Once again Greg and I are at the beautiful Alderbrook Resort and Spa. He is here for a conference, and I am here as driver and for my wit and charm (not). We have the room for one night but of course the weather was cold and rainy when we arrived yesterday, so I didn’t get out for much of a hike. I did spend a great deal of time in the coffee bar, artfully labeled the Drinkery.
Today, however, I plan a long walk along the beach.
One of the great things about writing in a different environment is how it jumpstarts my creative mind. I find it easy to write in coffee shops.
So, what am I working on?
I’m beta-reading a book of short stories for a friend and enjoying it a lot. These stories are set during the Vietnam War era and are quite interesting to me. I knew many people who were very like the characters in his stories.
Also, I am still trying to plot the final act of a duology that has been in the works for far too long. When that fails, I go back to working on the outline for November’s NaNoWriMo book, and both tasks are oozing along reluctantly.
On the fun side of things, I’m preparing for an in-person book selling event on July 1st at Olympia’s Pride Festival. I haven’t done an in-person event since before the pandemic. The best part of this is I will be with three other authors, Judy Kiehart, Ellen King Rice, and Johanna Flynn.
One of the questions prospective buyers always ask (and I hate) is, “What is your book about?”
My mind goes blank, and my mental response is “I don’t know” but since that won’t sell a book, I struggle to explain the core of my books in only a sentence or two. So, while I’m here at Alderbrook Resort, I’m working on my spiels. My goal is to make them short, concise (and hopefully) interesting.
Identifying the core plot device around which my narrative revolves is important.
Who or what is the book about?
I can sell either the idea of the book or the main character. Once I choose what to sell, main character or idea, I must stick to that. If I choose the character, I will use only the protagonist in the description, and forget the others, because it is that character’s story that I’m trying to sell.
Keep the spiel short. It’s easy to be long-winded and rambling about my work but I’ll only have about 60 seconds to sell that book.
I have no trouble selling my friends’ books – I’ve read them all and love them, and love selling them. Maybe I can sell their books because I’m not emotionally invested in their creation, but I am invested as a reader.
But back to this lovely resort—a place that is conducive to creativity. Greg and I were here at Alderbrook last year, and as a vegan, I found the food was both delightful and unusual. The food this year has been outstanding, created with care and attention. If you’re curious, here’s the link to my post from a year ago, #RoadTrip! The Resort, The Vegan, and June-uary #amwriting.
(June-uary is what we call a normal June around here because it will be cold, overcast, and rainy, like a slightly warmer January without the snow.) We like cold gray and rainy Junes here in the Great Northwest, because July, August, and September tend to be hot and dry. The summer drought normally starts on July 5th, but since today is warm and partly sunny, 74 degrees (23 Celsius), and weather models for the foreseeable future look the same or warmer, the annual dry spell may be starting early this year.
I’ve enjoyed our brief stay here at Alderbrook Inn. The view of Hood Canal is fabulous, the grounds here are beautiful, and the peace of this place is soothing. I’ve gotten some good work done.
We’re still unpacking at our new apartment. I’m not sure where some things are, but gradually our new home is shaping up. I like the ambiance of my new office. I think a lot of new plot twists are just waiting to emerge from my subconscious and complicate things.
Next week on this blog we will talk about the creative process and the importance of mind-wandering. We’ll also talk about why it is important to beta read for your fellow writers, and how to be a good reader, one who gives positive feedback and offers constructive suggestions.
In the meantime, happy writing!
I have “pantsed it” occasionally, which can be liberating but for me, there always comes a point where I realize my manuscript has gone way off track and is no longer fun to write. Then I must return to the point where the story stopped working and make an outline.
The first tool is a sense of balance. Every published novel has entire sections that were cut or rewritten at least once before it got to the editing stage.
At first, the page is only a list of headings that detail the events I must write for each chapter. I know what end I have to arrive at. But the chapter headings are pulled out of the ether, accompanied by the howling of demons as I force my plot to take shape:
Don’t be afraid to rewrite what isn’t working. Save everything you cut because I guarantee you will want to reuse some of that prose later at a place where it makes more sense.
Some novels are character-driven, others are event-driven, but all follow an arc. I’m a poet, and while I read in every genre, I seek out literary fantasy, novels with a character-driven plot. These are works by authors like 
And the prose … words with impact, words combined with other words, set down in such a way that I feel silly even thinking I can write such works. Thankfully, my editor weeds out pretentious hyperbole and slaps me back to reality.
