You can be born in Amherst, live in Amherst, and die in Amherst. You can go to your grave unheralded.
And then some interfering busybody will publish your poems, and you’ll be famous. Even rich, though only in absentia because by that time, you’ll be . . . elsewhere.
Dear Reader, I am no Emily Dickinson. I find it necessary to promote my own writings while I am still here.
Not that it will make me famous or rich. But I would like somebody to read what I have written.
This is especially true of a little book called Izzy Strikes Gold!, published in July 2024. My second novel. The one nearest my heart.
If you wish to dismiss it, you may call it a middle-grade novel, because that means only pre-teen children should read it.
But here’s a news flash: I wrote it for everybody.
Izzy Mahler is a bright and inquisitive lad, age twelve, the class shrimp in a small Midwestern town. Not everything is going well in his life, but he’s accumulating friends—one by one, almost without being aware of it. And he has private knowledge of a hoard of shiny metal. That could be gold, and gold could help.
The story is set in the Sometimes-But-Not-Always Fabulous Fifties, which lends it a certain charm for those who remember the era, or a sense of wonder for those who have never been there. The kids who inhabit the Fifties are just like kids now—only in a gentler world.
Izzy Strikes Gold! is a charming, sometimes sad, but always honest look at growing up in America, then or now.
It is what we used to call a coming-of-age story.
Did I mention it builds to a Christmastime climax?
This story is too good to be restricted to middle-schoolers. You can read it too.
Izzy Strikes Gold! is a book for anyone who was ever twelve years old, or ever will be. You can read it with your grandchildren.
Kindly old Mrs. Winders kept me after class one Friday afternoon in October. She sat me down by the dusty chalk rail and said next Monday morning I must report to the room across the hall.
Dazed by this announcement, I walked home. Skipping a grade was nothing I had heard of before. I didn’t know it could be done.
I told the news to Mom. She knew all about it. She, Dad, the teachers, the principal, and the school psychologist had already talked at length about this plan to make me a fourth-grader.
The only one left out of the conversation was me.
So What Else Is New?
It would have been extraordinary to include a kid in a decision that affected him.
We were to be seen rather than heard. Why would anyone consult us on a matter of importance? We were defective; that is, not yet adult.
“But Mom, I like my friends in third grade. Those fourth-graders are older than me. I don’t know them.”
“You’ll just have to make new friends.”
That was that.
The next Monday, I walked into a classroom where all the kids towered over me.
Where everybody already knew their multiplication tables.
Students practicing penmanship. Fair use.
Where the cursive characters—which I had barely begun to learn—were posted above the blackboards all around the room, from which vantage point they leered, taunted, and dared me to write using them all the time. And to practice “good penmanship,” whatever that was.
Fourth grade was a place where my new teacher, a mean old lady with beady eyes, saw me as an untutored savage, a burden thrust upon her.
Oh, the Humanity
Van Gogh suffering from an earache. Public Domain.
People say artists must suffer. If they never suffered, it’s not art.
Writers are held to be artists. Therefore we must have suffered too.
In this business of suffering I am also defective. I haven’t suffered much. At age seventy-nine, I look back on a life of tranquillity, prosperity, and more than my share of joy.
But in those days when I was an impostor posing as a fourth-grader—both smaller and younger than my classmates, resented by my harsh teacher, expected to know all sorts of things I had sped past in this oddball promotion—at that time, Dear Reader, if at no other, I thought I was suffering.
Making friends was the least of it. My classmates treated me as a novelty—a mid-season interloper with an overgrown brain and an undergrown body. At least they were nice. They showed a kind of mascot-worthy toleration. One or two offered real friendship.
Some other kid, with a different personality, might have used the sudden promotion to take fourth grade by storm. Some folks are outgoing, potentially meteoric, by nature. I am not one of them.
Years and decades have taught me versatility; the skills required to make new friends quickly; the ability to assert my own interests in a pleasant, no-nonsense way so I won’t be huddled in a dark corner when goodies are distributed. But way down deep, I’m still an introvert.
Timidity ruled me in third and fourth grades. I seemed born to be bullied.
“Stand up for yourself,” my parents said.
Now, I know what they meant. Then, I had no clue.
My path to a full social life may have been gradual, but I got here. Gone are my days of quailing and quaking. Life is now good to me.
Yet the wounds of childhood, even many years later, can still sting.
An Altered Ego
So there was a hidden agenda when I set out, a few years ago, to write fiction.
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. --T. S. Eliot
I thought through historical fiction—stories set in the past—I could fix the past.
I created a character, Izzy Mahler—a six-year-old boy, beleaguered by schoolyard bullies who shook him down for money, a dime he did not have. “You’d better get it,” said big bully Barton Bigelow.
