Same Old Soapbox

Simple Steps to Literary Lionhood, A Retrospect

At age seventy, I abandoned myself to the literary craving and became a full-time writer.

That was in January 2016. 

During an apprenticeship marked by small successes, the possibility of “doing a blog” was often brought to my attention.

The notion was preposterous. It would suck up all my time, leaving me none for serious writing. Besides, how could I ever think up enough new content? 

Every fiber of me railed against it, but in April 2019 I started this blog. In the process, I conferred on myself the title: “Your New Favorite Writer.” Well, if I didn’t do it, who would?

That was over four years ago. I have posted about a thousand words almost every week since then. It does take a lot of time, about a day a week. But on the other days I have still gotten some serious writing done. 

Besides, I have made an interesting discovery:  The blog itself is serious writing. 

“Be that as it may, O New Favorite Writer—how do you balance such unequal tasks as posting a blog and writing the Great American Novel?” 

The answer, Dear Reader, is that it’s all of a piece. (And thank you for asking.)

It’s All One Thing

Sherman

When I say “all of a piece,” I mean the writing life cannot be forced into small, separate pigeonholes—or narrow silos, if you prefer a farm metaphor. It is not that you must move your book forward at the expense of your blog. It is not that you must spend all your time writing, to the exclusion of reading what others have written. It is not that you must devote yourself only to the art of narrative and pay no attention to sales, trade, and the soil of commerce. 

No, Gentle Reader. You must do it all at once. 

General Sherman said, “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.” Your New Favorite Writer says: “Writing is a mess, and you cannot parse it.”

Lionhood

Lion. Photo by Kevin Pluck, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

About the time I started this blog, it dawned on me that to be a serious writer you must become a Literary Lion, and you dare not put that off until your first Nobel Prize. If you are to have any chance at all, you have to jump into the Literary Lion business right away. 

Armed with this stunning insight, I posted a series titled “Six Simple Steps to Literary Lionhood.” The six steps are:

  • 1. Cut the line. Skip straight to literary lionhood.
  • 2. Write.
  • 3. Get feedback.
  • 4. Associate.
  • 5. Submit.
  • 6. (Develop Your) Platform.

When I wrote six pieces, one a week for six weeks, about these six steps, I continually warned readers that “simple” does not mean “easy.” Each step is simple. But you have to do them all together, continuously. If they were easy, everybody would be Stephen King.

Some time later, I was compelled to revisit my six simple steps several times to enlarge or clarify, based on my new experiences. But in the main, the six steps have held up well.

Proof of the Pudding

It seems to be a law of language that common sayings and nostrums get simplified over time. One example has to do with proof and pudding. People today commonly say, “The proof is in the pudding.” That’s an interesting saying, but in isolation, rather mystifying. Why should proof be in pudding? Why conceal evidence in pudding?

Listen, Fair Reader: Your New Favorite Writer is old enough to remember when the saying was used in its original form: “The proof of the pudding is in the eating.” Ah! Clarity. If you want to know how good the pudding is, eat it. The eating will tell you what you want to know. 

I offer my journey as proof of the pudding of achieving Literary Lionhood in Six Simple Steps. 

I have been on the loose in the literary world for slightly longer than seven years. During that time, besides establishing and tending this blog (“One of the best writer’s blogs on the planet,” according to Laurie Scheer), I have:

  • Had a dog story published by Fetch! magazine.
  • Had three short stories published by The Saturday Evening Post.
  • Had my debut historical novel, Price of Passage, published by DX Varos Publishing, under a traditional, royalty-and-advance author’s contract. 
  • Completed a middle grade novel, Izzy Strikes Gold!, currently seeking representation and publication.
  • Begun a World War II historical.

But that’s not all. Besides these obvious milestones, I have been busy associating. I have attended six or seven writing conferences. I am a member of the Wisconsin Writers Association, the Chicago Writers Association, and the Authors Guild. I am de facto leader of two small but important writers’ mutual critique groups in my home town.

Selling books at Literatus in Watertown.

The moment you sign a book contract you become a salesman. So I am learning about that. I visit bookstores and ask them to stock my book. I do author events from time to time—signing and selling fests, where the books are purchased one by one after actual conversations with readers. I am scheduled as the featured speaker at a couple of events in the near future. And, with the help of publicist Valerie Biel I am learning how to sell books through Facebook advertising. 

