Tag Archives: writing

January 14, 2013 · 7:03 pm

The Terry Pratchett School of Prose

The Color of Magic_cover terry pratchettOne of the earliest influences on my sometimes smartassed style of writing was Sir Terry Pratchett, O.B.E.‘s watershed fantasy series, Discworld. Sir Terry takes  J. R. R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft and William Shakespeare, as well as mythology, folklore and fairy tales, and mashes them up in this hilarious series of tales. There are 39 books in this trilogy!  Talk about prolific!

Discworld is a flat disc balanced on the backs of four elephants which, in turn, stand on the back of a giant turtle, Great A’Tuin. Oh my goodness – what opportunities for mayhem were locked in that kernel of a plot!  The series begins with “The Colour of Magic.”

One of my favorite books in the series is “Mort.” It is the 4th book and is the first to give Death the main storyline.

As a teenager, Mort had a personality and temperament that made him rather unsuited to the family farming business. Mort’s father, named Lezek, felt that Mort thought too much, which prevented him from achieving anything practical. Thus, Lezek took him to a local hiring fair, hoping that Mort would land an apprenticeship with some tradesman; not only would this provide a job for his son, but it would also make his son’s propensity towards thinking someone else’s problem.

The conversation between Lezek and his brother Hamish as they discuss Mort’s future in the opening pages is hilarious and quite revealing in its simplicity. In this snippett, Lezek and Hamish are observing Mort as he attempts to frighten some birds away from the crop.

“He’s not stupid, mind” said Hamish. “Not what you’d call stupid.”mort - terry pratchett

“There’s a brain there all right,”Lezek conceded. “Sometimes he starts thinking so hard you has to hit him round the head to get his attention. His granny taught him to read, see? I reckon it overheated his mind.”

At the job fair, Mort at first has no luck attracting the interest of an employer. Then, just before the stroke of midnight, a man concealed in a black cloak arrives on a white horse. He says he is looking for a young man to assist him in his work and selects Mort for the job. The man turns out to be Death, and Mort is given an apprenticeship in ushering souls into the next world (though his father thinks he’s been apprenticed to an undertaker).

I love the snarky way Pratchett takes clichés and runs with them. He grabs the boring, bland, overdone themes of western literature by the tail and swings them.  When he sets them down they are SO much more fun to watch!

What I have learned from the Terry Pratchett school of prose is that dialog tells us as much about the speaker himself as it does about the words expressed.  In the quoted passage above we see enough of the two men who are speaking to have some idea of who they are.  Pratchett gives us the personality and demeanor of the character in those simple lines.  We can see them, fully formed in our minds eye as they speak. .

That is the hand of the master, and it is what I someday hope to be able to bring to my own work.  The important thing to remember is you must read the works of the masters, because if you have no idea of what good writing really is, you can’t write it. Read the best works in your genre and continue writing your own stories and never let the struggle of getting your work out there take away the joy of writing it. It’s not easy, going indie, but it is so rewarding!

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January 9, 2013 · 6:26 pm

Building the Beast

Anne_Anderson05 - Beauty sat down to dinner with the Beast illustration PDArt - Wikimedia CommonsI have been suffering with a cold for the last week and so my writing output has dwindled to nearly nothing.  I have gotten some work done, but not the amount I had hoped for.

I worked on a scene requested by my editor, Irene Luvaul, for Huw the Bard, one to liven up a dull stretch just a bit.  I didn’t want to put Huw through the wringer again when he has already suffered so much, and he was so close to making his way to Billy’s Revenge, but she was right – a bit of tension would add to the interest.

So I alternately thought and slept on it for more than a week, trying to force my plague-ridden body peck out a few lines with merit to them.

I couldn’t think of anything.

But then a passing paragraph toward the end of Billy’s Revenge I – The Last Good Night (under revision again, cleaning up the manuscript, thank you Carlie Cullen for volunteering) gave me the idea for a strange creature with which I could freak out poor naive Huw. (Having the right editor in the first place solves SO many problems further down the road.)

Firesprites.

But this meant – you guessed it – Building the Beast.  The only trouble was, I didn’t really know what one looked like – after all they were only mentioned in passing as being a nuisance.