Izzy’s first, forlorn appearance, from the Saturday Evening Post’s Depression-era art files. Fair use.
The ingenious means by which Izzy got the dime, warded off Barton Bigelow, scored a candy prize for himself, and learned a lesson in finance, became a fount of quaint humor. The Saturday Evening Post website liked the story well enough to publish it as “Nickel and Dime.”
By combining a couple of real incidents from early childhood—changing a few names, facts, and relationships—I had given Izzy a success that had eluded the actual me. How’s that for exploration, T. S. Eliot?
Two more Izzy stories, again bought by The Saturday Evening Post, showcased my flair for creative reconstruction of the past.
Then I caught the bug to write The Great American Novel. My great American novel, Price of Passage, took about five years to complete. All along, I had it in mind to write a book about Izzy’s grade-school experiences back in the 1950s.
And I did it. The result, Izzy Strikes Gold!, is a middle-grade novel that grandparents will also enjoy reading—as a dip into the roseate past, if nothing more.
It’s 1957. Twelve-year-old IZZY, long on hope and short on cash, claws golden nuggets from the waters of a secret spring. His co-discoverer COLLUM swears him to secrecy.
Izzy hopes to be a regular kid, not just the class shrimp. Half his brain teems with schemes to fit in with his peers, while the other half struggles to keep his family from falling apart.
MOM and DAD are at odds, Izzy helpless to save their marriage. THE RUSSIANS launch the first artificial satellite, blighting Izzy’s hopes of space-age glory. Bullying LYLE dashes Izzy’s self-image; breathtaking IRMA seems oblivious to his wistful ardor; and GRANDPA, who taught him to be brave, wastes away in a hospital room.
Money could ease these woes—but Izzy has pledged silence about the gold in the hidden spring.
DEEP IN DILEMMAS, HOW CAN IZZY HOLD ON TO HOPE?
Because it features a child protagonist with a child’s problems, this book is classified by booksellers as a middle-grade novel—one meant for readers eight to twelve years old.
But, Dear Reader, I wrote it for EVERYBODY. I hope there’s enough universality in Izzy’s story that people of any age can enjoy it as a snapshot of a magical time in a child’s life. People my age, who can remember the very different world of the 1950s, will resonate with the events contained in its pages.
I hope they will give this book to their grandchildren—read it along with their grandchildren, perhaps. It may spark wonderful conversations.
Themes
Authors must talk with people about their work. It’s easy to talk about characters and events in a story you have written. It’s harder to talk about themes.
You may not know the themes until the dust has settled.
Long before starting on the Izzy novel, I shared with my friend Christine DeSmet the fact that I wanted to write a “coming-of-age” book which would be mainly about “acceptance.” That desire sprang from the many times I suffered anxiety, hoping my classmates would accept me as a true peer even though I was younger and smaller, and knew bigger words.
But when the book was finished, I found its main themes are hope, friendship, and love.
All these transcend mere acceptance. In fact, taken together, they make acceptance unnecessary.
I thought I wrote about a child’s struggle to be tolerated in juvenile society. What came out was a saga of hope tenaciously held, friendship slowly gained, and love made manifest.
I went in for a penny but came out with a pound.
Having arrived where I started, I knew the place for the first time.
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers
Your New Favorite Writer
P.S.—If you’re in or near Madison, Wisconsin, on July 24, come to the FABULOUS LAUNCH PARTY. You can buy the book on site and get a genuine author’s signature on the title page. Details here.
It’s time to reveal the cover of IZZY STRIKES GOLD!, my new middle-grade novel from Three Towers Press. In the near future, I’ll post the link for pre-publication orders, but for the moment, just revel in this beautiful cover, please!
I think sensational cover artist KINGA MARTIN got it just right.
IZZY, the twelve-year-old hero of the book, is a real boy, battling real problems in a realistically rendered 1957 setting. But Kinga’s cartoon-like rendering universalizes him, makes him into an Everykid, while perfectly capturing his innocence and venturesome spirit. And all in a brilliant woodland frame that shows the half-magical woods where Izzy’s tormenting secret lives.
MATT FIEDLER, fifth-grade teacher at Winnequah School, pointed out the style of illustration is reminiscent of animé, an art form “the kids really like.” I know already that the kids in Matt’s 2022-2023 class like the book itself, because I read it to them in installments last year.
But I didn’t have a juvenile audience in mind when I wrote it. I was thinking EVERYBODY could identify with Izzy, a kid trying to balance the child and adult worlds. I know old folks of my generation will enjoy this trip back to the Fifties. If they read the book to their grandchildren, who knows what illuminating conversations might ensue?