I have become a fixture at my local public library, regularly reserving and carrying home more books than I have time to read. Stacks of books—all kinds of books—litter every horizontal surface of my home. I read as much of this conveyor-belt feast as I can manage.

And a lot of great books are being published by folks who have become personal friends of mine—Nick Chiarkas, author of the excellent, heart-filled New York gang novels Weepers and Nunzio’s WayGregory Lee Renz, whose debut firehouse novel Beneath the Flames delighted critics and book buyers alike; Christine DeSmet, author of the Fudge Shop Mysteries series; Kristin A. Oakley, author of Carpe Diem IllinoisGod on Mayhem Street, and the forthcoming The Devil Particle—and many others. 

Me, Me, Me

This is all about me. Does it sound like boasting? 

So be it. But my purpose, Gracious Reader, is to show how all these activities lean in on one another. A writer’s life comprises all of them, and more. If it’s just one thing—or two, or three—it will not sustain itself. It will not endure.

And what is success? Like beauty, it’s in the eye of the beholder. If literary success is measured in dollars, I am, to date, a miserable failure. But if personal satisfaction may be considered, the past seven years have made me a wealthy man

The proof of my pudding is in living the dream. You can quote me on that.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

Storming the Heights

Success in any endeavor is defined by the doing. The act of doing. The skill in doing. The manner of doing. The time and place of doing. 

A literary lion. Photo by Kevin Pluck, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Most of all: the dedication and constancy with which the thing is done.

Seven years ago, I set out to become a serious writer. 

I had retired once and then retired again. By January 2016, I was free to do what I had always wanted to do: Write. 

Hardly knowing what I was about, I had set my course to become a Literary Lion. 

(Gentle Reader, you may have heard me sing this song before, but it’s worth a reprise in a different key, if only to get newcomers up to speed.)

How to Build on Small Victories? 

In 2016, Fetch! magazine published (and paid for) a whimsical essay I wrote about our old Siberian husky. In the same year, and again in 2017 and 2018, the Saturday Evening Post web-published three of my short stories about Izzy Mahler, a boy growing up in the 1950s. Light reading, yes—but chosen for publication over hundreds of competing submissions.

I began to think of a big historical novel based on my great-great-grandparents who emigrated from Norway in the 1850s. By early 2017 I was ready to start writing chapters. 

It takes perseverance to write a novel. How could I sustain my purpose through this lonely quest?

Some writers may thrive as solitary artists, scratching out stories by midnight oil in a Gothic mansion, or under a gray mansard in some bohemian arrondissement of Paris. But I am not one of them. I can’t work in a vacuum. I need the stimulation of other minds and the encouragement of those farther along the path. 

Parisian mansards by Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894). Public Domain.

The University of Wisconsin Continuing Studies Writing Program, now defunct, was then in fullest flower. I attended its writers’ conferences in 2016, 2018, and 2019. At such events you can learn craft. 

You learn about marketing. You befriend others who, whatever their topic or genre, share a great obsession with you. They are writers. You have found your tribe. 

I also joined two smaller groups, mutual critique groups. With regular meetings in a more intimate setting, members of such a group read and critique one another’s material. You learn how your work strikes readers. You learn what works and what doesn’t. And again, you form friendships.

To Blog or Not to Blog: That is the Question

In our critique sessions, we sometimes discussed marketing. Most writers love writing—or, at least, feel compelled to write. We tend to approach marketing, however, with loathing and trepidation.

Yet, marketing is unavoidable. You want people to read your work. That means it must find publication. And, once published, it must find its audience. 

Bennett Cerf. Public Domain

No fairy godmother—no genie with the gentle smile of Bennett Cerf plus angel wings and a magic wand—is going to swoop down, pluck your manuscript from obscurity, and add it to the Modern Library. You, the writer, having gone to the trouble of filling the pond with water, must also round up the horses, bring them to the pond’s margin, and cause them to drink. 

We have little clue how to do this. But the notion that gnaws at our hearts is that social media equals marketing. To a geezer like me, that concept represented a dreadful imposition. Once I set foot on the slippery path of social media, how many hours of writing time would be devoured by constant, compulsive tweets, posts, and links?

