You put together a step sheet.

Perhaps you used tools to help organize your characters and plot ^[1].

You wrote key scenes to see if it flew. Maybe even a short story or two.

Researched.

You read: other works that did what you wanted to do. Authors who influence you.

You kept it fluid but did enough ‘real-time editing’ so it didn’t turn into some formless sprawl.

Even so, as you get to where the end of that first draft might be in sight, it all starts to feel, well, just a little bit daunting. And improbable. It’s gotten away from you. Then, in a moment of darkness, you think: what the hell am I doing?

What was I thinking?

That sense of story that you felt so strongly before, that you were so sure of, that instinct, is nowhere to be found. Gone.

Relax.

It’s all a part of the process.

Make a note in your manuscript and move on. (I use three asterisks *** and something like ‘Fred needs more nuancing’, ‘cut this scene?’), hit ‘ctrl-enter’ and keep going.

E L Doctorow said: “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

And the second time around, you have a much better idea where you’re going. You can eliminate some of those unnecessary side trips. And run a few stop signs.

I’m a software developer by day and one of the modern rules of programming is ‘iteration’. Don’t try to do it all at once. Get something down that kind of does what you want it to. Then fix it. Or get rid of it. Or redo it. Then build upon it. Iterate. People think I’m crazy when I say that writing fiction is a lot like writing code but both have much in common. Both are creative processes. And both can be iterated until you have something that works.

“With every book, around two-thirds of the way through the first draft, absolute panic sets in.”

I would love to know the source of that quote. Sounds like another Doctorow. But Google failed me. It’s a great quote, all the same:

With every book, around two-thirds of the way through the first draft, absolute panic sets in.

That means I’m right on track.

If you’re jittery towards the end of that first draft, then you probably are as well.

¡viva los autores! 

My advice to Indie authors considering Publishers Weekly Select to promote their books:

Don’t bother.

Like most Indies, I am always on the lookout for effective, budget-conscious ways to reach readers. And bookstore owners. And agents.

So I took the bait and sent $149 to Publishers Weekly Select, the PW program exclusively for Indie publishers. According to their website, they are “just the kind of people who can take a book and make it a bestseller.”

Well, alright!

The way the program “works”:

“When you register, your book receives an announcement listing in PW Select–which is bound into issues of Publishers Weekly and appears online at publishersweekly.com. Every announcement listing includes bibliographic, marketing, and editorial information about your book–so you can promote it to booksellers, publishers, agents, and industry insiders. Additionally, every book listed in PW Select is automatically eligible for a review from Publishers Weekly. From the hundreds of books listed in each PW Select, approximately 25 percent are selected by our editors for a review. And, all authors registering with PW Select receive a six-month digital subscription to Publishers Weekly.”

That sounds great!

But, despite sending two copies of my latest book – Who Sings to the Dead – to their ‘reader’, I did not receive a review. OK, only 25% of submitters receive a review. I can live with that, although what I did get was pretty feeble. By the way, the review ratio, from eyeballing the magazine, is a lot less than 25%.

I didn’t even get my cover listed in the mag or on their web site. Most Indie submitters don’t get their covers listed. Not one little ragged jpeg. Just a sentence or two of listing information.

Not much for your money.

So what did I get?

An “announcement” that eerily resembled my own book blurb, but that had been run through PW’s Limited English Skills Translator and converted into some clunky language. They even added a typo. Free of charge. Here it is:

“Police fficer (sic) Nina Flores is hunting for a kidnapped Indian beggar girl in modern-day Peru. The suspected kidnapper resembles what locals call a ghost who hunts children. Or is this case connected to one 20 years earlier, during the country’s dirty war?”

That’s kind of awful.

I requested that PW fix the typo, at least. No response.

So I asked for a refund.

You can probably imagine what kind of response that got.

The same.

It’s pretty obvious no one at PW Select read the book. Or opened it. Or even copyedited their own blurb.

I’m supposed to forward this ‘listing’ to agents and bookstores. And industry insiders.

