In a newsletter I receive on-line from a writing industry professional, I found this.

If you have read [book name] could you go over to the Amazon page [page link] and write several sentences along with a Five Star review? The Five Stars are important because they are averaged so please make sure to do Five Stars. Or maybe you have read my [book name]. If so, I’m asking you to please go over to the Amazon page [page link] and write a couple of sentences along with a Five Star review. Even if you read the book several years ago, I would appreciate your support with the review.

I don’t know how others feel, but I’m totally against this kind of request. Sure, a writer would like nothing better than to have a bunch of five star reviews and nothing below that. But to ask someone to give you a five star review? I don’t know, to me is seems rather crass. How about a request something like, “I’d sure like a few reviews for my book, Book Title, over at Amazon. Here’s the link to it. If you’ve read it, please consider going to that page and leaving a review. Be honest. I’d love a five star review, but if you don’t think the book deserved a five star review, rate it what you think it deserves.” That might be an acceptable way to solicit reviews.

Because of what that writer/agent/publisher wrote, I will not be giving him any reviews. I’ve read one of the two books he mentioned, and like it a lot and find it useful in my writing. But he killed it for me with that comment. He prefers praise to honesty. Well, he’ll get neither from me.

I think it would be alright to ask someone to review your book at Amazon. After all, that’s what traditional publishers and authors do all the time when they send out advance reader’s copies to reviewers. They hope for favorable treatment, but I seriously doubt they tell the reviewers how to do their job.

This newsletter guy irks me. “so please make sure to do Five Stars.” I hope I never sink to that level. Would one of you chew me out if I do?

As I mentioned in my last post, in my formative years we attended a church that did not offer hope for the dead. It was a liturgical church. We were into ritual, not hope. Duty to the sacraments was paramount, along with regular church attendance.

But we somehow missed 2 Corinthians 5:1 “Now we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not made by human hands.” But then, we didn’t read or know scripture back then.

If I write another short story in the Danny Tompkins series, it might be on this idea of hope for the dead. It’s something I didn’t even think about until I was maybe 22 years old. I was recently born again, was just about to move to Kansas City to take my first job after college. I had a talk with the new priest at our parish, a man I barely knew but with whom I felt some friendship. I don’t really remember what we spoke of, but I came away from that conversation suddenly thinking, “Oh, no, I never prayed for Mom during her long illness!”

We listened weekly as the priest intoned the prays for the sick, but the congregation didn’t join in. Dad never gathered us together as a family to pray for her healing, or for relief from her pain. He didn’t know any of that, because our parish priest didn’t know any of that and so couldn’t teach it to us. There was no hope for the dead, and so no real hope for healing. What good were prayers, then?

What would be the childhood memory, and the link to the adult memory? Maybe I’ll give too much away here, but I’m not sure I’ll write the short story, so I might as well go ahead. In 1961 we drove one Saturday from Cranston RI to Northfield Massachusetts to attend Mom’s 25th reunion at Northfield School for Girls. This was a boarding school that Mom attended, in proper British tradition. The trip was memorable for several things. It rained that day, putting a damper on everything. Mom was the only one from her class who showed up. And on the trip home, after dark, when we were passing through Worcester MA, the brakes failed on our old clunker (maybe a Studebaker?). Dad had to get us home using the emergency brake.

The adult memory tieing back to that is the biography I read of Dwight L. Moody. In that biography it said that Moody founded Northfield School for Girls, along with the nearby Mount Hermon School for Boys. They were Christian schools! The gospel was preached and taught. Sure, they were schools for the uppity, the ones who thought a boarding school education was superior to a public education.

The result of learning that was a smidgen of hope. What if Mom, fading away on that Thursday night, remembered the chapels she sat through, and the words preached? What if she read that biography of D.L. Moody—it had been her book. Might she have had enough wits about her sometime during that last week to remember why God lets people into heaven, and to have said the prayer, to have meant it, to repent of her sins?

It’s thin hope, I know, but it’s hope none the less. I’m going to think about this one a while. I see some potential, but am not sure I have enough for the story here. One thing, though: I already have the poem written to insert into this one.

One of the comments made by an agent who considered In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People was that the book has too much dialog, not enough narrative. She had (and presumably read all of) a partial manuscript, about the first 80 pages plus three pages containing two disconnected scenes that I had written ahead. Too much dialog? I certainly want to consider her comments, as she is a publishing industry professional who sees many books and many manuscripts.

I re-read the book in November-December-January for editing purposes. My goals were: fix the many typos I knew it had, take care of a few items identified by beta readers as unclear or not the best, and add/fix a few plot items I realized were weak. A couple of these plot items I discovered only while reading. I said something late in the book that conflicted with something early in the book. A change was needed either late or early.

To fix all these things, in consideration of the agent’s comment, I used narrative. I considered reducing the dialog in a few places, but found I liked the dialog and didn’t reduce any.

