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My Favorite Historical Novels

10/25/2013

1 Comment

 
I could cite a great number of historical novels here, because there are so many that are outstanding, but I’ll choose only two: Ironweed by William Kennedy and The Road to Wellville by TC Boyle.

Ironweed, which won a Pulitzer Prize in fiction, completes Kennedy’s “Albany Cycle”, a marvelous three-book series set in and around Albany, New York. The cycle starts with Legs, the story of 1920s and 1930s gangster Jack “Legs” Diamond, as told by attorney Marcus Gorman. The second, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, takes the titular character, a small-time and tarnished gambler during the Great Depression, through a harrowing kidnapping story.

The cycle finishes only a few weeks after the end of book two, with Ironweed, the story of Billy Phelan’s father, Francis, who returns to Albany with Helen, his companion and fellow hobo.

In his youth, Francis was a baseball player with major league potential and ambitions until he lost a finger in a fight. He fled Albany after dropping his thirteen-day-old son, Gerald, killing him. Decades later he returns to Albany to face the ghosts of his past, both literally and figuratively. Here’s how the book starts:

Riding up the winding road of Saint Agnes Cemetery in the back of the rattling old truck, Francis Phelan became aware that the dead, even more than the living, settled down in neighborhoods. The truck was suddenly surrounded by fields of monuments and cenotaphs of kindred design and striking size, all guarding the privileged dead. But the truck moved on and the limits of mere privilege became visible, for here now came the acres of truly prestigious death; illustrious men and women, captains of life without their diamonds, furs, carriages, and limousines, but buried in pomp and glory, vaulted in great tombs built like heavenly safe deposit boxes, or parts of the Acropolis. And ah yes, here too, inevitably, came the flowing masses, row upon row of them under simple headstones and simpler crosses. Here was the neighborhood of the Phelans.

Ironweed is a story of guilt and redemption, or such redemption as one can find in this life. It is at once violent and tender, hateful and loving. In my opinion, this is a masterpiece of American literature. My favorite book of all time.

The Road to Wellville is a very different book. I hadn’t read any of Boyle’s previous novels when I came across it lying on a new fiction table at a local bookstore. The cover looked interesting, and the cover flap info showed it was set in Battle Creek, Michigan, which is only about 30 miles from where I live. I read a few random pages and decided I immediately needed to devour it.

The Road to Wellville is one of those rare books that create grief about halfway through – a book so good and so much fun to read that I start to feel sad that I am going to finish it and will no longer be able to look forward to reading it every day. I come across those only every few years, and they all get reread.

Boyle brilliantly skewers the health industry of the early Twentieth Century with the story of Will Lightbody, who is dragged to the Battle Creek “San” (sanitarium) by his grieving wife, who had recently miscarried their child. John Harvey Kellogg, the founder and head doctor of the San, leads the patients with his brand of healthfulness, much of which is on the mark, with a few notable exceptions like radium treatment. Kellogg was a real man and was very influential at the time. He created the breakfast cereal industry and could certainly be described as a force of nature, which Boyle brings to the fore in this book. Here’s how it starts:

Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, inventor of the corn flake and peanut butter, not to mention caramel-cereal coffee, Bromose, Nuttolene and some seventy-five other gastrically correct foods, paused to level his gaze on the heavyset woman in the front row.  He was having difficulty believing what he’d just heard.  As was the audience, judging from the gasp that arose after she’d raised her hand, stood shakily and demanded to know what was so sinful about a good porterhouse steak–it had done for the pioneers, hadn’t it?  And for her father and his father before him?

The Doctor pushed reflectively at the crisp white frames of his spectacles.  To all outward appearances he was a paradigm of concentration, a scientist formulating his response, but in fact he was desperately trying to summon her name-who was she, now?  He knew her, didn’t he?  That nose, those eyes… he knew them all, knew them by name, a matter of pride… and then, in a snap, it came to him: Tindermarsh.  Mrs. Violet.  Complaint, obesity.  Underlying cause, autointoxication.  Tindermarsh.  Of course.  He couldn’t help feeling a little self-congratulatory flush of pride–nearly a thousand patients and he could call up any one of them as plainly as if he had their charts spread out before him . … But enough of that–the audience was stirring, a monolithic force, one great naked psyche awaiting the hand to clothe it.  Dr. Kellogg cleared his throat.