Now, I only had three passing references in BR1 that talked about these creatures, but those few sentences told me quite a bit about them, actually.

So when I thought about it I realized I did have enough to build one. I just needed to assemble the parts.

1. They are either  elemental creatures, or poisonous creatures, one or the other. I say this because they are called ‘FIREsprites’. Yet, logic tells me they can’t be made of fire, or there would be no forest. Therefore, they must be poisonous, and the poison must be an acid that burns like fire.

2. They must be small. Otherwise King Henri’s horse would not have stepped into a nest of them and thrown his rider.

3.  Something about them makes people think of fire, and it must be something bad, because Lackland and the people of Waldeyn feel compelled to kill the entire nest when they find them, sort of like fire ants only bigger and badder.  But they must be something that one lone woman (Lady Mags) could deal with, with only the aid of an amulet.

I always think it’s better when the folks who actually have to deal with them tell me what they look like, so here is what Matt St. Couer told Huw and I about firesprites.

Matt said, “Now we need to herd them to the center of the nest and get them bunched up in as tight a group as we can.  Don’t touch them, whatever you do. The slime on their skin will burn you like the hottest fire, and there’s no stopping it from eating your flesh away. That’s why they’re called firesprites. The wounds keep putrefying, and amputation is the only remedy. Water helps but only if you get the water on the affected area right away, before the poison has done too much damage. I’m talking minutes here, and you have to really sluice the wounds to get the poison off. Sadly, they never seem to nest near water.”

Ulleen said, “They like to nest along roads because there’s not so much foliage and they get more sun there.  The sun heats their nests and hatches their eggs.”

“They don’t look much like a sprite, do they,” Huw said, thinking they were interesting but not really fairy-like.  “At least, not what I always thought a sprite should look like. They look more like naked chipmunks with hairless tails. But their skin is pretty, all shiny and coppery like that.”

“I think they were named that because when they’re looking for grubs and such all you see is a little flash of copper as they disappear into the brush,” Ulleen replied. “I’ve always wondered about that too.”

Now as far as actually building the beast goes,  I have quite a lot of dragon parts lying around my office, and I can assemble a dragon in no time at all. I will even stick wings on it, if you like your dragons airborne. But dragon parts are far too large for this project, so I’ll have to look elsewhere.

Somewhere in here I have a box with everything one might need to assemble a demon.

I think this is the box.

Yes!

I’m partial to waterdemons. They’re quite fun to put into a fight-scene and some of their components will be perfect for the job. Clear, gelatinous skin is exactly what these little guys need, and I have a lot of it in this box. If I take some of that and turn it all coppery, it will actually be kind of pretty, in a hairless chipmunk sort of way. With the addition of a really strong acid to the gelatinous goo I think we’ll have a cute little firesprite!

I love arts and crafts time!

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January 6, 2013 · 5:05 pm

Oh, the Agony

The Aspirin Shop © 2012 Connie J Jasperson All Rights Reserved

The Aspirin Shop © 2012 cjjasp All Rights Reserved

Yes, we now find ourselves in the deepest depths of January. The days are short and dark, and my desk is piled high with the visions and revisions of my current works-in-progress. I stare at the mountain of work that demands my attention and my mind is consumed with solving that eternal paradox,  “Who gave me this damned cold? Which little germ-factory that I call a grandchild is the culprit?”

Alas, the responsible party is most likely sitting in his kindergarten class having a snack and discussing tactics for beating “Lego Star Wars”  with his mates while Grandma suffers the agonies of the damned.

In the meantime, cold or no cold, I must somehow wind up the tale before me. My characters have already been through quite a lot, and they aren’t in tip-top condition. Still, they have a job to do and they are going to do it or die in the process.

At this juncture my characters are lurking high in the  branches of fir trees outside the stone walls of a mountain keep, observing the small village surrounding the castle they need to enter. They need to decide how to enter the haunted castle, and they need to make a plan for getting to the rogue-mage and eliminating him.  Once he is dead, the spells he’s layered over his guards will be broken and my team should be able to leave safely.

Once inside the keep, they will have to make their way through the halls, killing off the bespelled guards as they come to them until they have finally met the mage they have been sent to kill.

They’ve already fought a dragon and been caught in an avalanche. They’ve fought many other elemental creatures and each other.

