Deborah Bogen

I am finally one of them. I am one of the winter-worn bitchers and moaners. According to the weather man I came close to making it through this winter without become a whiner...only a bit more, they say... but too late now. I've succumbed, sunk into self-pity and snarly-ness. Go Away Snow!

This mood may be more than just the weather. I am also in a waiting stage with the new version of "Witch." Or is it "Wych?" By now even I am confused. On my computer - this very one - there must be 12 versions of the book in various stages. I am afraid to get rid of any of them till we have the new final "Witch of Leper Cove" up. To complicate matters, before I decided I had to make all these changes my editor had moved on (naturally) to new projects so she is busy. I wait.

But what does this have to do with you? Well, I'm wondering, how do you manage winter and waiting? What do you do when all the work you have put into becoming the sort of person who makes things happen is useless...when you have to wait for things you can't really hurry to happen at their own pace. Somehow this feels worse than a normal "do nothing stage."

Perhaps it's just time to get to work on the next book. It's so much more fun to hang out in a story than whine. Hey thanks. Have a good writing day.  Read More 

When have you done enough research? When have you listened enough (to the right people assuming you can decide who they are) and sifted through enough ideas? When have you looked at enough prototypes, checked enough responses and lost enough sleep? I think I can actually tell you.

It's when you sit in your chair (a chair you have learned to hate in the past few weeks) and another version of X comes across the ethernet ----- and you feel yourself sitting up a bit and saying "yes, this is it."

Not "yes this is perfect" or "yes, this can't go wrong" - just "yes, this is what I'm going with, this is the one I'm going to try."

If you have a project with a variable that needs sorting out I recommend waiting for that moment. But if you do, and it comes, there's still no guarantee that it is the right one. A bit daunting? You want to be sure? Me too. Too bad for us.

So let's say you buy into this idea. How can you tell when that moment comes? What do you look for? For me, I lose the "hmmm" doubtey feeling in my gut, and a sort of recognition sets in. I find myself thinking "time to go for it," but I also have to remind myself - this is how we learn, this is how we learn.

All if which is leading up to the fact that I have just chosen the new cover for The Witch of Leper Cove. It is not universally loved. I still get comments about the font for heaven's sake. It's not even the cover I'd have if I had unlimited resources, but it is a cover I think will work for the book. It will be a week or so before it's up (revamping the text as well) but we will see how it goes.

What's that bumper sticker say? "Life's a lab class." May your experiments bear good fruit.  Read More 

I like knowing things already - don't you? The thrill of learning is great when it's an armchair activity but not when it comes to publishing books. However, I am not learned in this area.

Now young adult novel experts say I have problems. They say the title and the cover for "The Wych of Lyper Cove" is not so much intriguing or entertaining as overly confusing. The book is being renamed as "The Witch of Leper Cove."

Lots of early language spellings are being changed in the manuscript to go along with the more modern language theme. "Lyllie" is "Lily" - "Alys" is "Alice." No more "Lundin" -- instead "London." I thought I would hate all these but having taken a look at the changes - I like them. They let the story move along faster with less translation work. And it's the story that counts.

Then there's the cover. It's getting a facelift. A complete facelift. A professional book cover maker is at work making it a Young Adult cover complete with the heroine, the forest, a distant cathedral and yes, a wolf. My quiet "vaguely medieval" cover did not have the effect I thought it would. It did not attract readers of various ages.

The experts say you have to choose a target audience and hope other readers find you anyway. I am going with the Young Adult crowd, but please if you are younger or older try me anyway. But I am much less sanguine about the new cover than I am about the text because I do not know this stuff. I must rely on experts.

The experts do seem expert and they are both generous and kind so perhaps this will all work out. I'd like to post some potential covers here and get your feedback - what do you think? Does it take a village to put out a good book? Read More 

I know the answer already and it's "no," I'm not a yinzer yet. If I ask the same question ten years down the line the answer will be the same. No, not yet. Yinzers are (help me out here) native Pittsburghers. They do not buy books in Shadyside called "How to speak Pittsburghese." They park in the middle of traffic while their grandmothers get out of the car, or while they post a letter or chat with a friend. They blink their headlights twice to mean you should make your left turn in front of opposing traffic or you will never get to make it at all, and they park on the sidewalk, across driveways and sometimes up on the grass. They greet you in the coffee bars with a fast version of "so hows-it goin?" and while they mean that as a friendly gesture they do not really want to know. They are the natives of my favorite city - and yes, that's including Paris and San Francisco. If love made you a yinzer I'd be one - but as they often say "love is not enough..."

