Writer Unboxed

WE'VE MOVED!

2006-10-17T09:43:00.000-04:00

Come visit us at our new home: WriterUnboxed.com

Don't worry, we've taken all our interviews, linkies and cool posts with us. We'd appreciate it if you'd update any links you have to us. Thanks! Now hop on over for a visit. We've left the light on for you.

Taking the Plunge

2006-09-12T14:13:00.000-04:00

Today's the big day, folks. We are opening our new home for you. Therese and I would be thrilled if you'd come check out our new digs:

WriterUnboxed.com

The whole story behind the move is over at the new address. We've got some shiny new toys to show off, and some surprises too. We'd be grateful if you could take a moment to update your links (we'd do it for you, swear!).

We'll keep this blog live for awhile until we get some housekeeping finished. In some ways it's hard to part with an old friend, but we are excited about our new look and our new vibe.

On Friday, we'll feature the first of a three-part interview with screenwriter and Hollywood story consultant Michael Hauge. Therese did this interview, and she tells me it was awesome in terms of revealing the secrets to a great pitch, the most important ingredients for memorable storytelling and other stuff that takes years for writers to figure out on their own. You won't want to miss it.

We're still collecting entries for our first annual contest. We've gotten a sheaf so far, each of them compelling. For more information on how you can enter, click here.

Finally, we must say that we've really enjoyed our time with Blogger, despite its fractious nature. It's let us hone our voice and blog presence, basically for free. And free experience can't be beat.

We'll see you on the other end of the blogosphere.

No, no, not here. HERE! :) See you over at the new place. We've even dusted.

Remembrance

2006-09-11T21:00:00.000-04:00

We were originally going to move over to the new site today, but then we looked at the calendar a little more closely. Ah, 9/11. So we'll move tomorrow. Today I want to remember and share a few things about my journey with you as well.

I vividly recall seeing one of the towers collapse live on CNN this day in 2001. I remember sinking to my knees in shock and horror.

“I can’t believe what just happened,” I whispered.

My daughter came up behind me. “What’s wrong, Mommy?”

My hand was over my mouth. I told her the truth: “A lot of people just died.”

I’m not a native of New York City. I can’t imagine what someone who lives in the city—who had a loved one die or was running from debris or just watching terrified from the periphery—felt that day or how they’ve managed to cope in the aftermath. I guess most of them did what we all have to when life tuns out harsher than we could’ve dreamed: develop a thicker skin and try to move on.

Even though I’m not a native of NYC, I am a New York state resident. I remember the most ominous looking sky the day after the attacks, with positively stark, gray, fat clouds rolling overhead. I remember thinking they were overfilled with remnants of the terrible day-pieces of city and other people's lives descending on my hometown like a traveling cemetery, demanding that all of us pay our respects. They affected me, those clouds and the unnatural storm that preceded them. They made me anxious, and they made me hear the ticking of the clock more loudly than ever before. I began taking my dreams a lot more seriously. I looked at the faded fortune cookie slip I’d kept for years, the one that said, You are a lover of words. Someday you will write a book, and I thought, “Someday is now.”

And so I began.

The first draft of my story was pure garbage and as boxed as dry mac-and-powder-cheese. But at least I was doing it. I wrote the first few chapters of a second draft, and began to feel moderately proud of my work, in April of 2002. I finished the manuscript after about a year, then spent nearly another year editing it, getting feedback, and cutting 150 pages worth of information from its fatty body. I sent it out to a list of top-notch agents and received back a pile of rejections, though many of these were also top-notch. (“We loved your style of writing and unique voice, and would be enthusiastic about seeing future manuscripts." "There is something about your prose that is unique and captivating. You’ve got great potential.” And my favorite, “You’re a luscious writer, with loads of vivid details and language…this is the kind of story I would want to write.”) Despite the lovely rejections, I began to doubt the wisdom of my fortune cookie, because the truth was that I had no idea in the world how to turn those letters into anything other than THANKS, BUT NO. By this point, it was well into 2004.

It took a while—I had a mini dark moment of the soul, I’ll admit—but eventually I decided to follow one agent’s advice and let my voice grow as it seemed to want to. I tried writing other manuscripts and even got about 300 pages into one, but my first story kept poking at my insides, “Psst. This was a really good idea. Unique. Grow it. Make it more and then try again.” I had plenty of false starts, trying to weave old and new. It just wasn’t working. I sunk into a study of craft, studied some more, consulted good people. Finally I realized that if I wanted to salvage the heart of the story, I’d have to pretty much start all over again. I went into deep-think mode in early 2005, came up with a way to grow the story that seemed to have been bluntly staring me in the face all along, sighed with relief and then began brainstorming new threads. I’ve been working on my born-again story for almost a year now, and I'm committed as ever to finishing it.

Days like this remind me how it all began. They remind me of that death-shroud cloud and that life is short. They remind me I still have a lot of work to do but that it’s important--SO important--to continue.

I was recently asked to write an essay about art—about why art is important following loss. What I wrote seems to fit this day, so here it is:

Life is not always kind to us individually, or to our families, our towns, our country or our world. But it's important not to let cheerlessness grow within us uncountered, because it can choke out hope. Art is a great remedy for this kind of bewildered, lost feeling, because when we're in the midst of art we're reminded that life has purpose and that purpose is often joyful. It doesn't matter if you're creating art or admiring someone else's, or whether the art itself appears in a deft brushstroke or a poignant melody or an apt phrase or a lingering touch between two dancers. What matters is art's ability to take us outside of our own experience for a while to remind us that there is meaning beyond despair. Art is able to do this like nothing else because it stems from passion, and passion is--at least for me--nearly the very opposite of hopelessness.

I guess this is what motivated me to write after 9/11 and what brings me back to my wip, regardless of what might be happening around me. Passion. Hope. Find it, then use it well and use it often.

Write on, all.

INTERVIEW: Theresa Meyers, Blue Moon Communications, Part 2

2006-09-08T14:34:00.000-04:00

Last week, Therese and Kathleen had the great pleasure of interviewing Theresa Meyers, President of Blue Moon Communications. Theresa's firm handles publiciting and promotion for fiction authors. Part One of her interview generated plenty of interest. Below is Part Two of our interview with Theresa.

Q: What can writers on a budget do to promote their books?

TM: It all depends how wisely you spend it and what your expectations are. Again, generally speaking you are either going to save time or money. You're going to spend one or the other. I've had writers with a budget of $500 do mailings out to book clubs and been very happy with it. I've had other authors find ways of getting trips, wine and other goodies donated for contests so they didn't have to spend their own money.

The best use of an author's money is his or her website. Without it, an author isn't considered "real" by the outside world (and perception is everything when it comes to promotion). It can also serve as a place to reach out to readers, via blogs, contests, newsletters etc.

The next best thing they can do is go out and meet all their local booksellers face to face. Become friendly and ask them what works for them, what they like, don't like. Send thank you notes. Really simple things like that make an impression.

Q: Do new authors need a public relations professional in the early stages of their careers?

TM: It totally depends on the author. Some are planning a big launch with that first book and, yes they need the help. Other authors wait until they want to make a shift in their career. In general I tell authors that the time to consider a publicist is when you are spending more than 30% of your time on promotion. Only you can write the books. If it begins to eat away at your productive time, then really, you're only cheating yourself because no one else can bring in the money for you by producing the books.

