Lost

The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown (2009: Doubleday).

In my continuing journey toward getting my first novel published, I've subjected several drafts to the scrutiny of many readers – friends, experts, potential agents and editors – several of whom of whom have been very generous with their time and advice. Through scores of critiques, rejections, and painstaking edits – even a few wholesale rewrites – my story has improved in nearly every way. The plot, the characters, the quality of the prose, even the sequencing of events gained sharper definition. Mistakes got caught, nuances developed, twists emerged and grew sharper. My novel, now two-thirds the original length, tells a better story in fewer pages.

For this reason, among others, I've resisted the temptation to self-publish. True to my "Extroverted" Myers-Briggs profile, I process information most effectively through interaction with others. The world is my editor.

It makes me wonder how I'll fare on the second novel, assuming the first ever finds its way into print. I've enjoyed many writers' debuts, only to become increasingly disenchanted with their subsequent works. Do successful writers eschew the long scrutiny we endure to get our first books' toes in the door, and thereby miss out on the myriad of ways to improve upon early drafts? No doubt the desire to never again have to jump through all of those editing hoops plays a role, as do publishing contract deadlines.

In this context I admit to having read all five of Dan Brown's novels, including his latest, The Lost Symbol. It may well be the last one of his I read. Brown reprises "brilliant symbologist" Robert Langdon's unlikely role as the solver of ancient mysteries, racing against the clock to save the world from disaster at the hands of a twisted soul seeking revenge for old wrongs. As usual, vast, secret, and therefore misunderstood societies use ritual and archaic symbols to maintain an air of secrecy that Langdon is uniquely qualified to decode. Or so we would think. At critical moments, the good professor gets stumped by mysteries that appear rather straightforward – or at least, they are simpler than the ones he so casually succeeded in understanding one scene before. The tactic is intended to build suspense, I suppose, but at times it just seemed to belabor the obvious.

Even more than The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons, The Lost Symbolis plot-driven and character thin. As usual, and thank heavens, the bad guys are more interesting than Langdon, although Brown does a good job of masking just how many nemeses the good professor is up against. Langdon himself is perhaps the least interesting main character ever to spawn a multi-million dollar series. Naturally he is unable to avail himself of the romantic offering Brown provides him. I wonder if, in a future issuance of this ilk, the author will provide his hero some relationship counseling.

Readers of Da Vinci – although perhaps not his earlier works, Deception Point and Digital Fortress – will recognize Brown's awkward writing – the clichés, artificial cliffhanger devices and manufactured misdirection to simulate suspense. Some of that goes with the genre. What is harder to dismiss is the overdose of repetition, the telling and retelling rather than showing character emotion and intention, and a series of long, tedious monologs. The result is a bloated story of 500 pages where 400 would do, and one that makes the reader work harder than the writer.

All could be forgiven if the stakes involved were both high enough and relevant enough to make the reader care, but unfortunately that isn't the case. Unlike Da Vinci or Demons, Symbol's crisis – the potential revelation of the secrets of the Masonic order, including the participation of national leaders in ancient blood rituals (yawn) – simply doesn't resonate. Even if one cared, the risk is revealed too deep into the story to enable the reader to invest in the crisis. Call me old-fashioned, but it shouldn't take me nearly 200 pages to figure out why I'm reading a book, even – or especially – that of a best-selling novelist. Nor should I have to endure fifty pages of talking heads explaining why I bothered to read the first 450. Once the threat to the main characters is resolved, a quick wrap-up of loose ends should be enough.

I wish I could say I was shocked by the sloppiness of The Lost Symbol, but the fact is that I was not. Brown's earlier novels were far more carefully constructed and tightly edited thrillers, if less dramatic. Da Vinci's breathless language and short, choppy, chapters with leapfrogging scene progressions made that story more accessible to the mass market reader, but required some spoon-feeding of key plot lines to keep all of its myriad details in play. Symbol continues and exacerbates those unfortunate trends. Unfortunately its plot is much thinner than its predecessors and as such is unable to carry the weight those devices add to the narrative. The story gets lost – and Robert Langdon is unable to rescue it.

I wonder what kind of book The Lost Symbol could have been had Mr. Brown spent the time to pare the story to, if not the bone, at least to the well-toned muscle. If Hollywood decides to create a two-hour screenplay out of it (and why not? The series is a money-maker), we may see an approximation of that. If not, then one can only hope that Mr. Brown finds some other incentive to return to the painstaking, difficult task of editing and revising his future work in the same careful way he did as a first-time novelist. We would all benefit from that.

Family Ties

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy (2006: Vintage Books).

