Tag Archives: writing

July 13, 2016 · 6:45 am

#amwriting: The Query Letter

My Writing LifeEvery author, indie or traditionally published, comes to a point in their career where they must craft a query letter. For many, avoiding having to do that is one of the reasons they went indie in the first place.

Most editors and publishers want a 1 page, 300-word description of your novel. They want the hook and the essence of that novel in 2 paragraphs, and they want to get a feel for who you are. Both aspects of this 1-page extravaganza must intrigue them. Every editor and agent has a website detailing the way they want queries submitted. In general, they want letters/emails that follow a certain pattern, and that basic format is readily available via the internet.

The www.NYBookEditors.com website has this to say about query letters: “You must walk a very fine line between selling your manuscript without coming across like the parent who knows his kid is the best player on the bench.”

That, my friends, is more complicated than it sounds. Of course, we are firm believers that what we wrote IS the best player on the bench. I’ve always known that about my children and my books!

Anyway, back to the query letter. I’ve attended several seminars on the subject and written many of them. I’ve had good results and also bad results with mine. The best place I have found with a simple description of what your query letter should look like is at the NY Book Editors website.

In essence, what they tell you is this:

  1. Format your letter this way:
  • Your address at the top of the page, right justified.
  • The agent’s address, this time left justified.
  1. Use a personalized greeting where you acknowledge the agent or editor by name.
  2. Keep the body of your query letter to three to five paragraphs.

The 1st paragraph is where you introduce yourself. If you have a connection with the agent or editor you are approaching, say you met at a convention or seminar, or you are a fan of one the authors they represent, mention that. Briefly.

If you have no previous connection, NY Editors suggest you get down to business right away with your attempt to sell your book. Their point of view on this is that you only have a few paragraphs to sell your book, so make those words count.

In the 1st paragraph are the 3 most important things to include:

  1. Title
  2. Genre
  3. Word count

The 2nd paragraph must give a brief description of the work—showcase the plot, and show why you think it is a good fit for this agent/editor. Do this in one paragraph, and don’t give it the hard sell.

The 3rd paragraph should be a quick bio of you, your published works, and whatever awards you have acquired. If samples of your work are available on your website, say so.

This is most important: don’t forget to double-check your letter for typos and spelling errors. We all make them and we don’t want them to be our legacy.

As I have said, my luck with queries has been uneven. I think query letters are like ice cream—you just have to cross your fingers and hope your query arrives on a day when the person in question is in the mood for a story exactly like what you are selling.

Query letter image

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July 11, 2016 · 6:45 am

#amwriting: holding indies to a higher standard

Hamlet Poster Benedict CumberbatchI haven’t been able to read as much lately as I normally do and I miss it. However, time spent editing for clients and then trying to write has seriously cut into my ability to read. When I am editing for a client, I can’t disengage my mind from that mindset, which means I have a terrible time reading for pleasure. In fact, I haven’t written a book review in months. Lately, I am lucky to read two or three pages before falling out of the book. Thus I have been reading poetry and resorting to audio books.

When I am in an editing mindset, I notice things a casual reader might not, and I can’t just enjoy the book. And I am not talking indies here—I mean books published by the Big 5 traditional publishers. I keep finding things they could have phrased more actively, or should possibly have cut. These are things an average reader will never notice, and are examples of why authors must have a thick skin.

Typos and editing mistakes are pretty much taken for granted when left in mass-market paperbacks by the Big 5 Publishers, but woe to the indie who neglects to notice a repeated ‘and’ or any other editing error. Also, the Big 5 publishers are allowed to take questionable chances with “style,” such as Alexander Chee did when writing The Queen of the Night, allowing lazy habits we indies could never get away with.

I was unable to actually read the book, as it must have been too tiring for him to use closed quotations to indicate dialogue. The reader has no idea someone is speaking until they’re halfway through a conversation, and have to re-read it. I loved what I could read of it, so I had to resort to the audio book, which was the only way I could get through it.

As an editor, it’s incomprehensible to me why an editor for a large publisher would accept a manuscript that is as annoying as that one flaw makes this otherwise remarkable book.

It is also proof that large publishers (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in this case) are just as guilty as indies when it comes to making strange decisions that can negatively affect sales. They may have done this to elevate it to a “status” read, a must-buy literary name-dropper for those who wish to appear fashionably cultured. If so, it’s a disservice to work that is brilliant despite a flaw that would be fatal if it were to appear in an Indie author’s work.

However, though we can’t take avant garde chances with style, indies DO get to take chances with content, writing and publishing stories that traditionally published authors most likely wouldn’t be allowed to do. If a book might not sell, it won’t be published by a large publisher, because that is what they are in the business to do. However, once an indie has a best seller with a plot the Big 5 would deem sure to fail, traditional publishers will leap on it and the market will soon be glutted. (Can you say Fifty Shades of Grey?)

George R.R.Martin bormatting issue 1 via book blog page views, margaret ebySometimes the errors and flaws in the work sold by the traditional publishing houses are hilarious, as we saw in the first Kindle edition of George R.R.Martin’s A Feast For Crows. That was a formatting error, not an error on Martin’s part, so some poor intern probably got raked over the coals for it, as the book had to be pulled, reformatted, and republished as quickly as possible.

