Tag Archives: humor

June 6, 2013 · 11:17 am

Facebook–A Squirrel Ran Through It

After looking at my Facebook page today I am overwhelmed. So many random thoughts are piled up in my forehead I don’t know where to begin.

First, Dean Frank Lappi has rereleased his epic fantasy-horror, Black Numbers, along with a sequel, Blood Numbers. The Aleph Null Chronicles has to be the most unique fantasy series ever written. This book is not for the faint of heart, or for those who shy away from explicit and at times, violent sex. Yet the sex is not for prurient purposes–Lappi’s magic is created by melding high mathmatics (the sort that explain the universe) and that most powerful of human drives, sex. I have been waiting for more than a year for this, and I guess you know what’s on Grandma’s Kindle today!

Then, there was a hilarious post by a fellow Olympia area author, Elizabeth A.. It was a link to a blog called “Death and Taxes”, and the post is called “18 Obsolete Words Which Should Never Have Gone Out of Style.”

They are all just so awesome, it’s hard to pick my favorite! I do think “Snoutfair: A person with a handsome countenance — “The Word Museum: The Most Remarkable English Words Ever Forgotten” by Jeffrey Kacirk” is a real winner.

Also there were the usual snarky, funny pictures that make the rounds. So many posts by so many people, all intent on chatting…. If I’m Facebooking on my phone I’m in trouble. It takes me ten minutes to accurately text “On my way” so a readable post by me is out of the question. I do end up with some awesome auto-fill errors.

I love Facebook as much as I hate it. It is a vast, time-sucking black-hole at the center of my universe, but some of the things I run across are just so hilarious.

Some things are really thought provoking. Today there was the blog post by Traci Tyne Hilton on being a writer and other people’s perceptions of you. It’s titled “The Proof of the Writer is in the CV.”

“So the other day,when a friend called me a “new writer” my defensive nature kicked into high gear.

What did she mean by that? She just meant I hadn’t been writing long.

What did I hear when she said that? I heard: “You just picked up a pen for the first time, like, yesterday, and now look at you!” (She doesn’t talk like a Valley Girl, the voices in my head do.)”

I think a lot of authors can relate to that feeling of “Whoa– what do you think I’ve been doing for the last 30 years?” but, just as Traci does, we realize it’s perception and semantics, and try not to feel that pang of instant outrage that we suppress and cover with a smile. Frankly, how many people actually know we’ve been holed up in a dark room with only Strunk & White and a typewriter or keyboard for companionship for all these years? Who of my coworkers knew I could wallpaper an outhouse with my letters of rejection? Failure to land a publisher for a novel you penned in your own blood and tears is a deeply personal failure, and is not something you chat about over lunch with the girls in the data-entry pool.

To be honest, before I published my first book, probably only my husband, my kids and my sister knew I had this dark secret, so it shouldn’t bother me to be called a new writer. In the eyes of the world, I am a new writer, so I’ll embrace it, and roll with it.

I love all the off-the-wall, hilarious and thought provoking posts I find on my Facebook page. In fact, today I found enough to keep me from having to write for nearly 3 hours! Woot! Now the morning is gone, I guess it’s time to sit on the back porch and read me some Dean Frank Lappi! Strange, how dark and scary he can make a summer’s day appear….

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Filed under Adventure, Books, Fantasy, Humor, Literature, Uncategorized, writer, writing

Tagged as adventure, Art, battles, Dean Frank Lappi, horror, humor, literature, obsolete words, The Aleph Null Chronicles, word museum, writing

June 3, 2013 · 8:13 am

Sustaining the Passion

The first days of summer have arrived. I’m not sure where the winter went, it flew by so fast. I’m many months behind on a gazillion things I wanted to have ready by now. I realize that goes without saying, but I had to say it anyway.

On a positive note I’m making headway on all sorts of side projects I had no intention of working on until next year.

Of course, the sky is gray until about 10:00 or 11:00 here much of the time, as we are so close to the Pacific Ocean, so the early morning is good writing time with no gorgeous blue skies to distract my sun-starved northwest eyes.

It all balances out.

I have this incredible urge to spend all day sitting on my back porch reading, instead of writing.

