I’m Not One Of Those Who Can Easily Hide

I am on empty.

I am getting in bed with Blood Meridian and calling it a day after I put on my creams.

How do you refuel?

Girl, You Really Got Me Going

Today is publication date for Eli Gottlieb’s THE FACE THIEF. I just got home from his publication party which was fantastic, which means I didn’t spill wine down my shirt, didn’t blank on people’s names, didn’t raid the medicine chest (I am reformed!), made a toast that didn’t sound like Linda Blair in the exorcist, and shared a quip in the elevator with an editor from a glossy magazine before I hailed a cab and disappeared down Lexington Avenue into a clear city night, the kind I used to love, cold, sharp, and anonymous. But this isn’t about me.

Please treat yourself and read this psychological thriller for the tight, dovetailed structure, for the enigmatic femme fatale at its center, and two men who are her mark. Read it for sentences so good you’ll want to reread them, but the plot will compel you to keep moving forward. Congrats, Eli.

I’ve Done My Sentence But Committed No Crime

IS THIS LIKE A PUBLISHER’S SWEEPSTAKES SORT OF THING? Was I born yesterday? Do I have to write a check to get in? Wear pork chops around my neck to get the dog to play with me? Is this a gateway award that will lead to crack or oxycontin? Did I ever mention that I won a poetry prize in high school and there was an awards ceremony in Hartford and I wore a hunter green plaid skirt cut on the bias. Tell me about everything you’ve ever won or wanted to win. Badly.

Congratulations Betsy,

You’ve been selected as a nominee for our Top Writing Blogs Award!

The Top Writing Blogs Award was created to provide students with a collection of helpful and encouraging blogs from authors, publishers, book reviewers, writing experts, and talented bloggers. We have included nominees that will inspire and teach our student readers to find their writing style and improve their skills, whether the students are writing an essay for Composition 101 or starting their first novel.

eCollegeFinder, an established online education resource representing over 120 accredited online institutions, began hosting a series of Top Blogger Awards in early 2010. Our goal in hosting the awards is to enrich students while giving high-quality blogs the recognition they deserve. Award winners are listed on our site; you can view the awards we’ve given in the past at https://www.ecollegefinder.org/award-series.aspx.

To accept this honor, please confirm the following and provide us with the information we’re missing by replying to this email before January 17, 2011.

• · Your Name: Betsy Lerner
• · Your Blog’s Name: the Forest for the Trees
• · Your Blog’s URL: http://betsylerner.wordpress.com/

Also, we’d like to know in 2-4 Sentences each…

• · How would you describe your blog to readers of our site?
• · What advice can you offer students aiming to improve their writing acumen?

While not a requirement to win the award, we encourage you to create a student-targeted blog post to correspond with your answer to the latter question. If you compose a post directed towards our readers for the competition, please email us the URL so that we may link to it from our published list if you are chosen as a winner.

Thank you again for participating and I wish you luck in being named as one of the Top Writing Blogs for eCollegeFinder! Please let us know if you have any questions about the award series or if you have any colleagues that you’d like to nominate for the award as well. Hope to hear from you soon!

Sincerely,

If You Don’t Know Me By Now (redux)

I’ve now heard from three of my four readers about the script. The feedback was better than I had hoped for, especially from the youngest and toughest critic. He thought the action was suspenseful. The script tight. He was really flattering. There was only one problem: the main character. He hated him. Everybody hates him. I think I probably hate him. He’s a shit. He’s in pain. So what. I don’t have the first clue as to how to rewrite him. He’s that guy that people hate, mostly because his life looks so easy and he’s smart and good looking. Maybe I should give him a pair of glasses.

How do you rewrite a character? Or do you just have to kill him? Dig a hole?

