to think of it, the soccer World Cup final sequence. The World Series is hit-and-miss (ha, I just made a pun), and not as much of a ratings draw as the other things. Kentucky Derby, I guess if you live in Kentucky.

I'll always hold grudges against Sarah Hughes, Irina Slutskaya, and Michelle Kwan for making nobody come to my booksigning event in San Francisco on the night of the women's Olympic figure skating finals in 2002.

And now for a word about a book by a buddy. Congratulations to Jim Misko on his multi-prizewinning novel.

From the cover:

Miles Foster is a newly minted teacher who dreams of getting a teaching job in the highly respected and financially stable Portland, Oregon school system where everything is available, and where he and his wife call home. But the only opening for his talents is in a remote lumber mill town in central Oregon, two hundred miles away. It is a poor school with forty students, and is controlled by a jealous superintendent and school board who tolerate no thinking outside the box and who conspire to destroy his teaching career.

Miles must find a way to educate students who have been passed along regardless of what they learned, and defeat the damaging control of the school board and superintendent without losing his marriage or his job, or both.

Buy it HERE.

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