I’ve been working on several new vignettes for Lackland, for the new edition of The Last Good Knight. The trick is to keep the feeling of being on a roller-coaster that is part and parcel of the original work, and inject that sense of wonder and newness into the expanded work.

From my point of view, one of the best tales in The Last Good Knight is“The Dragon and the Daisies.” The story takes place some seven or eight years after Julian joins the Rowdies. Julian Lackland and Lady Mags have hit a rough spot, and it looks like they have gone their separate ways. Somehow, they work it out, and one of the more hilarious moments in Julian Lackland’s life ensues.

In order to recapture that feeling, I’ve been rereading my original work, and seeing it through new eyes. It’s amazing how much I loved that tale, and I feel that love every time I read my old ms.

I think that is what makes good reading–when the author is able to convey the passion for the story. That passion is apparent in Anne McCaffrey’s early works, such as Dragonflight, Dragonquest and The White Dragon. I felt that intensity of feeling also when reading Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, to name a few right off the top of my head.

The real trick is feeling that passion while you are writing so that your work is not flat, and yet keeping the story coherent so you don’t devolve into gibberish only you can relate to.

Sigh.

Rather than force it, I think I’ll clean house for a while, and then go read on my back porch.

The good news is, along with a new book in the Tower of Bones series and the two books in the Billy’s Revenge series, a book that I began writing in 1998, The Curse of the Stuarts, will be published early in 2014. This book has taken so long for two reasons. First, even though my sister Sherrie says it’s the most hilarious book I’ve ever written (and she would know,) it’s filled with every error a raw, newbie author can possibly make. I’ve been working on getting it straightened out off and on for two years. The second reason is I only work on this tale when I am between other projects, so it is inching toward publication.

Somehow when I revisit this old manuscript I once again feel that love of writing that is all-consuming, but sometimes eludes me!

Perhaps a relationship with your writing muse is like the most passionate relationship with a partner, filled with moments of absolute joy and abandon, and also with moments of intense struggle. Passion is, after all a two-sided coin–love on one side and hate on the other. Worrying about whether you’re feeling it or not it is a waste of time, because nothing ever remains the same and tomorrow will bring a different emotion.

Keeping the coin spinning is the key to keeping it interesting.

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Filed under Adventure, Books, Fantasy, Humor, Literature, Romance, Uncategorized, writing

Tagged as adventure, Billy's Revenge, books, dragons, humor, literature, The Last Good Knight, writing

May 28, 2013 · 5:40 pm

Manners in the World of the Ephemeral

Manners.

Etiquette.

Just what are they and what do they mean in the world of the internet? Indeed, what do they mean in our world at all?

Wikipedia, the Fount of All Knowledge, describes etiquette as a code of behavior that delineates expectations for social behavior according to contemporary conventional norms within a society, social class, or group.

Wendell Willkie, the early twentieth century American politician and author, said, “The test of good manners is to be able to put up pleasantly with bad ones.”

I confess that I do this with great difficulty, but I do it and try not to brag about it.

Benjamin Banneker, born November 9, 1731 – died October 9, 1806, was a free African American scientist, surveyor, almanac author and farmer. On the subject of manners he is quoted as saying, “Evil communication corrupts good manners. I hope to live to hear that good communication corrects bad manners.”

Whoa! How prophetic was that? In this era of instant communication, a carelessly worded post on a forum can lead to flaming responses and accusations of trolling.

Flaming, also known as bashing, is hostile and insulting interaction between Internet users, often involving the use of profanity. This occurs most commonly in eMail nowadays when the people involved have an emotional attachment to the subject and is compounded by the profound miscommunication caused by the lack of social cues available in face-to-face communication.

In the early days of the internet incidents of trolling were considered to be the same as flaming, but this has changed with modern usage by the news media to refer to the creation of any content that targets another person. The Internet dictionary NetLingo suggests there are four grades of trolling: playtime trolling, tactical trolling, strategic trolling, and domination trolling.

None of those activities are nice, as they are deliberate acts of bullying, and bullying is not polite.

Just sayin’.

The great American author, Flannery O’Connor, has been quoted as saying, “Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers.”

