The questions I get most about writing are the practical ones. What do you write with? Where do you write? How do you find time to write?

Answers to these questions are supplied by novelist Ann Patchett in The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life. It’s like a FAQ for aspiring writers.

Do you need to get an MFA in Creative Writing? Not if it means going into debt, according the prudent Patchett.

Should you turn your desk away from the window, to avoid distractions? “Desk positioning does not a real writer make,” according to the author.

Are you really a writer? Spend one hour a day for thirty days writing to find out. Sit down and do the work. You’ll be amazed at how much you can accomplish.

She also believes that writer’s block is a myth. If you were stumped by a complicated math problem, do you have math block? No, you’re still working on the problem, even if you have no evident progress.

Patchett also punctures the idea that “everyone has a great novel in them.” Would you say that everyone has a five-minute mile in them? Writing is a craft that must be learned.

Her description of plot is the best I’ve ever read:

The plot of a novel should be like walking down a busy city street: First there are all the other people around you, the dog walkers and the skateboarders, the couples fighting, the construction guys swearing and shouting, the pretty girl on teetering heels who causes those construction guys to turn around for a split second of silence. There are drivers hitting the brakes, diving birds slicing between buildings, and the suddenly ominous clouds banking to the west. All manner of action and movement is rushing towards you and away. But that isn’t enough. You should also have the storefronts at street level and the twenty stories of apartments full of people and their babies and their dreams. Below the street, there should be infrastructure: water, sewer, electricity. Maybe there’s a subway down there as well, and it’s full of people.

This rang true with me. A novel can’t be just about one thing. All your characters, even the most minor ones, are heading somewhere, pursuing their own destinies. They exist in a dynamic world and, if it’s a good novel, are worthy of stories of their own.

The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life is a Kindle Single. It’s a slim volume but at $2.99 is a bargain for anyone seeking answers on the craft of writing and the realities of the writing life.

Join me on May 12 at 3 PM for an online chat about my novel Murder in Ocean Hall. My mystery about the murder of the world’s most famous ocean explorer is the first book club selection of the Independent Author Index. This new site is a place where “readers meet authors” and is a good example of how communities are forming online to discuss books.

Looking forward to answering questions on May 12!

There’s a reason why Amazon is such a titan in the e-book world – it delivers income to writers. It does so seamlessly, easily and without authors having to do anything. You don’t have to hound publishers for checks or wait for the results of some sort of mysterious accounting process.

Amazon posts sales results weekly. For me, it’s just beer money, as I watch my two novels sell in dribs and drabs. Still, it’s something. My work is getting out there and I’m making some cash, even if it’s not going to get me more than a six-pack or two.

And the company constantly innovates, like with their Amazon Prime program. Among other benefits, you can borrow select e-books for free. And authors get a share of a pool of money set aside for the program. In March, it was $600,000!

Each time one of my Kindle titles got borrowed last month, I received $2.18, according to the Amazon press release. That’s a nice royalty, considering one of my novels is 99 cents and the other is $2.99.

So if you’re an Amazon Prime member, borrow my books please! You don’t need a Kindle either. There are Kindle apps for the iPad, iPhone, Mac and PC.

Murder in Ocean Hall is a great read if you like mysteries set in DC. A reviewer wrote that it will take you behind the scenes of the city and show you how things work – or don’t work. It’s a mystery novel written by someone who actually lives in Washington and knows the neighborhoods beyond the monuments.

Looking for something fast and fun? Then check out Don’t Mess Up My Block, a satire of the self-help biz. Follow the adventures of Laurent Christ as he pursues success across an American landscape littered with greedy consultants, social media frauds and incompetent bureaucrats.

Check them out! And remember, borrowing my books will keep me in beer, an essential element of my creative process

Harry Crews is one of those authors I wish I read more of.

His New York Times obituary describes his books as being filled with freakish, swaggering, outsized personalities. Born poor, and raised rough, he’s the type of writer that you rarely see these days, with a voice that hasn’t been sanded down by MFA programs or the need to be politically correct.

“Repellent” is another word used in the obituary, which is certainly true. His novels aren’t for the faint of heart, as they are filled with gory misfortune and sexual misadventure.

I read Body by Crews. It’s a twisted book about a female bodybuilder that brutally satirizes the South. He handles issues of race, sexuality and the American pursuit of success with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Seeing him violently deconstruct the hand-wringing concerns of today is liberating, making you want to be more honest in your life and writing.