IZZY STRIKES GOLD! launches July 24. It will be available from Amazon, Three Towers Press, or your favorite local bookstore.
As an old man, it’s easy to see I’ve had a wonderful life, filled with joy, love, and satisfaction.
At age twelve, however, things were not that rosy. Happiness sometimes seemed out of reach.
Casting a fond eye back on the 1950s, I have written a little book about a twelve-year-old boy and his hopes.
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His name is Izzy Mahler.
A secret spring: In the New England Woods (1855–65), oil on canvas, by Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826-1900), Public Domain.
Izzy lives in Plumb—an ordinary town sprinkled with a few magical places, like Patch Pagelkopf’s basement . . . the Public Library . . . and the dark, jungly Bottoms, where lustrous minerals lurk in a secret spring of water, waiting to be discovered.
Izzy’s great hope is to be one of the gang, not stand out as the youngest and smallest of his classmates. Fifty-one percent of his brain teems with schemes to fit in, while another fifty-one percent struggles to keep his family together. At times it seems his brain must burst.
Mom and Dad, caught in the grim world of adulthood, act like people from a strange planet. Izzy’s favorite grandpa languishes in a far-away hospital. And Izzy must keep his sister, Christine, from learning how dire things are—because she’s, like, a lttle kid, you know.
Extra money might ease the strains on his family, but Izzy has made a pact with his blood brother Collum to keep mum about the gold from the secret spring.
Everything comes crashing down when the Russians launch Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. It’s a vile trick to cheat the U.S. of its proper place in Space and make aspiring spacemen Izzy and Collum live out their lives as grim adults on Planet Earth.
What can a twelve-year-old do, in 1957?
You’ll have to read the book to find out.
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An eleven-year-old boy in 1956.
Izzy Strikes Gold!is a middle-grade novel. Boys and girls from ten to fourteen will identify with Izzy and his friends—steadfast Collum, bellicose Lyle Haycock, enchanting Irma Ruger, and the mystifying Mutt-mutt Corner.
But their grandparents—folks of an age with Your New Favorite Writer—will also enjoy this serio-comic journey into the rosy land of the past.
Publication is scheduled for July. We’ll have a big launch party. If you’re in or near Madison, Wisconsin, please come help us launch this lovely book. If not, tune in by Zoom.
In the weeks leading up to publication, you’ll be able to order Izzy Strikes Gold! at a special discount. I’ll let you know when pre-orders open.
Thanks for your constant support in these endeavors.
A boy named Izzy Mahler, seven years old, springs out of bed and dashes down the stairs. It is a Saturday morning in October, 1952.
The Old Philco
Barefoot and pajama’d, Izzy makes straight for the wooden Philco radio, switches it on. Izzy remembers going downtown with Dad to bring home the Philco and its fine supporting table. Ever since—through three apartments, the birth of little Christine, and now the move to this two-story house just across the alley from Grant School—the Philco has been the Mahlers’ proudest possession, and the most useful.
Moving on to the kitchen, Izzy opens the refrigerator, takes out a quart of milk, removes the round cardboard cap from the glass bottle’s neck, and pours himself a glass. Then he sits down at the kitchen table and listens as the radio set in the living room spills forth Let’s Pretend, Buster Brown, and Space Patrol. He sees every detail of each story.
Commander Buzz Corey is just cutting his way into Jelna’s spaceship with an atomic cutting torch when Mom and Dad come out in wrinkled pajamas, rubbing their heads with their knuckles. Izzy wishes he had an atomic cutting torch like Buzz Corey’s, or even just a plain old cosmic ray gun. He would give it to President Eisenhower for copying. That way, should American soldiers run into bug-eyed monsters from Planet Orkulon, they’d be ready.
Christine bangs her tin cup on the wooden tray of her high chair, but Izzy hardly hears. Why can’t you get a ray gun by sending in box-tops? he wonders. A ray gun would take more boxtops, and probably more quarters, than the usual things like the Lone Ranger decoder ring he lost while helping Buster Wiggins plant potatoes—but it would be worth it. He hopes none of the Wigginses will bite into a spud and break a tooth on his decoder ring.
Now Christine squalls to beat the band, so loud that Izzy can’t hear the radio.
“Harold,” Mom says. Dad stares into space, as usual. Mom plunks down the checkbook with a loud WHACK! Dad sighs and sits down at the kitchen table.
Izzy goes upstairs and gets dressed. When he comes down, Dad frowns over his slide rule, while Mom knits her brows over numbers scrawled on paper with a pencil.
Izzy opens the back door. Dad looks up. “Where are you going, son?”
“Out to play,” Izzy says.
“Be home for supper,” says Mom.
A fictionalized account of true events.
