New Title(s) from Jim Woods

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	English usage and grammar textbooks, at least those volumes when in paper print, are so big, so heavy…so complete. Students toting books and laptops in backpacks need relief, just as home authors can use more space on their reference bookshelves. So, You Want To Be an Author? takes up little space and weight but most importantly provides immediate answers to questions about grammar, spelling, punctuation and writing style. No searching through voluminous chapters in textbooks or scrolling incessant computer files. Pick a subject and go right to it for realistic examples of literary usage drawn from the author’s more than four decades working both sides of the editorial desk. Let his experience as magazine Editor, Managing Editor, Editorial director; independent book editor; and his four hundred articles and thirteen books as a fellow author, be your compact and shortcut guide along the path to literary success.
	Excerpt Word Count: 31,000 Pages to Print: 106 File Format: PDF                  Price: $4.99
	These accounts of shooting birds and hunting big game mostly relate the author’s adventures in North America—Canada and The United States. Game species encountered, or hoped to encounter, include mule deer, whitetail deer, blacktail deer, pronghorn antelope, elk, bear, turkey and geese. But by convenience, and necessity because all his hunts don’t fit neatly into the confines of North America, and the author had no other place to tell a couple of unique hunt stories, this volume also includes reports of dove hunting in Honduras and red stag in Spain. Mainly, this collection tells the story of one hunter who just happened to be a writer and whose job sometimes required him to go hunting, making him, if not a PH (professional hunter) then perhaps a PTPH (part-time) or a SPH (semi). Either way, for him it was a dream job.                                                                               Excerpt Word Count: 35000 Pages to Print: File Format: PDF Price: $3.99
	Three separate women with separate stories; all with guns, all with a mission. Marlene as “The Husband Hunter” had a husband but couldn’t keep him, but found him after years and a global search, and then didn’t want him . . . alive. Veronica simply was misguided; her sole and desperate interest was protection of her family against imagined evils, but she was set straight following a neighborhood encounter where “The Streetwalker’s Price” was a life-preserving lesson. “A Gun in the House” offers a sense of security and comfort, and protection against intruders, but Constance testifies not all the threat comes from outside the home.                                                                               Excerpt Word Count: 12,750 Pages to Print: 43 File Format: PDF Price: $3.99

 

EXCERPTS

So You Want to be an Author?

INTRODUCTION TO THE REAL WORLD OF PUBLISHING Acquisition Editors at the book publishing houses, and literary agents, big and small, are overloaded with work. Thanks to the computer age, thousands upon tens of thousands of manuscripts are submitted to them every year, and the numbers continue to grow. While the publishers are reducing their payrolls by cutting down on staff just to stay afloat in a tenuous economy, the agencies, many of which are single-staff proprietors, simply cannot handle the increase of prospective work that crosses their transoms. Reduced editorial staffs and inundated agents coupled with the ever-increasing numbers of submissions to those offices have resulted in a logjam of manuscripts that seems to grow in quantum leaps. It doesn’t take much of a perceived problem with a manuscript to cause it to be tossed out as unworthy of the editor or agent’s already crowded work schedule; they look for reasons to diminish the backlog. It may be the cover letter; it could be the paper stock on which the manuscript is printed; but more than likely it’s the grammar, punctuation, spelling, usage and structure of the first two or three pages . . . and that’s all that will ever be read! The first strategy in combating the problem, to allow the editor or agent to get further into the story to find out how really great it is, is to ensure that grammar, punctuation, spelling, usage and structure are as perfect as they can be made to be, by double and triple pre-editing before submitting the manuscript. We’re not talking style or storyline here; no amount of diligent copy-editing will build a stronger plot or develop more interesting characters. Those must come first with talent (which, of course, we all have in abundance), then guidance from qualified instructors and critics (not your spouse or best friend), and then the tedious re-write(s). It could appear to some that the answer to getting published is simply to circumvent the overcrowded, overworked system, and become your own publisher. The proliferation of information technology has spawned numerous avenues for self-publishing. According to which publishing newsletter or website to which you subscribe, there are perhaps half a million or several million self-published or vanity-published or web-published book titles on the market. However, the buying public can be just as critical if not more so than the professional editor or agent. A poorly done book, poorly written and poorly edited, will quickly get the bad name that will inhibit future sales. Self-publishing is not altogether an ill-conceived idea, but putting out a nonprofessional book, regardless of the publication and distribution media, is bad for the industry and the author. Subsequent sectors in this book will offer tips and insights on, and examples of, those little glitches and gremlins that can turn an editor or publisher away from your own potentially great article, short story or novel. Of course, any advice treatment must include a disclaimer: This book is not an English, grammar, spelling or punctuation textbook for the classroom. It does, however, serve as a useful adjunct to those textbooks, and reflects the practical side to all those literary disciplines as viewed by an author/editor who has worked both sides of the editorial desk for a lifetime. Teaching professionals will view the lessons presented here as incomplete, and that would be true if it were intended to be a course-study textbook. It does not pretend to contain all the answers to writing in the English language, but rather is designed, by use of examples and referral to the author’s personal experiences as both editor and author, to make writers think on their own and produce manuscripts less likely to be rejected prematurely. If you remember no other rule of commercial writing, it is this: The Editor is always right.                                                                              Back to So You Want to be an Author?

