I have been waiting on Amy Hale Auker’s new book The Story is the Thing and in a post on
Facebook, she mentioned there would be a delay until December 1, a few simple
publishing items needed to be taken care of before the book could find its way
to the readers. It made me think about the journey Authors travel and the
navigation skills needed to sail the publishing seas. I reached out to Amy
recently and asked if she would like to write about that very topic. Read what she has to say:
This Bonus of a Day by
Amy Hale Auker
Today I got a wonderful
surprise from my publisher. I can’t tell you what it is, but I can promise you
that it truly is something wonderful.
The cold wind is
blowing in the Santa Maria Mountains of Arizona. Our fall cow move is almost
over. And the publication date of my new book, The Story Is the Thing, is made of jello. We are aiming for
December 1, 2014.
Writing is one thing.
Writing is my first love. Publishing is another.
In 2004, I went to a
meeting with a man who was to become my best friend, my mentor, and eventually,
my non-fiction editor. The meeting was, on the surface, about an entirely
different matter, but Andy knew, probably more than I did, that I was a writer.
He asked me to send him something I had written that I had never shown anyone
else. Because of him, I stopped writing long, creative emails illustrated with
photographs and started filling a folder with lyric first-person essays that
made me run from my warm home out onto the prairie to escape their scary claws.
One morning as I cooked for a crew of fifteen men and poured coffee for the
truck drivers whose rigs idled growling beside the loading chute, I went back
and forth to my keyboard until I had all of the words on the page for an essay
called "Weather Talk." I cut and pasted it into an email addressed to
Andy, cleaned the globs of pie crust dough from the keyboard, and went back to
stirring the beans. The phone rang 30 minutes later. That is it. That is the voice.
Now go write some more of these and we have a book.
The problem was I didn't
care about a book. I cared about the soul-slamming feeling of having finally
gotten onto the screen the swirl of words in my brain. Gotten them on the
screen in a way that the swirl was making sense.
By 2006, I had enough
essays for a book, my marriage was failing, and the first seeds of ambition
were throwing off their lifelong seed cotes and pushing up through my creative
life. But books don't just happen because we finally wrote enough words.
Andy took Rightful Place to the university press
that had hired him to find voices in the rural West that might not otherwise be
heard. They balked. Where were my credentials? I had been published; a decade
before, in magazines like Western Horseman and American Cowboy, but the
university press wasn't impressed. So, the poor little sad collection of essays
began the brave march through a peer review process. It took four years. Yes, four. And in that time, I did not rewrite it
so much as reread it... over and over and over. Andy took the comments of one
peer reviewer and rearranged the essays, splitting one in half, putting half at
the beginning of the book and half at the end. Can't have "too much Amy,
too soon."
Life goes on even when we are holding
our breath.
I got divorced, got homeless, wrote
another collection of essays that was cathartic but not necessarily
publishable, got healed, was a bad mother, fell in love. I wrote my way through
bucketfuls of pain on a little website called Six Sentences. I gained a
community of writers. At one point, as I cried actual tears about the
publication process, my new love said, Eh. Who needs essays? I read to
be entertained. That brought me up short and I began to look
around at our newly combined shelves. Novel after novel after novel. GREAT novels, by really talented writers.
Some of them genius.
I stopped rewriting and rereading the
two collections of essays. I started showing up at the page every day. I began
to write about a girl named Charlie. I gave her a mentor named Bill Morgan. Who
would have imagined that Uncle Bill would become more fascinating to me than
this young girl trapped in a scary marriage, discovering her sexuality? In
fact, Uncle Bill began to tell me his life story and I couldn't write it down
fast enough. I filled yellow legal pads with his words. The Story Is the Thing was born.
And it was awful. I put it in a drawer
and started writing another novel.
Winter
of Beauty was easier to
write and much more traditionally structured. I spent hours in a dark hallway
with blue tacky clay, making a construction paper outline on the walls. I
discovered Rafe and Shiney. I met Jody and an old black cowboy named Delbert
Lincoln. I lived on a mountain called The Bride.
In February 2010, I got
the call I had been waiting for. The university press committee had voted to
publish Rightful Place and a contract
was on its way. I was back to the essays and immersed in a brand new process...
the publication process. It was a game of wait-for-years,
hold-your-breath-for-months and then "please return this with your notes
and corrections within ten days." I filled out endless forms. I got a
managing editor, a copy editor, a marketing adviser, and a design team. I
dotted all of the “I’s” and crossed all of the “T’s.” I did everything I was
told to do including pay my dues to organizations that support writers.