Out of the Ether
I was born in 1945 into a family that couldn’t, or at least didn’t, afford a television set until 1957, when everybody else had already had a set for two or three years. As a result, I was privileged to be present at the last stand of radio broadcasting as a mass entertainment medium—before TV gobbled up radio’s best shows, and most of its advertising revenue, added a few original programs of its own, and became—well, Television. As we know it.
If you did not experience those “radio days,” let me assure you: radio was great. All the action, all the drama, all the excitement, all the laughs of TV—only you could see it better, because everything played on the full color, panoramic, high-definition screen inside your mind—with all the pans, tilts, and zooms each story required.
Stan Freberg, the advertising world’s comic genius, produced a radio spot, “Stretching the Imagination,” that perfectly illustrates the vast cinematic potential of the sound-only medium. You can hear it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppZ57EeX6vE.
An Embarrassment of Riches
What kind of shows did radio offer? Besides the Saturday morning fare Izzy consumed in our fictional vignette, there were:
Westerns galore, all of the juvenile variety: Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy, Bobby Benson and the B-Bar-B Riders. But most of all, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 6:30 p.m.: “In the pages of history there is no greater champion of justice than this daring and resourceful masked rider of the plains, who, with his faithful Indian companion Tonto, led the fight for law and order in the early West. . . . Return with us now to those gripping days of yesteryear—the Lone Ranger rides again!”
Northerns, starring Royal Canadian Mounted Police like Sergeant Preston of the Yukon with his famous lead dog Yukon King; and mountie Jim West, The Silver Eagle, voiced by radio legend Jim Ameche—one of the Amici boys from Kenosha, Wisconsin—on Tuesdays and Thursdays in the Lone Ranger’s 6:30 time slot.
Game shows like The Quiz Kids and The 64-Dollar Question. That’s not a misprint. Sixty-four dollars was the top prize. That was big money. When television came along, the same show was recycled, “isolation booths” added for showmanship, and three zeroes tacked on to the prizes—so it became The $64,000 Question.
Audience-participation shows like Art Linkletter’s People Are Funny or Ralph Edwards’ Truth or Consequences, in which typical Americans made fools of themselves, on the screen in your mind, for fame, glory, and small sums of money. They may have been forerunners of what is today called “reality TV.”
Comedies, glorious comedies of all descriptions. There was the pompous ventriloquist Edgar Bergen with his dummies Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd; you could not even see his lips move—at least, on the radio. There were situation comedies of small-town life, like Fibber McGee and Molly and The Great Gildersleeve. Others relied on ethnic identities: The Goldbergs (not to be confused with the 2013 TV series of that name), Life with Luigi (in which Irish-American actor J. Carrol Naish played the title Italian character), and Amos ’n’ Andy (a show whose African American title characters were created and portrayed by white actors Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll). There were comedies about teenagers—Henry Aldrich, Corliss Archer, My Little Margie, and the high school denizens taught by Our Miss Brooks. And there were wholesome family shows like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and Father Knows Best. (Leave It to Beaver, the classic exemplar of this kind of show, never appeared on radio; it was a creature of television only.)
And then there was The Jack Benny Show, in some ways the forerunner of modern shows like Seinfeld. To say the Benny show was comedy is true enough; but it hardly does justice to the subject. Jack Benny was an institution. Perhaps a good subject for a later blog post.
Dear Reader: This has been an encore presentation of a blog article originally posted June 18, 2019. Hope you enjoyed it!
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
To be filed under “Further Adventures of a Literary Lion”:
Your New Favorite Writer is pleased to announce that his middle grade novel,
IZZY STRIKES GOLD!,
will be published in 2024 by independent publisher HenschelHAUS, Milwaukee.
TA-DA!! Huzzah!! Thank you very much.
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AND HOW DID THIS GREAT BLESSING COME TO PASS?
Here’s a recap:
When I retired from my retirement job in 2016 to devote myself to writing, I did not know exactly what I would write about. But I figured whatever touched the emotional core of my being would be a good place to start.
That sent me back to my childhood. Specifically, to my grade-school years in Streator, Illinois, a prairie town of fewer than twenty thousand souls. The era was the 1950s.
Yes, Gentle Reader, those 1950s. The famous Fifties. The Fabulous Fifties. Which were not always completely fabulous, in case you didn’t know.
But here’s the thing: Life, by itself, does not make good art. If I wrote a simple recollection, you would find nothing remarkable or interesting about it. Indeed, when I look back on my actual childhood, no meaning or theme can be divined.
Yet it draws forth a strong emotion, a yearning to revisit those moments and find something . . . momentous. That’s why I write fiction. Perhaps I can touch the core truth of life by wrapping it in pretense.