So I can be the next bestseller.

I would be ashamed to send this ‘announcement’ to anyone remotely interested in my book.

Which is OK as it’s near impossible to find the listing anyway.

As mentioned, this meager snippet is posted on PW’s website but good luck unearthing it, unless you know exactly what you’re looking for. None of their new release info is indexed to facilitate search. Searching on my book title returns nothing. Searching my name returns all of the ‘listings’. From there on you have to dig. Makes it a little hard to forward to those industry insiders.

The ‘bound’ issue of Publisher’s Weekly that included my announcement (along with 202 other hopefuls) was published in the April 2013 issue, in a skimpy magazine that resembles the kind of thing you toss out with the ads in your Sunday newspaper. And good luck finding your listing there too. Kind of like the classified ads but wedged together into one article. Or whatever it is. With typos.

So far, no calls from New York agents.

Or industry insiders.

Why am I not surprised?

I fell for it. Buyer beware.

Publishers Weekly used to have a good rep.

What I have received, however, are unsolicited phone calls and emails from various book promotional web sites and services (that no one has ever heard of) offering me even more services. For a fee.

OK,  what else can you, the Indie author, get out of my PW Select experience?

If you have $149 to promote your book here are two suggestions:

1. Sign up for Goodreads (if you are not already a member) and use the $149 to purchase copies of your book and send them to winners after you enroll your book in a Goodreads giveaway. You’ll probably get a few reviews out of it. I did. And some nice connections with readers.

2. Buy gift copies of your ebook and send to readers/friends/potential reviewers. This will also provide you a small ‘sales’ bump if done in a short period of time.

¡viva los escritores!

If you have any interest whatsoever in one of the most famous Argentines – make that women – who ever lived, then this book is highly recommended. In less than 200 pages authors Nicholas Fraser and Marysa Navarro sum up the life of a complex person driven to greatness despite her humble birth. At the same time they provide a succinct history of twentieth century Argentina.

But beware, myths are dispelled.

The young starlet

If, like millions, you held flawless visions of Eva Perón (née Duarte), the illegitimate daughter of a rancher left high and dry with her mother and siblings in a dusty rural cattle town, who went on to champion the rights of her fellow underprivileged and downtrodden Argentines, then you might just be disillusioned at the corruption and egotism that also marked much of her life.

And if, like many others, you believe that Evita was little more than a stylish fascist, a shill for her husband, the infamous General Perón, pioneer of the Argentine police state of later years, and was obsessed only with bars of gold, French gowns and adulation, then you will probably be disappointed as well.

Eva and the general

Because Eva Perón’s short life, before she died at thirty-three after a lengthy battle with ovarian cancer (ironically the same illness that would strike down Juan Perón’s first wife), was one of contradictions, demonstrated by grand gestures in the Latin style (she proposed a monument the size of a building to her beloved decamisados – the ‘shirtless’ workers who brought the Peróns to power), as well as tireless efforts to reach out to the poor, whom she never lost touch with. The Eva Perón Foundation, a massive charity not without its share of fraud and politicking, handed out countless fifty peso notes to anyone who lined up outside Eva’s office, and built state-of-the-art clinics and hospitals still in use today.

She organized the Female Peronist Party and raised political awareness for Argentine women. She was instrumental in getting them the right to vote – an effort that would help her husband win a crucial election, despite his many enemies.

Winning over Female Peronists

Not bad for a woman who escaped a windblown cow town with a cardboard suitcase and embarked on an acting career as a fifteen year old in 1930s Buenos Aires. Falling prey to more than one man willing to exploit her, in one instance Eva was publicly humiliated by an industry insider outside his office after she slept with him in the hopes of getting a part in a play. She didn’t get the part. And rumors of her more sordid activities to get by abound. But she kept acting. And she got better, becoming the highest paid radio actress at a time when radio was king in Argentina, and meeting the influential Juan Perón at a charity function. Even as a young starlet bent on fame she showed fervent support for charities.