Q: What kinds of questions should an author ask when searching for a publicist?

TM: Make sure you have a list of questions prepared to see if you are going to be a good fit together. Only you know what is important to you, your budget and how often you need someone to communicate with you to feel comfortable. Know what your goals are ahead of time and be clear in communicating them. If you want to be on your local television show, say so. If it’s more important to build your mailing list, then let him or her know. The best way to get the worst service is to make your publicist guess what you really want. Not every publicist is going to offer the same services or the same personality. Some have special contacts in certain areas and are better at securing different kinds of coverage for you. Don't be shy about using more than one if they are working on separate types of media or specific projects for you. Teamwork is always possible. Be sure to ask them what their background is. What are some of their successes and about some of the things they think might work for you based on the information you provide them. Ask if they will give you a written plan and be sure you both understand what your budget is.

Q: Author A writes well-reviewed books, but can’t seem to break out of the midlist. What can this author do to crack the ceiling and start the climb onto the bestseller lists?

TM: First she could hire a publicist! LOL. Seriously, what she can do would completely depend on the author. It isn't going to do much good for Author A to go out on a book tour if she hates to give interviews and hyperventilates in crowds. The best thing she can probably do is to get real and sit down with her agent and editor and publicist and say, hey, as a team, what can we do to launch this further? It's a blended effort of everyone on the team. Some publishers will release a trilogy back to back to drum up interest, other authors can go out with a smashing platform and generate all kinds of interest on their own because of who they are or what they've done (think The Devil Wears Prada). It's important for any author who wants to break out to start building the number of impressions out there. You want people to recognize your name. Frankly, I've had clients who've written more than 70 books who still weren't a familiar name. The number of books doesn't matter. You need to get people talking about you. How you do it is going to be up to you.

Q: How important is an online presence (blogging, websites) to promotion?

TM: It's an important facet to a complete plan. You need to remember that all of these are tools to build impressions. The more impressions you can get out there, the better. With so many people spending their free time surfing on the Internet, a website is a critical component to an author's presence. Again, it makes you seem like a "real" person to them and to the media. There have been a number of times where I've been pitching a journalist and heard them typing in the author's website to look them up. Blogging is a less valuable tool. It can suck up more time than it returns in benefits, but it can also build a great following for a person if they have the right voice and are religious about maintaining their blog.

Q: Booksignings strike fear into many authors. Are these worth the time and effort? If so, what’s the best way to get the most mileage out of a booksigning?

TM: Part of the fear comes because they are looking at the booksigning from the wrong perspective. Booksignings, in my opinion, are not about selling books. They are a publicity stunt similar to what politicians use when out campaigning for votes. You are there to shake hands and kiss babies. You are there to make friends with the bookseller and as many of his or her staff that hand sell to customers as you can. You are there to make a good impression with them and with your public who wants to see the real you and know that some robot isn't cranking our your books in a dank basement at the Federal building. You do all of this in hopes that the next time someone has a dollar to spend, then vote with their dollar for your book instead of another author's. Make sure you offer to help set up the event, autograph as much stock as they'll let you and send thank you notes afterwards. It also doesn't hurt to have materials written in advance (like a list of ten things aspiring authors can do or a signup sheet for your newsletter) to move a signing along. Above all be your best self and smile. Be someone they'd like to know and you have an opportunity to widen your market. Be a diva and you are shooting yourself in the foot.

Q: Besides writing a great book, what’s the number one thing an author can do to promote their work?

TM: Don't be shy about talking about it! How many bills do you pay in a month? Do you ever send out a bookmark with them? Get your friends and family in on the act. They can act as your own big mouth network. Don't hide your accomplishment. Tell people! This is not a time to be concerned if they think you are bragging. Since I also write, I see so many authors who are petrified of telling people about their books. This is not the time or the place. Shout it out! My first Scottish historical, The Spellbound Bride comes out in May 2007. And you can bet I'll be arranging speaking engagements, setting up contests and interviews. If you can, speak to your local writers group or a school. Ask booksellers if they'll allow you booksignings. Give people a reason to sign up for your mailing list. Look for opportunities to cross promote and get savvy about what works and what doesn't! If you need to take a class to educate yourself, then do it. Remember that all the work you put into writing the book won't amount to much of people don't go buy it and read that wonderful story. Let them know about the opportunity any way you can.

Q: What made you want to take the leap from public relations and into writing fiction? Why historical romance?

TM: Actually the egg came before the chicken, that is to say I was writing fiction way before I went into public relations. I started writing my first novel when I was 17. For a long time I tried to keep the two completely separate. Writing was what I did for me, and the public relations was my day job. So I worked doing corporate and agency public relations for about ten years until my good friend, and brilliant author Cherry Adair asked me for some assistance publicizing her book Hide and Seek. I told her I didn't do book promotion. She laughed and said she wanted my help. And, for those of you who've met Cherry and know she's a force of nature, she told everyone she knew about what I was doing and I had leaped into doing book promotion before I knew what happened. The reason I could do it so easily was because I was already writing. I'd already been a member of RWA for nearly as long as I had been in public relations. Historical romance was what I loved to read at the time and so that was the first and second story that consumed me. From there I branched into contemporary as well. I now write both. My first novel, The Spellbound Bride, was a finalist in the American Title 2 contest sponsored by Dorchester and Romantic Times, under the title The Devil's Maiden and will be coming out in May 2007.

Q: How does promoting your own work differ from promoting a client's? Are you your own 'dream client?'

TM: In a lot of ways it is the same. The challenge is not to short change myself because I'm working on my client's materials. For instance if I have a client that needs an interview a particular month, I usually hand it off to them before I'd consider it for my own work. I'm far from my being my own dream publicist, rather than a dream client. My publicist hasn't even made me a press kit yet! As a client I'm great. I know what to expect, don't chew myself out, and am endlessly patient. I know that might sound a little twisted and a lot of writers wonder how you can have one foot in each role. The truth is I'm a Gemini (the twins). It's like two halves of the same whole. There's a switch that flips on and off between publicist and writer. It took me about three years to be able to develop that switch and use it with ease. Now I easily flip back and forth from one mode to the other. (Which isn't surprising for a Gemini who is used to juggling multiple projects for as many as eight clients at a time in a busy agency). You just learn to juggle more efficiently.

Q: How do you schedule writing fiction with your busy day job?

TM: For a long time I did it with page count. I'd set a goal of so many pages a day and I wouldn't let myself go to sleep until I'd met those pages. That became more difficult as my two children grew to preschool age and their social/schooling commitments grew. Now I do it by sheer force of will. I treat it as my, second, wait, third job. But it's still a job that gets done.

Thanks, Theresa, for an insightful interview! We shall keep readers posted when The Spellbound Bride hits the shelves.

Photo credit: Lee Isbell, Studio 16.

James Frey - Million Little Paybacks

2006-09-08T05:07:00.000-04:00

NEW YORK - It’s pay back time for disgraced memoirist James Frey and his publisher, Random House Inc.

Under a tentative legal settlement, readers who said they were defrauded by Frey’s best seller, “A Million Little Pieces,” can claim refunds, an agreement called unprecedented — and understandable — by a leading publishing attorney.

...Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, said Thursday that he doubted the settlement would set a precedent for similar lawsuits against other books, although he acknowledged it was originally a “concern that passed through a lot of our minds.

Read full story HERE.

Linktopia, the Jeffersons Edition

2006-09-07T18:10:00.000-04:00

Oh yeah, we're moving on up. To that dee-lux blog over at WordPress...

The new hamster wheel for Writer Unboxed is nearly finished. We'll be doing the crossover soon to our new home. Therese and I are bursting to tell you all our news but we're holding off until we get the ducks in a row, the plugins adjusted, blahdie blah blah. But that won't stop linky goodness on Thursdays, nossir. Segway to:

The discovery of another new blog, I Should be Writing (h/t Memetherapy). I like this author's fatalism. It neatly parallels my own . . . also check out Indexed. This blog is hilarious . . . Nienke's blog is also sporting a new look . . . . the new writer's horoscopes are up at Publisher's Marketplace. Something about an eclipse and sacrific and loss. Good thing my forecast never comes true . . . . Eric wrestles with the writer's eternal dilemma--how to get the backstory across without an info dump . . . there's a contest over at Crime Fiction Dossier to win Gregg Hurwitz's latest release, LAST SHOT . . .

More after the jump.

The Man in Black reveals the connection between fall and a publisher's publicity machine . . . . Ray has some tips for making transitions between scenes . . . . Agent Kristen at Pubrants tells suppliants the fastest way to get their e-queries deleted . . . . What if you're a prodigy? Writing Fiction explains why this could be the worst thing for your career . . . . Inkygirl posts more freelance writing jobs . . . . Holly Lisle must be the most productive or crazy writer in the universe . . . . Booksquare has a nice post on hardback v. paperback and what sells better . . . .

Peace out, people. We'll see ya tomorrow for Part Two of Theresa Meyers interview on how to market your books and yourself.

Secrets of the Silver Screen: Imagery

2006-09-06T09:00:00.000-04:00

I read an article recently and thought, "Damn, I wish I'd written that for WU," and then I read the footer at the bottom of the article that said I could snag it with proper crediting and thought, "Damn, that's even better." Enjoy!

The One Secret Of An Unforgettable Story

Recognize any of these images?

- Boys walking along a railroad track

- A giant gorilla perched on a skyscraper

- A ferocious shark emerging from the sea

- A man and a woman on a fog-strewn airfield, with a plane about to depart

These movie images are so well-known that they've been remembered, imitated and spoofed for decades. But for filmmakers, finding one essential image can make the difference between a plodding, unfocused film and a piece of iconic cinema.

Artist Saul Bass was commissioned to create posters for some of the world's greatest filmmakers, including Otto Preminger and Alfred Hitchcock. His work on The Man with the Golden Arm was incorporated into the opening credits, but no matter how complex his designs became, he still liked to concentrate on one core image. For that movie, it was a crooked, grasping arm. For Vertigo, he depicted a silhouetted, faceless man caught in a swirling spiral. Two dancers on a fire escape summed up West Side Story.

Bass was appealing to something primal in his audience. He knew the emotional and psychological effect a straightforward illustration could have, and he also took the disparate elements of a movie, stripped away the inessentials and found a focus.

If your story doesn't have a core image, find one. (Here's how!)

Conjure an image in your mind, a glimpse of a scene - two people arguing, a boxing match, a romantic boat ride, anything that sums up your movie in one simple vignette. It could be a goal that your character dreams of, works towards and fights for.

Try to create that image faithfully on the page, and you'll be able to build on it, scene by scene.

By going through Bass' process of simplification and focus, you'll remind yourself of what really drives your script.

What's your image?

If you see a hero, then your screenplay's probably character-driven.

If you see a narrative twist, then maybe it's story-driven.

If you see a place, then maybe the setting has a life of its own, like a character unto itself.

Whatever your image, stick with it, use it and consider its meaning. No matter how innocuous it might seem, it will help to anchor your story, rooting it in a reality that you create.

Copyright (c) ScreenwritingInsider.com. Reprinting this article is permitted with this footer included.

Written by: Nick Smith

For your free screenwriting starter kit, visit http://www.ScreenwritingInsider.com

Crikey! What a character

2006-09-05T06:15:00.000-04:00

The news of Steve Irwin's death hit our household hard too. We had guests over the weekend, and last night's dinner was spent remembering our favorite Steve Irwin moments. It seemed fitting that a guy of Irwin's larger-than-life persona would have a death that not only shocks, but is, in a weird way, a fitting tribute to his sang-froid behavior with lethal animals.

Irwin's one of those guys who was a character, a real character. No one would have the courage to create a guy like that for fiction because he seemed almost make believe, a guy who happily wrestled crocodiles and plunged into manky swamps with glee. My daughter had a Crocodile Hunter board game and it was big on crashing jeeps and chomping crocs.

So last night while we were eating pizza and wings, we were also tossing around our favorite Irwin-isms. They all went something like: "Crikey, ain't she a beaut? Look at her razor-sharp teeth--she'd take a bite outtah you're hand quicker'n a wallaby on the lam. Let's get close-ah."

He shall be missed.

Aw, Steve, you'll be missed

2006-09-04T17:24:00.000-04:00

This has nothing to do with writing, I know, but it just doesn't feel right not to mention the shocking and untimely passing of Aussie legend Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter. Weird that you can feel grief for someone you've never met or had any sort of connection with--only the kind that can be forged through a television screen. Personable, fearless, funny...he was a true character and a fantastic educator. We'll really miss him here at my house.

INTERVIEW: Theresa Meyers, Blue Moon Communications

2006-09-01T14:04:00.000-04:00

Publicity has become more important as books compete with other mediums for a precious share of the passive entertainment market (I just coined that phrase, feel free to use it--Kathleen). It's also one of the most misunderstood and feared aspects of industry. The days of letting the publisher take care of promotion are mostly over. Authors need to take an active role in promoting their own books, but most writers didn't get into fiction to hawk books but to write them.

Enter the professional publicist. Therese and Kathleen had the pleasure of interviewing Theresa Meyers of Blue Moon Communications for insights on promotion, marketing, and something that could build an author's long-term prospects in a competitive marketplace: author branding. Theresa works mostly with romance fiction novelists, but her approach is applicable across the genres.

UPDATE: Theresa has agreed to answer YOUR questions about marketing, promotion, and author branding. Leave a question in the comment area and she will do her best to reply. Please note: she'll only be able to do this for a few days, so get your questions out there early!*Also note: If you're having trouble posting a question on Bugger, send it to us at writerunboxed@writerunboxed.com and we'll post it for you.

Part 1: Interview with Theresa Meyers

Q: Please tell us a little bit about your background in promotion and why you’ve decided to concentrate your public relations business on fiction authors.

TM: Before launching Blue Moon Communications in 2001, I spent over ten years working in public relations at corporations, agencies and publishers garnering millions of dollars in media coverage for her clients on national television and in daily newspapers. It's what I went to college for and I hold an honors degree in Mass Communications. In 2002 I secured placement for Carly Phillips as the third pick of the Kelly Ripa’s Book Club on LIVE! With Regis and Kelly and in 2003 Vicki Lewis Thompson was selected for the club as a result of my efforts. My clients have appeared in national magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Complete Woman and Publishers Weekly and on radio nationwide. I work with New York Times bestsellers, new authors and many of the largest fiction publishers in New York including St. Martins Press, Warner Books, MIRA Books (Harlequin), NAL, Dorchester and others. A former journalist and magazine columnist, I turned my interests to promoting fiction because I was looking for a challenge. It's very easy to get a non-fiction author in the media, because the book is the message. Crafting a message and platform for a fiction author is much more difficult and rewarding. It also helps that I write fiction and had been a member of Romance Writers of America (RWA) since 1993 so I felt I knew precisely what clients needed to make a mark.

