Uncategorized – Page 3 – Mystery, fantasy and romance at the dangerous ends of the earth

Choosing an Agent (Or why any agent may be the last thing you want)

By Karen Abrahamson | January 24, 2011

Okay, I’m headed off to Peru to climb the Inca Trail. The only problem is the Peruvian Government now only allows 500 people a day on the trail and ONLY if with a sanctioned guide. This is a problem. This means I must decide who is going to help me climb that mountain. Do I just go to a travel agent and have them book the trip? Do I just choose the first guide off the internet? Do I talk to one person and make a decision?

No. And no. And no. I want to plan my own trip, so first I have to decide what I want in an agent.

I’ve had this discussion many times with my parents who also like to travel. They like a travel agent who they can visit. They tell the agent generally what they want to do and the agent makes all the arrangements. Which means that the agent also makes all the decisions. Which has resulted in some pretty stupid oversights over the years – like my parents being stuck in veritable monsoons in Portugal unaware that their plane tickets gave them the privilege of escaping anywhere else in Europe at no cost. Or arriving for a second honeymoon in a beachfront hut in Tahiti, only to find that beach front and ocean view are two different things entirely. (They had a lovely view of the manure filled beach stables, however.)

So I tend to opt for taking a little more control in the travel situation.

For a trip of this nature I know there are plenty of agents to choose from. Go on-line and search Machu Picchu Tours and your search engine will indicate there’s 588,000 results. Not exactly how I want to spend my evenings. So I develop criteria. This is where you need to be self aware enough to know what you want. So my criteria are (in no particular order):

1. Experience delivering the service – how long have they been in business.

2. Client feedback

3. Local Peruvian connections

4. Size of group they usually take

5. Type of group they focus on

6. Knowledge of the area and culture

7. They speak English.

If you look at this list you are going to see a lot of similarity to considerations you should make when searching for a literary agent. If you want a literary agent (and this is an ‘if’ in this day and age. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about I direct you to a blog here).

So how long has a potential literary agent been in that line of work? Too long? Are they about to retire? Or are they young and hungry, but likely to drop out of the business when they find out how tough it is out there? You need to balance both these issues to find someone who might be appropriate to represent you. If you want an agent.

What are prior customers saying? Sure, you can depend on what the company posts, but look elsewhere as well. Editors and Predators, for writing, but also search for tour company recommendations.

For this trip I want a company that is locally based, instead of European or American. Yes, an American company may be well established, but does it give back to the local economy? Is it run environmentally and does it help the local people? A company with these sorts of links is also likely to meet my need for the guides to be culturally-based, because this is important to me. I want to hear what they think. I want to hear their stories and hear what they know about the environment I’m travelling in.

From a writer’s perspective considerations of this nature mean does the agent have New York connections? Sure the internet means anyone anywhere can make contact with New York editors, but if the agent is New York based, they are going to know the publishing culture – at least their part of it. (For more on this, see here, and read the comments as well)

Knowing who they usually serve as clients will help you know whether the tour group will fit you. I don’t want to travel the Inca trail with people who want to party all the way, but neither do I want to hike the trail with people who are going to complain it’s too hard. So I need to check the ages of people who travelled with a company. I need to check the photos on their websites.

With agents you need to know whether their model of agency works for you. Are they agents who provide editorial services, or are they agents who focus on sales. Your choice about what you prefer, but be clear about what it is you want and ask about it. (If you don’t understand, why, read that blog I mentioned.)

Size of group gets at whether I’ll be travelling with a group of 4-8 or a group of 17. Guess which size I’d rather travel with as an independent traveler? Smaller group means it might be a trifle harder, I might have to carry more, but it also means more opportunity to do what I want, instead of being dragged behind a larger group.

With an agent, it’s important to know how large their client list is and who their client list is. If they have a large list will they have time for you? If they have a NY Times best seller client, will they have time for you? Think about this. You shouldn’t need to have your hand held, but you should be able to get electronic correspondence from your agent in a timely fashion.

Lastly, I’ve listed English speaker. Why? Because I speak English and part of my reason for travel is to speak to people of another culture and learn. Yes, I should learn Spanish, but I won’t be fluent by the time I leave, so this is the next best option.

