Watching the Winter Olympics

I’m a sports fan and a particular fan of the Olympics – winter and summer. And right now – it’s on!

For years I’ve watched as much TV coverage as possible of the various sports, but I’ve been thrilled that streaming online allows me to see much more of the events I watch.

The networks have traditionally only had a few hours each evening to cover many events, so you only got to see the highlights.  That’s still true of much of the prime-time coverage. While watching the highlights can be great, but you can lose comprehension of just how outstanding most of the performances are without anything to compare them to.

Most people realize that getting to the Olympics is a peak experience for almost all the athletes participating. You don’t get there without training hard and long for much of your life. Reaching the top of your sport requires more than just enthusiasm and talent—although you won’t make it without those, success demands the kind of persistence, dedication, and sacrifice most of us can’t even imagine.

Those who get to the Olympics are the best of the best from around the world. Only a very few qualify to begin with, but even so a few of that select group will rise to the top of each sport or event.

Watching can be hard sometimes. Many of the things these athletes attempt are dangerous and have small margins for error.  It can be heartbreaking to see someone who has spent practically every moment of their lives preparing for the few moments of their run, jump, race, or performance come up just short or fail spectacularly.

But then there are moments like what happened yesterday, when a 17-year-old slope-style snowboarder who’d had two miserable runs that put him in last place, put it all together on his third and last attempt, and ripped off a dazzlingly perfect run that won him a gold medal.

And because I’m an author, I have to bring that around to writing. But it’s not hard to see the parallels. In fact, they’re rather obvious. If you want to be at the top of the writing game, you’ve got to have talent, but then you’ve got work, work, work at it. That means keep writing…and writing…and writing some more.

So for me, its back to writing. And then I get to watch more Olympics.

Attack of the Typo Gremlins

by Janis Susan May/Janis Patterson

The Husband says I’m weird. I prefer fanciful. That does not, however, change the fact there are some things out there that we cannot explain and which we definitely cannot control. In other words, my friends, the Typo Gremlin is real. He’s out there and he’s both malign and sneaky. I give it the masculine pronoun, as it is changeable, sometimes irrational and very dictatorial. It doesn’t matter what you do – edit, re-edit, get multiple professional editors galore and still that sneaky little devil will get around everything and embarrass you.

When I was still a child I started working in my parents’ advertising agency. Even then I was the picky sort, and one of my jobs was to proof-read the ads we put out. Being commercially oriented instead of consumer, our ads were both word-dense and generally boring, so that was a time-consuming job. Of course I wasn’t the only proof-reader – before an ad went out just about everyone in the office had looked it over – but in spite of that the Typo Gremlin would still have his way. We’d see the mistake – usually in 30 point type – right after the bazillion copy print run was completed.

When I was most definitely not a child I was editor in chief of first one multi-magazine publishing group and then later another; wherever I was, though, didn’t make a difference. The Typo Gremlin always managed to find me. The first group I worked for had been plagued with a slipshod editor who apparently didn’t care what the magazines looked like. I had been brought on board to bring the group up to snuff. Needless to say, it was not always a pleasant process, but after an issue or two I had pretty much everything looking better and under control. Except the Typo Gremlin.

The first issue of my editorship was a disaster; the second one was much better and by the third we were putting out a product I could be proud of. From the first day I instituted a law that even after our proofreaders had looked over everything no board went to the printer unless it had my initials on it.

And in spite of that the sneaky little Typo Gremlin still made his presence known, dancing through every issue, sometimes leaving one, or maybe two mistakes – though by the second issue they were usually little ones. Being a firm believer in turning a weakness into a strength I finally gave in and made a partner of the wee beastie, running a permanent contest that whoever found a typo in any one of our magazines (that group published three) would win a prize. The prizes were little – a yearly subscription, one of the little booklets we produced on everything from gardening to fortunetelling – but our readership soared and our ad revenue went through the roof. It was so successful that I carried the idea to my next publishing group, where we had the same results.

So, as odd as it sounds, your enemy can become your friend if you play things right. Even a Typo Gremlin. 

To Contest or Not To Contest

In a writer’s world, contest means a competition for prizes — either of a financial, professional or industrial sense. The biggest, most prestigious contests carry huge payouts the Man Booker, Nobel  and Pulitzer are probably the best known, usually run by publishing houses or their affiliates and bookstore chains. No doubt the online booksellers will get into this act soon, if they haven’t already.

With other contests within the writing industry itself (as opposed to publishing or selling books), the prizes are less fiduciary and, consequently, less prestigious. In the mid-1970s, the BBC presented a mini-series, The Glittering Prizes which was shown on American television a few years later to wide acclaim. The series, written by Frederic Raphael,  has been lauded as “a golden age of television, when the BBC made British dramas for a British audience rather than overblown costume nonsense for international consumption” (Amazon customer review) — Upstairs, Downstairs / Downton Abbey fans take note.

