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When we started this blog, one of the things I wanted to do is offer writing prompts and exercises. There is even a tab for it on the home page. That is a feature that really didn’t take off. But let me try again.

There is a story behind this prompt. A few days ago I made chili verde, a dish I’ve been making pretty regularly for years now. The recipe is unlike 99% of the chili verde you will find at Mexican restaurants, which is usually tomatillo based. I’m not a fan of the tomatillo tang. Fortunately, I found a recipe that is entirely peppers. (I’ll share it below.)

When I make it, I use a 4 pound chunk of pork shoulder, which means I need to cut it up into bite size chunks and trim off some of the fat. Invariably, I’ll cut a finger while doing so. For years, my younger son was in charge of getting the bandaids for me when I cut myself while cooking. Unfortunately, he was not home. Nobody else was home.

I posted a picture of the uncut slab of pork with pictures of the filet knife and butcher knife next to it. The caption: Get the bandaids ready.

And there is your prompt … Get the bandaids ready.

Use it as a first sentence, a last sentence, or anywhere between. And if you feel like sharing your story here, feel free to do in the comments.

Here is my Chili Verde recipe:

4 lbs of pork shoulder/butt, cut into bite size chunks

One yellow or white onion, roughly chopped

3 jalapenos, roughly chopped (the biggest problem with making a consistent chili verde is the variability of the spice in store-bought jalapenos. Occasionally I’ll add a serrano or two or more than 3 jalapenos)

3 garlic cloves, roughly chopped

12 Anaheim Chiles (or 3 8 oz cans of whole Chiles), roughly chopped.

Chicken broth (how much? I’ll get to that in the instructions)

Cumin

Oregano

Handful of cilantro, chopped

Salt

Pepper

If you buy fresh Anaheim Chiles, char them in the oven, over an open flame, or on the BBQ. they need to be charred sufficiently enough to be able to peel the skin off. Once charred, put in a bowl, cover and let steam for a bit. Then, under cold water, peel the skin off and get rid of the seeds. If you’re unwilling to do this, buy the canned Chiles.

In a Dutch oven or large pot, pour a little olive oil and brown the pork in batches. Remove the pork and pour out the liquid that has accumulated, add some more olive oil and saute the onions, jalapenos and garlic until they’re soft. Add the Anaheim Chiles and pork. Season with cumin and oregano and salt and pepper. I’d say I probably use a couple of tsps of cumin and oregano. Add chicken broth to cover everything. The last time I made this, I used 4 cups of broth and then added a Mexican beer.

Let simmer for 2 to 2 1/2 hours. The key is that there will eventually be more liquid than you need. About half way through, I start to remove some of that liquid a half cup at a time.

Eventually, all of the veggies will break down and form a sauce or gravy. Lately, at the end (once the veggies have all broken down, I’ve started adding some flour and water (or cornstarch and water) to thicken the sauce. I want it to coat the pork when I serve it.

And at the very end, add a handful of cilantro to the whole thing.

And that’s it.

— Mark Paxson

One of the “rules” of writing that I’ve never paid much attention to is that your characters have to be likable. I’ve actually tried to make sure that my narrators, or main characters, are less than perfect. That they have qualities that are likable and some that aren’t. Because, that’s real life.

I really don’t like it when characters are perfect, and there are certain genres where that seems to be a requirement. I’m thinking Clancy novels are a good example of this. The U.S. spies or agents are always right, never wrong. Always hit the bad guy and never get hit themselves. It just kind of gets boring after a while.

But I’ve rarely read a book where the narrator or main character(s) got so unlikeable that I didn’t care anymore. I’m not sure I ever have.

Sure, I’ve had DNFs. Plenty of them. But I don’t think it was ever about an unlikable character. It’s just that there is something about the story that has left me uninterested in continuing. My best DNF came with a book I read around 10-12 years ago. I read it and read it and read it, and then about ten pages from the end, I decided I just really didn’t care about how it ended. Those last ten pages weren’t worth it to me. So, I stopped reading.

I believe I’m about to give up on my first book because the narrator has become so unlikable I simply don’t care. About the story. About him. About anything that is to come. And it’s a shame. This book is considered a classic. It takes place during the Civil War — one of my favorite eras of history to read about.

But the narrator of The Red Badge of Courage is just horrible. I’m about 2/3 of the way through the book and I’m 99% sure I won’t be going back to the book again. I’ve got plenty of other stuff to read.

What about you … as a reader, how do you feel about characters who are unlikable? Do you want perfect characters? What types of things cause you to DNF?

What about as a writer? What’s your objective with your characters? If somebody DNF’d one of your books, would you want to know why?

