'Garden of Heaven' Update

I have completed all major pre-submission editing of the manuscript and have sent a query packet to a prospective agent.

This agent requests one-page query letters and the first ten pages of the manuscript to be sumbitted by mail. Subsequent agents will have other guidelines, all of which must always be followed to the letter.

It's usually wise to include some rationale in the query letter about why a particular agent was selected. If one has a reference from one of the agent's authors, one would certainly mention that. Without that, one might note that the agent represented a specific author's book that has similarities to the book one is querying him about. One never wants to pick a prospective agent at random or make it appear that this is what has been done.

Fortunately, the agent in question reprented a another novel that I liked a great deal, one that has some primary points of comparison with mine.

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In another area, I'm happy to report that a grant that my wife and apply applied for on behalf of Jefferson, Georgia's Crawford W. Long Museum has been accepted. The money will help pay for an updated version of the walking/driving tour guide for the city's historic districts.

Monday Afternoon With Sun

While many of us living in small towns north of Atlanta reported hail and ugly clouds Saturday afternoon, I've yet to hear of many actual tornado sightings, and that's fortunate.

Atlanta got the worst of it with the tornado that hit the downtown area Friday night.

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In the "What's New" department, my book review of Frank Gilbert's excellent civil war novel Chasing the Wind appears in the current issue of Living Jackson Magazine. The review will be available online later this spring after people have had a chance to read the newsstand edition first.

I posted a review of Besa Kosova's Raindrops on my Writer's Notedbook weblog this morning. This was the poetry I was reading when the sirens began going off Saturday afternoon. In these gritty poems, she speaks of weathering a storm, that of a husband's cocaine abuse, so it seemed fitting to be reading them during a physical storm.

My colleagues on the town's Historic Preservation Commission have, for reasons unknown, selected me as the chairman for another year. Since preservation, historic districts, and private property often comprise a volatile mix, being chairman ensures one is always in trouble with somebody. Thanks a lot, Scott, Gerry, Ralph and Buz.

The flu--which I thought I got rid of--is hovering around again. I'm pretending that it isn't while pushing ahead with manuscript edits for Garden of Heaven before sending a query to an agent. So far, this project is about a month behind schedule!

Saturday Afternoon With Sirens

I'd planned to spend this afternoon reading a book of poems for a book review. The weather had other plans.

After last night's tornado in downtown Atlanta, those of us north of Atlanta saw the predictions for more to come. This afternoon, Atlanta's northern suburbs and cities farther north spent the afternoon listening to tornado warning sirens and the rough sound of hail on the roof.

Several times, we ran through the house grabbing cats and herding them in to interior rooms. So far, there are reports of a tornado in Floyd and Polk counties west of us here in Jackson County; and, possibly another one south of us in Buford, GA.

We had hail, not the 3-4 inch hail reported in some places, but large enough. My wife, Lesa, snapped several pictures, one of which appeared with the deluge of hail videos and stills on CNN's iReports.

The poems, which I was enjoying, will have to wait until another day.

A Writer's Explorations

"Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go." E. L. Doctorow

This weekend, I'm learning about emergency preparedness while working on a review of Hostile Planet for Living Jackson Magazine. The first thing I learned was that while most people think they are prepared for floods, hurricanes and other distasters, most of us really aren't ready at all.

Recently, I discovered my true feelings about Geraldine Brooks' People of the Book after I finished reading it and began writing a review of it.

While staring at a blank page or a blank screen is often the prelude to writer's block, I see the empty space there as place that contains everything and anything--infinite possibilities. The page is a probable world awaiting it's creation.

Whether I'm reviewing a book, working on a grant application or working on my novel, I learn as I go. In simplistic terms, the material always requires research of some kind. That adds to my knowledge and usually changes my initial ideas about what's going to end up on the empty page.

Quite likely, my viewpoint will be different by the time I type "the end" because, as some writing teachers maintain, a writer's outlook about a subject isn't quite nailed down until s/he writes about it.

As I finish up my pre-submission editing for my new novel Garden of Heaven I see that the writing became a significant length of trail in my own spiritual journey. The same thing happened with The Sun Singer: I am not the person I was when I began writing the book. As I change, the book changes while I'm writing it. Among other things, as I edit, I find passages I am surprised that I have written. Sure, I may have written them years ago and forgotten them, but they often contain information and ideas that seem more to have been channelled in from somebody else. I read and I think, "my goodness, I didn't consciously know that."

I am still waiting for The Sun Singer to become an "underground classic"! Since Garden of Heaven hasn't yet been submitted to an agent, I have no idea how it will be received. To some extent, this "exterior outcome" doesn't matter. The writing in both books is not exactly what it appears to be on the page. It represents my inner journey of personal exploration. For the reader, it might be a tall tale, a good read, or a set of ideas that tweaks their philosophy of life.