For an agent you need to be sure that you speak the same language. You need to be certain that you both have the same understanding of what you want from your agent—or not.

So I’m down to two possible companies to choose from. One is LlamaPath and the other is United Mice. Both fit my Peruvian criteria and both have been around for a few years. Both were professional and sent information to me quickly after I queried. Tonight I make the final decision and commit myself to my faithful guide.

But only because I have to have a guide.

Sustenance

By Karen Abrahamson | January 22, 2011

My two cats have very different eating habits. Ben (or Big Boy, as I call him) weighs fifteen pounds and will eat just about anything I put in front of him. Shiva (aka Little Man) weighs all of 11 pounds soaking wet and after a good meal. I worry about his weight because when you pick him up and he feels like he’s all bones and skin.

Kashgar morning, before market (1998) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson

For Shiva it has to be the right food, at the right temperature, at the right age out of the tin, and (I swear) out of the right part of tin, or he won’t eat it. These days it’s venison – yes, venison. Nothing but the best for Shiva, dear. He’s the one who, when given a bowl of kibble with a mixture of the kind he really likes and the kind he tolerates but needs to eat, will, of course, fish the favored kibble out of the bowl and then turn up his nose at the rest. Blasted cats.

Now, while this illustration is indicative of the types of personalities of these boys, it is also a wonderful metaphor for something important in writing, which is feeding ourselves. No, I’m not talking about how some writers can plough through a mountain of food, or how some writers who shall remain nameless will not eat anything green, or anything that has passed within ten miles of a vegetable. No, I am talking about feeding our souls.

The writer’s soul (aka the wily muse) is a creature that requires constant feeding of the kinds of things that make you want to write. For some it’s the anger at some injustice in the world. For some it’s the inspiration of music. For me, the inspiration is travel and other cultures.

I was just reminded by a friend that people might want to know more about my travels in other places, like western China or Northern India. Let me tell you about one such event. It involves food, or at least tea, and is the type of experience that feeds my writing.

Apothecary, Kashgar (1998) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson

When, in 1998, I visited Kashgar, the westernmost city of China and an ancient Silk Road caravanserai, the railway from eastern China had not yet been completed and so ancient Kashgar still remained relatively untouched, though the Chinese were moving in, in droves. At the time I befriended a Uigher gentleman (the local, Muslim, Turkic people) and my travelling companion and I spent time with him talking. One evening, after he had learned that I might be interested in a Uigher carpet, he invited my travelling companion and I back to his rooftop home.

When I say rooftop, I mean rooftop. He had a small mud shack at the side of the roof on the top of a flat-topped mud-daub house, and his ‘house’ had interior furnishings that were only bits of cardboard. The rooftop itself was pink adobe that apparently you could fall through during the infrequent rains the oasis town experienced. So there we were, the three of us sitting on his rooftop in the ancient town of Kashgar under a pink evening sky with the distant aspen golden on the hills leading up to the Karakoram pass of the Himalaya Mountains and the smell of bread baking and roasting goat’s heads wafting up from the street. So we sipped bitter tea and talked of the Uigher ‘situation’ (see my travel page on China) and I looked at his rugs. None were outstanding, but one charmed me and my Uigher friend told me how he was trying to earn enough money so that he could get married.

So I bought the rug. I handed over cold hard American cash and my address and the next morning I climbed on the bus to leave town with the foolish realization that I’d probably never see my cash or the rug again.

Imagine my surprise when six weeks later I arrived home and the rug had beaten me there.

The experience left me with a very soft spot for this Muslim man who proved so honest. It also fueled the feelings that led to the writing of Ashes and Light when I read about how the Chinese government used the 911 ‘Muslim crisis’ to round up and execute Uigher men when they rioted over the destructions of their homes.

So just as with Ben and Shiva there are different ways of feeding our souls and so, when the rest of life can suck us dry, we need to undertake those things that fill us up.

The memory of sitting on that rooftop, of my Uigher friend’s utter lack of anything the west would consider household belongings, but his total honesty in the face of being handed a fist-full of American dollars, touched me far more than music or other forms of inspiration ever will. It’s those cross cultural encounters that feed my soul and my muse.