Hayyim Bialik

Prizes awarded within the industry are often genre-specific: the RITA, the Agatha, the Dilys, Aurealis Award for Best Horror Novel,  The Bram Stoker; community specific: the Bernstein, the Koret, the Bialik, Edgar Lewis Wallant, Alice B Readers, Prix République du Glamour, the Orwell Prize, the Spear’s Book Award; social issues: the Bellwether; the Pinter; the William O. Douglas.

Alice B. Toklas

The Man Booker, Pulitzer etc. are judged by a particular elite group of people who may or may not reflect the thoughts and considerations of the general public. The criteria for winning such an elevated accolade are, of course, based on the author’s craftsmanship but often there is a socio-political element that must also fit the judges’ narrative or world view.

There are also the industry-related awards such as: the Publishing Innovation Award, for digital publishing; the Hugo, for magazine publishing; the Herman Voaden, for playwriting; the ABC Award, Golden Heart and the Three-Day Novel Contest for the unpublished writer.

RITA

For the writer, some of the most rewarding contests are those judged by readers, especially readers in their genre. Among the best are: the HUGOs (Science Fiction), the NERFA,(for Romance novels), the ELLA (for Romance novellas) and the RUBY for (Romance novels) — both the RUBY and ELLA are offered by Romance Writers of Australia, not to be confused with RWA (Romance Writers of America).

Romantic Times also runs reader-judged contests. Smaller contests include the NewEngland Readers’ Choice, Romancing the Novel PublishedAuthors Contest.

RTN-PAC

Some of these are not what I call “reader-judged” because the readers are members of the writers’ organizations offering the contest. While they may also be readers, these are more peer-judged than the “real deal readers” who judge our work when they take it out of the library or buy a copy, read it and pass it along to someone they want to share it with. 

Riding the Contest Rodeo

The call came while we were stopped at a rest area off a highway in a rather deserted section of Northwestern Ohio. I was driving from Indiana to our home in North Carolina with my daughter and her three small children, who would all be visiting us for a couple of weeks.

At the rest stop, I was feeding snacks to the two older boys, aged three and a half and two, while my daughter changed the baby’s (three months) diaper. When the phone rang, I almost didn’t answer, but I don’t give out my cell phone number to many people, and it was a weekday, so it might be an important business call.

It was, but not in the way I expected. I heard a voice saying “Congratulations. The Detective’s Dilemma is a finalist in the Category/Series category of the Published Daphne Awards.” I think there was a bit of a silence and then maybe some stuttering excitement on my part. I couldn’t tell this wonderful woman that I’d completely forgotten I’d entered the contest! (To be fair to myself, I was helping to herd around three children under the age of four.  I had a few other things on my mind.)

It took a while to sink in that she meant it and it wasn’t a mistake.  I don’t think I really believed it until I saw the official list of finalists and found my name there.

I’ve been a finalist in contests before, and I’ve even won a few, but I had a long drought between books before this one so it’s been a long time before I’ve even entered one.

I don’t enter a lot of contests, usually no more than two or three per book, mostly due to the cost (entries fees plus cost of shipping books). My track record is so-so.  Looking back, I think I’ve probably made it to the finals in about one third of the contests I’ve entered. That’s probably actually a pretty good percentage, considering the number of entries most contests get.

For The Detective’s Dilemma, I only entered three – the Rita, which was more pro forma than anything since I knew I had zero chance of even being a finalist, and two other chapter contests. I didn’t final in the other one.  I didn’t expect to final in any of them.

To me, that’s the key to making the whole contest thing work. I look on it as a gamble that sometimes pays off, but more often than not doesn’t. Readers’ tastes differ and they’re not all going to like my books. In most contests it takes only one judge not liking your book to sink its chances. It may not be fair, but it’s reality and you always have to take that into consideration when entering. So I choose my contests carefully, and I build up no expectations of anything good happening, other than getting my book into the hands of a few new readers.

I enter the contest, send off the books, and then put it totally out of my mind. I move onto the next project, usually the book I have in progress and concentrate on that. Occasionally I’ll get one of those great phone calls or an email letting me know I made it to the finals. More often, I hear nothing or get an email saying “I’m sorry to have to tell you…”  There was a time when that could send me into a tailspin of depression. Not anymore.

Now, I’m more than happy to celebrate when good things do happen, and I’m always excited to congratulate my friends’ good news as well. But I shrug off the routine. But if it doesn’t happen, I shrug and move on. I’ll try to make the next book the very best work I can. But not to win contests. I want to win readers.

And because I don't want to lose my Good Grandma credentials, here are pictures of the daughter and three grandchildren who were visiting us:

Cassian (age two) is the redhead; Liam is three and a half.

Sarah with Liam and the baby, Henry (three months).

The Detective's Dilemma was published by Kensington/Lyrical Press in November, 2014, and is still available in trade paperback and ebook formats.