The thing is, errors do creep into even the most carefully examined texts and manuscripts. Usually, no one dies from it, but sometimes there are consequences, as in the case of the infamous Wicked Bible. The publishers paid a hefty price: Robert Barker and Martin Lucas, the royal printers in London, were fined £300 (£43,586 as of 2015) and deprived of their printing license.

Indies are held to a far more rigid code by most readers than the traditional publishers are because the internet is rife with disparaging rhetoric pointing the finger at us. And while the Big 5 traditional publishers are just as guilty of rushing-to-publish unreadable crap, the truth is, many new self-published authors haven’t yet gotten the hang of the publishing business, and often their books are rife with things they will later wish they hadn’t been so eager to publish.

Having learned my own lessons the hard way, I have made changes in how I review my own work. Besides working closely with a professional editor, I now have a solid group of friends who comb my completed manuscripts for errors and gross cut-and-paste errors. We can only hope we have caught them all. When you are an indie, it takes a village to help you get your book fit for the public to read.

Anyway—my editor’s hat is firmly on my head these days, and that means I can’t enjoy casual reading for a while more. This mindset slows my own writing output to nearly nothing because I am stupidly self-editing instead of just letting the words flow.

When I am editing I am looking for all varieties of mistakes–not just structural, grammatical, and glaring punctuation errors. I am also looking for things that will interfere with formatting the final manuscript for upload to Kindle or Smashwords, and I hope I find them all for my client, but it makes writing my own work challenging.

joyce corrections on his msAs an editor, I do my best. But, nothing is ever sure, and I won’t see the manuscript after I send my client the final suggested corrections. Mistakes can be made right up to the last minute while the client is making those adjustments, so someone else will have to proof-read her work.

Remember, you, as the author, have the responsibility for the final eye on your manuscript. So when my client has finished making revisions, she will have her posse check the manuscript over for the slings and arrows of publishing fate.

I will be done with my current editing project soon, and I plan to take a break from editing for a short while when that happens. Then I will let my mindset slide back into the joy-of-reading mode. I look forward to resting my editorial mind and over-indulging in the work of my many favorite authors.

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June 29, 2016 · 6:45 am

#amblogging: why authors should blog, take 3: the vegan

avacado dinner salad

my favorite avocado dinner salad

One of the things I love most about writing is this blog. I have made so many friends though this little place on the internet. Blogging offers me the opportunity to riff for several hundred words on any subject I’m interested in, without interruption. Of course, I’m usually only interested in writing-craft, but this is where I come to discuss it.

Nothing improves your writing chops more than writing every day. Deadlines can be daunting but say what you will about not being able to write under pressure—I think that is when I do my best work.

And, today I don’t feel like talking about writing. I want to discuss food! As many know, I am vegan, but my descent into veganism was (sadly) not motivated by any high moral prohibition against animal cruelty. There is a certain amount of that, but it was always there in the the way I purchased food for my family. During the 1980s, much of our meat we raised ourselves, cage free, free range chickens, and sheep raised in traditional farming methods.

However, I have developed an auto-immune variety of arthritis that is triggered by meat and dairy–all forms of it. Whenever I go off my diet (and cheese is the big draw) I pay the price. So, I stay on my vegan diet and I feel good.

I have discovered a wonderful resource for amazing, healthy, vegan food: the internet.

I know! It’s not just for Facebook and online gaming.

There is information out there, and it’s all in blogs. One of the best sites for me is called The Minimalist Baker. Today the main picture on their site is a gorgeous image of peppers stuffed with cauliflower rice. That image is eye candy. I will definitely be making some form of this recipe.

Oh my gosh! That website, and the recipes Dana and John have put together are just amazing. I use more of their recipes as the basis of my own cooking than from any other website or book.

Changing your diet is difficult, because you have to change your habits. Sometimes you have to change the flavors you love, and learn to like new ones.

And if you are just starting out and can’t afford to buy cookbooks, the internet offers an incredible wealth of free information, and much of it in the form of blogs by people like me.

I love to eat as much as I love to read, and I could easily talk for hours on either subject. If you are passionate about a particular subject, a blog is a great place to talk about it. It brings together people with similar interests, and for a writer, blogging is crucial, as it gets your name out there. Blogging shows people you can write well, and blogging regularly forces you to be creative.

If you want to know more about getting your own blog up and running, see my post of December 14, 2015, Blogging is Writing Too. This post talks about how to use the new default system here at WordPress so that you can insert pictures and make a nice looking post.

  • Keep it down to about 1000 words more or less.
  • Use the spellchecker tool to look for obvious errors.
  • Write in draft form and don’t publish it right away–come back and read it over again, and make corrections.
  • If you use information found elsewhere, quote it and credit the author
  • Use images that are either public domain, or that you have the right to use
  • Put links to other informative sites in the text
chocolate chip cookies, vegan

chocolate chip cookies, vegan and yummy

Rule number one: be consistent. I began by blogging once a week on a now defunct site—but my actual posts were more often made only once or twice a month. I dreaded it and didn’t want to do it. My blog stats were in the tank because I wasn’t applying myself to it.

It’s a commitment, and authors are procrastinators, but we can write to deadlines when we have to, and it’s good for us.  Now I am writing three posts a week on this blog, and at least one post a week for each of several other venues. I spend Sundays putting my blog posts together, which I couldn’t do if I was still raising children, but you only need to blog once a week to keep your content fresh. Writing this post took me about 45 minutes, so that is a small time commitment.