Now here they are, poised on the edge of finishing this adventure and Grandma’s too stoned on NyQuil to concentrate long enough to get them to where they can kill the evil bad dude.

This could take a while.

It’s just so much wo-o-o-ork…..

Actually this game looks fun. I think I’ll just rest in the play-room for a moment….

lego-star-wars-the-game desk top wall paper

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January 4, 2013 · 8:31 pm

Vegans and Version Control

caloricclassic red blender2013 has kicked off with the usual spin through the blender of life. I’ve begun a 31 day journey into the vegan lifestyle, and so far I’ve not noticed anything missing from my life other than dairy – giving up cheese is my one regret. Four days into it and I’m still committed. Not sure if I’ve lost any weight, but I don’t feel puffy so that’s something.  Unfortunately, with the return of my  thyroid tumor (benign) and a writer’s lifestyle ( I WRITE about athletic people) my chances of losing any weight are slim without both changing my diet and my level of activity. Walking is now a part of my day, walking and thinking about where my stories are going.  At this point it is unlikely the tumor will be removed again, but one never knows.  When I had the first one removed in 1981 I lost 50 lbs in 3 months.

Health issues aside, writing is also a real spin in the blender. I have 3 books in various stages of the editing process and two being formatted for print. Oh, the Agony! I am working on three or four different things every day and lets be real, I get sidetracked quite easily. It’s difficult to make the transition from my fantasy life to reality, and wait–is that a Rainbow YouTube video? Whoa, Munich in ’77…. Ronnie James Dio… Ritchie Blackmore….

Ahem.

I also have to make several revisions for Forbidden Road as suggested by my Beta Reader, and then Carlie Cullen will receive that one back for final approval.

The best thing (sarcasm) is when I get an email from one of my editors and I attempt to save the attachment in the wrong file!  Believe me, proper version control is crucial in this business!  I do this by saving a file in a separate folder for each step in the editing process and labeling them in a particular way that never varies. Let’s say I am saving a new file for Forbidden Road. It is the fourth time Carlie Cullen has seen it, and I have completed the revisions per her suggestions. This is the path and how I label each step in the process:

>Forbidden Road > File Folder> FR 4th Edit Complete > FR Ch 1 4th edit CC – cjjasp complete

I will attach that file to an email and Carlie will sign off or suggest further revisions. If she sends it back with further suggestions then a new File Folder will be created, for the 5th version.

If I had the sort of  relationship with an editor I have with both Carlie and Irene when I was first starting out as a full-time writer, many problems I am still dealing with in my earlier work could have been avoided! But it is all a learning curve.  The longer we do this the more we learn and the better we get at avoiding the little pitfalls of being an indie author.

I wonder if J.R.R. Tolkien would have been as easily distracted by random YouTube videos as I am.

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January 2, 2013 · 7:31 am

Which was that, anyway….

742px-L_Spada_Concierto_1615_LouvreAs a mostly self-educated old lady, I’ve had to learn some real lessons, regarding the words ‘that’ and ‘which’. I finally managed to rid myself of the inadvertent overuse of the word ‘that’ in my writing, but in the process I find I have become a ‘which’, as opposed to a ‘witch’, which my children will tell you I have always been.  Irene Luvaul, dear friend and editor on ‘Huw the Bard’ has spent many hours noting instances where I inappropriately used which instead of that. 

Sigh.

I’ve spent 59 years using these two words improperly!

So, when DO we use the word that in an appropriate and defensible fashion?  After all, too many that’s make the prose boring and forgettable. Some people say you must NEVER use it, but Irene says they are incorrect.

So does Grammar Girl,  (Mignon Fogarty)  on her awesome website for writers with questions. This website is an invaluable resource for folks like me, with some education, but no memory of what that education actually taught us.

There are instances where only that will suffice. When do we use the word that?

We use it when we have something called a ‘Restrictive Clause’.   So now you want to know (as I did) what the heck THAT is!

Quote from Grammar Girl, “A restrictive clause is just part of a sentence that you can’t get rid of because it specifically restricts some other part of the sentence.”  She goes on to give a specific example of a restrictive clause: “Gems that sparkle often elicit forgiveness.”  See?  Not just ANY gems elicit forgiveness in this sentence, but only gems that sparkle. It is restricted to one kind of gem.

