Tag: Poetry

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DAMN GREAT THINGS!

Art by my child! Sophie Yurkovich~

Can I just tell you that I am so excited that so many Asian actors won Oscars? Not that my Asian daughter wants to act, but I am glad that more Asian people are getting recognized for their contributions to the American/United States world. That is damn great!

AND another damn great thing is that Dave and I are almost finished with Anthony Doyle and his novel, Hibernaculum.

So, let’s discuss this a moment. In truth I never want to be finished with Hibernaculum.

I publish, I realized over the weekend, between individual pieces and full-length pieces, a fair amount of writing by other people. and I usually don’t publish it unless it really speaks to me.

And a funny thing about me, as a human, is that, whether through editing or editing for publication, I sometimes get really excited, really really excited, like so excited! over a book, or a poem, or a whatever… could be a small piece, something that I am lucky enough to work with. And when I am excited I tell everybody in my small circle about it. I wax rhapsodic, as they say. Truly! A woman whose book I recently finished editing wrote a book that also really excited me, and she told me that her spouse asked her, “Why doesn’t Dianne just marry (name of book) she loves it so much?” Oooo, snarky! And, do you know what… my husband asked me the same damn thing. WTH People? Listen, it’s amazing writing, and you can’t stop love! I love her book! And I don’t care who knows it!

And my husband also asked me why I don’t just marry Hibernaculum. So, yeah, Anthony Doyle, I do wanna marry your book. It’s a freaking great book!

Soon we will begin to reveal Anthony’s book, bit by bit. And we have done quite a lot of fun stuff to, and with, his book, not our stuff, really, but Anthony’s stuff, that we have “made flesh” for him, and I cannot wait to see the world’s reaction to it!

And I gotta toot our DPP horn for a hot minute here. We are small, but we are scrappy, and definitely author-centered.

I was at a writing conference guest over the weekend, my second in six months, and the publishing company is flourishing, and my child is flourishing, and the pets are all healthy, and I just ate a great tomato sandwich, and there is always plenty of coffee.

Tuesdays can be boring, and they’re not even “hump day,” so they can lack some pizazz.

But today I want to give Tuesday its due.

We just sent five wonderful books off to Midwest Review of Books and two we just sent off to the proofreader. Yes, we use a proofreader, because one or the other of us (usually me) edits the book, and the author goes over it, and then it needs fresh eyes, and we do not have the eye-time to spare. So we have a proofreader we trust, and we employ her. Freelance, but still, that’s how I edit, so…. I am so proud that we not only give authors publication, we also are able to give a freelancer work. I want to help authors who deserve it get published, and I want to give people work.

It’s Tuesday, and I am excited we’re doing that.


And I am thrilled to say we also have brewing:

~The poetry collection, A Break in the Field, that is well-underway by my new friend and talented poet Ellis Elliot.
~The wonderful surprise that Ellis is planning for the folks kind enough to pre-order some poetry! Oh yes, there is going to be fun there too!
~The poetry collective that is well-underway due to the really generous hearts of some gifted and moving authors who I also think of as friends.
~The kind authors who have trusted me as their editors, hired me freelance, and shared with me their books and stories, and who I also think of as friends now, and who I am rooting for as much as I am rooting for the folks we publish.
~The fantastic Hardboiled and Loaded with Sin noir anthology that is coming your way soon!
~A “cozy” surprise due to announce in… early April?
~A whole new genre of book we’ve cooked up with an editing client who I just had to find a way to work with!
~A little touch of something classic….
~A Fall we plan to fill up with horror! I love reading horror when the leaves turn; don’t you??

~And the wonderful Hibernaculum.

OMGOSH! HIBERNACULUM!!!

And, HEY! You wanna know all about the cool Hibernaculum stuff don’t you? I know I do. We’re making it a fun ride, people. Get your tushie over to Devil’s Party Press and sign up for our newsletter, because much of it is going to be secret, special stuff for the newsletter only! The next newsletter comes out this weekend! Get in that group now!

So, on this Tuesday, though I have no notion or idea of if anyone reads my comically self-important blog (and I suspect not), I have to just use this space to tell you how excited I am.
Thanks for reading!

