Authors Dawn Byrne and Marie Gilbert at Bogart's

Marie Gilbert, Joanne Costantino, and Dawn Byrne

Dawn Byrne and I always have a great time together when we do the book signings for Tall Tales and Short Stories, an anthology published this past year by the members of the South Jersey Writers' Group. But yesterday’s signing was the most interesting one that we’ve done so far this year. Dawn, Joanne Costantino and I were at Bogart’s Books and Cafe located at 210 North High Street in Millville, NJ, and all three of us had an absolute blast!

Bogart's

Amy, who is the owner, has done such a wonderful job with this bookstore. There is a touch of the bohemian in this quaint little shop that begs you to stay and take your time searching for that special book.

Even the bathroom has character; make sure to ask for the 3D glasses. There are comfortable tables and chairs in Bogart’s for you to rest, sip your hot tea or coffee, page through your purchased book, or listen to music. Check the Upcoming Events page of their website for scheduled entertainment. If you’re lucky, you might catch a glimpse of one of the special inhabitants who live at Bogart’s.

Alaina and Nolan

Yes, Bogart’s has ghosts, and since I attract ghosts, I got to meet 'Andrew' as soon as I entered the shop. He made sure to tell me how happy he is to be living in a bookstore. Amy confirmed that there are a few spirits occupying the building and she and her staff have encountered them on a daily basis. I’ll be going back with my team to do a more thorough investigation.

We sold lots of books and met a lot of nice people; a few who were interested in joining our group. Here is Nolan and Alaina, who bought the first book of the day. Hey, Glenn Walker, we found someone who loves pop culture and French fries and "Doctor Who" as much as you do. He’s a friend of SJWG member Sarah Hawkins-Miduski. Glenn, meet George Scully.

George Scully

After we packed up, we headed over to the Levoy Theatre to check out the NJ HorrorFest that was taking place inside the theater. Imagine our delight when we bumped into, and spoke with, William Katt (from "The Greatest American Hero," the original Carrie, and he coincidentally played a writer in House) in person. Sorry, I didn’t get a picture with Mr. Katt, the famous TV star. Dawn and I were like two giddy schoolgirls and forgot that we had a camera. We giggled the whole way back to the car. It was the perfect ending to a perfect day.

William Katt

Back to business, our friends at Bogart's need your help to qualify for a grant. Please go to Chase Mission Main Street Grants, type in the zip code for Bogart's: 08332, into the business search box, and then vote for Bogart’s Book Store. You must be logged into Facebook to vote. Thank you!

If you'd like to know what's on the schedule for the South Jersey Writers' Group, please feel free to stop by our website, and the calendar of events there.

And, if you're a writer in the South Jersey area looking for support, camaraderie, and most of all, information about the craft and the business, the South Jersey Writers' Group is open to new memberships through the end of the year. Details on membership and all the gatherings, workshops, and events that the group provides can be found on our website.

Don't forget to Like us on Facebook, and Follow us on Twitter!

Upcoming SJWG Book Signings

Super D (Dawn Byrne) and Super G (Marie Gilbert) are back and ready to rumble.

Read this message to the tune of "When You're A Jet" from West Side Story. Why not make it interesting, right?

Now, where were we? Oh, yeah, "When you're a Jet, you're a Jet all the way from..."

We are doing a book signing this Saturday, November 2nd at Bogart's Books & Café, which is located at 210 North High Street, Millville, NJ 08052 from 10:30 to 2:00 PM. If you need directions, click here, and don't forget to Like them on Facebook.

Stop by and chat with Dawn Byrne, Marie Gilbert and other members of the South Jersey Writers' Group, and buy a book. We can sing the rest of the song together... or... maybe not…

If you're not able to make this event, no problem, we will also be at the Maple Shade Library on November 13th from 6:30 to 8 PM. And there will be an Open Mike as well, where our authors will read some of their stories and we'll be selling our book, Tall Tales and Short Stories from South Jersey.

We'll be looking forward to seeing you there!

=========
P.S. from Glenn: If you'd like to know what's on the schedule for the South Jersey Writers' Group, please feel free to stop by our website, and the calendar of events there.

Also, if you're a writer in the South Jersey area looking for support, camaraderie, and most of all, information about the craft and the business, the South Jersey Writers' Group is open to new memberships through the end of the year.

Details on membership and all the gatherings, workshops, and events that the group provides can be found on our website. Hope to see you soon!

Keith R.A. DeCandido at SJWG

"This crap is hard."