If she had lived to see the internet and the explosion of “invisible friends” with whom the average person is in daily communication she may not have said that. This world we live in is no longer a world where snail-mail and telephone conversations are the means by which we communicate. Today we live in a world where people are isolated and insulated from each other, and communicate via the internet using forums and social media. People of all walks of life come together in this vast melting pot of anonymity and they become ‘close friends’ or ‘dire enemies’ despite never having physically met.

Manners and proper etiquette are critical to maintaining one’s credibility in a world where you are represented by the picture you have selected as your ‘icon’ or ‘avatar’ and by what you write in the comments sections of public forums.

In this world, an icon or avatar is the graphical (pictorial) representation of the user or the user’s alter ego or character. This photo or graphic is the image beside our user-name before every comment we post in any forum on the internet. We are careful of what we put up to represent us, because we want people to see us as who we think we are.

I believe common courtesy that a person would extend in a face-to-face conversation should extend into our online conversations.

And this brings me to the ongoing breech of common courtesies that brought this subject up in my mind.

If you, as an author, are invited through a forum to ‘like’ another author’s facebook page or website AND you choose to do so, it’s not appropriate for you to then post a comment on their page that you have done so and also post the links to your pages or books. The proper way to inform the author you have ‘liked’ their page is to send them a personal message saying you have done so and include those links in that message.

To post links to YOUR website or books on another author’s page is tantamount to pissing on their doorstep. You are saying to this author and his fans that you consider this author to be nothing more than another venue for your marketing strategy. You are marking their territory with your scent, claiming a piece of it for yourself. I am sure most of the offenders have no idea how rude such behavior is.

We denizens of the 22nd century live in a world of the ephemeral, but the ramifications of what we do and say in that world are monumental. The internet is forever, and deleting a comment won’t make it go away, because it has already shown up in the in-boxes of all the users on that forum. We communicate instantly and frequently with no filters between the brain and the keyboard. In this world of instant communication and myriad opportunities for damaging your own reputation it is critical to think before you do.

To that end, I offer up this list of suggested “manners” for authors in the world of the internet. I didn’t invent them; they are copied directly from the website “Common Sense Media” and made to apply to indie authors trying to make their way in the cruel world of the internet:

Rules for Online Etiquette

Context is everything. If you want to have a silly online name that conforms to the convention of a particular online community and only your friends there will see it, fine. But for more formal communication — like email addresses, posting comments, or anything to do with work or school — choose a respectable screen name (though not your real name) that they wouldn’t be embarrassed to utter out loud in front of, say, their grandmother. If it is author related, use your author-name.

Double-check before you hit “send.” Could something you wrote be misinterpreted? Is it so littered with slang that it requires a Ph.D. in Urban Dictionary to be understood? Were you upset when you wrote it? Check to see if it’s rude, mean, or sarcastic. If so, don’t send it.

Take the high road (but don’t boast about it). Chatting, texting, and status updates are all “in-the-moment” communication. But if there’s an escalating sense of rudeness, sign off. No good will come of firing off a nasty comment. Authors, who are touchy, hypersensitive creatures at best, will NEVER forget how you flamed them. You can always write out a response to get something off your chest … without sending it.

Grammar rules. Rumors of grammar’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. (I love that line!) But again, context is key. An IM to a friend can dangle as many participles as you want, but anything more formal — for example, a public online comment or a note to a colleague — should represent your best self. This applies to capital letters, too. By now, everyone knows that writing in all caps means that you’re shouting, but it bears repeating once your kid starts interacting online.

Keep a secret. In today’s world, photos, texts, and videos can be posted, copied, forwarded, downloaded, and Photoshopped in the blink of an eye. If you think something might embarrass someone, get them in trouble, compromise their privacy, or stir up drama of any kind, keep it to yourself — and maybe delete it from your timeline or the thread for good measure.

Don’t hide. For safety’s sake, you should use untraceable screen names, but using anonymity to cloak your actions can poison the atmosphere — and hurt people. If your kids want to be contributing members of the online world, encourage them to post productively, and walk the walk yourself.

Remember the Golden Rule. Don’t post something online that you wouldn’t say to someone’s face. If you do have something negative to say, discussing it in person is a better way to resolve your issues. Post nothing on someone else’s wall that you would not be glad to have on your own.

These suggestions translate directly to Do No Harm. Behave with dignity, and extend the common courtesies to others that you wish to have extended to you.

