Two bits of news:

 The Fiction Class is coming out in a large print version and the cover is completely different than either the U.S. or UK version, as you can see below.
 

Also, The Fiction Class was chosen as a selection for Reading Group Choices 2009 (www.readinggroupchoices.com) This is an annual anthology geared to book clubs, and so it’s a wonderful boost to my book.

TFC has now been out in print for nine months, which is about 3,000 years in publishing terms. One of the major things I’ve learned as a new author is how little time you have to make an impact. Basically four months. And by that point, you’re either selling or you’re not. So it’s a great relief to me that I’m still selling and that TFC seems to have some traction. In fact, one of the things I like the most is seeing the way my book is seeping through the country. I love getting e mails from all over the place, and I get a kick out of the fact that so many are from small towns in the South.

When I was writing short stories, almost every magazine that published me was from the South—Tennessee, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, and so on. And what struck me as odd at the time was that I was connecting with southerners and yet I could not be more of a New Yorker—born and raised in Queens, studied in Rochester and Manhattan, live in Westchester. And I think I conform to just about every stereotype I have about New Yorkers, so it is intriguing to me that my writing connects with people who I imagine as being so different. Maybe it’s my religious background? Maybe it’s the topics I write about? Maybe it’s a statistical fluke? I don’t know, but I treasure that connection because I think writing should about building bridges.

How about you? What surprises have you had as a writer?

Last weekend I worked at my church’s Attic Sale, which is a must-do event for any writer because you would be pretty hopeless if you couldn’t come up with a book’s worth of stories about the things that go on at this sale. The drama! The sale starts at 10 and by 9:30 there is a line of people literally pushing against the door to the church, desperate to get in. Every item has value to someone, and people often tell you the story of why it is significant to them. This ratty blouse reminds them of something her mother wore in the sixties, or this tea cup belongs in a museum. Lots and lots of little babies that people carry facing outward, so you have a parade of big soulful eyes staring at you as you write up the receipts. And the cutest little white dog I’ve ever seen (sorry Spencer) and someone left it on a table and it just sat there and shook. But then the owner came back. And ham salad sandwiches. I’ve noticed in my classes that people tap into some of their best writing when they write about smell, and there were people at this sale who were holding up the ham sandwich and sniffing at it as though it could bring back a lost time.

Anyway, I was a puddle through most of this sale, but that’s not the point. The interesting thing was that I was working in the book department (a promotion—last year I was in the children’s clothes department and was a disaster because I got tired of refolding things and just chatted most of the day). The interesting thing about the book department is that best sellers don’t sell. We had stacks and stacks of books and I (or possibly someone else) hit on the idea of separating out the best sellers (Patterson, King, Cornwall, Forsythe) and lining them up on a separate table. Alphabetically! The idea was that people would snap up these books. Brand new they would sell for more than $20 apiece, but we were just charging $2, and they were all in almost brand new condition.

Then there was a separate section of “book club” books. These were the trade paperbacks that sell, new, for around $14. A lot of Barbara Kingsolver here and Ann Patchett and you know who I mean. (No copies of The Fiction Class, but I hope that’s because no one from the church wanted to get rid of their copy.)  And here is the moral of the story, which is that these books kept selling and the hardcovers didn’t.

Periodically I would look over at the hardcover table, which represented thousands of dollars worth of books, and probably millions of dollars worth of advances, and I would cogitate. Obviously someone had gone off and bought these books in the first place, and even if James Patterson’s 1000th book is not as good as his 17th, it has to be a reasonably good read. Lots of people are buying it new. By the second day of the sale we had marked the books down to $1, and by the end of the second day we were giving out bags that you could fill up for $2. And still, when the sale ended, the book club rack was almost empty, and all those hardcovers were still sitting there. (Goodwill took them.)

What does it all mean? Perhaps people who read new hardcovers don’t go to attic sales. (More men, perhaps?) Perhaps the pleasure of owning a hardcover is in owning something new?  I don’t know the answer, in case you’re wondering. What do you think?

For the last few years I’ve been a judge for a self-published book contest, which means that I have read about ninety self-published books. I’d be willing to bet that that’s more than the average person has read, and every time I read one of these books, I think to myself—why did this author choose this path? Would a commercial press have published this novel? What’s the difference between this and a more traditional book?

For those who don’t know, self-published books are those that the author arranges to have published herself. Pays for herself. And probably sells herself. There’s no selection process. You want to do it, you do it–assuming you have the money and the willpower to finish writing a book. To me it would be like saying you don’t want to go through the college application process—you will go and sit in the classes and learn what you can, but the actual diploma doesn’t mean anything to you. You might learn a lot following this path, or you might learn nothing. It would be up to you.