But just like a healthy diet and a walk in the fresh air, a change of writing scenery is good for you.

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June 27, 2016 · 6:45 am

#amwriting: evoking a sense of place

800px-El_jardí_de_l'autor,_Josep_Benlliure_Gil,_Museu_de_Belles_Arts_de_València

The Garden of the Author, by José Benlliure Gil via Wikimedia Commons

Summer has officially arrived here in the Pacific Northwest. This is a time when I can take my notepad out on the back porch, enjoying the garden and, to a certain extent, people watching. I love my back yard and my porch, feeling as if the heart of my home is there.

My work involves creating worlds and making them real to the reader. All the worlds I write about are a composite woven of my personal experiences and places that I love.

My town is a tiny place, slightly more than a village, and less than a city. Historically it is a mining town. Three things kept my town alive during hard times: the sandstone quarry, the coal mines, and timber. Now it’s a bedroom community for Olympia, the capital city of the State of Washington.

I’ve been here since 2005, and although I love my small house and garden, I don’t really fit into this community, which is probably my fault. Most of my writing groups are in Olympia, and my favorite places are in that city too. But I have a “soul-home,” which is comprised of the places that had the most profound meaning to me in my life. My soul-home is made up of three places that I have lived, which have all had a profound effect on me.

One part of that soul-home is Seattle. I lived there until I was 10, and went to West Woodland Elementary School.Our house was in Ballard, an urban community of fishermen who spent most of their time fishing in Alaska, and who were first-generation Norwegians. Everyone, including my family, was Lutheran, which was a cultural thing as well as religious. In the late 1950s to the early 1960s, Ballard was a small town within the big city, and the kids in my neighborhood were close-knit.

Seattle and the greater Puget Sound area is one component of my soul home, mainly because of the many immigrants whose cultures made it what it is today. The Pacific Northwest and Seattle, in particular, is a fusion of Asian, Norwegian, Native American, and hardy sons and daughters of the pioneers who came from all over the world seeking a better life. We are a unique mix and happy to be so.

In Seattle, music takes on a life of its own, and the world listens. Wikipedia has a page that lists all the famous musicians who came out of Seattle, and it’s pretty impressive. You can check it out here.

Music, art, and literature are celebrated in Seattle, and the influence the city has on Pacific Northwest culture is felt all up and down the Puget Sound region. I was fired to write my own books by reading the works of local area authors like Frank Herbert, Greg Bear, J.A. Jance, Terry Brooks and so many, many more Northwest authors. The Puget Sound region is a breeding ground for creativity, and Seattle is where it comes together.

Amaranthus and Savvy at the needles by haystack rock cannon beach 2012

But I am also a product of many summers spent in Cannon Beach, Oregon. I love that place so much that it is another piece of my soul-home. Terry Brooks and Ursula K. LeGuin are also fans of the North Oregon Coast, as are many famous musicians and actors. Something about it calls to the wilder side of me, and it seeps into my work.

But the primary portion of my soul-home came into my life when I was ten, and my family moved to Olympia, to a home on Black Lake. We moved from a nice, large, two-story home in a middle-class neighborhood to a tiny, rundown, ranch-style vacation house miles from civilization. It was cold and damp in the winter, and cool and pleasant in the summer. The house was barely livable, but the property was what my parents moved there for: the 350 feet of waterfront and the sandy beach, with forested land going back 5 acres to the county road. Dad was a WWII vet, and fishing was his greatest hobby.

The first thing I saw the day we moved there wasn’t the lake, although it was impressive. It was the Black Hills that dominated my view—black and forested with cedars, firs and hemlock, and rising high over the other side of the lake, they dominated the front windows. The many moods of the lake were out there for us all to see every minute of every day. You knew what going to happen by the direction the wind was coming from.

I hated it. I was torn from everything I knew, thrust into a world where I had no friends, and didn’t know my way around. Nevertheless, after the first, terribly difficult months of adjustment, I grew to love my Black Lake home, relishing the rural privacy and the deep connection to nature we formed, without our knowing it. When I left home, I carried a piece of it in my heart, and it will always be with me. My contemporary literary fiction is usually set there, with the bits and pieces I loved so much about that home forming a memory that shines, and I am able to give that place to my readers.

Just as my world, and the place I think of as my home was created by many generations of immigrants and pioneers filled with hope and the dream of a better life, so are most other cities and cultural centers.

The sense of place you instill into your work is the sure knowledge of where it is and what it represents to the protagonist. If you are crafting a world that doesn’t exist, as I have done with most of my work, you must make it real. Take some of what you love about your home, your town, and your culture, and write it into your work.

The knowledge of place is created in the reader’s mind by subtle cues, small descriptions, minor mentions over multiple scenes. A few words, little references to the background setting give the reader a framework upon which his imagination will build the rest.

Terry Brooks’ world of Shannara is real in his mind, because he lives there, just as Neveyah is real to me for the same reason. Both worlds have evolved from the reality and landscape we live in and love so much, yet they are radically different, both from each other and from the Pacific Northwest. They are composites of our imaginations, made real by our experiences.