To that end, I leave you with this quote from the beloved tennis great, Arthur Ashe, “Clothes and manners do not make the man; but when he is made, they greatly improve his appearance.”

I think that goes doubly for indie authors, because for us eking out a living in the world of the internet, appearance is everything.

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Filed under Books, Fantasy, Humor, Literature, Uncategorized, writing

Tagged as african american scientist, behave yourself, Did I say that?, fount of all knowledge, humor, Internet Etiquette, literature, manners, social cues, writing

May 25, 2013 · 9:31 pm

Stephen Hawking, Morgan Freeman and the Randomness of Squirrels

Here in the wild world of blogging, we spend many hours writing posts, only to find when we read them a day later that our personal editing skills are somewhat deficient, especially if one wings it, as I frequently do.

I’ve been told it’s a technical problem with my keyboard–something about operator error–but I disagree. The incidents of inappropriate self-editing are usually accompanied by the sightings of random squirrels and shiny objects. I’m sure it’s something to do with extra-dimensional doppelgängers and particle physics as it seems to happen on a sub-atomic level, so I blame Stephen Hawking, Morgan Freeman and Michio Kaku. After all, if their documentaries weren’t so darned interesting and educational I would never be assailed by these thought of “what if….”

As I was writing this post, I was suddenly bowled over by a passing squirrel who casually reminded me that even worse than a badly edited post is the number of times I forget to properly tag my posts.

If you have a blog, and you are not having much luck attracting people to it, it could be as simple as you haven’t discovered the importance of ‘tagging’ your posts.

Many of us have WordPress blogs and many of us have Blogger Blogs. I have both, so I have a basic understanding of how some things work in both formats. Each one has its positive points. One thing they have in common is that blog posts must be tagged in a way that attracts the eye if you want to attract readers from various search engines such as Google, Yahoo or Bing.

Tagging is an art I’ve not quite gotten the hang of in regard to twitter, but I’ve figured out what works for my blogs.

Blogger is simple. The right side of the dashboard has a section that refers to tags as ‘labels’. On my Best in Fantasy book review blog which is blogger, I label each post with the Author of the book I am reviewing, the series the book is a part of if that is a factor, and the other labels say book view, epic fantasy, and anything else that pertains to the book. This could be a ‘Dungeons & Dragons theme,’ or even ‘Society for Creative Anachronism,’. I will use even just the label ‘humor’ if appropriate. You don’t want to use more than 9 labels. Because it is a book review blog, I just post once a week, whatever book I read that week that I really liked, and then tweet the post and sit back and let it perk along on its own. That blog is pretty much a self-maintainer, as long as I remember to assign ‘labels’ to each individual post. Then I tweet the post and my work is done on that blog for the week.

The blog you are currently reading is a bit different because it is WordPress. It is a two-step process but it is simple once you figure it out. First go to the right hand side of your dashboard. Underneath the “Publish” button is a drop-down menu labeled “Categories.” Decide what categories most clearly represent your post and assign them.

Posts for Life in the Realm of Fantasy usually fall under one or more of these categories: Adventure, Fantasy, Humor, Writing and Vegan Lifestyle. DON’T FORGET TO DO THIS OR IT WILL DEFAULT TO “UNCATEGORIZED.”

That is bad, because then your blog will fall into a giant heap of uncategorized blogs with nothing to show what they are about. If you are writing about the potato famine, you want to make sure your category is Irish History, and so on.

Just as important as the categories in a WordPress blog are the TAGS. The drop-down menu for the tags is located just below the categories. THIS IS CRITICAL! Select keywords AND themes that are mentioned prominently in the post, or that people who are Googling a subject might use in their search. This post’s tags will be:

fantasy, humor, literature,

tagging and labeling blogs,

writing,

Stephen Hawking, Morgan Freeman, Michio Kaku,

Squirrels

According to what I read on the internet (so it must be true) the best rule-of-thumb is to not use more than nine or ten tags for a blog, and never more than three tags in a tweet.

So back to squirrels and particle physics.

According to Particle Physics for Dummies, we still do not understand 95% of the universe.

It comforts me to know that Morgan Freeman, Michio Kaku, and Stephen Hawking are just as confused as I am.