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POETRY AND THE GRAMMY AWARDS

Want to read all about it? CLICK HERE

Poetry is more and more getting its due. Why is that? Could it be because poetry soothes the soul, and so many souls need soothing? Could it be because poetry is easy to read quickly, on your phone? What other thoughts do you have?

Dianne here, and I earned my MFA in poetry writing, and I am a fan of the stuff. We try, at DPP, to incorporate poetry into our anthologies, and certainly I love putting it in Instant Noodles. And I wish I could do more.

WATCH THIS SPACE (DEVIL’S PARTY PRESS).

We’re doing our best to hatch something poetic at DPP. So, stay tuned!

In the meantime, let me recommend a few poems for you:

THE BARBARIANS HAD ACTED REGRETTABLY – COLIN JAMES

SOMETIMES AN EGG – ALICE ROMANO

BLUE PERIOD #3 – R. GERRY FABIAN

SATURDAY – GREG HILL

NOTHING’S BETTER LEFT UNSAID – GABBY GILLIAM

TROUT FISHING – STEPHEN BARILE

CHRISTMAS DAY WALK ~ ALAN BERN

SUMMER ZUPPAI – ROBERT FLEMING

HOLY ILLUSIONS ~ VIRGINIA WATTS

STOLEN PLUMS – BENJAMIN B. WHITE

MOSS SOUP AND MANICOTTI – JOHN JOHNSON

ABOVE SNICKER’S GAP ~ MORGAN GOLLADAY

CHRISTMAS EVE FROM UNDER THE TRAIN TABLE – R. DAVID FULCHER

PARTY CRASHER SASHA ~ JANE FITZGERALD

MY HEART NOW – BUFFY AAKAASH

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I LOVE FOOD

It’s no secret. I have “battled” my weight my whole life, and I think almost nothing is as fun as trying a food I have never tried before. I’m getting better at accepting my body as it is, but I still want to try that food I’ve never had before. Like this one, pure coconut yogurt.

I might also be called a foodie too, and perhaps a bit of a super-taster, because I tend to like foods with strong flavors, weird textures, and the like. I adore anchovies. I do not find them to be even remotely too salty. I like to treat myself to an occasional can of herring in mustard sauce, or sardines in mustard. I can drink the cold black over-cooked coffee from the bottom of the percolator with not only ease, but even joy (it’s certainly going to kick that migraine!) And, between us here on this blog, I love a all things dairy. One of the dairy things I love is Leyden cheese, cheese that has cumin seeds in it that I call “kitty-cat” (I use another word actually) cheese, because to me it has a certain scent of a woman. Yep. I just wrote that. Dairy, wow. Ice cream and milk don’t agree with me as much as they did when I was a child, which is fine, actually, though I do miss the occasional glass of chocolate milk with something to go with it like a liverwurst and onion on pumpernickel with mustard. I love sour cream, and buttermilk, could eat a tub of one and drink gallon of the other, and I also like plain yogurt. Plain, not flavored with fruit or, heaven forbid, artificial sugar. Oh yogurt! What have they done to you? I also would prefer to live off of animals less than I do, and so when I saw this plain, unflavored, coconut yogurt, I had to try it. I believe I found it at Sprouts, a ridiculously expensive market that I go into (now that I am back in CA) occasionally just to see what new “healthy” delights have been created.

This stuff is delicious. Yes, I think I could throw it on some too-spicy Indian food or put it on a taco in place of sour cream. It has a colder feeling on the tongue than yogurt or sour cream, almost icy, and it has just a slight sweetness to it, very slight, and just a slight sourness to it. So if yogurt or sour cream are too sour for you, you may like this. Sadly I do not remember if it was pricy. It is thicker and smoother than both sour cream and yogurt (and I usually eat the skyr kind of yogurt). There is no wetness to it. Very dry. No jiggle, no glop. It’s very much like kindergarten paste from the 1970s. I didn’t eat kindergarten paste (though I do remember tasting Play Doh. Not bad, salty, but like sweat salt, not my favorite.), but the texture is bang-on: paste. Thicker than coconut cream , which I have made whipped cream and icing out of. I’m guessing you could do that with this too.

