This past week the St. Louis Publishers Association brought in best-selling self-help author Will Bowen, a Kansas City minister who started a 21-day "No Complaining" campaign at his church, handing out purple rubber bracelets. When the participants caught themselves complaining the bracelet had to switch arms. “Complaining is like bad breath,” he said. Word spread about this concept and before Bowen even wrote a book he'd been on Oprah Winfrey's show. Then he decided to write a book. He told us all about it.

After being turned down by one agent and then sucked into the scam "New York Literary Agency," he contacted the agent he wanted and got him. The book, A Complaint-Free World, became a monster bestseller--especially in China. Chinese book piracy is rampant, but Bowen's publisher undercut the six pirated editions by pricing the genuine book for less than the pirates charged, and bundling the bracelet with the book. The Chinese publishers also broadcast a weekly cartoon starring an animated Will Bowen on various positivity adventures, and booked him for a fashion shoot (he’s trim, bald and wears an earring) for Asian Harper’s Bazaar. “Now, those people are creative,” he said. “Most U.S. publishers try pretty hard but they really have no idea how to do it [marketing].” He went to Toastmasters to learn to speak, and arranges his own speaking engagements: one church per week. His intention for his new book is to sell 2.6 million copies.

Other things Will Bowen said:

• The joke is that the Random House-Penguin merger will create a publisher called Random Penguin.
• “Publishers want to build on the last big thing but are very conservative about the next big thing.”
• Hard-copy books will become extinct.
• “Everybody has doubts, but most people won’t face the doubts.”
• “We judge a book by how well it’s edited. There is nothing more important.”
• An author goes through three stages with an editor. 1) “I hate you.” 2) “You might have a point there.” 3) “Thank you.”
• “The editor is always right.”
• The formula for success: “Success equals consistency over time.”
• He knew an author bent on making The New York Times bestseller list. This guy, who had money, went to every bookstore he could and bought up 25,000 copies of his own book, which got him on the bestseller list.

Bowen believes in writing down his goals each day, writing daily, and having a wish board. He wanted Maya Angelou to write a foreword for one of his books, but she is reclusive and doesn't do favors. He pasted a photo of Angelou on his wish board and told everyone he met that he wanted to meet Maya Angelou. One day he told an actual friend of Maya’s who arranged the meeting. I guess they spoke about positivity. Bowen tape-recorded what Angelou said and asked if that might become the foreword to the book, and she agreed. Thus, "foreword by Maya Angelou." That's a heck of an endorsement.

I’m skeptical about lists and wish boards, but they can’t hurt, and increasingly I’m becoming convinced that writing is becoming a spiritual rather than professional pursuit. I know I went home from Bowen’s talk inspired, and boldly did something I’d never imagined I’d do, which I’ll blog about next.

Former student and friend, artist Tony Renner, actually prepared pocket-sized booklets of poems and handed them out free on Poem in Your Pocket Day, April 18, when we are all supposed to carry a poem around and read it to people and discuss it. Cool idea, and perhaps the future of poetry.

Those of you who've written many poems: Have you considered making of them and marketing a nice portable chapbook? Most every poet can winnow from his or her work at least 16 or 20 very good poems (usually a maximum of 24 actual pages), and it's all the better if they have a common theme. I did this recently for a client whose chapbook came in third in a national chapbook contest just three months after the chapbook was assembled. The poems came from his full-length manuscript. The chapbook poems share a theme and are all of excellent quality.

Those of you with completed manuscripts you're trying to publish: It feels good to have two manuscripts circulating. If you publish the chapbook first you can use the poems in your full-length book. What you probably can't do, unless all rights belong to you, is winnow a chapbook out of an already-published volume. That's recycling, anyway. You can write a new chapbook: all you need is to create 16 to 20 good poems, maybe on a theme, or maybe a poetic "cycle." That could be fun. So often, poetry is not fun. A chapbook is!

Finally, from experience I've formulated a rule of thumb:

Last-minute edits on a work that has been in progress for a long time, or a published work about to be republished, are mistakes.

Last-minute edits on a work you have very recently completed are likely to be good edits.

If one is "in the zone" of creation on a particular piece, ideas for revision rise from the same pool of thought, or, as they say, "are organic." After that work has been completed and set aside and another work commenced, that same zone simply never comes again. The author has changed or grown and can't step into the same work twice. I have longed to add a new insight to an old work, and did, and now that extra sentence in there jars me, and I am concerned that it might jar readers just as much.

One's old stories and poems can be rewritten or refurbished and turn out very well, but not if rewriting or additions take place at the last minute; say, a few hours before a contest deadline. It's like sewing a new sleeve on an old shirt. It might fit but it will be a slightly darker shade or nap or texture, and even if no one else knows, the author does. Is it too small a thing to care about? Not if you care about craft.