Haystack_rock_monochromeWhen you write a novel or an essay, whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, the setting is how you create the sense of place, and must be a creation of many layers:

  • Place: where the protagonist lives, whether in the city, a village, a wandering life with no fixed address, or a farm in the countryside
  • Landscape/Terrain: mountainous, forested, high desert, seaside
  • Culture: in many stories, broad hints of what passes for political systems, the influence of religion, and the amount of respect accorded by society to music and art.

None of these layers will be overtly discussed or described at length in your work unless it is part of what creates the tension and drives the plot. But you, as the author, must know and understand these components as if they were your soul-home. That knowledge will come across in your work via small cues, and your readers will have a firm picture of the world in which your work is set.

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June 8, 2016 · 6:45 am

#amwriting: don’t gut your novel

Excalibur London_Film_Museum_ via Wikipedia

This post has nothing to do with swords, but I felt one should be pictured, so here is Excalibur.

I have another novel in the editing process, one with many sections written before I embarked on my quest to discover how to write. I am now culling many unnecessary words and awkward phrases from the older sections.

If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you know the word “that” is like a keyboard tic for me. I use it a lot in my personal speech, and it falls into my work with a little too much regularity. I thought I had them pretty well under control, but one doesn’t see one’s own work with eyes of the disinterested reader.

Because of this, my editor and I are now combing each section for words I can eliminate and still retain the flow of the narrative.

Yes, I know I claim to be an editor. But I am first and foremost a writer, so I do have an editor because an unbiased eye is critical to producing a good, tight, manuscript.

When it comes to eliminating the word “that,” it’s crucial you look at each instance of how it is used.  Sometimes, “that” is the only word for a given situation. If a particular idea can’t be conveyed any other way, for the love of Tolstoy, use it. Don’t gut your prose just because some online guru tells you ‘that’ is the devil. If you remove every instance of “that” you’ll end up with a mess on your hands.

And just so you know, “that” and “which” are not interchangeable so you can’t just change every instance of “that” to “which.”

“That” is a pronoun used to identify a specific person or thing observed by the speaker, a determiner, an adverb, and a conjunction.

  1. “That’s his dog on the curb.” (Identifier)
  2. “Look at that red car.” (Determiner)
  3. “I wouldn’t go that far.” (Adverb)
  4. “She claimed that she was married.” (Conjunction)

In the case of number 4, the sentence would be stronger without it. Most of the time, prose is made stronger when the word “that” is simply cut and not replaced with anything. I say most, but not all of the time. Use common sense and if a beta reader runs amok in your manuscript telling you ax “this and that,” examine each instance of what has their undies in a twist and try to see why they are pointing it out.

There are cases where only “that” will suffice. When do we use the word “that?” We use it when we have something called a ‘Restrictive Clause’:

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. Only gems that sparkle bring about clemency. In this sentence, forgiveness is restricted to one kind of gem.

“Which” is a pronoun asking for information. It specifies one or more people (or things) from a particular set, and it is also a determiner:

  1. “Which are the best diapers for newborns?” (Pronoun)
  2. “I’m looking at a house which is for sale on Black Lake.” (Determiner)

Go lightly with “which” and “that” but use them when they are required.

keep clam and proofreadThe same common sense approach goes for “very.” I seldom need to use it, but I do when it’s required. However, some people employ it too frequently, and it’s rarely needed in the context they  place it, fluffing up the word count. As with every word, there are times when it’s the only one that will convey an idea crucial to your story.

Mark Twain had a perfect comment regarding overusing “very.”

“Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”

I’d love to be that editor.

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June 6, 2016 · 6:45 am

#amwriting: homonyms and honorifics

MSClipArt MP900390083.JPG RF PDAn editor once told me, “If you’re going to use grammar improperly, at least have the decency to misuse it consistently.” Since that day, I have made every effort to do so.

However, as a reader, I like to see that the author and editor both had a good grasp of the basics, and if a book is written with too many inconsistencies it ‘s hard to get involved in it.

We are all guilty of typos, homonym misuse, and the occasional comma splice. We sometimes are inconsistent with the words “sir” and “Son.” We make every effort to have our work read by editors and proofreaders, and still, invariably, some glaring blot of darkness sneaks through because certain aspects of the English language are as difficult to wrangle as a van full of toddlers on coca-cola.

One thing I’ve regularly noticed people have trouble with is the proper use of terms of endearment, such as “Sir,” or “Dad,” and “Mom.” The rules are basically simple to remember:

For people who are related, if you are saying it directly to them in place of their name, capitalize it.

  • “I love you, Son.”

If you are mentioning them in conversation, don’t capitalize it.

  • “My son is wonderful.”

Terms of endearment can also be relatively impersonal, denoting a friendship, or can even be slightly patronizing. If the speaker is not related to the person in question, do not capitalize it.

  • “I wouldn’t do that, son.”

Then there is the issue of the word “sir.” It is an honorific. Quoted from the Chicago Manual of Style section 8.32:

Honorific titles and respectful forms of address are capitalized in any context with several exceptions:

  • sir

  • ma’am

  • my lord

  • my lady

Where king/queen, Lord, or Sir is used as part of someone’s name, it is always capitalized, as are these honorifics:

  • King Olav, and Lucille, the Queen of Darkness
  • Lord John Davies; Lady Mary Shelton
  • Sir William Neville

Where king/queen is employed in the context of a general reference it is lowercased:

  • “Hello,” said the king.

But should one capitalize the word “sir” when it’s used in dialogue? Which of the following would be correct? “Yes sir.” OR “Yes Sir.”

