The Writer’s Workshop Blog highlights my adventures teaching writing classes, writing stories, articles and books, leading travel, food and wine writing classes to France and Italy, traveling the globe, promoting my books including the novel, The Storms of Denali, and other aspects of the wild and crazy world of writing and publishing. Writing and publishing are changing enormously and I hope this blog will help keep you up to date on some of the changes.
SOCIAL MEDIA FOR AUTHORS
Social media are a great way to get the word out about your book and to develop a community interested in hearing about your work. There are lots of social media useful for authors, including Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and Good Reads.
You probably won’t be able to use all these media, so ideally choose one or two to concentrate on. Pick one that you like and can update regularly. Andrea Dunlop of Girl Friday Productions recently spoke to my class at The Writer’s Workshop about how authors can best use social media to promote their work.
“It’s an exciting time to be an author,” she says. “Facebook, Twitter and other social media are the main tools to promote books.”
Reviews in traditional media like the New York Times or Seattle Times are also important, but newspapers are running fewer reviews and most people are getting their recommendations from friends, a definition which has grown to include Facebook and other friends.
“Don’t get too obsessed with numbers,” she says. “Focus more on quality rather than quantity. You want to cultivate an interesting stream of information. Get people interested in you as a person, and then bring up the book.”
The Cessna 185 speeds down the runway, heading for the top of North America. Jok Bondurant pulls up on the stick and the plane soars into the air. We’re heading for Mount McKinley, at 20,320-feet, the highest point on the continent and the crown jewel of Denali National Park, one of the most pristine places on the planet.
Bondurant, a pilot with Sheldon Air Service in Talkeetna, Alaska, and passengers Calle Hedberg , Tom and Jean Coghill, and I cruise above the wide, braided channels of the massive Susitna River. Climbing higher, we near the foothills of the Alaska Range, a jagged array of snow-clad peaks like the mandible of a fierce prehistoric beast.
“Granite erodes slower than other rock,” Bondurant says, pointing toward the granitic peaks of the Alaska Range—Foraker, Hunter and McKinley. “That’s why these peaks are higher.”
High is certainly right. They seem to belong on another planet. I press my face to the window, trying to take it all in. I booked the flight to revisit the mountain, which I wrote about in my novel, The Storms of Denali. I summited the peak back in the 80s and like many others had fallen under its spell. Now I’m hoping that will happen again on a short, three-day exploration of the park.
Lavender fields outside of Vaison la Romaine, the site of the Travel Writing Class.
Travel writing is one of the most exciting genres of nonfiction, calling on all of an author’s skills—dramatic scenes, character sketches, concrete detail, point of view, scene by scene construction. This six-day intensive travel writing course will introduce you to essential techniques of travel, food and wine writing and give you expert, insider advice about how to submit and publish finished stories.
In addition to learning these skills, you’ll dine at outstanding restaurants, visit some of the world’s best wineries, and explore fascinating historic sights. You’ll enjoy exclusive behind-the-scenes tours unavailable to the general public. Best of all, you’ll receive up-to-date story ideas from local industry experts that you can turn into finished stories by the end of the travel writing course and submit to newspapers and magazines for publication.
The six-day travel writing class (May 18 – 24) will take place in Vaison la Romaine, one of the most beautiful medieval hill towns in Provence, and a center of its cultural and epicurean life since Roman times. The cost will be $2600. Plane tickets and travel to and from Vaison la Romaine are extra. See travel writing page on this website for more information.
To enroll, send me a non-refundable deposit of $800 to 201 Newell St., Seattle, WA 98109. Enrollment is limited to 10. For more information, contact me.
The Writer’s Workshop Blog highlights my adventures teaching writing classes, writing stories, articles and books, leading travel, food and wine writing classes to France and Italy, traveling the globe, promoting my books including the novel, The Storms of Denali, and other aspects of the wild and crazy world of writing and publishing. Writing and publishing are changing enormously and I hope this blog will help keep you up to date on some of the changes.
Please join me Saturday, March 2 from 2 to 4 p.m. at the grand opening of the new Queen Anne Books (1811 Queen Anne Ave N. ) Despite all the doom and gloom in the publishing industry, there is also hope, represented in this case by the reopening of a great community bookstore.
Stag’s Leap winemaker Nicki Pruss beside the “Hands of Time” tribute to those who have worked at the winery
It’s harvest in Napa. The smell of fermenting grapes fills the air. Pickers comb the yellowed rows of vines, culling glistening clusters before fall rains or early frost damage them. Wine makers work feverishly to crush the fruit at the apex of its ripeness, insuring a stellar vintage. Fruit flies buzz excitedly, caught up in the frenzy of the crush.
“It feels like we’ve been doing an ultra-marathon,” says Nicki Pruss, the red-cheeked winemaker at Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, one of the most famous houses in Napa. “I sometimes don’t know what day of the week it is.”
During the harvest, Pruss serves as chief “grape herder,” coordinating the picking and tasting the fruit before it enters the stainless steel maw of the crushing machine. Amid the noise and haste, she recites her mantra “balance, elegance, restraint” allowing her to decide which juice from the vineyard blocks will go into the winery’s signature blends.
“Each block is like a color on a painter’s palette,” she says. “Each block is a slightly different expression of cabernet. Some have bigger, more structural components. The soils, climate and grapes all make a difference in the blend. We are trying to become in tune with this place.”
Warm days and cool nights make for an ideal Napa wine harvest
Stag’s Leap occupies one of the choicest sites in the Napa Valley, an oenophile’s Eden of some 400 wineries located 50 miles northeast of San Francisco. Thirty miles in length, it ranges from five miles wide near the city of Napa to one mile near the town of Calistoga. Internationally known as one of the world’s greatest wine regions, the valley contains the richest concentration of wineries, fine dining and wine touring facilities in North America.
