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Thank you for your beautiful book 'Wildnerness'. Your descriptions of the landscapes and weather transported me to the wilderness, and contrasted so starkly with descriptions of the brutal war being waged. I found the paragraph on page 100 'birdsong was everywhere that morning.......' particularly moving - you could feel the beauty and stillness of the morning and sense the impending horror of battle. I will be recommending your book to friends and family and look forward to reading more of your writing.
Hilary Adams, Bidford on Avon, England

Hi sir,
Just started to read "Wilderness". Immediately conquered by your style: sculpting, carving words and sentences. Great Poetry. I just imagine you're a mix between August Rodin, a famous French sculptor, and Jean Giono, one of my favourite French writers.
After starting your novel, I rushed to my computer to learn more about The Wilderness Forest, scene of a terrible battle near the end of the Civil War. This reminded me of tales about the 14-18 WWI in Europe during which my own grandfather lost a leg and many fingers at a very young age, so that he could no longer grow wine in my sunny south of France.
I'll write again when I've finished reading this powerful book.
Have a nice day. :-)

HI Vince,

Thanks for your kind words (and yours, too, Steve!).

The short answer about how I learned the craft is, simply, I read. I read (and still read) everything I got my hands on and, just as importantly, I paid attention to what I read. The rhythm of sentences and the breath sounds of words and the flow of paragraphs. All that nuts and bolts stuff. I didn't worry much about story because I've always thought the best stories rise from characters and so, instead, just concentrated on how words sounded together and how the ideas they conveyed made me feel. And the more I studied, the more I realized that it was important that I try and write with as much heart as I could. It's a tough concept to try and explain but someone once said that if the writer doesn't feel it then the reader never will.

I also did all the usual stuff. I read a lot of books on writing fiction and attended creative writing night classes at my local community college. For a long time I worried about developing some sort of "style" and did things like type up long paragraphs of Faulkner to feed into grammar analysis programs to try and figure out how he did it. But at some point, I stopped worrying about it and just tried to write about characters doing things that interested me and that made all the difference-- getting out of my head and getting it onto the page so I could see what I had.

But that's just me; I suspect that it has to be different for every one and, for as much writing as I do, the rewriting is where the real work is (again, for me).

--Lance

Hi Jeff,
Firstly, thanks for coming to the Lacey reading! Literary events can really be hit or miss and it was so nice to have folks to read to.

My first piece of fiction was published in Glimmer Train Stories when I was 25 or so. It was a short story called "The Breathable Air" and I was pretty lucky in that it was also the first story I'd ever written (though I'd been dabbling for years and years) and luckier still when it won a nice award through that magazine. After that I had a pretty good year or two with a couple more stories published and then a long, long dry spell. Health problems, bad luck. All those crises of self-confidence that come with the territory. Before Wilderness was finally published, I had had years and years of sending things out and watching them come back and I couldn't understand it because I felt what I was doing had value; I felt in my bones that it had real worth.

Then dumb luck and a pretty decent book proposal (I finally figured out how to do it right) put the manuscript for Wilderness in the hands of an enthusiastic agent and, after that, all I had to do was tough out a couple more years until it found the right editor. In the end, it was extremely gratifying because nothing substantive was changed between my draft and the book as published which told me I'd been on the right track all along.

So, in the space of a very short time, all the work and perseverance of a decade paid off and, as I often say, my whole life suddenly made sense.

Hope that helps! If you want more (or less. Or different.) let me know. You can reach me at lanceweller@comcast.net.

All best (and I'd love to hear more about your blog!),
--Lance

Hi, Lance. I attended your reading at the Lacey library. I'm writing a blog post about it and have a question I'm hoping you can answer.

The focus of the blog post is going to be on you as an inspirational example of patience, persistence, and grit. I wanted to ask more questions at the reading but you were getting fairly bombarded with questions about your personal life, and I didn't want to add to it.

So, how old were you when your manuscript was first accepted, and for how many years were you submitting?

I'd appreciate if you could find the time to answer that for me.

Thank you very much,

Jeff

Dear Mr. Weller:  
Digital galley proofs of my western, historical novel, The Great Divide, are now ready for review. It will be my first novel from a selective publisher. Inspired by our deepening national divide, it is set at the foot of the Rockies in Cañon City, Colorado, where northerners and southerners converged after the Civil War. When a Texas farmer's ten year old daughter dies mysteriously, Thomas, a "free-thinking" ex-union soldier from Kansas finds himself competing against Amos, a former rebel who is now pastor to Texan Baptists. In the balance lies the heart of a young woman and the future of the town.

As the author of Wilderness, which could be placed into a similar genre, I hope you would be interested in taking a look at the book's pdf file and writing one to three sentences, giving your general opinion of the book. Of course, if you prefer reading it all the way through in order to write a more complete review, please do and please post it on Amazon.

My publisher wishes to use your comments in one or more of the following ways: back cover blurbs, front page comments, press releases, one-sheet summations and web site promotion. In order to meet my publisher's schedule, I need to receive your comments within two weeks. If your are able to comment, I would be pleased to reciprocate on a book that you might write in the future.  Email me if you are willing to comment, at hreames@gmail.com. I will attach the pdf file to a return email. Books published under my name can be found at www.halreames.com.
 Thank you for your consideration,
Hal Reames

I just finished Wilderness. Thank you for this book. Many of the comments preceding talk about it as a war novel. Perhaps because I have no military background, I saw the book from a different perspective -- as a book about the extremes of the humanity, from sheer evil-heartedness to instinctive self-sacrifice for another. Even the canine characters reflect this humanness causing one to wonder if it indeed runs through all levels of nature. Your depictions of nature in "Wilderness" left me breathlessly immersed in its fierce beauty and power. Moreover on every page there was much to be learned about the craft of writing.

Lance Weller Novelist. Awkward.

le pogam ange Nov 27th, 2017 @ 03:43 PM

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