Foundation Eva

Becoming his mistress, the strong-willed Evita became Sra. Perón, when the public demanded respectability. And she was arguably his better half, bringing a new look to the outdated uniforms and stiff-armed style of the classic Latin American dictator and crafting an image that would serve him well. Juan Perón soon donned Italian suits and a softer bearing as Eva became his front ‘man’, winning over a postwar world no longer enamored with fascists. After WWII, when Juan Perón became persona non grata, it was Evita who travelled to Spain, Italy and the rest of the Europe (but shunning the UK when the Queen would not personally meet with her), spreading the kind of PR reserved for American movie stars and paving the way for Argentina to secure badly needed loans. All the while handing out coins and bills to the poor. She was called the ‘South American Eleanor Roosevelt’ only Eleanor Roosevelt didn’t travel with a separate DC3 for her luggage. Or have 25,000 well-wishers standing outside her hospital for close to a year, or a million and a half citizens trooping in from every part of the country to show their respect as death approached.

The letters back and forth from Eva to her husband during the European trip were the stuff of romance. She clearly loved the man who arrested and imprisoned his enemies and who allegedly had a predilection for young girls—warts and all.

Dior Eva

She delivered the ‘shirtless ones’, the workers who were the backbone of the Peronist Party, with huge, dramatically-staged gatherings that preceded the 1946 elections and saved her husband from defeat. And again in 1951, now bringing along half a million female votes as well, in the new age of women’s suffrage, despite being unable to stand (and often unable to speak), afflicted with the cancer that would take her life in 1952.

They couldn’t take their eyes off of her

Contradictions: the woman who hosted Argentina’s politicos and her husband’s powerful associates at their home in her pajamas when she couldn’t be bothered to put on one of her many ‘scandalous’ gowns, who would offer to ‘open a few tins’ if they suggested dinner, was the same woman who worked tirelessly at her foundation all day, every day, until she was confined to a hospital bed.

And once Eva was gone, in spite of being embalmed in a glass-topped coffin that millions of followers would file by and reverently touch, Juan Perón’s magic too vanished. By 1955 he was exiled in a military coup after his country fell into financial ruin. Coincidence perhaps, but Perón’s enemies understood the power of Eva’s ghoulishly preserved eighty pound corpse, and went to great lengths to conceal it after her husband’s fall. That’s another story, of how Eva’s body was rediscovered many years later in a grave in Milan under the name ‘Maria Maggi’. Her enemies needed to get rid of her image but were afraid of destroying her body. She held that much power — even in death.

Embalming Eva

Had she lived, Eva Perón would have eventually been elected President of Argentina. She had already been put forward for vice president at a time when women went to the beauty parlor.

Lining up to pay their respects

Eva was brought back from Italy to Argentina to lie in state in the Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires (called the most exclusive neighborhood in Latin America). Anyone visiting today will continue to see a line of people at her crypt.

The cult of Eva? Without a doubt. But an Argentine associate of mine tells me of his parents, who read Eva’s inspirational quotes in their school textbooks as children, and still feel a sense of pride in the woman who put their country on the twentieth century world map.

How many women who once lived in a single room with their mother and four siblings, who worked as a child in the kitchens of the estancias, helping their family scrape by, end up being played by Madonna in films named after them?

The woman every Argentine knows

Sunset in the Amazon – Yasuni National Park, Ecuador

Oil companies have recently discovered more than 900 million barrels of crude oil under this pristine rainforest.

If this post makes me sound like a San Francisco tree hugger, I can live with it. It’s not just that my tourist sensibilities were disturbed by reminders that we live in a world dependent on oil on a recent trip to Ecuador where I wanted to observe exotic animals and lush tropical rainforest and not the encroachment of big oil. It’s that, with a little more care, things don’t have to be the way they are.

Because, if big oil isn’t checked, another kind of sunset is coming for the Amazon.

I was more than dismayed to witness the ongoing devastation caused by oil exploration in one of the last primeval areas of rainforest that once covered much of a continent.