As Crews said about writing:

If you’re gonna write, for God in heaven’s sake, try to get naked. Try to write the truth. Try to get underneath all the sham, all the excuses, all the lies that you’ve been told.

My favorite books are short ones.

The Great Gatsby is a slim 180 pages. That’s all it takes for Fitzgerald to recreate the Roaring 20s and give us the quintessential American striver.

Ernest Hemingway is a master of economy, using just 251 pages to tell the tragedy of The Sun Also Rises.

A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh is another brilliant little book from the interwar period. It traces the fall of the British aristocracy in just 264 pages.

Yet, contemporary books seem to sprawl unfettered, as if editors have just given up on their duties. Authors ramble, they discourse, narratives go off into tangents and down weird little cul-de-sacs.

For example, Swamplandia! by Karen Russell. It clocks in at a wearying 416 pages.

The novel starts off incredibly strong, giving us the colorful portrait of the Bigtree family, famed alligator wrestlers of the Everglades. Being from Florida myself, I’ve felt that the comic potential of the state has been underutilized. From exiles plotting revolution to greedy condo flippers, if any state could produce The Great American Novel, it’s this one.

The collapse of the Bigtree family mirrors what’s going on in “mainland” society. Their struggles are shared by many in more prosaic circumstances – they lose it all and the family falls apart.

The section of the novel where the Bigtrees adapt to normal life is fascinating. I loved Russell’s depiction of The World of Darkness, a hell-themed amusement park on the mainland. It’s like a Disney World created by sadists.

But then the book rambles, in an endless journey through the swamp as 12-year-old Ava Bigtree goes in search of her older sister. Lush descriptions of flora and fauna are piled one upon another, creating a mangrove thicket of prose that nearly stops the reader cold.

It’s one of those books where you find yourself peeking ahead a few pages. When is the story getting back to the World of Darkness?

The odyssey in the Everglades takes so long that the ending feels rushed, unresolved, leaving dramatic threads hanging.

Swamplandia! is a good hundred pages too long.

Despite growing up reading books, even I turn away from novels that resemble doorstops. Reamde is a book that I desperately want to read. Yet, at more than a thousand pages, I don’t even want to start it. The novel represents too much of a time commitment in our distracted age.

It’s ironic. The Internet and our ever-present electronic devices have collapsed attention spans. Yet, our books keep getting longer and longer.

No wonder why so few people read novels.

Our lives are crowded with information. In order to break through the electronic din, a novel has to be concise and powerful, a book that looks more like The Great Gatsby than Swamplandia!

My new book, Don’t Mess Up My Block, has advanced to the Second Round of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award (ABNA).

ABNA brings together talented writers, reviewers, and publishing experts to find and develop new voices in fiction. The 2012 international contest will award two grand prizes: one for General Fiction and one for Young Adult Fiction. Each winner will receive a publishing contract with Penguin, which includes a $15,000 advance.

Finalists will be announced in May with grand prize winners selected in June.

Don’t Mess Up My Block is a novel that satirizes self-help books like Who Moved My Cheese and The Secret. It follows the adventures of an ambitious consultant as he goes from disaster to disaster, believing that success is a matter of just following the right catchphrase.

Read the first chapter and then buy it for yourself!

• Kindle – just 99 cents!
• Paperback
• Nook

It doesn’t matter what your business model is as a photographer. It matters what the customer’s buying model is.

The above bit of wisdom is by Guy Kawasaki, who is quoted in an interesting article on rethinking photography business models.

These days, just about the only way photographers can make a living is by shooting weddings. But brides are creatures of our modern age too and are balking at some of the more old-fashioned elements of the business. Scott Bourne writes:

Gone are the days when we can just send some negatives to the lab, order some cheap 8×10 prints, put them in a black folder, mark them up 400 percent and call it a day.

Instead, brides want everything done digitally. They want all the pictures taken during the ceremony burned onto a CD. They even want the unprocessed files so that they can Photoshop them on their own.

Photographers must adapt to what customers want in order to survive.

I see the same thing in the book publishing business. Customers have e-readers, wonderful devices that allow them to buy books instantly. They don’t believe that e-books should be as expensive as print. While publishers may resist, customers believe that e-books should be priced somewhere between free and $9.99.

Readers also don’t care who the publisher is. They talk about the new Stephen King not “Have you seen the St. Martin’s Press catalog?”

But publishers are sticking to their business model, of bringing out books slowly and pricing e-books sometimes even more expensively than their print equivalents. They won’t survive.

