Not Your Standard Undead Tale: An Interview with Jason Mott by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum & Matthew Huff (Part 4)

[Check out part one, part two and part three of the interview!] 

Jason Mott is a poet and novelist. His first two collections of poetry, We Call this Thing Between us is Love and Hide Behind Me, were published by Main Street Rag in 2009 and 2011, and his first novel, The Returned, was released in August 2013 with Harlequin MIRA and has been adapted for the television show, Resurrection, by Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B. Mott was nominated for an NAACP Award in the category of “Outstanding Literary Work—Debut Author” in 2014. Resurrection airs TONIGHT on ABC.

This conversation took place in May of 2013.

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum & Matthew Huff: Ok, so what are the returned? I mean it’s one of the mysteries of the book. They look and act more or less like normal humans. They have to eat, drink, sleep; they have internal organs etc. There are some differences like the vast amount of food they eat and the slight amount of time they sleep, but they seem more or less normal. What are they?

Jason Mott: I’m a very rational person. I love science, but at the end of the day this is an event that could never happen. So this question about the explanation comes up a lot. This is impossible. I’m not going to insult my readers by giving them some condescending answer. Instead, I ask the readers to ponder the question for themselves and, at the end of the day, the returned are whatever the reader decides they are. The reader can fill in the backstory of the returned however they see fit.

AMK&MH: Even if it did happen in the real world, we probably would be able to determine how, right?

JM: Precisely. To me, the returned are representative of so much more than whatever the answer to who or what they are could answer. It really comes in a far second to what they offer and what they fulfill in people. I just don’t really care what their backstory is or how they got there. If my mother showed up today, I wouldn’t give two shits about the how or why, I’d just be happy she was there. I would take circumstances as they were and make the best of what was given.

AMK&MH: This is another reason The Returned crosses over from genre to literature in my opinion: you don’t ask, “What’s going to happen next?” you ask, “What would I do if this happened to me?” You ask, “Why has this happened, not just what is going to happen.” I suspect that’s what will draw folks to The Returned... the novel as well as the TV show. Do you really believe you’d accept your mother if she returned, no questions asked?

JM: Oh yeah. I would love to have her return just to see how far I’ve come. I wanted to create this world where you had people who weren’t excited about those who were coming back. Every death is different, and it affects those connected differently. I’m not the same person I was when my mother passed in 2001; I’m not the same person I was when my father passed in 2008. So… in a way, part of me is worried, if she did come back, would she like the person I’ve become? Would we have friction? Would there be anything about me now that she wouldn’t like or approve of? I wanted to put those ideas into character as well.

AMK&MH: I hadn’t really thought of it that way before.

JM: Yeah, you spend years apart and you change and grow and develop; you get new interests, hobbies, you develop new outlooks on life. Take the pastor for example: his love interest (when he was 17) returns, but now he’s a married man, he has a wife. But she’s still 17; she still sees him at that stage in his life and, he has to ask himself if he is comfortable with who he has become in order to stay in the role he lives now. I think that’s a big friction point for people; I like to provide friction points for characters.

AMK&MH: How long did it take you to write The Returned?

JM: About ten months.

AMK&MH: Woah! That seems quick.

JM: Well, that’s before we got into revisions and serious editing, but yeah about ten months for the first draft of the entire manuscript. I started drafting it in September 2010 and finished it around July 2011.

Then I sent out queries way earlier than I should have….. I got lucky that my agent didn’t reply back until October; by then I had made some very heavy revisions. It wasn’t a complete train wreck by the time I actually got to speak with someone about it.

She did do a great job of making The Returned a viable book. I think this experience taught me as much if not more than my MFA program did. I’ve learned to be more self aware about what the art is doing and how it is working. For instance, the character of Lucille was a character who was pretty far down the row, to me. The novel was Harold’s; she was important but not extremely prevalent. In the original version, Lucille died four chapters before the end of the book. To me, that seemed like an appropriate departure for her as I didn’t view her as a particularly important character, I wanted the ending just to focus on Harold and Jacob. But when my agent read the script, the first thing she said was that Lucille died too early.

And something else I hadn’t considered while writing is that other people view the story through different characters. She said that Lucille was her main lens through which she read the book. Lucille was her filter. To have her die really didn’t work.

AMK&MH: Well, if we did a page count, I’ll bet Harold and Lucille actually share roughly the same page space. Like you said, they’re a unit.

JM: Lucille was as equally invested in the narrative as Harold was, and Harold was invested in her. But at the time, I was so engrossed in Harold and Jacob that I kind of forgot Lucille. That’s one thing my agent pointed out. She said you have to keep her alive longer, your climax is too early—you can’t forget that this is her story as well. At first I really resisted making these changes, but she talked about it again with my buddy, Justin, and he agreed with her. Then he came to me and reiterated that she does this for a living and that I needed to trust her judgment. From that point forward, I made any changes she suggested with no reservations. I didn’t even blink; I just did it. If she told me to get dressed up in an animal costume and go dance on the street corner I’d do it.

AMK&MH: So what are you working on now? I feel like I keep hearing about another new novel and some Retuned spinoffs.

JM: I just finished a draft of a second book set in the mountains of North Carolina. A small move from the coast to the mountains. A novel focusing on a father/daughter relationship, based loosely on one of my good friends from college. The novel has a few elements of the fantastic involved in it. Religion and a few other more characteristic elements of Southern fiction come into it.

AMK&MH: It’s unavoidable. Religion plays a huge role in those parts of the country.

JM: So I’m focusing most of my energy on that and also tying up a few loose ends with this novel. On the backburner I have a couple of fun graphic novel projects I’m working on. So hopefully if this does well and someone comes knocking on my door I can be like, “Hey! I got this too!”

As for the spinoffs, they’re prequels. They’re short stories that give early readers a chance to get a sense of the premise and tone of the novel, as well as my writing style. I’m a debut author. No one knows me. So these prequels are a good way for both The Returned and me to say “Hello” to readers.

AMK&MH: Thank you for your time, Jason.

JM: Thank you!

Not Your Standard Undead Tale: An Interview with Jason Mott by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum & Matthew Huff (Part 3)

[Check out part one and part two of the interview!]

Jason Mott is a poet and novelist. His first two collections of poetry, We Call this Thing Between us is Love and Hide Behind Me, were published by Main Street Rag in 2009 and 2011, and his first novel, The Returned, was released in August 2013 with Harlequin MIRA and has been adapted for the television show, Resurrection, by Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B. Mott was nominated for an NAACP Award in the category of “Outstanding Literary Work—Debut Author” in 2014. Resurrection airs on March 9, 2014.