So, the big question is, how are these self-published books? Are they awful?

Some of them are. Some of them read like the sex fantasies of people who live in nursing homes, and that’s as much as I want to say about that. But most of them are okay; a few are wonderful. The one I think should win is a terrific book and it should have a wide audience. There do tend to be a lot of typographical errors in almost all these books, and that really undermines the authority of the author. On the other hand, the books tend to be passionate. You don’t go and put down a lot of money on a project that may never bear fruit, unless you feel strongly about it. So the voices of the authors tend to come through very strongly, and this is no small thing. I recently read a very commercially successful book that read as though it had been written by a committee and, when I was done with it, I felt as though I had been swindled out of twenty dollars. So voice counts for a lot with me.

The biggest problem with these books, that I see, is that they tend to feel rushed. I get the sense that some of the authors got to the last page of the first draft, looked around and said, Done! Reading self-published books makes you realize what a good editor can do.  (Thank you Emily!) Don’t stop with the first draft; push yourself further. And be patient. Writing is not a race. There’s no glory in being the first one done; you want to be the best one. So, if you are thinking of self-publishing your book, take your time. Make sure you publish the best writing you can.

How about you? Anyone have experience with self-publishing?

Some years ago it was my job to recruit Sunday School teachers and what a miserable job that was. It would be easier to get someone to donate a kidney than to get them to teach a class on Sunday morning, and after a while I noticed that people in my church were avoiding me.  I was getting a little obsessive, I guess, and could not have a conversation with anyone without asking them to teach, and it was at that moment of revelation that I turned to my husband and said, You’re going to have to teach three classes.
 
I had a similar revelation a few days ago when I was talking to a friend and invited her to have coffee and she hesitated and then said, “You know, I’ve already bought five copies of your book.” I assured her that I really did just want to chat, and I promised not to mention The Fiction Class,  and I did keep my promise, sort of, but the fact is that for a first-time author, events and book clubs and readings are so important. I need sales!
 
Which brings me to an event that is taking place tonight (July 10) at the Bedford Library in NY about which I am very excited because it involves one of my students, Lynn Biederman. (We are going to have a bunch of these, so don’t worry if you’ve missed this one.) Lynn , and her co-author Michelle Baldini, wrote a wonderful and funny and honest YA novel titled Unraveling and it is being published by Delacourte and got a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly, which is a big deal.
 
Lynn was in my Beginning Fiction class some years ago (though even then she seemed rather advanced to me). I have watched with awe as she has navigated the shoals of publishing with a tremendous amount of grace, and what has made it particularly fun is that I was in such a daze when my own book came out, that I missed half of it. So I am getting to relive some of my own publishing moments, but without all the anxiety. For example, I had completely forgotten the excitement of getting that e-mail from amazon saying that The Fiction Class had shipped. And the terror of knowing that it was official that my book would be in strangers’ hands.
 
Another thing that makes reading Lynn’s novel, Unraveling, so much fun for me is that she covers much of the same territory I do in my novel, but from a completely different perspective. Whereas my protagonist, Arabella, is a grown woman, dealing with a difficult elderly mother, Lynn’s protagonist, fifteen-year-old Amanda Himmelfarb, is grappling with a different type of difficult mother, the domineering woman she refers to as Captain, along with such  other issues  as her perfect little sister, Malady, and the all-consuming issue of how to get a boyfriend.
 
So tonight, to get back to our event, Lynn and I will be talking about how our own relationship with our mothers affected our writing, and how being student and teacher and friend has affected our lives, and how wonderful it is that Bedford Library is hosting this event. And if anyone out there would like to arrange an event or a book club meeting or teach Sunday School, for that matter, be in touch.

I’m a big believer in that cliché (rule) that every day you should do something that scares you. Every time I step in front of a podium, or look into a TV camera, or go to a doctor’s office, or try to parallel park in New York, I think to myself, “Susan, you are a better person for having done this.” However, sometimes you have to do things just because they are fun. Which is why I went to a school a few weeks ago to meet up with some second graders.

The Fiction Class is not really appropriate for second graders and I knew I was not going to be selling many (any) books, but the teacher had said that the students had never met an author and the school happened to be in the part of Queens near where I grew up and I figured what the heck. There’s no pressure here; the only reason to do it is because it’s fun.  And I do love kids.