Not even capped, natural gas from oil drilling is simply left to burn off. This flare, along the Napo River, has been burning for eight YEARS. Millions of insects perish every night, drawn to flames like these, of which there are many, impacting the delicate balance of the rainforest.

Where to start? Open natural gas flares? The illegal hunting of monkeys and other endangered animals to feed the tastes of imported oil workers flush with cash? Illegal logging? Or the legal oil road cutting a swath through once-unspoiled jungle and spreading erosion and internal combustion where they have no business being?

I know I’m not the first to point out environmental threats to the Amazon. And others have said it much better. But if you’ve been to the Amazon then you know how beautiful and stunning the jungle is—what’s left of it.

The view as you head upriver – oil trucks on their way deep into the Amazon. Jobs for the boys—and gas at a buck and a half a gallon in Ecuador. Diesel around a dollar.

Bus rides are dirt cheap in Ecuador – in Quito about one US quarter, a couple of dollars from Quito to the mountain town of Otavalo. So everyone benefits from big oil — in the short term.

Just one example of the devastation in Ecuador’s rainforest. Chevron alone has dumped 50 times more oil in the Amazon than the entire BP spillage in the Gulf of Mexico. Fifty times. Damage from 1993 still hasn’t been cleaned up, despite court orders.

One solution prompted by Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa is that the developed world contribute 3.6 billion dollars to invest in clean energy for Ecuador and “keep the Yasuni’s oil in the soil.”

Unfortunately, that amount is only up to a few hundred million dollars at this time.

So it’s really up to us.

Right, I hear you say – what exactly are you doing about this — besides blogging?

Good question. I patronized one of the jungle lodges in Yasuni National Park, where local tribes are employed and supported by eco-tourism. At Napo, where I stayed, the Kichwa observe strict rules: no hunting, no motor-powered boats, use of green detergents etc. Everything is paddled in and out by canoe. You’re not going to find anything resembling that kind of restraint a few miles downriver in the oil boom town of Coca. Quite the opposite. This was my second trip to the Amazon, another trip of a lifetime, but this time an eye-opener as to how fast these precious lands are disappearing. If you can afford to go, it’s still the most enjoyable way to support preservation of the Amazon rainforest. You won’t regret it.

Back home: use less energy. We all know what we need to do. Our household just bought a hybrid. If you watch South Park, you know San Franciscans live in a cloud of Smug anyway.

I signed a petition to let Ecuador’s President Correa know that I, along with many others, want to ‘keep the Yasuni’s oil in the soil’. Correa is not a bad guy, considering what it means to take on Big Oil in a country dependent on its production—politicians who try are frequently ousted. But oil revenues are a quarter of Ecuador’s GNP so he’s under serious pressure to let Big Oil have their way. The more of us he hears from, the more he knows what the Amazon means to us. You can sign the petition too. Some of it’s in Spanish but trust me, it gets the message across: Email President Correa

I decided to support the http://www.greengrants.org/ who will humbly accept your tax deductible donations to preserve the Yasuni National Park and other endangered places around the globe. A few bucks goes a long, long way.

Maybe we can all live in a cloud of Smug.

A down-to-earth man in many ways, Mr. Presley – married to the same woman for 49 years – returned to laying bricks when the Troggs fell out of the music charts decades back. When one of his songs – Love Is All Around – won three Ivor Novello awards after being featured in the 1994 movie Four Weddings and a Funeral, Reg did the only sensible thing and spent much of his newfound wealth on one of his many passions: UFO and crop circle research.

So it’s goodbye to the man who watched the skies above for visitors from afar, who had the artistic foresight to add the oddball ocarina solo to the world’s most famous garage anthem – the song that defined garage anthems – that gave early punk the green light – and launched hundreds of cover versions.

RIP WILD THING. My ears are still ringing …

This flash fiction piece is dedicated to Reg Presley.

