Nathan Henrion

I was thinking about an idea for a story over the weekend, an idea that is still in the very beginning amoeba state of being.  After just mulling the idea around for awhile I came to the conclusion that I am just not ready to tackle the concept. (I will refrain from divulging the thesis here).  I think it has something to do with the fact that some themes require a lot of living to grasp. 

Call it maturity or experience, I’m not sure.  Maybe its the notion that once you hit a certain age you won’t care if you can’t pull it off.  Who knows?

I wrote the idea down and will keep it in a file.  Maybe in ten years I will be ready to begin it.  Right now, the idea seems too big, too deep, to nuanced and beyond my capabilities to do it justice….for now.  I’m not talking about word count or length, I am talking about depth.  Subtleties.  The magnitude of a sliver of emotion.

So here’s the question:  Have you ever thought about this with an idea or story?  Have you ever admited to yourself that maybe now is not the time to begin that masterpiece?

Needless to say, I have been pretty geeked up the past 24 hours.  I now can say I have people.  An agent.  A Jerry Maguire to my Rod Tidwell.

What is most exciting is that I instantly got some great feedback and critique of my story, as far as what I would need to do to make it even stronger.  So over the past day I have been thinking about the points expressed to me and you know what(?)…the brain is firing again.  I am re-energized to go over the script again and make it even better.

And just like that, my mind is tracing plot lines for another tale that has been on the back burner of the synaptic stove top for a couple months.

This is basically just a “yeah for me” post.  Sorry about that.

Felicia Pride wrote a solid article for the most recent issue of Publisher’s Weekly.  Yours truly is quoted in it.

Great article Felicia!

African-American Books in Today’s Marketplace

A colleague of mine recommended Robert B. Parker’s westerns to me as an example of what my writing reminded her of.  So I went over to the local B&N. After seeing that the dude has about 50 mystery novels out, and dealing with a clueless staff worker who wasn’t even aware that there WAS a western section in the store, I happened to find it.  The first book I picked up was Appaloosa.  In my opinion, as far as desired style, it was spot on.

I don’t think I have ever read in the genre before.  The storyline was a bit like every movie I had seen (i.e. Sergio Leon), but the characters were gritty and the flow was lean and mean.  It was a quick read, so I was able jump right into The Gunman’s Rhapsody and then Resolution.

Gunman’s Rhapsody was a retelling of the Wyatt Earp tale in Tombstone.  A bit dry in spots, but so is history.  It can’t all be action.  Reading it, I couldn’t help seeing in my mind Val Kilmer as Doc Holiday from the film Tombstone.

But Resolution, now there is a story worthy of the re-read pile.  It is a sequel to Appaloosa, following Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch as they go to a new town and shoot a bunch of people.  What made the book so cool is that there are two ancillary characters,  Cato and Rose, who are hired on as opposing gunslingers.  They are mean and nasty, but through the book they prove that they got a strong moral side.  Bad guys you root for who ultimately do the right thing.

The western may be a dull and tired genre, but I HIGHLY recommend checking out Resolution at your local library.  Brimstone, a third in the series, came out last spring, but I haven’t got my hands on that yet.

Check out this query letter brought about by the ABA concerning the book price wars going on at Amazon, Wal-mart, and Target

DOJ letter calls for investigation

I’m still waiting to hear back from some friends who I sent my manuscript too. A few have given me some kudos, love, support, all that good stuff. “It actually reads like a book,” said one of my colleagues. The best compliment I got was from dear old mom who said “Its not like a Danielle Steele book, I like that.” Yes! I succeeded in my goal of not writing a manuscript like Danielle Steele.

So, sitting here waiting.  What to do now? As a good rule of business, it is not a good idea to just sit and wait for one path to materialize.  So I started thinking “What if I wanted to self-publish” this book.  Barring the many reasons why that is not my ideal route, I entertained the idea for awhile and then thought about what I would need to accomplish this.

In the digital age, cost of production is growing smaller and smaller.  So that was not a concern in my hypothesizing.  I came up with three things that would be essential for getting a self-published venture under way.  (Its the same thing that sells books off a book shelf in a store by the way).

1. Cover : with a bad cover, you won’t sell squat.  I’ve been to enough book trade shows to know from experience…you can almost always spot the self-pub books by their cover.  They are horrendous.

2. Sales Copy : you would not believe how important those 25 word blurbs on Amazon (B&N, etc…) are until you read enough bad ones.  That short little blurb is what will sell the book after the cover gets it recognized.  Hell, from a sales perspective, the back cover copy is sometimes more important than the contents.

3. PR :  you need to call in favors from everyone you know to write, post, comment, review the life out of the book.  You would have to rely on word of mouth, because self-pubs are not going to get the trade journal reviews.

So, with this thinking, I started tinkering with a cover.  FYI, it was done just as an experiment with the crappy editing tools that come stock in Windows XP…so don’t be to crazy with the slams.

I practically copied this from the Vintage edition of In Cold Blood by Truman Capote.  I liked the feel and design that cover lent to the book itself.

Check out the Prologue if you haven’t done so already.

