Tag: Writing

Having at least a critical mass in hand, if not a workable draft, is still progress 

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

I got out before I was axed, but the next three interludes weren’t so fortunate. All ended with my head and heart served up to me on a plate, in terms of my career, yet somehow I always landed back on my feet.

The least time was when I allowed myself a self-imposed sabbatical in Baltimore in the mid ’80s, one of the smarter moves in my life. Putting those savings into a solid investment would have made much better sense than using them for a year of poverty existence writing, but I hoped if I could get published, my shift over to being an author full-time would be assured. I knew too many others who had put off their big dream till retirement but never been able to manifest it.

The paperback cover …

So I hunkered down over my keyboard, kept to a strict schedule, and amassed the bulk of two major fiction projects that now stand as Daffodil Uprising, Pit-a-Pat High Jinks, Yoga Bootcamp, Nearly Canaan and parts of The Secret Side of Jaya. There were also a few other blueprints that remain undeveloped. (As novels, the two boxes of manuscripts were truly too unwieldy, no matter how vibrant their contents.) “Subway Hitchhikers,” now embedded into Subway Visions, was already in place.

That year wasn’t all work, rest assured. I underwent some crucial personal growth and recovery. There were close friendships and time for reading. Mennonites and Brethren added to my Quaker practice. A writers’ group hosted upcoming Tom Clancy one evening, with his first book then being turned into a movie. I was learning to part-sing a cappella. We walked to Orioles games from one couple’s third-floor quarters.

Alas, my money started running out before I could land an agent or see a volume lined up for publication, and so it was time for me to move on. At least I had those precious drafts in hand – or more accurately, on computer diskettes. Even as raw material, they were full of details I’d never be able to recollect a decade or two later, much less in the distance of retirement. And with that, I was off for New Hampshire and a new life.

What became painfully clear was that newspapers weren’t the only part of the publishing world in serious trouble. So was the book trade. A few hot-shot agents replied that the book I’d pitched them deserved to be published but they couldn’t take on anything new, they were utterly baffled by what was happening as the number of houses handling fiction kept shrinking. Most agents didn’t even return the self-addressed stamped envelopes. (The jerks.) Even so, I kept revising, leading to the publication of “Subway Hitchhikers” as a trade paperback in 1990, followed by the hard reality of being “backlisted” and out-of-print when sales failed to materialize.

… and the back cover.

Still, I was hooked. All along, there was a flood of poetry that found its way into circulation and a few projects that seemed commercially viable, if only I could add the right co-author, one with creds. My years since Baltimore also included book-length new writing, mostly Quaker related, but again, print proved elusive – it is a small market, and the faith as a whole is filled with active writers.

So I was caught in a limbo until the emergence of ebooks, starting with my “Ashram” in 2006 as a PDF from pioneering PulpBits in Vermont and then my Smashwords entries beginning in 2013.

What I now realize how much free time and focus fiction demands. It is, as I’ve learned the hard way, so different from journalism, and not just in the ways I’d be confronting. When I was employed, I could deal with deep revisions of my Baltimore lode during my vacations and holidays, and do the routine polishing of its prose on my free days, but generating entirely new novels was out of the question until retirement, when I turned to creating “What’s Left.”

In short, most of the books of fiction now available under my name are the result of 35 years of labor, more or less. I’m glad I’ve lived long enough to push them on to completion.

Their names are a way of remembering, too

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

One challenge in a large multi-generational story like What’s Left comes in managing first names. Many families customarily name babies in honor of grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, even the parents, but even with nicknames, that’s bound to create additional confusion for readers.

I skirt the issue by introducing names independent of any mention of family connection, perhaps justified with the break from the old country at the outset of their arrival in America and perhaps as a reflection of adapting new customs as well.

Pressed on the point I might respond that Stavros’ three sisters, who remain unnamed in the text, repeated earlier names. And then I wondered about Nicky, a generation later.

Does your family have naming traditions? What’s the pattern? Which names are most popular?

 

How a novel takes shape and grows

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

While she thinks she’s learning about her father in my novel What’s Left, we’re really learning about her.

Let me confess, that’s not how the story started out, back in 2013. Cassia really grew up in the meantime!

All of the changes are what really matter.

~*~

If it were only pink, like Cassia’s family headquarters in my novel!

Photography just ain’t what it used to be

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In my Freakin’ Free Spirits novels, Cassia’s father is a professional photographer who views the world in a unique spirit.

Now that digital technology has made taking pictures so easy and ubiquitous, everybody always seems to be holding their cell phones up for another shot.

Does anyone else miss the sound of the clicking shutter?

How do you find capturing photographic images affects the way you see events around you?

 

Never mind that bit about bearing gifts

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Growing up in the middle of America, I had little awareness of the extent of immigrant Greek influence in the New World, much less in my own hometown. These days, though, I see how pervasive — yet nearly invisible — it’s been, now or then.

My decision to have my first novel close with Cassia’s future father marrying into a Greek-American family was, in part, predicated on a desire to have his immersion in one ancient culture from Asia, Tibetan Buddhism, be countered by another from Western civilization, and thus Greece , blending both classical glories and some New Testament threads, which seemed appropriately symbolic.

