A bowerbird, or so I read years ago in National Geographic, or Smithsonian, or one of those other popular magazines with a bent towards science and nature, was a native bird species peculiar to Australia and the farther reaches of New Guinea, which had the curious habit of decorating its nest with all sorts of colorful bits of this and that – glass, shells, colored leaves, pieces of glass and plastic, berries – anything and everything which caught it’s eye and which it liked enough to pick up and take home, arranging it with all those other finds in pleasing patterns. This apparently makes sense to the bird doing the arranging, because they seem to be quite set on those patterns. They will, according to researchers, also restore bits that are deliberately disarranged back to the pattern which they chose. It also seems, according to the internet (which I turned to in confirming this tiny and almost useless bit of knowledge – hey, it’s on the internet, so it must be true!) it is the male birds who do this, so this is where this simile falls apart. I am, and have always been of the female persuasion and pretty happy overall with that designation, although in a truly just universe, I would have preferred looking a hell of a lot more like Audrey Hepburn, as well as having her mad dancing skilz.
But I do have somewhat of a similarity to the bowerbird (of whatever sex) because I collect stuff, random stuff that is attractive and catches my eye, and which I can arrange in attractive patterns. I do this when I write, or more specifically when I am reading and researching for what I am preparing to write. I never know what particular bit will engage my interest – and some items are very odd bits indeed. I keep coming back to them, and by this I know that they must be an element in the story. For “Adelsverein” I kept returning to the Goliad Massacre of 1836, to the kidnapping of children from the Hill Country by raiding Indians, to a throw-away comment in an old memoir – a then-senior citizen recalling that his youngest sister actually wasn’t of his blood, she was an tiny orphan found and rescued from the Verein camp on the Texas Gulf Coast, never able to recall her real name. I also kept circling back to the recorded memory of an elderly woman, recalling proudly that she was 90-something and didn’t need glasses to thread a needle – and also recalling that the husband she loved, and had been married to for only 13 years, being taken away by the Hanging Band during the Civil War and hung, for the crime of being a Unionist in a Confederate state – all this, in spite of her attempting to sneak his revolver to him. Reading about these tiny events was like getting a small electrical shock, or perhaps recognizing something that I had known in another lifetime. These combined with any number of other bits and pieces of frontier lore, with small and humble items seen in museums, with paintings and sketches of scenery, daguerreotypes and memoirs, even a 1850’s travelogue by a famously observant political writer who did a horseback journey through antebellum Texas and the south. Thrown into this mix are my own visits to various places in the Hill Country, my own first-hand observations of clear green rivers, their beds paved with round marble-white gravel, sessions with subject matter experts in frontier arcane, the memory of certain people and conversations — and then arrange it all in a somewhat-logical pattern. Just like a bowerbird, although my own bower is a famously complex excel spreadsheet of a dozen and more categories, organized by month and year. All those pretty, shiny bits are plugged into the place where they seem to me to belong.
In a year or two, there is a book come out of it, all; a ripping good adventure yarn with the added benefit of having the very best bits of it based on historical fact; not bad for a bowerbird.
Celia Hayes
Author - To Truckee’s Trail & The Adelsverein Trilogy
www.celiahayes.com
Who Are “The Major Book Publishers,” Really?
Well, it’s a bit confusing, but here’s a bit of the bigger picture, and, forgive me, please, if I’ve gotten some of the internal hierarchy muddled. It’s a bit overwhelming to sort through.
Bertelsmann AG
Random House, Inc. (World’s largest book pubisher)
- Bantam Dell Publishing Group
- Crown Publishing Group
- Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group
- Knopf Publishing Group
- Random House Audio Publishing Group
- Random House Children’s Books
- Random House Diversified Publishing Group
- Random House Information Group
- Random House Publishing Group
- Random House Ventures
Lagardère (Second largest publisher in the world)Hachette Livre
Hachette Book Group USA (Formerly Time Warner Book Group)
- Grand Central Publishing, formerly Warner Books
- Little, Brown and Company, including Back Bay Books imprint
- Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
- FaithWords
- Windblown Media
- Orbit
- Center Street
- Yen Press
- Hachette Audio
Distributes
- Chronicle Books
- Microsoft Learning
- Arcade
- Time Inc. Home Entertainment
- Harry N. Abrams
- InnovativeKids
- Phaidon Press
- Filipacchi Publishing
- Kensington
- MQ Publications
- Strictly By The Book
- Weinstein Books
- Gildan Media
News Corporation
U.S. Publishing Imprints - General Books
- Amistad
- Avon
- Avon A
- Avon Inspire
- Avon Red
- Caedmon
- Collins
- Collins Design
- Ecco
- Eos
- Harper Mass Market
- Harper Paperbacks
- Harper Perennial
- Harper Perennial Modern Classics
- HarperAudio
- HarperCollins
- HarperCollins e-Books
- HarperEntertainment
- HarperLuxe
- HarperOne
- Morrow Cookbooks
- Rayo
- William Morrow
U.S. Publishing Imprints - Children’s Books
- Amistad
- Eos
- Greenwillow Books
- HarperCollins Children’s Audio
- HarperCollins Children’s Books
- HarperFestival
- HarperEntertainment
- HarperTeen
- HarperTrophy
- Joanna Cotler Books
- Julie Andrews Collection
- Katherine Tegen Books
- Laura Geringer Books
- Rayo
Publishing Groups Worldwide
- HarperCollins General Books Group - U.S.