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Filed under Adventure, Books, Fantasy, Humor, Literature, writing

Tagged as fantasy, google yahoo, humor, literature, Michio Kaku, Morgan Freeman, particle physics, Squirrels, Stephen Hawking, tagging and labeling blogs, writing

May 20, 2013 · 6:53 pm

Hacking through the brush

Writing is mountain climbing. Half of it is uphill.

Yesterday I spent all day writing a scene that occurs in the relationship of a main character, Billy Ninefingers, with the woman he loves. It’s a pivotal scene, and the way I first wrote it, she makes a decision that hurts Billy, but he goes along with it because he doesn’t know what else to do.

It didn’t read right to me.

So I rewrote it, making him angry, making him push to have his needs met in the situation. I was still not happy with it, so I trashed the new scene.

What I did yesterday was waste 11 hours writing 3624 words, which I then threw away.

Today I’m going to rearrange the living room instead.

Some days you’re writing and the prose flows like fine wine into a crystal glass, gorgeous, smooth; a delight to senses.

Other days your writing takes you deep into the bug infested jungles of Look-There’s-A-Squirrel Valley and the divergent paths you find yourself on are downright frightening.

Where does my mind come up with some of the crazy things that pop up in my work? I don’t know, but some days writing is as much about hacking through the brush trying to find your way back home as it is basking in the glory of a completed chapter.

The bright spots on my horizon are the two women who’ve dedicated a great amount of time to making my work readable, Carlie Cullen and Irene Roth Luvaul.

Irene is what some people in this industry are beginning to refer to as a ‘line editor.’ She helps me make my manuscript submission ready – that is, she makes sure I’ve dotted my ‘i’s and crossed my ‘t’s (insert comma) (delete comma) and that the manuscript is as clean as it can be before I submit it to my editor, Carlie Cullen. Irene checks the manuscript for consistency in spelling the frequently made-up names of people and places, so that my spelling doesn’t inadvertently drift (Liam…Lyam….) Some authors have spouses who will do this for them, but my husband doesn’t read fast enough and has a day-time job. Fortunately my best friend Irene saw I was struggling, and offered to help. This is the first stage of the process, and clears the way for Carlie to work her magic.

Irene is a retired legal secretary with 40 years of proofreading and punctuation behind her. That she WANTS to do this mammoth undertaking on my raw, bloody manuscripts is amazing to me. I’m not as well-educated as many other authors are, and my first drafts are clear evidence of that.

By having the brush cut back (so to speak) before she gets the manuscript Carlie is able to concentrate on the true task of editing the work for publication. I’m not wasting Carlie’s time on things that should have been corrected before she was handed the manuscript. After all, she has other clients and also her own writing. I want her to enjoy working with me, not dread it!

Of course, she will make edits on grammar and things Irene and I may have missed, but Carlie guides me in cutting out the fluff and excessive backstory that finds its way into the tale. She has me expand on the important things, the points of the tale which are the real meat of the matter. She may have me take a minor thing and expand on it, or she may think something is not as important as I think it is. This is where the real story begins to unfold. Carlie turns my manuscript into a book.

If you have been suffering from a series of rejection letters and you don’t know why, it may be that your manuscript was not submission ready when you sent it in. You may not even have known your pride and joy was an unruly child. Many editors and agents will reject manuscripts with plots based on wonderful concepts and with great characters simply because the task of getting the grammar and punctuation corrected in order to get to the real editing is not worth the effort.

But after having been in this business for a while now, I’ve come to realize that it takes more than a great story to make a great book. I’ve seen manuscripts a third grader would not have been proud of, but they were the blood sweat and tears of an author and it killed me to tell them it wasn’t acceptable in its current state.

I’ve had other authors look at me with disdain and say, “Well I always refer back to Strunk and White when I am writing, so I don’t need an editor.”

Yep.

Well, so do I, when I pause long enough to think about it, but I write like a freight train–once the tale has me and I’m rolling, I’m not going to stop for anything so minor as grammar.

Strunk and White IS the final word when it comes to grammar and use, but unless those two lovely men have actually laid their eyes on your manuscript, you may have missed a few things or you may have a tale that, while it is grammatically perfect, it is full of dead ends and lackluster prose.

Having been through hell and back with “The Last Good Knight” I cannot express strongly enough the importance of having TWO sets of editorial eyes on your work.

