New Blog Address!

New Blogsite!

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 21:16:48 -0600

I am in the process of phasing out this blog.

I was originally going to try to move all the old entries to the new blog--one by one by one (no good export program for iweb that I can find).

And then it occurred to me that there are links out there to all these old pages--so might it be a disservice for the pages to migrate?

I mean, really, it’s not that I’m lazy when I’m looking at the gazillion hours of work this would take. It’s for the good of the community, right?

Yeah, I should think of the others. It would be selfish of me to move them, now that I think of it. They really should stay in the archives here.

The new blog is lovely. You can find it here: http://www.johannaharness.com/blog.

Tweeting at Willamette Writers Conference

Wed, 4 Aug 2010 05:46:03 -0600

I’ll be live tweeting from the Willamette Writers Conference this weekend. Yay! Although my regular twitter account is @johannaharness, I live tweet as @johannalive so I don’t irritate with my high level of chatter.

If you’re at the conference and see me, please say hello! I have #amwriting buttons and moo cards to give away and I’d love to meet you.

What to expect?

Well, for starters, I don’t want to miss being in Portland the way I missed being in Seattle for PNWA. I don’t like being in a place and only being outside for the short jaunt from airport to hotel to airport. I get Setting Sickness. I could be anywhere. It’s horrible.

So I’m leaving a little early this time, heading for Powell’s first and then maybe The Chinese Garden or Voodoo Donuts or Music Millennium or. . . okay, yeah, I’m not going to see all my favorite places, but I do plan to start the conference knowing where I am. Hopefully I’ll get some photos tweeted so you know where I am too. I love Portland. I think you’ll love it too.

Thursday evening is early registration and pitch practice and that’s all, so look for a ten percent chance of wordy tweeting and a high concentration of travel-related twitpics.

Friday, Saturday, and Sunday the fun really begins. I’ve written to speakers ahead of time and I’m live tweeting from workshops where I’ve asked for and received permission to tweet. There will be a smattering of descriptive tweets from panel discussions and other less-tweetable events, but workshop speakers will receive most of my attention because their workshops intrigued me and the speakers were cool with tweeting.

Be sure to visit the speaker websites, leave comments on blogs, and let them know (when appropriate) that you’re there because of live tweeting. Speakers need this feedback to make decisions about tweeting at future events. If you buy a book because of live tweeting, this is especially important feedback for them to have! When you go to your next event and ask someone about live tweeting, we want the response to continue to be as positive and enthusiastic as it’s been for me this season.

That said, how much I tweet depends both on the inherent tweetability of a workshop and whether one of my agent appointments cuts into that time slot. For those of you wanting to read tweets in real time, here’s the schedule of workshops I plan to attend. All times are Pacific Daylight Time. Complete workshop descriptions are available from this page of the Willamette Writers Conference site.

Friday:

10:30am-12pm: Penny Warner: “It was a Dark and Stormy Setting”

1:30pm-3pm: Jessica Morrell: “Beginnings, Endings, & Turning Points”

3:30pm-5pm: Andrea Brown: “The Hot YA Category”

Saturday:

8:30am-10am: Andrea Brown: “Demystifying The Children’s Book Market”

10:30am-12pm: Stephen Fraser: “Create The Perfect Elevator Pitch”

3:30-5pm: Melissa Hart: “Travel Writing for Newspapers and Magazines”

Sunday:

8:30am-10am: Eric Witchey: “Levers, Ratchets, and Buttons”

10:30am-12pm: Christine Fletcher: “Close to the Bone: Writing The YA Novel.”

1:15pm-2:30pm: Jessica Morrell: “Blood, Roses, & Mosquitos: Writing with Details”

3pm-4:15pm: Christina Katz: “The Prosperous Writer: Career Strategies for Staying Flush”

Expect a high wordiness/attribution quotient with a few splashes of twitpics (probably all in florescent lighting).

Please do reply while I’m tweeting! I know most of you don’t reply because you know I can’t really respond right then (and you’re right), but I do love knowing what you’re thinking and it influences the details I choose to report. And hey--you can always talk amongst yourselves about the ideas being presented. Backchannel discussion reminds me of the internet in its early days. (“You mean there’s a discussion going on underneath the reality?” Oh yeah--and now there’s a discussion of the discussion of the reality. Or is it a discussion of the discussion of the discussion? We’re certainly stretching the bounds of “A life unexamined. . .” and some of us are giggling.)

