Scags at 30

Scags as character and author

~ deborahemin ~ Leave a comment

It is time to start writing about two novels that will be published in early 2018. One is about Scags, the character I created for the Scags Series and will be the final volume of the series. The second book will be by Scags and it will be the start of a new set of stories, written by Scags.

On the face of it, this may seem like a bit too much of the same thing. The final volume, Scags at 45, is a memoir, Scags’ story of her life with its own ending to the series. In the midst of “writing” that story, she is given a set of stories to tell that are not about her but about a different character, Sophie, who is a new kind of super-hero: a lesbian, angered by a lover’s betrayal who receives a packet of papers that reveal the secrets of the most successful businesses in the US, which are also involved in sex trafficking, drugs and money laundering. Sophie, being pursued for these papers because of who they expose, becomes involved with a group of women, many of them clergy, who are engaged in destroying this tumor at the heart of the American soul.

As Scags at 45 advances, Scags shares her early attempts at writing this political thriller that becomes the novel, Born Loser, Born Lucky (BLBL). These writings, embedded in the e-book version of Scags at 45, will link to a separate landing page on the Sullivan Street Press website. For those reading the book in paperback, the links will be available too.

I’ve been asked if writing two novels at once is really possible. One trick I found for keeping track of each story is to talk about them. As counter intuitive as that seems, I am getting help in two ways. First, by repetition, I remember more of the story. Second, which goes concomitantly with this, by watching the faces of those I tell the stories to, I see if they are bored, confused. So far, no one has been either bored or confused.

This process of writing has made me think that perhaps I am a story telling trail blazer, which is a great motivator to write every day.

Follow some of my progress here: www.facebook.com/scagsseries

Buy books here: http://sullivanstpress.com/

E-Books, Print Books and Giving

~ deborahemin ~ Leave a comment

Ah, it is that time of year again, no, not quite Christmas, but almost my birthday and Chanukah. Now my thoughts turn to snow, the cold and how you can support this publishing company I run, Sullivan Street Press.

Hear my prayers

First I pray that most of you will take it into your hearts to love and to read e-books. Whether you buy them for yourself, buy gift cards for your friends and family, ask your libraries to buy our books, there are so many ways you can both show your support for our e-books while at the same time helping the authors I publish get their stories into a wider world of readers. (To learn more about e-books, here is a recent blog post about e-books.)

Know our mission

I was talking to a new author today and I realized that I don’t outline our mission clearly enough. It is a lofty one, full of the need for more stories being told that will help our readers understand the life around us better. The authors I publish have all helped me to gain things I might not have even known I needed. Paul Graham’s book, Eating Vegan in Vegas helped me to become a vegan. Mickey Z.’s first book with us, Occupy this Book helped me to understand how to be an advocate and activist while his second book, Occupy These Photos was an eye opening series of photos showing activists at work from OWS to the #BlackLivesMatter demonstrations in NYC.

Coming Attractions

It is not seemly, some say, for a publisher to sell her own books through her company. My answer to that is simple: Who cares? The latest volume of the Scags Series, Scags at 30, will be out in May. (You can learn more about the earlier volumes here.)

Look to April for the Third Edition of Eating Vegan in Vegas. This latest edition will be a guide to vegan restaurants in Las Vegas but more than that it will be a resource for all visitors to Las Vegas who want to know what is going on in the Animal Rights community, how the environmental movement is shaping up in Las Vegas, where to go to find the artists and those working to help spread the word about a plant-based life in Las Vegas.

Starting a new poetry series, too

I had a vision in West Virginia of the sort of poetry books that SSP could publish. I know we now have the capacity, through our distributor, INScribe Digital, to make available both e-books and bound books that could have text as well as full-color photos in them. I had been thinking about Liza Charlesworth’s poetry and her photographs for a long time.

Out of these visions and memories, a new hybrid poetry book was born. Liza’s book, Why Happiness Makes Me Nervous, uses text as a trunk for her lyrical narrative of a girl growing into the world and uses photographs as visual poems that expose another set of emotional experiences similar to leaves on a tree that come out of the trunk, her poems. This will be a book to linger within for hours. Whether bought as an e-book or a bound book, it will be a beautiful addition to what we refer to as poetry but as a new hybrid form.Liza’s book will be out in April, in time for National Poetry Month.

Send good wishes, support and your money

SSP is in need of your support as we begin this new year with new books, new authors, new ways of producing books (which I will describe more fully in another blog post) and our continued commitment to see publishing as a creative act.

GoFundMe will gladly take your payments for next year’s work. Thanks in advance.

Writing Habits–Research

~ deborahemin ~ Leave a comment

I obviously like to tell stories. It would be pretty sad if I didn’t like to tell stories being that I am a novelist. I also like to listen to people tell the stories about their own lives.

When I realized I needed to talk to a nun about her life in order to flesh in my character, Margaret, in my new novel, Scags at 30, I asked friends for recommendations. I wanted to fill in what I could about a real nun’s life rather than try and make it up from the books, movies and essays I had read.