This conversation took place in May of 2013.

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum & Matthew Huff: The Returned takes place in the small, Southern town of Arcadia. When Arcadia is selected as a location for a Bureau internment camp (as more and more returned flood the streets of America, the Bureau decides that “temporary” incarceration is their only option) the novel changes from a story about a small town to a story about a small town taken over by Colonel Lewis and his camp. The story also takes on a lot of historical weight from this point on. The Holocaust, for example, is referenced. A pretty serious risk.

Jason Mott: There were some delicate steps taken when I was working on this part of the novel. You know, once you tread into that territory there are so many things that people start bringing to the reading and interpretation of the book.

At the same time, when I was in grad school I did this project which focused on Japanese internment camps during WWII. So I spent a couple of years researching camp Topaz out near Salt Lake and learned a lot about that type of life and what those people endured. Many of the camps were quite nice but others were just devastating. These were just ordinary U.S. citizens who happened to be Japanese and all of a sudden they were jailed in these camps. That stuck with me for a long time. I think that this section of the book was largely a reaction to this past and also from a fear that it might happen again. It seemed important to me to write about.

Given the unique circumstances that occur during the book, you would need these pre-built/fabricated rural areas to put these camps in (old schools, for example). The town of Arcadia (modeled more or less of the town my mom is from) fit that purpose perfectly. And it made logical sense for the story too. The returned were growing in number and the US reached a point where they had to figure out what to do with all of these unaccounted people. Not all people are wanted back by their families—

AMK&MH: Right, when Agent Bellamy asks Harold if he wants to keep Jacob, he first says “No.”

JM: Exactly. Imagine how many people might reject the returned. There are only so many people that any one place can hold. Ergo, you have to keep these people somewhere. These camps made the most sense. So I don’t think it’s fair to say I’m making a political statement here but to deny the historical/political reference it makes would be ludicrous.

There certainly are shadows of the Holocaust here. Any time you have a group of people who are perceived to be different based upon race, religion, creed, etc., (in this case they people discriminated against used to be alive!) you have, I think, the potential for a lot of turmoil, chaos, and instances of regular, everyday people making poor choices. But you also have extremists. That’s why the Colonel Lewis shows up. I try to make characters who counter one another.

AMK&MH: The Returned doesn’t have a huge, explosive ending, which makes it (aside from the writing itself, its pacing and structure) a shade more literary than it might be with a more punctuated climax.

JM: I didn’t want a terribly dramatic ending. In small towns, you can have feuds, but there are limits to how far they will take them. It’s very rare that any feuds end in bloodshed. You’ll shoot someone’s dog, but you won’t shoot them. There’s lots of animal theft and weird things like that but not much more, While you can fight all you want in a small town, when something bigger comes along, you head over to that person’s house and help them out, even if you hate them. If a hurricane comes through a town like that, you’ll find sworn enemies helping to rebuild each-others homes. You can hate them later.

I really wanted this small town dynamic represented in the characters. I wanted these characters, when they finally confronted one-another, not to be strangers. They still live in the same town and are both part of that community. So when Fred finally confronts Harold, when Fred demands he let him kill the returned Harold is keeping safe, when that big, explosive climax should happen, it can’t.

AMK&MH: They’re also cast in extreme circumstances. Harold seems pretty cognizant of that. He basically gets what’s going on; he understands what Fred is up to. That’s one of the things about the book that I really liked, when they finally get to the big confrontation Fred’s like, “I’m gonna burn your house down, but it’s cool cause you have insurance.” Hilarious!

JM: That’s kind of what I’m saying, no matter how much you dislike someone, there are limits to what kind of damage you’ll do. You can absolutely hate someone, but you still won’t want to do them permanent damage, and if push comes to shove you help them out. In small towns, there isn’t a lot of outside help, so you’re somewhat forced to rely on one another.

Not Your Standard Undead Tale: An Interview with Jason Mott by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum & Matthew Huff (Part 2)

[Check out the first part of this interview here!]

Jason Mott is a poet and novelist. His first two collections of poetry, We Call this Thing Between us is Love and Hide Behind Me, were published by Main Street Rag in 2009 and 2011, and his first novel, The Returned, was released in August 2013 with Harlequin MIRA and has been adapted for the television show, Resurrection, by Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B. Mott was nominated for an NAACP Award in the category of “Outstanding Literary Work—Debut Author” in 2014. Resurrection airs on March 9, 2014.

This conversation took place in May of 2013.

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum & Matthew Huff: How did you come up with this idea of the dead reanimating as near-exact copies of their former selves rather than as flesh-hungry zombies or ghosts or something more…. mainstream? I’ve read that the premise emerged from a dream you had.

Jason Mott: Yes, I had a dream where I came home from work, just a regular sunny day and my (deceased) mother was sitting at the kitchen table. She was just sitting there waiting for me, much as she had in my childhood when I would come home from school.

It was a weird dream. Humdrum really, a boring type of dream where nothing particular happened. In the dream I just came in like this was a normal occurrence and then she asked me how everything had been going. After that we just spent the entire dream sitting at the table and talking about everything that had happened since she died.

I told her going to undergrad, about grad school, new friends I had made…just normal life. She harassed me about still not being married. There was no dramatic ending to it; I just remember waking up and being incredibly emotionally distraught. I expected to walk out and find my mother in the other room.

I told one of my good friends (Justin Hedge) about this, and he brought up the notion that I might not be the only person with these experiences. “What,” he asked if it weren’t a dream and it was happening to people across the world?” He ended up talking me into writing a short story about the experience. I read the story at a reading we were doing together a bit later, and it was received very well— visceral responses from everyone. After that we talked a bit about whether or not it had potential as a novel, tossed around story ideas, and then I started writing.

AMK&MH: So the two of you did a sort of “treatment” for the novel like a film?

JM: Yeah, we bounce material and ideas off of each other all the time. This was one of the ideas that Justin believed in more than I did, but it ended up working out.

AMK&MH: The Returned is a complex novel with a particularly vivid world. How did you go from dream, to premise, to a world rich with such varied characters, settings, and conflicts?