If you've already sent your children's book to several publishers and it's been rejected:

• First, if you are sending right now, stop sending because you can't re-send the revised manuscript to publishers you've already tried. 
• Publishers like to use their own illustrators. If your manuscript is already illustrated and you like it that way, you will probably have to self-publish.
• If you've written the story in rhythm and rhyme, it had better be expertly done or you are better off writing plain prose.

Next, contact a professional editor. The market for children's books is extremely competitive, because the majority of the book business is adults buying books for adults, and adults tend to buy for children the books they used to love: Make Way for Ducklings, Wind in the Willows, Winnie the Pooh, Little House on the Prairie. Having your work professionalized and perfected gives your manuscript an edge.

• feedback on your plot and characters and suggestions for any improvements
• corrections of any grammatical, punctuation or spelling errors
• feedback on rhythm, rhyme and vocabulary, and (with my master's degree in poetry) I can rewrite rhymes so they're professional quality
• I will tell you whether the manuscripts are ready to publish or require revision
• I will tell you whether the market is saturated with similar stories and you're better off writing some new stories more likely to sell
• I will pinpoint the age range of your readership. You might think you have written a picture book for ages 2-5, but in fact the text might be accessible only to ages 8 and up. I once read a Wind in the Willows-type manuscript with many references to early 19th-century styles and culture that young children couldn't appreciate. The characters spoke in Hollywood-British dialect and vocabulary ("What ho! Who goes there? Show yourself, lackey!"). The book was really for adult readers who could see is cleverness.
• advice on professional formatting, and I will format your manuscript if you want.
• an assessment of your cover letter, if you want. If it's less than optimal I will rewrite it or make suggestions, as you choose. If you didn't send a cover letter, we can compose one of professional quality so at least your cover letter won't hold you back.
• suggestions regarding potential publishers

A good short story, personal essay, poem, or memoir captures the texture of life. The most celebrated memoirs are those which tell more than one story. For example, in Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life we read about the boy's education and conscience, but also about the bad second marriage his mother is trapped in, and how she is changing, doing things formerly out of character, like campaigning for JFK. These experiences happened during the same period. They were parallel.

Wolff could easily have written the entire memoir about his youthful self and how he learned to lie and fight. He could have written a fine memoir just about his mother's life. Either one would probably have been swell. But these in reality were intertwined, and Wolff wrote them that way.

What this appears to accomplish:

1) More accurately depicts the boy's exterior reality (events, conversations, his stepfather's behavior, friends and schooling and lessons learned)

2) More accurately depicts his interior reality. We all live more than one life at a time. In fact, at least two: the life that people can see and the one they don't. I've read (dull) stories and essays delving deep into an individual's emotional life that never indicate that this character or person has a job, or siblings, or a loan to pay off, or a best friend who isn't a dog, or a political opinion, or a goal.

Fiction and nonfiction have this in common: To capture the texture of real life, the work needs a subplot or more than one narrative thread.

You can see this on television, say, on The Simpsons, when the main story is about, for example, Homer, but a secondary story is woven in about two other characters. If you look for this, it is absolutely everywhere. That's because having two or more threads captures the texture of life.

When your creative prose seems dull or flat or thin or like "weak tea," it's usually because it has only one facet or thread. A secondary or parallel story, or "subplot," is a lot of work for the writer and requires skill. It is a large part of what makes superior fiction and creative nonfiction. You can spend years in creative-writing courses and never once hear about subplotting, or why subplotting is as basic as the "main story." I have, however, heard a poet say, "A poem should always be about two things." Poets get it.

Prose writing is a little different. After you have learned how to develop and play on one thread, attempt to add another to the piece you are working on. Don't worry about how well or poorly you do it at first. I said it's a skill and that it's not easy.

A writer must have a reliable ISP and it helps if it's a fast one. I used speedtest.net to test my upload and download speeds and so should you if you suspect that your speeds are slower than they were.

My HughesNet satellite connection, although reliable, had become so slow I could do calisthenics or watch 5 minutes of TV while connecting, and there was no way it'd let both my computers work at once. This poor performance crept up on me over 3 years of service and I accepted it as the norm, the price one pays for living away from the big city. Then I heard about the Verizon JetPack. It will support up to 10 devices on the Verizon network, one of those being the ISP transmitter which uses their 4G network. They offer a two-week trial. So I got one.

Joy! It was a simple compact thing that plugged in, needed a password and then began instantly to work. Still, though. . . I live in one of Verizon's "extended service" (read "fringe") areas and I could get online within a few seconds but couldn't stream "Gangnam Style" worth a darn. I speed-tested the JetPack. In this fringe area it scored about .8 mbps. The HughesNet actually did equal or better, in its best test scoring 1.35,  but the JetPack gave me that little edge -- seconds instead of minutes to get online, especially after 5 p.m.