So I made up a juvenile character, Izzy Mahler, a young boy in a small town in the 1950s, beset by bullying schoolmates, mystifying grownups, and a drive to reconcile conflicting events. Izzy’s experiences are my own, but rearranged in the hope they will add up to something.
I wrote a short story, “Nickel and Dime,” that links a six-year-old Izzy with two separate memories—being shaken down by bullies, and buying a candy novelty on credit. The tale had humor and nostalgia, and The Saturday Evening Post featured it on their website May 27, 2016.
And I hit the trifecta with a slightly deeper story, “The Lion’s Den,” about Izzy, still age seven, and his family tree. This piece won honorable mention in The Great American Fiction Contest and was published in its annual contest anthology.
There was more yet to say about Izzy. I thought there might be a coming-of-age novel buried somewhere in Izzy’s experience. I wanted to write it but didn’t quite know how.
After most of the writing was done on Price of Passage, and while engaged in a two-year struggle to get it published, I doubled back and started to work on Izzy’s coming of age.
This book would be a bit stiffer in content than the innocent childhood tales picked up by The Saturday Evening Post. It would focus on an older Izzy, in the momentous year when he was twelve.
Alluring and enigmatic Irma Ruger plays a part in the story, and bullies from earlier Izzy stories also appear, as well as a couple of new bullies. This time around, Izzy is mired in a family drama with serious dimensions. But there is also humor and a huge dose of authentic Fifties nostalgia.
You will enjoy the read, and so will your grandchildren.
When I thought the book was finished, I did the same thing I had done when I thought Price of Passage was finished. I took it to Christine DeSmet.
Christine DeSmet
In the most respectful and encouraging way, she took it apart—chapter by chapter, paragraph by paragraph, line by line—and helped me see what was working and what was not. We found enough needed improvements to make the book five hundred percent better than it had been.
Nobody can do this like Christine. She has a gift and a calling.
The next step was to expose it to the target audience. Though written for ALL readers, Izzy Stirkes Gold! will be classified as a middle grade novel, merely so the booksellers know what shelf to put it on! It’s unlikely the book will appear on many bookstore shelves. Most of its sales will be online or direct from author to reader at book fairs and craft shows. But the need to categorize persists.
In the publishing world, if your protagonist is twelve years old, you have written a middle grade novel. It’s that simple. Many such books provide enjoyment and edification to full-grown adults, but no matter; they are still middle grade books.
I wanted to see how Izzy would do with its nominal target audience, so I contacted my grandson’s fifth-grade teacher, Matt Fiedler, and asked if I could introduce Izzy Strikes Gold! to his students. To my delight, he invited me to visit two or three afternoons a week and read the whole book aloud to his class, a half-hour at a time.
That experience alone was worth the whole effort. I found out what eager learners those kids are, and how they identified with a boy much like them but living in The World of Sixty-Five Years Ago. We had a fabulous time, and they affirmed for me that Izzy Strikes Gold! brings the reader some of the same longings and frustrations I knew as a boy.
By then I had begun a wide-ranging search for an agent or publisher to help me make the manuscript into a book.
A few weeks ago, I began conversations with Kira Henschel, a very experienced publisher with a catalog of books by wonderful authors.
As a result, I am now to be one of the wonderful authors in her catalog. This blessed event will occur about halfway through 2024.
Don’t worry, Dear Reader; I’ll keep you informed.
When the book comes out, do yourself and your grandkids a big favor: Buy it!
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.”
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.
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
A sweet little secret of the Lit Biz—which I am about to let you in on, Dear Reader—is this:
After giving months, or maybe years, of your life to writing an 80,000-word novel, you must then tell the story again, accurately and with zing!, in one page.
That’s only if you want anyone to have a chance to read it.
“What, one page?” I hear you cry. “Dear New Favorite Writer, that’s hardly possible.”
The situation is not quite as bad as it seems. You can single space.
Why Is this Trip Necessary?
Agents, editors, and publishers want to see a one-page synopsis to decide whether there is any point in reading your whole manuscript. An agent or independent publisher receives a thousand or more queries a year—a query being a proffer of a new fiction manuscript the author hopes will get the green light for a traditional publishing contract.
The agent or publisher can represent, or publish, only a handful of titles a year. A dozen, or two dozen, perhaps. So barriers are built, like the steep waterfalls and boiling fish-ladders of the Pacific Northwest that keep all but the strongest of salmon from reaching their spawning grounds and scoring the Darwinian reward of posterity.
Salmon try to leap a waterfall. Photo by Marvina Munch, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Public Domain
The Synopsis
The synopsis is one of those barriers. Does it tell the whole story? Does it tell the story clearly? Is the story interesting? If not, fuhgeddaboudit.
