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CATCH SABIN HOWARD & ME 1:00 PM ET 11/10 ON THE POWER OF WE

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THE POWER OF WE

THE POWER OF WE

My husband sculptor Sabin Howard & I will be live on internet radio “Power of We” on 11/10/11 @ 1:00 pm ET.

Maryanne and her husband David Raynal will be interviewing us. How fun is that?! Check out their great website!

Call in with questions: 1.800.555.5453

We look forward to hearing from you!

THE POWER OF WE

Five-star review of FALLEN on TicToc Reviews
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Five-star review of FALLEN on TicToc Reviews

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Five-star review of FALLEN on TicToc Reviews

FALLEN enjoyed a terrific 5-star review on The Romance Reviews, which was also posted on the reviewer’s website, TicToc Reviews. This is my favorite kind of review, because the reviewer was totally engaged with the story, and she wrote with clarity and insight about why she liked the novel:

“From the beginning, I was enthralled with the story and Slatton’s voice. She has taken an end of the world scenario and created characters that are so real they make you feel. To arm such a story with the budding of a love of such heat and passion creates a crescendo of feeling that keeps you turning the pages to see what happens next.”
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ePublishing, Self-publishing, and Legacy Publishing: the Folly and the Glory

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ePublishing, Self-publishing, and Legacy Publishing: the Folly and the Glory

Of this I am sure: I love story. I love books.