And the fact that my friend may no longer be alive.

Uigher men, Kashgar, (1998) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson

Finding the Perfect Jacket

By Karen Abrahamson | January 17, 2011

Let me start by saying there’s no such thing. You might get close, but perfect is beyond anyone in my humble opinion.

Searching a Paris shop window for the perfect whatever. Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson

I spent a good portion of my Christmas shopping time also looking for the jacket I was going to carry on my trip to Peru. Now I know my trip is three months away, but when you are as tall as I am, finding clothes to fit you is never easy and finding specialty clothes to fit me is even tougher. Shirts and jackets and fleeces that on most women would reach down to the hips, on me barely clear my belly. Trousers—well let’s just say they are never cut long enough.

So finding a jacket that would be very lightweight, but rainproof enough for the rainy season in Peru, warm enough for the mountains, but still breathable enough when I was climbing UP said mountains (probably uphill both ways) was no small task. I needed to start early. I needed to plan where I would go to look. I needed to plan it all and find the perfect jacket.

I didn’t find it.

Everything was either too short or too short in the arms, or it was a man’s jacket and fit like a box. I finally settled on a jacket that they had to order for me and I’m hoping it will do the trick. Not quite as long as I wanted, not quite the fit I wanted, and it has a hood you can’t hide. Maybe it will work, and maybe it won’t, but the trick is to try it.

Why am I telling you this? Because finding the perfect jacket is a lot like trying to write the perfect book.

Over the past three and a bit months I’ve been writing another novel, this one a romantic suspense set in Cambodia, that I call Shadow Play. Writing it, and the last three books I’ve written, have been some of the most difficult creative exercises for me. Why? Because I wanted them to be perfect. Because I knew if they weren’t perfect, they wouldn’t sell. Talk about the wrong emphasis (selling).

The result was that I was so caught up on all the qualities I couldn’t seem to find in my own writing, that I couldn’t seem to see anything good, and if there’s one thing that can shut down the creative brain it’s the editor on your shoulder telling you it’s not good enough.

Luckily, I’m immensely stubborn and I have some great writer friends who helped talk me through these crises of faith, but the most important thing was to keep reminding myself it doesn’t have to be perfect. In this day and age of computers you can write the story, like I did, and discover the characters and their background through the writing process. Then you can go back and reshape the manuscript to fit the characters you actually wrote.

As I write this, I am chuckling because of something I tell my students in an investigative report writing course I teach. Of course I forgot to apply it to my novel writing.

Apparently there were researchers looking at people’s styles of writing and where writers placed the majority if their times in the planning, drafting, or redrafting process . The researchers surmised that people would spend most of their time planning and drafting with a small amount of time on redrafting.

What they found was that they were wrong.

There were actually two approaches to writing: one was the person who spent most of their time planning and writing. The other was the person who just wrote and found their report through the writing and redrafting process. These people rarely did planning. Both types of writers came out with a reasonable product at the end of the day, but both had deficits in their writing toolbox.

Why is this important? Because the best writers can use skills in both planning and redrafting.

When I initially read this information I laughed because I had virtually gotten through school with never writing a second draft, but it told me I had a serious deficit in my skill set. Writing novels has changed that.

I’ve spent time learning the skills of redrafting and now I no longer have to write the perfect novel first draft. With Shadow Play, the next few weeks will be spent going back and redrafting the front end of the book to be more compatible with the latter half. Maybe not perfect, but pretty darn good.

If only it were as easy to add four inches of fabric to the not-so-perfect jacket.

Going Places You Never Thought You Could

By Karen Abrahamson | January 15, 2011

The title sounds like it’s one of my travel blogs, but in this case it’s not. Although it could be. I certainly have gone places I didn’t think I could.

But anyway, the inspiration for this blog came this morning as I was stepping out of the shower. So there I am, all naked and dripping wet and there is big Ben, waiting for me—standing on top of the door. Nicely balanced, if I do say so myself. He was actually able to turn around and give me a pained look when I asked him what he thought he was doing. When he leapt halfway across the room to the floor, it was with a cat-shrug as if it was something he has done every day. And maybe he has. Cats make difficult, naughty things look easy.

