An auditory sneak peek
A preview of Our Orbit,
Anesa’s new novel, coming soon. Here are the opening pages, read by the author.
Coming soon – Our Orbit
Coming soon – Our Orbit, Anesa Miller’s debut novel.
About the book..
Richly detailed with the realism of everyday life, Anesa Miller’s new novel, OUR ORBIT, reveals the perennial tension between modernity and tradition in the Appalachian corner of bellwether Ohio. The conflict plays out between two families who’ve lived side by side for generations, never crossing paths until now.
When a series of misfortunes rips the Winslow family apart, nine-year-old Miriam is separated from her parents, her sister and brothers. She becomes a foster child to the Fletchers, a well-meaning, college-educated couple. At home, Miriam never wore new clothes, was not permitted to cut her hair, and believed that children must repent their sins with major displays of remorse, or harm would come to their loved ones. Now she must adapt to the lifestyle of a more secular family while struggling not to lose her connection to the past.
Rick and Deanne Fletcher quickly come to love their “new little girl” with her cheerful energy and unusual ideas. Then they encounter the rest of Miriam’s family: Uncle Dan believes he was the subject of an invasive experiment. Sister Rachelle, just released from juvenile detention, harbors many painful secrets. Brother Josh is outraged that the Fletchers disrespect Christian teachings. When his plan to remove Miriam from their home fails, Josh reacts with growing hostility to interference in the Winslow way of life.
With writerly skill, Miller poses provocative questions about the forces at play in an American upbringing. Her narrative takes an unflinching look at the often conflicting systems of authority that operate within a family, a small town, and society at large, exploring how these systems shape an individual life. Among the interactions of her finely drawn and compelling characters, we glimpse the spirit that binds us in our common humanity—all of this in a literary novel that reads at the pace of a thriller.
Images that inspired Our Orbit…
Drawer No More! — Take 4
My first adventure in self-publishing dates back to the mid-1990s. Under heartrending circumstances (more on that later), my fiancé at the time offered to pay for printing a small book of my poems. I had written several poems for him, addressing his sorrowful circumstances, which partly motivated his offer.
Even so, his generosity blew me away.
In a whirlwind of action, I reconsidered all the verses I’d ever penned that remotely fit the poetic topic of loss. I contacted a printer in the nearest town of sufficient size to have a printer. Prevailing on friendship, I recruited a local artist to create illustrations and advise me on stock, color, fonts, illuminated letters, and all such visual elements. Within weeks, I had selected a manuscript of 20 poems and made plans for a 64-page perfect-bound chapbook to showcase them.
With eager anticipation, I showed these plans to my fiancé, Jaak (pronounced Yahk, it’s a common name in Estonia, where he was born). He smiled and nodded until I whipped out the printer’s quote. This marked a shift in attitude, almost like a sudden drop in temperature. I had kept him up to date on every step of the planning process. But now, he seized a handful of paper from his inkjet printer and proceeded to demonstrate how efficiently one can fold several 8.5 x 11″ sheets and tape or staple them by hand. Voilà! A nice little booklet! Illustrations? How convenient they’re pen-and-inks—a cinch to photocopy! No, no, sweetheart—you didn’t waste time driving 50 miles to the printer to pore over expensive papers. It’s always worthwhile to see how professionals operate.
But let’s be reasonable, can’t we?
I’m afraid not. First, you urge a hungry writer to picture her name on the cover of a perfect-bound book, then you break the news that what you really meant was a home-assembled saddleback?
I’m afraid the scene wasn’t pretty. Language was used that I prefer not to remember as I accused Jaak of backing out after he—and he ALONE, with no wheedling on my part!—had raised my hopes to the lofty level of 64 pages and a card stock cover. That was an especially bitter pill: in order to keep the price down to (what I took as) a reasonable figure, I had foregone the fancy C1S (coated 1-side) cover, virtues of which my salesman refused to shut up about. AND NOW YOU’RE SNATCHING THOSE PRETTY DREAMS AWAY, LEAVING ME TO STAPLE LOOSE-LEAF COPIES FROM THE XEROX SHOP?!!
How could I claim that the book was really even “published” if it were a mere mock-up like I often made for my children, decorated with crayon drawings? How could I put an ISBN on that?
So my first self-publishing venture was marked by painful conflict.