This is a four ounce container at one hundred and ninety calories. Not too many calories in what looks to my eyes like a big container; I don’t think I can eat more than half (it is my afternoon snack). BUT, and this is a big but, speaking as a person with a big butt, look at the fat. 18 grams, and 15 of them saturated. That’s coconut for you. Man, I love fresh coconut. If I ate a whole coconut, which I could not but let’s just say I could, I’d be eating 1400 calories and 144 grams of fat. But, I’d also get fiber, 36 grams of it, and over 50% of my daily iron needs. This has only 2 grams of fiber. So, an actual hunk of coconut may be better for you than this. But if you want it for a treat, you could do a lot worse, and I think it’s really yummy.

Tell me, what are you making for dinner tonight? Sometimes I am so inspired, but I have been editing my tushie off the last few days, and I am a bit brain-fried. I just want someone to hand me a meal. LOL.

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AN ADVICE COLUMN ON WRITING, FROM THE EDITOR IN ME TO THE AUTHOR IN YOU: Ahem… Ah- em. No. Just no.

This is a writing advice column. If you don’t want my unsolicited writing advice, do not, I implore you, read on. Fair warning. 😉

I belong to one or two Facebook groups, and recently, in one that is writing focused, another author and I discussed em dashes, which I do not like and she does, and all the kids are using them, and Jane Austin used them in Emma, so there. And she’s written a bucket of novels, so she is not a new writer.

“Yes,” I wanted to say but didn’t, “and I bet you have written them all in the last three to five years.” That is a new writer. Sorry.

And there is a group I belong to (a different group then the first one) called 20 to 50K that is all about writing as many books as you can as quickly as possible because that is how you (20 books) make a lot of money (50K) fast.

And that second group is great because it has a lot of good information given by generous people who have realized that lots of people want something very particular to read that scratches their particular itch (and I do recommend the group, and am not commenting on the fiction the members are writing, but rather their good advice on selling the fiction). The members have realized that if people want more, they don’t care about the quality of the product. If they loved “Beauty and the Beast,” and they want more monster love, with sex, and you give it to them, they don’t really care about plot holes or grammar. Just get the monster and the person both naked as quickly as possible, and do a boy-meets-girl-boy-loses-girl-boy-gets-girl-back-thing as quickly as you can, and on repeat, for them, as much as possible. Publish it yourself, and to hell with people like me. In fact, get AI to write it, or some guy in another country, seems to be Africa or India, slap your name on it, and mic drop!

Heavy sigh.

This is very difficult for me. All of us eat at McDonald’s sometimes, even if very rarely. As I have written previously, I am a person who has spent the better part of her life studying what makes writing not just entertaining, but good, like To Kill a Mockingbird good, which is different from Emma good, but can be the same as Good Omens good, or even When You Are Engulfed in Flames good. Emma, well, it’s not Austin’s best, IMHO, and even Austin is, really, a glorified and now dead romance novelist, as are the Bronte sisters. And while I adored Jane Eyre as a teen, I never liked Wuthering Heights, could not finish it actually, though I tried over and over, and that was back when I was finishing everything. And from there I never read another, because for me, ultimately, romance is boring and full of tropes. Austin has some good books for that genre, I prefer Persuasion, but she also quickly gets wrapped in her own tropes and bores me, and while I would love to take the time to read Tale of Two Cities again, which is in the same century as Austin, I’m not going to pick up Persuasion again in this lifetime. And Emma? Apologies ladies. Apologies.

And I believe that if you have written a novel in a year, you are some kind of miracle. If you have written over ten, and not used AI or that person across the ocean, you have stamina beyond my ken. (If you used AI or that person across the ocean, I make no bones about scraping you off the bottom of my shoe, having accidentally stepped in you.) I celebrate your hard work, and your dedication to your writing, and your making money at it, and all the wonderful things.

I now I wonder if I can, as in my previous post, promise you, that the number of books that will be written that change all conventional rules (or just the ones that particular author doesn’t like or understand) and do well out of it will be small. Because if all the newly minted folks start mass-producing the same genre of book over and over, written to a niche, but rabid, group of readers, and they fill them with clumsy em dashes because they think they make their work look more important, or Austin used them, or whatever, then em dashes instead of commas are going to become a thing, whether I like it or not.