I hope you enjoy your twitter trip to Willamette. Almost time to go. In 3, 2, 1. . .

Happy birthday, #amwriting!

Tue, 3 Aug 2010 05:40:20 -0600

One year ago today #amwriting started. It’s a birthday. Or a hashtagversary. Or something. It’s cool; that’s what it is.

I’ve been asked since: how does one go about creating a hashtag that takes off like this one did? My answer: I have no idea. I can only tell you how this one started.

Just over a year ago I was hashtag invisible. I had a twitter bug that kept my tweets from appearing in hashtag searches and, thus, live chats. I didn’t know about the bug. I would go to chats, participate, and no one would respond to me. I thought I was just monumentally unpopular. When I found out I was really invisible, I felt a little stupid and I registered a help ticket to correct my search issues. Then I waited--a long time--for a response.

In the meantime, I found that people would respond to me when I’d do a regular shout-out, asking “who is writing right now?” Any time I was writing and felt alone in it, I could call out and ten or twelve people would respond. My only problem was that I then had a conversation going with ten or twelve people and I was no longer writing. I wanted to know other writers were writing alongside me, hear them talking to me AND each other, participate here and there, and get back to work.

So I tried something different: as more people responded to my semi-regular shout-outs, I experimented with retweeting comments, hoping writers would find each other and continue the conversation, even after I moved on to writing. It didn’t work that way. Instead, the more I retweeted, the more new people responded. Instead of talking with ten or twelve people, I was now conversing with twenty or twenty-five.

#amwriting rose out of a synchronicity of events that happened in one evening. A follower DM’d me and said, “I have to unfollow you because you tweet and retweet way too much” and an email came in telling me my hashtag invisibility was fixed.

The next morning when I did my call-out, I suggested a hashtag with morning implications--because it was morning in my part of the world. I immediately received responses from people all over the world saying, “What about me? I’m writing right now, but it’s not morning here. Can I play?”

And honestly, my immediate response was, “OMG. Someone from across the world is writing at the same time I’m writing. My sun is coming up and their sun is going down and it’s the same sun and look! There’s someone else fixing soup for lunch every afternoon when I’m barely awake here and I’m not even in the same season with half these people--and we’re still writing alongside each other and we’re caring about the same things and this is the most amazing thing EVER!”

And I responded: “Um, yeah, that’s cool.”

So for about an hour during a time that happened to be morning where I was, this hashtag was for morning writers, because I was totally provincial and short-sighted. During the second hour of existence, “AM writing” came to mean “I am writing” because it was better.

Then, about an hour after that, @inkyelbows showed up in a room full of chatter and asked how long we’d been meeting and she asked for information she could post on her website about the chat.

And I was thinking, “We have a chat?” And I looked around and there were about thirty people chatting and I realized, “oh, yeah, we have a chat.” So I wrote something up and sent it to Debbie. (Thank you, Debbie!) And then more people asked, so I created a FAQ (http://bit.ly/9yoZUE).

Every morning I’d do the same call-out, but I encouraged people to talk to one another and not just me--and I pointed them to the FAQ. More people showed up every day. Then they started showing up before me--and staying after I’d gone. I remember discovering #amwriting discussion continuing two hours after I left the chat and I was so excited I couldn’t stand it.

My goal became something simple: I wanted #amwriting to grow big enough it wouldn’t need me anymore.

Today we’re there.

We have over 2000 active participants and you can find writers posting to #amwriting around the clock. We have published and pre-published, indie and traditional, business writers and novelists, and we cross boundaries without blinking.

The one thing that pulls us all together, always, is that we are practicing our craft. It doesn’t matter how much we have written in the past or what our intentions might be for future writing. What matters is the moment of writing: the process. It’s great to know someone will celebrate with you when you spend your day replacing passive verbs with active--or when you finally find the perfect name for your dastardly character with a sexy limp. It’s great to know that you can ask goofy writer research questions like, “what’s the circumference of a blood spatter under these conditions?” and someone probably knows. Or you can say, “I’m switching from third to first person” and others understand the mountain of work to which you’ve committed yourself. It’s great to have people like Joe “Mr. Clarity” Roy reminding us that the well-turned phrase impacts more than a novel or poetry; it impacts everything within a business or organization.

