Edward Unspooled Craig Lancaster File Size: 3117 KB Print Length: 286 pages Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited Publisher: Missouri Breaks Press (July 23, 2016) Publication Date: July 23, 2016 Sold by: Amazon Digital Services LLC Language: English ASIN: B01I2D7HU2 BOOK BLURB:  Change keeps stalking Edward Stanton. He and his new wife, Sheila, have retreated to his small house in Montana after an unsuccessful attempt at operating a motel in Colorado. That failure has left wounds, especially for Sheila, and now they face a bigger challenge: pregnancy and impending parenthood. Edward begins penning notes to the child (ever precise, he refers to the gestating being as “Cellular Stanton”) as he navigates married life with Sheila, who is unhappy and unfulfilled in Montana; a work partnership with his friend Scott Shamwell, whose own life is teetering; and the emergence of a long-buried family secret and the effect of this revelation on his relationship with his overbeari...

At the top of my blog, A Mind Adrift in the West , there is a quote from Ernest Hemingway: "Prose is architecture, not interior decoration." Papa was a smart man, and this quote is one of my guiding lights when I sit down to write. If I build well, my story will stand up. The time to worry about the color of the walls (just to stretch this metaphor to the breaking point) comes later. I would posit that one of the essential elements of rock-solid writing is balance -- properly weighted words, meanings, cadences. A well-designed sentence has structural integrity that promotes simple elegance and ease of reading. One of the ways this balance is achieved lies in parallel construction. Consider this sentence: She wore taffeta, diamonds and had a gold ribbon in her hair. That sentence is out of balance, and it thumps along the page like a warped wheel. The solution? Make the construction parallel: She wore taffeta and diamonds and had a gold ribbon in her hair. The o...

My upcoming novel, The Summer Son , includes approximately 71,900 words. Of those, an even 50 are the F-word, or one of its colorful variations. I know. I just counted. In light of my buddy Jim Thomsen's recent Insta-Poll on this topic, it occurs to me that some readers might find this number a bit distasteful. And with all due respect to individual sensibilities, delicate or otherwise, let me say this: I don't f-ing care. For much of the book, my protagonist, Mitch Quillen, searches his past and present for a way to get close to his father, Jim, an itinerant well digger who put a decades-long breach between father and son in one violence-drenched summer in the late '70s. Most instances of the word in question fall from Jim's mouth, either in present day or in Mitch's memories. As those exercises in expletivity migrated from my fingertips to the page, I had to satisfy just one standard: Did they ring true? The answer, in every case, is yes. F...

A couple of days ago, I visited a creative-writing class at Montana State University Billings , invited by an instructor who is kind of enough to have me come up once a semester to meet with her students. The instructor, Sue Hart (so complete a repository of knowledge about literature of the West that she ought to be a national treasure), told me that this class, in particular, was lively and engaged on the topic of writing. She wasn't kidding. In a rollicking 90 minutes, we covered a huge range of subjects related to writing and publishing. Of those, two stood out as particularly salient in this time when those who aim for traditional publishing are facing intense competition and those who lean toward independent publishing confront a huge marketing challenge. To protect the innocent, I'll identify the question and not the questioner: Since a publisher provides editors, how much do I have to worry about grammar and punctuation? An honest question deserves an honest answer: You...

Anyone who writes has been there: All your work in building three-dimensional characters, compelling settings and a taut story arc has led to a moment where your story will undergo a seismic emotional shift. You're about to build in the reward for the readers who pick this book up. It's going to be great. You have one job here, and it's one of the toughest chores writers face: You need to get out of the way. Step off the gas and cool down that prose. Wait, what? Let's think about this in cinematic terms. One of my favorite movies is Heat , the 1995 cops-and-thieves flick starring Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro. The crucial scene in that movie occurs when DeNiro's high-end crime team tries to take down a bank as Pacino and the LAPD bear down on them. The background music falls away. Faces get bigger in the frame. You can hear breathing amid a hail of bullets and see palpable fear. And every time I watch that scene, my pulse quickens and my nerves are set on edge. ...

Less than a year ago, I appeared on this site and audaciously banged the drum for my debut novel, 600 Hours of Edward . It was the first stop of a hastily thrown-together blog book tour, and as I look back on it, I realize that “hastily thrown-together” is an apt descriptor for much of my promotional efforts in those early days of the novel’s emergence. So here I am, back in this cozy seat as I approach the January 2011 release of my second novel, The Summer Son . I’ve learned a lot about promotional work in the past several months – enough to know that I still have much more to learn. Here’s a short list of what I’m doing better this time around: 1. I have a much more robust, focused blog book tour planned: 10 stops instead of seven, at sites with established readerships that are good bets to be interested in my book. 2. I’m taking advantage of a slower rollout: Lining up blurbs, putting together mailing lists for ARCs, seeing if some buzz can be ignited. The current ...