This dialog vs. narrative, or maybe scenes vs. exposition, is the subject of a recent blog post by editor Victoria Mixon. Her example author is Dashiell Hammatt, author of The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man. I haven’t read either of those, so I’m a bit hampered in understanding her arguments. She compares the two books, written many years apart, and mentions how Hammatt adapted to reader preferences changing around him.

Mixon says that exposition has become big in the last twenty or thirty years, at the expense of dialog. But, she says, dialog isn’t dead. I suppose I’m not quite sure what she means by “exposition” and “scenes”. Are these the same things I’m calling “dialog” and “narrative”? It seems to me that my novels are all scenes. No where do I have the type of intercalary chapters that Steinbeck used in The Grapes of Wrath. Everything in both my novels involves the characters of the story doing something or having something happen to them. How is that not scenes, even if there is no dialog?

Sigh, I have much to learn about this business of writing. And much to figure out on how to write the best books possible. Hopefully I’m not over-analyzing here.

I read writing blogs a lot. Agent blogs. Some editor or publisher blogs. Fellow writers blogs. Every day I read an average of five blogs, but not the same blogs each day. Over the course of any week I probably read 20 blogs.

Now, some of these I just skim. Sometimes one just refers to another. Some of them make frequent use of guest bloggers. A few of them, the ones I’ve read for a few years, are now recycling topics without giving much new information. So the time required to read these blogs really isn’t increasing even though the number of blogs I look at is slowly increasing.

Today Rachelle Gardner had a guest blogger, who talked about character flaws, something I’ve blogged about before. Our heroes must have faults. And it’s good if their faults are what cause them to get into hot water. The guest blogger used the example of Scarlet O’Hara in Gone With The Wind. She had her faults. Readers (and viewers) want to hate her for her flaws, but usually wind up sympathetic to her in spite of it.

This is something I struggle with. I wonder how much the general book-reading public really want the hero to have flaws. Do they want to see the mild-mannered become angry? The virtuous succumb to lust? The timid become obnoxiously bold? I wonder.

I’m out of words for right now. Maybe I’ll come back and edit more in, or just do a follow-up post.

My last post was kind of short. It was prompted by something silly. On Jan. 26 I accepted a friend request on Facebook. It was someone I didn’t know, who is a member of a certain political page I’m also a member of. No problem, I thought. He must have seen a post I made and decided to friend me. I accepted his request.

Days later, on February 1, I responded to a message on Facebook from another friend. In the process, I noticed that, when you click on the word “Messages”, not on the button, underneath “Messages” is the word “Other”. Next to “Other” was the number 1. Strange, I thought. Why didn’t that 1 show up on my news feed? I clicked on “Other”, and saw the message was from January 26, from that man who friended me. He is involved with a couple of political groups, in the real world and on FB, with many followers. He wanted to review my book Documenting America and hopefully recommend it to his followers.

Now, I was happy for the interest, but terribly upset over the fact that this request for a book and offer to review had been sitting there for six days, and Facebook never notified me. That’s what we all want: a champion for our books. Someone who will supplement whatever marketing we are doing. Someone who knows people and can expand your circle of contacts. I had it, and it almost slipped away. Maybe has, for all I know. I contacted him, he was still interested in reading and reviewing it, so I shot him an e-copy of the book. It’s only been four days since I did that, so no feedback yet.

Writing is hard enough, and marketing is harder yet, that a flub such as this, minor as it was, is disheartening at best and demotivating at worst. I did a promo post that brought at least one result that came close to dying. If promotional successes are so hard, I thought, why bother?

On his influential blog, Joe Konrath wrote about how most writers way over-promote. It’s something that is drilled into wannabe authors when they first start chasing publication, especially the e-self-publishing route. You’ve gotta get out there and promote yourself. No one else is gonna, so you’d better. Be creative. Be active. Do it regularly and often.

But it’s something I have to psyche myself up to do. And right now I’m not psyched to do it. I suppose I’ll get over it, but not yet. Plus, after Mom’s Letter being featured on the short story blog, and having no sales result, I’m questioning whether any promotion will work. I guess I won’t bother looking up phone numbers for the local Kiwanis and Lions clubs and see if they need another speaker.

Life has conspired to keep me from writing much the last few days. I think it was Sunday that I last wrote more than a paragraph. Tonight I got to look a little at In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People, mainly just to check it for what pages I need to reprint after my last round of edits.

Too much is going on in life to worry about writing and promoting what I’ve already written. With all that’s going on my mind is kind of just mush. Tonight I remembered something I need to do before February 15th. It involves several days of off-hour research. That’s besides a lot of family finances stuff, which seems to pile up faster and faster these days.

Plus, given how poorly recent promotional efforts have impacted sales, I’ve lost interest in promotion. For now, if the books sell, fine. If they don’t, fine.