It is my particular karma to be both on the inside and on the outside of a number of groups. For example, I was born Christian and converted to Judaism. I can talk about both anti-Semitism and anti-Goyism. They both exist. Both are horrible. But many Christians don’t want to hear about anti-Semitism, and most Jews don’t want to be confronted with anti-Goyism. One virulent version of anti-Goyism is anti-Schicksaism. I can tell you a lot about that.
So now my great passion: story, writing, books. And, naturally, publishing, which is the only way to reach people with the work.
We are on the verge of the greatest revolution in publishing since the invention of the Guttenberg Press five hundred years ago. ePublishing has taken control of distribution away from the legacy publishers, which is a wonderful thing. Monopolies are bad. Opportunities, choices, options are good. Especially for the consumer.
Legacy publishers are in trouble. There are solid reasons why they are foundering: they are gate-keepers instead of gate-openers serving the reading public; they take too long to read manuscripts and to respond to the market; they function via committee-mind and group-think, so they are averse to risk, originality, and innovation; they are looking for an algorithm to turn every book they publish into a best-seller; they lack the foresight and vision to nurture mid-list authors (like myself) through a career that gains traction and a global readership; they publish the same book in slightly different format over and over, beating that dead equine into a gelatinous pulp and boring readers into apathy. Editors aren’t editors anymore, they are flunkey marketers serving the almighty marketing department. PR departments at major publishing houses are incompetent and exist only to thwart authors’ sales.
Legacy publishers are dinosaurs. They are mired in the quicksand of conventional thinking. The system is broken.
For all of these reasons, and more, excellent books are not being picked up by the legacy publishers. So other venues have arisen, particularly now that ePublishing has arrived. Kindles, iPads, and nooks abound, crying out for content. The stigma of self-publishing is lessening–a “vanity press” isn’t considered quite so vain anymore. ePublishing is a huge gain for the demotic. Authors can get their work out to the buying public and let the market decide. Everyone in self ePublishing likes to point to John Locke as an example.
I had two books go through a difficult process, both agented by first-rate, well-regarded NYC literary agents. Both projects were “almost bought” a number of times. Then my agent wanted me to publish with the new ePublishing arm of her agency. I would pay for the privilege, and then give her 15% of the proceeds.
It is unethical for literary agents to publish this way. There must be a separation of church and state, a separation of agenting and self- or ePublishing. If agents want to ePublish: fine! Great! Stop agenting and be an ePublisher. But doing both is a conflict of interests, and it is unethical.
I had already done a lot of research into ePublishing and I knew the scoop, so I politely declined the agent, whereupon she dumped me. I was hoping she would continue with foreign and sub-rights, because my novel IMMORTAL was a big bestseller in Italy, Brazil, and Russia, and there’s a good bet that foreign editors would be interested in my new work. I love foreign rights sales. They’re like money from Heaven. You’ve already written the book, and you get more money for it!
So I went looking for another agent to handle foreign and sub-rights.
I found two groups of agents: one who was stuck in the clubby, outmoded, legacy publishing mold. You know, they go out for lunch and drinks with editors at major publishing houses four or five days a week, and those editors read their submissions first and fast. If the editor falls in love with the manuscript, AND can sell it to a committee of other editors terrified to lose their jobs, AND THEN can sell the project to the marketing department–the project is a go. The agent makes a sale. The agent takes the commission.
That’s an old system that has worked well for agencies like Inkwell, Sanford Greenberger, Sterling Lord, etc. Those agencies are not open to alternatives. They are not getting it that a change is afoot. And why would they? They were very successful with the antiquated model. Well, Sanford Greenberger is making changes, but they are doing one of those unethical ePublishing scams. Not okay.
Then there are agents who say, “Ok, the publishing world is changing, so we have to, also.” They see the benefits of being flexible. They understood why my logic led me to the necessity of an agent to handle foreign and sub-rights. These agents get it that the publishing world is changing, and they must change, too.
So there’s my critique of legacy publishers like Random House and Hachette, and my critique of agents. Here’s my analysis of self ePublishers. When the legacy publishing system didn’t work for me, I went that route. I have some things to say about it.
There’s satisfaction, even pleasure, in the guerrilla warfare of independent ePublishing and POD publishing. It suits a maverick like me. It’s a great feeling to believe in my own work strongly enough not to let the legacy publishers tell me “You can’t.” I am really happy to have the opportunity to put my work out into the world. This is a great venue for a fast-writing, versatile, pathologically persistent author like me.
But there are some issues in the field. For one, everyone thinks they can write a book. Maybe they all can. There are a lot of really smart, well-educated, well-intentioned people who have been successful in a non-literary field who think, because of their vast money or worthy accomplishments, that 1, they know everything about everything, or 2, they know everything about writing a book. They flock to self ePublishing when their manuscripts aren’t professionally polished enough to get a nod from a legacy publisher.
So in the world of self ePublishing, there are a number of writers who think they have the answers, because they were successful lawyers or business people, who are actually rookies when it comes to publishing. I understand the slight–mostly unacknowledged–contempt that legacy publishers have for self-published authors.
As a professional dictum: what every self-published author must do is 1, hire a professional manuscript editor, and 2, hire a copy-editor. This separates the amateurs from the professionals. It makes for professional integrity.
I get a lot of flak from these self-published know-it-alls when I say this. I have heard a number of completely wacky excuses about why these self ePublished authors don’t need an editor. “I believe in the art of novel writing,” one author said. Another claimed, “I was a successful XXX. My wife taught for many years. I don’t need an editor.”
The fact is that good editing makes a great novel. It makes a professional novel.
Joyce Carol Oates gets edited. I know, because I know her editor. Steven King gets edited. Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus get edited. P.C. Cast gets edited. John Grisham gets edited. Daniel Silva gets edited. With all due respect, no self-published author is better than these writers.
Self ePublished authors are, by and large, nice human beings, as I’ve encountered them. But most shouldn’t quit their day jobs. I said to a small group of male self-published authors, “There isn’t a writer alive who doesn’t need an editor. Period. It’s an absolute value. To think otherwise is bush league…. It depends on whether you want to play in the major leagues or the minor leagues. If you want to play in the major leagues, you do what the major league players do.” I then mentioned a famous, gazillionaire author who I know gets extensive editing.
This ruffled feathers, since it punctured some egos. That vanity thing, in the field of vanity publishing. But it’s not confined to publishing. There’s just a lot of this: people who are successful in one field who then think they are awesome in another field. It’s a form of narcissism. Our culture is rife with narcissism. A touch of narcissism, when it drives people to perform well, isn’t all bad–but that’s tangential to this discussion.
My beef with it here is that sloppy, unprofessional books degrade the entire field of self-publishing.
This doesn’t mean that there aren’t terrible editors out there. I could tell some stories…. There are also great editors who make icky mistakes. It’s a really delicate art to edit someone else’s work.
However, it is an essential, integral art. It is an essential, integral part of the publishing process–if the author wants a professional book.
But self ePublishing is filled with narcissistic amateurs who can’t take criticism, and think they don’t need it. They are fools. A smart writer knows to get an editor.
The self-ePublishing people love to point to John Locke. But for every John Locke, who has made millions of dollars selling 99 cent ebooks and then was offered a great contract by a legacy publisher, there are ten thousand wannabes who are never going to attain that.
And what legacy publishers do well is get books into every airport kiosk in the country, from Boise to Newark to Fort Lauderdale. I will tell you honestly: to have someone give you many thousands of dollars UP-FRONT for your novel is the greatest feeling in the whole world. It’s a home run with the bases loaded.
It’s also much easier NOT to have to attend to manuscript editing, copy editing, cover art, cover copy, layout, PR, and sales yourself. I mean, I can do it–it’s not rocket science. No matter what the legacy publishers want people to believe, publishing a book well is NOT an arcane science accessible only to a few.
But it does take me away from what I love doing, which is writing stories.
With respect for Budd Hopkins, June 15, 1931 – August 21, 2011
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With respect for Budd Hopkins, June 15, 1931 – August 21, 2011