JM: It started slowly. We started talking about how people would react when their family members started returning. On a small scale, it is first perceived as a miracle. But on a larger scale you’d have to have people who could help place these returned back where they belong or to help you find someone you thought might be returned. Thus the “Bureau of the Returned,” a government agency designed to help return the returned to their families and to make sense of them. They, of course, coalesce an extreme level of political power and wealth as the crisis escalates and, by the end of the novel, are on the verge of taking over the world.

We wanted to develop an organization similar to the Red Cross, something to help people out but also an organization that aided in the organizational properties of the narrative itself…like a character. I figured I needed one government bureau to take the reigns of this problem rather than have many smaller organizations scattered throughout the story. You don’t want to make the reader wander aimlessly; you need to keep the narrative focused as much as possible.

Once we had the Bureau, it was nice because you can give a made-up organization whatever freedoms and limitations you deem necessary. On a small scale (realistically), you have many branches of government that all operate under different rules and circumstances. Then you have different governments that operate differently in different countries. By using the umbrella of the bureau simplified things as it would operate the same on a global scale, the reader doesn’t have to worry about change of rules across various parts of the globe. The book takes a leap from this one small town to this global issue in a simple way. I try not to distract readers too much; that’s something I struggle with on first drafts because I always have tons of distracting elements that need to be streamlined and extricated from the text.

There’s nothing cooler than the massive, faceless corporation. I’ve always been a huge fan of video games and many games make use of this to great effect. I’m a huge fan of this idea and using it in my writing… giving them their own character.

AMK&MH: How did you manage to create such a rich, original world without falling into the more standard undead story, i.e. The Walking Dead and World War Z.

JM: Those are great books… but they’re different, that’s all. They’re both well-written, literary, and intelligent. They’re just different stories from The Returned. I never thought of myself as trying to avoid writing another type of book (especially since I’m a big fan of those books), I just chased an idea and the story grew in its own direction.

AMK&MH: Like most parents who lose a child, Harold blames himself for Jacob’s death; Jacob wandered off while he was the one who didn’t keep a close enough eye on him. I think this is why Harold struggles so greatly to accept Jacob when he returns. Now he must face his demons… literally…

JM: Exactly. Harold has spent his life hiding from Jacob’s death. Now, there is this paradigm shift and Harold can no longer hide; Jacob is sitting right there on the chair in their living room. That’s why Harold has the most conflict with this change; he can’t hide anymore.

AMK&MH: You don’t have any children, but the way Harold and Lucille deal with Jacob and parent him once this conflict is resolved for Harold is wonderfully genuine and authentic. It almost feels “old American”…

JM: Well, I don’t have kids of my own, but when my mom passed, I was twenty-three and my nephew, Justin, was thirteen. I became this type of surrogate wife to my father. I cooked the meals and more or less raised my nephew while my dad went to work. Luckily, I had already quit my job and moved back in with my father to pursue a career in writing, so I was around.

I learned a lot about parenting through my nephew and my father. It was kind of like being thrown into the deep end of the pool; I started my experience raising kids by raising a teenager just a few years after being a teenager myself. It was a quick learning process you might say, because I was learning to take care of someone younger, take care of my father, and also learning to write during this period of my life.

A lot of people have asked me, “Why didn’t you use younger characters for Harold and Lucille?” It’s a popular trend in novels and in Hollywood right now. But the greater the distance between Jacob’s death and his return, the greater the emotional complexity. That’s why it takes the entire novel for Harold to come to terms with what has happened and how things have changed; Harold has been brooding on hiding from his son’s death for fifty years now.

AMK&MH: This conflict reaches its climax when Lucille finally confronts Harold about the way he’s treating Jacob. Harold won’t hang out with him or even really acknowledge him; he just sits on the front porch smoking cigarettes while Jacob stands inside the screen door. When Lucille asks why he won’t acknowledge Jacob, Harold says something to the effect of, “That’s not my son.” Lucille smacks him, and Harold has a decision to make. In many ways, The Returned is about marriage; it’s about family.

JM: I’ve never been married, but I drew a lot on my parent’s and my friends’ marriages for Lucille and Harold. I think that in a strong marriage, a good marriage, each person becomes a living representation of the other person’s conscience. So it took Lucille slapping the shit out of Harold for him to be able to embrace Jacob. It took that moment of spurn for him to make that journey. I don’t think I’ve ever properly grieved for my mother; I think that’s partly what allowed me to write so strongly for Harold’s part and to root for him in his journey. Harold and Bellamy were always my focal characters.

AMK&MH: Is The Returned Harold’s book?

JM: The book is more or less about Harold’s grieving and having a second chance. In whatever form you recognize resolution, Jacob’s return was Harold’s chance to find it. Anyone’s death leaves unresolved issues for those still living. Some are bad. Some are good. I wanted to provide, through Harold’s character, some answers to these issues everyone deals with at some point in their lives.

***

Stay tuned for more of this interview later this week!

Not Your Standard Undead Tale: An Interview with Jason Mott by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum & Matthew Huff (Part 1)

Jason Mott is a poet and novelist. His first two collections of poetry, We Call this Thing Between us is Love and Hide Behind Me, were published by Main Street Rag in 2009 and 2011, and his first novel, The Returned, was released in August 2013 with Harlequin MIRA and has been adapted for the television show, Resurrection, by Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B. Mott was nominated for an NAACP Award in the category of “Outstanding Literary Work—Debut Author” in 2014. Resurrection airs on March 9, 2014.

The Returned centers on the sleepy, Southern town of Arcadia and an elderly couple, Harold and Lucille Hargrave, whose son, Jacob, shows up on their doorstep fifty years after his drowning. He is one of “the returned”: women, men, and children of every age, race, and nationality who have returned, impossibly, from the grave.

Unlike the undead in recent novels and films like World War Z and Zombieland, the returned are not hungry for human flesh or lifeless reanimations of their former selves; rather, the returned return just as they left the world, their memories and personalities fully intact, their bodies as capable or sickly as the day they died.

This conversation took place in May of 2013.

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum & Matthew Huff: Given our culture’s current obsession with zombie, vampire, and what we could call apocalyptic narratives, The Returned is a little different. It takes place in a small town. It’s about two old people. The returned aren’t zombies; they’re basically regular people. Even so, The Returned is selling very well and ABC has invested quite a bit in Resurrection. What do you think your publisher and Plan B and ABC see in The Returned and Resurrection given that it’s not the standard undead tale?