Now what? Back to PeoplePC and dialup? (There's no DSL out here.) I called HughesNet to cancel because the JetPack was better at firing up. But they offered me an upgrade for the same price and a 30-day trial. Installers came, and in an hour I had oh-wow downloads between 8 and 10 mbps and now can watch the nightly weather report online and get rid of my TV -- which had just begun charging $8 more a month for fewer channels. I didn't even get CNN anymore! I phoned and said, "I don't get to charge more for reduced service. Why do you?" and they trimmed $6 off my monthly bill because I complained.

Why didn't I look into all this sooner? Your ISP is a crucial tool and should make you proud. If not, you have alternatives. Seek them out; don't waste the time you could be spending on writing, editing, attending webinars, or connecting with your writing community.

The biggest self-publishing concerns, those most advertised on the Net, are precisely those that new authors should avoid. They exploit over-eager authors who sign contracts without reading the fine print and find out later that they might have signed away the rights to their work -- forever. Don't be so eager to see your own book in print. Make sure you're not getting the shaft. It's your book and your money and you have rights. Check everything out. Read reviews. Call their references. Believe what other authors who've published with them say. Have an editor review the contract before you sign it. Just for the record, avoid:

iUniverse
Xlibris
West Bow Press
Author House

I have the answer.

Brilliance is revision and revision is brilliance.

Brilliance doesn't come in the first draft. Brilliance is accumulated over drafts.

Writers are very lucky because we can take our first drafts and over time develop and craft them. A first draft is like Adam's rib. We add the muscle, nerves, flesh, hair, and breath of life. Editors, publishers, and fellow writers help us polish the work until it shines and communicates perfectly, and keep us from making public our inevitable misjudgements and mistakes. That's why your favorite writers dazzle you. How do they do it? Revision. That's why years pass between their books.

We all want to write brilliant first drafts and be done with it. That's like wanting to climb Everest right this minute without a base camp or a team, or have a baby right now without a pregnancy. That'd be brilliant, but it's unlikely. Don't pressure yourself with the belief that you can or should write brilliantly immediately and all by yourself all the time--that you must be superhuman. That will be unproductive. Revision is very human. The humanity which soaks into the work through revision is what makes it brilliant.

Ninety thousand words the normal length for a novel and this is the first time I can say I've written one. Since I last wrote an entry here, I looked at my life and saw articles weren't any longer a reliable source of income or creative satisfaction. Decided that when I write my own stuff, I will write books or nothing.

This forced me to review, just three days ago, the 50,000 words of fiction that I wrote during National Novel Writing Month and haven't looked at since November 30. I was amazed by how much of the Novel-Writing-Month material was readable and usable, how good the dialogue is, how the characters (I enjoy their company!) made connections and friendships on their own, and built their own biographies. They are directing the next draft and I can barely keep up with them. Possibly it'll finish at around 120,000 words, and now I am sure I will finish it. Remember, this is the first time in my life I can say this! How about you?

The work is extremely absorbing, but one of my main tasks on earth is to help any writers who ask me, so next Saturday, Feb. 23, I teach a seminar on a subject I know well: writer's block. The University of Missouri-St. Louis Continuing Education program offers non-credit seminars on creative writing, and Feb. 23, 9 a.m. to 12 noon, the subject is writer's block. I will do my teacherly best to breathe fresh air into anxious minds using discussions, writing assignments, facts and surprises. The seminar is $65. Register by phone on weekdays only: 314-516-6950. If you yourself aren't blocked, maybe your students or friends are.

Here's my Spring 2013 teaching and workshop schedule so far, February through May. Pleased and honored to be teaching:

Spring 2013 Seminars, live at the University of Missouri-St. Louis (UMSL):

• Saturday, February 23, 2013, 9 a.m.-12 noon, "Overcoming Writer's Block." Call it procrastination, fear of exposure, fear or rejection, fear of failure, wanting to quit: how to get past it. $65. Click here to register, or phone (314) 516-5974.

• Saturday, May 18, 2013, 9 a.m.-12 noon, "Writing for the 'Net." Publish your work instantly. Be your own columnist. Sell your work. Establish a Web presence. Writing for the Internet is easier than normal writing, and a fun challenge. We will practice "translating" prose into internet prose. $65. Click here to register, or phone (314) 516-5974.

To register for the above short courses, please call UMSL Continuing Education at (314) 516-5974 or Register Online through the course catalog.These courses are part of "The Write Stuff" non-credit Chancellor's Certificate program in writing.

and also

Spring 2013 Online Course: Lindenwood University Graduate Online MFA Program: "Advanced Focused Nonfiction Workshop." (You need not be enrolled in the MFA program.).  Click here for information. April-June 2013, entirely online. Participants in online courses come from everywhere: Missouri, Colorado, Oklahoma and California, to name some. Half tuition for students over 60. Contact Beth Mead, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , for MFA program information and advising.

and also

• Saturday, May 25, 2013, 11 a.m. - 1 p.m., speaking to the Saturday Writers group at the city hall in St. Peters, MO; topic TBA.