As a writer, I knew what I needed to do was listen to a nun talk about her life. It would be comparable to preparing for a role. There were missing pieces to the character, Margaret, that I needed to understand. I figured even nuns like to talk about themselves. So, I found a way to meet with Sr. Marion Defeis and it led to some incredible insights about Margaret as well as to meeting a truly remarkable person.

I had two opportunities to observe Sr. Marion. The first was at a panel discussion on solitary confinement at The Oratory of Saint Boniface in Brooklyn. She led an evening’s discussion that featured three other women involved in the ongoing work to end solitary confinement in New York State. Watching her was my job that night; yet my attention was often diverted by the emotional talks each of these other women gave.

I approached Sr. Marion at the end of the evening to make an appointment to talk to her privately. I thus got on the subway to meet Sr. Marion where she lived– at Providence House in Coney Island. The subway ride from Queens to Coney Island is one of the longest in the system. It was long enough for me to use to prepare for my talk with Sr. Marion. Fortunately, I found in me what I needed to be able to listen closely to Sr. Marion in order to find out who Margaret is.

Sr. Marion and I sat on the porch of Providence House for over an hour. It was an overcast and chilly day but it was comfortably quiet. This is what I heard as we talked that afternoon. She began by telling me of her life before Rikers. Her sentences were short, crisp but as she approached her tenure as a chaplain at Rikers, they filled out, grew long and more involved and required me to ask more questions because there was so much more  of that life for me to understand.

Before Sr. Marion could work at Rikers, nuns were more confined to one profession–teaching. When she was able to work at Rikers, she worked part-time. She therefore had time to do other work related to her chaplaincy, like going to Albany to lobby the legislature to end the punitive Rockefeller Drug Laws and to meet with the Archbishop of New York to get his support. She gleefully told me he wrote a very good op-ed in support of it too. She also went into great detail about the work she did with the Queens DA’s office to help drug mules get better treatment in the courts and so forth.

As she spoke, I  realized I had never expected to hear a nun speak about “drug mules.”  At first, I wanted to laugh but then came a different response.

Margaret became a real person to me. By listening to Sr. Marion, Margaret grew out of an idea and into actuality. I could now have conversations with Margaret I knew her so well.

I wasn’t fully aware of that in the moment but I was so thrilled to have found Margaret that I asked Sr. Marion what I could do to repay her for her time. From that question, another part of this adventure with Sr. Marion began. Stay tuned for that report next.

(More to come on Sr. Marion in my next blog. In the meantime, please help Sullivan St Press pay its bills by donating here: GoFundMe.com/yw769w)

Writing Habits

~ deborahemin ~ Leave a comment

Working on Scags at 30 has been an exciting albeit troubling experience. Too many interruptions of the deepest kind–too many deaths and too many illnesses have caused me to constantly lose focus. That shattering of my concentration is something other writers have discussed with me as well.

What to do?

I am not the sort of person who can just dive into work no matter where I am. I have to make the space my own in some way–putting my books on the table; pacing the space and exercising in it; sitting for long periods of time staring into space. Something is needed to help me get to work that resembles the things I do at home.

While writing in a laundry room in the Cooperstown KOA recently, I remembered one of the habits I had while working on Scags at 7. I used to write copiously in the margins. What I wrote became like a personal diary of my thoughts as they helped or hindered my work.

That practice became such a useful tool that when I started teaching writing, because it doesn’t matter what genre you write, I encouraged my students to use that practice as well. Soon, I discovered that John Steinbeck had also used a journal to help him write East of Eden. On the recto page he wrote his draft and on the verso page he wrote to his editor every morning before he started writing the draft. It is fascinating reading for any writer. (Here’s a good review of it http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/book-of-a-lifetime-journal-of-a-novel-by-john-steinbeck-1819459.html)

Many writers do this without knowing they do it. At one time, Yahoo had a very good journal keeping tool that allowed me to write to myself every day so that I could get the wheels moving. I gave myself 15 minutes and then I had to turn to the novel (Scags at 18) and move it along.

The earlier technique of mine was to write in the margins themselves. This was when my own writing was clearer and I could read what I had written, even the tiny notes about what it was at that moment that was keeping me from saying what I knew or thought I knew needed to be said.

Writing early drafts is the hardest work as all writers know. Revising is a joy and I always look forward to that work. But the really difficult choices are made early on and with great fear and caution because the choices we make are the ones that will determine whether we are risking enough and saying it well enough to help a reader understand what is at stake in the story they are reading.

(We are now home due to my wife being sick and my mother in hospice. This raises another level of fear when it comes to writing Scags at 30 but I am doing it and with some pleasure. If you can help us to cover some of the costs of what Sullivan Street Press is doing, please use this website to donate whatever you can. Thanks in advance.) http://www.gofundme.com/yw769w