So, now we know about restrictive clauses, but what about nonrestrictive clauses? Again we turn to Grammar Girl and she says, “A nonrestrictive clause is something that can be left off without changing the meaning of the sentence. You can think of a nonrestrictive clause as simply additional information.” Again she gives the example, “Diamonds, which are expensive, often elicit forgiveness.”  The word ‘which’ isn’t really necessary, as the meaning of the sentence would not be changed if you left it out. “Diamonds are expensive, but often elicit forgiveness.” Sometimes the sentence is better without the extraneous word.

I still make a mish-mash of things as they fall out of my head and into my book, but I take comfort in knowing I am not alone!  Writing is a journey, and I learn something new every step of the way.

 

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December 18, 2012 · 8:25 pm

Charles Dickens was an Indie Author, Too

achristmascarol George C ScottFew people are aware that one of the most famous and inspirational books in the English language was originally self-published, and didn’t do as well as the author intended. Charles Dickens began to write A Christmas Carol in September 1843, and completed the book in six weeks with the final pages written in the beginning of December. Unfortunately he was feuding with his publisher over the meager earnings on his previous novel, Martin Chuzzlewit. Because of that, Dickens declined a lump-sum payment for the tale and chose a percentage of the profits in hopes of making more money. He then published the work at his own expense. It was as expensive then as it is now to publish quality print books and high production costs netted him only £230 (equal to £19,128 today) rather than the £1,000 (equal to £83,164 today) he’d hoped and needed, as his wife was once again pregnant. A year later, the profits were only £744 and Dickens was deeply disappointed.

Formatting was as tough in those days as it is now and Dickens was unhappy with the first edition of the tale. It contained drab, olive colored endpapers that Dickens felt was unacceptable. The publisher, Chapman and Hall, quickly replaced them with yellow endpapers but those clashed with the title page which was then redone. The final product was bound in red cloth with gilt-edged pages and was completed only two days before the release date of 19 December 1843.

I take comfort in knowing that the man who wrote the most powerful story of redemption in my personal library was an indie author too. Self-Alastair Sims - A Christmas Carolpublishing is much easier nowadays, but nevertheless it too is fraught with costs and formatting difficulties.  I have one last little formatting issue to solve in the Tower of Bones on page 361, and then I will be able to okay the final print version of it.  Wonky formatting is the curse of my life!

This is the time of year when I watch every single version of A Christmas Carol that can be found. Alastair Sims, George C. Scott, Patrick Stewart, Mr. Magoo and now Jim Carey occupy the small screen and remind me of what is really important in life – love and family.  Even Mickey Mouse has warmed the cockles of my heart in the role of Bob Cratchitt.

And now, I must go wrap presents by the flickering light of my television, as once again the Ghost of Christmas Present leads Mr. Scrooge to see what he should have seen all along – that Christmas Spirit is a year-round emotion, and has less to do with cash flow and Black Friday Shopping and more to do with charity of spirit.

If you are feeling charitable, I would recommend these fine charities:

The Salvation Army

The Union Gospel Mission

Clean Water for the World

Patrick Stewart - A Christmas CarolThere are so many worthy charities, and any gift you make to them will benefit millions of people.  I live in the lap of luxury, and I know it. I have a good roof over my head, a reliable income and a healthy family. I am grateful for all these blessings, and if you are similarly blessed, I encourage you to make some donations to your local charities as a way of giving thanks!

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December 15, 2012 · 7:43 pm

Punish me no More

Paradise Lost wikimedia commons Gustave Dore PD ArtI was reminded about the book, Finnegans Wake, in a blog I regularly read.  James Joyce wrote the classic novel, and James was a man who loved words.  He loved words the way I love Ritchie Blackmore and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.  He couldn’t get enough of them and when old words didn’t suffice, he invented new ones. Puns, those low class examples of verbal violence, became an art form under the pen of James Joyce.

Robert MacLean’s most recent post for his fascinating blog on morality, humor, and art, ‘The Devil’s Pleasure Garden’ is on Fellini, and Shakespeare.  He rambles though Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Fellini’s 8 ½ , and lightly touches on Luis Bunuel.  I enjoy MacLean’s morality crises – his angst has led to some of the finest blog posts on creativity out there!

