This first episode is dedicated to the memory of Fred Klein (1923-2020) of Bantam Books fame, and the host of the original Literary Gumbo TV. This premiere of the reboot launches on what would’ve been Fred’s 100th birthday.
I’m here today with author and publisher Matthew J. Pallamary. I first met you at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, which we will talk about a little bit later. But first, why don’t you let me know, how did you get into this writing game?
Matt: Well, I’ve always had a knack for writing and didn’t realize it when I was in the sixth grade. I won the school spelling bee and then I went on to a citywide competition and I missed out. One of those weird I don’t remember the word, I fell out on that and I was in fourth place. I was one place out of getting $50 gift certificate and two places out of 100. So I could spell. And then they had a short story naming contest and I won that too, both in the sixth grade. I thought, okay, I’ve got an inclination toward writing. And then when I was in high school, interestingly enough, you should see my grades English was at the top. I got a B-plus because I let my buddy copy my term paper. And he wasn’t too bright. The teacher figured it out and she knew that I wrote it. I would have had an A, but I got a B plus. But I was fine with that. But if you look at my grades my senior year, it’s like English was B-plus.
History was B, and then they went downhill from there. And as fate would have it, I ended up just barely graduating with a C minus in woodshop. Oh, thanks. Anyway, I had the inclination, but I went on for a number of years and then in my early twenties, I took a creative writing course here in San Diego at Mesa College. As part of my degree and the assignment was toward the end of the term, was to write a paper about an experience. And what she said is, you need to write it out longhand or not necessarily but write it out and then turn it into me. I’ll go through it with you. Then you have to go back and rewrite it and type it out and then you’ll get your grade.
I wrote out longhand about the first time I jumped out of an airplane. Wow. Yeah, it was first person sort of stream of consciousness. So I wrote it out longhand, and I went up to her and she read it and she said, basically, My God, this is great. You already get in here, you pass. You don’t have to do anything else.
This is great. And I was blown away. I was like, I can write. I never thought about it. I never thought of myself as a writer or anything like that. After that, I was inspired and I started writing inspirational nonfiction, and I was writing for this spiritual magazine. My first article was published there, and it did well.
Then as time went on, they asked me to write more articles, and then they were featuring me. They commissioned an artist for one of my articles and I got the whole I was the main article centers spread, blah, blah, blah. So I was doing well writing inspirational nonfiction. But I realized that when I’m writing inspirational nonfiction for inspirational magazines, then I was basically preaching to the choir.
I came to the conclusion that you need to take your truth and dramatize it and tell it in a story.
Because the audience of inspirational magazines are already kind of on board. I started writing fiction then, and I did pretty good with it. I wasn’t making a lot of money, but I was selling short stories here and there.
Did you have a big break?
Matt: I like to say I’ve been writing for 44 years and I’m hoping to be an overnight success. But I did have a big break along those same lines when I was writing that stuff. A really good friend of mine that was riding motorcycles with and he got killed on his motorcycle. I wasn’t with him at the time, but I couldn’t shake the grief.
I started writing a novel, and ended up writing the novel two times on legal pads and pencil and got carpal tunnel syndrome for my troubles. At that point, I had to teach myself to compose on the keyboard. But I started doing short fiction just to learn how to write tighter. And I was doing short stories.
And my very first short story sale was to Oui magazine. It was not a kids magazine and it was a very prestigious sale because it was a big market. It was a huge market. And I actually wrote a story with a friend of mine. We collaborated on the story and had sent it out and it got rejected.
This one editor went on about how much he hated it. And then the editors at Oui actually called me on the phone and all the things that the other editor hated, this guy loved, and you know, Oui is a men’s magazine and so they get inundated by stories, you know, like hundreds a month or more.
So they called me and they loved the story and they accepted it that I wrote with my friends. The funny part of it is people would say to me, “Oh, you have a short story published, where can we find it?” And I said, “Well, you have to go to a liquor store and you have to go to the magazine rack. And down at the bottom, the ones that are in the brown paper bags, that’s where you’re going to find my story.”