Editors have eyes AND they have Strunk and White, and they are not afraid to use it. But editors also understand what makes a good tale and they will guide you in that direction if you will let them.

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Filed under Books, Fantasy, Humor, Literature, Uncategorized, writer, writing

Tagged as adventure, Art, divergent paths, fiction, humor, manuscript submission, pivotal scene, writing

May 14, 2013 · 7:26 pm

Creativity

Creativity. Making something good and wonderful from something ordinary.

Sometimes writing is more about inspiration than it is anything else, and other times it is all about the perspiration.

Even when we are inspired and our work is flowing, there is a lot of work involved.

Research. The internet is an awesome resource and I highly recommend you do not rely solely on Wikipedia, The Fount of All Knowledge, fine repository of sometimes mythic information that it is.

Stitching the plot holes together. Finding them is the trick, because everything looks perfect to me, until Irene gets hold of it!

*doh*

Meeting and greeting the characters who people your tales. I write descriptions and biographies of them as they appear in the first raw draft of the tale so that I know them and how they will react in a given situation.

The day 14 writing prompt for the short story a day in the month of May from StoryADay.org for today was (and I quote:)

“Simple task today (ha!): The Prompt Write a story that opens, “On the edge of the mountain, silhouetted against the setting sun, there is a small ramshackle cottage made of wood.” Tips This sounds, at first blush, as if it has to be set in a fantasy or fairy-tale world, but I bet you can […]”

SOOOOO this is what MY somewhat less than fertile mind came up with today:

On the edge of the mountain, silhouetted against the setting sun, there is a small ramshackle cottage made of wood. The wind blows through the cracks and crevices, and the glass that once graced the windows has long since fallen prey to the winter storms.

Once it was full of laughter, love and merriment. Children played in the now wild garden. Raccoons now raise their young beneath the floor boards, and owls nest in the rafters.

The cottage and the mountain are one; both have always been and only time will tear them down. Nature always takes back her own.

This is in keeping with my commitment to writing my shorts in 100 word bursts, even though I’m not that impressed with it. It’s an exercise, and just doing it is good for the writing muscles.

Am I any closer to being able to write a decent pitch for my forthcoming novels? I don’t know, but I’m having fun. One day I wrote my 100 words as a love poem, too frank and soul-baring to post here.

It’s cathartic in a way – 100 words that fall out of me for no one’s amusement but my own. Some are good enough to share, some are just mental crap. But it’s a good exercise, and it stirs the creative juices.

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Filed under Books, Fantasy, Literature, writing

Tagged as adventure, Art, battles, fantasy, fiction, humor, literature, writing

May 10, 2013 · 7:15 pm

The View from the Fishbowl

<– The Starbucks in my son’s office building has a fish tank, and this is what the fish see when I am working there!

One of the more awesome things I get to do frequently is drive to and through Seattle. It used to freak me out to even contemplate making that journey, but now I’m so used to it I barely notice it unless something is on fire alongside the road.

We’re stopping…we’re going…stopping…going…meh….

Downtown Seattle isn’t all that user friendly if you are in a car. I am becoming the queen of negotiating one-way blind-alleys and parking garages designed by Daedalus.

Driving in heavy traffic has a great deal in common with writing a novel. It is important to develop a sense of Zen-ness, ninja-like calm; keeping the flow going in the face of roadblocks and characters with limited vocabularies.

You start out going really well, at the speed-limit or even above. You’re sailing along! Suddenly you notice brake lights ahead and you slow down, or even come to a complete stop, hoping the guy rapidly approaching your rear bumper has insurance.

Then you go, real slow. You may be doing 10 mph, but you are doing in a forward motion. You are rolling! You pick up a little more speed and you think “This isn’t so bad, I think were past the worst of it.”

You’re wrong, but hey, you actually gained 500 feet of forward motion toward your goal before you had to stop again! After 10 miles of that you find yourself once again sailing along and life is good!

Negotiating rush-hour traffic on I-5 is exactly like writing a book, or indeed, completing ANY artistic endeavor.

What’s important is not how fast you made the journey.