Q: Most writers write the book and think that’s all they need to do, assuming that the publisher will take care of promoting the book. Can you explain why that’s not the case anymore?

TM: There are actually several reasons. One is the market has changed and become more competitive. Books aren't competing with other books, but all forms of media and entertainment. The other half of that equation is that most book publishers are now owned by larger corporations that see bottom dollar and are demanding publishers perform for the shareholders. Having a good book isn't enough, you've got to be able to market it and sell it. If you don't make a big splash, and start earning out, you've got far less time to prove yourself before your publisher will drop you. What was once a slow building career over five to eight books has been compressed into one to five books.

The second reason is that your in-house publicist is overworked, period. She or he has upwards of 25 or more books to promote every month. They simply don't have the time or resources to completely commit themselves to every book with the same passion the author would.

The third reason is a matter of perspective. Most publishers are completely focused on promoting the book. Which is great. That's what they should do. They are not, however, out to promote the author's brand. That doesn't come until the author's brand has become well enough known that it out paces the books in terms of market value. (In other words until you are big, they are just going to push your book.) The problem with this is how can you expect to build a brand when no one knows about it? There are so many more components at work in promoting an author brand, than there are in promoting only a book.

Q: What is author branding and why should authors do it?

TM: I usually give a month long class on this! Simply put your author brand is made up of a number of factors including what you write, how you act, speak and look in public, and how you present yourself in places like blogs, your website, advertising, etc. All of it is done in an effort to mold people's perceptions about you as an author. For example if I say Stephen King, do you have an instant perception of what he writes, who he is and a slew of ideas related to him? Of course you do. The same thing happens if I say J.K. Rowling or Nora Roberts. These authors are recognizable brands. How do I know? Look on the back of the latest Nora paperback and you won't even see a back cover blurb most of the time, just her picture. That's because people will buy whatever she writes. They don't care what the story is because they believe in the author brand to deliver no matter what. That's what a strong author brand can do. It builds loyalty, strengthens market share and brings in dollars. What author doesn't want that?

Q: What’s the best use of promotion money?

TM: This is probably the most often asked question by authors. I'm going to give you the mental checklist I go through before I ever spend a dime of my client's on an item, project or mailing. This checklist is very general, but it also gives you some guidelines to use in evaluating what you spend, before you spend it.

Theresa's Checklist of Promotion Spending Questions:
1. Does it support your branding?
2. Does it fit the Rule of Three?
3. Can you do it cheaper with someone else or by doing part of it yourself or is it cheaper to hire out?
4. Will it be something they reuse and remember?

Let's tackle them in order.

1. Does it support your branding?
You should have a solid author brand before you ever begin promoting for it to be cost effective. Don't have one? Don't know what your brand is? Don't stress, you can always work on that, but at least be aware you need to figure it out. The point is all your materials and activities should support your brand and contain the taglines or message points of your brand whenever possible.

2. Does it fit the Rule of Three?
I have a rule that I share with all my clients called the Rule of Three. Simply stated, it's this: If an item or action does not fulfill three purposes, do NOT spend money on it. You know how the scenes in your book need to be doing more than one thing at a time to be effective? It is the same with the money you spend on promotion. If you are only buying bookmarks or keyrings or mailing out postcards because you want people to know about your book, you only have one good reason for spending that money. Don't do it! Have three good reasons. For instance, if you purchase bookmarks, because you are 1) planning on sending them out in bundles to bookstores that you have personal relationships with that have requested them, 2) are using them to send out to reader's groups that love bookmarks and will chat up your book to get grass roots buzz started and 3) planning on giving them away as autographed incentives with a SASE to build your mailing list, then you have three good reasons.

3. Can you do it cheaper with someone else or by doing part of it yourself or is it cheaper to hire out?
In general one thing holds true with publicity and promotion: you can either spend time or money, but you are going to invest in one or the other. In the beginning many authors have the time and not the money. It is easier for them to spend eight hours stuffing envelopes (or getting free labor from their kids to do it) than to pay a professional an hourly sum to get it done. As your career progresses, you will find that time becomes your single biggest commodity. Your time is worth more to you when it is spent producing your product (because no one else can do that for you) than it is on tasks other people can do. Only you can decide which is worth more, your time or your money. It will always vary, but it is a major factor in deciding when to spend and when not to spend.

4. Will it be something they reuse and remember?
Many authors are in such a hurry to get something out there, that they don't think about how it will be used or remembered. The single biggest waste is something that gets used once or tossed out. Now this can vary. Some people collect bookmarks, some people toss them. The point is you want to only send the bookmarks to the people who collect them and send something else to the other people. One of my clients said the single biggest waste of money she ever spent before working with me was some mints with her name, book and release date printed on the packaging and set out at a large conference in the goodie room. Everyone loved the mints. They all got taken. But the problem was that the moment they opened that mint, what did they do with the wrapper that had the vital message on it? Tossed it in the trash! It's better to spend money on items that will have a longer life, even if they cost a bit more in the beginning because every time they use that nail file, or coffee mug, they'll be getting an impression from you.

The point of all this is there is no one magic item for authors to spend their money on to promote. What works for one author isn't going to be a good fit for another. Play to your strengths. Are you better at public speaking? Then go get speaking engagements. Hate to be seen in public? Think radio (no one sees you.) Do you love contests and actively send out mailings to your mailing list? Then consider using mailings and contests to get the word out to different mailings lists that are out there.

Anything and everything is a possible tool. The professional publicist sees everything as an opportunity if you can just slant it the right way. Anywhere you can connect with people who read is fair game. Look for state book fairs, book clubs, writing groups, civic groups, schools, women's expos, whatever works. If you write in a genre, find out what magazines do the best reviews or include interviews for that genre. Romantic Times Bookclub does 250 reviews a month in all different genres. Romance Sells is only open to members of Romance Writers of America but goes out to more than 10,000 booksellers and librarians nationally. Go talk to your booksellers as far as you can drive in your area and introduce yourself. Go make ARCs of your books at Staples or Kinkos and send them out. (Julia Quinn said she spent the majority of her first advance making ARCs of her books that she sent out to the top booksellers in the country with a personal letter introducing herself and her book and that it was the best money she ever spent.) Make sure you look for unusual opportunities that perhaps your publisher isn't considering. One of my clients has a Wine Lover's Mystery series. She contacted all the wineries with wines mentioned in her books, scheduled book signings at wine shops, has done tastings at society dinners, all kinds of things and it's done an amazing job in selling her books!

As far as materials, everything is possible from piggybanks to pens, crystals to box cutters. Just make sure you include your author website and a tagline that grabs their attention and if you can make the item something with a cute connection to the book, so much the better. But once again, I'm going to remind you that if it doesn't fit the Rule of Three DON'T SPEND YOUR MONEY on it!