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. But the rest of us could end up stuck with it as convention because that is how language works.

You have to be especially educated about the rules to break them and do it well, in an effective way. Yes. But you just have to be part of a huge onslaught of people doing the same thing to change the rules, and run them right the heck out of town.

Can I be annoyingly prescriptive here for a moment? I want to tell you that you have one job: to tell a good story.

All that other stuff that may seem super important to you is fluff to your audience, and could stop them from loving your story. It will stop me. If I drive down a road full of potholes, and I have any other alternative, I will not drive down it again. If I drive behind shopping center that has a long straight run of asphalt that the owner of the shopping center has dropped speed bumps all over to force me to slow down, I am going to curse myself and not do it more than once.

When you have a thought to convey, and you feel the need to interrupt it and stick in an extra bit of information, you can use em dashes to emphasize it, but commas work for that, and are less intrusive to the reader’s eye.

When you have a thought to convey- and you feel the need to interrupt it and stick in an extra bit of information- you can use em dashes to emphasize it- but commas work for that- and are less intrusive to the reader’s eye.

Em dashes are doing this:

How many times do you think an author who is putting words together in a clever, meaningful, or irresistible way is going to need to drop in a giant pointing finger?

I am a well-trained reader and a decent and slightly clever author, so my advice to you is that you should endeavor to find a way to write your sentences so that you’re not constantly interrupting them to stick in information, whether you do it with commas or em dashes. Jane Austin is always trying to pump up her scenes and get her readers very invested in the little romances and petty slights of people who are often rich or privileged enough to sit around doing needlework all day. These are boring people with nothing going on. She is throwing anything she can at it to inflate the lack of drama, and for all we know she genuinely felt the drama. Maybe to her it was tremendously exciting. Maybe she was hot and bored and stuck in a stiff dress that did not lend itself to walking or having fun and this was how she made it through. Maybe every word she wrote was “stop and look” worthy to her. Still, dash away, dash away, dash away all, I’m not interested.

As I get to know the world that is writing and publishing today I find myself sometimes feeling a bit like Inspector Morse. He likes poetry and the classics and classical music and all those around him do not and make fun of him for it. He is a principled dinosaur.

My daughter says my arms are short and calls me a T-rex. Maybe I am a principled dinosaur too.

And my best advice is to also think about the life your story will have without you- when someone is reading your book- and you are not in the room with that person to answer a question or explain. Will the life your book has- without you in that new home- be a good and celebrated one- or a sad and relegated one- or somewhere on the spectrum in between? I would truly like to see us all reach our writing dreams- and- therefore- my advice is because I care- and not because I am competitive with you or want to stop you- or fence you in. And I have to- again- give you the same piece of advice- you have to tread a line between what you want from your book- and what your reader will want.

Same paragraphs as last time-with all dashes. What do you think of the dinosaur’s advice?

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AN ADVICE COLUMN ON WRITING, FROM THE EDITOR IN ME TO THE AUTHOR IN YOU: K.I.S.S.

This is a writing advice column. If you don’t want my unsolicited writing advice, do not, I implore you, read on. Fair warning. 😉

I belong to one or two Facebook groups, and recently, in one that is writing focused, someone asked whether a character’s thoughts always had to be in italics.

“Yes,” I responded, “that is standard.”

And then another member jumped up my butt to tell me how all kinds of “world-building” is happening now and people can do whatever they want!

Both are true.

But, listen, Author, even as you create new, far-out worlds, and that is so much fun for you, you have to judge a few things: Is it fun for your editor, your publisher, your agent, and your (hopefully) eventual readers? One piece of advice I might give you is that you have to tread a line between what you want from your book, and what your reader will want.

“I’ll publish myself!” you might yell back.

And yes, you could, and that is what is absolutely happening: lots and lots of people are publishing whatever they want with no feedback from anyone else, and publishing it anywhere they want, and I (me, personally) can just go scratch.