The important thing is arriving at your destination alive and with your temper and your dignity intact

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Filed under Adventure, Battles, Books, Fantasy, Literature, Uncategorized, writing

Tagged as adventure, battles, humor, literature, Starbucks, Traffic Jams, vegan lifestyle, writing

May 8, 2013 · 7:28 pm

The Knight Returns

As always, I have five or six projects going at once. I’m in the editing process on Mountains of the Moon, a Tower of Bones prequel. I’m getting a sci-fi short-story ready for submission to Analog. If they reject it, I will publish it as a novella.

And now I am doing revisions on Huw The Bard, and writing Billy Ninefingers, I find myself writing a new opening vignette for The Last Good Knight. The revised edition will have several new chapters, one of which was completed only a few days ago. It will not have the prologue, nor will it have the chapter that is a long info-dump. They tell a lot, but they are mistakes made by a new author, and they do the book no good.

I know I’ve said it before, but I’m in love with my characters. And of all my characters, Julian Lackland holds a special place. He was my first real hero, my first slightly-flawed-but-nonetheless-still-perfect hero.

This is the issue: we as authors want readers to see our literary vision with the same clarity as we see it. The problem with that is our readers will NEVER see our vision as we do. They will see it through their own eyes. This means our task is to enable them to visualize the story and the characters in the way that is most pleasing to the reader.

Folks don’t want info–they want action.

So I’m going to give it to them. Heh-heh. Good Luck, Lackland!

Fortunately, I am an indie and I have the ability to unpublish a book that isn’t working as it currently stands, and do it as it should have been done in the first place had I not been so new at this business.

Today I hit the road north again, this time to Seattle. I will be working in a Starbucks in the South Lake Union part of town, in a building that houses Amazon. Afterward I will meet my son there and we’ll go to a vegan restaurant, where he’ll pretend to enjoy the food (because he loves his mother) and we’ll have a good time. All the while, all three tales, Huw the Bard, Billy Ninefingers, and Julian Lackland will be rolling around in my head, and I will attempt to carry a conversation on as if I weren’t a raving lunatic, obsessed with my imaginary friends.

He’s used to it.

Tomorrow, while my son is having oral surgery, I will be in the waiting room, devising new tortures for old friends. If it goes long enough, I might finish another vignette!

Sorry son, Mama’s a writer. Reality isn’t her best thing.

5 Comments

Filed under Adventure, Epilepsy, Fantasy, Humor, Literature, Romance, Swashbuckling, Vegan, writing

Tagged as Art, fantasy, fiction, humor, knights, literature, vegan lifestyle, writing

May 5, 2013 · 1:35 am

Sell me that book in 100 words or less!

I’ve been participating in a month-long exercise where you get a prompt and you write the story. I have set the bar a bit high, as I am giving myself only 100 words to tell that story. It’s a bit difficult, but I have a reason for this, beyond my usual insanity.

The back of a book has something we writers call blurbs (I know. I shouldn’t use author-speak in company, it’s not polite.) Technically it is called “the pitch” because you are pitching your product to prospective buyers. This little thing is critical. Your cover must make them pick up the book or click on the icon and your pitch must sell it. But hello – you have only about 30 seconds to capture the prospective buyer’s interest enough for them to crack it open, or use the look inside feature for eBooks.

I’m not real good at writing pitches. Neither are the Big Six Publishers, oddly enough! Even the big companies have found ways of avoiding pitching a novel simply by putting glowing reviews of other works by that author on the back cover.

Back Cover of Mage-Guard of Hamor by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

Bleah. That doesn’t sell me a book, Tor-Forge, publishing giant that you are. As you can see, on the back cover of this book there is no blurb, only glowing comments about the author’s other series of books. This may work for a well-known author like L.E.Modesitt Jr., or Brandon Sanderson, but it doesn’t work for me as a reader.

I have observed many indies taking the same route, and skipping the blurbs entirely.

Indie authors take note: I (and millions like me) don’t buy books without blurbs of some sort, somewhere, unless I am already familiar with that author’s work. I want to know what I am buying, so even a bad blurb will interest me more than a quote from a glowing review by one of your Beta Readers.

Just sayin’!

So here I am, suffering the curse of the indie author, trying to not only be my own publicist, but also my own advertising agency.

Thus, I am going to learn how to write a blurb, if it kills me. Writing a 100 word piece of flash-fiction is called a “drabble”. I figure if I can get this down to a fine art, I can write a decent blurb.