Jason Mott: I think Plan B and ABC see the potential of the personal interaction, that personal friction between characters in the book that could make for great television. They’re excited by the prospects of how we would deal with all the returned as well. They see the potential for viewers to come to the TV each week with the questions “What would I do if my mother or sister came back from the dead? Would I be happy to see them, or would I be terrified? What would we do as a nation with all these returned flooding our homes and streets?”

AMK&MH: Do you know what the show is going to look like? As I read The Returned, I thought it definitely had the makings of a film, but it was a little harder to see how it could be made into 40-minute episodes.

JM: I have a general sense of what they’ve got in mind for the arc of the television show, but no specifics. And I’m okay with that. The TV show is their baby, and I trust the people who are producing it and I feel like they will be true to the spirit of the novel. That’s good enough for me.

The writer, Aaron Zelman (he’s written episodes for The Killing, Damages, and Criminal Minds), is a really great guy and amazingly talented. In all honesty, he inserted certain elements in the pilot that, when I read it, I was like “Man, I wish I’d thought of thatl!” I think that’s the biggest compliment and statement of my faith that I can give Aaron. And he deserves it. You always hear horror stories about how literary projects get dismantled in the transformation to screen, but I’ve actually had quite the opposite experience; this hasn’t been the case at all with Aaron at all.

AMK&MH: What’s it like seeing your characters “in the flesh”?

JM: Oh, the casting is spot on. Each time a casting announcement came, I was like “Yes! That’s exactly who should play that part!” But it’s funny: I try not to think of these actors as just the physical representation of my characters. I’ve met them all and they’re not the characters they play on television or in movies, they’re people. Kurtwood Smith isn’t “Red from That '70s Show,” he’s Kurtwood Smith—an actor, a husband, a father, and a great guy. So, more than anything, I’m excited by the skill, talent, and passion that these actors will be bringing to their roles…and it’s just an added bonus that these roles will be my characters.

AMK&MH: How has it been working with them?

JM: Man, they’re pretty amazing. A bunch of them found me and asked to read the book so they could learn about their characters from me rather than just the script they were given. It’s funny, one guy got his copy before everyone else did and they all got really jealous! It felt great. I came into this expecting many of the actors to be standoffish. I expected (sorry guys!) them to have this attitude of, “I’m the actor. I’m the talent.” But they have been almost the opposite of that, very friendly and approachable. We’ve actually had many very fun, cool conversations. I can’t begin to tell you what terrific people they all are.

AMK&MH: In The Returned, Harold and Lucille lose Jacob when he drowns in a nearby river. Then, when Jacob returns fifty years later (thirty-two years in the show), Lucille immediately welcomes him home even though she is a staunch Christian who believed, just moments before Jacob came back, that the returned are devils. Harold, on the other hand, has serious doubts. Just who and what is Jacob? he wonders. How has this person who passed away fifty years ago suddenly reentered the world? This becomes the major conflict for Lucille and Harold, for Arcadia as more and more return, and for the world at large. How did you come up with this conflict?

JM: It came about in part due to my own upbringing. I grew up in a very small town, just outside of Wilmington, North Carolina—so small that I just tell people I’m from Wilmington: one blinking stoplight, no fast food, two gas stations, and 600-800 people.

People in such small communities tend to make, in my experience, snap judgments like the one Lucille makes before Jacob comes back. She sees the returned on the news and, because she’s so distanced from them, she has no problem saying they’re devils. But when one of them turns out to be her blood, everything changes. When something like this bleeds into the small town, things get very complex in that town. Small towns are used to being overlooked. Whatever politics are going on in the world or whatever is happening outside of these small communities doesn’t seem to affect them much. Change doesn’t occur very often in small towns, so when change does come, people tend to react very dramatically.

So when these fantastic events start occurring, Lucille falls back on her religious upbringing while Harold remains somewhat aloof to the change so long as it doesn’t drastically affect him in a personal way. When Jacob arrives on their front porch, they start to own it, they have a personal investment. For Lucille, she gets her child back—the only child she could ever have. Lucille immediately declares that this event is a miracle. For Harold though, this event becomes a living, breathing reminder of what he perceives as his failure as a parent.

***
Stay tuned for more of this interview next week!

More Announcements from the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing!

Below, please find a couple exciting new endeavors from the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing:

 
YOUR NOVEL YEAR

The Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing is excited to introduce our new accelerated online certificate in writing the novel: A full year working with celebrated faculty and a small cohort to bring your novel to the page!

• Choice of two tracks: Young Adult or Sci-fi/Fantasy.
• Small, inclusive classes and a supportive community of fellow writers.
• Expert instruction from celebrated faculty.
• A full year of mentoring.

Apply by October 31, 2013.


WRITER'S BLOG

The Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing's freshly launched blog kicks off with the first of our ongoing biweekly guest posts by distinguished writers.

Check out Michael Schiffer's "Writer's Blog" here.

Piper Writer's Blog posts feature advice, creative writing, and creative thinking by prominent writers. Check back often and stay inspired as we add to this invaluable resource! Watch for future guest bloggers Dana Stabenow, Tania Katan, T. Jefferson Parker, and many more.

ABOUT MICHAEL SCHIFFER
Happily living and writing in Phoenix after escaping alive from L.A., Michael Schiffer wrote the groundbreaking screenplay for Colors, directed by Dennis Hopper and starring Sean Penn and Robert Duval. His next film, Lean on Me, starring Morgan Freeman, won NAACP Image Awards for Best Film and Best Actor and was followed by Crimson Tide (Gene Hackman and Denzel Washington), The Peacemaker (George Clooney and Nicole Kidman), and The Four Feathers, starring Heath Ledger, Wes Bentley, and Kate Hudson. Schiffer published two books with Simon & Schuster, Lessons of the Road and Ballpark, and is working on a new novel, To End All Wars. His producing credits include Lean on Me and Le Divorce, a Merchant/Ivory film based on the novel by Diane Johnson, a finalist for the National Book Award. A Creative Advisor at the ScripTeast Writers Conference in Poland, Michael has taught for over twenty years and is currently a Trustee Professor teaching actors and writers at Chapman College.

Book Review: The Girl's Club by Sally Bellerose

The Girls Club, by Sally Bellerose.
Bywater Books, 2011.
Novel.
Review by Debrah Lechner
Debrah.Lechner@gmail.com

The Girls Club observes and lovingly describes the passage from childhood to adulthood in a working-class, Catholic household rich with daughters (Cora Rose, Marie, and Renee, as well as hapless cousin Lorraine) in a society that is gradually, ever so gradually, changing―even if it is still changing too quickly for the LaBarre sisters at times.

