Run, Baby, Run. Write, Baby, Write.

by Amy Franklin Willis

2013, I completed my first half-marathon.  That’s 13.1 miles.  I am not a runner.

I do not possess the classic “runner’s body”—i.e. all hard, pointy edges of lean muscle and solid compactness.  At forty-one, I am round, curvy, soft, fleshiness.

In college I was on the rowing team.  But that was twenty years and three children ago.  Over the past decade I ran short distances to forestall the middle-age gut intent on wrapping itself around my waist.

As 2012 drew to a close, an ad for the Bay Area women’s running store See Jane Run’s half-marathon featuring Champagne and chocolate caught my attention.  Champagne and chocolate are among my top all-time combinations, above Laverne & Shirley re-runs and below “beach cottage.”

When my eldest daughter expressed interest in doing the marathon together, I committed, entranced by visions of us crossing the finish line simultaneously, cue Chariots of Fire theme music.  Those visions evaporated in to the mist—discarded next to my fantasies of a perfectly clean and organized home and a bottomless well of maternal patience--when our training runs proved that my fourteen year old ran at a slightly faster pace.  In short, she left me in the dust.

For the first half mile, I maintained contact with Georgia, her slender, classic runner’s shape always just ahead in the distance.  But then her muscles would warm and her pace would quicken and my muscles would warm and my pace would stay the same and I would have to content myself with a shouted, “Make sure your cell phone is on!”

Two months before the race, we got serious and tackled a nine-miler around Lake Chabot and then a relentlessly boring, unmarked 11.5 mile trail along the Hayward Shoreline—for the first four miles I told myself it was the Cornish coast of England and I was running towards my thatched roof cottage but my rational self caught on quickly and said, that is the San Francisco Bay, Amy, and you are running this trail so you can run the race and not embarrass yourself.

We logged over one hundred and fifty training miles.  And during those interminable stretches of aloneness and unpluggedness—running at Lake Chabot offered preening wild turkeys, a great egret surveying the water, and a brush rabbit huddled alongside the trail that distracted me enough not to require pulsing digital beats in my ears—I recognized the singular truth of running.

The only way to fail was to stop.

To cease putting one foot in front of the other.

And, in fact, the only way to rest the burning, fatigued muscles was to run faster, to reach the end more quickly.

Before 2013, I had never run distances longer than three miles but this business of just slogging through, quarter mile after quarter mile, struck me as very similar to writing novels.

Novels are the marathon of the writing world.  People, generally short story writers, argue that other types are more difficult and I think this is complete and utter nonsense.  Sustaining a coherent and interesting fictional story over the course of eighty-thousand some odd words is a uniquely challenging endeavor not meant for the meek.  It takes days, weeks, months, and more often than not, years to get a novel done.

You begin with an idea—a character who intrigues you, a situation that puzzles you, a setting you want to memorialize within a story.  The writer has no guarantee she will finish.  No assurance the idea can grow and stretch and bear the weight of three hundred pages without collapsing in to the ash of might-have-been stories.  One never knows what obstacles narrative will present us.   A character who does not perform as the plot requires.  A structure that is impossibly complex.  An unsatisfying resolution.  

In the beginning, the writer can also not anticipate what the outside world will throw at her.  She may be diagnosed with a life-threatening disease.  She may divorce her spouse.  She may lose her job.  She may temporarily take leave of her senses.  Her children may experience physical or mental crises.

Each one diverts her from the writing.  From the story.  From finishing.

On race day, the weather report predicted record highs for parts of the Bay Area and, most troubling, no cloud cover. Georgia and I trained in low 70s temperatures with abundant cooling fog.   The See Jane Run course was set on the quasi-island of Alameda, a small city attached to Oakland by drawbridges and fragile stretches of land, and thus typically prone to breezes off the San Francisco Bay and the Oakland Estuary.

As I hit the first mile and a half of the race, three truths emerged:  in my nervousness, I neglected to put sun screen on either myself or Georgia; the sun appeared intent on burning stubbornly hot and bright for the first half of the course; and lastly, the race was going to be much more difficult than I imagined.

Novel writing is a grind.  The only way to complete one is to make the pages pile up.  I force myself through this by using daily and weekly word count goals.  Printing the pages and seeing their vertical height grow is the only way I know to push forward through the story.  It’s the structure I impose on a task that feels all too loose and magic-like, subject to the idle winds of procrastination and despair.

The middle is the worst part.  In the race, miles six through eleven felt like twenty.  I was beginning to tire—hamstrings pulling ever tighter; multiple water blisters forming on my right foot, disappointment that the course wound through bland office parks and covered acres of steaming blacktop, the sun leaving a swath of my right arm blazing.