I just spent an intimate week with the novel -- tentative title THE SUMMER SON -- that I finished back in August. Except I wasn't really finished. Hence, the intimate week. While I waited to decide what I want to do with it, and waited for others to decide what they want to do with it, I decided to take a fresh run at the manuscript, to see what perspective a few months' distance would give me. This brings me to a confession: I love revising and editing. I love it more than I love writing a first or second draft. Drafts fill me with anxiety. Without really meaning to, I write quickly as I try to transfer what's in my head to the computer screen, even as story threads blow up and transform and head in new directions. I tend to work at a breakneck pace -- not so much because I enjoy it, but because my head and my fingers compel me to. Ah, but revisions. Revisions are a love affair in full bloom. I sit with a printout, red pen in hand, and I bleed on the pages. I stri...

Gift Book Suggestions I recently read two books that would make great gifts for the upcoming holidays, especially for writers. One is a memoir by a political cartoonist, Jeffrey Koterba, titled Inklings . This is a funny, poignant, and interesting look at Koterba’s life journey that was anything but smooth and easy. In it he writes freely about his dysfunctional family, led by an alcoholic father who also had Tourette’s syndrome, but the writing is not filled with angst and anger. It is almost a celebration of the craziness that played a big part in shaping the artist Jeffrey was to become, and he shares that artistry with wonderful sketches sprinkled throughout the book. The second book 600 Hours of Edward is a novel by Craig Lancaster, and I read this one right after finishing Inklings. This book is about Edward Stanton, a 39 year old man who has a severe case of obsessive-compulsive disorder along with Asperger's syndrome. The title comes from the 25 days, or 600 hours t...

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Last week's guest blogger, Craig Lancaster, generously offered a book drawing for copies of his new release, 600 Hours of Edward . Here are the lucky winners. Maryann Miller Vistavision (aka, Mike Goheen) Kristen Tsetsi Please email me at hotbuttonpress AT gmail DOT com (you know what to do here) with your mailing address, and I'll forward the information to Craig. Thank you for participating and congratulations!

Be sure to leave a comment to qualify for the third book drawing. We'll announce winners and contact information on Sunday! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ THE BOOK GOES TO RIVERBEND By Craig Lancaster I originally contacted Riverbend Publishing, a regional house in Helena, Montana, in the earliest days of the self-published version of 600 Hours of Edward in the hopes that I might be able to strike a distribution deal. Chris Cauble, the president, gave me the skinny on how such an arrangement might work and asked me to send along a review copy. As the weeks dragged on and my book started to gain some traction in my market, I followed up with a note to Chris in which I expressed chagrin at my crude early version of the book and told him of the updates and the response to the book. I suggested that I remained interested in a distribution deal but that an even better arrangement might be Riverbend's picking up the book. Cheeky, no? Weeks later came his initial note of interest, in which he s...

MISADVENTURES IN SELF-PUBLISHING By Craig Lancaster When I originally published my novel through CreateSpace, I did it in the crudest way possible. I used CreateSpace's pre-made templates to build a cover that, in retrospect, screamed “sloppy self-pub job.” I formatted the inside pages haphazardly in Word, with vast spaces between the lines. (True story: Later, when I reconfigured the interior, the book went from 342 pages to 256 just because I tightened up the leading.) I did a less-than-careful edit, resulting in my missing dropped words and backward quote marks and other such signs of an amateur at work. And I unleashed this book on the public! Oh, the retroactive shame. Slowly, though, I found my footing. A professor at Montana State Billings, Sue Hart, let me talk with her creative-writing class and helped me make some contacts. Local writers were generous with their advice and direction. Eventually, as encouragement and response to my book built, I started trying to place it ...

Now that I'm neck-deep in the world of books -- a fairly successful (but stumble-filled) self-publishing experience behind me and the launch of my novel, 600 Hours of Edward , with a mainstream publisher just days away -- I'm a bit awed to think back to where I was on the brink of November 2008. My friend Jim Thomsen had pitched the idea of trying National Novel Writing Month together, to see if either or both of us could finally break through and write the novels we had always talked about writing. I spent a couple of days before the event conceiving a story and writing a very loose outline of where I wanted it to go. In hindsight, I trace my success in finishing to that outline, crude as it was. I've been a journalist for more than 20 years, and thus most of my writing had never ventured far beyond 1,500 words. The idea of setting down 80,000 or so seemed preposterous. The outline, which I'd never attempted before, served as my trail of breadcrumbs through the woods...