All Those Dreams We Held So Close Seemed To All Go Up In Smoke

Some comments lately have noted that my blog is more negatively cast than my book, FOrest for the Trees. They should have seen the first draft of the book. My editor covered the margins with her blue pencil saying the same thing over and over: too negative, too dark, too pessimistic, and my all time favorite, “why would anyone want to read this?” LOL! Actually, at the time, I was pissed and hurt. Wasn’t I a realist, after all? I never promised you a rose garden. For every happy writer there are thousands working in obscurity, collecting rejection slips, miserable and anguish-filled. And in my experience even so called successful writers can hit a patch of black ice and wind up in a ditch, shattered and stuck and totally fucked. This is not a game for the faint of heart. You need guts, courage, talent, wit, cunning, stamina. You need to be smart and clever, handsome and strong, or strange and winsome. You need to have bad teeth and habits, a flat ass and corns. You need to be the ugliest person in the room and proud of your penis. I’m sure you need a waist coat and velvet slippers. You need to love women and carry chap stick and run a never ending ticker tape of words inside your noggin.

I made the book nicer because I wanted to get it published (yes, you can stick to your guns). And I also saw what she was talking about. Mortals do need hope. But this blog  is me, straight up.  If you want nice, buy a Hallmark card.

We Can Take Forever Just a Minute At a TIme

People always ask how many clients I have. Fifty-nine. Okay? Is that a lot? A little? Or just right? Fifty-nine, but they’re not all active. No, not sexually active. They’re not all writing. Some wrote one book and that’s all she wrote. Some take years on a single book. Some are AWOL. And by that I mean they’ve stopped responding to emails and phone calls. Some have been seduced by industry or Hollywood. Some are stuck. Some depressed. SOme have stage fright. Some lick their wounds and come back fighting. Some reinvent themselves. Some reliably deliver a book every 18 months. And some go crying wee wee wee home.

Who are you?

I TOok A Wrong Turn ANd I Just Kept Going

Manuscript fatigue. It’s a fairly widespread condition. Symptoms: you can’t look at your manuscript anymore. You start to hate it, turn on it, call it names such as “that fucking manuscript,” “that motherfuckingcocksucking manuscript,” “my shit eating novel,” or  ”my douchy poem.” You start to cut like a depressed high school girl. You gain or lose five or ten pounds. You snap at the dry cleaner. You scream your answers at an automated voice system. You forget to take your meds or you take them twice. You can’t read anything. You alienate the people you love the most. You alienate people you barely know. You’re terrified if you leave it you’ll never go back. You fear if you go back you’ll make it worse. Why are you looking at me? I’m not a doctor.

How do you deal?

Did You Write the Book of Love

One topic I have avoided over three years of blogging is self publishing. Here is a link to the 2011 self-published bestsellers. Has anyone read any of these? Has anyone self-published?  I’m all for it, even if it cuts out the middle man, ahem. Getting your work out there is all that matters. Finding readers. And it looks like at least these folks have figured out a way to monetize. Other things this blog endorses:  self-love, self-loathing, selfishness, self-centeredness, Will Self, self-cleaning, self- absorption and self-satisfaction

Are you tempted to self-publish?  How do you want it to go down?

If I Knew The Way I Would Take You Home

For me it was under the stairs. With a satin-edged blanket, a chenille throw pillow, and an abandoned lamp with a makeshift shade. I first stole away from the world to write in that crawlspace beneath the stairs in a faux leather diary with gold stamping and a small lock. I mostly recorded things I hated: mustard, hebrew school, my friend Carolyn’s father, sharing a bedroom with my sister etc.  From there I went on to headier subjects like my love of hotdogs or to recount the latest advance or retreat in the acorn wars against the Frankel brothers. For some reason that I couldn’t begin to understand, I needed to write stuff down. And needed to keep secret.

How old were you when you started writing and what, if you remember, did you say?

Like Some Heroine

I’m in Miami and I’ve been skateboarding all day in my silver lyrcra unitard, so forgive me if this post is brief but I’m really tired. I went up and down the beach and people are reading. They’re reading Steve Jobs bio and Girl in a Dragon Hairdo. I love watching people read. If I had bigger balls, I’d go up to each one and ask what they are reading and why. And I would assemble the most amazing body of research that helped explain why it is that people need stories so desperately and why certain stories draw them in.

Tell me, what book are you reading right now and why. If you would.