So on this day when #amwriting turns a year old, I do my regular call-out: “Who is writing right now?” and I lift my cup to writers everywhere, no matter where you are or what you write--because you people are the smartest people anywhere and I’m so incredibly lucky to know you. Thank you for opening your hearts and minds not just to me, but to each other. It’s been a great first year.

PNWA Wrap-up

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 18:26:33 -0600

What a whirlwind four days this has been. I’d think it couldn’t possibly have been four days--except I’m exhausted enough to know every hour of it.

The best wrap-up is the twitter feed for my @johannalive account. I tried to keep live tweeting (although some discussions were more given to bullet points than others). I go into much more detail in my tweets. Here I’ll try to give you some of my take-aways.

Thursday with Bob Mayer: The man has experience with publishing and he gave me a lot to consider. Big take-away for me: thinking about where I want my career to be in five years I’ve been focusing on what-next for long enough that I’ve lost track of five years I need to give that some thought.

Started meeting twitter people right away: Kerry Schafer (@uppington), Everett Maroon (@4evermore), Jason Black (@p2p_editor), Levi Montgomery (@levimontgomery), Nathan Everett (@wayzgoose), Monica Pierce (@ThePreyers), Holly Warah (@Dubai_Words) and Penelope Wright (@penelopolini). (Please forgive me if I missed you. I know there were others.) I gave away a lot of buttons and a lot of moo cards. Take away: These people are even more amazing in person than they are on twitter. Twitter just scratches the surface. I am so lucky to know them and even luckier to stay in touch after the conference is over.

Thursday keynote with Andre Dubus III: What a charming, smart man. Brilliant writers still have doubts they are really good enough. I find that a comfort. Also--I’ve now witnessed the perfect art of signing books. The line moved so slowly and I didn’t realize why until I drew near the front of the line and watched him talking to each person--and not just talking--asking questions and listening to answers, warmly shaking hands or hugging--connecting to his readers. Admiration. That’s my take-away.

Friday the energy changed as editors and agents appeared in the hallways, each name tag color coded with RED--a huge target painted on their chests. Veteran attendees began pitching immediately. The rest of us stared nervously from afar, trying to soak in the new vibe and the new expectations.

The editor and agent forums more clearly defined agent/editor personalities and writers began camping out in the line for appointment changes before the forums were complete. Kerry and I waited in line for over an hour. Take away: it’s good to have friends at these things. Someone has to hold the place in line while the other person goes for food.

Sessions: I won’t describe each one. I have so much more detail in my tweets. A few of the sessions validated things I already knew, but other sessions overwhelmed me with new information. One of those in the latter camp was “Marketing Tips Your Publisher Doesn’t Tell You” by Alice Acheson. Many take-aways from this one: Learn all you can about the publishing process, make other people’s lives easier, know how to advocate for yourself (and when), look at every part of your background to find ways to market yourself, start keeping a marketing file when you write the first word of your book.

First day pitching: I was off. I knew my pitch before the conference started, but I let a lot of things mess with my head. Conference speakers gave ideas for how to pitch that didn’t fit with what I was planning. Writers pitched to each other and didn’t really listen because they were too worried about their own pitches. I think it was the latter that really bothered me the most. You could see the exact moment when people quit listening. Usually it was within the first half of the first sentence. I tried to rearrange my pitch on the fly.

The editor pitch was in a group and the first guy started giving a detailed synopsis of his book. When time for the whole group was almost over, the editor asked how far along he was in the telling (1/3 into the book) and she stopped him. The rest of us had very little time. She was really critical of titles and she liked mine, so that was something. She invited all of us to send queries, but also said she handles very little fiction and we’d be better off finding agents.

At this point I understood why there is no follow-through with 90% of invitations to submit. Another writer at the conference said these lukewarm requests felt like pity sex. That’s why people don’t send. There may be a request, but in some ways it feels worse than a rejection. It feels sad. There was general consensus in my group all the same: you get a request and you send, no matter whether or not it feels like a pity request. You send.

