Reading, Writing & No Arithmetic (Volume 2)

"My most commonly offered caveat is this: don't fall in love with your words; fall in love with your craft. That's when you will begin the process of being a quality writer."

Kelli Jae Baeli, Indie Publisher with Indie Literati Press and Lesbian Literati Press, and author of 54 books, and 23 bestsellers, numerous articles, stories and essays, shares some thoughts about the writing craft and the writer's life, which necessarily also includes lots of reading, followed by thoughtful examinations, splenetic ruminations and often humorous outbursts of weirdness.

Included in this box set is Diction Deja Vu, The Truth of Fiction, and Literary Loitering.

FROM STRANGER FICTION, REVIEWS, TRUTHINESS:

“First, an opinion isn’t always a fact.

Second, you can’t please everyone.

And third, and most importantly, (and with the most paradoxical irony), this concept: I may have failed to do the best job on a book, if I didn’t make the fiction seem like truth, even if the truth seemed like fiction.

Truth is, as the adage goes, stranger than fiction, and thus, when it appears, it is perceived as lacking credibility, even though FICTION is, by definition, NOT TRUE.

So there will always be readers who lament the lack of credibility in some aspect of fiction, when many times the depiction is accurate, it just doesn’t SEEM accurate. So therefore, we, as fiction writers have to be careful to be credible and realistic, while lying our collective asses off. Are you following this?

(Where is my medication?)”

My most commonly offered caveat is this: don't fall in love with your words; fall in love with your craft. That's when you will begin the process of being a quality writer.

FROM WRITING WORDS OF WISDOM:

“The competition to be a published writer is fierce. The dream of getting published has been overly-romanticized in the media so that many beginning writers think not only that writing is easy, but that they have a good chance of getting a contract from a major house. The odds are, realistically, one in a million-maybe worse than that. We hear about the success stories, not the ones who spend their lives toiling for that dream, to the exclusion of everything else, only to wind up poor, alone, lacking in social skills, and profoundly jaded that life has passed them by. There are so many unpublished writers who pursue this dream, and publishers and agents have had to crack down on the criteria to even LOOK at work sent. And it is very expensive for a writer to submit manuscripts, as I mentioned, and it's time consuming as we have to do this repeatedly, if we ever hope to get traditionally published. You have to pour lots of money into the endeavor over a period of many years, sometimes. And more often than not, this investment does not return.”

FROM THE AUTHOR's NOTE IN LITERARY LOITERING:

Perhaps I shall skip the author's note in this one, since this collection is me, the writer, writing about writing. And reading. (and as I declared on the cover, NO arithmetic. What can I say? I don't like math, and it doesn't like me either. Math and I have a sort of mutually assured destruction). Anyway, since this is a booklet about that, a note from me here would be superfluous. Thus, I will not write one.

Except to say this: as a writer who happens to be a lesbian, I frequently write about lesbian characters and their lives. This does not, however, preclude my ability to write in the mainstream, and I often do. It also does not speak to the vocation of writing in a general sense, and no matter who they choose as partners, writers are writers. Except when they're readers. And some are both. Like me.