For most people, family relationships underlie all other relationships we form in our lives. You can choose your friends, the saying goes, but not your family. Sometimes that can be a blessing – most of us can remember a time when family members rallied to our cause against an unfair, evil world. Other times family can be a source of stress, misunderstanding, and heartache from which there is no escape. Having grown up as the seventh child in a brood of nine kids, there were times when all I wanted was for the people who knew me best to simply leave me the hell alone.

Under normal circumstances, family relationships are complemented by other relationships – friends, lovers, coworkers, even casual acquaintances provide alternative outlets for love, camaraderie, competition, and other healthy human interaction. When extreme situations strip away those alternative outlets, the peculiar strains, stresses and strengths of family bonds are put to the ultimate test.

In The Road, Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic tale of a man and his son's struggle to survive, extreme circumstances reduce the world of the two unnamed main characters to pure mutual dependence. The boy, at first innocent and vulnerable, depends on his father to steal food and blankets, seek shelter, continuously improvise new strategies for survival, and even, when the need arises, to kill. Less obvious but no less real is the man's dependence on the boy. The boy's presence brings to him a sense of responsibility and hope, and, we soon discover, of much-needed humanity. We're the good guys, right? the boy asks repeatedly. That's why we don't eat people, right? Right, says the man, and they walk away from fresh corpses, one day closer to the brink of starvation.

That the two depend on each other for their very survival is a point driven home in a myriad of ways both gentle and firm. We learn that the absence of the boy's mother was by her own self-sacrifice to motivate the man to take action to save the boy. But it also saved himself, for without her disappearance and his desperation to save the child he would have done nothing, and all would be lost. Time and again the man is motivated to improvise, to press on, to take extreme measures and improbable risks only out of his sense of paternal duty. Likewise, beyond the boy's diminutive size, his naivety prompts him to shame his father into sharing their meager supply of food and blankets with any passing stranger, placing them both at perhaps greater risk in their Hobbesian man-eat-dog world.

The lack of other relationships in their lives – except confrontational, violent ones – warp the perspectives of both man and boy on their trek to the sea. The boy, born after whatever apocalypse wiped out humanity and much of its infrastructure, innately senses that the cutthroat competition to survive is somehow not normal, and his hunger for healthy human contact exceeds the pain in his empty belly. The man, having known the love of a wife and family, neighbors and friends, remains at constant war with himself whenever another human crosses their path. Friend, or foe? Almost always he assumes foe. He must, but that is not the way it was, and he hates it. Is this all that his son will know? If so, why go through the trouble of surviving? Why not use the two remaining bullets on themselves instead of attackers, who could mercifully put them out of their misery?

The Road is typical of McCarthy's work in its economy of language, its rule-breaking narrative and grammar, and its minimalist punctuation and structure. The book for example, has no chapter breaks and nearly all dialog attribution is inferred from context. Yet the reading is not laborious because the writing is so well-paced and clear, and the narrative, while understated, packs such emotional wallop.

I nearly always pine for the ending of books – those I like, because I'm curious to see how the hero solves his dilemma, and those I dislike because I can't wait to be done with it. But I raced to the conclusion of this book for a different reason: I wanted the pain of this man and boy to end. I had grown to love them. There were, I realized when I turned the final page, like family. And in that moment I wanted them to know, I was here for them, the whole time.

The Crying Tree: The Far Reach of Family Roots

When I was sixteen, my family, me included, moved halfway across the country to a place with a climate, culture, and to some extent language very foreign to what I had grown up with. In the long run, the change of scenery did me a world of good, but at the time the entire world felt like a foreign and lonely place. I was sure my parents only did this because they hated me, or because they were crazy, or both. Such is the thinking of teenagers.

The truth was far more complex - or far more simple, depending on one's perspective. Driven by the dying construction boom in the northeast in the 1970's, we followed so many others into the prospering sun belt - and then, as the boom went bust in the American south, we again moved on. Some, like my parents and a few siblings, moved back to Massachusetts and the comfort of our family roots. Others, like me, explored new horizons. The reasons for these and subsequent moves were always equally compelling, to us if not to the casual observer.

Americans, more than the citizens of most nations, move their homesteads. We do it for reasons as varied as there are people. The effect on families, and individual family members, is unpredictable. This unpredictability can make for some excellent story-telling. Such is the case with first-time novelist Naseem Rakha's The Crying Tree.

The novel revolves around the family of Shep Stanley, a teenage boy killed shortly after Nate, the boy's father, moved them all from his wife Irene's childhood home to a remote town in eastern Oregon. Irene blames Nate for the tragedy and escapes into a self-imposed emotional exile, obsessed with the seemingly endless wait for the execution of Shep's killer, Daniel. The family returns to Illinois and each of them - Nate, Irene, and Shep's sister Bliss - retreat into their own emotional shells, a family in name and structure only.