If the reply is to a respected person in general, it is written with no capital, as it’s not a formal name. But you do need a comma just you would with a formal name:

“Yes, sir.”

“Yes, George.”

For a more in-depth exploration of that subject see my post of March 14, 2016: son and sir: to capitalize or not?

When writing dialogue: if your speaking character is in the military and the person he/she is addressing has a military rank above them, and is speaking in their military capacity you must capitalize it. The exception to this is if a younger person of lesser rank is talking to an older person of higher rank in an informal setting. At that point, the younger person is simply speaking respectfully to an older person, and “sir” does not need to be capitalized.

Remember, English is a strange and mysterious language, and is one even which even native-born speakers rarely master. While it has rules, it has many exceptions to those standards, so it is easy to be confused. Your word-processing program’s spell checker won’t notice these things because they aren’t misspelled.

to lie means to restHomophones: Words that share the same pronunciation, regardless of how they are spelled and Homonyms: Words that sound alike, but have different meanings:

  • there, they’re, their
  • to, too, two

It’s also good to recognize homographs (words that share the same spelling) that have different pronunciations and meanings. These words include:

  • desert (to abandon) and desert (arid region)
  • tear (to rip) and tear (a drop of moisture formed in the eye)
  • row (to argue or an argument) and row (as in to row a boat or a row of seats—two words which are also a pair of homophones)
  • bark (the sound of a dog) and bark (the skin of a tree)

Capitonyms are words that share the same spelling but have different meanings when capitalized. They may or may not have different pronunciations. Such words include:

  • polish (make shiny) and Polish (from Poland)
  • march (walk or advance) and March (the third month of the year in the Gregorian calendar)

chicago manual of styleNegotiating the shoals of English grammar can be tricky, and it’s easy to get a fortune tied up in reference books. However, if you are on a tight budget, these two good references will help immensely with gaining some mastery of it:

I always recommend these two as they are the most comprehensive examples of their kind, and good, lightly used volumes are sometimes available second hand through Amazon.

Strunk and White’s Elements of Style is an excellent reference book if the Chicago Manual of Style is too daunting for you, as it’s not nearly as detailed and does hit the high points, and old copies are always available in second-hand bookstores.

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June 1, 2016 · 6:45 am

#amwriting: the rough draft

My Writing LifeI have begun a new novel set in Neveyah. It is the “how it all began” novel and takes place at the beginning of their recorded history. It’s been rolling around my head, and bits of this story are alluded to at various points all through the Tower of Bones series and also Mountains of the Moon.

The protagonist of this story is mentioned regularly in the Tower of Bones series as a character featured in children’s books. He’s portrayed as a kind of superhero, doing many impossible things.

But as always, there was a real man and real events at the core of the mythology.

I am taking the mythical man and giving him his place in history as the founder of the City of Aeoven, the College of Warcraft and Magic, and the first leader of the Temple of Aeos. I had the basic story drawn up back in 2009 when I began devising the world of Neveyah—three lines mentioning their childhood heroes.

The events that launch Aelfrid down the path of the mythic hero are all laid out. Now I must connect the dots and bring him to life.  If the story grows too large, it will be published as a two volume set, but my intention is to keep it to the same length as Valley of Sorrows.

As an indie, I must pay CreateSpace up front for my stock whenever I go to book fairs or signing events, so keeping my costs down is critical. CreateSpace costs are dependent on the length of the book, so if I have to pay $6.99 for each book, it limits  how much stock I can afford to keep on hand. I don’t want to run short of books, so I try to keep my costs to below  $5.00 per book. This also makes donating them to libraries and shelters affordable.

Even though Tower of Bones was published first, the rough draft of Mountains of the Moon was actually written first. In early 2009 I had been asked to write an epic fantasy story-line for a Final Fantasy-style anime-based RPG that was never built. For that reason, the world building was super-heavy.

Before I even had a story, I had to spend months

  • devising history and mythology
  • designing all the many environments where the story would take place
  • drawing maps
  • designing the creatures the characters do battle with
  • I also had to design the rules for magic, including its limitations

Having all these things so well-drawn and documented has been a bonus, as I can just write the story. The setting is clear in my head, laid out in a style sheet for that world, and the terrain is detailed on maps.

The north in the time of AelfridI have learned from the mistakes of others. Unlike the Saga of Recluce series, my maps for the early days detail the world as it was then, so there is no struggling to guess where the major towns are. (See my post, of  March 10, 2014, Spanking L.E. Modesitt Jr.)

I would definitely do two things differently, if I were to create that world today: the calendar, and the names of the days. I wouldn’t go with a 13-month lunar calendar, and I wouldn’t name the days after Norse gods.

But the calendar is canon now, and just as in real life, you must work with what you have. So, right now I am nearing the first plot point, where the first calamity occurs. Since this is the rough draft, everything to this point is really sketchy—a lot of “he said,” and “he went,” just to get the ideas down and everything in place.

These “telling and not showing” places are road marks, to guide me when I sit down to write the true first draft. My synopsis was about 3000 words. This rough draft will top out at about 55,000 words, and the first draft of the novel itself will be around 90,000 to 100,000 words.