Unlike the marketing blurb on the back cover of the book, which will give enticing hints of the story while gingerly avoiding spoilers, the synopsis—meant for publishing industry eyes only— must reveal the whole plot, including the ending. If it does the job well enough, the author’s reward is a request from the agent or publisher to send the full manuscript for review.
Thus, you have made it over the first waterfall on your way upstream. The next waterfall is steeper. After they read the whole manuscript, they may pass. But at least your synopsis has earned you a chance at success.
Which brings us back to the impossibility of writing your whole novel in one page. But trying to do so is actually a valuable exercise. An amazing number of characters, phrases, and plot twists must be left on the cutting room floor. What remain are only the real essentials, connected causally in whole different way from what the meandering course of the book itself required.
Izzy’s Novel
Now, Gentle Reader, I’m going to do something that’s almost never done. I’m going to give you a peek at the one-page synopsis of my new middle-grade novel about a boy named Izzy Mahler. You will see it before any agent or publisher sees it.
WARNING: If you hope to read the book after it is published, if your memory for plot details is good, and if you can’t stand reading a story when you know what’s going to happen, AVERT YOUR EYES NOW.
For those who remain, here is the synopsis, preceded by a one-sentence logline.
Synopsis
In 1957 Illinois, class runt Izzy Mahler just wants to become a regular kid as the world falls apart around him—but can he shield America from Sputnik, and will a secret gold mine save his struggling family?
It’s 1957. IZZY MAHLER, 12, youngest and smallest of eighth-graders in Plumb, Illinois, longs to be respected as a regular kid, not battered by bullies like LYLE HAYCOCK,13. Izzy and fellow Space Patrol afficionado COLLUM GUNDERSON, 14, find a shiny gold rock in the woods near their homes on Wry Lane. Collum swears Izzy to secrecy, because the discovery is their special thing, which Collum’s three half-brothers must not share. Emerging from the woods, they meet IRMA RUGER, 12—Izzy’s third-grade flame. Izzy keeps mum, the gold rock safe in his pocket. But the secrecy irks Izzy. If the gold is real, it could save his parents’ marriage, which is foundering over money. He visits the public library to learn about gold, but all he garners is a couple of cool space travel books. On his way home from the library, he inadvertently goads the MORIARTY BROTHERS into a baseball game: Court Street versus Wry Lane, to be played in two weeks. Izzy recruits players for the Wry Lane team, filling out the roster with physically impaired and oddly-named MUTT-MUTT CORNER.
Izzy’s underemployed DAD, a war veteran with a science degree, goes into a part-time upholstery business with PATCH PAGELKOPF, a wise old jack-of-all-trades. Izzy interrogates a pawnbroker and learns that even a little gold is worth a lot of money. But he prays Dad’s extra cash from the upholstery sideline, on top of his night-shift job at a glass bottle factory will be enough to keep the family together, so Izzy can keep the gold secret. Time comes for the Big Game: Lyle Haycock, playing for Court Street, shoves and harries Izzy mercilessly. The fey Mutt-mutt Corner makes an oddball play to win the game for Wry Lane, closing out Izzy’s summer on a high note. In the fall, heart-stopping Irma Ruger is once more a schoolmate, adding spice to life. Things are going swell!
Sputnik. NASA photo. Public Domain.
But the glass factory lays off the midnight shift. As Izzy’s family reels from Dad’s job loss, the Russians launch SPUTNIK, the first man-made satellite—which Izzy, furious, takes as a personal insult. Now suddenly, America wants young scientists. Izzy can easily see himself as a space opera hero. He and Collum, advancing America’s space program, launch a skyrocket over the local brickyard, but a night watchman calls the cops and the boys must flee through the woods. With his parents’ marriage on the rocks again, Dad vanishes. Izzy wonders whether he’ll come back. At a science expo for young students, Izzy learns that Irma has a brighter future in science than he. MOM tries to explain to Izzy that Dad was damaged by combat, but try as he might, Izzy cannot picture Dad as a war hero.
Dad comes home. He’s been up North and landed a new job that will make use of his science degree. Seems Dad’s wedding ring is all the gold the family needs. But Mom, Izzy, and kid sister CHRISTINE must move to Pikeport, Wisconsin—Dad’s new work site, after Christmas. Izzy is devastated. Just when he is fitting into kid society in Plumb, he gets yanked away. Walking home from the town’s Christmas pageant, Izzy ponders his improved status as a kid among kids. Lyle Haycock waylays him and starts a fight, which becomes a conversation—one in which Izzy learns the facts of life in a truly broken family. Only Dad’s new job up North can spare Izzy from sharing Lyle’s crummy fate. After Christmas, the Mahlers move to Pikeport. On their way out of town, Izzy gives his new baseball glove to Mutt-mutt Corner, wishing him a good 1958 season. Up North, Pikeport is a hard place to adjust to, but Izzy finds a couple of new friends. His morale improves when America finally manages a successful launch of its own satellite in January 1958.