The moment I walked into the school, my ego felt nourished. There was a security guard and she checked my ID and beamed at me and said “You’re the author?” And I said, “I am!”  Then two little sprites ran across the lobby and scooped me up and led me up a steep flight of steps, but I didn’t collapse, and then into a class room.  The great thing about kids is that when you ask a question, everyone raises his or her hand. There is so much enthusiasm.  I met with three separate second grade classes and we did all sorts of naming exercises: What’s a good name for a bully? For a ballerina? For a police officer?  They were fascinated by the process of writing, and intrigued by the fact that I had managed to fill 300 pages. Best of all were the thank you notes I received a few days later, just filled with love and gratitude and interesting questions: Don’t your hands get tired? Reading through those letters, I felt as much pleasure as I’ve felt about anything lately (except for seeing my beautiful daughter get ready for the prom and my son win a major award at his middle school, etc.)

This Saturday (June 14) I will be doing something a little more nerve-wracking, which is that I will be reading at the KGB Bar on 85 E. 4th Street in Manhattan at 7:00. (I’m giving all these details because it is my great hope that many friendly people will show up.) I should be fairly easy to spot. I will be the short woman having an anxiety attack in front of the microphone. Be sure to say hello!

How about you? Have you done anything lately to make yourself happy?

Here is a good example of how stupid a reasonably intelligent person can be.

I have a graduate degree in Russian economics and when I was a young mother, home with my children, I got a freelance job writing about Russian history for a reference book. The job was a lot of fun because I had to make believe I was writing newspaper articles about great events in Russian history—Susan Breen at the execution of the Tsar, and so on. The money was okay, something like $50 an article, and everything would have been fine. Except that I came up with a brilliant plan.

Because I am so bad about saving money, I decided that what I would do, is hold off on submitting invoices to the publisher. I would wait until they owed me $2,000 (about 6 months work) and then I would submit the invoice and have a bundle of money, instead of the trickle I had been receiving.  Clearly this was a very bad idea (and this is why today, I let my agent handle anything to do with money).

However, I worked diligently for six months, wrote my articles, accumulated my $2,000, submitted the invoice, whereupon the publisher immediately went bankrupt. I got one of those certified letters saying that they would pay me after they had paid off their major creditors. Such as General Motors, or something much bigger than Breen. Suffice it to say, I never saw a dime, though they did still go ahead and publish the book. So I had the joy of seeing lots of people spending money on a book from which I was receiving no money.

So why am I thinking about this now?

Because not long ago, I gave a talk at my library, and it was a lot of fun (and it turns out that a lot of people buy books at libraries!!!) But when I stepped up to the podium, I happened to look over to the shelves at my right and, lo and behold, there was that book. Staring at me. And so my first words to the accumulated library crowd were, “Damn it. They still owe me $2,000.” (Things got better after that.)

Afterwards I was thinking about how strange it was that that book, of all books, should be right in my line of view; and how odd it is when the past and present converge, a sensation I have been having a lot lately.  Maybe it is simply a function of middle age, that I have lived enough of my life that every event in the present triggers a memory of the past. Or maybe there are force fields converging and I am at the epicenter and am about to explode. I suspect it has a lot to do with the dreamlike state of having my book published, and feeling my life take an unreal turn.

But the end result is that I find my 51-year-old self continually bumping up against my young self, as though we are both ghosts haunting the same bit of space. Isn’t one of the joys of writing to be able to spend time with your younger self again, and with the people who you knew and loved in the past? One of the great pleasures for me in writing The Fiction Class was that the protagonist’s mother, Vera, was very much like my own mother, who passed away four years ago, and so when I had the two of them talking, I could actually hear my mother’s voice.  It was a great comfort.

Anyway, after the library talk was over, I went home and flipped through that book. (I do own a copy, though it is not worth $2,000.) I looked at the articles I wrote, and could still remember how proud I was of some of the language, and  what pride I felt in writing it. Then I thought about how that $2,000 is probably worth $10,000 now and there is just no positive spin to put on this.

So what about you? What’s the most stupid thing you’ve done?

The great thing about being published is that you never again have to answer the question:  So, Susan, anyone interested in your book?  The bad thing is that you have to deal with another bone-chilling question, which is:   “So how’s your book doing?”

The short answer is, okay. As far as I can tell. It’s been two months and The Fiction Class is still in the front of a lot of bookstores and my amazon rankings, which I shouldn’t be looking at, but do, because my husband keeps telling me, which is another story, have been quite good. My editor and agent return my calls, which is always a good sign. Of course, I could do the obvious thing and ask someone in authority, but people in authority make me nervous and I’ve discovered that when there is something very bad or very good to tell you, someone always does. (My next book is going to be titled, My Life as a Coward.)