398px-Heroes journey by Christopher Vogler

Hero’s Journey, by Christopher Vogler, via Wikipedia

What I am doing at this point is setting the scene, introducing and developing the characters, and finding the reasons why they are who they are as people. I have a grip on my mentor’s character, and also the side characters.

I know my protagonist fairly well, although what initially motivates him is still a bit of a mystery. His personality and what he has to do are clear, but I haven’t yet discovered what lies within him that pushes him to achieve this thing. That is part of the journey for me.

For this book, I know exactly who my villain is, and how he came to be that person. He is new to me, but his motivation is clear and easy to imagine. I feel a real connection to him.

Altogether, if everything goes according to plan, writing this book will take about a year for me to get it to the final draft and into the editing process.

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May 25, 2016 · 6:45 am

#amwriting: advancing the plot

e.m. forster plot memeIn the previous post, I discussed the story arc, and how it relates to what E.M. Forster said about the plot: that plot is the cause-and-effect relationship between events in a story. The story arc is a visual description of where events should occur in a story. For me, knowing where they should happen is good, but it doesn’t tell me what those events are.

Planning what events your protagonist will face is called plotting, and I make an outline for that.

“Pantsing it,” or writing using stream-of consciousness, can produce some amazing work. That works well when we’re inspired, as ideas seem to flow from us. But for me, that sort of creativity is short-lived.

Participating in nanowrimo has really helped me grow in that ability, and one nanowrimo joke-solution often bandied about at write-ins is, “When your’re stuck, it’s time for someone to die.” But we all know that in reality, assassinating beloved characters whenever we run out of ideas is not a feasible option because soon we will run out of characters.

As devotees of Game of Thrones will agree, readers (or TV viewers) get to know characters, and bond with them. When cherished characters are too regularly killed off, the story loses good people, and we have to introduce new characters to fill the void. The reader may decide not to waste his time getting invested in a new character, feeling that you will only break their heart again.

The death of a character should be reserved to create a pivotal event that alters the lives of every member of the cast, and is best reserved for either the inciting incident at the first plot point or as the terrible event of the third quarter of the book. So instead of assassination, we should resort to creativity.

This is where the outline can provide some structure, and keep you moving forward.  I will know what should happen in the first quarter, the middle, and the third quarter of the story. Also, because I know how it should end, I can more easily write to those plot points by filling in the blanks between, and the story will have cohesion.

Think about what launches a great story:

The protagonist has a problem.

You have placed them in a setting, within a given moment, and shown the environment in which they live.

You have unveiled the inciting incident.

Now you need to decide what hinders the protagonist and prevents them from resolving the problem. While you are laying the groundwork for this keep in mind that we want to evoke three things:

  1. Empathy/identification with the protagonist
  2. Believability
  3. Tension

We want the protagonist to be a sympathetic character whom the reader can identify with; one who the reader can immerse themselves in, living the story through his/her adventures.

Also, we want the hindrances and barriers the protagonist faces to feel real to the reader. They must be believable so that the reader says, “Yeah, that could happen.” Within every scene, you must develop setups for the central events of that moment in their lives and show the payoffs (either negative or positive) to advance the story: action and reaction.

Each scene propels the characters further along, each act closing at a higher point on the story arc, which is where the next one launches from.

Some authors resort to “idle conversation writing” when they are temporarily out of ideas.  Resist the temptation—it’s fatal to an otherwise good story. Save all your random think-writing off-stage in a background file, if giving your characters a few haphazard, pointless exchanges helps jar an idea loose.

imagesDon’t introduce random things into a scene unless they are important. What if you had a walk-on character who was looking for her/his cat just before or just after the inciting incident? If the loss of the cat is to demonstrate the dangers in a particular area, make it clear that it is window dressing or remove it.

If the cat has no purpose it needs to be cut from the scene. To show the reader something  is to foreshadow it, and the reader will wonder why the cat and the person looking for it were so important that they had to be foreshadowed.

Every memorable element in a fictional story must be necessary and irreplaceable.  In  creative writing, this concept is referred to as “Chekhov’s Gun,” as it is a principal formally attributed to the great Russian playwright, Anton Chekhov.

Finally, we want to keep the goal just out of reach, to maintain the tension, and keep the reader reading to find out what will happen next. Readers are fickle, and always want what they can’t have. The chase is everything, so don’t give them the final reward until the end of the story.

But do have the story end with most threads and subplots wrapped up, along with the central story-line. Nothing aggravates readers more than going to all the trouble of reading a book to the end, only to be given no reward for their investment of time.

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May 4, 2016 · 6:45 am

#amwriting: A Writer’s Armamentarium by Jennifer Vandenberg

armamentarium coverWe all have times when we are at a loss for an idea. I love books that will give the creative muse a little kick in the pants. An intriguing little book in the writer’s arsenal is available for pre-order now.  A Writer’s Armamentarium, by Jennifer Vandenberg is a nifty little compendium of lists and writing prompts–things to  nudge your muse when you are a little bit stalled and blocked.

I came to know Jennifer through the online community of the Lewis County Writers Guild, a wonderful group of people I met at the 2015 Southwest Washington Writers Conference. 

CJJ: A Writer’s Armamentarium is an awesome title for book. What exactly is an Armamentarium?

JV: An armamentarium is a collection of resources used for an activity. It is often used in a medical context, but I loved the idea of creating a collection of lists that writers could use when they needed a bit of inspiration.

CJJ: Who did you create this book for?