Mile thirteen nowhere in sight.

In writing, the middle is where I lose my mind and my faith.  It’s the point in the story where everything gets complicated and is not at all like you thought it might be and the ending you originally had in mind is now, clearly, not going to work.  The writer may say to herself, What have I done?

And this is the dangerous part.  The part where she is most likely to give up.  To stop because it has become too hard.

At the start of the race, I found a pacer—a person who carries a sign with the miles per hour pace she promises to keep and who functions as your beacon in the midst of five thousand running bodies trying to throw off your pace.  I thought, yes, this is a pace quicker than my usual but surely I can do it.  And won’t it be better to run with this group connected to her?

I couldn't keep up.  My race pace ended up two minutes slower than my normal training pace.  Why?  No idea.  The heat?  Concern about failing to finish?

Around mile seven I settled in to a pace far behind the last of the pace ladies.  It was just me and a small Wonder Woman doll tucked in to my belt for inspiration.  It was the speed I could manage.

When I hit mile eleven, I rejoiced.  I knew I could finish the last two miles.  The course curved next to the bay and nearby home owners held hoses over their yards to give runners a cooling mist.  A young girl of seven pointed a hose at me and I ran through it grinning, my arms thrown open wide.  People held up signs of encouragement as we passed—“U Hella Inspire Me”--and the clang of cowbells rang out.  A man in his forties and his teenage son gave me a high-five, yelling, “Finish strong.  You’re almost there.”

A novel requires fortitude.  And when one passes through the valley of the shadow of the middle, if you can keep going, keep putting one word after another, the end will rise up before you.

If you are lucky enough to have people cheering you as your near it, all the better.  If not, you cheer yourself.  You see the end coming.  You write it.  You collapse.  You celebrate.

Fifty feet from the finish line I caught sight of my six and ten year old daughters and my seventy year old mother.  The long wait finally over, they hooted.  They hollered.  They jumped up and down.  In that moment, the six stinging blisters and the tight hamstrings disappeared from my consciousness, making room for joy.

And then I saw my wife and my oldest.  Georgia had arrived fifteen minutes earlier.  The “I Ran for Chocolate” medal already around her neck.

___________________________________

Amy Franklin-Willis's debut novel The Lost Saints of Tennessee is out in paperback now.  She is writing more and running less this summer.

How To Party Like An Author Rock Star

Twelve months ago I was an unpublished writer. My name hadn’t been in print since George W. Bush’s first term.

And then, magically, I could walk in bookstores and there it was.
The Lost Saints of Tennessee was published by Atlantic Monthly Press, a division of Grove/Atlantic, in hardcover in February 2012; the paperback is out this month. Despite the trend of letting debut books sink or swim on their own, my publisher consulted me on cover art, marketing strategy, and sent out a small truck’s worth of advance reading copies to reviewers and booksellers across the country. They had faith in my book. For a writer who spent eight years working on a novel with sparse amounts of encouragement along the way, it felt like an alternate reality.

And then things got really surreal a few months before the hardcover launch.

Grove’s director of publicity Deb Seager called me. “We’re thinking of hosting a media lunch for you and another author the next time you’re in New York.”

This was startling. First, no one and I mean NO ONE in publishing calls you—not your agent or your editor or your publicist—unless they view it as EXTREMELY IMPORTANT. Everything else is handled via email.

Second, it had never occurred to me, not even in my wildest self-aggrandizing fantasies, that anyone would throw me a “media lunch.” Sitting in deep conversation with Oprah? You bet. Talking with Terry Gross about how my little novel made its way to the #1 spot on the New York Times best sellers list? Of course. But lunching in a fashionable Manhattan restaurant with magazine and newspaper editors talking about my book? Uh, no.

I said yes. Yes, yes, yes.

And then I learned the identity of the other proposed lunch author. Grove/Atlantic is the American publisher for internationally renowned English author Jeanette Winterson—whose literary and film accolades include the Whitbread Prize and the Prix d'argent at the Cannes Film Festival, that Jeanette Winterson. Her memoir Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? was being published by Grove the month after Lost Saints. I had been a fan of Winterson’s work since my college days when I read Oranges Aren’t The Only Fruit, her semi-autobiographical first novel written when she was 23.