Check back next week for Part 2 of our interview with Theresa. It goes live on September 8.

Photo credit: Lee Isbell, Studio 16.

Linktopia, Labor Day Edition

2006-08-31T18:09:00.000-04:00

Surfing the best of the writers' blogs so you don't have to.

For our non-American readers, the upcoming weekend is known as Labor Day, where the working stiff gets an extra day off on the boss' dime to drink lots more beer and eat foods loaded with nitrates. But we writers will be furiously plugging away at our wips and taking advantage of the . . . eecch, who'm I kidding. I'll be sleeping in and drinking beer too.

Don't forget, this weekend is also the perfect time to enter our first annual WU contest. This year we're giving away an AlphaSmart 3000. Details here.

Some people shouldn't be let out of their cages or allowed to drink beer even if they are a major figure in their genre, but SS/F "legend" Harlan Ellison didn't have his frat buddies around to police him at this year's World Science Fiction Convention (h/t GalleyCat) . . . . here's yet another new blog by a publishing insider, helpfully called Publishing Insider . . . . also worth a look is Dibs!, "early buzz on upcoming books" . . . . but vintage blogger Ray has a nice post on "conclusion" words and luckily this is NOT one of my vices, which is good because my writing suffers from plenty of other problems . . . . the post-conference high has worn off the Alphabet Girls . . . . Conversations with Famous Writers has one with John Shors, author of Beneath a Marble Sky, now coming to a theatre near you soon . . . . Random Reader reads the debut of one of my favorite mystery writers, Bruce Alexander, and loves him as much as I do . . . . So writers are born, not made? Anyone else think that's messed up? Eric's got the goods.

More after the jump.

La Snark is annoyed at crappy queries again . . . . Writer Beware has to update their Worst Agency list again . . . . a tale of rejection woe (h/t Slushpile) . . . . Melly's back in the saddle after living in a war zone for a month which gives me hope for the power of human resiliancy . . . . MJ Rose may have put his finger on why B&N and Borders sales are hitting the skids . . . .

Alright, I'm ready to start the weekend early. Write on.

Gloamy Cleome and the Happy Bee

2006-08-31T13:36:00.000-04:00

Longtime reader Thea McGinnis certainly found music in language when she composed this paragraph of WU beloved words. We had to share this, taken from the comments section of the previous post:Gloamy Cleome woke up discombobulated. The sound of jazz music playing outside her window caused her to undulate beneath the light summer coverlet. A light but consistent hum bounced around the room. Peeking out from under her pillow she saw the plump little honey bee, no doubt flush with nectar, trying to escape the room it inadvertantly bumbled into. Staggering out of her comfy bed she went to the corner and got out her butterfly net, scooping up the bee on its next fly by. Leaning out the window, she released it. 'Bee happy' she whispered as it buzzed its way home.
~By Thea McGinnis

The Music of Language

2006-08-30T10:19:00.000-04:00

A friend recently sent me a note along with a quote. "This is you," she said, and the quote was this:

To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the inner music that words make. ~Truman Capote

She's right; I love the sound of words. And I love finding new ones, like the one I discovered last week via Wordsmith:

quaggy (KWAG-ee) adjective

Marshy; flabby; spongy.

[From quag (marsh), of unknown origin.]

And how can you not like:

embrangle (em-BRANG-guhl) vert tr.

To embroil or entangle.

[From en- + brangle (to shake), from French branler (to shake).]

Embrangle sounds like something I'd make up. But more than fun-sounding words, I love beautiful ones like lambent, gloaming and kismet (my puppy's name!).

Is it just me? Can the words you choose help make you an unboxed writer? Maybe...

I sat in on a workshop session with Judith Ivory some years back, and she mentioned that she keeps unusual words she falls for in a notebook so that she can pull them out and use them in her writing. She's certainly unboxed. One fan once told her that it took a long time to get through Ivory's books because they weren't skimmable; there were just so many words and phrases requiring thought.

"Good," said Ivory, "then you're getting your money's worth."

The notebook is a great idea, and I've adopted it somewhat by keeping a file of favorite words that I receive through Wordsmith. Like Capote, for me, it's all about the sound, the music the word makes. It's why I like quaggy; a fun-sounding word; a word a quirky character might use. It's a keeper. Here's a compilation of others' picks for beautiful words (I'm stealing this verbatim from a site called A Collection of Word Oddities and Trivia):

Wilfred Funk's list of the most beautiful words in English: ASPHODEL, FAWN, DAWN, CHALICE, ANEMONE, TRANQUIL, HUSH, GOLDEN, HALCYON, CAMELLIA, BOBOLINK, THRUSH, CHIMES, MURMURING, LULLABY, LUMINOUS, DAMASK, CERULEAN, MELODY, MARIGOLD, JONQUIL, ORIOLE, TENDRIL, MYRRH, MIGNONETTE, GOSSAMER, ALYSSEUM, MIST, OLEANDER, AMARYLLIS, ROSEMARY. [Alysseum may be a misspelling of alyssum, but this is how the word appears in Paul Dickson's Words.]
In the same poll, other American writers, poets, and critics responded with these selections: HOME (Lowell Thomas), CHATTANOOGA (Irvin S. Cobb), MELODY (Charles Swain Thomas), NOBILITY (Stephen D. Wise), VERMILLION (Lew Sarett), GRACIOUS (Bess Streeter Aldrich), PAVEMENT (Arnold Bennett), LOVELY (George Balch Nevin), HARBORS OF MEMORY (William McFee), and NEVERMORE (Elias Lieberman). Louis Untermeyer responded, "The most musical words seem to be those containing the letter 'l'. I think, offhand, of such words as VIOLET, LAKE, LAUGHTER, WILLOW, LOVELY, and other such limpid and liquid syllables" [Charles Turner].

According to James Joyce, CUSPIDOR is the most beautiful word in English [Dickson].

In A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (page 86), Annie Dillard writes: "My friend Rosanne Coggeshall, the poet, says that 'sycamore' is the most intrinsically beautiful word in English" [Sarah Gossett].

A survey conducted in 2004 by the British Council which asked more than 40,000 people around the world to rank the most beautiful words among a list of 70 words found MOTHER first, followed by PASSION, SMILE, LOVE, and ETERNITY [Charles Turner].

According to reporter, editor, writer, and author Willard R. Espy, the ten most beautiful words in the English language are GONORRHEA, GOSSAMER, LULLABY, MEANDERING, MELLIFLUOUS, MURMURING, ONOMATOPOEIA, SHENANDOAH, SUMMER AFTERNOON, WISTERIA [The Book of Lists 2 (1980)].

Okay, Therese here, because I can't help but interject...Gonorrhea? Bleh. Onward...

In a 2005 column in the New York Times, James Gorman wrote that he was infatuated with the word AMYGDALA. "I like its sound, you might say its musicality" [Robert Brown].

And here, the opposite end of the spectrum:

The ten worst-sounding words in English, according to a poll by the National Association of Teachers of Speech in August, 1946: CACOPHONY, CRUNCH, FLATULENT, GRIPE, JAZZ, PHLEGMATIC, PLUMP, PLUTOCRAT, SAP, and TREACHERY.

Of course, the word flatulent would be on the teachers' list. Hee.