As the sisters grow up they learn about the realities of life, of boys, of establishing lives and families, and formulate their individual definitions of sin while practicing their faith. The story is told from the point of view of Cora Rose, who has one ill-kept secret, “the dreaded bowl disease”― ulcerative colitis. Her sisters and family protect her from ridicule about her frequent bathroom visits and bouts of debilitating illness as well as they can, but Cora Rose can handle herself, as well as the sometimes unwanted help from her siblings, and she begins to learn early how to maintain her identity even when she finds herself afflicted with the shame and social insecurity that comes from being different.

She also has a secret that she initially hides from herself—that she is lesbian.

The Girls Club references her close relationship with her sisters, and also a lesbian bar that has, unknown to Cora Rose, been thriving a few blocks away from her home. There she meets an old friend from school, and many new women to inspire her, if only she can manage the reactions of her sisters, the husband she married when she became pregnant, and most importantly, avoid confusing her young son as she navigates both her coming-out process and her ostomy procedure, which changes her body at the same time that she is defining and revealing her sexuality. A passage from The Girls Club:

"A woman on the stool next to me says, “You okay?” She’s not a regular. Or at least, I’ve not seen her before. Maybe she’s been coming here for months. “Adjusting my ostomy bag.” It’s the wrong thing to say to a woman you’ve just met in a bar. It’s kind of fun to say the wrong thing and not really give a damn."

This is a book with both pathos and humor, very fun to read, that will reinforce the hope that friendships and family can flourish even through illness, differing lives and unfulfilled expectations.

Bellerose has published in numerous venues and was awarded a Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts for an excerpt of The Girls Club. It is available on Amazon.com both in a paperback and Kindle version. There’s an interview with Sally Bellerose on the web with the great title of Talking Shit and Getting Away With It. Check that out too.

Book Review: The Terror of Living by Urban Waite

The Terror of Living by Urban Waite, 2011. Little Brown and Company, New York, NY. Review by Debrah Lechner.

The Terror Of Living is a purebred, full-blooded thriller. If you want a book that will keep you up all night and make you look forward to coming home to finish it up the next day, this is all of that.

My enjoyment of the novel was increased by the variation in characters. All are flawed, and the hero is criminal, but is also more than that. He's human; he's compassionate; he's realistic about who he is; but the trouble in which he becomes entangled inspires him to transcend the limitations he was once content to live with. At the same time, there is also a vicious killer in the mix, and I do so appreciate unrepentant psychopathology in a villain. Along the way, the reader will meet a number of other well-drawn characters, including an engaging law-enforcement officer and a woman who is motivated by love, but is not a stereotypical character.

The plot is absorbing, building through several harrowing and violent crescendos to a satisfying finale. The setting is rural; finely drawn, easy to get comfortable with and settled into, which only makes the mayhem that ensues all the more shocking. The reader also comes to identify and empathize with most of the characters. It's reminiscent of Tony Hillerman, but with the terrifying twist of a full-throttle thriller.

The Terror of Living is going to take off like a bottle rocket when released this Monday, February 7. Remember that you heard it here first.

Urban Waite has published in a number of prestigious journals, including the story "Don't Look Away" in Hayden's Ferry Review, issue 42. For those of you who are interested in the process that writers use to produce their work, you will find two special treats below: the Hayden's Ferry Review Contributor Spotlight, written about and by Urban Waite himself in 2008, and the Hayden’s Ferry Review blog interview with the author in 2009.

Pick up an advanced copy of The Terror of Living, here.

Book Review: The Wilding by Benjamin Percy

The Wilding by Benjamin Percy, Graywolf Press, 2010. Review by Debrah Lechner.

In The Wilding, Benjamin Percy takes on three important themes: the vanishing of wilderness and the impact of homo sapiens on the ecology of our planet, the meaning of family and how it pulls us together or apart, and the definition of what manhood means through three generations.

Percy’s writing in this novel is recklessly passionate, ferocious and fast-paced, but his thinking about these subjects is profound and carefully reasoned. He sees, illustrates and defends the differing viewpoints of grandfather, father and son. He portrays marriage in all of its potential for support and growth, limitations and frustrations. The gradual encroaching of our civilization into undeveloped areas for the benefit of our species, without regard to the detriment of others, is an issue that is explored in all of its complexity. Readers concerned with these issues will appreciate the ideas and insight on these subjects that can be found in this novel.

The Wilding is equally a riveting thriller, where the beauty of nature becomes peril, man becomes animal, and both the natural environment and the societal environment serve to show how wide and how wild the world is, and to what lengths an individual must go to fight for a place in it.

Benjamin Percy has also published The Language of Elk and Refresh, Refresh. He has won the Whiting Award and the Plimpton Prize and his work has been included in Best American Short Stories. He teaches both as an Assistant Professor in the MFA Program at Iowa State University and as a faculty member at Pacific University.

Visit Benjamin Percy’s website to learn more about the author. Then head over to Orion Magazine's website, where you can download audio of Percy reading "The Heart of a Bear".
You can pre-order The Wilding for your personal library at Amazon.com.

The Quiet Hell

Susanna Daniel has looked into my writer's soul and written about it in her essay, "What Took You So Long? The Quiet Hell of 10 Years of Novel Writing" at Slate.com. It's no fun to go through a "quiet hell," but it's a little bit easier when someone else acknowledges it. Three years after my MFA degree, I'm still painstakingly making my way through the second draft of my "novel." I still need to, apparently, put quotes around the word. When will I feel like a real writer? When will I ever finish this thing? When will my teaching and editing jobs stop taking up so much of my time? When will I stop making excuses and just get the thing done already?

Susanna Daniel has given me hope. Not only did she finally finish her novel Stiltsville, not only did she get it published, but I read an excerpt of it in One Story, and it's good. Like, really good. And now she's written this little gem:

"Writing is hard—writers say this all the time, and I think probably only other writers believe it. But it's not nearly as hard, in my experience, as not writing."

I'm going to put this up on my wall. Tattoo it somewhere noticeable. Make t-shirts. Cross-stitch it onto a nice wall hanging. You know, propagate it through any number of projects that will keep me from working on my novel. (Just kidding, I think!) If you're at all frustrated with a writing project, check out her essay. And then get back to work.