After nineteen years, prison Superintendent Tab Mason informs Irene that Daniel's execution will finally happen - in four weeks. This sets in motion a series of revelations that shake the Stanley family to its core. Nine years before, on what should have been Shep's 25th birthday, Irene's aborted suicide attempt prompted her to re-evaluate her life. Rather than live for Daniel's death, she startles herself and the prisoner by writing him a letter of forgiveness. This leads to a secret nine-year correspondence that blossoms into an odd relationship, something akin to friendship.

The notice of execution brings to light not only Irene's secrets, but also some held by Nate that finally explain Shep's otherwise pointless murder and the boy's connection to the convicted man. Bliss, now a Texas prosecutor, intervenes in unexpected ways to help her estranged parents come to terms with the feelings they've long suppressed and have only begun to understand. The execution also challenges Superintendent Mason's uneasy truce with himself over his own buried family history, including his relationship with his estranged brother languishing in his own prison hell - on the other side of the wall, so to speak, from his law-abiding younger brother.

The Crying Tree is a story of violence and healing, of hurting and forgiveness, of loves discovered and lost and then, sometimes, rediscovered. It is the story of the complicated and often hidden relationships among people brought together by circumstances beyond their control - sometimes by a seemingly rash decision to move across the country, other times by decisions made by perfect strangers in relation to people brought close by sheer accident. Complex characters housed in the shells of simple people expertly interwoven by beautiful language and artful narrative bring The Crying Tree into vivid focus from page one. Rakha's writing reminds the reader that even what appears to be a cut-and-dried situation may contain nuances of meaning that often escape our attention at first glance - and that the bonds of family take many forms.

Recommended.

The Crying Tree by Naseem Rakha (2009: Random House).

Choices, choices

Finishing a novel, I'm learning, is kind of like tending a garden. It's never really done until harvest. In the case of novels, "harvest" refers to seeing it on the bookshelves at Borders and Barnes & Noble. Or, in the case of Portland writers, Powell's.

Lying in Judgment, for good or for ill, is not yet at the point of harvest. Which means, there may be plenty of spade work left.

The story, for those of you who don't know, is about a Portland man (Peter Robertson) who serves on the jury of a murder trial - for, as it turns out, the murder that he committed.

After confirming that his wife was cheating on him, Peter followed and - in a moment of uncontrolled rage - killed the wrong man. Meanwhile his wife left him, his mom suffers a debilitating stroke, and his best friend and employee is accused of sexual harassment. The trial offers an opportunity to put at least the legal risk behind him by convicting the innocent defendant, who, it turns out, had plenty of motive to kill the actual victim.

Agents and readers alike have commented favorably on the compelling nature of the book's premise, the interesting twists and turns in the plot, and the tightness of the writing. But a few things have kept it from selling. Tops on that list is that it's hard to root for a main character who's a murderer - and who is trying to convict someone else of his crime. Those are, unfortunately, core drivers of the story.

However, recently a few kind readers - one an agent - provided some useful feedback, which has led to some ideas for revision of the story to help address those issues. I'm incubating a few of them. To wit:

- Length. Publishers, I am told, will not consider a book from a first-time author exceeding 90,000 words. After countless round of trimming, LiJ is at 93,500. Where to cut? The trial, I am told. Too much courtroom loses the reader.

- If Peter's problem is that he's rooting for conviction, maybe he should instead argue for acquittal. That makes him more likable, but would it take too much away from the narrative tension? Also this is more than a tweak - the entire second half of the novel would have to be rewritten.

- Maybe Peter needs a foil. There's nobody in the story who is a demonstrably worse character than him. His friend Frankie could serve that purpose. Perhaps he needs to be guilty - and obviously so - of that harassment? Peter's continued friendship of him would show loyalty, and hence greater likability, plus he'd seem more likable by comparison.

I continue to tighten the prose and work on sharpening Peter's voice, but those are easy chores compared to the changes that these very interesting suggestions would require.

What do you think? What would help improve the story AND help improve its chances of being published?

Escaping the POD People

Lying in Judgment will not, at least for the time being, be self-published. Or hybrid-published.

The hybrid offer from Inkwater - a print-on-demand contract for the first 1,000 copies in which I spend $1,000 for design and layout, another $1,000 for proof-edits and probably another $1,000 for marketing and a customized cover - doesn't pencil out for me. One, it's too expensive. Two, I don't have it. Three, I think that I should be paid for selling my book to a publisher, not the other way around. And four, and perhaps most important, I believe that this book will earn a traditional publishing contract with a major house for commercial mass-marketing.