Can a writer go to far with great words? Hell, yeah. If you haven't already, you MUST read Paperback Writer's hilarious post Thesauritis; just be sure you're not eating or drinking anything while you do.

Write on!

Tightrope Walking

2006-08-29T18:13:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, Therese blogged about kicking herself in the butt and entering Writer's Boot Camp. She had that vague pit-sinking feeling you get when you've been frittering away time instead of working on the wip.

I, on the other hand, have the opposite problem. Creature of habit that I am, I get up most every day at the same time and stare at the screen whether or not I have something to write. Inevitably I'll slap down some crap I'll end up deleting anyway in rewrites. I'm also something of a tinkerer, and I'll tinker and tinker the life out of a passage until I want to vomit, and yet I can't stop polishing. Sick, I know. [Aside: John Robert Lennon was featured in Sunday's NYTBR; he'd written a short story about a writer who'd kept editing her novel until she was left with only a haiku. It cut frighteningly close.]

So in my own way I've been eating up just as much time as Therese. I've got a jumble of words that need sorting. You've heard me whine about it here and here ad nauseum.

The muse is a fragile thing. Sometimes I think it's ok to take an extended break away from writing and let it recharge. But we're trying to chisel our way into a business that's pretty unforgiving toward creative people who want or need space for their writing. Ask Laura Kinsale.

And so the anxiety piles up.

The writer walks a tightrope between the fantasies in our brains and the reality of our lives. I don't pretend to know the best way to write a book, because every project I've tackled has been messy. Maybe that's what we have to accept. Each book has its own special flavor of frustration.

I'm looking forward to following Therese's experience with Boot Camp. When she's on the other side of it, we'll compare how Boot Camp measures up against the editing method I'm using this summer, Holly Lisle's One-Pass Manuscript Revision process. Hopefully we'll have something valuable to share other than commiseration.

Writer's Boot Camp + A Poll!

2006-08-27T14:00:00.000-04:00

I am the Queen of Excuses, I'll fess up. The kids have been home for the summer...I've had a lot of freelance work...My mother was ill, and she and her dog stayed with us and our puppy for a while (Oh, you can't imagine)...I haven't found a stretch of time to get into the zone....My muse is avoiding me. Lots of reasons why I haven't progressed on my wip. Funny (or not so) when mine is a story I love and am committed to complete. Not working on it is the reason I often feel a hint of anxiety in the pit of my stomach; it's my twisted innards saying, "You're not doing it. You let another day slip that you'll never get back. No one else can write this book." This is a story I know inside and out, a story that has already been written once (before I knew better), a story that is outlined to the max with every scene, every motivation, and every action accounted for.

So what's my problem?

I've developed a bad habit--the habit of NOT writing--and I need to break it or I'll probably develop an ulcer already. So I've taken drastic measures, starting with this one:

I bought a book.

Not drastic you say; but Novelist's Boot Camp by Todd A. Stone is not just any book, as you can see by the army-green cover. Here's a peek at the intro:

WRITERS, ATTENNNNN-TION!

Welcome, new recruit, to your very own novelist's boot camp.

Now drop and give me twenty.

Everyone knows that military life is different from civilian life, so you can expect this book--modeled on the boot camp that makes soldiers out of everyday men and women--to be different from ordinary how-to books. And it is.

You will see and do things differently. And you will do push-ups.

Wow. A book that makes me smile. A book that has grabbed my attention. A book that could very possibly help counter the effect of chocolate. I like this book so far.

The second part of my grand plan involves the Flogging the Quill Online Storytelling Workshop. That's right, I took the plunge. Not because I don't already have fabu critique partners, because I do, but because the experience will be different from the ordinary; and I believe it will be valuable and enlightening to share works with writers from other genres and with an accomplished editor.

The third part of my kick-own-butt strategy sends me away from home. Once the kids get on the bus September 7th, I'm going somewhere. I'm not sure where, but it won't be here--in front of this computer, in this chair, in this house. I'm going to find somewhere new and commune with my AlphaSmart. Who knows? I may be holed up in a corner at Lowes. You may read about me in the news: Desperate Writer Stuffs Self in Hummingbird Feeder to Escape World. Thing is, something has to give. My home environment has been one of non-productivity for the last few months, and I need a new one in order to revivify my hibernating muse.

At least that's the plan.

Different kind of book, different group of people, different scene. The irony that summertime boxed me good is not lost on me. Maybe I'll even skip the chocolate for a while. You know, while I'm doing my push-ups. Ack!

Speaking of, I need to order some Godiva for the AlphaSmart contest, and though I have my own personal preferences, I'm not sure what the general consensus might be. So I'm asking: you do prefer dark or milk? Hmm? Granted, I could wait and order after the winner is announced October 2nd, but then there's the ship-time wait and all, so I'm just going to go with a mass vote! Opinions? Comment here or email us at writerunboxed(at)writerunboxed.com ... and enter the contest if you haven't already!

I'm off to check my wardrobe for ca-mo. I don't think bile-green is my color, but I'll try anything at this point. ;)

Write on, everyone!

INTERVIEW: Anthea Bell, Part 2

2006-08-25T09:00:00.000-04:00

Translating foreign works is a tricky business, and not just because the magic of a foreign author's work must be lovingly preserved. In part two of our interview with Anthea Bell, we learn more about how she works, the challenges she faces when language itself becomes a barrier, and which recently translated books she feels have the potential to become best sellers as they enter our markets.

Part 2: Interview with Anthea Bell

Q: How do you receive the text? What is your process?

A: When I have the whole text in its final version – and it is going to be a big, long book again, a really satisfying read – I’ll set aside time in my schedule to get straight down to it. I know I can ask Cornelia any questions as they arise, and in fact we’ve already been discussing names in English for some of the characters. Most have already appeared in Inkheart and Inkspell, but there are a few new ones. Then she and her agents and the publishers will all see it, and the publishers’ editors will comment too.

Q: Does much change after the agent, editor and publisher comments? Can you give us an example of what may pose a “sticking point” for them?

A: I don’t think I have a good answer to that. No, probably not much does change. Cornelia is such a careful worker. In books with complex plots like her trilogy, it is important to her for her time scheme to connect up, since the chapters often move from one set of characters in one place to another set somewhere else.

Q: Are there any special considerations when translating German to English? Have you had any unique challenges with any of Cornelia Funke’s books in particular?

A: German to English. Sometimes German does presents difficulties in translation, but not really significant ones in Cornelia’s work. (I think, however, of W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz. Sebald deliberately writes an intricate German sometimes described as almost nineteenth-century, and breaking up his long sentences would not have been right; one of them goes on for no less than nine pages, and is meant to, because it describes the totally pointless hurry and bustle of the Nazis working away to make Theresienstadt look like a happy holiday camp for Jews, for the benefit of a visiting Red Cross commission. The long sentence is part of the effect.) But Cornelia writes a clear, straightforward style, with lovely descriptive passages for the settings of the story and excellent dialogue.