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Missing Time

I met Budd Hopkins only a handful of times. We had a mutual friend who knew of my interest in UFOlogy and who grudgingly–and with noted mockery of me–made the introduction. My friend quoted a line he’d heard at a dinner party where Budd had spoken about UFO’s, and one of the other guests had rolled his eyes. “I’ll believe when I can kick a tire.”
Budd was a brilliant man. He was unfailingly polite and soft-spoken, with the current of intelligence and thought bubbling through his conversation. He was both passionate and restrained about his work in the UFO field. I have a personal interest in UFO’s and am somewhat private about the origins of this interest, despite my outspoken support for reincarnation, energy healing, and the paranormal in general. I didn’t quite work up the nerve to ask Budd some of the real questions I wanted to ask. But I could have.
Budd showed my husband Sabin and me around his house in Cape Cod, where he had a studio. Budd was very much working with sacred geometry. I liked his current work though his earlier abstract expressionism didn’t do much for me. That’s a matter of taste. Regardless, Budd was a talented artist with a fabulous eye for line and color. A world-class artist, in fact.
His UFO work was seminal. It inspired some of the greatest researchers into the field, including Dr. John Mack, the Harvard professor who worked with UFO abductees and who came to believe that something real was happening. Something that must be studied because so many people were affected. “An extraordinary phenomenon demands an extraordinary investigation,” Budd proclaimed. Rightly so.
I know that UFOs are real. I am here to witness: They are here. By UFOs I mean non-terrestrial biological entities. I do not know if they are real in the physical sense or if they are confined to the bandwidth of the astral planes. This question I did pose to Budd, who told me flatly, “They’re real in the physical.”
For sure they are present in the astral planes. The thing is, the astral planes are real. They are, in fact, as real as the physical planes. They’re just different bandwidths.
Budd once mentioned to me the phenomenon of invisible beings. The moment he brought that up, I could feel, tangibly and powerfully, the being standing near Budd. Ten feet away, as present and watchful as if a stalker were standing there.
The universe is bigger than many people like to acknowledge. This, I think, is about safety. Many people (especially educated folks) feel safer clinging to the Newtonian box, the grand machine, which is predictable. To hell with quantum physics, that spooky action at a distance that made Einstein shudder. To hell with infinite dimensions in the multiverse, which the many worlds theory espouses. These people have blinders on which only allow them to see a tire which they can kick.
Fortunately great souls like Budd Hopkins aren’t wearing blinders. To Budd: it was great to meet you, and I wish you peace and joy in your journey.
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Great review of FALLEN, and fun guest post….

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reviews, interviews, and giveaways from an eclectic reader…

Drey’s Library blogspot asked me to write a guest post on how I get inspiration. This was fun…. Then my novel FALLEN got an “Excellent!” from Drey. Thanks to Drey for the opportunity and the wonderful read!

drey’s thoughts:  Fallen starts off with a bang, capturing your attention right away…

I was flattened against a brick wall, watching in terror as she struggled not to inhale the killing mist that pulsed a few centimeters from her face. If she breathed it in, it would kill her. If she moved into it, or if it moved to engulf her, it would kill her. Dissolve her from within, filling her mind with madness before blistering her cells with heat until she ruptured into steam and water droplets. All that would be left of her would be a splatter of water on the ground and a fine beige powder sifting down from the air.Yikes!!  This is so not a world I want to live in–a mysterious mist that kills, rogue bands of survivors who round up women and children for far more nefarious purposes than you could imagine, dwindling food supplies…

It is in this world that Emma Anderson finds herself in charge of her five-year-old daughter Mandy, and seven other children; trying to survive and keep them safe and alive. When she meets a band of men who are seemingly able to keep the mists away, Emma barters for protection for herself and the children. Before she knows it, she’s healing the camp’s sick and making friends. Well, except for a few of the men…

I like Emma. She’s strong, she’s resolute, and she’s fearless in standing up for those who can’t help themselves–almost to the point of getting herself killed. I like that some of the survivors have acquired a new skill, like Emma’s healing.

The plot is simple (survive), the story is moving. I enjoyed reading Fallen, and the realization at the end makes me antsy to find out what happens in the sequel to this first-in-a-trilogy.

drey’s rating: Excellent!