#
There you have it, Dear Reader—my latest book, soon to join the crowd of manuscripts battering their way upstream in the world of publishing.
When it comes out in paperback, do yourself a favor and read it. Especially because of all the ’50s reminiscences included, it’s a fun book for grown-ups as well as kids.
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
An American institution marked two centuries on August 4.
I am letting you all know here, in case you missed the announcement.
Readers old enough to remember the Saturday Evening Post may think it died years ago. Not so.
The once ubiquitous flagship journal of the Curtis Publishing Company was rescued from demise by the Saturday Evening Post Society, a nonprofit group which purchased the magazine in 1982. The Post now appears as six large-format print issues per year, with an impressive circulation of 237,907 (2018). It also manages a thriving Web presence.
“And this is significant, Dear New Favorite Writer, because of . . . exactly, what?”
Mainly, Astute and Forbearing Reader, because of the magazine’s unassailable tradition and the long list of distinguished writers whose works have graced its pages.
Rockwell in 1921. Photo by Underwood and Underwood. Public Domain.
Great Illustrators
Younger readers may recognize the Saturday Evening Post as the locus of a series of cover illustrations which cemented the fame of 20th-century artist Norman Rockwell.
But those full-color covers—52 of them each year—by Rockwell and other great illustrators merely scratch the surface of the Post’s glory. When Your New Favorite Writer was a kid, in the 1950s, the Saturday Evening Post was a major pillar of Main Street America. People from all walks of life read the Post, learned from it, and were endlessly entertained by it.
Saturday Evening Post Cover of 27 Sep 1924 by Rockwell. Public Domain.
Great Writers and Editors
Each issue held a lively mix of fiction, nonfiction, and features. The Post’s quick response times and generous pay attracted the best writers—Joseph Conrad, O. Henry, Rudyard Kipling, and others. Jack London’s Call of the Wild premiered in the pages of the Saturday Evening Post.
Under a succession of editors—George Horace Lorimer, Wesley Stout, and Ben Hibbs—the magazine reached a peak circulation of over seven million and attracted writers such as Owen Wister, Ring Lardner, William Faulkner, Stephen Viincent Benet, Agatha Christie, and Ray Bradbury.
A Focus on Fiction
The magazine was particularly known as a great venue for fiction. Not avant-garde fiction, but mainstream fiction. And not just the writings of the greats, but great writing from not-so-well-known authors.
Movie poster for Warner Brothers film based on Hazlitt’s Alexander Botts stories, starring Joe E. Brown.
As a boy I followed the exploits of Alexander Botts, freewheeling salesman of Earthworm Tractors for the Farmer’s Friend Tractor Company. In a series of stories by William Hazlett Upson, Botts’s odd-ball sales campaigns were chronicled as a stream of frantic memos, letters, and telegrams between the loose cannon Botts and his perplexed home office in Earthworm City, Illinois.
It was, as they say, to larf.
Many young writers got a hand up by selling stories to the Post. Young writers are still doing this today—not to mention a few superannuated novices, such as Your New Favorite Writer. When I began to write fiction as a septuagenarian, I had a few quirky tales about a young boy named Izzy Mahler, growing up in a small town in the 1950s. The Post was kind enough to publish three of them (see here, here, and here), including one which won honorable mention in the magazine’s 2018 Great American Fiction Contest. For this I cannot help being grateful.
Rescued from Oblivion
And I was thankful for the far-sighted energy of Indianapolis industrialist Beurt SerVaas, who saved the Post during its distressed days in the 1960s and ’70s. When he acquired the Post, he was primarily interested in its sister publication, Jack and Jill, the well-known children’s magazine. In 1982, he spun the Post off into a nonprofit company, and the magazine began to focus on nonfiction articles about health, medicine, and volunteering—the passions of his wife and business partner, Cory.
A more recent strategic shift, in 2013, brought the Saturday Evening Post back to its original mission. According to the magazine’s website, it “returned to . . . celebrating America, past, present, and future. Since then, the Post has focused on the elements that have always made it popular: good story telling, fiction, art, and history.”
Storytellers, take note. The Saturday Evening Post is still in business, doing what it has always done best, bringing high-quality mainstream narratives to the American public.
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
OUTLINERS figure out what the story is, then write it.
PANTSERS are writers who “fly by the seat of their pants” and get surprised by their stories.
Which one are you? Or, which would you be, if you were a writer?
I have always been an Outliner. Now, however, I’m changing my tune, and it scares me to death.