This part of the novel is often difficult for me to get right. The protagonist must be put through a personal crisis. Their inner world must be shaken to the foundations.
This emotional low point is necessary for our characters’ personal arcs. It is the place where they are forced to face their weaknesses and rebuild themselves. They must discover they are stronger than they ever knew.
And what of my female protagonist? Where does her story begin?
I must introduce a story-worthy problem in those pages, a test propelling the protagonist to the middle of the book. The opening paragraphs are vital. They are the hook, the introduction to my voice, and must offer a reason for the reader to continue past the first page.
My favorite books open with a minor conflict, evolving to a series of more significant problems, working up to the first pinch point, where the characters are set on the path to their destiny.
The inciting incident is followed by a series of plot points, places where complications are introduced into the narrative.
The opening setting for this story is a small town in an exceedingly rural part of Thurston County. One must travel at least ten miles in any direction to find another city. After sundown, you must drive on narrow, winding, pitch-black country roads. I, the protagonist in my story, suffer from severe night blindness, which meant we had to return home before sundown, putting a real crimp in our social life.
Major surgeries happened for the other two, and I was many miles away to the south, getting our house on the market. But our sons and daughters are entering middle age, and our older grandchildren are adults. Despite our worries, our granddaughters proved they were mature and more than capable of handling their lives.
The protagonists are settling into the new neighborhood. One of the niftiest things about their community is the Starbucks—and yes, I did say Starbucks. The owners of the 
I find that writing is easy here. Creativity comes in bursts, and I feel good about my writing. We have pared our possessions down to the point that they don’t possess us—something you don’t realize is a problem until you are faced with serious downsizing.
In writing, this happens when the narrative keeps expanding, and expanding, and expanding … and what was canon in chapter 4 is contradicted in chapter 44. The story grows as we write it.
If you are writing a tale set in a fantasy or sci-fi setting, you are creating that world.
Your map doesn’t have to be fancy. Use a pencil to easily update your map if something changes during revisions. You want to know:
No matter the level of our education or the dialect we speak, we use these rules and don’t realize we are doing so.
Muddled phrasings often slip by when I revise my work because my mind sees the words as if they were in the correct order. This is the writer’s curse—the internal editor knows what should be there, and the eye skips over what we actually wrote.
I adore mishmash words. They’re poetic and musical and roll off the tongue with a satisfying rhythm. Sadly, while I regularly bore my grandchildren with them, I hardly ever get to write them. Mishmash. Hip-hop.
“Ing” words are a terrible temptation to those of us raised on Tolkien. He was writing a century ago, but that style of lush prose has fallen out of fashion. We open the gate to all sorts of verbal mayhem when we lead off with an “ing” word at the front of a sentence.
I have been following the adventures of Keltin Moore and his friends since the first novel, 
Beasts and weaponry abound in this installment of Keltin Moore’s adventures. The story opens with Keltin trying to keep his fledgling business afloat and pay the bill it incurs. It details the journey of his apprentice, Jaylocke. Jaylocke is a Weycliffe Wayfarer, a young man seeking to regain his status within his clan, by participating in a ritual called the Proving.
Lindsay Schopfer is the award-winning author of The Adventures of Keltin Moore, a series of steampunk-flavored fantasy novels about a professional monster hunter. He also wrote the sci-fi survivalist novel Lost Under Two Moons and the fantasy short story collection Magic, Mystery and Mirth. Lindsay’s workshops and seminars on the craft of writing have been featured in a variety of Cons and writing conferences across the Pacific Northwest and beyond.
It’s been over ten years since I first started writing my series about the adventures of a professional monster hunter. With the release of 
One of my most treasured experiences in writing The Adventures of Keltin Moore has been meeting the fantastic subject experts in the course of my research. I already mentioned panning for gold, but there have been so many more generous, enthusiastic people I’ve spoken to on subjects ranging from big game hunters to horse-pulled wagons. In particular, I feel blessed to have known Gordon and Nancy Frye. The Fryes are a fantastic wealth of historical information, particularly regarding the development and implementation of firearms over the centuries. If you ever read something in my stories and thought that something involving guns was particularly cool, you can probably thank the Fryes for contributing to it!
Life in the Realm of Fantasy 