This past week our furnace broke down just in time for the first cold week of the season. We spent a couple nights wrapped in blankets, and then decided to move into a hotel while it is being repaired. On the way to work this morning, my mind drifted onto a train of thought (you know how that goes) of memories I had not thought of for a long time. Here is the scattered recollection:

My parents grew up in Kansas, my mother in Topeka, my father in an orphanage in Kansas City. They met in McPherson Kansas while attending college. My father worked for a man who installed appliances (and furnaces) in the small town, and this boss became a surrogate family to him.

The business owner’s names were Mark and Mary. Through the years, they became my adoptive grandparents, and we would spend our summers there. From the time school got out in June to when we started again in August, we would travel out to the middle of the prairie and spend the days doing stuff kids do growing up.

Mary had a large garden out back, and a side “house” where she would can all of the things she grew. I was never a big fan of this, as I remember having to eat all the things that grew in the backyard. What kid likes to eat vegetables? Not me. There were many nights I remember sitting at the table refusing to eat a green pepper stuffed with God-knows-what.

At the table, I would sit by Mark. It was confusing at times in the names, sometimes it would be “grandpa”, sometimes it would be “Mark”, as if nobody had decided collectively on the proper naming convention. I still don’t know what to call him when I tell stories about Kansas.

Mark was a hard working man. He would be out the door by 6, and return home 12-14 hours later. Old school all the way, he would come in, sit in his recliner, and wait for dinner to be on the table. His clothes of choice after work were a pair of tan cloth shorts, a white v-neck t-shirt, black dress socks, and slippers. A short man at maybe 5′ 5″ on a good day, he wore the old army style black rimmed glasses that were so thick you could start a brush fire with them.

Sitting next to Mark, staring at a plate of of vegetables I didn’t want to eat, he was smacking away like a toothless muppet on his meal. He looked over at me and smiled, then hit me in the arm much harder than a 9 year old could take. “Don’t like that food?” he asked with a grin. I didn’t say anything, quietly scared of voicing that I didn’t want to eat it. He leaned closer and whispered “Some of it is pretty bad…but sometimes you just have to force it down to make her happy.”

I can’t remember if I ate it, but I remember his look when he said it. An old man even back then, he knew how to get through life without ever complaining about anything. Hard working, stubborn, but kind.

So here I am now, with a broken furnace that I am not able to fix myself (thinking about a “grandpa” that could), and finding that I am complaining about circumstances that piss me off. I guess there are a couple things I could still learn from Mark if I just slow down to remember.

This may seem like a bizarre question, but do you have books in your library that you know from experience are extremely worthwhile, but are so disturbing at the same time that you are hesitant to recommend them?  I am wrapping up Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, which led me to this question.  The book is fantastic, but so gruesome and violent at the same time, that I would be hard pressed to hand it to someone and say “Here ya go, have a nice weekend.”

There have been other books like that when I come to think of it. Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers by Filip Muller was that way.  The story of a Jewish man in WWII who was forced to work on a camp crew manning the gas chambers is a book that you feel bad suggesting to someone, but is so gripping that you wish others would read it.  A lot of Holocaust literature is like that.  Everyone should read some it, just to reflect on how brutal the world can be while remembering those poor souls who endured it.  But then again, its not light beach reading either.

That is what makes Blood Meridian so over the top.  Its fiction, but it uses a lot of historical facts to show that the wild west was just that…freakin’ wild, barbaric, frightening, and sick.

Another one that comes to mind is The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andric which dealt with four centuries of Bosnian/Yugoslavian history centered around one particular location.  Andric won the Noble Prize for Literature in 1961, probably for his capacity to give people nightmare visions that won’t go away.  If you have read this book, then tell me how to get the impaling scene on the bridge out of your mind?

So, are there books in your favorite’s list that would fall into this line of thinking…or am I the only one?

In studying Russian literature, I came across a lot of authors whose names never crossed my mind before.  Gogol, Turgenev, Goncharov, the list could go on.  Sure, Pushkin and Tolstoy are writers most people are familiar with, but opening up a canon of unknown entities was part of the fascination.

Even fewer people know that Joseph Stalin wrote poetry.  Before he became a paranoid homicidal maniac, he commited thought to verse.  In my studies and research, I unearthed some of his poems that have never been published before, and I would like to share those with you right now.  Here are three of my favorites:

To My Cat

Curled up on the floor
Next to Berea’s feet
No sign of dissenting
But peacefully asleep
Lays Bo Bo, my cat.

I recall with a smile
How you turn me all softy
Especially when you pooped
In Khrushchev’s coffee
Sweet Bo Bo, my cat

Curled up on the floor
Plotting my downfall
But I will get you first
And nail you to the wall
DIE! Bo Bo, my cat.

It is clear from this verse that his paranoia knew no bounds, and even those close to him were not immune from his rage.

This second poem shows Stalin’s humorous side mingling with his inherent mean streak.

The Joke

A joke was told
By me of course
About a handicapped Ukranian
And his seeing eye horse

Roosevelt felt slighted
turning silent and cold
Churchill told him
“Lighten up, butthole”

Roosevelt looked off
Pretending we weren’t there
But me and ol’ Church
We didn’t much care

Ultimately however, Stalin was a lonely soul.  Murdering all your friends will tend to do that to you.  Thus, his vain attempts at commraderie all proved futile.

The Party

Another birthday has come and gone
Invited friends for cake and song
But no one came…

I hope you enjoy these as much as I did!