It’s up to you to weigh in on how well it works in my novel What’s Left.

In the past decade, though, perhaps prompted by the annual community-wide festival our local Greek Orthodox church presents every Labor Day weekend, I’ve been connecting the dots and discovering how many Greek-Americans I’ve known over the years and how much the recent encounters have been enriching my own outlook.

As I wrote to one friend:

One thing that’s greatly surprised me is how little literature exists that relates the Greek-American experience. You’re too numerous to be so invisible. What’s up? Just look on your impact in Dover alone. Perhaps the best overall portrayal comes in Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex (a masterpiece, by the way), although the work is acclaimed mostly for its exploration of hermaphroditic genetics and identity. Along the way, he also does a knock-out job of nailing the Midwest where I grew up, another strand of literature that’s otherwise anemic. I am glad I’d finished the first draft of my new work before encountering his novel — he won the National Book Award and Oprah’s endorsement for good reasons. It could be too intimidating. Well, if he could go on to do such an insightful job with Quaker Meeting, as he does in his third novel, The Marriage Plot, maybe I’m not so out of line in venturing into yours. I hope. Oh, yes, I’m also glad I finished the draft before getting to connect the dots of your own family. You’d be ideal for the movie version.

~*~

Look around at the people you know. Tell us something (good, we hope) about someone of Greek descent.

~*~

I think she looks a lot like the young woman on the cover of the book, apart from Cassia’s Goth garb and makeup. Aphrodite, anyone?

A breath of new heights

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Despite growing up in the flat country of the Midwest, I’ve always been attracted to heights. The top of the tree in our backyard was mine alone. I remember taking the speedy express elevator to the top of the Carew Tower in downtown Cincinnati as a child and looking down on the ant-like people on the streets far below. And mountains have always loomed large in my imagination, later abetted by a few early visits to the Appalachians in Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina. I even backpacked a week on the Appalachian Trail at age 12 as a Boy Scout with my primitive-camping troop.

By the time I returned to Indiana in the mid-’70s, I had also lived in the Allegheny foothills to the west of the Catskills in New York state as well as the Poconos in eastern Pennsylvania. I’d even ventured into New Hampshire to climb Mount Washington, the highest point in the Northeast. I thought I had a familiarity with mountains.

The paperback cover …

My next upheaval sent me west. The drive across the Great Plains and Rockies was a revelation, and the entry into the environs of my new employment came frankly as a shock. Neither my wife nor I was prepared for the arid, open desert where nearly everything, including its famed apple orchards, required irrigation. Forefront in my mind was Swami Lakshmy’s observation from her first visit to India, that every place she visited had its own unique vibration.

And yes, there were mountains, including the barren heights defining our valley as well as the eastern flank of the Cascade Range to our west and glacier-clad Mount Adams looking down on us from 50 miles away.

As I adjusted to the realities, everything was filled with wonder I came to love, as you will see in my novel Nearly Canaan, which started out being more about the distinct landscape than about fully considered characters.

My employment situation, meanwhile, provided its own fodder for what would emerge as Hometown News back in the Rust Belt. I never wanted to leave Pacific Northwest, for sure, but a new publisher at the newspaper made the situation intolerable. As I bailed out, along with the most of the rest of the management team, I entered a difficult period that added much to the newspaper tale, plus a divorce and broken engagement.

It’s always hard to come down from a mountain. A part yearns to hang there forever.

Death takes a big toll on a family firm

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

A huge challenge to family-owned businesses arises in the passing of one generation to another. The unanticipated death of the patriarch or matriarch in his or her prime can wreak havoc on the company, even if inheritance tax liabilities aren’t overwhelming. Sometimes the heir apparent isn’t the best option, not all of the heirs want to be part of the operation, or bitter rivalries emerge. Getting through the fourth generation, with a spreading number of family members and interests, can determine the fate of the enterprise. As I saw in the newspaper industry, most nameplates sold out to media chains at this point, losing much of their underlying local connection in the process.

Do you know of any businesses that fit this description? 

One side of a family as friends

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Having a circle of close cousins in my novel What’s Left, freed me from having to create additional friends for Cassia. She had more than enough in her own extended family, close at hand.

I hadn’t thought about that before now, but as an author, it’s a big relief. Cassia’s busy enough as it is, and we have plenty of named characters.

~*~

Well, while thinking of fondness and monikers:

Do you have a nickname? How did it come about? Does it fit? Are you fond of it? Or does it annoy you? Have you ever tagged one on someone else?

~*~

Anyone else fond of Greek yogurt? Especially with honey?

Are we finished?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

We writers or artists, at least some of us, push ourselves as far as we can, coming to a point where we no longer know if a piece is any good or not, only that we’ve done everything in its pursuit that we possibly can at this period in our life.

Either it gets published or whatever as is or gets pushed aside, maybe to be picked up later and reworked, maybe to go in the trash. Or maybe Death intervenes.