Mary Ellen Lives

Dear literary agents and publishers,

I have a question.

These days most of you want queries and sample pages of our writing to be included in emails; attachments will not be opened. This is stressed not only on your websites but when we see you at conferences and workshops. Also stressed — that our work be perfect before even thinking of sending it to you. Perfect not just in grammar, punctuation, character consistency, non-cliché language, plot curve, and all the other mandates of a good book, but also in FORMAT.

Here is where the trouble rests. We authors spend months, nay years, perfecting our written work only to see it undone by copy and paste. Email programs don’t seem to place the same importance on format as you, or I. Once pasted the original format is forgotten.

Some paragraphs are indented, some are not.

Some of the indented graphs are ten spaces in, some are only one, or three, or any other number.

Some paragraphs are in the original font, some have been mysteriously transformed.

To quote the Kind of Siam, “Is a puzzlement.”

Internet solutions all lean on the “rich text” formatting in the email options. These do not work.

There is still no consistency.
So, we authors must deal with each paragraph in the email indenting or
not indenting as the choice may be, changing each one individually.

When emailing a query plus fifty pages it becomes a frustrating experience, not to mention the amount of time it requires. Then there is the nagging suspicion that the email, once sent in the correct format, will arrive completely jumbled again.

So, here is my question for you, overworked literary agents and publishers: How kind are you? When reading an email that deviates in its paragraphing, haphazardly changes its font, do you sigh and delete? Do you wonder as you shred those pages your assistant printed out, shredding the author’s dreams as well, if you are turning the next great novel into confetti?

Or do you take pity and read on?

Sincerely,
Tortured by Email

I loved Mr. Brown’s debut novel Fallen Land and had recommended it to a friend who then recommended Taylor Brown’s second novel, The River of Kings, to me. The second book is set in a very different time period then the first, is actually set in three different time periods. The narratives are held together by the setting of the novel, Georgia’s Altamaha River. Indeed, the setting is a character onto itself, so beautifully and powerfully described in Taylor Brown’s wonderful language. The story lines held me with their poignant and horrifying details of human desires and follies. In short – I loved this book! I can’t wait to see what tales Taylor Brown has in store next.

The Lightkeeper’s Daughters is a tale of an old woman and a girl united by secrets from the past. The narrative shifts between modern day and a period from the mid-twenties to the forties. It also shifts between Morgan, a sixteen year-old foster child on the road to delinquency, Elizabeth, a blind elderly woman in a nursing home, and the rediscovered journals of Elizabeth’s father – the lightkeeper of the title. Coincidence and fate are interwoven in the plot, which keeps the reader in a calm state of suspense throughout the book. The mysteries uncovered at the end of the story may be predictable to some but are no less thrilling. Ms. Pendziwol’s writing is evocative and sensitive, her characters fully realized. A great read!

 

Every student of writing has heard the axiom “write what you know.” It is drummed into our heads by English teachers. We interpret this to mean write about ourselves, our town, our loves, our family. But this limits our writing and, indeed, our imaginations. “Write what you know” can have a much broader scope.

After losing my brother in 1984 I went kind-of nuts from grief. So much so that I walked into a closet at the home of an acquaintance during a party while looking for the bathroom. Once in the closet I didn’t know what to do. I started crying and couldn’t stop. I had closed the door behind me and couldn’t seem to leave. I was in the dark. When finally found I was asked the very logical question, “Why were you in there?” Of course I had no reasonable, or sane, answer.

Years later, I was reminded of this incident by that same acquaintance but had no memory of it at all. I had blocked out this most embarrassing occurrence of my life. It came back to me as a whole piece when it was brought up. I was speechless in its wake, mortified all over again.

In my book Under a Gibbous Moon there is a scene where the main character is rooted to a concealed spot atop a staircase, horrified and grief stricken by what she has overheard. In the writing of this episode I was again in that closet, crying, unable to get myself out. I know what it’s like to feel trapped, to feel helpless, to feel out-of-control. So I wrote what I know.

Bingo!

Be brave and dig deep. You’ll be surprised at how much you can write about, how much you really “know.”