On a few other occasions I’ve found him busy knocking shells I’ve gathered from around the world off an ornamental shelf I have hung above my towel rack. You know—one of those shelves of mock wood that you hang from the wall. He has to get to this shelf by balancing on my towel rack. Thank goodness I’ve got both rack and shelf screwed into the wall.

Trouble- Shiva and Ben at 6 months Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson

But Ben’s absolute fearlessness, and his determination to get wherever it is he sets his mind to, reminds me of the permission we need to give ourselves as writers. When I was working on Ashes and Light, the romantic suspense set in Afghanistan, I had a dickens of a time getting started.

Each time I did, I stopped within the first 20 pages, because I just couldn’t get my head around where I was writing about. I felt if I didn’t know a place firsthand—hadn’t inhaled the spices, felt the grit on my skin, and almost broke an ankle on the uneven pavement—there was no way I could start. This begged the question: Could I only write about places I’d been? Could all those literary fiction pundits be correct when they said that I couldn’t write about a culture other than my own?

That’s a perspective that has slapped me upside the head a few times, and with which I heartily disagree, because if we can only write our own culture, then by extension, how can I write about anyone but me? (A fine idea for those narcissists among us, but….) So if I could reject the second hypothesis, then surely I could reject the first. The only thing getting in my way was my own ability to grasp the greatest truism of novel writing:

It’s Fiction!!

Yes, I had to do research. Yes, I had to recall my travels to parts of the world where Turkic people live, and to the mountains so like those around Badakshan in Northern Afghanistan. I had to find photo books and travel books and contact the Canadian military for information about the landscape. I befriended a local Afghani woman and picked her brain for hours about life as a woman in Afghanistan, attitudes towards woman, and folk stories and sayings.

After all that work and about 450 manuscript pages I still found myself hung up. There I was with my characters crossing a pass in the snow-bound Hindu Kush mountains and they and I were stuck. I couldn’t find anying describing the pass. I knew it was high. I knew it was rough. And Google Earth wasn’t exactly helping with accessing details of the militarily sensitive landscape.

That was when I had the epiphany.

It’s fiction.

It’s fiction and how many people are going to go to that tiny speck of earth to check whether my details are 100% true to life? Besides, in the Hindu Kush mountains, the landscape changes. There are earthquakes.

So knowing it was fiction, I wrote a fictional scene, in a fiction book, and you know, it worked.

I got down out of that imaginary landscape just as slick as Ben got off that door edge.

Biting the Bullet – or the ‘Oh *@#%’ moment

By Karen Abrahamson | January 10, 2011

The other day, in the midst of planning my trip to Peru I had that old familiar rush of anxiety that I’ve had when planning for every other trip I’ve ever taken. It’s what I call the ‘oh shit’ moment.

I first came across this feeling when I was in my late twenties. I’d foolishly decided to relive my teen-age years by climbing onto a set of water skis. There I was at the end of a whiplashing line skimming along the water so fast I thought I was flying. Then the ‘oh shit’ moment arrived and all I could think of was ‘what the heck am I doing???????’ and ‘this is going to hurt like heck if I go down’.

And I did. Hard.

But I walked away with most of my pride. I’d tried it at least.

So planning a trip, or a book for that matter, can be a lot like the anticipation I had waiting to go up on those skis. I want to do it. I need to do it. But darn it, it can be scary.

I knew I was going to be whipping at the end of that line, just like I know I’m going to be stepping off of a plane into some place I’ve never been before. Some place I don’t speak the language or know the culture. Some place I don’t know if I’ll have the courage to get through.

Now that’s deep water. For a lot of people, that’s when they stop.

But that, to me, is part of what travel is all about. I don’t live in the age of exploration and I don’t have the physical prowess to climb mountains—so I do this. Run off to experience other places and the ways that people live. So the ‘oh shit’ moment is something to push through to prove myself.

In that way, each time I start a new book I find there’s an ‘oh shit’ moment. That’s when you open the computer to that blank page and say “okay, hands, start typing”. Like with the travel, I don’t really know where I’m going, the culture, or the characters I’ll meet, or if I’m prepared for the geography. Sure, I have plans, but we all know about plans.