MacLean also mentions James Joyce’s incredible monster-piece, Finnegan’s Wake, quoting the delicious pun “…when they were jung and easily freudened.”  I realized when I was re-reading MacLean’s blog today that the reason so many people despise puns is that for a pun to be funny one has to know what the pun is about. If a reader has never heard of Carl Jung or Sigmund Freud that pun will go right over their head. They get a sour look and say “I despise James Joyce – I don’t know what people are thinking calling him a genius.”

When people don’t understand something that makes other people laugh, they feel somehow inferior and they hate it. So my job is to not make my readers feel ignorant, and yet still write in such a way that my work is not ‘dumbed-down’.  Humor is essential, and I usually love a good pun, but since the key to enjoying a good pun is knowledge and you can’t guarantee your readers will have that knowledge, it’s best to avoid puns when writing.

But for me, humor is crucial to keeping me interested in the characters. If you are going to have your characters grimly going about their work, with nothing to brighten the mood you have immediately lost me.51EwwPIAJbL__BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA278_PIkin4,BottomRight,-64,22_AA300_SH20_OU01_

Shaun Allan’s brilliant work, Dark Places, is a classic example of how an author can blend humor into the darkest events, and keep his readers’ eyes on his book.

I find myself injecting humor into my work, not in a calculated way, but because it naturally flows there.  Macabre humor is what keeps my family together at times—that ability to laugh at the worst times keeps us slogging through the strangest twists and turns of life. Oh, it’s a little embarrassing at times, but it gets you through it. And that is what happens with my characters. Lackland, Huw the Bard and indeed all the Rowdies rely on their sense of humor as the way to find logic in the worst of events.

In Tower of Bones, the sense of the ridiculous surfaces several times when the characters are under the most stress. Friedr is one of my favorite characters in the TOB series, as he is the most in touch with his sense of humor and his frequent lack thereof. Christoph was born with a joke falling out of his mouth, and humor is his armor.

Good grief!  I just said “one of my favorites” – all of my characters are my favorites! Even the evil ones!

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December 12, 2012 · 6:32 pm

The Alternative Guide to Alternate Realities

The Infinity Bridge by Ross M KitsonToday we are going on a voyage, visiting three very different realities, or as I like to think of them, Blogs.  We are on a progressive blog tour, guided by the incredible Ross M. Kitson, author of the Steampunk fantasy, The Infinity Bridge.  Part I of this tour is today, here on Life in the Realm of Fantasy. 

Part II will be tomorrow Dec 13, 2012 at  www.alisondeluca.com – Alison Deluca’s wonderful blog.

Day III will be at Ross’s own blog http://rossmkitson.blogspot.co.uk

I encourage you to check out these blogs and follow this post through all the realities it travels through!

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Alternative guide to Alternate Realities 1: Literature

By

Ross M. Kitson

One of the key aspects of my latest book, The Infinity Bridge, is the existence of parallel universes or alternate realities. As the book is written for the teen market upwards (MG/YA is the latest term, to avoid the patronising ‘kid’s book’ I suppose) I spent a good while musing about whether to include a meaty information dump in the next about the ideas of alternate reality. And here’s an odd thing- the more I thought about it, the more I realised that as an idea in fiction/TV/film it is so thoroughly established that I didn’t need to bother!

I think my first exposure to the idea of alternate reality came in the form of comics (which was pretty much my first form of literature anyhow). I’m going to ramble about those in a separate post—for this one I’m going to focus on alternate reality in books.

The idea that history may have taken a different course, and the ramifications of that, have been a popular theme for centuries. The first works about the topic popped up in Victorian literature (N Hawthorne’s short story ‘P Correspondence’ and C Holford’s ‘Aristopia’) but the real boom in the topic came in the pulp science fiction of the forties and fifties. During this time some awesome writers, including Heinlein, L Sprague De Camp, Poul Anderson, Andre Norton and Larry Niven turned their hand to the topic. In many of these works we have protagonist able to cross between the alternate realities, often armed with knowledge of their own historical variant, via portals or machines. In some tales they are ‘police’ figures (the best example of this being H Beam Piper’s Para-time books, which I read recently and absolutely loved) trying to address some renegade or some disruption, whereas in others the individuals are more passive in their roles, thrown into the new reality and learning of its variance as the reader dose.

