A week ago, I went out to the Oregon coast and spoke to a writer’s workshop about how I sold my first book.  It was a week-long workshop focused on how to sell your fiction — writing queries, crafting proposals, targeting editors and agents, and generally getting a better understanding of the publishing business.  Since my story had a few interesting twists and turns, including switching literary agents at one point, the teachers thought it might serve as a good example.  And for these particular teachers, I was more than happy to do anything I could to help pay it forward.  

That’s because I’ve known these teachers — both prolific, longterm professional fiction writers — for fifteen years.  I realized this driving back from the coast.  I met Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith when I was a green nineteen-year-old college student when I wandered into the open weekly writing workshop they were running down in Eugene, Oregon, brought there by my friend Michael Totten, whose now become a notable writer in his own right.  The funny thing is, I went to the University of Oregon because I thought that’s where I would learn how to be a writer, but I ended up learning far more about writing by attending the workshop for the next three years.  At least half the people in that workshop were reguarly selling books and short stories. 

Why am I telling you this?  Because if you live anywhere in the vicinity of Lincoln City, Oregon — and for my part, because of how valuable I feel their teaching is, I define vicinityas anywhere on planet Earth — you, too, have the opportunity to benefit from Kris and Dean’s teaching.  At two distinct points in my life, I was able to benefit from their knoweledge and experience.  I would never say I’m a writer because of them, but I would say I’m incredibly grateful to them for their willingness to share what they’ve learned, and I’m pretty confident in saying they helped me cut years off my development as a writer.  Sure, they’re charging for their workshops to cover their time, but trust me, they could make more money with that same time writing fiction.  They do this to pay it forward.  

Every few years, they do a series of workshops, some for a weekend, some as long as two weeks, whose sole purpose is to help writers learn to write better and sell more frequently.  These are workshops specifically targeted at professional fiction writers. If you want to learn how to do something professionally, the best way is to learn from folks who have walked the path.  

Kris and Dean have walked the path.  Both have published dozens upon dozens of novels, in many genres, in many names, hitting bestseller lists and winning awards.  They’re ordinarily pretty selective about who they take as students, but right now they’re offering a workshop targeted at any writer who’s even thought about the possibility of writing publishable fiction.  They call it the Kris and Dean show.  It’s a weekend out of your life, on the lovely Oregon coast.  If you have any thought of writing for publication, then you should take this workshop.  

It’s interesting:  Michael Totten told me he brought along a dozen or so writers over the years to that Eugene workshop, all of them supposedly serious writers.  But I was the only one who came back.  Part of the reason for this, I think, is purely human psychology.  Those writers were paying good money for their English or Journalism or MFA degrees, and the weekly workshop was free, so how could the free workshop be worth more?  How could it be worth anything?  You pay for what you get, right? 

Sure, but when it comes to achieving success in writing, or really anything, the primary payment is not in money.  It’s in time and effort.  If you find good teachers, the ones who have walked the path, and you’re willing to put in the time and effort, you will get what you paid for in blood, sweat, and tears. 

The key is knowing a good thing when you see it.  It still boggles my mind how many writers don’t understand what a rare thing Kris and Dean’s workshops are.  But I suppose that’s fitting.  A real professional fiction writer is a rarity, too, right?

• Wicked Lovely, Melissa Marr.  Listened to this one as an audio book, and it lived up to its title:  It was both wicked and lovely.  A short, engaging YA novel about one teenage girl’s struggle to find her identity — while also struggling with her unusual ability to see a world populated by fairies, with a love story thrown in for good measure.
• Uglies, Pretties, and Specials, Scott Westerfield.  I’d heard a lot about Westerfield’s far future YA series, so I decided to give them a shot.  I was not disappointed.  Tally Youngblood proved to be a very engaging main character, and well worth spending three books with.  I can also see why the first book became a bestseller, because it has one of the best opening chapters I’ve seen in a while.
• Baby, Would I Lie?, Donald E. Westlake.  Short, punchy and fun.  An aging country western star is on trial for murder.  Throw in a spunky female journalist, and a nice twist ending, and you’ve got yourself a good read.  I’d never read any Westlake, and always wanted to try him; now I have to go find more of his books.
• What Do You Care What Other People Think?, Richard Feynman.  A short nonfiction memoir by the Nobel Prize laureate.  I’d read and enjoyed Feynman’s Surely You’re Joking, Mister Feynman?, and I liked this one too, especially the chapters that focused on his part in the committee investigating the Challenger space shuttle disaster.

I’m not bragging here, but not every writer has the benefit of a genius in his office — like I do, with good old Albert Einstein.  Especially a genius wearing a hat from The Cat in the Hat.

Actually, Albert was a gift from my parents, who bought him for me when I started a bookstore.  And when I sold the store, he was the only thing I took with me.  We’ve developed a good friendship.  He doesn’t say much, but that’s okay.  He’s a genius, so he doesn’t have to.

I have my beliefs, and I don’t want to rain on any one’s parade, so I generally don’t try to pick fights with the religious crowd.  Mostly, I envy them.  That belief in an after-life is like a nice warm blanket you can pull over yourself when the cold realization of your own mortality overcomes you.  That feeling suddenly overcame me today when I was out on a walk.  I got to thinking about our home remodel, and how this is the house we plan to raise our family in for at least the next fifteen years (until Calvin graduates from high school), and I realized that if all goes as we expect, I’ll go from 35 to 50 in this house.  Essentially, passing from being a young man through middle age.  My children will grow up.  Many others will die; still others will be born.  For what?  And why?  There is no why.  There just is.  Why is the moon the moon? 

You can either invent a fiction to believe in, or you can try to put it out of your mind as best you can.  Otherwise you’ll be overcome with grief — not sadness, but grief.  You’ll grieve for your own eventual death and for the eventual death of everyone around you.  It’s not a way to live. And topping it off is the cruel possibility that your life could be winked out unexpectedly at any moment.  

The one good thing is that it does make you appreciate everyone around you.  You feel more sympathy.  You realize that everyone is on the same road, even if they are on different journeys.  We are alone, and yet we are together.  It is the great irony of humankind. 

So I sit and watch my children playing before me.  Children are born and live with the cherished myth of an everlasting life.  Then one day they, too, feel the death-pangs of grief for the first time, and that will be  beginning of the end of their childhoods.  It is sad and poignant and you wish you could spare them from it, but you can’t.  No one can.  You shelter them for a little while, maybe, and that’s part of parenting, but in the end they have to become just as fully human as you. 

So what do I do?  I go on living.  I go on parenting and being a good husband.  I love.  I try not to do harm.  I write, because it’s something I’m somewhat good at, and because I want to become my best self.  Occasionally, I write about things like this, because I don’t want to shy away from the shadows or the light.  It’s all I can do.  

And in the end, you decide to appreciate the gifts the universe has given you.  You didn’t have to be born, after all.  Ever think about that?