Just a little caveat to that. I was in a writing workshop, I think maybe before you came to the conference, but I used to be a protege of Joan Oppenheimer, who was a fiction workshop leader. She was a great teacher. She made a big difference for me. She used to write her stories were made into ABC Afterschool specials back in the day. She was writing about teenage problems before anybody else really was. I’m sitting in a restaurant after a writing workshop with Joan, and everybody’s proud of my story.
And there’s the magazine on the table. So the waiter looks and he sees the magazine and, you know, he kind of reacts. So Joan took the magazine and turned it over to put a covered face down on the back of the magazine where all these 900 nasty numbers. So, you know, the writers, they were really proud of me because we had a very big circulation for the time.
But that was actually my first fiction sale that I wrote with my friend. It was a story called “Scaredy Cats” about a guy and his cat and his girlfriend and the cat’s jealous.
Oh, well, that sounds like a story that a lot of people will identify with.
Matt: Yeah, I’ll kill the ending really quick. You know, cats when they love, you know, go and they’ll eviscerate a mouse and bring it to you. So the cat was jealous of the girlfriend and the guy woke up one morning and found the gift of his girlfriend from the cat. We had fun writing it anyway.
Lisa: Yeah, but then you transitioned at some point to writing books. Was your first book fiction? I know you have a memoir as well.
Matt: Just a couple of years ago, I pulled out my first novel, which was called The Afterlife The Adventures of a Lost Soul. And it was about a guy who gets killed on his motorcycle and wakes up outside of his body and he meets the spirits. And they tell him that they’re teaching him how to relive his life. He experience life to learn his lessons by going into the bodies of other people. What he doesn’t know is that they’re demons and they’re teaching him how to possess people. And what they do is they would hang around like bars and people would get really drunk and they would come in and possessed them and do all these crazy things.
Then, of course, the people wake up in the morning and not remember anything because they blacked out with the drinking. So, I don’t know, four or five years ago, I pulled that manuscript out. It was like looking at a really poor, poor, poor student manuscript. And I edited it and tweaked it and I ended up republishing it.
Then I did a sequel to that. I haven’t done anything with that. And then I did a third book, which I published a while back. Then my fourth book was Land Without Evil, which was a historical novel about first contact between the Jesuits and the Indians in South America. But it’s told from the Indians point of view that received great critical review.
I got some wonderful blurbs from my mentors at the conference Barnaby Conrad, Jack Champlin, my friend Victor Villaseñor, who’s a big Hispanic writer. I kind of jumped to myself there because we’re talking about novels, but prior to them my actually first short story collection was my first published book, which was the Small Dark Room of the Soul and Other Stories that I got combined that did well.
And then I got combined with some other writers, some horror writers here in San Diego, and they wanted to do a summer reading roundup of horror writers, and they had three of them who were two of them were friends of mine, and they said, We need one more person. And they said, Matt. So I got in on that.
They featured us all in the Sunday paper, and then every Thursday the arts section featured one of us. So on the Thursday and my turn, they gave me two full pages and the newspaper, they commissioned an artist and it brought up a flurry of a lot of really good activity in the feature story, which was in The Small Dark Room of the Soul. It got an honorable mention in the year’s best horror and fantasy at the time, and it would have got more.
But it was very late in the game when Ellen De, who was an editor, I think she was originally with Omni magazine when she found out about the story, they were already too far along. She said she would have featured it, but I got an honorable mention. But just the fact that my first you know, one of my first short stories was one of the year’s best horror was a wonderful boost in a struggling career, as we all know, as writers just struggling all the time.
So that was that. And then Land Without Evil came out.
You got your books published. How did you get your first book published?
Matt: We had a magazine here in San Diego called San Diego Writers Monthly, and I was a regular contributor and I helped out a lot with the magazine, and he started doing a little bit of publishing. So I got on board with him and he did all the legwork and everything to get it all out there.
Then with Land Without Evil, I just mentioned my good friend Victor Villaseñor, his then wife, Barbara published Land Without Evil for me. She has a history in publishing. Her dad was a legendary editor and she published it. And we did really, really well. And I was doing book tours and this and that, and I really had some momentum going.