True, until nobody buys your book, or people buy it in a Kindle (or other) online format and you see by their page views that they don’t finish it, or it gets bought in paperback and never read, or they buy it, read at least some of it, and leave you a crap review.

I can promise you, the number of books that will be written that change all conventional rules (or just the ones that particular author doesn’t like or understand) and do well out of it will be small.

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

You have to be especially educated about the rules to break them and do it well, in an effective way. And you need some of them anyway, because your reader (if you self-publish and don’t care about the editors and etc.) will need some rock to put his/her/their feet on, or they have no place to stand with the book. Yes, you could drug me, and wake me up in a foreign country with zero information, language, or money, and, depending very much on which country, I might make it out alive with an interesting experience that I enjoy discussing with friends, but few of us would choose that experience, and choose it multiple times.

Can I be annoyingly prescriptive here for a moment? I want to tell you that you have one job: to tell a good story.

All that other stuff that may seem super important to you is fluff to your audience, and could stop them from loving your story.

Another fair warning, this paragraph is about me, exclusively, my qualifications and my ability to be prescriptive in this way, and you can skip this if you don’t give a hoot:
I was lucky that I read every freaking thing I could get my hands on when I was a kid. If you read an earlier post about my Kindle Vella I mentioned that I read The Godfather, by Mario Puzo, when I was under ten years old, by which I mean nine, because we were in our old house. I was not a genius, but I was a precocious reader. I also read my way through The Bible quite a few times while I was bored in church. I preferred the Old Testament. I read The Stranger (Camus) in sixth grade, and it was very upsetting, and I became really overwhelmed by existential dread until I got a new Encyclopedia Brown. I also tried to write a book report on The Stranger, and my teacher admonished me and said my parents should be monitoring what I read. My parents did not monitor what I read, and my middle school had annual used book sale where kids collected books from their neighbors and gave them to the school for the high used book sale, and I bought a book of S&M pornography there in seventh grade because my parents did not monitor what I read, and the school did not monitor what I bought, and, to this day, I think both were the best thing, the not being monitored, not the porn book, which was a parody of A Tale of Two Citiesand about Marie Antoinette, I remember. I also remember buying complete collections of comic strips like Battle Bailey and The Lockhorns, and novels like M*A*S*H, and The Wide Sargasso Sea. For $20 bucks, which my parents would give me, I could get around 20 books, and I was done them in a few weeks. When I got to high school I was in advanced English, where we really took apart the books we read, and in college I majored in English literature, where we did so much more of that, and then, when I went to my MA writing program, my two teachers, Luann Smith for fiction and Chris Buckley for poetry, taught us how to write by making us read and analyze the writing of other well-respected really good authors like T.C. Boyle, Tim O’Brien, Philip Levin, CzesÅ‚aw MiÅ‚osz, Diane Wakowski, and Amy Hemple, among many others. I am long-time trained, by my educational experience and my own varied and precocious reading habits, to be very good at spotting what makes work work, and what makes it flop. This is one of the things that concerns me when I see a person on FB say, “Hey folks, I’ve decided to be an editor. I’ll do your book cheap because I’m just getting started!” And people hire them, because they’re cheap. Okay. You get what you pay for, but you may never know what you’re not getting. This is just to say that I am well-prepared, and probably have advice that is not fluff or uninformed. And “This Is Just to Say,” interestingly enough, is one of my all-time favorite poems.

You’re the author. Do whatever you want. And publishing it yourself is always an option.

And my best advice is to also think about the life your story will have without you, when someone is reading your book, and you are not in the room with that person to answer a question or explain. Will the life your book has, without you in that new home, be a good and celebrated one, or a sad and relegated one, or somewhere on the spectrum in between? I would truly like to see us all reach our writing dreams, and, therefore, my advice is because I care, and not because I am competitive with you or want to stop you, or fence you in. And I have to again give you the same piece of advice: you have to tread a line between what you want from your book, and what your reader will want.

Your story should be good, and, if it suits the story and the genre, maybe it should be complex. The mechanics, the things the reader has to do to reach that story, to get that ride or message or what-have-you, should not be the things that cause or add to the complexity.

K.I.S.S. It’s advice that serves me well, all the time, in all situations.