The Haven of Preparedness
Outlining may be considered a premeditated act. An Outliner commits Fiction in the First Degree.
Dentistry in my day. Public Domain.
This approach has a lot to recommend it. Once you have the whole plot engineered in outline form, you know where you are going. All that remains is to render it in prose.
But the way I personally think of it is: I must do the hard part first, the part I don’t like one bit, the part that intimidates me, which is making up the story.
Inventing plot twists, character actions, and dramatic events is like having all my teeth drilled and filled, one by one, and then extracted, without benefit of Novocain. That’s why I prefer to take refuge in historical novels. The main events have already happened and are known. All I need to invent is a few details. Even that seemingly small effort can leave me wounded and edentulous.
Writing prose, on the other hand—with its delicious prospect of future revision, and further revision; polishing, and then polishing the polishing—is a pleasant gambol in Elysian fields. Given any encouragement at all, I could spend the rest of my life merrily revising a single chapter.
Elysian Fields by Carlos Scwabe, 1903. Public Domain.
Fabulous
The problem is, people want a story. People consume stories wholesale. People hunger for story. And The Magic of Story is the reason I got into this game in the first place.
I was seventy years old then. In the five years since, I have learned a lot about writing. Mostly about the technique of writing. About craft. About marketing.
But the most important thing I’ve learned is that a story is more than the words by which it is told. It’s more than the plot turns along the way. A story is the verisimilitude of a live person’s meeting and overcoming—or perhaps succumbing to—challenges that are interesting and exciting. A story is the telling, or the showing, of “life as she is lived.”
To bring a story to life by draping a string of phrases over an outline is a highly artificial skill. Only a few people can do it well, like an actor bringing a character to life on stage by sheer technique. For what I’m trying to write now, that just won’t do.
I must become a method actor.
A Pantser.
Izzy—or izzn’t he?
A few years ago, I wrote some light-hearted short stories about a 1950s boy named Izzy Mahler. I was thrilled when three of them were e-published by The Saturday Evening Post. (You can read them here, here, and here.)
These Izzy stories replicate my own boyhood. Every detail comes straight from personal experience, with minor re-arrangements to enhance the drama.
Now, I am starting a book about Izzy Mahler. It’s not a collection of Izzy short stories but a full, front-to-back novel aimed at young people, starring an Izzy slightly older than the one who appears in the Saturday Evening Post stories.
The story this novel tells will have a bit more substance. I could never write anything really dark; but growing up in the 1950s was not all Leave It to Beaver. Kids had problems to face.
I started by outlining a plot for this book. It took a great deal of mulling over, but ultimately it went well: I emerged with a real spiffy outline. Then I started to write the text, based on my outline. I got seven chapters in before noticing that, although the writing was going very well, the book was going astray. The story was going off the rails by staying true to the outline.
There was no spontaneity to it. No real voyage of discovery for Izzy Mahler.
I had made a rookie error. I mistook my protagonist for myself.
If Izzy is merely a smudged copy of me, his saga will be a failure. My actual boyhood served me well enough, but it was not the stuff of stories. Whatever unhappiness I owned, whatever traumas in my upbringing, they cannot be cured by rehashing old grudges or inchoate yearnings on paper. That is not fiction, it is whining.
Protagonizing
What is needed, if the past is to have meaning for the future, is an imaginative restaging, starring a better and more interesting person than me. That would be Izzy, you see. But this improved Izzy will not take pleasing shape from an outline. Izzy needs to be a true protagonist. He must burst forth from his circumstances and shove the story rudely in its ultimate direction.
Melancholy protagonist? Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. William Morris Hunt, oil on canvas, circa 1864. Public Domain.
In this account of things, Izzy is someone who flies by the seat of his pants. To capture him alive, I must follow his example.
Someone told me:
“The protagonist must protag.”
Don’t waste your time looking up “protag” in your Funk & Wagnall’s. No such word appears. It’s just a writer’s in-joke, meaning that for a book to enthrall readers, big things must happen; and the central character must be the one who makes them happen.
If I have a main fault as a writer, it’s that my characters are too much like me: Timid, passive, inert. Lord, preserve my little hero Izzy from such a fate. But Izzy will only seize his destiny if I grasp the nettle and make him strong where I am weak.
That is why Pantsers are always saying things like, “I thought it was a story about lust and betrayal, but then my hero took it in a whole different direction.”
All I can do is put Izzy on paper and confront him with challenges that he must address. Just fly by the seat of my pants, and hope the story will be worth reading.
But right now, in the moment of doing, it feels like I’m riding the world’s tallest roller-coaster. My carriage, on the top level, has just tilted sharply downward and started its plunge.
Pray for me.
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