Website of the Week: Calibre

So you have your Kindle, or your Nook, or your Sony Reader. Or all of them. And you also have a passel of ebooks in different formats. How to organize everything into a cogent library? Enter Calibre, an ebook Manager. It downloads metadata on your books, allows you to store books on your computer and browse them, and can even change the format of the ebook. Want to change Kindle to ePub? Nook to Sony Reader. Even the iPad. Done with a click. You can check out more features on the 16 minute demo on the home page or read this independent review at LifeHacker.

I like this because it puts the control ebooks back into the hands of the reader, not Amazon, Google, or anyone else. Calibre will also pull reading content from the web, perhaps opening the door to small publishers and magazines down the line to easy distribution. That sounds good to us.

Website of the Week: F()@k Yeah Reading!

Self described thusly: "Like all other tumblrs of its ilk, gloriously self-explanatory." All things reading, lots of pretty pictures to admire. Check it out.

Congratulations to Urban Waite!

HFR contributor Urban Waite just sold his two novels, The Terror of Living and Dead if I Don't at auction in New York City to Little Brown. The story collection is next. The Terror he wrote while on a fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center about a drug deal gone horribly wrong on the Washington/Canada border, and in the aftermath, an ex-con trying to make a good life out of a bad past. There is even a guest appearance in the novel from Eddie Vasquez, the criminal friend in "Don't Look Away," the story that appeared in HFR #42, now anthologized in Best of the West. The second novel, set in Arizona around Maricopa County, is about a cartel hitman trying to repent, but ending up deeper and deeper in sin.

We couldn't be happier for Urban. He's a fantastic writer, and his success is well-deserved!

Website of the Week: How to write a novel in 100 days or less

Are you experiencing writer’s block? Well, let’s face it: you’re probably not alone. Good thing Peace Corps Writers has some advice for those of you going through the tremendous torture of completing a novel. Whatever day you’re on in completing this fantastic piece (yes, it is fantastic, it will be fantastic!) just click on the number that corresponds to the amount of days put into it and lo and behold there are the supportive and useful words you have been looking for! What's that? You say you're on day 1, 453 of completing your novel? No matter! Clicking at random still provides helpful and yes, hopeful, tips. An example:

Day 50: The novelist and poet James Dickey, talking to students near the end of his life, said, “I don’t mean to sell the poet so long or at such great length, but I do this principally because the world doesn’t esteem the poet very much. They don’t understand where we are coming from. They don’t understand the use for us. They don’t understand if there is any use. We are the masters of the superior secret, not they. Not they. Remember that when you write.”

Banned Books Week

Next week is Banned Books Week. I am trying to take more notice of this “holiday” this year. It’s perfectly fine to wear your pins with Huck Finn on them and give another pin wearer a “Rock on” and a nod (or maybe a high-five) during the day as this week goes on. But as writers, we should never forget that when people talk about banned books, they are talking about banning us. That is, they are preventing writers from writing and readers from reading, though in some cases they haven't even read the book they are banning.

Writers are often among first ones imprisoned in a repressive regime. You can take a look at Pen American Center’s list of authors that have been imprisoned or tortured for their work here. Also PEN lists five things you can do to protect freedom of expression abroad and at home. Free speech is only as strong as those who will defend it. Get involved, so that in the United States the right to write, publish, and read what you want remains for you and your readers. We’re always saying it’s all about the work, right? So let’s protect it.

You can check out more of the American Library Association’s excellent Banned Books Weeks site at the link above. One of my favorites is this page of 100 banned classics. You can also check out the American Booksellers for Free Expression. And you can’t forget the ACLU. They have their own top 100, a list of the books most frequently challenged in the last 15 years. Still think we’re not in trouble? Don’t blame me when they come for your copy of Song of Solomon.

Website of the Week: Three Percent

Part of the University of Rochester and affiliated with its translation press Open Letter, Three Percent is a site devoted to what is new and valuable in translation. The name of the site comes from the fact that only three percent of all works published in America are works in translation, a staggeringly low amount in the University's opinion. The website's job is to advocate for translation of world literature and be guide to some of the best examples out there.

It's a good time to be looking at translation. Most American lit-heads were at least somewhat chastened when we were singled out last year - by no less than someone who helps choose the Nobel Prize - that Americans do not read enough of the rest of the world's literature. It does give you pause. Reading only Americans makes no more sense than only reading Texans or Pennsylvanians. Where would the short story be without Chekhov? Where would poetry be without Wislawa Szymborska ? Where would we be without Magic Realism? Scolding from the Nobel aside, there is a lot we may be missing. Give Three Percent a look, and make sure you're not coming out on the short end of the stick.

Infinite Jestation

How long should it take to read David Foster Wallace's 1,000-page masterwork? 92 days, according to Infinite Summer, the new website/reading project bringing all of us "endurance bibliophiles" together this summer to stop the procrastination. You have until June 21 to pick up or dust off your copy of Infinite Jest, so the reading camaraderie and discussion can begin. The schedule asks that you read only 75 pages per week, then head over to Twitter, Facebook, or the website discussion forums to speak your mind through September 22nd. In these remaining weeks before the marathon begins, the website asks only that you "finish or abandon all books, hobbies, and/or relationships." Now you have a reason.

Voting Open for Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award

Amazon and Penguin have announced the three finalists in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. Now, it’s up to Amazon.com customers to vote for the Grand Prize winner. The voting period is now open here now through this Thursday, May 21 at 11:59 PM EDT.

The 2009 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Finalists are:

Ian Gibson, Victoria, British Columbia, for Stuff of Legends
The author, who works at a theater in British Columbia, developed the characters in this novel from a comic strip he created in 2003. Stuff of Legends is a comic fantasy about heroism and celebrity, where a 15-year-old boy’s fondest wish is granted and he is teamed with his idol, warrior hero Jordan the Red, to defeat villains, monsters and demonic armies.

James King, Wilton, Conn., for Bill Warrington’s Last Chance
A corporate communications specialist for the past 20 years, the author earned his master's degree in creative writing in 2008 as a way to achieve his lifelong goal of writing fiction. In the novel, Bill Warrington tries to reestablish ties with his estranged children after he is diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. After several attempts at a reunion fail, he decides to kidnap his 15-year-old granddaughter, April, so that his children will be forced to talk to each other – and to him – as they attempt to “rescue” April.