Then 911 hit and at the time, publishing was totally New York centered, so everything shutdown. I had big name writer friends who were on tours who got pulled. All my stuff stopped. They started sending returns back and it basically killed off the book in terms of all the momentum and the steam I had going.
It was done in hardcover. They can find it on Amazon and they did a great job. And then from there, over time I had the e-book and I narrated the audiobook a year or two ago and the audiobooks doing pretty good.
You made your transition to audiobooks before you went into publishing your own books?
Matt: Yes, that is correct. I got fed up with all the publishing stuff, you know. Okay. You find an agent and then the agent shops it around and then an agent finds an editor and then the editor tries to get it sold with the committee and the publisher. And then if that happens, you’re still going to wait another year or two, you know, and there’s all the things that go with it.
I had been going for a number of years submitting it, and I started to realize that I’m not getting any younger and I got frustrated. I thought about it and thought about it and thought about it. And then I decided to write my first memoir, Spirit Matters. I didn’t think I’d have a lot of chance because at the time I was very open about all my psychedelic experiences.
I don’t know. I’m sure they may be out there, but I don’t know anybody who’s done more psychedelics than me.
Lisa: And this is before it was popular.
Matt: I’ve been on the cutting edge with a lot of big time people, especially around 1998, 1999, even the mid-nineties, actually. I thought, nobody’s going to even accept this. I did some queries here and there and they didn’t. So I did it. And then I hired an editor to give me an overview and she basically said, it’s really well written, but there’s just way too much violence in here.
You know, it was part of my life and she said that I was amazed by it in the beginning. And then there was so much that I actually kind of got numb to it. So I did a lot of editing, I cut out a lot of stuff and then I ended up publishing it myself. And then I submitted it to the USA Best Book Awards and I got an honorable mention and I was beaten by Julie Andrews, which is fine with me.
Julie deserved to win and then I submitted it to the San Diego Book Awards and it took First Place for the best spiritual book. I’m tremendously proud of that because I was thinking people were going to judge me for my psychedelic use and my, you know, my violent history and background. So I got those two awards which were very, very validating and encouraged me to continue on because when I entered that who knew, nobody.
I mean, people might have known me as a San Diego writer, but it wasn’t people who I really knew, like when they gave the award. It was genuine, you know, there was no favoritism or nepotism. It won out, right? So I was very proud of that. So that took me in a new direction.
Well, so you published that yourself. What year was that?
Matt: 2007.
Lisa: You published your own book in 2007. How hard was it to do it that? That’s like 16 years ago. It probably wasn’t as easy as it is today.
Matt: No. I actually I have minor regrets about it, but I had went with an outfit called Author House and they did it in softcover and hardcover. And I hired a layout person, my good friend Linda Gibbs, she’s married to Richard Gibbs, who is a keyboard player for the band Oingo Boingo. And he had this big studio in Malibu, and she had done tons of CD covers for big bands and big people and big names.
But she had never done a book, so I found her through her cousin, who was a good friend of mine and actually a personal coach. She did wonderful, wonderful work on it. We got it published and it went out and it’s done well on its own. Not huge numbers, but it’s still very popular and it’s selling.
And I also that was really before the big, big revolution in E Publishing and all of that. That wasn’t really quite happening yet.
Did that even come out in e-book?
Matt: It did. After, because I did the e-book was one of the first things I did. And then when I started to find out as the audiobook thing evolved, I had been on a radio show in Laguna Beach eight or nine times and the host of the show really loved that book and he wanted to do the audiobook.
We made a deal. And at that time the radio station let us use their studio to do the recording. Every Sunday for about three months I drove from San Diego up to Laguna Beach. We’d be in there in the studio recording, and he was directing and he was pounding on me in a good way. He’d be like, one time in particular, I remember he said, “You’re writing about the time this guy pulled a knife on you and you act like it’s just another day at the office.”
And I’m like, put some drama into it. And so he really pushed me to be a better narrator. And it was really important for me to narrate that book because it was my memoir and it was first person. So we got through the recording. In fact, we did the first 30 pages and they were horrible and we made a decision, okay, that was a warm up.
