If this were a normal year, no pandemic and no restrictions on gatherings, I'd have a party to celebrate the recent release of a new nonfiction book, The Many Faces of Grief: Stories of Love, Loss, and Hope From a Hospital Chaplain.  But... In a celebration here in my home office, I'm drinking hot chocolate, with a little something extra for added warmth. As I write this, it is 25 degrees here in Texas. Way colder than a normal February day this far from the snow belt.  And I may add a cookie or two to my extravagant solitary celebration. :-) Still, it is important to mark these accomplishments, even if we can't do that in style for the time being.  This current release is taken from a blog I wrote prior to the release of my first hardcover novel, One Small Victory. This was back when blogging was still fairly new, but my publisher, Five Star Cengage, thought it would be good to build some advance interest in the novel via a regular blog.  Since blogging is so much...

Marketing a book starts long before the book itself is more than a gleam in the author’s eye. For me as a writer, the toughest part of the marketing package is one that comes early on: the pitch . This is the teaser that will hook an agent or an editor to read the manuscript. Or, if you're publishing your work yourself, the pitch is what goes on the back of the cover, or in the description on the e-book websites to hook readers. A pitch isn't a summary, but it does need to give a sense of the writing and the story. It also needs to explain why the book matters. And it should be short: certainly less than a page. What works for me in writing a good pitch is to step back–way back–and focus on the essentials: why the book matters and what makes it unique. The pitch below is the draft I wrote on a recent weekend for my memoir, Bless the Birds . Let me know what you think! Bless the Birds is part of a national conversation that is happening quietly and privately, but nee...

Memoir can get a bad rap. It’s been likened to reality shows, panned for TMI, pigeonholed as mere publicity for politicos. My favorite peeve is the ghostwritten celebrity memoir—or, worse, the simpleminded recovery story in which the protagonist falls into drink or illness and, inevitably, regains health by page 300. It’s the "inevitably" that bothers me. These memoirs, written according to formula, often gloss over the real difficulties of people trying to make and keep their lives better. The “my cat saved my life” story bugs me no end, as you can imagine. So why did I write a memoir about a feral cat who helped ground me emotionally in an uneasy period of my life? The most important answer is that Henry, the ginger cat I rescued one night after someone’s car had hit him on a busy road, turned out to be one of the sweetest creatures ever. Oh, he hissed and spat at the beginning and hid under my spare room bed for six months. But when he finally began to trust ...

Photo by Cara Lopez Lee I’m living a double life: promoting the new edition of my memoir while also pitching my novel to agents. In one life, I’ve arrived at a pinnacle. In the other, I’m standing breathless on a false summit, staring up the steep slope ahead, wondering if I’ll ever reach the top. The view always promises to be better up there, but I find it important to pause and appreciate the climb. Back in 2006 to 2007, I began researching my historical novel. I explored East LA and El Paso from my grandmother’s and father’s point of view; interviewed family, locals, and historians; read books about Chinese-American and Mexican-American history; and studied archival photos and articles. That same year, I sent fifty queries to agents to pitch my recently completed memoir, They Only Eat Their Husbands . In 2007, I registered a synopsis of the novel I planned to write, Daughter on the Borderline , with the Writers Guild of America, West. That same year, I landed an agent...

Often the best titles, and memoirs, come from seeking connections between seemingly unrelated events. This takes time. In Colorado, a boyfriend threatened to shoot me, so when I was twenty-six I moved to Alaska.

As a ghostwriter, I have written many memoirs for non-writers. Memoir is my favorite genre to ghostwrite, perhaps because of my educational background in history. I love exploring how our individual lives affect, or are affected by, the events and trends of “big history.” It’s a cliché that “every life has a story” but it is a cliché because it is true. Unfortunately, the vast majority of these stories are never told. How many of us wish they had an ancestor’s story, told in their own words? Sometimes all we know is a tantalizing tidbit: a tiny piece of an ancestor’s story that raises as many questions as it answers. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, we think, to know the hopes, dreams, wishes and fears of Great-Great-Grandma as she bounced over the plains in a covered wagon? Wouldn’t it be cool to know what Great-Great Uncle Joe was thinking while he robbed that bank? And why did Great-great-great Grandpa leave Scotland in such a hurry? Well, if they didn’t write their thoughts down, ...

Memoirs have become very popular of late, and I think that is due, in part, on the fact that so many Boomers are becoming "of a certain age" and discovering the importance of that connection between now and the past. Kim Pearson has written several posts here at The Blood Red Pencil about memoir writing, and here is a link to one of her more recent posts about dealing with the facts. If you are inclined to write a memoir, her series is most helpful. The following is taken from a memoir I have been working on in between my fiction projects, and in looking at this piece I realize how quickly we can forget those things that molded us into the people we are today. Perhaps capturing the memories is more important than we ever thought. "One day when I was reminiscing about high school, I dug out my high school yearbooks – I won’t tell you how old they were, but it was a relief to find the pages didn't crumble. Anyway, my intent was just to look for a picture of someon...