Of all web-based avenues, blogging seemed the wisest, if only because it was a longer form. What could I say, worth saying, in 140 characters? Or even 280? It seemed I would need to invest a day or two each week to write a blog post that anybody would want to read. 

But how would I come up with topics? And even if I found things to blog about, why do it at all? How would this help me sell my REAL writing—my great American novel

In our Tuesdays With Story writing group, Jerry Peterson, a great mentor, said something I did not expect. “If you think you’d like to blog, you could give it a try,” he said. “And consider that blog posts are one part of your writing—not just a gimmick to sell your other writing.” 

So I plunged into the blogging world on April 12, 2019.

Clarity

I had little idea what blogging could do for me. 

One thing it did immediately was to impose a clarity that had been lacking before. 

My friend Dan Blank is an apostle of clarity. He uses a simple exercise with index cards, which he calls “Clarity Cards.” He urges creators to assess their goals and purposes at frequent intervals to gain clarity on their main channels of endeavor. It is, as billed, a clarifying thing to do.

Just to design the front end of a WordPress blog site, I needed to clarify my thoughts about what I am trying to do as a writer. I knew it was all tangled up with the past, since I always want to write historical fiction. 

I had a sense that history is not just dead events, inexorably receding on the conveyor belt of time.  History, though consigned to the past, also lives in the present. We live in the midst of history. We never get clear of our history. 

T.S. Eliot wrote a brilliant definition of what I want to do:

T.S. Eliot. Photo by Lady Ottoline Morrell. Public Domain.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring 
Will be to arrive where we started 
And know the place for the first time.                                                                                                                        —from “Little Gidding”

I want to take readers into the past with me so that we may return having learned something that helps us be ourselves in the present.

So I came up with the title “Reflections” for my blog—because it’s a reflective endeavor—and the slug line “seeking fresh meanings in our common past.”

We all have individual histories, but there is also a collective past—a background we all own together. The more fully we know this, the more human we will be. 

Dedication and Constancy

Since beginning this blog in 2019, I have published my debut historical novel, Price of Passage. Diane Donovan, senior reviewer for Midwest Book Review, called it “just the ticket for an absorbing tale of evolution and enlightenment.”

I have completed a middle grade historical novel, Izzy Strikes Gold!, and have begun querying agents on its behalf. When I read it aloud recently to the members of my grandson’s fifth-grade class, they were engaged and asked lots of questions. 

I am now writing early chapters of a Word War II historical novel (for adults), as yet untitled, about two brothers with an intense rivalry. My writing coach, Christine DeSmet, Distinguished Faculty Associate, UW-Madison Continuing Studies, thinks my plot outline has enough substance to support a good book. 

And oh, by the way, I have added 193 posts to the blog, for a total of about 200,000 words. You are reading post number 194. My fear of not having enough material proved groundless. It turns out the more you write, the more you can write.  

Laurie Scheer, former director, UW-Madison Writers’ Institute 2010-2021 and co-founder, New Nature Writers, has called it “one of the best writer’s blogs on the planet.” And Christine DeSmet agrees, saying, “Sign up, people! It’s an amazing blog.”

So Jerry Peterson was right. This little endeavor, far from being a sales gimmick, has turned out to be a worthy endeavor of its own. For this reason I have begun to publicize Laurie’s and Christine’s kind comments about this blog. That publicity has gained the blog some readers.

But know, Kind Reader, that you are still among a select few. In a good week, my blog is read by a hundred readers, many of them repeat customers. EVERYBODY ELSE IN THE WORLD does not know what they’re missing.

About the “Reflections” Blog

If you’re new to this blog, you may wish to sample a few previous posts. You can navigate there using the “Search . . .” box at upper right, or via the ARCHIVES, organized by month, farther down the right-hand menu.  

The posts are not all of one kind. 

  • Some, like this one, speak of my writing journey.
  • Some address writers’ concerns more generally, such as “Six Simple Steps to Literary Lionhood.”
  • Many are family stories, or personal recollections of the past, like “Life on the Vermilion.”
  • Some focus on traditional historical content, for example “General Grant.”
  • Some are literary, for example my very popular review of Where the Crawdads Sing.
  • There are some writing samples, like the short story “Encounters With Monsters” and the poem “Blood Quarrel.”
  • Some can only be called general commentary on our times. These are not exactly political, but they may raise political topics or questions, as in “No. We’re Not.” 
  • A few are overtly religious, such as “A Meditation.”
  • Some few posts expose the haps and occasional mishaps of my old friend Milo Bung, a third cousin of Slats Grobnik and direct descendant of Æthelred the Unready.
  • Numerous others, no doubt, elude easy classification.