Why? Well, for one thing, I will never have stories to tell about growing up in a neighborhood where all the grandmothers spoke Italian (only) and cooked in their basement kitchens so they could keep the upstairs kitchen clean for show. Although I make a dandy pizzelle, I don't much care for anise. I'll never feel strongly about the Pirates, the Steelers or (gasp!) the Penguins. I will always read novels set in Pittsburgh simply to enjoy the fact that I can identify many of the places where the story takes place but I will never get to work out with people who were in my kindergarten class.

Still, I can love this town. I can love its bridges, its neighborhoods, it amazing Cathedral of Learning. Jim and I came here in '98 for just one term - he was a visiting fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science. I was writing a how-to book for paralegals and we lived in the student ghetto in south Oakland. Everyday I typed away till 3 or so, then crazy to move I would put on a coat and walk the streets. Things here are close! You can get to the Carnegie Museum from Oakland in 15 minutes on your feet, you can take a run to Squirrel Hill and stop there for coffee before heading out Shady Ave to the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. You can grab a bus for the northside (Mexican War streets, Warhol and Mattress Factory museum) or one for the Southside (bars and bookstores) and you can head downtown anytime you're bored with the neighborhoods -- but first you should hit the Strip with its great cheese and meat markets. Maybe what really sold me on Pittsburgh was when Spring hit after the long winter. As students shed the jackets, hats and scarves that had made them impossible to sex in the depths of winter, thousands (that's literal) of tulips came up all over town at the same time. By then my book was mostly done so I could walk more - and I did, stoned on the glory of rebirth and amazed at the over-the-top spring gardening yinzers do. Flowers were everywhere. Food too. I felt as at home on the streets of Pittsburgh as I have ever felt anywhere. Rational and practical being that I am I thought - we should move here... Read More 

I hate it when I'm stupid. You too, you say? Stupid, stupid, stupid, I am feeling this morning. Having read all the books that advise "experimenting" with Amazon's categories, I did --- and knocked my book right of the sites that have been giving it some press on Amazon's sites. Now it is not showing up as a Hot New Anything so today is not the day some cool teenager will find my book, read it and recommend it to her friends. I have gone back into the KDP Dashboard (this all gets very familiar quickly once you publish this way) and tried to re-create my old category choices. The system is actually very responsive and by tonight they will be updated I'm sure but it does make me wonder at my ability to be an entrepreneur.

Because of course what I want are minions. Minions and perhaps even lackeys that I can give commands to --- minions with actual expertise instead of the "let's try this" kind I seem to have. I have to lift my eyes I think, away from today and check out the horizon. I have learned things before. I can learn this too. By this time next year I hope the successor to The Wych of Lepyr Cove will be on Amazon and I will be able to do more things right the first time.

For now I will remember what the wise Isak Denesen said: 'When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself." From her mouth to God's ear. Read More 

On the one hand - they walk you through it. If you publish on KDP or via Createspace I can tell you first-hand they make it easy...and I have no reason to think Smashwords or the other options would be more difficult. KDP and Createspace give you lots of information -- "units" sold, average price and of course royalty info. They offer you the ability to change things quickly so you can experiment with what might bring your book to your readers' attention. Their email customer support is so good I haven't had to call them yet, but from what I hear the phone folks are splendid too. SO what's my problem?

It's the other hand. The larger techno world where many ebook readers hang out. I am not a total luddite but I speak computerese about as well as I speak French. "Je suis tres desole, madam, je'ne pas parle la francaise tres bien..." (and yes, I know my French spelling sucks as well.) So when someone in-the-know says I need a MAP I think of a charming illustration for the front part of my book, a map of 13th C England showing Aldinoch and Guildsford (pronounce it Gyfford), but that is "defiantly" not what they mean. It's some kind of computer talk for making my various twitter, facebook, tumblr etc. feed link up. At least it might be that.

Educating myself about this is part of the job - one I am taking a step at a time. This website is fairly rudimentary (notice there is no RSS button for you to click to subscribe and the link on the right hand side of this page DOES NOT WORK so to subscribe you have to bookmark it and choose the "subscribe" option or click the RSS button in the webpage address if you use IE as a browser. But then, you knew that....because all of you are more hip than I am when it comes to managing the machines that manage us. Anybody who has wisdom to bestow on an old woman is welcome to comment - and have a great day out there. In Pittsburgh the freeze is letting up and we are starting to hope...now off to the gym!

PS -kudos to the sitebuilder folks who fixed the subscription link. it now works Read More 

There are two kinds of baking - the precise kind where you 'play as written,' you follow the directions, every jot and tittle, and you get an exact result. That's how I make pie crusts. I use Chez Panisse's precise recipe and when I do, I can be confident. The crusts are always outstanding.