Panic mixed with a nerve-wracking blend of excitement and disbelief took hold.  What would I wear?  What would I say?  What if I froze up?  What if they hated me?  What if Jeanette Winterson was annoyed some no-name debut person was sharing her lunch?  But mainly, what would I wear?
From the dressing room of Macy’s, I texted pictures of myself in potential outfits to my elegant and always stylish author friend Christina Meldrum.  She gave the thumbs up to a green wrap dress and a fitted leather jacket.  I bought brown knee-high boots to match.  The lunch would be late September with a crisp hint of fall in the air.

As fate would have it, crisp did not show up but a gasp of late summer heat did. The morning of the lunch I climbed out of my hotel room bed and prayed the suspicious cold symptoms that had plagued me for weeks would go away; the following week I'd be diagnosed with walking pneumonia. I drank coffee with a Thera-Flu Daytime chaser. The temperature forced me to scrap the leather jacket.  I wanted to ditch the knee-high boots too but had no suitable alternatives. Make-up applied, particularly to the under- eye circles and reddish nose, hair coiffed, and I was off.

Before heading downtown, I teetered up to the Magnolia Bakery near Rockefeller Center to procure the lunch’s final course—two hummingbird cakes, each inscribed with the title of the books being featured.  Hummingbird cake is a Southern delicacy and my main character Ezekiel’s favorite cake.

I cabbed it to the Grove offices with my suitcase for the plane ride home and the massive Magnolia boxes in tow. Their offices are on Broadway, right next door to the Max Brenner Chocolate Restaurant and across the street from Strand Bookstore, in other words an ideal location for a publishing house.
By this point I didn’t yet know who was attending the lunch only that I’d have five minutes to talk before the meal.  I had practiced my spiel on the drive from Bucknell to NYC the day before. I lugged my belongings to Deb’s office. Her email pinged. Library Journal gave Lost Saints a starred review, our first official review. My anxiety downshifted.

Then I saw the guest list.

On deck: book editors from Vogue, Oprah, Good Housekeeping, Ladies Home Journal, People, Library Journal, a sprinkling of local newspaper editors, and a soupcon of Manhattan booksellers.
Anxiety upshift. Like, into overdrive.

I had no illusions the group was assembling for me. They were coming to see Ms. Winterson. And like Tom Cruise in Days of Thunder, I would happily draft behind her considerable star power.

The restaurant was four blocks from the office. I walked with Deb, Grove/Atlantic head Morgan Entrekin and my editor Elisabeth Schmitz. It was a LONG walk in humid seventy-five degree temperatures while wearing a dress of a non-natural fabric and boots. We were the first to arrive at Ciano.

I immediately disappeared in to the downstairs bathroom where I spent five minutes psyching myself up-- I will not vomit. I will be charming. I will not sweat. I will not spill food on myself. I will not drink wine. Okay, one glass. I’ve been waiting for this moment my whole writing life.

Our party was in the private room upstairs. I joined the Grove people and saw that no one else had arrived yet except for a petite woman with curly red hair standing by a table with a book in her hands. My book.

Before my brain could even begin to process who this person was, she walked over to me. “You must be Amy. I’ve started your book and I really, really like it. Would you mind signing it for me?” said Jeanette Winterson.

As if the heat and the extreme nervousness of facing NEW YORK LITERARY PEOPLE were not enough, this, this was too much. I looked at Ms. Winterson with my mouth hanging slack. A beat passed. Then another. She gave me an encouraging look.

I finally managed, “I’m not sure where to sign it.” At that point, I had never signed a single book. Not one. To anyone. She kindly pointed me towards the title page and then told an amusing anecdote about where one was supposed to sign and how some people were just going to go sell the thing on eBay.

Here is what I wrote: To Jeanette, From a great admirer of your work.  XO Amy Franklin-Willis. Yep.  I put x’s & o’s on my inscription to one of the great literary treasures of our time. Oy.

For the entrée course I sat next to the Vogue books editor. A reader of Vogue since my teenage days, I was a bit intimidated but I mustered up the following ice-breaker: “Your friends must never want to go places with you because they feel such fashion pressure."

There was nowhere to go but up. I somehow managed to stand in front of the assembled crowd and say something about my book without stuttering or spewing spittle. Ms. Winterson, of course, put everyone at ease and made them laugh in her remarks. Note to self:  always use “f” word and say it with an endearing British accent.

My shining moment arrived at dessert. I whipped out the Magnolia cake boxes and told the story of hummingbird cake and how my great Aunt Beth made one when I was a little girl and the scale of the layers astounded me. Most of the crowd had never had it before and a pleasant ripple of sophisticated anticipation manifested.

I finally relaxed. Baked goods I could talk about until the cows came home. I sat next to the People editor and we traded working mom stories. I made the editor fellow from Newsday laugh.