JV: At first I created it for me and all the varied topics I’m interested in. As I started getting remarks from beta readers I learned that writers were more interested in these lists than non-writers so I included the chapters that writers would find most interesting. I hope that all writers, from hobbyists to professionals, can find inspiration for their stories among these lists.

CJJ: What made you decide to embark on such an ambitious project?

JV: I had dreamed of creating this book from my personal lists for about four years. I finally felt I had collected enough knowledge to fill out a book and I was excited to get started. Cleaning up and fact checking these lists took longer than I expected, but I loved every minute. This book is definitely a passion project for me.

CJJ: I was fortunate to read an advanced copy of this book, and loved the list of unusual words. What is your favorite unusual word, and why?

JV: I have so many favorite words that it is hard to pick just one. My favorite word from the Writer’s Armamentarium is omnology, which means the study of everything. I consider myself an omnologist, which sounds better than “someone who can’t decide what to focus on.”

CJJ: Let’s talk about your other work. Tell us about your Travis Eldritch series of short stories. Who is Travis, and how did you come to write about him?

JV: I love my Travis Eldritch series. He’s a private detective living on a moon in a system that has thirteen moons. In this system everyone is given a Problem at birth by the gods. Travis’s Problem is that he turns into a statue at random moments. This Problem has both advantages and disadvantages. Travis follows his gut more than his brains, but he and his partners manage to stop the bad guys eventually.

Each story is about 9,000 words. Six books have been published so far as eBooks on Amazon and in total there will be twelve books. Each story stands on its own, but there is an overarching subplot that connects all the books.

I’m a discovery writer and sometimes I just sit down and start writing with no idea of what is going to happen. I had this Sam Spade-like character talking to me so I started writing down his thoughts. Travis was born and he continues to tell me about his adventures.

CJJ: You have also written a book, Goofy Tips for a Happy Disney Vacation. What inspired that book?

JV: For three years I wrote a Disney travel blog at www.agoofyidea.com. New posts came out on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. At the end of each post I wrote a Goofy Tip, a quick suggestion to improve the reader’s Disney vacation. I put all of the tips from the first year of the blog into a book so people could access helpful tips in one source.

This July I will be overhauling A Goofy Idea. I am creating a serial that is part fantasy, part Disneyland travelogue, about a teenage girl who was born in a book, but now lives in our world, and her fight with story spirits that want to pull her into their worlds. This story will be published on the website one chapter a week. It will be free to anyone who loves Disneyland and great stories.

CJJ: I love serials–some of the best work out there began as a serialized novels. I look forward to reading this. But, what has been the largest hurdle for you as an indie author?

JV: I love to write but I don’t love to market. My largest hurdle is balancing my time between the creative end and the business end of indie publishing. If I could have someone else do my marketing I would, but instead I’m working at finding techniques that are both successful and enjoyable.

CJJ: It is indeed a business, whether you are indie or traditionally published. The indie has a more difficult path as they must finance the entire endeavor on their own, and nothing happens overnight. So what advice do you have for the author just embarking on the indie path to publishing?

JV: Join Facebook groups. Join both virtual and in-person writing groups. Sign up for helpful blogs. Writers love to talk about writing and you can learn so much, but more importantly you need to surround yourself with a group of people who will support you as you embark on this exciting and sometimes difficult path.

CJJ: If you had it all to do over again, what would you do differently?

JV: I’d write more. Every day I didn’t write set me back from achieving my publishing dreams.

CJJ: Finally, where can the reader find your books?

JV: All of my books are published as eBooks on Amazon. All my books are listed on my author page.

CJJ: Thank you, Jennifer, for taking the time to talk with me today about your forthcoming book, A Writer’s Armamentarium.

This intriguing little book is a fun and useful little guide for the author who may need a little jump-start to their creative muse. Once Jennifer has it in paperback form, it will also be a nifty little book to have on the coffee table as a conversation piece, or as a gift for anyone who likes odd little self-help books.

>>><<<

steampunk Jennifer - CopyGeology student, National Park ranger, secretary, tax preparer, swim instructor, Hallmark sales associate, school aide, library assistant, children’s bookseller, merchandise supervisor, property curator, volunteer, food service employee, farmer, and blogger. Jennifer has had all these jobs and she’s not even old enough to receive social security. However, no matter where she worked, Jennifer has always been a writer.

In 2014 she won the Short Fiction Writers Guild Flash Fiction award for her evil Christmas entry, Advice from Siblings. She was a panelist at 2015 Left Coast Crime and gives writing workshops around her southwest Washington community.

Check out her website www.jennifervandenberg.com to learn about all her various writing projects. She has turned her Mattie Garrets/Jackson Pierce mystery series into a podcast on iTunes and will be starting a YouTube channel in summer 2016. She also plans to publish her first non-fiction book in May and start a fantasy/Disney travelogue serial in July. There are no limits to Jennifer’s imagination.

You can find Jennifer at:

Jennifer’s Author Website:

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March 30, 2016 · 6:45 am

#amwriting: too many words

My Writing LifeI have been accused of using too many words to say what I mean—and my critics were right. For the last four years, I have been on a quest to learn how to convey a story and keep my reader involved. I’ve had some successes and also failures. The successes keep me going, and every failure inspires me to figure out what went wrong.