— Mark Paxson

For the most part, writing is a very solitary experience. Which may explain why some search out writing groups. For the socialization. Also, if the group is a critique group, helpful advice can help a writer feel better about what they are working on. And, for me, there also is just the motivating factor of talking to other writers about writing. Anytime I do that, I come away with a renewed intent. I don’t always follow-up on tha renewed intent, but still … it helps to push me.

In my 20+ years of writing, I can think of the following writing groups I’ve been a part of:

• Critique Group #1
• Critique Group #2
• Writing Prompt Group
• Writing Exercise Group #1
• Writing Exercise Group #2
• Writing Conference three-day group
• WSW Video Chat Group
• Elk Grove Writers Guild

Here are the sordid details of each of those.

Critique Group #1 was a group of older men who had been in the critique group for before one of them asked me to join the group. Sure, why not, I thought. Well, let me tell you why not. They were a bunch of grumpy old men who were basically tired of each other. In particular one writer who the others would offer constructive criticism to and who would then whine about why they didn’t like his writing. I only went once or twice and the group fell apart shortly afterwards.

Critique Group #2 is a group I just joined a few weeks ago. I did so with caution because of my first experience and also because I had just been writing a lot longer and had ideas of what I want or need in critiques and what I don’t want or need. Also, the group would be mostly on-line on a forum platform with occasional zoom meetings. No in=person options. I expressed my caution upfront but decided to give it a try.

One of the things I don’t like about critique groups is that they generally involve shorter portions of longer stories. A chapter at a time. Ten pages at a time. Some portion submitted for review and critique as you spool out the entire piece. I really don’t know how to offer an effective critique of part of a piece. I also much prefer to reach an entire story before offering my own critique. How do I know if something is missing or doesn’t make sense unless I’ve read the whole thing.

So, back to critique group #2 … a group of about a half dozen people, some of whom posted pieces. Some who didn’t. The feedback I got can be broken down into two categories: (1) can’t wait to read more; and (2) feedback that suggested a much deeper, meaningful story than the one I wanted. It’s that second category that just doesn’t do anything for me. Don’t try to find meaning in what I write. Don’t try to force it on me. Maybe just read the story I’ve written, you know. But that’s the problem with these groups … you don’t get the entire piece so you just kind of make things up and assume things as you go along.

I let the organizer of this group know yesterday that I was done. That it wasn’t working for me, through no fault of anybody. It’s just not what works for me.

Writing Prompt Group — when the pandemic started and I was recently retired, I joined a weekly prompt group. At the time they met entirely by zoom. The sessions start with a prompt. Everybody writes to that prompt for 20-30 minutes and then they take turns reading what they’ve written. Minor feedback, always positive, is provided. I tried one of the zoom sessions, but found it less than ideal. I’ve become every more distractible and I just couldn’t maintain my focus during those sessions. So I rarely participated, although occasionally I’d write to the prompt and email it to the group. Some of those efforts have led to short stories.

Writing Exercise Group #1 — this was a group led by Zoe Keithley, a wonderful woman who had attending the writing program at Columbia College in Chicago. She used her experience there to inform her writing workshops. We’d meet once a month for four hours. The sessions would start off with various types of exercises. An example: close your eyes and identify a sound you hear and then describe it. Another: close your eyes and then open them and look around the room and find something in the room and describe it. All of these exercises were designed to get us to realize that there was far more going on in a scene than we might first realize.

The sessions always ended with a series of exercises in which we would imagine a scene and start placing things in it. A person, a smell, a sound, an object, an object that didn’t belong, and so on. And then we would spend 20-30 minutes writing something that occurs in that scene or any other thing we wanted to write. And then we would each read what we wrote and offer feedback, always and only positive feedback.

I participated in Zoe’s workshops for several years. And just in case you’re interested, if you ever want to read what I consider to be one of the best examples of literary fiction I’ve ever read, check out her novel, The Calling of Mother Adelli.

The second writing exercise group was led by Donna Hamelin. We had a series of similar sessions, but with different types of exercises. One I remember was to write for five minutes about a place, then five minutes about a person at that place, and then five minutes about something that happens at that place. I wrote about a church on a hill, with an old priest standing in the doorway, and a stranger who comes to talk to the priest.

I captured a rhythm in what I wrote that day, but I was working on something else, so I put the handwritten pages away. When I went back to try to move the story along, I couldn’t find those pages. Over the next year, I looked a couple more times and still couldn’t find them. I tried to rewrite it from my memory but felt I had lost the vibe. Then, more than a year later, I looked again, and I found the pages and that idea became my second completed novel. A story that I consider one of my best.

And that’s the thing about those writing exercise groups. To the extent that any of these groups have done anything for me as a writer, these exercise groups did it. A lot of exercises with Zoe led to critical pieces in my third novel, The Dime. Without her group, it’s very possible I never would have written that book and, if I had, it would have been much weaker. I would love to find another group like this, but it is so important to find the right leader and the right group of writers. I’m not sure if I’ll ever find that.

The next best group I was in was at the Mendocino Coast Writer’s Conference. I don’t remeber what year I went, but it must have been at least a dozen years ago. The conference is a three day event in Fort Bragg. In the mornings, participants sign up for different “courses” that last the entire three days. In the afternoons, different sessions are held each day. I signed up for a fiction writing group. Twelve writers who had to submit up to 10 pages of material and be accepted into the group. Peter Orner, who writes literary fiction and has a number of books to his credit, led the group. Each morning, we would offer critique to four of the pieces that were submitted.

It was an interesting group. One writer critiqued that nothing the others submitted had any emotion to it, and when I read his piece, I really wanted to know where the emotion was. Another writer’s common criticism was that there were too many things left unanswered or unexplained. To which I wanted to respond, “it’s only a snippet and, besides, how ’bout you use your imagination.”

But it was a very good experience and a positive one. I submitted the first ten pages of what would eventually become The Dime, what I thought would be it. A short story. But after the comments I received, I decided there was definitely more story to tell and over the next few years, with a lot of help from Zoe’s workshop, I was able to extend it to a novel that I’m pretty proud of.

Our Video Chat group also qualifies as a writers group. I mean we’re all writers and we talk about writing. I enjoy our conversations and I always leave them wanting to continue on as a writer and figure these things out that we discuss and that befuddle me at times. One of the things I like about it is that we don’t share our writing, we don’t read each other’s writing. We just talk about writing, so it’s different than all of those other groups I discuss above.

Finally, the Elk Grove Writer’s Guild. I joined this three or four years ago after seeing them at an arts festival. There is a monthly lunch, and the guild puts on conferences and workshops and also makes appearances at arts festivals and book fairs.

The monthly lunches are typically attended by 10-15 members. We spend most of the time with each writer talking about what they’re working on, progress they’ve made, whatever updates they may have. Again, it’s good to engage with other writers. It helps keep me motivated. But some aspects of this group are starting to wear thin for me. The biggest is that some of the members seem a bit too lackadaisical about the threat of AI. It really bothers me that they are willing to have AI do things for them as they write their stories. But beyond that, the benefits of the conversation outweigh that drawback.

There may be some other “groups” I’ve forgotten about, but I think that’s it. I wonder what would make for a good critique group, or if maybe I’m just not the right person for a critique group. I’d love to find another writing exercise group like what Zoe did, but don’t know where to start. And I’ll keep talking to the WSW group as long as we come up with topics to cover.

What about you? Are you a solo writer or do you look for engagement with other writers in any settings like I’ve described? If you have, what works best for you? What type of engagement do you look for? What doesn’t work?

— Mark Paxson

I finally finished a novella I started writing over ten years ago. I’m trying to get it published by the end of September. So, why am I screaming?

I’m cursing the formatting Gods. The Microsoft Word Gods. I … just … can’t take it anymore.

One of the challenges I’ve always had with publishing paperbacks is getting the headers and footers right. I gave up years ago on having headers that say my name on one side of the page and the name of the book on the other. Page numbers are a different story.

As I’ve always understood things, the front matter in a book should be numbered with Roman numerals, but the title page shouldn’t have a number. The Roman numerals start with the next page. And the pages of the story itself should be regular numbers (what are those numbers called), but you don’t start the numbering until the second page of the story and then you start with 2, with numbering going on from there.

I’ve learned over the years that the key do getting headers and footers and page numbering right is to use section breaks. With previous books, I’ve been able to figure this out, although never 100% perfect. A recent book has the Roman numeral “i” on the title page and the number “1” on the first page of the story. But at least I could get Roman numerals on the front matter and new numbering for the story.

This time around … Microsoft Word is scoffing at me. I decided going into the formatting of this book, I wouldn’t bother with the Roman numerals, just start with the “2” on the second page of the story. I’m a silly, silly man.

Whatever I did before that worked is no longer working. No matter what I do with the section breaks, I can’t get it right.

I asked a couple of writer friends if they knew how to do this. One said something that made no sense. The other said she uses Atticus for this, but she also offered to run my manuscript through Atticus for me. I didn’t want to do that because then I’d have to do that every time I publish, and I’ve got more stuff coming.

Based on her recommendation, I went and purchased Atticus. $147 later, I had it on my Chromebook and MacBook and started fiddling with it. After a couple of hours last night and the entire morning today, after more than a dozen uploads of the manuscript followed by deleting it and making tweaks to the manuscript to address issues, I think I finally got it.

The final product isn’t perfect, but it does have headers and footers now. The biggest problem is that the second page of the story is actually numbered “4”. I have no idea how it came up with that, since that first page is actually the fifth page of the document. I’m going to let that slide.

The good thing about Atticus is that it formats the manuscript much better than I ever did. It gets the margins right. It gets the headers and footers right. Maybe this was a good investment.

But why, oh why does Microsoft Word have to be such a hellscape for stuff like this?

Meanwhile, the next issue is this. I’m going to use Draft2Digital’s ISBN, but as near as I can tell, they don’t tell me the number before I have to upload the manuscript in PDF (which means it is unalterable). But I have to include the ISBN on the copyright page. So … how do I do that without going through the entire process and then starting over, once I get the ISBN and then upload the corrected version of the manuscript?

I’ve send D2D a question about this.

What are your publishing horror stories? Please tell me you have some.

— Mark Paxson

Over on their personal blogs, our very own Chuck Litka and Berthold Gambrel have had a few things to say about the growing impact of AI on writing and other creative pursuits. Here is what Chuck had to say. And here is what Berthold had to say.

Here are mine. We’ve already lost this battle, if not the entire war. When I sit in my local writing group, the subject comes up now almost every single month. Our monthly lunches usually include 10-15 people. Not a single other participant objects to the use of AI. They all seem to have accepted it, and use it in various ways. I’m not saying they are using AI to write their stories, but can I actually say that with confidence? Nope. And some of them seem absolutely giddy about how AI helps them. One uses AI for editing and creating covers. Another uses AI to handle the “non-creative” stuff so she can focus her energies on the “creative part.” To which I just want to know what parts of writing a story are not a part of the creative stuff.

It’s just very disappointing. If it continues, I will likely drop out of the group.

Meanwhile, AI and generative AI are now a part of virtually everything we do on-line. Every single app and platform and website now has some kind of AI functionality that you have to opt out of, instead of opting in to. The last update on my iphone made some significant changes to the email app. The biggest, most noticeable change is that now each email comes with an AI-generated summary of the content of the email and the email chain that the email is a part of. Google now produces an AI-generated answer to most search requests I submit.

At work, we have so many apps we’re using for communication and project management and every single one now has a generative AI component that has to be turned off if we don’t want to use it. Which is what we’re supposed to do because our employer is still coming up with policies and rules to govern our use of generative AI, and we aren’t supposed to use it until those are finalized. But!!! The question isn’t going to be whether or not we use generative AI. Nope. The only question is how to incorporate it safely and securely. A co-worker is incredibly concerned about how this will impact people — as in, people will lose their job because of AI.

What I’m most worried about is how all of this will affect our humanity. We’re already losing a piece of it because of all the things our smart phones do that we used to have to do ourselves — remembering phone numbers, figuring out how to get from Point A to Point B, playing games against a computer on a tiny screen instead of in person with real human beings, and so much more. The way in which our schools now teach children — for the most part, it’s all about doing well on the standardized tests — means our kids are losing important skills, like critical thinking and analytical thought processes, and also the ability to write in a serious and compelling fashion.

When we give up the very human desire to create, we might as well nail the coffin shut. Yes, there will be people who won’t use AI, but I’m not sure how that will look in the future. If enough people give over this aspect of their humanity to AI, those who don’t will be overwhelmed by the flood of AI-generated product. Us indies already find it difficult to be noticed in a crowded sea of books published every day. With AI-generated books, that will only get worse.

I can see a world in the near future in which a lot of people are not just unemployed but are unemployable, a world in which the movies we watch have nothing real in them, books are soulless vessels, and all too many are dependent on what AI does because, if I’ve figured out anything over the decades, it is that there are all too many humans who would be perfectly fine with this kind of world.

Not me. I’ll just sit over here and write my stories and maybe eventually finally learn how to paint. And some day, I might also just finally throw my smart phone into the deep end of my pool and grab back that piece of myself that damn phone has taken from me.

Here’s my hope for those who decide to use AI to “create” their art — acknowledge that so those of us who want nothing to do with it can make an informed decision.

— Mark Paxson

Let’s say you’re a writer and you’re nearing the end of a final draft on a story. The story will be novella length, getting close to novel length. What does your runway to publishing look like?

Beta readers? ARCs? Editors? More edits by you? Hesitation to pull the trigger? Joy? Sadness?

And as you move towards your publication date, what kind of pre-publication promotional efforts do you engage in? ARCs? Set up pre-orders? Paid reviews like Kirkus? Line up a blog tour? Set up a GoodReads giveaway? Line up some of the promo sites? Beg on social media for people to buy your book?

And once you publish, then what do you do?

Asking for a friend, because nothing I’ve done with the last few books I’ve published has done a thing, so I’m curious what has worked for other people. We’ve talked about this on our occasional chats, but I’m not sure any of us are finding answers to these questions.