The original prompt went as follows:

Write A 100 Word Story (“Drabble”) . . . although a 100 word story will probably take longer than expected, it’s still going to take a manageable amount of time.

To make a drabble work,
-Choose one or two characters
-Take one single moment/action/choice and show us how it unfolds
-Give us one or two vibrant details in as few words as possible
-Show us (hint) how this moment/action/choice is more significant than the characters probably realize in the moment

I decided to use these parameters for the entire month of flash fiction. Here is my first one, written May 1st.

Ted (5-1-2013)

Edna stirred her coffee and looked out the window toward the shed.

“Did you feed the chickens?” Marion always asked, though she knew Edna had.

Edna looked away from the shed. “Of course I did.” Her eyes turned back to the shed. “We won’t be able to keep him in there much longer. He’s growing too big. We should have a barn built for him.”

“Ted was always a greedy boy.” Marion stirred her coffee. “I warned him he behaved like a beast.”

A rumbling bellow shook the shed. A long green tail snaked out of the shed door.

I will keep practicing until I get the hang of creating something interesting in 100 words. Blurbs don’t have to tell the whole story, that is what the inside of the book is for! All they have to do is sell the book–be that tantalizing bit of interest that hooks the reader into buying your book.

Yesterday’s drabble went like this:

Drake – 5-3-2013

He stood on the parapet, silhouetted against the starry sky, his wings wrapped tightly about him against the chill wind. The sounds of the darkened world below drifted up to him. The nightbird’s song. The servants in the castle below. The lowing of cattle in the distance.

Hunger, intense and overwhelming clouded his vision.

Spreading his wings Drake fell forward, the wind catching and lifting him; soaring. A scent on the wind alerted him to his quarry.

On a corner she stood, ripe and full lipped—the tamale vendor.

Silently, he dropped beside her, whispering seductively, “Two tamales, please Senora.”

I’ve had a lot of fun with this, and I may have some ideas for longer short stories here, so it’s certainly not a waste of time, even if I never get the hang of selling my own work!

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Tagged as adventure, Art, battles, Brittain, dragons, fantasy, fiction, humor, writing

May 3, 2013 · 6:14 pm

It’s all Greek to me

Dragons.

Two tons (or more) of muscle, scales and, frequently, fire.

What’s not to love?

They are rumored to be as devious and crafty as your mother-in-law.

Don’t bandy words with a dragon or you may lose more than the argument.

Again, not unlike your mother-in-law.

My dragons are not really the kind who bandy words about, however some do breathe fire. That heats things up a bit!

Heh heh. Oops.

Darn it. Now we need a new hero.

I hate that when that happens.

In English, the word dragon is directly derived from Old French – dragon, which in turn comes from Latin draconem (or draco) meaning “huge serpent, dragon,” AND also from the Greek word drakon meaning “serpent, or giant sea fish”. Both the Greek and Latin term referred to any great serpent, not necessarily mythological, and this usage was also current in English up to the 18th century. So in that sense, dragons REALLY did exist.

Which came first Latin or Greek? Greek – it’s a living language and has been spoken for over 3000 years. Many Greek words found their way into Latin, and other proto European languages. Thus English has some roots in Ancient Greek.

Now as far as dragons go, in my two worlds they are quite different from each other. In Waldeyn, (Billy’s Revenge) there are two kinds. The smaller wingless variety often has a second breath that allows them to breathe fire–quite an effective weapon, as Huw the Bard will discover. The bigger ones fly and prefer to eat people, so they are considered a nuisance.

No, my dragons are NOT vegans. But that would be an interesting twist….

In Neveyah, (Tower of Bones) they tend to be immense creatures of both magic and the element water. This puts the mage at a disadvantage, as the element that heals the beast is the element of water and you must never use it against them. Water is also their best magic weapon, and they are relentless. They have high reserves of chi and strong magic at their disposal, along with excellent shielding ability, so using any magic at all against them is a no-no.

Good luck, boys.

There are ways to fight them, and all my heroes will find ways to do so with varying degrees of success. Writing those scenes is a real adventure, as I get to put myself in the battle, and choreograph it so that it flows, is believable, exciting, and hopefully no one crucial to the story dies.