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How I Get From Inspiration to Ideas to Research to Novel
By Traci L. Slatton,
Author of Fallen

This topic fascinates me, because I wrestle with it every day. I am a creative person and I have a lot of ideas for stories. I’m also hungry. I’m starving to write 100 books before they peel my cold, dead fingers off my keyboard and lay me in a plain pine box. Then there’s another consideration: writing is misery. Every page is agony.

Ideas come and I take notes. If I’m walking, I’ll make a voice memo. Usually characters stuck in tense situations, and bits of their dialogue, come to me first. Sometimes I’ll get a palpable feeling-sense of a relationship: the tenderness and eroticism and playfulness and fierceness of it. I also see my main characters in my mind’s eye. With FALLEN, my recent post-apocalyptic romance, I had a vision of Europe in shambles, and a man and a woman who were both very strong and very tormented. She was willing to do anything to keep some children alive, but she was strongly connected to an absent husband. So the premise came to me first. I had a clear sense of the man as good and bad, a leader, a striated human soul. I could feel his essence.

Usually I won’t start writing until the idea threatens to shove bamboo shoots up my fingernails if I don’t write it. That’s when compulsion has set in. The beginning is great fun. It’s a rush. I’ve never been interested in drugs but I always think that the rush of creative energy when I finally surrender to a story must be like the rush of some potent chemical. It’s intense, it’s alchemical, it consumes me. It’s like falling in love, because it’s all I can think about. I walk down the street with scenes scrolling through my brain. I feel alive in a new way.

After that initial rush, the work sets in. Maybe it’s like a marriage at this point. You know, when the honeymoon has worn off and you’re sick of picking up your spouse’s toenail clippings from the coffee table and you just want to throw a heavy wrench at his head. It’s a lot of unglamorous work. Here’s when I mock up an outline of the story, the main turning points, and the character arc. I grapple with the nuts and bolts of story, and the fundamentals of what I aim to do with this particular one.

Best I’ve figured out, and this is an on-going inquiry for me, story is what your main character wants and how they DON’T get it. All story has a common source: it’s an argument for a specific value. And all good fiction has two qualities: 1, it’s about truth but not necessarily about fact, and 2, it is structured around conflict and obstacle.

So I have scenes, obstacles, disasters, bits of dialogue, and the faces of my characters all jumbled up in my brain, and I sit down and start writing the first few chapters. Then I pause to write an outline. I also figure out what value I am arguing for. I am opinionated and I have strong values, which helps. I write out my value on a sticky note and tape it to the side of my iMac.

I also almost always have a clear sense of the ending of the story. With FALLEN, I saw my heroine riding off without her man. I saw her heart-broken and determined. I enjoy writing stories where the stakes are high, so I tweak the plot points to up the ante. How can I push a scene? How can I turn up the volume on a character’s breaking point?

Writing is an arachnoid process: it’s like weaving an intricate web from the silk in my gut. That weaving happens in the back and forth between the vast, oceanic creative flow and the careful structuring of analytical thought. Both are crucial.

I usually do research as I am writing. I’ll pause in the middle of a page and read six chapters in a book, or google around the internet, or send emails to people I know who might have answers. A small plane flies from Edmonton to Le Havre in Fallen, so I emailed my friend Geoffrey, who’s a pilot, to ask him how that would be done. He had some ideas and he emailed some of his friends, too. When I have my answers, I resume writing. If I need to do further research, then, after a day or so, I’ll keep writing and start reading the necessary texts at night.

The end is another rush, because I get excited to torture my main characters more intensely, and so finish the story. Finally I have a first draft. Here’s where I ask a few trusted friends to read and critique. I’ve also found a free-lance editor who is scary smart, and I have her read the draft. Then I go back and revise, revise, revise . . .

Fun guest blog on MOONLIGHT GLEAM’S BOOKSHELF
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Fun guest blog on MOONLIGHT GLEAM’S BOOKSHELF

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Moonlight Gleam

This was a good time… I participated in a character guest post on Moonlight Gleam’s Bookshelf. I got to be Luca from IMMORTAL, Laila from THE BOTTICELLI AFFAIR, and Emma from FALLEN.
Am I already those characters? Yes and No. Novels and screenplays are like dreams, everyone in them is the author. But it’s not that simple, because consciously, to create a character, I merge qualities from many different people I know. A three-dimensional character in a story is a kind of chimera.
So it was an opportunity to inhabit my own mythos, and I got to play….

