A literary week and then some

Last week was dominated -- happily (yes, I know it's a adverb!) -- by things literary.

The first event of the week was a fantastic presentation by Sharyn McCrumb and Adam Edwards, authors of Faster Pastor, Sharyn's third NASCAR book and the first one written with a co-author. I had the pleasure and honor of reading an advanced reader copy of the book and reviewed it for Valley Business Front earlier this year. If you want to laugh out loud, this is a good book to read.

Sharyn and Adam were very generous with their time, talking to a crowd of around 75 who braved sloppy, snowy roads, answering questions and signing books. The event was a fund-raiser for the Westlake Library, the newest community center at Smith Mountain Lake.

The second event was private. A few friends gathered over lunch to talk about marketing for writers, both self-published and commercially published. We have been working on a marketing plan for new writers. We challenged each other, asked questions, brought in outside ideas, and I captured everything in an organic document. We want to test this with some of our friends who have books in print. We also think this would be a good resource for writers who have yet to publish, but who are getting close. We all determined it was never too early to think about how to promote your works. We also decided that it was hard work, but worth the effort in the end.

And finally, the weekend concluded with me finishing My Name Is Red, by Orhan Pamuk. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006. This literary novel is worth the investment in time. It is beautiful. I wish I could read the original Turkish, but if the English translation is faithful, I don't need to. The novel breaks all the "rules" for what agents say they want. It has so many different narrators that you have to refer to the bottom of the page to see who is speaking. The narrators do not have different voices. There are descriptive passages, adverbs, and other contemporary taboos. Perhaps because it is historical fiction, set in sixteenth-century Istanbul, that Pamuk broke all the rules and still found an agent. I'm glad he did.

And now back to removing words ending in "ly" from my manuscript. (This caused no small amount of concern when I searched for "ly" and found over 1,000 of the bad critters. Then I remembered that a main character is "Emily." Solved that problem. For now, she is "Emilie." Can always change it back. . . .)

Have a productive week and to all my writer friends, keep cranking out pages.