If, starting today, you went through the archive month by month and read one post a day, you would be up to date in less than a year. Now, that would be dedication!

I hope you enjoy these posts. If you do, spread the word. And buy Price of Passage. Thank you kindly.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

Author of Price of Passage: A Tale of Immigration and Liberation

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

(History is not what you thought!)

Wicked Bloginations

Read Time: 4 minutes

“In my dotage, I am reduced to bloggery.”—King Lear, Act VII, line 4,926

King Lear and Cordelia, by Benjamin West (1793) / Folger Shakespeare Library, Wikimedia Commons.

Dear Reader,

When Your New Favorite Writer began blogging nineteen months ago, his declared purpose was to “cultivate my author platform . . . so that people beyond my family may take an interest in my books when they are published.” 

The blog was an auxiliary to my budding late-life career as a fiction writer. It was supplementary, not central, to my calling as a teller of tales. Therefore I proposed to fill it with ancillary content such as:

  • “Ruminations on ‘the writer’s life.’
  • “Narratives of past events, sometimes written as fictional vignettes.
  • “Mentions of good books recently read.
  • “News and chat from my widening circle of fellow writers.
  • “Tales of success (or even of well-curated failure!) in the literary lists.
  • “Pretty-much-brilliant observations and insights on the passing scene.

and

  • “Occasional adumbrations of the Judeo-Christian faith that informs and animates all of these things in my life.” 

Every Tuesday since then, I’ve been approximately hitting one or more of those targets.

But a funny thing happpened on the way to literary lionhood. 

I started to take fiction writing as a serious challenge. The smug conceit that I was just around the corner from stardom wore off in the literary ball mill of submissions and rejections. 

What remained was this: A passion to keep on making up stories and pitching them until somebody noticed.

I had completed two novels not yet published in book form. I vowed to take Ray Bradbury’s advice and write a short story every week for a year. (His explanation was: “If you can write one short story a week—it doesn’t matter what the quality is to start, but at least you’re practicing, and at the end of the year you have 52 short stories, and I defy you to write 52 bad ones.”)

And, Gentle Reader, since you’ve been with me these nineteen months, it seemed churlish not to let you in on the fun part. 

So I’ve been posting those stories, in first draft form, for your comments and suggestions. I am serious. Help me out. Let me know what you find appealing and what you find boring or distracting or otherwise off-putting in these stories. We’ll have this fun together.

You will find the stories by clicking this link or by selecting Short Stories under the Fiction in Progress tab at the top of my website, https://LarryFSommers.com

Which brings us to the next news item: The website has been re-jiggered.

To make it easy to navigate straight to the short stories, or straight to the ancillary content if you prefer, I’ve set up separate tabs on the top menu for Fiction in Progress and Commentary. If you want to see both, mixed in together, just click on Blog.

As an added bonus, I rearranged the other tabs so that the Home Page now introduces what this site is all about, and the About Page has bio notes on me, Your New Favorite Writer.

So now you know. Happy surfing!

And don’t forget to leave comments.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Writer

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

(History is not what you thought!)

Into the Blogosphere

DEAR READER: This is a re-post of the first entry to this blog on 12 April 2019. You can judge for yourself whether subsequent posts have fulfilled the original intention. Of course, to do that, you would have to read them all, which is definitely encouraged.

“In my dotage, I am reduced to bloggery.”—King Lear, Act VII, line 4,926

King Lear and Cordelia, by Benjamin West (1793) / Folger Shakespeare Library, Wikimedia Commons

Perhaps the best way to tell you about that, as Michael Hauge would say, is to tell you how I came to write this blog.

I was a happy, successful septuagenarian. But—from the time I wrote a detective story on a pencil tablet in third grade, when I was supposed to be doing something else—I had always meant to be a writer of fiction. What with one thing and another, I just had never gotten around to it.

