David Mark Brown

A conference room full of writers is worse than a little Miss Texas beauty pageant.  Every writer tries earnestly to say nice things to every other proud parent in the room, all the while bouncing between the extremes of thinking that their own manuscript is a goddess among toads or a stinking turd among roses. It just can’t be helped.

This weekend I attended a conference here in Salt Lake City with over a hundred other writers and a handful of people from the “biz.”  Really, it was a great time.  There were certainly times of commiseration and shared struggle as well as genuine celebration in the creative art of writing.  But I had to make an intentional effort going into the conference to chill my own jets and try to appreciate the talent around me.

K. M. Weiland, in a recent post, stated the dilemma quite well when quoting well known author Orson Scott Card:
Writers have to simultaneously believe the following two things:

1. The story I am now working on is the greatest work of genius ever written in English.
2. The story I am now working on is worthless drivel.

   Read moreTurds and roses: Mine smells better than yours

The title of a book will be the only words read by the majority of not-quite-readers (some won’t even get that far). As a writer I have to earn every sentence. The title helps lots of readers get over the hump toward reading the first sentence. If they like that one hopefully they will read a few more, etc.

My working title turns out to have been someone else’s working title (and now published title). This someone else is also a bigger fish in the novelist pond, so I am dropping Blood Vines as my title and looking for a new one. I mean, hey. I’m sure it was better suited for my soon-to-be-pulitzer-prize-winner, but first come, first serve. No hard feelings (for taking my title, you jerk!).

Here is where you come in. I need some help coming up with the new money-making, “buy me!” title.

Read moreTitle quest, help wanted

In many ways, I’m sort of a jerk.  Some of those ways have proved quite beneficial.  I have a remarkable ability to hear stories of terrible tragedy in the lives of others and then wander off wondering if I should have peanut butter and jelly crackers for lunch or chips and salsa.  It is not my memory that sucks.  It is just that reality has never really seemed, well, all that real to me.  But more like a book or a movie.

Life is real to me when I am in the story.  In the moment.  While I am listening to the heart-rending tale I’ll cry my head off right along with the teller.  But once I close that book and move on to the next…  I guess the old expression “out of sight, out of mind” really does sum me up.

This sort of “professional distance” (I used to hear lots of horrible stories and real life nightmares regularly as a part of my job) has allowed David Mark Brown, common citizen, to roam the earth pretty care-free.  Hurrah.  But as a novelist it is death.

Read moreNot keeping a professional distance