Hits and Misses

HONK IF YOU LOVE GEESE Choosing a favorite big game species is a difficult and arbitrary decision for me. My selection could be swayed by the latest daydream inspired by one of my trophy mounts on the wall, or by one of my rifles that I associate with a particular hunt. I might vacillate between an African species that I have collected several times, or one that almost collected me; or I might settle on the noble western mule deer that I have loved to hunt. It would be a tough choice. But among the birds, everything comes second to geese. For no good reason that I can offer, I do not have a taxidermy mount of a Canada goose, although I favor those mounts with giant wings cupped for landing. The only tangible goose decoration in my writing work space is a pair of carved birds; not decoys, but miniatures carved of fir and not painted, just the natural color of the wood. What makes them special is that they were fashioned by a Cree Indian, carved over several evenings during the winter freeze that imprisons the far reaches of Ontario, and finished to splinterless perfection by being scraped with broken glass. Not that the Indians could not get sandpaper if they wished it; on James Bay where the Crees live, the historic Hudson Bay store still supplies all the necessities of life, and that could include sandpaper. Why broken glass then, instead of sandpaper? Because they have broken glass, and materials on hand are to be used. It could be called conservation and recycling. Geese are godlike to the Crees. Tribal hunters take them by the boatload under the native subsistence laws of Canada, and the tribe does subsist on geese for the entire winter when the waterways freeze over. For a people normally given to hard work, days of forced inactivity produce some native art of exceptional merit, including my toy geese. I do love the big birds. If there is a greater thrill than a flight of geese lifting off the water and flying past my blind, I haven’t experienced it yet. It’s exciting to have them pass close enough to get off a shot, and a pure satisfaction to bring one or two down from the flight, but many have been the times I was content to watch them pass without my ever slapping a trigger. It’s another thrill to have the grand creatures come to your call and decoys. In fact, I’m not sure I could say whether sitting in a morning blind waiting for and experiencing the liftoff and formation or turning the birds from a high flight by a coaxing call is the more exciting. Much of my sitting in blinds waiting for the over-flights has been on Maryland’s eastern shore of the Chesapeake. There is little in the United States to compare with the Chesapeake when it comes to geese. James Michener captured the spell of the geese in the novel, Chesapeake, and to have written that novel, he had to have experienced the flights over Chesapeake Bay. If I were to build a permanent waterfowl blind on Chesapeake Bay, I’d outfit it with a pew for a bench, for at no time do I feel more in church than when the geese fly. I was fortunate to have hunted the Chesapeake without having to compete for space along the public accesses, and without the necessity of joining one of the expensive private clubs that control much of the admittance to the waterways. All my Chesapeake experience has been as a guest of Remington Farms. Remington, the arms and ammunition people, at the time operated Remington Farms on the bay. The farm, which included a wetlands sanctuary, was a virtual field laboratory for wildlife habitat and related sciences. It was common to observe university students and wildlife biologists at work on Remington Farms, and not only on waterfowl projects but also on those associated with deer and small game, and with general agricultural-improvement methods that benefited farmers nationwide. In addition, some limited hunting was authorized, controlled hunting being a prime wildlife conservation tool. Remington utilized the setting to host outdoors writers from time-to-time for introduction of the company’s new firearms products. Those sessions usually included a couple of days of hunting. It was during these sessions on Remington Farms that I enjoyed my well-remembered Chesapeake Bay goose hunting. At all times when hunting on those press junkets, the Chesapeake geese were zealously protected, by the federal waterfowl regulations, those of the state of Maryland, and perhaps most rigidly of all by the caring custodians of Remington Farms. The geese at Remington Farms do not originate at Chesapeake Bay but only stop there en route to wherever their instincts take them on their annual journeys. The geese moving down the Atlantic and Mississippi flyways, and perhaps some that take the Central Flyway as well, gather for their odyssey at James Bay, the southern projection of Hudson Bay between Ontario and Quebec. The birds don’t necessarily originate there either. Most of them are spread much farther north, summering all along the northernmost perimeter of Canada, including frigid Victoria and Baffin islands and all of the Arctic landfalls.