So I quit my day job to write fiction. I had something to say. Just didn’t know what it was. Now, if you have an itch like that, nonfiction won’t scratch it. Something about fiction gives you an opportunity to tell the truth.

My approach to writing fiction is what the psychologists call a “projective technique”—akin to journaling, role-playing, or inkblot-guessing. I just thought, “I’ll start writing, and see what comes out.” 

What could possibly go wrong?   🙂

Early Success

Within a couple of years, I was lucky enough to get a few short pieces published: a dog essay in Fetch! magazine and three “Izzy Mahler” stories, about a young boy growing up in the 1950s, published electronically by the Saturday Evening Post.

Meanwhile, I started thinking about a historical novel based on Anders Gunstensen and Maria Nybro, my great-great-grandparents, who came from Norway to Illinois before the Civil War. 

Fast forward to Now, and I have a good first draft of that work, Freedom’s Purchase. All I need to do is make it a lot better, and then pitch it to agents and publishers.

The Writer’s Life

But—STOP THE PRESSES! It turns out that to be in the writing game in a serious way, you must become a Major Literary Figure before the ink is dry on your first paragraph. You can’t simply write something great, publish it, become rich and famous, and then go on to your next triumph. That’s not How the World Works.

You must let other talented writers see your work and critique it. This is a vitally necessary step, if you want to avoid writing unprintable dreck. But when others spend time and effort to read and critique your stuff, you must do the same for them. Reciprocity rules. That means that from the outset of your writing career, you’re sending drafts to fellow writers, receiving and responding to drafts of theirs. 

For researching subject matter and for familiarization with the literary landscape, you find yourself reading more and more books—things you would not have read otherwise. You write and submit thumbnail book reviews on Amazon and Goodreads.com. You subscribe to writers’ magazines and literary market websites.

You’d better attend a writers’ conference now and then. Two great ones are hosted every year in my home town by the University of Wisconsin–Madison. They cost money and time, but it’s necessary money and time. Writing can be a lonely business, and a solid bond with your “tribe” of fellow writers will help see you through. 

And what of querying and pitching—researching agents and publishers, and learning the best ways to approach them? The material they receive is so voluminous that you need to find ways to make your submissions stand out.

“You and what army?”

And finally—or, perhaps, initially—you need an “author platform.” Platform is a code word for a large band of fanatical followers. (This could include you, Gentle Reader!)

Book publishers try not to take unnecessary risks. They do want to publish great writing. But, as between a Great Writer with an Army of Rabid Fans and a Great Writer who is just, well, a Great Writer—they’ll take the former. It all but ensures a certain number of sales. If you were a publisher, you’d feel the same way, n’est-ce pas?  

There was once a golfer with a platform that just wouldn’t quit. His name was Arnold Palmer. His fans were known as “Arnie’s Army.” I could use an army.

“What’s it All About, Alfie?”

At some point, a writer starts thinking like this: Why am I doing this? Writers don’t make fortunes, unless their name is James Patterson. Writers are lucky just to get advantageous publication. Still: If one must write, one writes. And it would be good to have lots of people read what one writes. 

So, hoping to zero in on why people might want to read what I write, I plumbed the depths of my psyche (both inches) and concluded that what I have to say to people is always rooted in a general awareness of our common past.

A noted poet, T. S. Eliot, wrote 

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

–“Little Gidding”

That sense of better-late-than-not-at-all recognition of the world is what I seek, in personal memories from my long life or in the delving into events that no one is still alive to remember.

To cultivate my author platform, therefore—so that people beyond my family may take an interest in my books when they are published—I hereby launch this website, larryfsommers.com, including this blog, titled “Reflections.”

If you come back from time to time you’ll encounter various kinds of content:

  • Ruminations on “the writer’s life.”
  • Narratives of past events, sometimes written as fictional vignettes.
  • Mentions of good books recently read.
  • News and chat from my widening circle of fellow writers.
  • Tales of success (or even of well-curated failure!) in the literary lists.
  • Pretty-much-brilliant observations and insights on the passing scene.
  • Occasional adumbrations of the Judeo-Christian faith that informs and animates all of these things in my life.

Be brave enough to stick around through several posts, and you’ll catch on. I’ll try to post something new every Tuesday. Hope to see you often.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Author

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

(History is not what you thought!)