Most of the time it was my love of playing with words that derailed my story. Today’s example is a passage from an early work of mine. I will be rewriting this book over the course of the next few years, once the three books I am currently working on are published.

When I rewrite this book, I will eliminate the verbosity. I won’t change the basic story, only pare down the wordiness. This book was written for my first NaNoWriMo and was completely unplanned. I had no idea of what I was going to write until 12:01 a.m. on Nov. 1st, when I began writing it. In the back of my mind lurked Fritz Lieber’s great character, Fafhrd, although he’s not represented in this tale. Yet, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser influenced this tale.

It still shocks me that over the course of 21 days, a 92,000 word story about a group of mercenaries in a medieval Alternate Earth emerged from my subconscious mind.

The original manuscript is a great example of everything that is both wrong and right about a  stream-of-consciousness first draft.

  1. Positive: It has a great, original plot,
  2. Positive: It has wonderful characters,
  3. Positive: It (surprisingly to me) has a basically good story arc.
  4. Positive: It ends well.
  5. Negative: I led off with an info dump.
  6. Negative: I used no contractions (Doh!)
  7. Negative: I made way too free with my adverbs and modifiers. This fluffed up the word-count by about 15,000 unnecessary words.
  8. Doubly negative: I used hokey phrasing, because I was trying to write well.
  9. Negative: Oh, and another info dump was inserted toward the end.

The example:

“I’ve brought along something so that we shall not have to boil the water to drink it,” ventured Lackland as he uncorked a bottle of wine. “Chicken Mickey was right about the trots you know, but I will never tell him that; the old thing enjoys mothering us so. It would take away the joy of nagging us to death if he thought we were able to care for ourselves.”

What? We shall not? From what hell hath this beast arisen? Still, once the hokey crap is pared away, something worth reading can be found.

SO, let’s take that unwieldy, 70-word behemoth of a paragraph apart and trim it down.

“I brought something so we won’t have to boil water to drink.” Lackland uncorked a bottle of wine. “Mick was right about the trots you know, but I’ll never tell him. It would take away the joy of nagging us to death.”

_72982736_vikings courtesy of BBCI trimmed it from 70 words to 42, and made it stronger without changing the meaning or intention. I changed the way Lackland refers to an absent friend, Chicken Mickey, the Rowdies’ supply-master. By this point in the ms, there is no need to use his full mercenary nickname every time he’s mentioned. Everyone knows Mick’s nickname and why he has it (he retired from the Rowdies to be a chicken farmer for a while, but that didn’t work out) so going with the short version of his given name, “Mick,” immediately helps that paragraph.

In the process, I axed one of my favorite sentences: “The old thing enjoys mothering us so.” It’s redundant as the sentiment is expressed in the sentence that follows, which also shows Mick’s character despite his absence.

Also of great benefit is the cutting away of unneeded words: along, to drink, ventured, as—these are words that can “go without saying” in the context of that paragraph. The reader understands they are there as silent partners: unwritten but understood. At this point, I feel that no dialogue tag is needed because Lackland has an action to perform, showing both who speaks and setting the scene.

Using contractions makes dialogue more natural. Some people would go even further than I did, and make “It would” a contraction. I don’t like the way “It’d” looks or sounds so I won’t do that—and that is part of what I think of as my voice. It is a deliberate usage choice, one that I prefer.

When I wrote the first draft of this manuscript, I was at a different stage in my writing development than I am at now. I had never been involved with a writing group, and I had never studied the mechanics of writing. The rudimentary skills I had were developed from trying to copy the styles of my favorite authors, but I had a limited understanding of the mechanics of writing fantasy fiction. The only writing I had done was for myself and my children, although I had done a lot of that.

While I had a standard high-school education and some college and had done a bit of writing in the course of my work, I realized I was woefully uneducated about the craft of writing. I made it my business to get an education, via the internet. It’s free and available to anyone who wants to learn. You just have to want to learn.

I began attending seminars, and writer’s conventions. I scavenged garage sales for books on the craft of writing and I joined local writing groups. I found other writers and made life-long friends, learning a great deal from them.

Nowadays, I have my own voice and my own style. I write far leaner prose in my first draft than I did in those days, and the editing process is not nearly such an ordeal as it was the first time I had one of my manuscripts edited professionally. I continue trying to learn the craft, updating my education constantly.

leonard elmore quoteChoose your words carefully, so they express what you want to say clearly, and in as few words as is possible, while still conveying the atmosphere and mood.

  1. Nothing can be included that does not advance the plot.
  2. There can be no idle conversations “just to show they’re human”: conversations must advance the story.
  3. We don’t need a chapter detailing the history behind the core conflict. Let that emerge as needed.
  4. Never use three words when one suffices.
  5. If you’re in love with a passage you wrote because it’s “great writing,” it probably should be cut.
  6. Ax all redundancies. It only has to be said once, unless the character has forgotten it, and that “forgetting” is a core part of the plot.
  7. Adverbs are important. They need to to be chosen carefully and used sparingly.
  8. If you occasionally love to wax poetic, go ahead and write poetry—just not in the middle of your political thriller. You have permission to love action-oriented genre fiction written with lean, mean prose, and still appreciate (and write) poetry.

What I didn’t know when I first began this journey is this: deleting the excess verbiage will add up to large gains, reducing the overall length of the book, increasing readability and (hopefully) the reader’s enjoyment.

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