Even if I wanted to go with a POD-based self-publishing route, much more affordable options exist with better-known companies. CreateSpace, an Amazon.com company, and Lulu, who also distributes with Amazon, provide essentially the same services and opportunities for a much lower up-front investment ($50 - $200) and higher royalties. Both are more DIY-type outfits, but the difference between Inkwater's premium services and what Lulu and CreateSpace offer is kind of like the benefits you get from premium gas. The mileage obtained doesn't pay for the considerably higher price.

There is also the fact that the sample books Inkwater provided didn't exactly sell their editing services to me. I shouldn't cringe when reading, ever, and I did. I don't want my readers doing that about my writing.

There are certainly benefits to POD self-publishing - and products that are more appropriate for it than Lying in Judgment, such as niche books, vanities, experimental designs, etc. But LiJ isn't any of those. It's a legal thriller written for readers - people who buy and read dozens of books per year. For that I need the help of a big house with broad, deep distribution channels. POD firms don't have that.

Nor do they have established marketing platforms for beginning writers. I would have had to buy marketing services from Inkwater, for example - yet, they couldn't even give me an outline of a plan, nor point to a similar book in their catalog with the type of sales I'm looking for. I'd have been as responsible for marketing as they were.

Not a good plan. I'm a writer, not a marketer, or publisher. I'm willing to hustle to sell my books, but I need expert help on a marketing strategy.

So, I'll hold off. I have four appointments with industry book agents at the Willamette Writers Conference in two weeks. Wish me luck.

To POD or not to POD

To POD, or not to POD. That is the question.

Tomorrow morning I will meet with Portland-based Print-on-Demand publisher Inkwater Press to discuss their offer. For $999 they will "publish" my book, Lying in Judgment - whatever "publish" means, when the actual printing doesn't occur until and unless someone places an order for it. From what I can tell, it includes layout, design, ISBN registration, a bar code, and establishing a distribution channel through Ingram, Amazon.com, and other on-line sources. Editing and marketing would be my responsibility.

In effect, POD makes me a co-publisher of my own work.

For four years I've been pitching my book the old-fashioned way to traditional publishing houses, hoping for a commercial contract for what should be a book with broad audience appeal. For readers new to my story, Lying in Judgment tells the story of a man serving on the jury of a murder trial for the murder he committed. Pretty cool premise, no? However, I've had no success pitching it to agents and editors. Not doubt the issue preventing publication thus far has been, at least in part, the writing itself. Its somewhat distanced, over-the-shoulder point of view of the murderous main character trying to convict an innocent man of his crime made him even harder to root for.

A recent rewrite hopefully addressed that problem. The narrative centers much more on his state of mind and is expressed in his own voice - until the newly-added epilogue that provides an unexpected twist from the point of view of a surprise observer. The rewrite did snag the attention of Inkwater's editors as well as two agents (resulting in one rejection so far, and one still deciding).

However, I wonder if I'm too late with this rewrite. The publishing industry is reeling, and has been for several years. Several publishing houses have closed, have been swallowed up by larger companies, or have simply stopped buying new titles. Even the healthy ones have cut way back. Agents have used phrases like "horrible market" repeatedly in correspondence.

On the other hand, actual book sales, while down, have not contracted as deeply as the overall economy. People still buy books. It's relatively cheap entertainment, after all. At least one segment, electronic books, has expanded dramatically, with the rise of the Kindle, iPhone, and Sony Reader, among others. Opportunities to sell books still exist. The question is, what's the right way to do it? More to the point, what's the right way to sell my book?

POD advocates (particularly the publishers) often claim that their model is the way of the future, and that the traditional model is dying a painful death. There's no doubt that the market is shifting and, overall, contracting. The question is whether the POD way is the right response to the changing market - in general, and again, particularly for my novel.

In some ways it appears to be. POD lowers the up-front cost -- and risk -- to the publisher, since they don't have thousands of units of unsold inventory (read: sunk costs) by unknown authors consuming valuable warehouse or bookstore shelf space. Also, the writer is expected to pony up for some share of those up-front costs - if not all.

But in other ways, POD goes against the grain. Printing one book at a time is much more expensive than printing 1000 at a time, so POD-published books are more expensive. Also, in tight times, careful shoppers want more information before buying, but POD books are rarely reviewed by independent professionals such as Literary Digest. Nor can the consumer see, or feel, the product in advance; they have to order it on-line, then wait for delivery. If it's not on the shelf, it can't scream "Buy me!" to the casual Barnes and Noble shopper.

Considerable argument persists about the benefits of a traditional publisher vs. print-on-demand when it comes to marketing and distribution. From what I have read, publishers do precious little in this area for first-time authors - and this was pretty much true even before the market tanked.

Thus, whichever path I take, it's clear that most of the work of selling my book will fall on my shoulders. What's not clear is whether, in addition to the role of Author and Marketer, I should also take on - and can succeed in - the role of co-publisher as well.