The concept of parallel worlds and alternate history progressed from the pulp SF realm and into that of more popular and conventional literature. A recurrent favourite of the genre is the course of World War 2 being changed: Philip K Dick ‘The Man in the High Castle’ describes the Axis powers winning WW2 (and has a character in it who writes a book about the Allies winning!); Robert Harris ‘Fatherland’ is a similar very popular example. I’ve yet to read one where Adolf has a better moustache, however.

In MG-YA books the theme is quite a popular one too. I recently read Time Riders by Alex Scarrow in which three teens are recruited by a futuristic agency to help ‘mend time.’ The first novel explores the idea that time travellers go back in time and assist Hitler by stopping him attempting to invade Russia. The ramifications are that an alternate timeline is created, which alters the present in which the heroes occupy. My 10 year old son took the plot in his stride, and when we talked about it had no issues about the whole concept!

Purists of the SF genre would ponder whether works of alternate histories are fantasy or SF, namely is there any science behind it (I feel like Jennifer Aniston in a shampoo advert… ‘now here comes the science’).

Semantics would argue ‘alternate histories’ are not the same as ‘parallel universes.’ The idea is that parallel universes co-exist, namely they run along at the same time, whereas only one ‘alternate history’ can exist, i.e. the history has changed and continues along its new course. For me this is pretty pedantic, but since I grew up with the ideas in Star Trek, Dr Who and comics I’m hardly a hard-core sci-fi buff…

There is a school of thought in Quantum physics that gives a degree of theoretical credence to parallel worlds and alternate histories: the Many-Worlds Interpretation, or the ‘relative state formulation.’ It’s the sort of quantum theory advanced since the 1950s and sufficient to make you reach for a large spliff and say ‘Hey, man’ as someone in a brown corduroy jacket begins to explain it. Its basic tenet is familiar though- every event even at a quantum level, can go a number of ways. As a result there are a myriad set of possibilities that extend out from each other in a never ending tree. There was a famous thought experiment to do with a cat, a radioactive isotope and a vial of poison (Schrodinger’s Cat, not to be confused with Schroder’s piano in Charlie Brown). I’ve rambled enough now, so I’ll leave you to seek that one out yourself (or follow Douglas Adam’s Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency where the cat had got bored and simply wandered off).

To me the popularity of the alternate history is that it forces us into questioning our world, querying about how things came to be how they are, and extending that idea from simple practical aspects (what if we flew around in airships not planes) to greater moral and ethical considerations (what if the philosophy of the Nazis were part of our own daily belief structure; what if the Americans lost the War of Independence and remained a colony of Europe, how would it alter their perspective of the world and their Constitution-based beliefs?).

I think that the idea of alternate reality, alternate history and parallel worlds is so ingrained now in our literature that it hardly needs explanation and I think a massive part of that is the progression of the idea from 50s sci-fi into the popular realms of TV and Film.

And in my next post on the topic, I’ll explore that some more….

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Part II will be posted tomorrow Dec 13, 2012 at  www.alisondeluca.com – Alison Deluca’s wonderful blog. http://alisondeluca.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-inspiration-behind-adventures-of.html

Day III will be at Ross’s own blog http://rossmkitson.blogspot.co.uk and will run on December 14, 2012!

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Ross M. Kitson

Author Bio

Ross M Kitson is a published author in the fantasy genre, with an ongoing series (The Prism Series), a number of short stories on Quantum Muse web-zine and several stories in Steampunk and fantasy anthologies.

His debut series for Myrddin is due for release in October 2012, and is a sci-fi series set in modern day York. It is written for ages 12+, although its combination of killer androids, steam-powered airships, kick-ass heroines and action packed chases will appeal to all ages.

Ross works as a doctor in the UK specializing in critical care and anaesthesia. He is happily married with three awesome children, who nagged him incessantly to write something that they could read. His love of speculative fiction and comics began at a young age and shows no signs of fading.

You can Follow Ross on Twitter:   @rossmkitson

You can find him on Facebook  http://www.facebook.com/TheNuKnights http://www.facebook.com/ross.kitson.9

Ross M Kitson’s Books are available at Amazon.comUS and Amazon.comUK.

