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The Painful Side of Publishing

May 8, 2013 in Business, Karen, Personal, Publishing, Theology with 49 Comments

by Karen Ball

Ache

We’ll get back to focus next week, but something has been weighing heavy on my heart and I want to share it with you.

We all know that publishing is a tough gig. It was proven yet again by what happened last week with the B&H Publishing Group’s fiction division (see Steve’s blog about it). It’s easy to commiserate with the authors impacted by this sudden change, to pray for them and encourage them. But I saw something happening in a number of blogs and author loops, and I confess it troubles me. What I saw was people making caustic comments about the publisher and about the people who work at the publishing house. Even to the point of questioning their faith. As in “How can they call themselves a Christian publisher and do something like this?”

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Focus from the Mountaintop: Career

May 1, 2013 in Business, Career, Karen, Writing with 12 Comments

by Karen Ball

Working on the rock

Focus. We all need it, in our careers, in our lives, even day to day. But as we discussed in previous blogs, there are different kinds of focus. Today we’ll take a look at how you can use Mountaintop Focus to guide you in your career as a writer.

As we discussed before, when you’re on the Mountaintop, you can see for miles and miles. So, first and foremost, Mountaintop Focus is big-picture time. It’s time to consider the whys and wherefores of what you’re doing. To determine—and then review and refine, if needed—your core values and goals. I’m sure you’ve all determined long ago why you’re writing, but it’s a good idea to review those reasons at least once a year to see if they’re still what drives you. Because life changes, and we change as a result. I started out wanting to write fun romance novels, novels that celebrated the wonder of romance and love between a man and a woman. But as life went on, I found myself asking some hard questions about those relationships. And about faith. And surrender. So the driving questions behind my stories changed. As did my core values/goals.

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I DID Finish Your Book…and I Plan to Read it Again!

April 24, 2013 in Craft, Creativity, Karen, Writing with 18 Comments

by Karen Ball

Reading a book

After reading Steve’s and Tamela’s thought-provoking blogs on why they don’t finish books, I decided to talk about the flip-side. I totally agree with all that Steve and Tamela said. I’m not among the camp that has to finish a book once I’ve started it. But what a delight it is to find a book that I not only want to finish, but that I wish would never end. Those are rare treasures that live on my bookshelves, friends I can’t wait to be with again.

So here’s why I finished your book—and plan to read it again and again and again:

Consuming Story

From the first page I knew the story was powerful—and that spending time in it would be not just worthwhile, but wonderful. Your attention to the ebb and flow of the tale; to making it true to life and heart; to giving me a moment to catch my breath, then plunging me even deeper into the conflict; to the powerful and satisfying ending…it all wove the story together into a tapestry that I will revisit to catch new details and beauties and truths.

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Focus from the Mountaintop – Part One

April 17, 2013 in Career, Karen with 14 Comments

by Karen Ball

Lower_Table_Rock_(Jackson_County,_Oregon_scenic_images)_(jacD0040)

Our valley is watched over by two majestic sentries: Upper Table Rock and Lower Table Rock. A number of years ago a friend of mine and I hiked the trail to the top of Lower Table Rock. We both suffer from asthma, and it’s not an easy hike, so we feared they might find us collapsed halfway up! But we made it, and when we reached the top…well, you just don’t see views like that often enough.

I grew up in this valley, and know it front and back and sideways. But seeing it from that vantage point–it was as though I’d never seen it before. The view of the mountains all around, the sun shining through the clouds, the patterns and textures of the landscape, it all worked together to create a stunning panorama that is the Rogue Valley.

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Focus (Part Three)

April 3, 2013 in Career, Craft, Creativity, Karen, Marketing, Writing with 13 Comments

by Karen Ball

I’ve always enjoyed photography. But it wasn’t until I came to understand the power of focus that I loved taking pictures. Focus helps you tell the story that you see in the picture. Whether your focus is on what’s close to the camera:

Blog Front of Camera Focus

Or what’s in the background:

Blog Background Focus

Or on the minute, microscopic details:

blog minute focus

Each aspect gives us a different story in the same picture.

