The Live Journal of James Stevens-Arce

I've just placed my 19th-century historical novel Blind Man, Preacher Man on the HarperCollins authonomy website.

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The following quotes are taken from the authonomy Home Page and FAQs page:

authonomy is a brand new community site for writers, readers and publishers, conceived and developed by book editors at HarperCollins. We want to flush out the brightest, freshest new literature around - we’re glad you stopped by.

If you’re a writer, authonomy is the place to show your face – and show off your work on the web. Whether you’re unpublished, self-published or just getting started, all you need is a few chapters to start building your profile online, and start connecting with the authonomy community.

authonomy invites unpublished and self published authors to post their manuscripts for visitors to read online. Authors create their own personal page on the site to host their project - and must make at least 10,000 words available for the public to read.

Visitors to authonomy can comment on these submissions – and can personally recommend their favourites to the community. authonomy counts the number of recommendations each book receives, and uses it to rank the books on the site. It also spots which visitors consistently recommend the best books – and uses that info to rank the most influential trend spotters.

We hope the authonomy community will guide publishers straight to the freshest writing talent – and will give passionate and thoughtful readers a real chance to influence what’s on our shelves.

Will HarperCollins be reading my work?
Once a month we’ll be pulling out the top five books from the Editor’s Desk Chart, and passing them on to our Editorial Board. HC editors will read from the first 10,000 words of each manuscript, and will feed back their comments to the appropriate authors, who will be able to decide whether or not to make these comments available to the community at large.

Will HarperCollins be publishing books from authonomy?
We’ve set up authonomy in the hope of finding new authors for our various publishing lists, so we’ll certainly be looking for promising books – as will other publishing houses and agents.

We only buy books we really believe in – as such, we’re not guaranteeing to publish anything submitted to us. In this way, you can be sure that any books picked off authonomy will have been chosen because we really love them.

The terms of any publication deals arising from the site would be negotiated as and when such opportunities arise – there is no fixed ‘boiler-plate’ offer specifically for authors who come to our attention via the site.

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And this quote is taken from their blog:

WEDNESDAY, 21 JANUARY 2009
Here at authonomy, we always hoped that our site would help people get spotted and get published, and today we’re really pleased to pass on the news of several publishing contracts coming through.

We’re fit to bursting with pride: not one but three different authonomy authors have been signed up to HarperCollins. Each one has a very different story to tell of the journey to acquisition, which we hope is an encouraging sign. World rights have been acquired in all three cases.

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The logline for my book Blind Man, Preacher Man is:

In brawling, sprawling 19th-century America, a blind Wild West show trickshooter must square accounts with a resurrected traveling evangelist who swindled the woman he loved.

Should you care to take a look at it, just click here.

And should you decide to post your own book, do let me know in the comments to this post.

Excerpted a section from my 19th-century historical novel Blind Man, Preacher Man, which, over the weekend, I finished revising and adapting into a short story I've titled Annabelle Fahey and the Comanche Raid.

Since it's an adventure story featuring a 15-year-old female protagonist, I'm submitting it to Cicada and mailing it off today.

I'm now beginning to revise and adapt another excerpt into a story which will be titled Annabelle Fahey and the Great Match Race, which I also plan to submit to Cicada.

Now that my 19th-century action-adventure coming-of-age novel Blind Man, Preacher Man is in my agent's hands, I'm currently:

• working on the third draft of my contemporary noir crime fiction novel Sins of the Heart,

• collaborating on a screenplay adaptation of an original stage musical in Spanish titled El Bombón de Elena (which would translate, roughly, as Elena's Candy, with the intentional double meaning of "the candy that belongs to Elena" and "Elena is herself like candy"), which the head of the local PBS station is convinced could be "the Puerto Rican Oklahoma" (only with salsa music), and

• excerpting and adapting a couple of 5,000-word adventure short stories featuring a 15-year-old female protagonist from Blind Man, Preacher Man with hopes of selling them to Cicada Magazine (working titles: Annabelle Fahey and the Comanche Raid and Annabelle Fahey and the Great Match Race.

I've also got to do my income tax.

I've got about 50 pages to go before I finish revising and polishing my 19th century action-adventure / coming-of-age novel, Blind Man, Preacher Man. This pass. Because I still haven't been able to find a big enough bloc of time to read the whole thing straight through in a single sitting. Maybe I'll be able to do something close to that on the flight to West Palm Beach this Monday and the return trip the following Monday. Tita and I are accompanying Tara there to assist her in finding an apartment and leasing a Jeep Grand Cherokee prior to her starting work selling commercial time for the local Fox Network tv station on February 14.

In the meantime, there's a section of BMPM focusing on the frontier adventures of a secondary character (the renowned trick shooter and Wild West show empresario Col. Annabelle Fahey) as a teen out of which I'm thinking I could get maybe two short stories I could submit to Cicada as follow-ups to my first sale there of Was Once a Beauty. One I've tentatively titled one Annabelle Fahey and the Fatal Comanche Raid and the other Annabelle Fahey and the Great Match Race. Since Cicada pay 25¢ a word and each story's wordcount will probably run a little over 5,000, there's a nice monetary motivation there.

The trick is finding the time for that while producing the stuff that puts food on the table and keeps a roof over our heads, such as writing the articles and designing the artwork for a four-page newsletter in Spanish and Portuguese I produce for Citicorp Financial Services Corporation's clients in Latin America (I write the articles in English and they send me the Spanish and Portuguese translations, although I could do the Spanish versions myself), creating an 8-panel insert and a 10-page booklet for CFSC, revising the artwork for some of CFSC's account opening forms, and writing press releases in English and Spanish and producing a full-page ad for an Interstate General Properties office complex which is opening for occupancy in March.

Oh, I bought a laptop last weekend at CompUSA — an Apple iBook G4 with a 14"-screen and a combo drive — which I plan to take on the trip, so I should be able to keep up with my day job while I'm gone and maybe even get in a little writing, though most of that will probably consist of more revising and polishing.