I used to plot out everything just like I’d plan a trip, but what I found was it took the spontaneity out of the whole experience. I’ve actually found that I get frustrated when I plan a trip in too much detail, or when someone plans it for me. Having an itinerary means I can’t stay that extra day or take the time to step off of the beaten path or listen to locals about the road less travelled. The same can be said of a manuscript. Sure, having an outline can give you direction, but does it allow your characters to have adventures you never even imagined?

Travelling alone without any itinerary other than I know I want to go to this list of places (and sometimes I have to choose between them) means that yes, there are frustrations and yes, things might not always go as planned, but you also get some enormous gifts. Like meeting the young woman at Burma’s Schwedagon Pagoda who told me her tragic tale of love gone wrong, or stopping at the side of the road in Cambodia to meet shadow-puppet-making orphans whose story was so sad I ended up crying, or having dinner on the roof of a Rajasthani house with a family I met on the streets of a small Moghul fortress town. I learned so much from those encounters. Things I never would have had if I’d stuck to an itinerary.

And the same thing happens with writing. Yes, there’s the panicked feeling of not knowing where a story is going, and the fear that comes when I think things like ‘Dear god, I have to be coming to a mid-point climax, but I’m not sure what it is’. But I live with the fear and then, suddenly, by magic the driving direction or the climax appears. And it’s usually better than I ever could have imagined.

So when I feel that ‘oh shit’ moment when planning a trip, or starting a manuscript, or even when I’m caught in the middle, I remind myself that the ‘oh shit’ moment is more like the feeling the race horse must get in the gate: anticipation at the race. And wonder at what might be around the first turn.

The whiplash at the end of the line, or the gift of feeling like you’re flying.

And even if you fall, you had fun while you were trying.

Controlling the Muse, and All Cats Have Aspergers

By Karen Abrahamson | January 8, 2011

Ben and Shiva 2008, Photo (C) Karen Abrahamson

My companions at home are two, two-year-old cats, Benares and Shiva. (People warned me about naming a cat after the god of destruction.) I like to think I’ve gotten through the wild and wooly kitten years and on to the years of peaceful coexistence. Except my cats are Bengals. For the first time in my life I didn’t go to a shelter or a friend’s place for a kitten and I didn’t adopt a mature cat. I’d just lost a cat and she had been marvelous. She was gregarious and liked to travel with me when I went on trips. I wanted that in my next cat and had read that Bengals were friendly, attention-seeking cats and I’d met one that was on a leash in a pet store with dogs all around him. The Bengal ignored the dogs and sat there imperiously. So I got my boys.

Since I brought them home my life has been in turmoil, or if not my life, at least my home. I won’t bore you with the destructive forces of kittens (well, maybe I will in a future post), but let me just say that attention-seeking is not the half of it. These boys will practically grab you by the throat if you’re not giving them enough attention. I’m talking the throw books off the shelves, swing pictures off the walls kind of attention seeking. I’m talking about shred the manuscript and steal my pens attention seeking.

It’s a lot like trying to control a muse. Now I’d never actually thought about having a muse until I thought I’d lost her/him/it. Suddenly every word came out harder and with a lot more doubt that it was the right word, in the right place, at the right time in my manuscript. It all started when I became REALLY serious about marketing my manuscripts. Everything was about producing a product that would SELL, the product the reader would love. And the words came out slower, and more doubts crept in, so I held on tighter and harder. And things got even slower and the doubts greeted me whenever I sat down at my computer.

So I tromped down on the doubts and the sense that something was wrong, and focused harder on finding those right words, in the right place, at the right time. I’m frighteningly stubborn, you see.

And it solved nothing. A lot like following the advice I got from a cat breeder that I needed to do something about my cats to make them behave—like take a rolled up newspaper to them when they were on the counters or pulling something off shelves.

I did what the breeder said and my big boy, Ben, reacted exactly as I didn’t expect: I’d swat him with the newspaper and he’d hunker down and purr at me. Hard to swat him again when he does that.

So it was suggested that I treat them as a big cat might a small one and so, when he was creating some form of havoc, I picked Ben up by the scruff of the neck, yelled, and locked him in a room. The results? Well aside from the room taking a beating from the temper tantrum he threw, nothing changed.