Then there's the other kind of baking, the kind I am doing today. Because today is bread-baking day. Today's looking through the kitchen to see what grains are in the bins and checking the honey supplies, choosing either buckwheat or the orange blossom. I'm feeling like oats today so they'll be in the mix, but I think I'll leave out the molasses-- too dark for oat bread. The things I choose will affect the bread but so will other factors like this exceptionally cold dry air. I am pretty confident the bread will be splendid - because I have been doing this for decades -- but that still leaves room for flukey failure. Maybe there's a factor I am not registering. Maybe my attention will slip and I'll add the salt too soon. Unlikely but not impossible, because I am still learning bread-baking. Forty years into it and still learning.

Just this last year I discovered the "do-nothing" stage in the process. Mid-mixing - when the most of the flour was in, but the dough was still sticky and raw, I was called away from the kitchen. The boys from next door were in the yard wanting to share their current exploits - catching bugs and doing well in school and growing taller. By the time they were done with their stories I'd been away from the dough for maybe 20 minutes. And while I was gone ---

something great happened. I reconstructed what that probably was, after the fact. While I was not pounding that dough, while it just sat there, while I did nothing, the flour did something. It absorbed more of the liquid ingredients, becoming less sticky. As a result I needed to add less flour to get a dough I could knead easily. Less flour meant more air in the dough as it rose, meant a lighter loaf. I liked it. In my bread baking practice the "do nothing stage" became important. Walk away. Put on an old Crosby Stills and Nash record, dust the stairs, check out one of the zillion art books we have accumulated over the years. Meditate. Whatever I do with those twenty minutes, I get a better loaf.

Right now I need the "do nothing" stage for a couple things in my life. The Book has been prominent in every day and most nights of my life since it went up on Amazon. I have researched what I should do to "get more sales." I have ridden the high of Amazon rankings and despaired as it slid down the list of most purchased. I have tried to figure out if it fits a niche - and if so - which one. I have felt like a success and a failure and I have tried to work very hard, very fast to learn things I could not possibly already know. Some people think a new cover would enhance the book. There are a zillion ideas. Who do I listen to? What's the "next step?" It's exhausting. And the opposite of creative. Today I am embracing the do-nothing stage in this process. I'm walking away and picking up my uke and going to yoga and doing some laundry. We will see if anything happens. Read More 

Okay, I know it sounds like a bad sexual reference but shrinkage is on my mind. They tell me I need to be able to relay the gist of my novel in a short sentence. Short. It needs to be "catchy" and "have a hook" because it needs to be memorable. I tried '"When Alys, a 13th century herbal healer, is accused of wychcraft, three orphaned siblings along with several unlikely allies must rally to try and save her from the Inquisition." Far too long. Cut it in half.

First of all the confession. I took part of my sentence from a great review Barbara Machamer wrote. But now I must cut her good language and some of mine. It needs to "tweetable" (which sounds a little like a breakfast cereal, doesn't it?) and it needs to be "hooky"-- like the chorus of a bad country western song.

"Three teenagers rally to save an accused wych from the 13th C. Inquisition." What do you think? Or "Can three teenagers save an accused wych from the 13th C. Inquisition?"

The biggest problem of course is that what I hope will make the book a rich experience for the reader is not the main action plot. The plot's fun, it moves things along. But I hope readers will linger over the musings of Lyllie and Wyllym and Edric and Alys and even Father Odo as those characters ask the kinds of questions we all ask ourselves at one time or another.

Beyond that, I hope they feel the book is an E ticket ride into rural 13th century England. I even dare to hope they will see parallels between Edric's concern over the Church and our own concerns as we find ourselves dealing with huge almost corporate entities whose good works and values are open to question. When I have to wonder about the wage Goodwill pays their people, and whether the money I send the Red Cross ever means food on the table for flood victims, like Edric, I have to pause. I have to ask, are these really my people?

Of course that's a complicated question. In a huge organization some are, and some aren't. Who gets my support? But dealing with all that is not today's chore. Today's chore is to shrink a 350 page book into 6 or maybe 8 words. Any ideas? Read More 

I am embarrassed that I cannot tell you his name. It was one of those two-syllable J names I ran into all the time in classrooms, Justin, Jordan, Jared, Jason? It wasn't Jacob, I would have remembered that as I remember him, in the corner of the room, back curved so he was always looking down, as if his battered desk held all the secrets of the universe. He was very still.

The teacher told me about him so I would not be surprised that he was quiet, so I would not try to draw him out. But I never would have - I recognized him right away. He was brother to me and all the other people who as kids were thrust suddenly into a world they could never have anticipated - a world so different from the safe sweet world of happy families where kids play sports and do well in school, and moms and dads live fulfilling lives having to do with good work and family. He had entered the world that was in fact the real world, the one behind the pretty curtain.