In Inkspell I did come upon one perennial difficulty: German has two words where we have only one for “prince” in English. Fürst is the word for the ruler of a principality. Prinz is the courtesy title of a close male relative of such a ruler. The ruler of Lombrica in Inkspell is a Fürst, a ruling head of state. The Black Prince is a Prinz – his is a name given him or adopted by him as a nickname, but if he were a real prince it would be a courtesy title only. In fact Cornelia took the name of this character from the fourteenth-century Black Prince of British history. But that word Fürst is the bane of my life! I had it in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s last novel, published in English by Penguin Classics as The Life and Opinions of the Tom-Cat Murr, which is full of princes and princesses of both kinds. And I have just had it again in a very entertaining adult historical novel by Robert Löhr, to be called The Chess Machine in English and coming out both sides of the Atlantic next spring, about the famous Mechanical Turk chess-playing automaton invented by the Austro-Hungarian nobleman Wolfgang von Kempelen. (It ended its days in the States, where Edgar Allan Poe saw it and worked out how it operated; Kempelen pretended to have invented a genuine thinking machine, a forerunner of the chess-playing computer, but in fact there was someone hidden inside making the chess moves.)

Conversely, German has one word, Stadt, where we have to choose between “town” and “city” in English, and one word, Wald, where we have “wood” and “forest. In Inkspell the original German for the Wayless Wood is der Weglose Wald, and if you found that phrase in a sober work of non-fiction you might well translate as “the pathless [or impassable] forest”. But that didn’t sound quite magic and mysterious enough, and I wanted to keep the alliteration, hence Wayless Wood.

There were in fact some particular challenges in Inkspell in the names – that ruler of Lombrica in German was ‘the Speckfürst’, literally, “the Bacon Prince” or “Blubber Prince”, because he was such a tub of lard. Neither sounded right in English. After a lot of thought, and consultation with Cornelia and her English-language editors, he became first “the Laughing Prince”, as a kind of Bluff King Hal figure, and then, as he fell into depression on his son Cosmo’s death, “the Prince of Sighs”.

Q: What an interesting process! Did she have a name change for the prince in the German version of the story also, once Cosimo dies?

A: Yes, he is later called der Fürst der Seufzer in the German, meaning the Prince of Sighs. The name doesn’t occur a lot, but it tells us a good deal about his devastation at the death of his son.

Q: What are some of the other works you’ve translated? And how many languages do you work with?

A: I translate mainly from German and French. I’ve done a few Danish stories for young people, but I don’t really consider Danish one of my languages; I have mastered it on the printed page but can’t speak any. I ought to try learning the pronunciation along with my twin granddaughters, who are half-Danish, and we hope they will grow up bilingual – I listen hard when my daughter-in-law says something to them in her mother tongue. Like almost all Scandinavians, she also speaks English better than most native-born English people!

I’ve translated a great many books over the years, from the Asterix the Gaul saga (not unknown in the States but not, I think, as hugely popular as in Europe) to Freud, a volume in the New Penguin Freud series recently.

Q: I see you’ve translated some of the Brothers Grimm texts! That must have been interesting, as I’ve been read some of the original texts are quite shocking. Do you ever feel tempted to act as editor as well as translator? What was the Grimm experience like for you?

A: Yes, I have translated a number as separate stories, and several in a volume to be called Magic Fairytales in English, selected and illustrated by Henriette Sauvant (German, in spite of her French name), mainly Grimm, two Perrault – I went to the original French for those, of course. Sauvant has illustrated in her unique, slightly surreal style. Egmont are publishing it in the UK this fall, and I’ve added a few notes about the origin of each tale. The point about the grimness of the Grimms is that these were never children’s stories in the first place, but traditional tales that the brothers collected and wrote down, although they did a little editing in the process. I am particularly fond of allegedly the most horrific, “The Juniper Tree”, a version of the House of Atreus theme: the boy cooked in a stew by his wicked stepmother, unknowingly eaten by his father, revived from his bare bones by magic and the love of his little stepsister who gathers them up. (I did a translation of this one a little while ago, although in the end the project asking me for it and half a dozen other tales fell through, and I think I have cracked the way to translate the difficult verse that recurs at the end. It’s in Low German in the original, and was given to the Grimms for their collection by their friend the painter Philipp Otto Runge.) And I always remember how my younger son, then aged seven, told his family on the drive home from visiting his grandparents all about the wonderful, fascinating story he had read in a book on their shelves the night before … as I listened to his account of the plot, I quickly realized that the wonderful, fascinating story was none other than the notorious “Juniper Tree”.

Q: Are there any books you’ve read in a different language and thought, “Oh, this would make a great book translated into English!” or “This book SHOULD be translated into English!” What book(s)? And have you ever petitioned to do this work and had your request successfully met?

A: Yes, I do sometimes see a book which I love so much that I tell a publisher about it – but more often, publishers send me books to read so that I can give them an opinion. Watch out for the runaway German bestseller Die Vermessung der Welt, by Daniel Kehlmann, which is coming from Pantheon in the US in a translation by Carol Brown Janeway later this year, as Measuring the World (and later from Quercus in the UK). I am pleased to say I saw what a splendid book it was before publication in Germany, when I read it in MS. The British publisher who sent it to me and to whom I recommended it didn’t take it, feeling that a novel about the explorer Alexander von Humboldt and the mathematician Carl Gauss might be difficult to sell, but I have gleefully watched its progress up the bestseller lists in the German-speaking countries.

Q: Can you tell us more about it? What about this book excites you?

A: Measuring the World, by Daniel Kehlmann, is a historical novel about the very different parallel careers of the explorer Alexander von Humboldt and the mathematician Carl Gauss: both lived and worked in the late 1700s to early 1800s. The author writes fascinatingly about their work, and the book is also extremely amusing. It's just not true, as so many people think, that the Germans have no sense of humour. While this is a serious novel, I laughed a great deal as I read it.

Q: Being so intimately familiar with great works of fiction, what are your impressions about what it takes to write such masterpieces? What are you most struck by?

A: That is a very difficult question to answer! But I am sure that while the spark of originality in thinking up ideas is necessary to produce great works of fiction, so is a great deal of hard work. And incidentally, I have found that among living authors the best writers are the easiest for a translator to work with, and are happy to answer questions (of course one can't, alas, ask the dead. I had so many questions I wanted to ask E.T.A. Hoffmann about his Tom-Cat Murr.)

Q: You obviously love what you do. What is your favorite part of being a translator?

A: I think the attraction of being a translator is the sheer variety of the job. And working with books the whole time. In Willis Barnstone’s book The Poetics of Translation (Yale University Press, 1993) he says: “Reading is translation and translation is reading … Translation tends to be a certain kind of reading, an ‘intensive reading’ of the original text, which as a result becomes an ‘interpretative reading’.” Exactly: getting to know good books intensively is what I really enjoy.

Q: Have you ever thought about writing a book of your own, and if so, what would you write?

A: Far too busy to think of writing a book of my own, I'm afraid! I have a few short stories put away in a drawer, and I guess that's where they'll stay.

Thank you, Anthea Bell for a fabulous, enlightening interview!

Linktopia: Scribblers Edition

2006-08-24T05:36:00.000-04:00

Sheesh, I don't check a blog for a week or so, and I miss something big. Over at the stellar Flogging the Quill, Ray has what he terms "a modest proposal" but is really a killer deal: an online storytelling workshop. Folks, if you have a WIP you'd like honest feedback on .... and I'm talking about honest feedback unencumbered by friendships, blood ties, tit-for-tats, critique group political b.s. . . . . here's your opportunity. Then scroll up for his guest post by Sheila Williams on first drafts. I felt a whole lot better reading it.