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December 6, 2012 · 5:07 am

‘Like’ me, please…

Berry-ellen-mcclung-by-branson Public Domain Art -Wikimedia CommonsSocial networking has always been important for girls–invite me to your birthday party and I will invite you to mine.  We both gain that way. After all, you get a present and I get a cupcake!  In childhood the little bits of social networking we did led to tears as often as it did to cupcakes, but now we’re grownups and we have a book or a music cd to market.  We can’t afford to shed tears over this.

Whether it is music or books, if you are an indie, you must take responsibility for your own marketing.

1. Decide what you are marketing.  This sounds like a no brainer, but many people are blurry on this, and they apply a lot of energy and get nowhere.  I know many people who  write, paint and ALSO make music.  If you are doing multiple things, separate your website into different pages for each aspect of your career, with a good home page that directs your prospective client to the product they are looking for.   I really like the website which Blackmore’s Night has put up, and I also like Mercedes Lackey’s website.  Both are professionally done, but a free WordPress Blog can be utilized to good advantage by a determined self-promoter.  The lovely folks at WordPress give you all the tools you need to learn how to do this!

2. Make regular posts and updates, to keep your blog fresh.  After all – we’ve all clicked on links in the google list that take us to abandoned virtual warehouses, with out of long out of date information and links to nowhere!

3. Use Twitter well and sparingly.  Twitter can easily become a spam-fest, so be careful how you use it.  Be sure to retweet your twitter-friend’s important events, and they will return the favor.  Once in a while, post your homepage, your professional Facebook page and links to your books or your music, but be wise and respect your friends.

4. The eternal sunshine of the Facebook page – again, be careful not to spam the world everyday with your links on your personal page, because your highschool chums and distant cousins won’t pay anymore attention to them than they do Aunt Caro’s constant barrage of invitations to play Farmville. In fact, they may unsubscribe from you. This is where having a professional page comes in handy. After you send out ONE invitation to your family and friends to ‘LIKE’ your professional fb page, you are good to go. Maybe in a few months, re-post the link on your personal wall, but don’t beat folks over the head with it. Do tweet the links to it once in a while, and post them on your blog/website. Page Owners need to make sure their content is interesting and in that way they are encouraging Likes, comments and Shares so that their posts continue to show up in their Fans’ News Feeds, but they MUST NOT SPAM.

BTW – My Facebook page is at https://www.facebook.com/cjjasperson and I would be awfully happy if you would stop by and ‘like’ me… I’ll save you a cupcake at my next birthday party! (…hmm…should I use ‘lol’ here or is that too hokey?) (I’m not really joking, so maybe ‘lol’ is appropriate… it’s jaunty and pretends I’m not serious…)

lol.

It’s tough trying to learn the ropes in the world of self-promotion.  There really is no handbook, because the social-network scene is always changing.

One thing hasn’t changed though and that is business etiquette. Trying to walk that fine line between getting your name out there and being that annoying acquaintance who deluges his casual acquaintances with constant demands that they buy his wretched cd or book is difficult.  I think this is where our manners come into play–what would you like your friends who are self-promoting to do? Behave the way you want them to behave for you and hopefully you will still have friends in a year!

lol. (I mean it this time.)

I do have some acquaintances on Facebook who bury me with spammy demands to push their product, and I have friends who only ask to have a product pushed once in a while.  Guess who I am always happy to help? Not Spam-the-Man Jones and their sad book of badly conceived, not-so-erotic, pornographic haikus.

Now that might actually sell.  (Note to self–consider writing a collection of seventeen-syllable erotic poems…)

Nah. lol.

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November 26, 2012 · 6:39 pm

The Descriptive Balancing Act, Maria V.A. Johnson

Today’s guest post is by Maria V.A. Johnson, poet and editor. Maria was the editor on Carlie M.A. Cullen’s novel of paranormal love and adventure, ‘Heart Search: Lost’. Maria can be found blogging at http://mariavajohnson.com. 

Maria is discussing the fine balancing act an author has when it comes to description.  For me, description is like hot-sauce. I love it, even when my lips are on fire, but I fear going over-board with it so when I am cooking, I don’t go there as often as I should.