We’ll dump all that and start all over again. Which we did. And then his brother owned two recording studios in L.A., so his brother mastered it for us. It went out and it’s still one of my bestsellers. I mean, I’m not talking about New York Times or, you know, all that, but I mean, it’s just like just yesterday I sold another audiobook of it, so it sells steadily and the e-book sells steadily.
And the evolving and changing marketplace has changed all those dynamics, too.
Lisa: Speaking of the changing marketplace and that kind of thing, what was your next big transition or your next big break?
Matt: Those were my first three published books and I’m very proud of them. And then I got asked and I’m big on sacred geometry. I love it. I like to say that I learned everything I know about sacred geometry in the jungle in my visionary experiences. And then I read the books, but I learned it. And I had the concept for a book and a tennis coach through another lady friend of mine approached me.
He had a whole idea. He invented a device called the Eight Board, which helps tennis players to get the perfect tennis stroke. You stand on it. It’s like two turntables, and it helps you to turn your hips and learn how to get the perfect tennis stroke. We talked for hours and I got what he was saying.
It had to do with the figure eight and the movement of the Figure eight. And, you know, if you look at figure eight and it goes back and forth and back and forth, but the whole place of power is in the middle of the figure eight. That’s the sweet spot. Anyway, I got the idea for the book and he wanted to collaborate and I started writing it and it just started writing itself and he was smart enough to know. He said, “I saw where you are going. I just got out of your way. I’ll let you go.” So I wrote it and I was amazed at how it came out because it kind of wrote itself.
So then I had a deal set up with my girlfriend at that time. Her sister was a graphic artist and I had it all set up. I had a check for $2,500 bucks to get her started to do the graphics, and she hemmed and hawed and she did it. I mean, I had a check in my hand and this and that and blah blah.
And then she writes me like this three or four page letter blaming my girlfriend like I’m not I can’t do this because of her and I’m like, so I just wrote her back and said, Thank you. That was it. Thank you. I’m not giving any energy to that. How? In another moment of frustration, I did the layout and the cover art.
That was my first time really doing the whole thing like that. I did it all and then I submitted it to the International Book Awards and it took first place in in the New Age category. So it was another wonderful validation. I’m like, Wow, those people don’t know who I am. They don’t care. They’re looking for what they think was the best book and it took first place in that which was super wonderful, super validating.
It’s done well. It still does well. And I actually ended up garnering an Italian publisher who bought up the rights and did a translation. So there’s an Italian version out there, I think it’s called La Zona Empanada or something like that. It’s all in Italian and I got a few bucks for that. So that was another wonderful validation.
But that was your first time actually doing the whole publication, except for his input. That was your first time really doing the whole publication yourself?
Matt: Yeah. And you know, to come out of the day like that, doing the first-time graphics and blah blah and then getting a First Place in an international book awards. Okay, I think I can do this. Yeah. You know, so that really launched me. And then from there, I had already written a number of novels that weren’t published.
I got to pull them out of the mothballs and clean them up and they’ve had various levels of success and popularity. So that really set me on the path with confidence and validation.
Lisa: Now you’re publishing your own books and your own e-books and your own audiobooks.
Matt: Yes, I am. Whne the e-books first started, which was kind of really before the print on demand, a little bit, and I was in a rough place financially, so I did my first books. I did Small Dark Room, and I did Land Without Evil. I went through all the things and got the catalog that I had at the time all caught up.
Then I had e-books and tree books, then a good friend of mine actually pushed me into the audiobooks, and so I started looking into that and I did the first one with the radio show host, like I said. Then the next four or five I hired different narrators. I’ve had some really good success with some of them.
Some of them were total duds. And then after a while, a friend of mine was looking into narrating his own audiobooks, and he is a musician. And so he had all the gear lined up to do it, and all the gear to do it was like $350 bucks. So I bought the gear. Yeah, but the learning curve was horrendous.
I have a background in technology, so I understand waveforms and all that, you know, signal peaks and all that and had to go through all that. And I got really stuck in the beginning that was pulling my hair out for an entire week.
I called my buddy Mick Nash, he was the lead guitarist through Alice Cooper’s Billion Dollar Babies album and tour. He’s a good friend and he goes, Oh, well, just do this and this. And I was like, Really? So after a week of pulling my hair out, I did what he said and it started working.