Brandi Lynn Ryder, Napa, Calif., for In Malice, Quite Close
A Napa resident who grew up in the gold-mining town of Sonora, the author draws inspiration for her novel from her passions for Impressionist art and French culture. The novel opens in 1979 San Francisco, where an unlikely relationship forms between 15-year-old Karen, who longs to escape her abusive father, and wealthy art collector Tristan Mourault. Tristan gains Karen’s trust and she soon adopts a new identity as his daughter, sending the two on an extraordinary odyssey that spans 15 years and two coasts.

Find out more about the three finalists, read short excerpts of each manuscript, and see reviews from the expert panel (including Sue Monk Kidd and Sue Grafton) here.

Frank Norris & the fate of the novel

After his death in 1902, novelist Frank Norris's critical essays were published in The Responsibilities of the Novelist. The title essay argues that novelists have a greater responsibility to their audience than even a newspaper editor or a minister. While celebrating the form, Norris acknowledges how different eras appreciate different genres. He writes:

"Today is the day of the novel. In no other day and by no other vehicle is contemporaneous life so adequately expressed; and the critics of the twenty-second century, reviewing our times, striving to reconstruct our civilization, will look not to the painters, not to the architects nor dramatists, but to the novelists to find our idiosyncrasy.
"I think this is true. [...] There is no doubt the novel will in time 'go out' of popular favour as irrevocably as the long poem has gone, and for the reason that it is no longer the right mode of expression." [for the full text of the collection visit: http://www.archive.org/details/responsibilities00norriala]

Certainly, the novel is facing its greatest threat since Norris first declared it his choice genre of the American century. The economy threatens to freeze the publishing industry. Money to acquire and market novelists is drying up, editors are being laid off and the survivors are asked to do more work they don't have time for. Authors face shrinking advances and lower royalties thanks to fewer booksales (given the choice between groceries and books, people tend to pick groceries. Unless they are in graduate school and can live on Ramen noodles.)

The shift from print material to digital material has rapidly begun with the development of e-readers, Google's great book scanning project, and the growing sophistication of web developers and web users. The economy has pressured the industry to embrace this untested arena faster than anyone expected. Web-only journals have done some initial work, managing to spread quickly thanks to lower operating costs and the satisfaction of near-instant publication. (The time it takes to respond to stories has decreased thanks to online submissions, but reading a 5,000 word story still seems to take the same amount of time.)

It's possible the short story will have a stronger presence as web-publishing gets sorted out. But the printed novel faces a the kind of marginalization that poetry currently suffers. The printed readership will decrease, albeit slower than proponents of online reading will suggest since novelists will continue to work in the medium. It will take a few commercially viable web-novelists to help convince casual readers to get on board. (Stephen King has already tried, if I'm not mistaken.) While there will always be an argument for the portability and low-cost of mass market books (who wants to take their e-book to the beach or risk leaving it behind on the subway?), the tech-savvy members of current and upcoming generations will celebrate the advantages of e-readers.

The serial publication may be the best way to encourage online or e-book reading. It certainly worked with early novels in England and in the 19th century, though the initial reason was due more to the limitation of printing and the amount of money people had to spend on books. The growth in storyline continuity since the 1990s in television suggests a greater openness to serial publishing. Daytime soap operas and comic books have used this stategy for decades. Serial films, too, tapped into an audiences desire for a perpetual storyline.

Writers can use this strategy to lure their readers in with monthly or bi-weekly chapters or short stories. And, while the hypertext revolution didn't immediately catch on with readers, writers who become/work with webpage designers have the option to lure readers/surfers in and get them to spend an hour or more exploring a story on a website -- creating a new form where the once unseen material becomes accessbile or visual material enhances the reader's understanding of the story. Think of it as a director's cut or a special-features online novel where character sketches, alternate endings, character journals, etc. give the reader a fuller experience. Aside from that approach, a novelist could easily create a graphic-novel world with visual and audio elements that correspond with the text. The footnotes of David Foster Wallace would seem quaint or groundbreaking in this world. (For some idea of the potential of the website-as-novel, consider sites that allow readers to follow rabbit holes in the text like some older iterations of the band website Radiohead.com or the site for the film Donnie Darko). The phrase getting lost in a book can easily become getting lost in a webpage-novel.

In this setup, publishers would still have plenty of revenue opportunities (and thus writers would still get paid for their labor). Imagine reading a book that has a musical reference and being able to play the song along with the scene? Or go off to buy the song? Imagine a publisher with 4 authors -- each author publishes a new chapter each week on the website. (or 30 authors, each publishing a chapter a day!) Readers could pay for access to the entire site or the specific author's work. Want to download to an e-book reader? It's no harder than downloading from iTunes or the Amazon MP3 store. Maybe there's a fee or maybe it's included in the website membership. I'll leave the captilism to the experts, but the novelist would not have to fear a complete loss of financial stability because of the change.

The greatest change might be to the reading experience, and not necessarily the composition. The internet doesn't encourage long reading periods both because of the physical limitation of reading things onscreen as well as the lack of interest people might have spending time online after working on a computer all day. True, printed novels are only slightly easier on the eyes, and if you've ever sat in bed reading a long novel all day you know that the neck, the hands, and elbows all ache. But the technological aspect of reading, along with the physical connection so many readers love to have with their novels, will change no matter what. The price of printing, the environmental impact of so much paper used (and so much wasted), the price of storage, etc. mean that reading digitally will become the norm regardless of the merits of the printed novel.

Publishing is going to become digital. The initial generation of writers who have access to more sophisticated technology and online distribution will try very hard to push the "novel" forward. We may see monstrocities that don't deserve our reading time. There will be pieces that later readers will say was "ahead of its time." There may even be a few commercially successful books (if publishers can convince already-proven writers to given online writing a shot and not simply paste a novel on a website.)

Frank Norris (among others) will be both right and wrong. The novel as a printed object will go out of favor. But the novel as a genre, a form, will carry on. If the novel, at its core, is a detailed story involving characters and conflict, subplots, related scenes, cause and effect, and the moral obsessions of all art, then it will be the manifestation of the genre that goes out of favor, not the novel form itself. Like the long, narrative poem, the printed novel will become an artifact, making way for a different (not necessarily better or worse) form. Most assuredly, what we'll see online will not resemble the books that line my well-stocked IKEA bookshelves. What I read onscreen or download to some device will still be called a novel, but it won't resemble its printed cousin closely, just as e.e. cummings and The Odyssey are both related but vastly different.