This being a true confession, I must return to the fact that Jaak was deeply bereaved. At the time I’m harking back to, a couple of years had flowed under the bridge since the terrible night when his teenage daughter, Tiina, was killed on the highway south of town by a drunk driver. But the death of a child is a blow from which a parent never fully recovers, so that dreadful night was still fresh for my man, and my poems were meant to aid his healing. Instead, there I was putting vanity above compassion as I protested his stinginess after the fact.
(In my defense, I had sacrificed my eyesight, going from 20/20 vision to my first-ever pair of prescription glasses, helping Jaak put out his book, which I edited developmentally over a period of two years, then helped copyedit and proofread. Please bear this in mind before judging me harshly…)
Heaven sent down a few mercies, and as it turned out, a small grant materialized. I got my perfect-bound booklet of 64 pages with 2-color cover and professionally photographed illustrations. The end result was quite lovely, and Jaak declined to hold a grudge over my petulant outburst. In fact, as my husband, he remains willing to this day to support my further adventures.
Nonetheless, that early foray still provokes nightmares. I mentioned the difficult decision of turning down the C1S cover, despite the claim that it would lead to “reliably brisker sales.” How embarrassing to admit that I, a sane and relatively well-educated adult, believed my poetry book would sell! Everyone familiar with self-publishing in that pre-electronic era knows my next confession: I have nightmares of posthumous embarrassment, imagining how my descendants will find those cartons of books stacked in the garage. Oh—and here’s another pile in the attic! And, my gosh—even more in the hall closet!
You mean they didn’t fly off the shelves, after all?
Self-publishers used to hock hard copies of books from the trunks of their cars. Now there’s been a revolution with the advent of e-readers and online retail bringing costs down and boosting accessibility. Has this solved the problems of sales and distribution? Tell me what you think—please feel free to comment on these or related matters.
Drawer no more! – Take 3
As you can easily figure, through all the years of submissions and rejections, publishing a book was my ultimate goal. Or my pipe dream, as it seemed. I produced two full-length manuscripts of poetry, one of short stories and one of essays. I attended writers’ groups and book clubs. I wrote three novels, appealed to agents and editors, researched small presses (which always seemed to cut off submissions the week before I discovered them), and I paid tidy sums for critiques of my work and my query letters.
All to no avail.
One bright morning, sometime after my collection of rej slips topped 2000, I opened the manuscript drawer and started shoveling. All those pulped trees and heartfelt phrases that no one cared about (except me, who didn’t seem to count) weighed like an albatross around my neck. A ton of stuff that didn’t deserve to see the light of day went straight to recycling.
But as I wheeled the last bits—the best of my rejected work—down to the curb, a fresh thought dawned in my sorrowful brain.
Why not publish some of it myself?
Please bear in mind: self-publishing is not what I had ever wanted. Well, okay, here’s a true confession: for one minute, almost 20 years earlier, I did want to self-publish a book. My fervent desire to NEVER do so again is a direct result of that ill-fated experiment. I have spent nearly every day of the subsequent decades yearning for the other kind of publication: the knight-in-shining-armor kind, where my work, on its own stellar merits, attracts a caring agent who finds an intelligent editor at a major publishing house just dying to produce my work and promote it to all the world, which of course comes flocking to buy and read!
Oh, God—Farrar, Strauss & Giroux! Yes, yes—W. W. Norton! Don’t stop—Knopf, Penguin, Random House! Such was my fantasy life, year after year after year. (Dare I imply that these Great Houses f*ck their writers? Do writers delude themselves into believing traditional publishers offer the best arrangement since wine started coming in bottles?)
In short, after all that unrequited lust, you can imagine how hard it was to accept the new idea dawning upon me. I resisted furiously, drummed up excuses why self-publishing was wrong for me—even if other writers were embracing the process left and right. For example—
I hate e-books.
I don’t speak mobi and don’t intend to learn.
Arcane formatting makes me break out in a rash.
Don’t trust the term “creative team.” Don’t work well with others after years in that lonely garret.
Can’t find a competent copyeditor, proofreader, designer, illustrator, or other members of that team I don’t trust.
Can’t tell a shyster from a legit author’s services company.
POD what?
And on and on.
But more compelling than any excuses, all the while I wallowed in my stalling tactics, the characters in my latest novel kept speaking in my ears. Their babble of voices told me, “You owe it to us to try! We want out to see the sunlight! You know people will love us if they only get the chance. We don’t care if it’s not Knopf—just publish us. We’ll do the rest.”
What could I possibly say to that?
Tell me what you think: Does corporate publishing make off with too much of the pie while writers starve in their garrets? Is it fair for the house to take the major cut even on low-overhead e-books? Please feel free to comment on these and related matters.