Character Guest Post With Traci L. Slatton

Traci L. Slatton has kindly agreed to participate in a character guest post starring “Emma”, as well as characters from her previous novels “Luca”, & “Laila” to discuss her inspiration for writing in honour of her newest release Fallen.

Traci: “Blog readers, please meet Emma Anderson from FALLEN, Laila Cambridge from THE BOTTICELLI AFFAIR, and Luca Bastardo from IMMORTAL. Guys, who’d like to talk about my inspiration for writing?”

Emma: “I’m a painter and illustrator, and before the apocalypse, I got my inspiration from looking into the faces of people around me. Especially my loved ones’ faces.”

Laila: “Who needs inspiration? It’s just so much fun to forge the Old Masters! I don’t wait for inspiration. I just have a blast doing what I do best. Gimme a paintbrush and some terra verde green and a little lapis lazuli blue: voilà, a Vermeer!”

Emma: “You’re lucky. I live during the end times. Billions of people have been killed in a global eco-disaster. We survivors are left struggling to stay alive, fighting vicious rogue bands, and haunted by strange psychic powers that dissolve us into madness.”

Laila: “What a drag! But you know, it’s not easy for me, either. My dad is missing and he’s being pursued by vampires. Evil, remorseless, blood-hungry vampires.”

Luca: “Inspiration? I get inspiration from Giotto’s frescoes, from Botticelli’s ravishing female figures. Such inspiration gives me the courage to endure a brutal indenture in a brothel of horrors.”

Laila: “I can paint just like Botticelli.”

Emma: “It’s not painting that saves me now. It’s love. When the world ends, all that’s left is love.”

Luca: “I am waiting for the great love who has been promised me. I chose her, and I know that the Laughing God will bring her to me, when His joke is ripe. I love her already and I haven’t even met her yet. Love is the only immortality we can know.”

Laila: “I’m waiting for my love, too. I can be close to him, but I can never quite have him. It’s too perilous. The hottest guy I ever met, and he smells so yummy, too. I just want to wrap myself around him and squeeze!”

Luca: “My great love smells like lilacs and clear light.”

Laila: “What does clear light smell like? Hey, there’s a beautiful Botticelli painting for sale, it has a pristine provenance provided by my friend Lord Cromer. I can get you a good deal . . . “

Luca: “Sandro Botticelli is one of my best friends. I already get good deals. Though he does negotiate relentlessly. It’s the Florentine way. At heart, Florentines care about money, food, and art. And wine. I myself have a fondness for vino nobile di Montepulciano. Though I don’t know if I’m Florentine. I don’t know my origins.”

Laila: “I’m a margarita fan, myself. Nothing like tequila to inspire a rowdy game of strip poker!”

Emma: “We don’t have the luxury of money, wine, and art. Food is the luxury now. I don’t know if the human race even has the luxury of a future. Arthur says we do, but I am not certain. He believes that we’ll rise out of the ashes and create a better life. He’s like that, always trying to do something noble and good. I just want to keep a few children alive . . .”

Luca: “God’s grace sees us through. There’s always God’s grace, even when we can’t see it. But we know it’s there. We’re receptacles for it, because of our souls.”

Laila: “The man I love has half a soul. What does that mean? What is a soul, anyway? Does having a soul explain why I’ll spend my last dollar on a pair of above-the-knee white patent leather boots with six-inch stiletto heels? Is there an explanation for that?”

Emma: “Soul has something to do with the invisible field of information that holds us all, the way the ocean holds fish and algae and seaweed and its myriad other creatures. I think soul may be what got us into trouble with the mists. Our souls make us vulnerable to psychological influence via the biomind.”

Laila: “What’s a biomind? Never mind, I don’t want to know!”

Emma: “Arthur knows. He’s brilliant.”

Laila: “I hope he’s hot, because he sounds like a smarty pants.”

Emma: “He’s beautiful beyond the dreams of women.”

Luca: “The most beautiful man I ever met was Leonardo, son of Ser Piero da Vinci. He was also the most talented and intelligent. I was his tutor, but he taught me more than I ever imparted to him.”

Laila: “You’re not so bad yourself, Luca Bastardo. Too bad I’m six inches taller than you!”

Emma: “You both have red hair, though Laila, yours is flame-colored, and Luca, yours is yellow-red. I’d love to paint you both. Laila, your laughter is infectious. Luca, your soulfulness emanates from you!”

Traci: “So did you guys figure out what inspires me?”

Laila: “Tequila and patent leather boots?”

Emma: “No, silly, it’s love!”

Luca: “Love and beauty!”

Laila: “Love, beauty, and laughter!”

© 2011 Traci L. Slatton, author of Fallen