We received Advance Reader Copies for Rightful Place in January 2011.
I submitted both novels to the managing
editor at the university press only to be told that they didn't have time to
read them. Perhaps I could workshop them?
I began to shop, not
workshop, the novels to agents and independent presses. Rightful Place began to win awards. And still, I edited and immersed
myself in the manuscripts. I rewrote The
Story is the Thing. I made another pass on Winter of Beauty. I wrote query letters and new essays for magazines. I wrote morning pages. I edited the
mss again.
During this whole time I was also
working for a living, learning new ways of being in the world. I was learning
that I needed to choose something to earn a paycheck that fed the writing. I am
blessed to be a cowboy on a big ranch in the high Sonoron desert. Riding and
writing go hand in hand.
My query letters began
to pay off. I got an email from a "publisher" who wanted both novels. He sent me a
contract and the specifics of how he publishes. I was to put up half the money
for publication and the publisher would put up the other half. I asked about
cover art and design... he sent me to a website I hated. I asked about copy
editing and big picture fiction editing and he basically shrugged and said he
was sure he could handle all of that. I took the contract to the man who owns
the ranch where I work. He asked one question: What was I going to get for my
money? In short, nothing. These scams are everywhere.
In October 2012, I got
another bite. An independent press called Pen-L Publishing asked to read both novels. (Have you ever seen a crazy
lady do a happy dance?) I think the turn-around time on that email was four
minutes. Pen-L sent me a contract for Winter of Beauty saying that The Story Is the Thing was too
experimental, not traditionally structured enough for them to take a chance on
it. This time, the contract was legitimate. By the time WINTER OF BEAUTY was released in October 2013, I
had probably read it, with a red pen in hand, upwards of 20 times... the whole
thing. And we still found typos in that first batch of 100 copies.
In December of last
year, I sent Pen-L an email saying that I had rewritten The Story Is the Thing and asking if they were interested in seeing
that draft. They replied with a contract. In the negotiations I pointed out
that I knew too many great Western artists for any of my books to end up with a
stock photo on the cover. They agreed. I asked my friend Steve Atkinson to step
in as cover artist and designer. Design matters.
During this time, since
2008, I have also been writing essays, enough that a new collection now rests
on the desk of the managing editor at the university press. So writing
continues, even as publication swirls around it. By now you have gotten the
idea that I am always writing something new, but also always reading and
rereading and editing and polishing something old.
The publication date for
The Story Is the Thing was set for
Fall 2014.
Delays in the
publication of this book have been coming our way, one after another. Whether
it is a misplaced draft or an overlooked email or … get this… Did you know that
IS needs to be capitalized in the title? So, the cover had to go back to the
designer… minor, but time consuming.
I was supposed to move
back to cow camp today with pending final page proofs hanging over my head.
Instead, my boss (yeah, he’s also my husband) said that the wind was too cold…
we’ll go tomorrow. Those cows can wait. One more day.
This morning my inbox
dinged. The file I had been waiting for. I poured more hot water over the tea
bag in my cup and curled up beside the most wonderful fire in the world, bolstered
by pillows and this bonus of a day. And I began to look over this book, this
book that means so much to me and will go out into the world soon. This unconventionally structured work of
fiction…
The surprise took my
breath away. It is on page 117. I hope you get to see it ...
Thank you Amy for sharing your experience with us.
I know I always appreciate knowing the story behind the story and now I’m certainly curious to learn more about the publisher’s page 117 surprise.
I’m looking forward to reading Amy’s new book.
Her writing is beautifully lyrical and her stories are heartfelt. Her body of
work is growing and her voice is strong.
It’s easy to realize Amy is a poet. She has written several poems and has performed at the cowboy poetry gatherings. She will be a featured
performer at the Cowboy Christmas, Wickenburg, AZ on December 5-6, 2014 and
at the Texas Cowboy
Poetry Gathering, Alpine, TX on February 27-28, 2015
Pre-order The Story is the Thing at Amy's website.
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Author Amy Hale Auker will be was among a panel of authors at the Peregrine Book Company Saturday, Sept. 6, for a discussion on “Women Who Broke the Mold.” (Steve Atkinson/Courtesy photo) {from The Daily Courier} |
Be sure to catch up with a few other posts on Amy’s work by
linking to:
