Does blogging build a writing career?

Abha from Writtenroad.com asks several travel writers HERE, “How important is blogging in building your career as a travel-writer? Has blogging ever got you any work with print publications?” She included part of my answer, here’s the rest:

As far as advancing my career as a writer, blogging has been every bit as important as dumb luck.

It was dumb luck when Literary Agent A stumbled upon my blog, www.whereamiwearing.com and asked me if I had considered writing a book about the subject. This was before I had even left on the trip the blog was about.

When I returned from the trip I went to a writer’s conference in Muncie, Indiana, (not exactly a hotspot for meeting agents) and asked Agent B about pre-contract etiquette dealing with Agent A. Agent B asked about my book and was darn near more enthusiastic about it than me. Agent B, Caren, became my agent and a few months later sold my first book, which shares a name with my blog.

In the year I’ve kept the blog, I’ve spent over 72,000 minutes (50 days) writing it, but never considered myself a blogger until the Publisher’s Marketplace listing of the sale was released:

Non-fiction Narrative: www.whereamiwearing.com blogger Kelsey Timmerman’s WHERE AM I WEARING?, in which the author learns about the garment industry by following the Made In China/Bangladesh/Honduras tags of a complete outfit and goes to the countries to visit the factories that made his clothes and talk to its workers…

I started as a blogger and, with a little dumb luck, I became an author.

As for print publications…

I rarely direct editors of newspapers and magazines to my blog, for the simple fact that they might visit on a day I write about shaving my tongue or farting on airplanes. However, I have adapted blog posts that eventually ran in print publications or aired as essays on NPR. In this way, blogging is more of a personal writing tool for me than an eye-catcher for editors.

In the hands of a higher power

I finished editing the book yesterday. Now it’s in the hands of a higher power – Richard, my editor.

I’m happy with how it all went and I enjoy reading it, which is really saying something because I wrote it and I’ve read each word a bazillion times. I should be sick of it.

Back in December when I signed the contract for the book, I was somewhat worried with how soon Wiley wanted it. I had never written anything over a few thousand words and wasn’t sure if three months would be enough time to pump out a book that I would be happy with. As it turns out I wrote at least 25% more book than I was contractually obligated to write. I’ve cut some of the words, but I’m still about 15% over. In the next couple weeks, I’ll have a new challenge – unwriting.

For now I’m happy with the book, but this is subject to change depending on what the Higher Power thinks.

Excuse me while I sacrifice a goat.

Today’s writing exercise: Rolphing

If only I would have discovered Rolphing before I finished my book. I’m sure it would have taken my creativity to whole other level. Matt Sloan and Aaron Yonda of Chad Vader fame spoke at the conference this past weekend and introduced a room full of middle-aged women to rolphing. Some of the women may have thought it was funny. I thought it was hilarious.

Erma Bombeck writers’ conference

I’m not sure I’ve made it as a writer yet. Such things are like knowing whether or not a country is in a recession – only hindsight can tell. But I owe much of what success I have had to the Erma Bombeck conference in Dayton, Ohio.

It was there, in 2006, that I met an editor at the Christian Science Monitor who gave me my first big boy clip, which led to an editor at the World Vision Report radio program contacting me to record some essays for them. One thing led to another and by 2007 I had enough clips to be taken seriously by editors of books and magazines.

This year, the director of the conference mentioned me in his opening address. He mentioned my small victories, my underwear wall of fame (which I forgot I even had), and the fact that I spent a month in Bangladesh because that’s where my underwear were made. I was “the underwear guy” the rest of the weekend. Garrison Keillor even signed his latest book Pontoon, “For Kelsey, the underwear guy.”

Garrison Keillor’s speech was awesome. Connie Schultz, Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist and author of And His Lovely Wife: A Memoir from the Woman Beside the Man, gave a hilarious and touching speech. She was a single mother and feminist that ended up marrying Sherrod Brown shortly before his campaign to become an Ohio Senator. I was lucky enough to meet both Keillor and Schultz and her husband.

