Category Archives: publishing

The Monday Book: A STEP TOWARD FALLING by Cammie McGovern

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This is what’s known as a high-concept book. In other words, the premise that makes the plot unfold is a little bit complicated.

Belinda is a special needs girl getting ready to graduate high school. She has a fixation on Pride and Prejudice and a mild crush on a football player who dances with her at a BEST BUDDIES required event. (In other words, the football players have to go to a dance for special needs kids. Yeah, no worries there.)

Belinda winds up under the bleachers at a high school football game trying to see her crush, but meets someone else instead. And as that meeting goes very South, all the kids who see her, who see what’s happening, ignore it.

Which lands two of them in community service hours working with, yes, you guessed it, the special needs day program for adults. Where they get their lives handed to them in pieces as they realize what jerks they actually are. (Spoiler alert: there is redemption.)

A lot of the subtleties of the plot are driven by Emily, one of the two, being an academic nerd and Lucas, the other, being a football player. Cue the violins. The story is told from Emily and Belinda’s points of view in turns, and Emily spends a lot of time trying to unravel how stuck she is in stereotyping people.

The do-gooder pair wind up holding a play with scenes from PnP for the day care center, and that’s the culminating conflict of the book, which is more about exploring the shortcomings of policies for people like Belinda. The author is the founder of a non-profit for parents of special needs kids, and a lot of information comes out in the fiction.

Comes out well, I hasten to add. This is not a sermon cloaked in a story; it’s a story that delivers a good sermon. Belinda is a compelling character and her voice as a narrator is the best thing about this book. Emily and Lucas are interesting but a bit more predictable. The scene where Belinda walks away from Emily the first time she attempts an “apology” is wonderful. And the insights into a world too often hidden from view are meaningful. Thoroughly recommend this book, which provokes both laughter and thought.

The Monday Book: BLUEPRINT FOR A BOOK: BUILD YOUR NOVEL FROM THE INSIDE OUT by Jennie Nash

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This week’s Monday book comes courtesy of Paul Garrett

I once had the opportunity to observe the construction of a high-rise apartment as I drove by the site once a month. The first time I went by they had cleared the lot. The next month they had begun to dig a hole. The next month the hole got bigger, the next month bigger still. Finally, after several months a concrete column appeared. After that, the building went up rather quickly. I often use this anecdote as an analogy for my writing students to emphasize the importance of building a strong foundation for their work.

In her newly released (September, 2021)  book, Jennie Nash, the guru behind Author Accelerator, where they train people to coach aspiring authors, is also a strong proponent of laying the groundwork for one’s opus. That’s why she has produced her Blueprint for a Book: Build Your Novel from the Inside Out. With decades of coaching experience (She coached, among others, Lisa Cron on both her books.) She lays out a step-by step process to take the prospective author from the germ of an idea to a completed manuscript.

Blueprint for a Book is also the title of her Author Accelerator curriculum and could serve as a companion for her popular course, which is how I us it. (Full, disclosure I am a student of the course) or it could serve as a standalone guide. She avoids the jargon that many writing teachers use to show how smart they are; words like “premise,” “theme” “logline,” and “character arc” to make the material a little more accessible to the novice, but the experienced writer will find much to interest her as well.

Ms. Nash focuses on planning the novel and on the often overlooked but vitally important minutia of novel writing, whose neglect may be responsible for many of those unfinished and unpublished manuscripts languishing in drawers and on hard drives. Her best innovation is her “Inside Outline.” a way to marry the story and character arcs throughout the book for a more coherent narrative.

While the material seems tailor-made for the plotter, it may be confounding the pantser, who’s chomping at the bit to get it on paper. But the exercises can be helpful even after a rough draft is finished.

Whether just beginning your story, going into revision, or stuck in the middle, Blueprint for a Book can offer writers a helping hand.