But the point I am making my way toward is that, the reason I know, in my heart, that my book is doing well is because I’ve been getting fan mail. And by fan mail, I don’t mean that people drop a line and say, “Nice book.”  I mean that people, often women, often of about my age—I can tell—write me long, long emails telling me about what The Fiction Class means to them and how they relate to Arabella and how they’ve always dreamed of being writers themselves.  Is there any better feeling than to know you are connecting with the people who are reading your book?  This is why we become writers, right? Because we think we’re strange and we have to put it all down on the page, and then it turns out that everyone feels that way and they are so relieved to find out they are not alone.

Of course I always write a letter back to whoever sends me email, and, I always send bookmarks. Both because I like the idea of doing something physically to say thank you for reaching out to me, and also, because I like to imagine little TFC ripples going on all around the country, with people saying, Have you seen that book with the apple on it? Here, take a book mark! (I get a kick out of tracking where the letters are coming from. They started off in New York, and then a lot came from Virginia and then it started to move west and yesterday I got one from Washington. I picture The Fiction Class seeping its way across the country. ) Seeping and rippling! That reminds me of an exercise I used to do with my class in which you’d write a paragraph about making love but you could only use cooking verbs.

Which reminds me that I have a writing exercise contest.  You can get the info on my web site (www.susanjbreen.com), but the key things to know are that it’s free and every month the exercise changes. This month the exercise is to write a page or two of a story starting with the line, “Why are you wearing that?” Then email it in to me and I’ll pick the best one and post it. (You can check out previous winners on my site.) The winner also gets a free copy of my book!

So what about you? Who do you imagine will connect with your writing?

Some years ago, I was at a conference and my teacher, a brusque and somewhat imperious man, was scheduled to read from his new novel. I went to the reading, of course, and was surprised to see he had a glass of scotch hidden behind the podium—suffice it to say, I recognized the color and that was not Poland Spring. Every time he read a page, he took a swig of scotch. It was a long reading. When it was over, he couldn’t move, and some obeisant MFA student had to cart him off, but I remember thinking at the time, “Oh, get a grip.” And I thought that up until I had my first reading at Barnes & Noble a few weeks ago and looked down at my glass of water on the podium and thought, if only…

Even I think it’s ridiculous that I get so nervous before a reading, particularly given that what I do for a living is stand up in front of people and talk. And I never feel nervous before a class, but there is something about reading your writing in front of people that feels different. There’s a strong autobiographical element to my writing, and so, when I read, I feel as though I am quite literally baring my soul. It would be a little bit like going to a psychiatrist and beginning to talk and then realizing that there were thirty people listening to you.

Matters were not helped along by the fact that I got to my first reading about an hour and a half early. I am chronically punctual, and the positive side of that is that even if a train breaks down, I arrive on time, but the bad side is that I am always roaming around the city, trying to kill time, and in this particular instance I was with my husband, who has a very loud voice. We walked into the store, my husband walked right over to the New Releases table, and remarked, so that any but the deaf might hear, that there were no copies of my book to be seen. I snapped that he was going to get me banned from Barnes & Noble and we argued for a while and then there was an hour and fifteen minutes to go.

So then we went to get something to eat. There was a wonderful bakery on the fourth floor of this particular B&N and I got a latte, but for some God-unknown reason my husband did not want his own latte; he wanted to share mine. (You see how after twenty five years you begin to argue about everything.) I am good about sharing, but I was absolutely convinced he was going to knock the latte onto my shirt—I could literally feel it searing a scar onto my chest—and so every time my husband would reach for the latte, I would knock his hand away. It seems funny to me now, but at the time I was ready to knife him, and things did not get better when he told me to make sure to go to the bathroom before the reading.

Anyway, we finished the latte and now there were about ten minutes to go and we argued over which of us would walk into the auditorium first and whether to put our coats onto an empty chair in a front row and then my son showed up, which was a great treat. And from then on everything went well. It turned out that the reason there were no copies of my book downstairs was because they were all on the fourth floor. There were quite a few people in attendance, some of whom I didn’t even know, and they all smiled and were friendly and clapped and some even bought books, and then we went out with old and new friends for a wonderful dinner.

On the train ride back, Brad and I were both glowing. He seemed to genuinely enjoy the reading and I was relieved to be alive and for the first time in a while I felt relaxed. In fact, I was quite calm and then Brad said, “I have an idea. Let’s check your amazon ranking!” The rest of that discussion I’ll leave to your imagination.

So what about you? Do you get nervous when you have to speak in public?