So then I did better. And then I did the second one, which was still bumpy but better. So now I’m working on my fifth or sixth and I’ve got it down. Good. Now I got the narration down when the technology screws up, I’m pretty good about figuring it out and I’m moving along. But I really paired some serious news with the learning curve, you know, going into it to start with.
But it’s worth it?
Matt: When I saw the royalty agreement with the narrators that I hired, they got half and I got half, which is fair. I’m okay with that. But now that I’m doing it myself and I know I had a little bit of a lack of confidence. But you know what? I’m reading my work. I know when to emphasize, I know when to accent.
And I’m actually doing a better job now than they did, although I did have some very good narrators. So now I’m confident I do it myself. And just like you and I are right now, we’re on this podcast. Well, I’m using all my audio book recording gear to do this podcast, you know, good headphones, a good microphone coming through clear and all that.
And only in the beginning with those initial frustrating times, everything. Room was noisy. So I would stop and start and stop and start and even little things because the microphone is so good, like the refrigerator turning on. Yeah, I remember going nuts at my brother’s house because I get all that figured out and I just started to record and then the wind was blowing.
The wind chimes outside. His door would go and that would stop and then a plane would fly overhead and then that would stop and the neighbor’s dog would stop barking. And I was just going bonkers. Then I started doing it. I’d stay up late until the wee hours of the morning and even then like 2:00 in the morning, I’d be well into it.
And all of a sudden, like a Harley would go by outside, you know, and then I’d have to back up. So now where I live, it’s a lot quieter when I’m close to the San Diego airport. They stop at 11:30 at night in this flight path and they start again at 6:30 in the morning. So right now, I’m making myself go to bed earlier and I’ve been getting up around four and recording from roughly 4 to 6:30 and getting it done even then. Still, something happens. Somebody, some hot rider goes by, you know, whatever, but it’s a lot better.
And part of the recording process, you can do a really good role and you may flub a word. Well, you know, the microphone is so sensitive a couple of times I’m doing it and all of a sudden my stomach growls and the microphone picks it up. So I got to stop. I got to go back. I got to get rid of all what I did and redo it. But as I get into it, it’s a book and it’s like writing. Like I said, I think I’m now narrating my fifth and I’ve got this will be this will be a dozen audiobooks I’ll have out.
Santa Barbara Writers Conference
Lisa: Oh, wow. Well, like I said, I first met you at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. When did you first attend that? Joan Oppenheimer, is she the one that got you into it?
Matt: Yeah. So she raved about it. I didn’t know her down here in San Diego, but there’s the Southern California Writers Conference, which was modeled after the Santa Barbara conference. And I went to the third year of that, which was, I think 87. And they were all excited about my writing. They weren’t giving awards, but one of the ladies I was working with, she said, “We’re not giving out fiction awards, but if we’re giving them out, you’ll get one.”
So I was like, Oh, okay, you know, there’s hope here. So then I went to the Santa Barbara Writers Conference in 1988, and as it turned out, all the coolest people I met were part of John Oppenheimer’s workshop. And that first year I tried to do all the pirates, I tried to do all the workshops, I tried to do everything, and I basically exhausted myself.
And then I submitted to an agent. I got rejected and I was totally destroyed. So in the course of all that, I had met Joan Oppenheimer and she said, Let me see some of your work. And so I showed her and she invited me to join her workshop down here in San Diego. So I joined and then I really started learning a lot of really good stuff.
I had been doing writing workshops a few years before that. My first writing workshop was with my good friend Nancy Holder. She writes all the Buffy books and stuff, the novelization from Buffy the Vampire. She’s done Superman, Smallville. She’s a real hardcore genre writer. And I spent two and a half years with her and learned a lot.
And then when I went with Joan, it was like this whole other level. So my second year I wasn’t going to go to the conference because I didn’t have the money. And Joan insisted that I go. And another really sweet, dear friend of mine, Lynn Ford, said to me, “I’m never going to make it as a writer, but I think you are and I want you to go and I’m going to pay your way.”