That’s the tough truth that guest speaker Keith R.A. DeCandido opened with at the October 2013 SJWG meeting - The Business of Writing and Publishing - in Bellmawr on Thursday night. Wearing an "ironic" black tee under a NY Yankees Hawaiian-inspired shirt, the Bronx-born author of more than fifty novels reiterated what we’ve heard many times at writing conferences and from people in the industry.

Writing? Getting published? Self-Publishing? Yeah, all difficult stuff, he said, requiring a lot of work and discipline. In 1999, only after he’d successfully published four novels, was he "allowed" to pitch his Star Trek tie-in novels to an interested party. He’s since fifteen Trek novels, not to mention a ton of short stories and comics and stuff, he told the large, appreciative crowd who came to listen and learn. Many new members - and some of the usual suspects - took notes and listened intently. He is what we aspire to be, after all: a successful author.

Still, he gets rejected all the time. "One acceptance is just that; one," he said. Getting published does not automatically open the door for your next one. No matter what success you’ve had, you still have to work your ass off. Being a freelance writer means you must constantly be thinking, keeping up with things, and understand tax structure!

"If you treat it like a hobby, that’s all it’s ever going to be. Want it as a profession? Treat it like a job." He still gets the same thrill, he said, after fifty novels as he did when he saw his name on the cover of his first book in 1996. Although he has gone the "small press route" a couple of times, he says that writers should try to sell to the New York houses because we have nothing to lose.

DeCandido, who’s also a member of the Liar’s Club, said self-publishing is not for him because he doesn’t have time to market and promote his books. "I’m too busy writing," he said.

"To self-publish, you have to become the sole proprietor of a small business; that’s a full-time job and you have to treat it like that. So many writers don’t realize that going in." If you do choose to self-publish, he added, take care with the cover.

"The truth is that everybody judges a book by its cover!" he said, suggesting that writers work with graphic artists. When asked how publishing contracts work, he said that they’re all different. "In fact, the answer to nearly every question about publishing is: it depends."

"If we knew what was gonna be successful, we’d all be much richer right now." DeCandido went on to say that it’s better to get rejected by someone who’s not enthused by your book than to be accepted by them. "Editors have to work for you, be seriously behind your book, get it in front of the publisher’s eye." The good news for us is that he said publishers look for new writers because we’re 'cheap' and 'get paid the smallest advances possible.'

Still. JK Rowling was once an unknown. The Help was only accepted after more than 100 submissions; now that was a relentless writer who believed in her story! Publishers will not, however, be interested in a book that’s already been published online or through self-publishing. But that is just one of many reasons your book may not make it to the show.

A publishing house may already have too many books like yours. Or, maybe they think their sales force won’t be able to sell it. Yes, it’s tough to write; it’s tough to market and promote yourself; it’s tough to get published. Still, we do it and hope for the best. His suggestions:

FINISH WHAT YOU START

"The ratio is like six-gazillion to one - novels started to novels finished. Don’t worry about going back to rewrite all the time; forge ahead and finish the damn thing. It’s like your mother told you: if you keep picking at it, it’ll never heal. Get to the end; fix chapter four later."

READ YOUR STUFF OUT LOUD

You’ll hear the repetitions, the word you used five times in the first two sentences.

FIND YOUR OWN PROCESS

"It’s up to you when and how you work. Make your work place free from distractions like the internet. I listen to music, some people like it silent. Whatever works for you is what’s right."

PROOFREAD

GET AN EDITOR

For more info on Keith DeCandido and for a list of his books, visit his website.

Also, DeCandido’s fiancée, Wrenn Simms, offered this: The L. Perkins Agency is apparently looking to publish ten erotic romance books per month for the next year. Manuscripts should be 125 pages and up, and she’s paying between $600 and $1,000 for each. So get your Shades of Grey on and get writing.

About today's guest blogger:
South Jersey Writers' Group member Patti O'Brien is an award-winning writer and editor extraordinaire. Be sure to check out her excellent editing service Editing Is Everything, Follow her on Twitter, find her on LinkedIn and Facebook, and read her always entertaining blog, A Broad Abroad.

The Collingswood Book Festival

On Saturday, The South Jersey Writers’ Group participated in the Collingswood Book Festival.  This was the Book Festival’s 11^th year and each year it gets bigger and better.  One of the things that made it better this year, was that the SJWG’s had a table. 

 

Our table had a great location, and a very nice tent to shade group members from the sweltering sun.  Although it was October, it felt more like August. The heat seemed to make everyone feel a little less energetic.

 

 

The group worked hard selling books.  Tall Tales and Short Stories was for sale and other group members had some table space to sell their books.