If you want to know what he says, you’ll have to get the book.
;>)

(As seen on WritingHistoricalNovels.com)
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Advice to an Aspiring Author

10/10/2013

2 Comments

 
A friend of a friend recently asked me for some advice. She has written six books, but none have been traditionally published. She's self-published the last two and feels they are good enough for the big guys to pay attention. I gave her the following advice, which I think would apply to an awful lot of aspiring authors out there. Hope this helps.

Given your situation, here's my advice.
  1. Make sure the novel you're going to pitch is as perfect as you can make it. Agents (or worse, agents' assistants) read with the idea of finding something that will let them reject the book, so they can move on to the next one on the giant pile. You can't give them anything to use. As they say, "The first sentence has to be the best you've ever written, and every one after that has to be better than the last."
  2. You have to jump through whatever hoops your desired agents want you to jump through. Give them exactly what they want, when they want it. Be eager, positive, gently persistent. (For example, if an agent says to expect she'll get back with you within 30 days, after forty-five shoot her an email asking about progress.)
  3. Query letters are the second hardest thing to write. (In my opinion, synopses win by a wide margin.) Here's what I did and recommend everyone do: lead with your greatest strength. Start with why you are querying her, and it should be a good reason, like your book is very much like Author X, who she represents, or something equally compelling. Get the genre and word count out of the way, and then wallop her with the greatest thing about your book. That might be an award it won, a blurb from a respected novelist who writes something similar, or the killer hook. The best thing I've found is starting with "Author Y recommended I query you because ..." (Even if you don't have a personal relationship, if you ask writers for agent recommendations, most would accommodate you.) Then hit that killer hook.
  4. Knowing writers who write what you do is always helpful. They can open doors. Even the mention of their names will open doors.
  5. A great hook is essential. Can you make your story compelling in just a few words? My agent is going to be pitching the book I'm working on right now as "Huck Finn meets Goodfellas." Two dissimilar works, but both interesting and successful, and it sounds like a book I'd want to read. If an agent you're querying thinks the hook is compelling, she's going to want to read the book.
  6. This is the most important piece of advice, so burn this one into your retinas. If you are set on being traditionally published, you can't give up. Ever. I got lucky. In 2009, when the publishing industry was completely in the toilet and virtually no new authors were getting contracts, I got a two-book deal with St. Martin's only 4 months after I finished the book and started querying. Now, I think it's a good book, but there were a lot of other good books being rejected. The reason I got the contract was that I happened to be in the right place at the right time. I queried an agent the day after she'd had lunch with an editor looking for a book like mine. Had I queried her two days earlier, she might have remembered that letter. Maybe. A week earlier, I wouldn't even have registered. I've seen a lot of agents going through queries at conferences. They give them 5-10 seconds before they move on to the next. Don't let that depress you. This - and only this - might be why you haven't gotten picked up. You have to keep querying. There are a lot of agents out there, and they all want to sell a new book. Send out 10 queries. If you don't get at least a couple of requests for material, rework your letter and send out 10 more. Keep going. Fine tune. If you've tried them all, start over with a different book. You have at least two that sound ready.
I hope this helps. Rejection isn't fun for any of us, but keep in mind that what the agents are saying when they don't pick you up is, "I don't know an editor who I think will buy this right now," not "You are not a good writer."


Keep track of who responds (I used a spreadsheet) and then throw away or delete the rejections. Negative thoughts are not allowed. You are an author. You just have to make the rest of the world realize it.


And nobody is going to do that but you.

Good luck!




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    D.E. Johnson:
    Author of the Will Anderson Detroit Historical Mystery Series

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