Still, as long as there is a story and character and sentences that make the hairs on my arms prickle with electricity, I'll be happy.

EDIT: Found this on Endgadget today: http://www.engadget.com/2009/02/03/v-books-the-future/

A Triumphant Return to Genre

Back in September, I wrote—what has become known here at HFR as my opus magnum—on science fiction and its place in the literary world. To recap: I have a deep respect for the genre and take it as an insult whenever it's relegated offhandedly to "genre" fiction meant for the masses rather than the discriminating, literary mind. There's bad fiction everywhere and no one "genre" holds the corner market for it. It's my personal opinion that science fiction doesn't get the time of day from critics, reviewers, and academics out of ignorance, prejudice, and your garden-variety snobbery. But this argument has already been made. There has been, dear Reader, some new information that has come to my attention and I'm very excited to share it with you.


Back in 1998, the Modern Library developed two lists of the Top 100 Novels, all written in English and between 1900 and 1999. The first was their own and the second was voted on by over 200,000 readers across the country. In the first list, five—count 'em, five—could be considered outside of mainstream "literary" fiction and all five were either science or speculative fiction. The list that the Readers devised, however, showed a very different story. There were cross-overs, of course, like Lolita and The Great Gatsby, but far fewer than half of the books were "literary." There was almost an equal number, in fact, of science/speculative fiction titles as there were literary (approximately 35/35), with the remainder spread out among fantasy, horror, and magical realism—all of which were painfully absent from the Library's list. Only three of the top ten are firmly placed within the "literary" canon. I also found it interesting to note that there were far more women authors on the Readers' list than there was on the Modern Library's. Harper Lee's seminal work To Kill a Mockingbird, for example, did not make the Library's list. Four of Ayn Rand's most essential novels made top ten for the Readers but she's nowhere to be found by the Library. Charles de Lint, Robert Heinlein, John Irving, Stephen King, and Thomas Pynchon also made significant appearances on the Readers' list.

These lists are perhaps the most poignant demonstration of the disconnect between the Canon and what people are actually reading I've ever found. Is this evidence that the people who are constructing the Canon, the academics, are not quite as well-read as they think they are? Maybe. Does this show that readers will go for an easy story over an intellectual one? It's possible. Stephen King once equated his books with a Big Mac and fries, but anyone who has read his work (mostly the early stories) knows just how challenging, thoughtful, and imaginative he can be. And Pynchon is famous for asking, and living up to, the question why reading should be easy, but his presence on the Library's list is nill. Having read a significant number of titles on the Readers' list—and, admittedly, not quite as many on the Library's—I would agree with a lot of the selections and, since it comes from the collaborative efforts of over 200,000 readers, I think it carries a lot of weight. I don't think we should use popular reading taste as our first and last compass to find great literature, but it is certainly instructive—as both a reader and a writer.

Breakthrough Novel Awards to Consider

Although the novel is more viable in the reading marketplace, the short story is how many writers get their start in the publishing world. Most workshops center on them. An undergraduate degree in Creative Writing spends most of its time learning to work small before going large. Even MFA classes spend their time on the short story. I suppose that's to be expected. After all, who has the time or creative energy to read, edit, and comment on an entire manuscript just for a class that meets once or twice a week? Who has the time or creative energy to write that story for such a class?

But that leaves potential novel writers in a peculiar state of having a lot of practice with the short story, but having very little practice with the longer story. It has been said by many that the art of novel writing isn't really something that can be taught, it can only be done. Thomas Pynchon has supposedly said (though I can't find it on the internet), "I learned a lot after writing my first novel. When I sat down to write my second, I forgot all of it." Not a lot of help to novel writers who are just starting out. Apparently, the only advice that can be given and taken is to just sit down and do it, which is a little daunting to be sure. Giving someone a wrench and a few bolts and saying "Build me a car" is just as easily accomplished. But thankfully, there are those who know how to speak the language of the emerging artist—money—and are saying all the right words of encouragement. As this is National Novel Writing Month (how's the word count coming, by the way?) it would be a good idea to take a look at the people who might accept your manuscript once it's finished (and edited).

First on the list, are Amazon and Penguin. These two are pairing up for their second annual Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, starting February 2 and continuing through February 8, 2009. Unpublished writers with an English-language novel manuscript can submit their work here. Bill Loehfelm won last year from a pool of about 5,000 entrants and Putnam published his novel, Fresh Kills, in August 2008. This year, up to 10,000 submissions will be accepted. The winner of the contest will receive a publishing contract with Penguin and a $25,000 advance.

Next on our list, Wilkes University and the James Jones Literary Society are holding their 17th Annual James Jones First Novel Fellowship contest. The award will go to an American (U.S. specifically) author with a first novel, novella, or collection of closely linked stories (think Winesburg, Ohio) who has never been published before. There is no entry fee, the award is $10,000, and the deadline is March 1, 2009. Hurry to their website to see how to enter!

Brighid's Fire Books, a relatively new imprint, is looking for new talent to build up a repertoire of respectable publications. To this end, they have set up an annual contest for unpublished authors to get their work read, critiqued, and possibly published. Last year, the contest was canceled due to lack of submissions—and as we all know an untapped market is the holy grail in the publishing industry. This is definitely a contest you want to consider since the competition is low and the rewards are great. There is an entry fee of $25 and the deadline is April 30, 2009. Finalists will be chosen in October and each one will receive criticism, regardless of place. The grand prize winner will get a publishing contract and a $1000 advance. Check their website to see what they're looking for in submissions.

Delacorte Press is holding a similar contest for first-time YA novelists, its 26th Annual contest of the sort. Submit a book-length, unpublished manuscript for readers ages 12-18 to be considered. But the deadline is December 31, 2008, so you'll have to hurry on this one. There's no entry fee and the prize is a $1500 cash prize, a book contract, plus a $7500 advance. You should check out the website for more information on submission details.

Finally, James River Writers and Richmond Magazine will be holding their 35rd Annual Best Unpublished Novel Contest. There's a $25 entry fee but a prize of $500, publication of an excerpt in Richmond magazine, a spot at the 2009 James River Writers Conference, and one-on-one feedback from a JRW board member. As always, check their website for submission guidlines.

So hurry back to your NaNoWriMo manuscript! The clock's a-ticking and opportunity is a-knocking!