Then, poof, it was over.

The media mavens left.

Morgan and Elisabeth were thrilled to have learned that Vogue planned to excerpt Ms. Winteron’s book in the magazine. They flanked her and her agent on the walk back to the office. I trailed behind them, feeling exhausted and just the tiniest bit like the girl no one picks at a middle school dance. Deb kindly kept me company.

The office buzzed with the arrival of Ms. Winterson. I ran into Elisabeth. Well, more accurately we both happened to be in the ladies room at the same time. She said some parting words through the stall before rushing back to her office where discussions about the gorgeous new covers they’d commissioned for Ms. Winterson’s backlist ensued.

I boarded the Virgin America flight back to San Francisco feeling one part author rock star, one part hopeless beginner author, and one part extreme gratitude that my publisher cared enough to put me in the same room with a literary star.

I could only hope that The Lost Saints of Tennessee caught a sprinkle of that stardust.
_______________

Amy is better at casual lunch conversation now.  Her debut novel is out in paperback Feb. 12th, 2013. The Lost Saints of Tennessee is an Indie Next Selection and Vanity Fair Hot Type pick. Visit her at www.amyfranklin-willis.com

Why Debut Authors Need Hogwarts: The Top 5 Publishing Secrets No One Tells You

by Amy Franklin-Willis

When the unknown writer crosses into the promised land of publication, she feels victory. Validation. Joy. Astonishment. Revenge. Lucky. Grateful. Psyched.  Exhausted.  All at the same time.  And so the publishing roller coaster begins.

In March 2010 my novel The Lost Saints of Tennessee sold to Grove/Atlantic. Two months ago it was published.  Throughout I have found myself wishing there was a writing conference or a retreat or, perhaps most of all, a school to attend that could prepare me for the most challenging and thrilling stage of my writing life.  

A school where your publishing contract gains you admission and the campus is located in a castle outside of Manhatttan, maybe in Poughkeepsie or Fishkill.  The school uniform consists of skinny jeans and rumpled turtlenecks.  With compulsory crest-emblazoned berets. And everybody smokes but no one gets cancer.

This Hogwarts of Debut Authors features a faculty of esteemed, successful authors of all stripes, genres and sales records.  My dream team would be, in no particular order, J K Rowling, Zadie Smith, John Grisham, Nora Roberts (or NFR as her friends call her), Carl Hiaasen, Ann Patchett, Marilynne Robinson, John Gardner (who is deceased but we’re dreaming here), Chris Bohjalian, Lauren Myracle, Mary Oliver, Michael Chabon, Dorothy Allison, Harper Lee and Toni Morrison.  Can’t you just see them all lined up at the head table for the opening dinner? 

And we learn to play Quidditch.  Just because. 

But since the school is still in the early concept stage, I’d like to share my top five publishing secrets no one tells debut authors.  And we’ll go in reverse order because it works for David Letterman.

·     

    SECRET #5.  The legend of the “Publication Date.”   

      As your book makes its way through the editing stages, your publisher sets a date for its official publication. You mark it on the calendar. You shout it on Facebook.  You tweet it. You post a photo of the mark on the calendar. 

Don’t.  It’s a big old lie.  Your book is no more likely to show up in one synchronized wave of instant placement in bookstores on its publication day than a woman is likely to give birth on her “due date.”   How many babies are born on their due date?  Less than five percent. 

Here’s what you can expect.  Your reviews, if you are lucky enough to get them, will be timed to come out either right before or right after your pub. date—this helps the magazines and newspapers organize their review workload and gives you a healthy promotional rocket booster launch out of the gate. 

Three weeks before your “pub. date” your great aunt Beth in Cedar Rapids will leave you a message saying, “Amy, I just saw your book in the store down the street!  Isn’t that great?  But didn’t you tell me it wasn’t coming out until next month?” 

You panic. The giant levers of publishing are off kilter.  Your book is premature.  PREMATURE.  Premature anything is bad, right?   

Worry not.  Your book is simply making its way towards “full distribution.”  Friends in New York will rejoice because they got the book “early” and friends in New Orleans will complain about the friends in New York because it’s not in their bookstore yet so they had to go listen to music and get drunk instead on Bourbon Street.  The official moment when all of your books are supposed to find their way to their temporary bookstore homes is your pub. date. 

This subject is confusing because we hear about the Harry Potter and Hunger Games midnight book release parties where thousands of readers line up outside their favorite bookstores.  Most authors think that someday, people will be doing this for our books too and when they do, the publisher will then “embargo” our latest book when it ships to the stores with tiny little bombs implanted in the cartons of books set to go off if the bookstore breaks the seal before the official pub. date. 