I went and these science fiction geek friends of mine asked me to do a science fiction horror workshop unofficially. Then went to Mary Conrad, who was running the conference, and she blessed it. She said, “Sure, you know, go ahead. It’s sanctioned by the conference.”
I ended up having 30 people come. And it was a big hit because back then they didn’t have anybody doing all the weird stuff that I do, you know? Yeah, romance writers. There were mystery writers, but there was nobody doing the bizarre stuff like me.
After that second year, Paul Lazarus, former vice president of Columbia Pictures, who was part of the conference, invited me to come back and do a workshop at the time, and I found this out later. I was the youngest workshop leader for 15 years. I’m not so young anymore, but I had a great turnout.
I had a good core crew and that became a regular thing. So back then we used to do the manuscript critiques ahead, they’d send the early submissions and it was a running joke because Barnaby Conrad would get the manuscript to look at and go, “This is bizarre and weird. Send it to Matt.”
And as the years have gone on, my appreciation for him has deepened and deepened and deepened. And he used to talk to me. He pulled me aside. He’d go, “Well, my boy, you know.” Then he’d tell me something. I would trade bad jokes or he’d give me some advice. And it was really like a dad to me, and I very much appreciated him. And I didn’t realize until many years later how much he recognized me as a real, quote unquote, a real writer. So him, Chuck Champlin, Sparky Schulz, all those guys. Bradbury, especially all those guys really took me under their wing.
And at the time I was real puzzled. I was like, What? Why are these guys paying attention to me? Now I know in retrospect they saw I was the real deal in terms of my commitment to writing, and I had some talent and they encouraged it. So I asked when Land Without Evel came out, they all pretty much went to bat for me and gave me wonderful blurbs and Ray Bradbury gave me a blurb for my first short story collection too, and he never used to give out blurbs, so I was very thankful for that.
That made a pretty significant effect on your career?
Matt: Major and bless his heart, Sid Stebel, who passed away a couple of years ago. He was best friends with Ray for like 50 years and Sid went to bat for me and asked Ray, who didn’t give out blurbs and not only did he give me a blurb which did changed my life, but I had sent him Land Without Evel the novel and I didn’t hear anything for a little bit. Then I got a postcard from him and he’s apologizing. Is that. I’m sorry, I didn’t. I couldn’t get to your book, but I had a stroke. I mean, he’s apologized and really because he had a stroke. Right. So he said, I’ve been incapacitated. But you can use the blurb I gave you for your first collection for your novel.
So I took that. And what a blessing. What? Ray, I can’t say enough. I was honored to be with him when he would speak. After he would speak, he’d go to the back of the restaurant and there’d be like four or five people sitting at the table with him. And I was always invited. And he would sit there and tell stories about writing Moby Dick with John Houston or and he’d go into it and he’d go into the John Houston voice. Well, you know, he’d just imitate. So him, along with Barney and the rest of those guys, my appreciation just deepens more and more for them.
Even 30 some odd years later, you are still a workshop leader.
Matt: 35. But who’s counting? Yeah. And I feel, you know, the conference is family to me. Like I said, Barney was like a like my writing dad and I, everybody else, I call my writing uncles, including Sparky Schulz. He was very supportive and very, very thoughtful. So now, you know, they’ve been checking out and getting older. And for me, it’s more important now, more important than ever to carry the torch and the tradition and the legacy that I was blessed to be pulled into.
And now I’m the old guy. It’s not just me. There’s others, too. But my workshop has been, like I say, 35 years going strong. And it was originally horror, fantasy and science fiction. And then at the turn of the century, around 2000, I started seeing more spiritual things and sort of new agey things. So over time I changed it to Phantastic Fiction.
Lisa: And you also have a book by that title.
Matt: Yes. Bless you. I put all the things I learned into the book. I designed the book and did the whole thing. I submitted that and won international Book Award for Best Place for Writing and publishing.
Lisa: I must say, I do own a copy of it.
Matt: Oh, bless you.
Since you are a writing guru, do you have a valuable tip for any of the writers out there listening?
Matt: Yeah, two things. One of the very first things I ever read and I heard that I really love it is writing equals ass in chair. I can’t tell you how many people. Oh, I got that great book idea. You should write it and then I just stop. Stop right there. That’s your book. And it was a period where I was getting that request almost every day.