So I was stymied. I didn’t know what to do and believe me, my house was getting torn up, big time. And then one night I realized something. All this bad boy behavior was aimed at getting my attention and my reaction was to give negative reinforcement to the bad behavior by giving him attention. I realized that what I needed to do was just give them attention. Spend time with them. Love them.

And you know what? The destruction didn’t completely stop, but it slowed down immensely. (You see I can’t be at their beck and call ALL the time.)

So what I learned with my cats I applied to my writing. I had to get out of sales mode and focus on what made my muse happy—not right words, in the right place, in the right time, but the story I was telling. I met my muse again and spent time with him/her/it. I relaxed and stopped putting rules around my desk and suddenly I was writing again, focused on creation, not selling.

Which puts me in mind of a wonderful little book called All Cats Have Aspergers. It’s a little book, a picture book really, for parents of Aspergers children. (For those of you unfamiliar with Aspergers, this is a form of autism, but the children are higher functioning, just in a different way than most of us. The heroine of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo probably had Aspergers. So did the protagonist of the Curious Case of the Dog in the Night Time.) But one of the messages of the book is that Aspergers children (and cats) have their own way of doing things. They want attention when they want attention. They like to play their own games. And they don’t like to be held too tight.

A lot like muses.

You’re Going Where?

By Karen Abrahamson | January 4, 2011

Okay, so I’m going to Peru. I’m going to follow the Gringo Loop and hike the Inca Trail all the way to Machu Picchu.

Or at least that’s the plan. If food poisoning and altitude sickness don’t get me first.

But then neither of them has ever stopped me before. You see, I like to travel. I like to travel just as much as I like to write fiction and so I thought I’d combine my two passions in a blog as I get ready for the trip and as I hike (uphill both ways) to Machu Picchu.

A lot of people ask me how I decide where I want to go. Yes, I’ve been to ‘normal places’ in Europe, but mostly I travel a bit off the beaten path. I’ve traveled through East and West Africa by truck. I’ve spent three months in northern India travelling by train, bus, jeep and, dare I say, camel. I spent two months travelling the Silk Road through China and made side journeys to the Tibetan highlands. I’ve travelled in Egypt, Burma, and Cambodia and lived in Thailand. A good friend described my travel as going to all the weird places in the world. Of course he followed it up with the question “Why don’t you go someplace normal? Like Palm Springs? Like Florida?”

Answering that question is a lot like answering a best-selling author who, when I told her I was writing a suspense novel with romantic overtones set in Afghanistan, asked to me why in god’s name I would write something like that.

The answer?

Why not?

Besides, it was something I was interested in. It was something far away and foreign that I wanted to understand. That inspiration became Ashes and Light, it was just after the invasion of Afghanistan and I wanted to understand what was happening in that country. I’d enjoyed Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, but I wanted to write something that was more mainstream, that would reach into the hearts of readers who wouldn’t read The Kite Runner and provide them with insights that might explain – even a little bit – the misunderstandings that were brewing between Islam and the rest of the world. My travels to northwest India and far western China—areas that enjoy similarities of people, religion, culture and landscape with Afghanistan—all helped me with the book.

While the Afghan story arose from a cerebral process, sometimes the idea for a story or destination arises from something far simpler. Sometimes it’s another traveler’s tale. Sometimes it’s a photo. In the case of Peru, it was two postcards: One was a framed postcard in my doctor’s office of a traditionally dressed Peruvian girl peeking out from behind a brightly striped blanket. There was something so fresh and lovely in her face that it made me want to meet people like her. The other post card was of Machu Picchu and was from my parents who were on a world cruise. Unfortunately, they couldn’t visit the ancient Inca site because they are 83 years old and if the altitude sickness didn’t get them, the uneven ground would have.

So part of my reason for going to Peru is to bring the feel of Peru back to my folks. And that’s what I see travel as being—one part inspiration, one part imagination, and a whole lot of hard work and a magnificent gift—when it works. A lot like writing a book.

So I leave for Peru on March 25, 2011. Come on along, if you like, and I’ll try to get us through without the food poisoning and altitude sickness.