Our careers in publishing are like that, too. There’s so much involved in what we do—big picture, little picture, microscopic picture–and we need to understand it all. But here’s the thing, we don’t need to make every aspect the primary focus every day! Trying to do that too often leaves us befuddled and confused. For example, how many of your days have started like this:

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The Beauty of Community

March 27, 2013 in Conferences, Karen with 15 Comments

by Karen Ball

MtH4

As I write this blog, I’m sitting on a bench beneath towering California Redwoods. There’s a gentle breeze blowing, carrying with it the fragrance of evergreens and sunshine. But it carries something else. Something wondrous…

The sound of community.

All around me, people are walking and sitting and standing, and as their voices drift past me I hear a number of things:

Excitement
Shared laughter
Commiseration
Exploration
Instruction

But most of all, what I hear is passion. Pure, unadulterated passion. For writing. For words. For sharing God’s truth and wisdom on the written page (or, as the case may be, on the Internet). For the gift that is writing.

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Refine Your Focus

March 20, 2013 in Career, Craft, Creativity, Karen, Writing with 16 Comments

by Karen Ball

Spring daffodils in the warm light of sunset.

Let’s talk about Focus.

I like Webster’s definitions:

Focus (noun)

a : adjustment (as of the eye or an eyepiece) for distinct vision

b : the position in which something must be placed (as in relation to a camera lens) for clearness of image or clarity of mental perception

: a central point: as

a : a center of activity or attraction or one drawing the greatest attention and interest

Focus (verb)

1a : to bring (as light rays) to a focus : concentrate

3 : to adjust the focus of (as the eye or a lens)

intransitive verb

1: to come to a focus : converge

2: to adjust one’s eye or a camera to a certain range

<newborn babies cannot focus for several months>

3: to concentrate attention or effort <she was already focusing on her next role>

I love it that focus is both a noun and a verb. We need to understand both the essence of focus and the actions that build or hinder it. Take a look at Webster’s definitions again. What particular words or phrases jump out at you?

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Get Focused

March 13, 2013 in Karen, Writing with 30 Comments

by Karen Ball

off focus green abstract background

Listen.

Do you hear it?

Voices… all around you…thoughts and opinions on the state of publishing, on what sells and what doesn’t, on good ideas and bad…words zipping back and forth in the ether. Write this. Write that. This is how you market. This is the key to platform. Buzz words. Marketing. Blogging. Craft. Deep POV. Are you Pinning? Tweeting? Linked-in? Google plussed? Skilled in hashtags? Metadata? EcommerceQRcodesDiscoverabilityNanowrimoCross-siteblahblahblahBLAH!

It’s enough to drive a sane person around the bend. As for writers? Well, we know they’re (we’re) already around the bend and up the next rise, so what does the cacophony do to us?

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Down in the Valley

February 20, 2013 in Craft, Creativity, Karen with 17 Comments

by Karen Ball

I see you

Imagine awakening one morning, not knowing where you are, utterly unable to move or speak. Imagine coming to the slow realization that you are in a hospital, and that the people all around you are looking at you and talking to you, but you can do nothing in response. Imagine doctors telling that, at the age of 43, you’ve suffered a stroke that has caused what they call “locked-in” syndrome, where your body is frozen but your mind is fully functional. Fully functional…and trapped. Imagine realizing that the only thing you can move is your left eye. That’s it.

One eye.

Such was the case for Jean-Dominique Bauby (Jean Do–pronounced jhan doh–to his friends and family), a one-time editor of ELLE magazine. I’d never heard of him until I caught the fascinating docudrama, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.  But get this: the movie is based on Bauby’s memoir. Written after he had the stroke! Remember, now, he can only move his left eye. That’s it. He cannot speak. Cannot respond in any way except to blink that one eye. And he wrote a memoir.

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The Writer as Editor: More Tools to Use

February 13, 2013 in Editing, Karen with 19 Comments

by Karen Ball

Adding the finishing touches to his hairstyle

There are some great quotes out there about editors and editing. For example:

“Read your own compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.” Samuel Johnson

“What I have crossed out, I didn’t like. What I haven’t crossed out, I’m dissatisfied with.” Cecil B. DeMille

“From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I shall not put.” Winston Churchill

“I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.” Shannon Hale

And my favorite:

“So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.” Dr. Seuss

SO, how to edit your own writing? Well, we already talked about three helpful tools in my post last week. Now, let’s take a look at three more:

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