I had never met a Senator before. I was excited to meet Senator Brown because I voted for him in 2006 and he has worked a lot on trade laws. He helped introduce the Decent Working Conditions and Fair Competition Act in 2007, known by some as the “Anti-sweatshop” bill, and even wrote a book on trade. I have a bazillion and one questions for the Senator. When I told him about my book he was very interested, promised to send me one his book, and told me that he would give me a call. I think he might even have mentioned the possibility of contributing a blurb. I’m not sure about this; I was a little busy trying not to look like a stuttering idiot. The strange part is that he was on my short list of people to ask for blurbs. So was Nicholas Kristof who I met a few months ago. I would have never dreamed I would be lucky enough to meet them both.

Of course the most exciting part is meeting other writers. I had the pleasure of celebrating literary victories and consoling one another in our literary defeats with Dave Fox, Bobby White, Seth Brown, Lizzy Miles, DC Stanfa, Jenn Dlugos, Danny Gallagher, Norm Cowie, and Joanne Brokaw.

All-in-all a pretty successful and enjoyable conference. I’m sure I’ll be at the next one.

A thousand words…Garrison Keillor

At the Erma Bombeck conference in 2006 I met Dave Barry. This weekend at the conference I met Garrison Keillor of Prairie Home Companion/Writer’s Almanac/Lake Woebegone/column writing fame.

More about the conference tomorrow.

Heavy stuff

It’s one thing to have an idea in your head, but it’s a whole other (super cool) thing to hold that idea in your hand.

The heavy lifting of the writing process is done and I’m about to begin the very undigital process of marking my manuscript to shreds with a red pen. It’s due to Wiley on April 15th, which should be plenty of time to find the sucky parts and make them not suck and to make the good parts better.

There will be carnage. 13,000 words must die and I won’t hesitate to kill them.

Have a sneak peak…

The 1st word of the book = I
The last word = story

Contractual benchmark obliterated and still obliterating

After yesterday’s day of writing I thought I had surpassed my contractually obligated 65,000 words and was feeling kind of proud. It turns out I had excluded a few chapters and my count is actually 71,163 and growing.

This is exciting in a sense, but it is also scary because I’m not done. I’m wrapping things up, but I bet I could be flirting with that 80,000 word mark by the end. Early on, I asked Caren, my agent, what was typical to be over or under. She told me 1,000 words. Yikes, that’s precise.

Although, it would have been even scarier if I finished the last chapter spot on the 65K mark because I need editing room. Normally, I write 1,000 words to get 800 (what I consider to be) good ones. That means I have to write 125% more than the target amount. It turns out that writing 80K to get 65K is pretty much on pace to do that. I love it when it looks like you actually know what your doing, but you know you don’t.

Next week I’ll probably pull out the red pen and start the slashing. It should be fun.

I’m guest blogging today

Today, I’m guest blogging on my agent’s website. Since I have both a website and a blog Caren wanted me to give the pro’s and con’s of each from an author’s perspective (not that I feel like an author yet, because I don’t).

So, I guess I feel like I’ve kinda met my blogging quota for the day.

If you’re bored – which you are because what else would you be doing here – check out my new site www.kelseytimmerman.com. I just started working on it last week. I welcome any suggestions you may have about how to improve it.

Do I look like an author to you?

Despite wanting to skip through the streets and scream from the rooftops that my book, my very own book, is going to be published in November, I don’t (other than the virtual street/rooftop you are reading this on now). I was raised to not brag and even though it’s not really bragging telling someone what you’ve spent the better part of the last year working on, it feels like it.

Often Annie will work it into conversations with people that don’t know the news. I guess it’s okay if your wife brags about you. She did this when we were home for Christmas.

“Kelsey is going to have his first book published in November,” Annie says to a family friend.