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Women with Weapons

“What do you mean,” she screamed, “there’s nothing the police can do? He stole my money! Don’t you understand? My husband took all my money from my IRA and he’s gone. Run off. With my money; a hundred thousand dollars! That’s robbery. He’s a thief! Why can’t you do something?” “Ma’am, please control yourself. Shouting and abuse don’t help matters. There is no indication of theft here. Now I suggest you take this up with your bank, or perhaps your lawyer can do something for you as a civil matter, but there is nothing pointing to a crime in what you’ve told us. I’m sorry, Missus Tucker, this simply is not a police matter.” Marlene Tucker was shocked beyond tears. She had to make the trip to Missouri; Aunt Catherine became ill and no other family member could, or would, make the effort to attend her. First the hospital in Kansas City for four days and then more than two weeks at Aunt Catherine’s home, nursing her back to self-sufficiency. Bedpan duty. Nursemaid. Cook. Housekeeper. Marlene didn’t mind, at first; she loved her aunt. Now she hated her. Philip telephoned her daily, or she him, and sometimes both ways. He was supportive, or seemed so. Said he missed her. She assured him she’d be home soon, but had to be truthful; her care to Aunt Catherine was going to run into weeks, maybe even a month. He’d muddle through, Philip assured her, “You take care of Aunt Catherine; I’ll take care of things here.” Oh, he took care of things all right! Philip hadn’t called her at her aunt’s home for the past three days, and he didn’t answer when she called him. Marlene was fearful Philip had an accident, or a heart attack. Finally she had to leave her aunt on her own and she rushed home to Portland expecting the worst—and found it, but not at all what she dreaded. Philip was not at the house. The houseplants were dry and wilted. Philip’s car was in the garage; his key ring on the hook near the front door. The front door was not locked; the security alarm was not set. Marlene could not say what prompted her to look in Philip’s closet. Some of his clothes remained, but most of them were gone. Philip was gone. She went to his underwear and socks drawers. Mostly empty. Fear turned to trembling understanding, to anger, to rage, to utter shock. Philip had left her like a thief in the night. The unspoken phrase ran through her tortured mind and triggered her to action. Noting the time, and realizing the bank was closed for the day, Marlene went to her computer and accessed her account. She was relieved to note the checking account balance was more or less normal, close to the four thousand dollars they always tried to keep for operating expenses and small emergencies. Then she scrolled down to recent activity, and terrified understanding came to her in a shockwave. Three days ago, some six hundred and fifty thousand dollars had been withdrawn. A week before, two super large deposits were made, totaling a similar amount. The sonofabitch! He had cashed out both their retirement accounts, nearly a hundred thousand in hers and more in his, more than five hundred thousand. He got away with over six hundred thousand dollars! But why would he do this? Where would he go? Marlene had nowhere to go but to the police. She called 911. The dispatcher calmed Marlene as best she could and upon understanding the extent of Marlene’s hysterical trauma, suggested an officer on the scene was not the remedy, and coaxed Marlene to come down to the station and talk with someone in person. The dispatcher assured Marlene she would have an officer apprised of the situation and Marlene would be expected. But the police detective, sympathetic but firm, turned her away.

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