After leading wine tours for The Writer’s Workshop to France and Italy, I wanted to see how North America’s greatest wine region stacks up against the best of the Old World. I’d passed through the valley before, but didn’t have the time to fully explore it till a three-day trip last fall. What is special and unique about the place? Why do so many people fall under its spell? How does it differ from the great wine regions of Europe? These were some of the questions I sought to answer during my visit.
I was here on assignment for Alaska Airlines Magazine to write about Napa as a wine touring destination. In the course of the writing assignment, I interviewed Nicki Pruss of Stag’s Leap, Chris Howell of Cain Five, Antinori’s chief enologist, Renzo Cotarella, and visited with Karen Trippe at the Conn Creek Barrel Blending Experience. The assignment required research and interviewing skills, as well as structuring the story in terms of a quest, some of the techniques I discuss in my writing classes as well as trying to put into words what makes a wine like Stag’s Leap Cask 23 so superlative. The story will be coming out in the February or March issue. Please let me know what you think!
Ryan Johnson with the steep, rocky Grand Reve Vineyard in the background.
The most exciting new vineyard in Washington could easily be mistaken for a rock quarry. Perched on the side of Red Mountain–perhaps the premier site for red wine grapes in the state–Grand Rêve (big dream in French) slants down a steep, rocky, wind-blasted slope, looking more like a rock garden than a vineyard. Littered with shattered volcanic boulders, cactus and tumbleweeds, the vineyard has proven very difficult to establish, but likely will yield some of the some of the richest syrah, mourvedre and Grenache in the state.
Despite the unusual appearance, Grand Rêve resembles the best terroir in the world. It looks like a combination of Chateauneuf du Pape and the northern Rhone, the rocky cobbles of Chateauneuf tilted on their side, recalling the extraordinary vineyards of Hermitage and Côte Rôtie, home of Guigal, Chapoutier, some of the biggest names in French wine-making.
Co-owner Ryan Johnson gave me a tour of Grand Rêve in September when I came over to pick up merlot grapes from Ciel du Cheval for our Les Copains Winery. As much as I enjoy writing about travel, food and wine, there’s nothing like participating in the process to bring home the romance and frenetic intensity of the crush. It’s this kind of first-hand research that yields the freshest, most detailed stories, a point I make in my writing classes, and one which came back to me again as we climbed over the basaltic rocks and cobbles of the vineyard.
“It’s hard to farm but very promising,” said Johnson, who is also the vineyard manager of Ciel du Cheval Vineyard, one of the premier sites on Red Mountain. He co-owns Grand Rêve with Paul McBride and knows the soils of Red Mountain like few others, having grown grapes there for 10 vintages while also managing Cadence Cara Mia, Galitzine Estate, and DeLille Grand Ciel vineyards, a who’s who of Washington winemaking. He is most excited about his improbable new vineyard.
“We can raise the bar for Red Mountain and Washington State,” he said confidently, citing the unique character of Grand Rêve. The 13-acre vineyard contains 34 parcels, with nine different soil types. Before he started planting, Johnson dug 57 soil pits, trying to figure out exactly what to plant, seeking to match varietals and clones to the individual lots. What he found astonished him: layers of volcanic ash in one parcel, silt over limestone in another, volcanic rocks mixed with silt in yet another—a dizzying variety of terroirs, likely to produce an incredible variety of grapes—if he could only cultivate it.
“It was a lot of work,” said Johnson, of one parcel nick-named El Terror. “The plants were put in with a pick axe and crowbar.”
Walking through the vineyard is more like a rock scramble than a walk, but it’s exactly the kind of ground I visited in May at famed Vieux Telegraphe in Chateauneuf du Pape, where I will return next spring to teach my annual Travel, Food and Wine Writing Class. Such rocky soils yield the tastiest syrah, mourvedre, and Grenache.
Grand Rêve will produce its first fruit next year, with wine to follow shortly, but you can get a hint of what’s in store with the Grand Rêve “Collaboration Series” wines available in limited quantities via mailing list, and through a select number of Puget Sound retailers and restaurants. The Grand Rêve tasting room is located at 12514 130th Lane NE in Kirkland, Washington. (susan@grandrevevintners.com, 425-549-0123).
This collaboration series contains fruit for some of the best sites on Red Mountain, and will whet the appetite for the wild, vertical world of Grand Rêve. Several years ago, Johnson tasted a McCrea Cellars pure Grenache and was blown away by it, inspiring him to make a similar 100-percent varietal from the highest, rockiest parcel on the site.
“It’s a quest,” he admitted as we got back to his pick up. “It’s my Holy Grail.”
The Big Dream is becoming a reality.
For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth.
For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.
Anne Lamott
One false word, one extra word…
One false word, one extra word, and somebody's thinking about how they have to buy paper towels at the store.
Patricia Marx
Writing a novel is a terrible experience.
Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.
Flannery O’Connor
Just follow your hero.
First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him!
Ray Bradbury
…with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always.
I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced…the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always.
Ernest Hemingway
Get it down. Take chances.
Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.
William Faulkner
The difference between the right word and the almost right word…
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
Mark Twain
Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you.
Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.
Barbara Kingsolver
Pleasure in a good novel…
The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.
Jane Austen
It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world.
It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling.
V.S. Naipaul
There are only two or three human stories.
Isn’t it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes for thousands of years.
Willa Cather
Literature is nothing but carpentry.
Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The forms of things unknown and the the poet’s pen…
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
William Shakespeare (from A Midsummer Night’s Dream)
The Writer's Workshop 
Social media are a great way to get the word out about your book and to develop a community interested in hearing about your work. There are lots of social media useful for authors, including Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and Good Reads.
