Jeff Haws

Independent author

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Evolution/Devolution from Writer to Author

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Writer

I’ve been a “writer” — minus the “author” evolution — for quite awhile now. Going on 20 years, in fact. Well, “writer” in some respects, anyway. Not necessarily, ya know, a paid writer for all that time, as a few of those years I was in high school and a few more I was almost getting paid to write for the student paper at the University of Tennessee, so “writer” may be a relative term. Let’s say I’ve been writing very regularly since 1996, in a variety of formats from newspapers to magazines to blog posts. I’ve written about sports — lots of it — politics, music, movies, straight news, science, human interest, etc. I’ve interviewed Hillary Clinton — name drop! — and John McCain, Tiger Woods and LeBron James. I’ve spent days at the U.S. Capitol and White House, and I’ve spent them in press boxes in stadiums across several different states. [Read more…] about Evolution/Devolution from Writer to Author

And So the Writing Begins …

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Start

Writing begins on my first book this week, and I’m excited about getting it going. This is sort of Stage 3 of the process of getting this thing done.

Stage 1 was just reading. That’s it. Admittedly, I hadn’t read much of any fiction in several years, concentrating my energy largely on news writing since, well, that’s what I was writing. I felt like I needed to keep reading different writers in that style, continuing to pick up style notes, new ideas and influences that could help me improve. That’s what you do, right? But, about six months ago, I decided this was a shift in focus I wanted to make, from non-fiction to fiction. And I’ve got a good friend, Stan Mitchell — a terrific and successful author already — who encouraged me to make it, probably because he thinks I’m better at this writing thing than I am. Whether I’ll be any damn good at fiction is yet to be seen. [Read more…] about And So the Writing Begins …

The Book I’m Writing is Not Mine

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Writing

This recent blog post from Mark Malatesta at Literary-agents.com was pretty striking for me to think about, the notion that the book I’m writing, this one I’m putting all this time and effort and energy into eventually producing for people to insult me over, isn’t really mine at all. It actually belongs to you, the reader. Maybe these blog posts do too. Or is that taking this whole idea a bit too far? Let’s look at this for a second.

With the book, I am, believe it or not, hoping to actually sell a few copies. It’s true. As such, once I pour out my blood and sweat for months, then do it again for a second draft, then let people read it and tell me how much it sucks, then finish a final draft, then answer a million questions about how to go about publishing, perhaps querying agents/publishers, the title, cover design, genre categorization, printing, price, and where I last saw my phone (pretty sure it was on the side table by the bed … hmmmmm), I’ll set out to sell the book to people. People who read. People who can’t read will be of little use to me, but I wish them well in their journey of life. [Read more…] about The Book I’m Writing is Not Mine