Jason - let's call him Jason - had been riding home with a friend from their soccer game. The friend's soccer mom was driving them home. I don't know if she had them buckle up - but I'm pretty sure she would have. This school district was a place where moms were wholesome and involved in their kids lives. The boys would probably have been buckled into the back seat, reliving the game, or trading snacks, who knows? But there was an accident-- and "there has been an accident" is what people often say to convey the worst news. There was an accident and Jason walked away from it unscathed (they say "unscathed," too) - but his friend - his very best friend was killed. Jason lived. He lives. His friend dies. Everyone is sorry and eventually Jason is sent back to school, wrapped in the grey cotton wool that is adult concern at its worst.

But, I still had a writing workshop to teach. There was a terrific kid named Billy in that class who did not believe language changed. I could quote slang, even his own, but evolving language was not an idea he embraced, so I ended up bringing Middle and Old English into that classroom to make my argument. Billy loved it. He was totally engaged.

All the while Jason hunkered over the scarred wood that was his desk, his place, still as a vacant spot. I watched him, sad myself, because I knew what was up with Jason.

I knew kind grown-ups were saying things to Jason, things like "I can't imagine what you are going through," or "tell me what you are going through," or worst of all, "I know what you are going through." But Jason was not going through anything. Things were going through Jason. Big things. Windy things. Empty things. Things with question marks as big as ostriches. Those winds were blowing right through Jason and giving him new meaning for words like "zero," "space," empty," "void." They were busy emptying him out, causing words like "know" and "believe" and "understand" to fall away as the meaningless constructions they now were. They really are. Jason was dealing with "not-fifth-grade- things." He was in the place where impermanence is revealed as the only permanence...and that's not a thing the other kids could get. He was alone.

Meanwhile there's Billy, raucous and happy. He is at me about the Middle Ages. He is entranced with the idea now of such a different place, a different time, different spelling, different words, and he wants to know all about it. He tells me about the books he loves and he says he wants a good book about the Middle Ages. He says I should write one. He is talkative and pretty smart, and fun. He participates with a vengeance. He is alive and he believes in everything his teachers and his parents tell him. At least he is willing to be convinced. He is the not-Jason in the classroom, and I need him there. I need that lively 11 year-old brain as I steal glances at Jason, aware of my impotence.

So I wrote the book, the one I'm trying to sell you right now. I meant to write it for Billy - who was as rambunctious and physical as Wyllym is in the book, and of course the book is partly for Billy. But in the end I also wrote it for Jason, who like Edric, was and will always be, sober beyond his circumstances and older than his years. He was the real thinker in the classroom - well, he wasn't thinking yet, too soon, too painful, but he was poised to be the deep thinker, the one who questions the easy assumptions. The one for whom "forever" meant something totally new, the one who now had doubts about the authorities in his life who painted the happy pictures we all must paint for our children. He had seen behind the curtain...and was going to have to live there now.

Oh, I remember now. He was Jacob. How could I have forgotten that? He was named Jacob. He was the boy who wanted one thing and got another.  Read More 

It's incredible what the outdoors - the world outside this office - can do for a writer. At least for this writer. It's been warmer, then colder and that reminds me that the rhythms in this process - the putting the book out process - are probably also natural.

I'm probably not some weird inadequate human being because I have these ups and downs. It's most-likely natural to be hyped up the first day you see the cover on the Amazon website and think - YES - finally! It's probably just as natural to be tired by the third straight day (and night) of trying to figure out how to pitch your baby to the world - especially a part of the world that has no reason to know or love you.

By now the friends and family who will buy the book have, and I am enormously grateful. I am likewise faced with the task of learning a whole new thing if I want some unknown 16 year old to come face-to-face with book, and then decide to read it.

So I'm researching. This week I've read that "tweens and teens" (and isn't that an icky turn of phrase) like to read "up." That means they like to read about kids a bit older than they are, so opening my book description with my heroes' ages at the beginning of the book is a mistake. A mistake. Another mistake? Good grief.

But by the time the book ends they are all two years older, so I must re-write the book description. If this information is correct, that is. So I polled a few folks and sure enough - they remember liking to read about characters who were older than they were. Then I think of 10 (I mean 10 and half) year old Madeline who also likes to do that. Fortunately grammar and syntax provide avenues for the re-write. With Kindle and Print on Demand I can change the description in about 48 hours - it will be interesting to see if anything changes.

Which brings me to my thought for today - I think I better treat this enterprise as an experiment. I think I better view it with curiosity and a sense of humor and with the sure knowledge that no on is born knowing all this stuff so I am entitled to my mistakes.

I think I also better remember that no matter what the world thinks of Wych, it is a story I wanted to write, to tell...and it was written for one boy who sat quietly in the corner of a classroom I was teaching in. He could hardly think about what we were doing in class because he was trying to recover from an experience that had placed him immediately and violently in the presence of questions that were beyond his years.
Tomorrow I'll tell you about him... Read More