Prior to 2000 it was estimated that a third of Cusco’s residents lived in the slums and that up to 70% of the female Quechua population were sufferers of domestic abuse who never came forward. Many simply did not know they had the option.

At work in the pueblos jovenes (shantytowns) of Cusco

Today, Peru’s Defensorías Comunitarias (community defense) number over 35,000 women who have grown their volunteer organization to a national level. These remarkable ladies continue to provide a first line of defense, reaching out to those who do not yet know how to take that initial step in controlling their own lives.

Women of distinction

Who Sings to the Dead?

Nina Flores knows who … in the highly anticipated follow-up to Sendero …



Who can you trust in a country haunted by its past?

On the hunt for an abducted Indian beggar girl, Peruvian National Police officer Nina Flores is determined to track down the suspected kidnapper, a man who resembles what the locals call pishtacos: tall, pale ghosts who steal children. In spite of being jumped by a mysterious attacker, and the murder of a woman who gets too close to the truth, Nina is blocked at every turn by her superiors. Then she discovers links to a second case reaching back twenty years to the country’s dirty war. Defying the powers that be, Nina forms a shaky alliance with a member of a brutal drug cartel and heads deep into the Amazon jungle. She will bring the lost one home, or die trying.

Available on Amazon

Just a heads-up.

viven los escritores

You can find the review here. Sendero is third row from the bottom, on the right.

Abimael Guzmán dressed as he was when paraded through the streets of Lima in 1992

During the 80s, after an unknown philosophy professor by the name of Abimael Guzmán founded the Shining Path (“Marxism–Leninism is the shining path of the future”), there was a period when it seemed that the Maoist revolutionary movement might well take control of Peru.Inflation was rampant, as was corruption, and the indigenous Quechua population, along with many demoralized Peruvians, were more than ready for change.

But at what price?

Somehow Chairman Gonzalo (one of Guzman’s noms de guerre) was able to take that deep discontent and turn it into a full-fledged insurgency that lasted twelve years and killed, by modest estimates, 30,000 Peruvians. (Some estimates go as high as 70,000.)

The Cult of Shining Path

The Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) were matched only by their Cambodian counterparts The Khmer Rouge for creative brutality and out-and-out atrocities. Stories of dogs hanging from lampposts in Lima, beheadings for civilian infractions such as adultery, and random bombings with explosives strapped to farm animals only touch upon what the Senderitsas were capable of.

Cult-like activities including free love (but absolutely not ‘love’) and members taking oaths (the cuota) agreeing to their own death once they had killed their share of soldiers and capitalists, only helped raise the Shining Path to a level of notoriety well above your average South American revolutionary group.

Somehow the Peruvian people lived through it all and on September 12, 1992, Abimael Guzmán, a man few people had ever actually seen, was arrested in a Shining Path safe house in Lima. And thus began the decline of the Shining Path.

President Alberto Fujimori (currently in prison for human rights abuses and bribery scandals) was given much of the credit for ending the dirty war. Many Peruvians are willing to forgive the methods he used.

Ironically both men on either side of the struggle are still in prison today.

 

In recent years the Shining Path’s numbers have dwindled to 100-300. The odd military-style attack has been carried out against soldiers and political leaders but the main effort has been to provide security for Peru’s drug cartels. It is said that a five percent fee is charged for ‘protecting’ cocaine shipments through the Huallaga Valley, where half the world’s cocaine comes from.

 

Last December Comrade Artemio, one of the last infamous old school terrucos, said the Shining Path were defeated. He requested the Peruvian government grant amnesty to imprisoned members and open talks with the remaining holdouts.

 

But on February 12 of this year Comrade Artemio was captured in a jungle basecamp. After two bullets were removed from his stomach, he too, is in prison.

So, finally—the end of the Shining Path?

Unfortunately, not yet. Just last April, Shining Path rebel leader Martin Palomino (Comrade Gabriel) took responsibility for the kidnapping of three dozen natural gas workers in the coca growing region.

The workers were ultimately set free but only after six soldiers were killed in a shootout.