Today is the official publication date for my book, and contrary to all my expectations, a meteor has not hit the earth. Yet. In fact, the day itself is fairly quiet. I plan to drive over to my local Barnes & Noble to see my books (which are supposed to be in the front of the store—thank you Penguin!). Later today I’m teaching my class and we’ll have a bottle of champagne, which, given that there are fourteen people in the class, is not likely to lead to much debauchery. And then, tonight, some friends are coming over and we will have more champagne.

Not to say that nothing exciting is going on. For one thing, for this week, I am the official blogger for the Penguin web site, which is a big, big honor (and I have put the link in the blogroll). Let me tell you that going to the Penguin site and seeing my name (and face) alongside some of those other authors is just surreal. I spent a good part of my childhood in a library looking at those little penguins on the spines of books and it’s thrilling to be a part of it.

There are lots of other things going on—reviews and articles and readings and so forth, but the whole experience is different than a movie premiere, for example. There is no one moment at which my editor trots out my book and people applaud (unless, of course, she’s not telling me something). When I think of the other major experiences of my life (marriage and having children), they have followed a more traditional narrative arc. There’s all that excitement before the baby is born and then you have that big climactic moment of labor and then, there’s the baby. With a book, the narrative arc is more like a Chekhov story; life goes on and you’re different, but in a quiet way.

Which is really fine with me, because as exciting and wonderful as all this is, the fact of the matter is that I don’t want to do anything that takes me away from writing. At the end of the day, I’m happiest when I’m sitting in front of a computer, thinking about a story. So I’ll drink my champagne, and then I’ll go back to work. 

How about you? What will you do the day your story or book is published?

What did I do right?

In two weeks time, I (and hopefully you) will be able to walk into a bookstore and buy my book. For me, this is a sensation that is surreal. Two years ago, my beautiful gleaming book was nothing more than a bunch of notes that I was writing down in a diary in a Whole Foods store near Columbus Circle, and then it was a ream of computer paper piled up on my desk, and then a somewhat neater pile with fewer marks on it. Then there were galleys with editorial marks and then it disappeared into the bowels of Plume and then it came out, all sort of awkward in ARC  (advance review copy) form, and then it came out again, all spiffed up and lovely, with beautiful colors and blurbs. And now it is going on sale and people who are not related to me are thinking about buying it.

Let me tell you, it feels great. People have told me that there’s a lot of angst associated with being published—the reviews, the disappointing sales, the stress of marketing, and so on, and I’m sure that’s true. I’m also sure that it’s very difficult to be beautiful because you never know if people really like you for you or your looks. But neither of these issues is up there with finding a cure to cancer. The fact is that somehow, remarkably, I have beaten the odds. My first novel is being published by a major commercial publisher;  I have done something right. And I keep trying to figure out what that is.

The Fiction Class is the third novel I wrote, but the first that I sold, and so I keep asking myself, how is it different from the other two. The first novel I ever tried to write, Pitch, was the story of a woman whose first lover, an eccentric musician, suddenly reappears in her life, forcing her to choose between the life she has and the life she once thought she wanted.  My second novel, Courting Disaster, was the story of a woman who has been engaged seventeen times and then falls in love. Both novels were finalists for major awards, so I think they were well-written, and yet they never made the cut. In the rejection letters, which I saved, so that I could torture myself, agents and editors praised the writing, but said they just didn’t love the book.

When I began to write The Fiction Class, I did have a sense that I had stumbled onto a topic that might have wide appeal. I know firsthand that a lot of people want to learn to write and I did think, that if I could do it right, I could probably sell this book. One thing that struck me was that my class evaluations always came back saying that the students felt that I was warm and friendly, but the rejection letters for my novels came back saying I was cold and bitter. So clearly I was doing something different when I was teaching than I was doing when I was writing. Then I realized, when I’m teaching, I’m concerned with keeping my students interested and entertaining them and I’m not thinking about myself quite so much.

So, I decided to pretend that I was teaching my novel to my students. I put imaginary names on post-it notes and stuck them in front of my computer, so that I could imagine a class sitting there, listening to me.  I stood up and spoke the words of the novel out loud.  I became much more conscious of the reader. And the novel almost wrote itself. I have never written anything so quickly and with so much pleasure.

So what’s my advice? As always, write what you have to write, but you might want to think about who you hope is going to read it. How about you? Who do you imagine reading your work?

One side note. I have a bunch of readings coming up and I will be posting the event schedule on my web site (www.susanjbreen.com) very soon. So if you’d like to meet face to face, please stop by and say hello.