Hero Path Resources

Since THE SUN SINGER (2004) and my novel-in-search-of-a-publisher GARDEN OF HEAVEN both follow Joseph Campbell's hero path schema, I've created a new resources blog that displays on the web sites for each novel:

www.campbelleditorial.com/sunsinger.html
www.gardenofheaven.net/gardenresources.html

I selected Enemy, Cripple & Beggar: Shadows in the Hero's Path by Erel Shalit from Fisher King Press as one of my first resources, for it is both highly practical as well as illustrative of the classic hero's journey.

Shalit writes, "The central, nuclear myth of Jungian psychoanalysis is the Hero-myth, because the psychological essence of the hero is to abandon the kingdom of the ego, to challenge the norms and obsessions of collective consciousness and the persona—the face of social adaptation—and to search for meaning."

From Star Wars to Harry Potter, we see the hero's journey played out in books and on the screen. It's a journey we can live by as well as enjoy in our literature.

Open Query Letter to Publishers of Literary Fiction

Dear Publisher,

I have completed a new novel called GARDEN OF HEAVEN: AN ODYSSEY about a middle-aged man looking backward via memories and personal journals at the events in his life to learn when and where he was betrayed by a kiss he no longer remembers.

At 240,000 words, GARDEN OF HEAVEN is magical realism/literary fiction for an adult audience. This audience will be similar to those who enjoyed The Shadow of the Wind, The Time Traveler’s Wife, and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell with a dash of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Marketing might focus on those who see the connections between “new age” spirituality, myths, archetypes and their personal stories, and who prefer discovering these connections for themselves in the fiction they read.

BRIEF SYNOPSIS

On David Ward’s tenth birthday his grandmother gives him the secret of the universe and his grandfather gives him a magic rowan staff that will one day save his life. At 19, David climbs a sacred mountain for a vision quest that shows him scattered glimpses of his future. While his eyes are opened, fate hides everything he needs to know. He doesn’t see that the young Anne Hill he will meet in the meadow called Garden of Heaven will be lost to him after he’s duped into sleeping with her double in Tate’s Hell Swamp. Nor does he see that one woman will carry his child and another will carry dreams of revenge for 18 years until the death of a friend in Vietnam, a bad marriage and a prostituted career blind him to everything that matters.

His odyssey begins in the mountains along the crown of the continent, moves to his conscience-plagued tour duty on board an aircraft carrier in the South China Sea during the Vietnam War, and concludes at a corrupt Midwestern college where unexpected ghosts appear.

Among the ghosts is a well-disguised Anne Hill. She destroys his reputation, chases away his wife and child, and turns his powerful magic against him to extract promises. When David escapes, she crashes her plane into a ledge where he’s taking a leap of faith into the lake below. Most presume David is killed in the fiery crash. A friend assembles old friends and enemies at the family’s ranch for a wake. Each has a story to tell. David, who is healed by the magic of the rowan staff is the last to arrive with stories no one will believe.

BACKGROUND

In addition to my quest/adventure novel THE SUN SINGER, self-published in 2004, my writing has appeared in Nonprofit World, Living Jackson Magazine, Nostalgia Magazine, The Smoking Poet, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the Rosicrucian Digest. I have worked as a college journalism instructor, technical writer, grant writer and corporate communications director.

Thank you very much for your consideration of this manuscript.

Sincerely,

Malcolm R. Campbell

How far would you go to kill your competition?

When another author who's posted work on HarperCollins' Authonomy in hopes of winning her way onto the "Editor's Desk" for a shot at an HC publishing contract asked how many of us thought the site resembled the Survivor TV show, I wondered how far any of us would go to "win."

Book-length manuscripts posted on the site advance to the "Editor's Desk" when they are backed (as worthy) by authors on the site. While contestants on Survivor win by voting each other off the island, Authonomy authors don't have buttons that lower each other's scores or kick books out of the running altogether.

But if we did have such a button, would we push it? "Winning" on Authonomy brings with it no guarantees other than a look and a comment from an HC editor. There are no cash prizes and certainly no promises of a publishing contract with HC. To my knowledge, none the monthly winners have been published by HC.

Short of getting to the Authonomy "Editor's Desk," the only other way to get your manuscript in front of a HarperCollins editor is through an agent. And agents know that HC doesn't consider manuscripts unless they're likely to sell a minimum of 50,000 books.

As I wondered how many authors there would push a button to knock another book off the site, I couldn't help but think of the well-known Milgram experiment back in the 1960s that explored whether or not subjects would administer electric shocks to others when told to do so by an authority figure. The subjects didn't know that those purportedly getting the shocks were actors. A fair number of people in the survey were willing to push the button.

On the Survivor program, the stakes are high: $1,000,000. For an author trying to get HarperCollins' attention, the states are also high: a prospective contract with one of the top five publishers in the country along with fame, fortune and a jump start to a very difficult career to break into. Would you push the button?

I can hear the rationalizations already: "He said something nasty about my book?" "Her manuscript is full of errors." "His book isn't bad, but it had more than the average number of sluts in it." "My book is about important themes, and those other books are just chick lit."

As I wonder just how we might act if Authonomy were set up exactly like Survivor, I'm not sure desperate authors would behave as well as we think we would. Sobering thoughts on this cold Georgia morning.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Malcolm R. Campbell