 

Jordanna East (Blood in the Past), Gregg Feistman (The War Merchants) and John Farquhar ( What to Expect When You're Dead) all sold copies of their books.

 

SJWG also worked at promoting the group.  Amy came up with the idea for these great pins.

 

They worked because people did in fact ask us about our writers’ group and we were ready to hand out our nifty postcards out to anyone who asked. 

One of the best parts about the Collingswood Book Festival is the chance to meet and talk with all of the authors and listen to the panel discussions.

Amy, Shelley and I really enjoyed the panel called, Publishing Your First Novel.  The panel featured four newly published young adult authors.

-Alison Ashley Formento –Twigs

-David Lubar- Extremities: Stories of Death, Murder, and Revenge

-Kit Grindstaff- The Flame in the Mist

-Evan Roskos- Dr. Bird’s Advice for Sad Poets

They were very honest about the trials of publishing your first novel, and gave encouragement about how to handle rejection.  Author Kit Grindstaff recommended chocolate. 

 

 

Amy and I also attended a panel called, What’s the Buzz in YA Fiction-Fantasy or Realism?  The authors on this panel were

Elisa Ludwig – Pretty Crooked

Ty Drago- The Undertakers: Rise of Corpses

Ellen Jensen Abbott- Watersmeet; The Centaur’s Daughter

James Mascia- High School Heroes

The authors on this panel were quite encouraging about writing the story that you want to write and not worrying too much about whether or not your story is hitting on a particular trend (examples- vampires, zombies,  wizards, etc..).  By the time you are finished writing and revising your novel, the trends may have changed.   

 

It seemed that all of the authors that attended the festival were genuinely nice people as well as being talented writers. 

At the end of the day, we drank a lot of water, we sold some books, we sold some tote bags, and got some people interested in joining the group.  If you missed the Collingswood Book Festival or if you had a great time at the festival this year, be sure to mark your calendars for Saturday, October 11^th 2014.

(by Sarah Hawkins Miduski-guest blogger)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gilbert Interviews the Talented & Funny Author of What to Expect When You're Dead

                                                                      

                                                                      

I'm always amazed at how talented The members of  SJWG really are. Every single member brings some sort of a specialty, which they're willing to share with the group. John Farquhar is one of those amazing people. John's specialty is humor and his stories are a joy to read. John has a gift of seeing life in general and human foibles in particular through unfiltered glasses. I've read some of the manuscript before it was published. I won't be one bit surprised if this book to becomes a movie; it's that good! John is also published in the Tall Tales and Short Stories from South Jersey Anthology.



John, thank you for being a guest on our blog. I can't wait to read the book. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

                                                                       

                                                  John Farquhar with his daughters
                              

Myself:  I was born in England, of Irish parents, and educated at Liverpool University and St. John’s College, Oxford. I first came to the USA 17 years ago, to get married to a Jersey girl. We have 2 wonderful daughters, Gemma (15) and Kate (13). I teach literature and languages at Rutgers and Temple University. My passion is World Literature, the older the better.  I find I can relate more to texts that are 4,000 years old than I can to recent masterpieces which, I suspect, won’t be masterpieces for very long.  I am not trying to be ‘an angry old man’. I have the utmost respect, and love,  for writers, but I suspect the novel as we know it may well have run its course, because it is a long time since I have read a novel that I would call a masterpiece.  There seems to be an unnecessary emphasis at the moment on the very violent, the very personal, the whimsical and the animated, in the bad sense of that word, but the refusal of so many writers to engage in important questions of the time, and the embarrassment most seem to feel at the old classical ideal of ‘entertain and instruct’ seems to me to be a dead end.

 Tell us about your book, What to Expect When You're Dead.

Book: My book has two very simple aims: to make people laugh and think.  Though the title might seem morbid to some, to me the tone is unrelentingly cheerful and warm-hearted, and I hope this is how it is read.  I am not trying to antagonize anyone, or to get any believers so angry as to burn my book, though that would be excellent publicity.  The simple question I am asking is why so many believers are so uneasy when humor is used in relation to the search for God.  Are we to assume that God does not understand irony, or does not appreciate it, or feels it should be banned?  The serious tone of so much religious debate is, in my opinion, more a reflection of unresolved fear than unconditional love. Theologians, of whatever persuasion, sometimes seem to me to be engaged in a sustained campaign to remove humor from the face of the Earth, and there should be periodic attempts to stop them, because it is precisely when we lose that ability to laugh at ourselves that we tend to start killing each other.

Oh, My God, I’m a preacher…

                              John Farquhar holding the anthology that has one of his stories                                                                              

 What inspired you to write about the afterlife?

