How the light bulb went off for me

by Rick Blechta

If you haven’t yet read Tom’s delightful post from yesterday, do so now!

I’m certain if you asked nearly any writer about when the writing light bulb went off in their head, they could probably tell you. Me? Not really.

You see my bulb must have come with a dimmer switch set at 0, and it only gradually began creeping up to full “you gotta notice me” brightness when I was nearing 40 years old. Let me explain.

Even as a youngster, I loved making up stories. (Lots of us can say that, Blechta!) More often than not, I would only do it in my head to amuse myself, but occasionally I would share my imagination’s output with family and sometimes friends. Some of those thought I was kind of weird. Perhaps I am…

My 4th Grade teacher, Miss Wenzel noticed that a) I always had my nose in a book, and b) I was very enthusiastic when it came to writing book reports. For a boy in 4th Grade, I guess she was amazed by that since I wasn’t all that enthusiastic about any other parts of the curriculum. It was her who gave me an extra credit assignment to write a small story.

Because I’ve always had trouble with the concept of “short”, I handed in a story about a chipmunk. It was 14 typewritten pages. You can imagine how long it took me to do that since I’d never used a typewriter before. So the light bulb was getting brighter.

In high school I got asked to write a review of the school musical by the local newspaper. (My first byline!) I guess it went well, because I was asked to do it again the following year. Sadly that run ended right there because I was in the musical the third year and I didn’t think it would be seemly to write a review of a production I was in. I mean a headline of “Blechta steals the show!” probably wouldn’t have garnered me any friends. But the brightness of the light bulb was definitely up.

In my first two years at university I wrote some reviews of concerts, a few of which got published, I even got paid for two! (What a concept. You could actually make some money putting words together.)

What turned the light bulb to full brilliance after so many years was artistic boredom.

In the late ’80s after a number of years doing music 24/7 as a performer and teacher, I burned out. Don’t get me wrong, I still loved my musical life, but I found I was just doing too much of it. I needed a fresh artistic outlet.
After casting about a bit, I sat down to write a baseball short story. While it had some artistic merit, I wasn’t all that great. But I had thoroughly enjoyed the process.

Since I’d been voraciously consuming mysteries for many years, I began another short story. As I said above, I have trouble with short, so when I finished my narrative a few hundred pages later, I had a full-blown mystery/thriller on my hands that I titled Knock on Wood. Its weaknesses are very evident now, but the narrative does contain a few strong points.

However, the end result was…I found myself wanting to continue writing crime fiction. And with that, I was off!

What’s your story?

Authors: the importance of knowing your business

by Rick Blechta

I have written at length on Type M about the difference between the job of “writer” and “author”. Yeah, those thoughts are very much my view of the two, and you might well not agree with them, but please hear me out. I’m not going to rattle that cage very much in this week’s post, anyway.

A few years back I did a very rash thing. Toronto was being considered to host the 2017 Bouchercon and I went to the meeting (held at the end of the Cleveland Bouchercon in 2012). What happened next I may live to regret. I said I would be willing to do the convention program book. Now payment is coming due and the sheer amount of work involved is daunting in the extreme.

Anyway, I’m currently dealing with processing author photos to accompany the brief bios that form a review of the authors in attendance. Here’s where I didn’t think through my commitment when I said, “I’ll do the programme!” At this point over 600 authors will be in Toronto next fall. Each should have a nice photo in the programme, right? That means dealing with those photos.

(When is he going to get to the writers vs authors part?)

With my professional designer’s hat on, I have to say that 20% of the author photos I’ve received have been (to put it bluntly) appalling: awful photos, too small photos and even ones that are quite blurred.

It seems to me that if you want to be taken seriously as a published author, first off, you should have a professionally done photo that can be used for situations just such as this. Yeah, your husband may have taken a great photo of you on your last holiday in Cancun, but is it up to professional standards?

I also put together a pretty exhaustive list of what authors need to know before sending in their photos. I know some of the authors submitting didn’t even give this a moment’s consideration.

One of the biggest things an author can do to help themselves stand out from the crowd — and probably the easiest to accomplish since it’s completely under their control — is to appear professional. For instance, a newspaper asks for a nice headshot for a profile they’re doing of you. Your job is to fire off a professional photo of yourself — and you do it promptly and in the proper format for print. That’s called being professional. It will help them to take your seriously.

That means educating yourself about things like finding out the difference between a photo on a computer screen and a photo on a piece of paper. (And it’s easily “google-able”.)

The thing that appalls me is that not only do too many authors attending Bouchercon not know anything about these requirements, but they obviously didn’t bother reading my instructions (designed to help them if they don’t know).

And they expect to be taken seriously as professional authors? Ain’t gonna happen. You tend not to get second chances with other professionals, especially media outlets.

I’ve just covered one small area of knowledge that an author should know. If you’re new to this game, especially, do yourself a favour and educate yourself. It will only help you.

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One additional thing: Bouchercon2017 sent out a call for author photos over two weeks ago. Do you know how many I’ve received? Just over 10%. I’ll bet a good 20% of the attending authors will submit their photo at the eleventh hour. Guess what’s going to happen? I’m only going to have time to be able to just throw their photo on the page and hope for the best. So if you’re one of those authors who has registered and not taken care of this, do yourself a HUGE favour and get me your photo now when I can give it my full attention. Details are on the Bouchercon website.