Instead, the publisher as middleman will dissipate as authors and readers find each other on Amazon and other e-bookstores.

Social Media Week has been going on this week in DC. One of the sessions was on open source culture. Derrick Ashong is on a mission to give away a million downloads of his music tracks.

How can you make money at that? You can’t. But the sad truth is that most musicians never see a dime from album sales. If you’re a new artist, it’s better to give your stuff away and make money from concerts. (Or, if you’re a rapper, from your clothing line.) But first you need an audience. Giving away music is a way to develop that audience, a model that is explained in Free by Chris Anderson.

In his talk, Derrick explained that the hardest thing to get was people’s attention. “I’ve never heard of you – why would I listen to your music?” Giving away music is a way to start the conversation, to hopefully turn the disinterested into fans.

Can you give away music and make a living? How do photographers adapt to a world of photos everywhere all the time? What does a writer have to do to connect with an online audience?

Nobody knows the answers to these questions yet because the traditional business models are changing, driven by advances in connectivity and consumer demands. But hanging onto the old will lead to irrelevance. Those that adapt to the wishes of consumers will succeed.

This is a preview of my next novel, Don’t Mess Up My Block. It’s a parody of self-help books like Who Moved My Cheese. Look for it after the holidays!

Get my book Murder in Ocean Hall for just 99 cents in this holiday offer exclusively for Kindle owners.

My novel is a murder-mystery set in Washington, DC. Inspired by my experience in the city, Murder in Ocean Hall follows a veteran detective as he investigates the death of the world’s most famous explorer.

My book takes you behind the scenes of our nation’s dysfunctional capital, revealing the real place beyond the monuments.

Amazon reviewers call it:

“a fun, quick read”

“a howdunit with some good research on the author’s part.”

Get Murder in Ocean Hall today!

Now, Discover Your Strengths is one of the very few personal improvement books worth the money. It’s been superseded by the awkwardly-titled StrengthsFinder 2.0 but the message is the same in the new book:

You should concentrate on what you’re best at. Don’t try to improve your weaknesses, instead sharpen the skills that you do better than anyone else. It’s a countervailing message in this age of self-improvement. It says to drop what you suck at (I’m never going to be a great basketball player) and work on what you do best (writing and photography).

The two books contain surveys to identify your unique strengths.  You’ll probably experience an “ah-hah” moment at the results, confirming what you already knew.

The same principle of concentrating on your strengths can be applied to social media efforts. In this new and ever-changing field, how do you determine what to spend time on? Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, FourSquare, Digg, SlideShare, Scribd, Flickr… and on and on and on. You could spend twenty-four hours a day in front of an overheated laptop updating social media sites.

I worked with Janice Hall Booth, a very interesting woman who wrote an inspiring book, Only Pack What You Can Carry. She’s an “adventurista” and an excellent role model for young women who want more out of life than Sex and the City.

Janice had a problem. She wanted to use social media to promote her book but had a full-time job. I’ve seen some of the social media plans for authors – they’re comprehensive, exhausting affairs filled with exhortations such as “get 20 new Twitter followers a day for 30 days.” How do you compel people to follow you? These plans treat all social media channels equally and require herculean efforts to complete.

Also, social media experts are extroverts; writers are not.

I took a different approach. I advised Janice to concentrate on the social media channels that she was most comfortable with. She was more likely to stick with something she was really passionate about and enjoyed. For Janice, this was blogging. Not surprising, since she’s a writer.

For my own social media efforts (for me and Murder in Ocean Hall), I’ve concentrated on blogging and Twitter. I like the constant newsfeed of Twitter, as well as the back-and-forth wittiness with friends. And for writing longer than 144 characters, I have this blog.

There’s a thousand other ways of promoting a book online. GoodReads is a really interesting online community. Facebook marketing ties yourself to the whims of a single online service. A book trailer (like a movie preview) on YouTube is a good idea for graphic novels. An email newsletter is something I’d like to do at some point. I post a lot of photos on Flickr, though they’re about my life in general, not just my book. FourSquare – why do I want people to know where I’m at?

My other piece of social media advice: evaluate after 30 days. What’s working? What’s not? Most social media, like media in general, does not reach a mass audience. You will not have thousands of followers overnight.

Instead, I’d look at your social media efforts based upon your individual strengths. Do you have blog posts that you’re really proud of? Have you made new connections that you treasure? Have you learned something new?

Passion and authenticity are rewarded in social media. Don’t try to do everything. Concentrate on what you enjoy.