Until then, dear debut author, we must make do with a sprinkling approach to our books arriving in stores. 

·     SECRET #4:  There is not a “best” time to publish a new author.    

      There are better times.  Unless one is getting a huge push from his publishing house, avoiding the fall publishing season as a debut author seems favorable. Fall is when all the big author books get pushed out in advance of the December holiday season.

So let’s say you and your publisher determine Winter or Summer is the perfect season. You pray that your publication month will be a “quiet” one where your debut book shines like the North Star to potential readers.  No.  Scratch that.  Your first book will function as a solar eclipse amongst the other books foolish enough to schedule publication during your month.

And, inevitably, no fewer than three best-selling authors will have their new books out the same month as yours. Those selfish one percenter author bastards will suck all the air out of the publicity you know was destined for your masterpiece.  You know this as surely as the Flat Earth Society knows the idea of the Earth being round is political propaganda.

·     SECRET #3:  Social Media Will Consume Your Life.    

      At a minimum, your publisher will expect you to:  develop a Facebook presence, either on your own personal page or, more frequently, on an author fan page; tweet snappy, interesting things via Twitter that talk about other things besides your book but occasionally mention your book; have an engaging, easy to navigate website. 

This obligation surprised me the most. I work a full-time job, am raising three kids, and attempting to be a novelist. I now spend more time on Facebook than my teenager.  You will too. 

The social media piece is a HUGE time commitment. Your family will make snarky comments like, "Oh, look, Mom's going to tweet about how sorry she is for running over that poor squirrel because she thinks people will 'favorite' it." They will try to wrest your i-Phone from your hands just as you are uploading to Facebook the cutest picture of your book at the local bookstore.

But the modern reader loves to connect with her authors. She wants to tell you via Facebook or Twitter that she is on page 176 and loving it. And you better be there to thank her for buying your book.

On the web page front, I initially budgeted $1500. My web designer fell through and I ran out of money so I ended up doing it myself through a company called Squarespace. They charge $22/month to host a site and though I pulled several all-nighters to set it up initially, it ended up being the most effective and economical approach. I love my site and can easily add new event dates, reviews, videos and pictures.

·    Secret #2:  The Great Mystery of Sales Data.   

      For five years I worked for UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business as a fundraiser.  I met lots of Silicon Valley CEOs and learned something about business via osmosis during my tenure.  One of the basic expectations of business is tracking sales.  That information is then shared down the food chain from the executives to the sales force to the product developers. 

Not so in my limited publishing experience. Fuzzy ideas about your sales numbers exist at places like "Author Central" on Amazon's web site where you can tap in to Bookscan data (Bookscan is the industry's primary sales tracking method for print books but it contains only 40%-80% of actual sales--yes, you read that right, there's a 40% spread on the accuracy) and get your Kindle e-book rank but not the actual number of e-books sold.

Sales information seems to be guarded by publishers as if the release of the bare figures to you, the author, might be tantamount to giving Mahmoud Ahmadinejad blueprints to our nuclear facilities.  

The one place I've found thus far where I can get hard numbers easily is from my independent booksellers. They happily tell me how sales are going in their stores.

·      And the #1 SECRET is:  Having Your First Book Published Will Be More And Less Than You Ever Dreamed.  

      Here is the bad news. You will not be able to retire on the first royalty check you receive, providing you are in the fortunate group who earns back their advance and makes it into royalty territory.  Odds are against your book making it to the New York Times Bestseller list, though there are always a few debut books each year that do.   

      Most people you meet will never have heard of you or your book. And at least one person, probably more, will write a review either in print or on the web that says your book is “predictable” and that she likes the dog in your book better than the main character. 
  

      But there will be moments, I promise, when the miracle of publication causes your breath to catch. Someone throws you a book party, invites your closest friends and family, you buy a new outfit and feel, for a few hours, as if you are a literary princess or prince and the only person on the planet to have accomplished publication. 

      The first time you see your book in an actual bookstore. Facing out. On the front table. 

      A reader sends you a message that tells you your book--those words you wrote in the dark night while your children slept nearby--caused him to think differently about his relationship with his own family. 

      At a bookstore event, a stranger approaches you shyly with your book in her hands and says that it was wonderful. This same person will ask  your daughters--to whom the book is dedicated--to sign their names on the dedication page. 

      A reviewer will quote one of your favorite lines from the book as evidence of your writing talent and you will feel as if someone is listening. 

      As if your words have gone from that secret place where we conjure them, to the page, to the world.