My face gets a little red and I feel an “Oh, shucks” coming on.

“Oh, that’s exciting,” says the family friend. “Who are you having publish it? Is it a publisher in Dayton?”

First, “having someone publish” the book implies that I paid a Print on Demand (aka Vanity Press) to do so, which I didn’t. Second, I never knew there were any publishers in Dayton, Ohio. If there are, they must be pretty small.

“No they’re from New York City,” I say. Actually Wiley & Sons is located in Hoboken, New Jersey, but you can see NYC from their office and they used to be located there, so that’s what I go with. I fight the urge to add a “you ever heard of it?” or, a “they paid ME,” or a “What the hell? Is it impossible to think that a large publishing house would actually pay little ol’ me for the rights to publish my book?”

A similar thing happened to me just last week. I was visiting my alma mater Miami University and was killing some time in the book store when I decided to ask one of the booksellers if they ever hosted any author events.

“Why?” She asked.

“Well,” I say, as my face, once again, reddens, “I have a book coming out in November.”

“Oh, a self-published book,” she says. (Note: this could also be a question, but it wasn’t; it was a statement.)

I understand that there are probably a lot of good books that publishers won’t stand behind because the “market isn’t good” for a particular book and self-publishing is the only way to give life to a work. I don’t have a problem with that. But considering that there are hundreds of thousands of books published each year by publishers, what makes these people think that my book couldn’t be among them.

Plus, there’s no way I could have afforded to pay to have my book self-published. The trip alone cost me (or I should say my second mortgage) $8,000. I am thrilled to have sold my book to a publisher because there was no way I could have sold the idea of paying to have it self-published to Annie: “Annie, my dear, I spent $8,000 on my quest, now for only a couple grand more we can have it published!”

She would have beat my (writerly) aspirations out of me.

What is it that makes people think I couldn’t be a paid author? Do I not look like an author or something?

Just Add Banjo

Writing under the influence

Hemingway, Thoreau, Emerson, Twain, and Melville are just a few of the writers who have NOT influenced me. I would never insult them like that.

I’m not sure whether it sounds more conceited to say writers like these have influenced you or that no one has influenced you – as if you are doing things with words that no one has ever done before (you trailblazer, you). If someone asked me who my influences were – and no one ever has because I’m not that successful – I would list the following, for better or worse, as my influences:

1) Some dude that wrote about paddling a canoe down the river that runs through his backyard with his son for National Geographic Adventure. The story taught me that adventure is a state of mind that can occur anywhere at anytime.

2) My fear of punctuation leads to a fair amount of short sentences. Sure, I could reference Hemingway here, but I’ve only read a few of his books (I don’t remember which ones) and I just spelled his name with two M’s, so I’ll stick with fear. Hyphens, colons, semi-colons, I think I know when and where to use them, but I often opt for a period and new sentence out of fear.

3) Spelling Bees. I’m a three time Mississinawa Valley Middle School Spelling Bee champion. Not that my vocabulary is great by any means, but it would be worse if I hadn’t learned all of the darned words on those dreadful lists.

4) Rick Reilly. Finally, an actual person. Rick Reilly used to write for Sports Illustrated, and I read his column The Life of Reilly religiously during the time I was developing my travel column. His stories always had a beginning, middle, and an end, and he often poignantly tied the beginning to the end. Plus, everything he wrote had a point without being preachy or superior. I don’t get Sports Illustrated anymore, but I was at the dentist yesterday and I was horrified to flip to the last page of the magazine and there was no Rick. Apparently, he has moved to ESPN and will write for the magazine in addition to some TV work, starting in June. Of all the things on this list, Rick’s column in SI influenced me the most.

So, my influences are some dude, fear, spelling bees, and a sport’s journalist. I’m sure there are probably other things and people that should get some of the credit/blame for my writing style, but more likely than not, they aren’t pillars of the literary world.

They aren’t impressive. But they’re mine.