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The Descriptive Balancing Act

One of the hardest parts about writing is getting the level of detail correct. If you don’t describe something well enough, how are the readers supposed to connect to it? On the other hand, if you describe too much they will give up reading it completely.

It has always been a balancing act, between description and plot. One thing you need to remember though is that a story should always be either plot or character driven; it cannot be driven on description. The whole point of description is to paint the scene. Think of a painting of a woman. Is it interesting if she is standing in a white canvas, nothing around her? Not really. But is it interesting if she is standing in the middle of a huge crowd, or a forest, so you can barely see her? No. An author has to try to find the middle ground, just like with that painting.

So how do you use enough description to show the scene without overwhelming it?

Step One. Focus on telling the story. You can always go back and add more detail later if it’s needed.

Step Two. Try to be realistic. Don’t put in fancy words and elaborate phrasing just because it sounds good or you think it will stun the reader with your eloquence. Look at this phrase from the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/2011win.html

The Los Angeles morning was heavy with smog, the word being a portmanteau of smoke and fog, though in LA the pollutants are typically vehicular emissions as opposed to actual smoke and fog, unlike 19th-century London where the smoke from countless small coal fires often combined with fog off the Thames to produce true smog, though back then they were not clever enough to call it that.

Now a) this sentence is way too long, which makes it difficult to follow from one end to the other, and b) you only need the first 8 words. Who doesn’t know what smog is? Who doesn’t know this author is referring to the car emissions? It is unnecessary detail. And the reference to 19th-century London? This would only be relevant if this were in a Historical Fiction novel or something similar, rather than being a throw-away comment on what real smog should be.  The author should just say “The Los Angeles morning was heavy with smog,” and then move on with the story. We all know what it looks like, and those 8 words conjure enough of a picture for us to understand the scene.

Step Three. Think about your characters. How do they act, think, feel? When they do or say something can you see their personality, their motivation, their feeling behind it? You don’t need whole paragraphs to do this unless it is a scene that calls for it, e.g. when someone is crushed by grief and the emotions are overwhelming everything – including the story, sometimes all you need is a word or two. Look at this example from Heart Search: Lost by Carlie M. A. Cullen.

“I don’t know what to say,” he moaned, anguish still apparent in his tone.

The male protagonist has just accidentally hurt his partner. You can see with just a few words how much it has affected him and how he feels about it. This tells you a lot about his character, how caring and gentle he is, and how much he loves her.

Step Four. Before sending it off to an editor, give it a read through and ask yourself “Is this something I would like to read?” If the answer is no, then ask yourself why.

Four easy steps to follow towards a balanced story. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, but even for the exceptions there is a rule.

The Rule. If you are going to break a rule, make sure you do it well enough that nobody cares!

Let’s look at two classic examples of this – C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Tolkien is known for his amazing scenes. Pick up The Lord of the Rings and you will find description on top of description. Even when they take up the entire page, it doesn’t feel too heavy. This is partly because of the length of the book, and partly because of the way he makes the scenes come to life. You don’t notice how long the descriptive passages are when you are lost within the world he has created.

On the south-eastern side the ground fell very steeply, as if the slopes of the hill were continued far down under the trees, like island-shores that really are the sides of a mountain rising out of deep waters.

Lewis is the exact opposite. Read The Chronicles of Narnia and you will see how little description he actually uses. The fact that this is a children’s book helps. A person’s imagination is most vivid as a child. He gives just enough detail to release the child to see the rest. He makes the reader the describer, letting them go where they want with only a little nudge. In The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe most things and people are described, but not until you are half-way through the final chapter do you learn anything about the four main characters.

And they themselves grew and changed as the years passed over them. And Peter became a tall and deep-chested man and a great warrior, and he was called King Peter the Magnificent. And Susan grew into a tall and gracious woman with black hair that fell almost to her feet … Edmund was a graver and quieter man than Peter, and great in council and judgement. He was called King Edmund the Just. But as for Lucy, she was always gay and golden-haired…

 

So now you know the steps to follow, you are half-way to having a decent novel which will engage your readers. Don’t forget that you should ALWAYS send it off to a professional editor – NEVER try to do it yourself!

Remember The Rule and happy writing!

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