My first agent appointment came on the heels of that editor appointment. I messed it up and the agent showed no pity. She said she didn’t know if the book wasn’t ready or the pitch wasn’t ready, but I was welcome to submit a query when it was. Not pages. A query. I went back to the hotel room and licked my writer wounds, analyzed all the things that went wrong over the last hour of my writing career, briefly considered giving up writing altogether.

Then we went to dinner and stood in line for the buffet. By the time we reached the front, there was no protein left. I’m gluten-free and they had only pasta and salad. I ended up at a $70 dinner, staring at a plate of iceburg lettuce. The talk by Lisa Gardner was amusing, but very short--didn’t last as long as the salad line. It was not the best ending to the day.

Thankfully it wasn’t the end of the day. Hanging with new writer friends in the bar, drinking overpriced, watered-down drinks--that was the end of the day. Takeaway: writer friends create wickedly funny stories out of the day’s worst events. We laughed so hard we cried.

Saturday morning I hit the reset button in my brain and decided this would be my day. I had speed pitching first and I knew I might have to face the same agent from the day before. With speed pitching you get 8 minutes total--2 minutes with each agent. They stage you on one side of the room, with all your belongings on top of the table. You can take a pen and notes over to the agents and that’s all. They tell you when to start and you have two minutes. At the end of the two minutes they say, “3, 2, 1” and then you move to the next agent and start again.

I decided to pitch Claire. Claire and I have been through a lot together. It was like taking a friend with me to the table--a tougher, more sensible friend who didn’t give a damn if she was rejected.

1st agent was one I was seeing later that day. She seemed interested and said we’d talk later.

2nd agent: the same agent from the day before. She looked at me and I saw “oh god, not this one again” flash across her face. I pitched with confidence and her eyes lit up. “You didn’t pitch me this one yesterday!” she said. “You pitched me something else!” Yes, I acknowledged. Yes, I did. “You always start with your strongest pitch!” she scolded. “This one I want to see.”

Oh gods, really? Gulp. Okay then.

3rd agent: Another big agent. Top in his field. Another yes. Another request.

4th agent: Not really what she usually represents, but it sounds like something she might want anyway. Another send.

Thank you, Claire Morgane. Everyone should have a kick-ass teen heroine at their side when they pitch.

I joined a session already in progress and met up with supportive friends. After lunch (more iceburg lettuce), we went to a wonderful presentation by Andrea Hurst. My last agent appointment was right in the middle of it, so I left all my stuff with @uppington and @ThePreyers and I caught only the beginning and end.

This agent appointment was really wonderful. I felt at ease talking with her. I liked her. She asked me what I wanted to send her first--my choice. I’m taking some deep breaths before I send. I’m so hoping she likes my writing style and my voice.

Take-away from pitches: hitting the reset button is a good, good thing.

More speakers and an awards dinner followed. We had our own little cheering section in the back. Whether they won or not, our author friends knew we were there. We stayed up laughing well into the night again.

Sunday morning was the morning after the storm. Writers stared at each other over coffee, no words left. Agents and editors had mostly gone. Many of the attendees were absent as well. Worried she’d fall asleep if she left any later, @uppington went ahead and started her drive home. I stayed with @ThePreyers for the last writing workshop. Elizabeth Lyon presented such rich and wonderful ideas, but I’m glad I bought her book as I was too tired to make the most of my time.

At the airport, with time to kill, I bought a copy of Linger by Maggie Stiefvater, and I read with the eyes of a writer, contemplating point of view and imagery and characterization (and how it changed from Shiver).

All my writing thoughts have been shaken like a soil sample placed in water. The big pieces have fallen to the bottom and the sand is starting to fall and trickle around those pieces. The clay and silt will take a little longer, but eventually they’ll layer in as well. And I’ll know who I am as a writer again. For a time.

Did I mention I’m going to Willamette Writers Conference in two weeks? Then it will be time to shake things up again.

Misa’s moo cards!

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 18:20:08 -0600

Misa’s moo cards seemed forever stuck between England and Idaho. With a delivery estimated for July 28th, I went ahead and sent off cards and buttons today. On the way home, I stopped and picked up our mail--and there were her moo cards! They arrived in time for the PNWA Conference! Hooray! But along the way, we missed a few opportunities to show her cards to everyone, so thought it only fitting that she have a blog entry just for her. Beautiful cards, Misa!

Follow Misa at @misaditas or see her blog at http://misabuckley.blogspot.com.