Afterlife:  It should be obvious, when you read the book, that, unlike the narrator, I am a skeptic, as indeed I always have been. My hero, growing up as a Catholic, was Thomas the Doubter, and I can still clearly remember how, aged seven, I couldn’t understand why my teachers were portraying Thomas as the bad guy for wanting proof that Christ had returned from the dead. They were the ones, after all, who demanded proof that a dog had eaten my homework.  Whatever faith is, it is not blindly believing everything you are told; there must be some basis to faith, and, unless you have put it to the severest of tests, you can’t really call it faith at all. Given what appears to be a sharp decline in the membership of organized religions, my position is, I suspect, much more common in America than is generally admitted: I don’t have faith in the existence of God, but nor do I have faith in his non-existence. This no-man’s land, to me, is funny, and this is what compels me so often to write about death and failed attempts to find God. The reader, in this book, is taken, by a well-meaning, but possibly nutty narrator, on a journey to meet God, and beyond; if you laugh at his revelations of how we fit into the Eternal, you should ask yourself why you have laughed; if the journey annoys you, or seems irreverent, you should ask yourself how you personally think Eternity will shape up,  how you envisage yourself as a Spirit.

                                                                                                                                                

 Tell us about your publisher.

Publisher:  I am in awe at the sheer energy and fearlessness of the most remarkable multi-tasker I know, Amy Hollinger, of Hypothetical Press. Without Amy, this book would certainly not have seen the light of day. I’ve no idea, of course, what  fate my work can expect , but, if this little  book  ever gets known even locally, I often think with glee of Amy walking the streets of Audubon, and people pointing at her, saying: “that’s her! She’s the one!”

 Can we expect to see a sequel to What to Expect?

Sequel:  I take you, the reader, from your death, through the tunnel, across the Astral Plain, to the Astral Dome, through an interview with God, into apparently endless darkness, to an unexpectedly happy and eternal finale. How the hell can there be a sequel?

Thank you John for being my guest. And, for our followers, John's book should be out soon. I'll be promoting the Book Launch on this very site. Read the Book; be prepared :)

A Day On the Greene

         


                                                                       

                   SJWG Authors: Bob Cook, Joanne Costantino, Marie Gilbert, Dawn Byrne 

                                                               

                                  SJWG Authors Janice M. Wilson (seated) and James Knipp (standing)

Super G and Super D along with fellow members of the South Jersey Writers Group had a wonderful day at the beautiful and historic town of Smithville, N.J. on the Village Greene.

                                                                          

 

We were part of the Authors on the Greene that was hosted by Wendy Birkbeck of Through the Looking Glass Tea Shop. She did a wonderful job of pulling this event together. We sold lots of books and made many new friends, like the lovely ladies from Eight Women Writers

                                                                            

                                                          the lovely Kristin Battestella Snouffer

                                                             

                                                           our very own Nanci Rainey

                                                                                    

                                                                             Jeff Markowitz

                                                                                         

                                                                        Paul Evens Pederson.

                                                                               

                                                                 

There were vendors, specialty shops, food, and...ghosts. Hey! Sometimes, the ghosts come looking for me. Ghost hunter and author, Richard J. Kimmel, and I spent some time talking about two of the buildings on the Greene that definitely were haunted.

                                                                             

 

                          The weather was just right and the music kept everyone on the upbeat.

We even had a wedding take place during the Authors event. The lovely bride and groom were nice enough to pose outside of the bed and breakfast where they’ll be spending their wedding night. Congrats to both lovely people.

                                                                            

I think our writer’s group will be growing larger because a lot of people at the event wanted information. We’ll be taking applications this October.

http://South-Jersey-Writers.com

Tall Tales and Short Stories to Invade Smithville

                                                                        

                                            

So, the dynamic duo of Super G and Super D are at it again. We're off on another adventure. Where are we going, you might ask?

                                                                          

Dawn and I are heading down the shore to the beautiful, historic, and quaint town of  Smithville. Yes, we'll be selling our anthology of 2012 and promoting the upcoming anthology of 2014. There will be lots of venders there, and let's not forget the shops.
                                                                      
                                                                      

Come down, visit our table, and say hello. You'll find us along the Village Greene. Dawn and I, along with other authors from Tall Tales and Short Stories from South Jersey will be happy to tell you all about the South Jersey Writers Group and maybe you'll become a member.

                                                                      

This is a big event and a perfect way to enter the fall season. So mark this down on your calendar:

Authors On the Greene
Saturday, September 14th, 2013
From 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.



https://www.facebook.com/AuthorsOnTheGreene