- HarperCollins Children’s Books Group - U.S.
- HarperCollins U.K.
- HarperCollins Canada
- HarperCollins Australia
- HarperCollins India
- HarperCollins New Zealand
- Zondervan
Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck
Macmillan
- Farrar Straus and Giroux
- Henry Holt & Company
- Metropolitan Books
- Times Books
- Owl Books
- Picador USA
- Books for Young Readers
- W.H. Freeman and Worth Publishers
- Palgrave Macmillan
- Bedford/St. Martin’s
- Picador
- Roaring Brook Press
- St. Martin’s Press
- Tor Books
- Bedford Freeman & Worth Publishing Group
- Scientific American
- Nature
Reed Elsevier Group plc
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- Mariner Books
- Peterson Field Guides
- Taylor’s Gardening Guides
- AudioHoughton Mifflin & Walter Lorraine Books for Children
- Houghton Mifflin Books for Children
- Walter Lorraine Books
- Clarion Books
- Graphia Books
- Kingfisher
- Harcourt Trade Publishers
- Holt, Rinhart and Winston
- among hoards of others, mostly educational text book and learning-related materials)
- Publishers Weekly
Harlequin
- Harlequin
- Silhouette
- MIRA Books
- Red Dress Ink
- LUNA Books
- HQN Books
- Steeple Hill Books
- Steeple Hill Café
- Kimani Press
- SPICE
- Gold Eagle
CBS Corporation
Simon & Schuster
- Aladdin Paperbacks
- Atheneum
- Atria
- Downtown Press (Pocket’s “chick lit” line)
- Fireside
- Free Press
- Little Simon
- MTV Books
- Pocket Books
- Scribner
- Simon Spotlight
- Star Trek
- Touchstone
- Wall Street Journal Books
- Washington Square Press
Scholastic, Inc.
John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
Thomas Nelson, Inc.
Rodale
I just heard from a friend who used Llumina publishing to put out her first book. It cost her several hundred bucks. Other friends use PublishAmerica, iUniverse, XLibris, and a host of other pay-to-play “publishers.”
Guess what? These are NOT publishers! If you self-publish a book (e.g., become an independent publisher), then that’s great, wonderful, and you-go-girl (or boy). This is totally legitimate. Anybody who’s been querying agents will tell you that your chances are almost 0 of getting one.
Here’s my rant. Agent blogs and newsletters tout their latest books. I’ve seen multiple sexy vampire loves human girl, multiple retarded MC makes good in the world (everybody be inspired by the McDonald’s heart-wrenching), and multiple naked chests of buff gay guys making the story.
ENOUGH! Agents say they want something new, a fresh voice! Well, damn it, quit signing up the same old tired tropes. I will not read those books. If a half-nude person of either gender is on the cover, I will NOT pay my good money for it. If your MC is a misunderstood vampire or werewolf, I will NOT pay my good money for it. If your MC is a mentally-challenged person finding their place in the world (sometimes with the help of a very clever dog), I will NOT pay good money for it.
I have read far better concepts and writing from people who can’t get the attention of an agent. I’m tempted myself. Can I have my teen witch character do the nasty with the troll? I suppose. Would it sell? Maybe. But I don’t want to trash up my writing with crap just to be sold.
Pant pant pant. Okay, rant over.
Just write what you know is good and screw the establishment. If your book is good and original, just bet on it being “not right for me at this time.”
I will regret this post, no doubt. Oh, well. I’m at rope’s end anyway, so I may as well hang myself entirely.
“Even the most well educated and seemingly least xenophobic of Americans will pack a paddy and fly into a pelter of jingoistic hysteria if you dare to criticise things American? If a thing is badly wrong it needs correcting.” –PDR Lindsay, author, educator, and editor
The American editors of the Historical Novel Society’s journal, ‘Review’ the quarterly collection of reviews written by readers, recently threw me off their list of reviewers of American written historical fiction for writing a review which they called anti-American. In other words it was unfavourable, one of several such reviews I had written for them over the past two years. That last review must have been the review which broke their patriotic nerve, but the book really was badly researched on such simple basic things which many British readers would have known about.
Why is it that even the most well educated and seemingly least xenophobic of Americans will pack a paddy and fly into a pelter of jingoistic hysteria if you dare to criticise things American? If a thing is badly wrong it needs correcting.
In the case of the novels I had criticised it was the lack of research which irritated me so. If a writer of historical fiction wants to write about another country, yet does not visit that country, but collects their information on the internet, often from unknown, unqualified and/or dodgy sources, then has their publisher puff off the book as well researched and a ‘real’ glimpse of Victorian, Regency, Georgian whatever-period England, (The publisher never remembers it is the United Kingdom of Great Britain either. It’s always England - such rudeness to the Irish, Scots and Welsh members of the U.K.) those writers are guilty of, at the least, cultural arrogance and certainly a kind of cultural vandalism. And if those writers fail to write an author’s note in their novel, providing details of said research and an apology for any mistakes, well, they really are in trouble when a reader spots the mistakes.
Why do I feel so strongly about this? Because readers believe the written word. If it is in print, the average reader thinks it must have been passed by editors and publisher, therefore it is true. Writers of historical novels have a duty to ‘get it right’.
PDR Lindsay
http://www.rowanlindsay.co.nz/
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