But that’s not how it works. But the other thing I always tell my students in the beginning is puke on the page. If you have that stream of consciousness flowing and the story is flowing, don’t worry about anything. Don’t worry about punctuation, any of that. If you’ve got that flow happening, roll with it and just follow it. Even if it seems nonsense.
Once it’s coming out, do it. Get to the end of it because that’s what editing is for. And there’s a saying, you probably know this, because I know you’ve paid your dues, too. It’s not writing, it’s all rewriting it. And rewriting is a requirement. I mean, when you and I worked together, we did a lot of work on your book, Whiskey and Old Stogies, and those are all the things I learned from Joan Oppenheimer and Ray Bradbury and all of those things that go into making that happen.
In our society, with school and all that, people worry about the rules of grammar and all that and they’re worried about how everyone needs to be perfect. Then they stifle the flow of the creativity. And when you’re doing your initial drafts, you’ve got to totally forget about all of that because that’s what editing is for. In fact, another one, a little side story, you and I both know, Fannie Flagg.
Fannie came to the conference years ago and Eudora Welty was speaking. She was only going to come for the lecture but she entered the short story contest under the name of Edna Ferber. And she won. And she is dyslexic. So she was talking to Barney Conrad and she was like, well, you know, I’m dyslexic. Barney told her that doesn’t matter. That’s what editors are for. And look where she’s gone with it now. You know, she’s a legend and we’re all really proud of her and have her part of the conference and part of the family, you know. So the point is, let it rip. Don’t edit yourself. There’s time for that later.
And each successive manuscript that you work on, you’re looking at it with a different set of eyes. So after my carpal tunnel syndrome episodes, I forced myself to learn how to compose on the keyboard. I get it all as far as I can. And then I print it out. And then I get the red pen and look at it on paper with a red pen, it just looks totally different.
And then I line edit it then I put those in. So actually it’s like a third edit when I’m putting my line edits in because I’m also tweaking as I go.
And then you have to do the audio version. I’m sure there might even be a little bit of editing you might do once you have to read it out loud.
Matt: You are absolutely correct. And I’ll give you a good example of that. I used to do about a dozen edits or more. Now I’ve just combined steps and now I do about three edits. But those are all combined with everything. Then it’s clean and I know better anyway. But I wasn’t that good. But no matter who you are, your last edit should be reading out loud.
And that’s one of the wonderful things that we do at the conference when we do read and critique workshops is reading out loud because then you hear and you know. But I got lazy for a few years with that. And then of course people were pointing out typos and things like that because you even look at it a hundred times and still miss the typos.
So now I have combined my audiobook narration is my last edit and I have Word there. So when I get to a point and I’m reading the story or the chapter or whatever I’m reading, and I, I noticed something amiss. I get to the point where that audio point stops, whether I stumble on a word or a plane goes by or something.
And then I go back and I call up Word and I fix it. So that is my last edit and reading out loud is painful and miserable as it can be. Is the best thing you should do. Everybody should do it to really get clean because then you can hear it. You can see where the punctuation is. If you’re stumbling when you’re reading it, then you’re going to stumble when they’re reading it.
So that really is the best way to do it. And that’s my M.O. now.
Lisa: Well, that’s really good. I hope a lot of people take that to heart and put those steps into their own process. And I hope well, I know that I will see you in June and I’m looking forward to that.
Matt: Yeah. And you and I are presenting a workshop on websites and online marketing for authors.
Lisa: And I’m looking forward to that very much and I thank you very much for being my first guest on this experiment of this reboot. And I just really appreciate it.
Matt: No, thank you. I’m honored to be the person to help you lose your virginity there, young lady.
Lisa: And that’s the type of humor and interaction and uniqueness that you get from Matthew J. Pallamary.
Matt: Thank you and thank you so much for having me. I’m looking forward to seeing you again, as always, and I hope this podcast really takes and I really am honored that you chose me to be your first guest.
Lisa, great interview. He sounds like a sweet and humble man. You’re lucky to know him.
Sharon