But I'm not sure how I feel about this alleged "Top Ten Blogs About Writing and Publishing" entry if WU isn't on it, but there are some links to good blogs by industry insiders (h/t Pubrants), and I found this guy who isn't shy about his disdain for La Snark (warning: expletive-filled, venomous and hilarious) . . . . Eric shows us a nifty way of organizing your story before you start writing . . . . this disturbs me so much I can't even begin to explain . . . . Bookdwarf wades into the bitchslap war going on in the chick-lit genre, as does Paperback Writer . . . .

More after the jump.

Melly's coming home, yay! . . . . the Writer Beware ladies are back from vacation and post some victories in the fight against publishing scammers . . . . . Nienke. Where does she find these games? Another 20 minutes lost . . . . terrorism has some side benefits for authors . . . . just what Nora Roberts needs, more publicity . . . . . Is horror dead? Crawford Kilian answers .

At the risk of sounding overly precious, TTFN. Write on.

MOVIE ANALYSIS: PotC, Dead Man's Chest, Part 2

2006-08-23T10:32:00.000-04:00

Yar! Yesterday Therese and I dished about the latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie. We agreed that the plot was preposterous, but that we didn't care because we loved the humor and the characters. We continue our discussion below.

KB: Let's talk about that last scene in DMC, the one where Captain Barbossa shows up crunching into an apple (which I guess means he's human again), and he goes from being an antagonist into a protagonist in one fell swoop because now he's the only one who can save Captain Jack Sparrow from the Kraken. It got me thinking about character reversals and how Gore Verbinski and his confederates of mayhem take our characters from the first movie and spin them 180 to make them fresh for the second movie. Elizabeth Swan's a bit of a hussy now. Shipshape Commodore Norrington is a puking drunk. Will's become the thing he hated most in the last movie: a pirate. Now there's a whole new cast of fresh characters familiar enough that they don't have to spend a lot of time setting them up. These guys are pretty fearless when it comes to mixing up expectations. What did you think?

TW: I loved that antagonists in Pirates I were protagonists here--friends of Jack, and in the end Will and Elizabeth, and willing to fight against Davey Jones and company. I think the fresh spin on character was essential to making this movie work. We saw them–Norrington, Elizabeth—evolve like real people do when tested in new ways. It made the movie more believable to me, despite the campy fantasy elements, and it gave the whole thing a richer flavor. It's intriguing that Elizabeth wanted a taste of piracy (literally) and that really no one in the film came off as one-dimensional. I guess the only thing the writers did in the name of being fearless that I question is their playing with the life-death stuff. When someone dies, shouldn't they stay dead? I mean, Pirates isn’t supposed to play like As the World Turns, is it? Kind of makes it impossible for the protagonists to ever succeed--at least in this kind of setting. Oh, wait. There's death, and then there's REAL death, naturally. Heh. Oh, yeah, and no one in my party understood that dice game. Thoughts?

KB: I didn't get the dice game either, but that was one of the many kooky asides I brushed off. Maybe they'll explain it in the extended DVD version. But you bring up a good point. If people get killed or come back to life with impunity, it undercuts the tension. Why worry that Jack Sparrow gets eaten by a Kraken if he's just going to be voodoo'd back to life? As much as I loved Captain Barbossa, dead should be dead.

TW: Right. And, hey, his monkey is about the funniest undead monkey I’ve ever seen, and perhaps the most interesting secondary character.

KB: I LOVED the monkey, though I wondered how it was that he remained a zombie when the others became human again. I guess that's just another one of those pesky loose threads :-) I wanted to talk about the Norrington character for a moment. In the first movie, I was impressed the way the writers steered clear of cliches (he's Will's rival for the affections of Elizabeth Swan) and made him a decent man who was trying to do his job of ridding the world of pirates. In the second movie we see him punished for an act of mercy, his career's in the toilet and he's become a drunk. Basically he's running the darker edge of Will Turner's dilemma, forced to become the thing he despises--a pirate. By the end of Part Two, we don't know if he's going to turn on pirates or become one. I'm more invested in this thread than even the "save Jack from the Kraken" plot because what's at stake for Norrington is a universal human desire: redemption. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that Jack Davenport looks strangely hot covered in vomit.

TW: Ewwwww! LOL! I suddenly feel the need to shower for four hours! But that’s a great analysis of Norrington. It’ll be interesting to see how his character evolves in part III; he seems close to the edge of his humanity as it is. It brings up another point: stretching characters to their limits. The writers are testing Norrington’s, and it makes for great drama. They’re testing Boostrap’s character, too—how much is he willing to sacrifice for his son? They’re testing Will’s love for his fiancé. They’re testing Elizabeth; Will with a little Jack on the side, or vice versa? What a quandary! And then there’s Jack. A man who can choose to do the right thing…sometimes. “I love those moments,” he says. “I like to wave at them as they pass by.”

KB: Hee. Luuurve Jack Sparrow.

TW: Ditto! Anyway, I think the movie definitely benefited from the stretch treatment. In a way, doing it took the characters out of the box created in flick #1.

KB: YES! The writers really are fearless when it comes to playing with our expectations. What will be the limits of Davy Jones' character? Barbossa's? The new villain (Cutler Beckett)? And therein lies the success of these movies, IMO. We care about these characters to the point where we'll tolerate any stupid plot device just to see what they'll do when pushed to their limits. Good storytelling always boils down to good characterization.

TW: You just reminded me of a fun side note to add. Did you notice that Cutler Beckett was played by Tom Hollander, the same man who played Lizzy's cousin Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice? It was funny to see Keira staring down her nose at him again.

KB: I kept thinking that too! Though this time it was fun to watch Hollander put her in her place. I think that guy's adorable even when he's being evil. Speaking of, one of the great things about the movie is the way they took stereotypes and freshened them for modern audiences. For example, Jack Sparrow. He's the classic pirate who could have easily teetered into boring stereotype. But Johnny Depp freshened him with a weird accent and the writer's freshened his motivation by making him the Trickster archetype (they talk about this in the extended DVD version, for those interested) and playing with expectation. One never knows if Sparrow's an idiot or a genius, or just a lucky bastard, but whenever he's on the screen I hold my breath because I never know what he's going to do next. Another character stereotype they freshened: Barbossa. The writers give this character the classic pirate lingo but it's done with a wink so we know that they're getting the joke too. It's a fiendishly hard line to walk, but they pull it off.

TW: Speaking of turned-on-head stereotypes, Elizabeth was acting--and looking--as much a pirate as the boyz this time around, and it played so well because really we didn't know what she would do next. Her motivations are a mystery to me at this point.

KB: I admit, I was a little repelled by that face-sucking scene with Johnny Depp.

TW: Yeah, I'm a little pissed at Liz. I mean, c'mon! Orlando. Orlando. Orlando.

KB: I didn't think they needed to go there. But it did add conflict. And of course, Will's eyes puddled an adorable pain-filled brown.

TW: Ah, conflict, yes. I guess the last thing I want to touch on is the great balance the film had. There were loads of comic moments (“I don’t give an at’s rass…”) and poignant ones (Will’s pain as he watched his fiancé suck face with a pirate – and then later decide to put her life on the line in order to retrieve said pirate). There was plenty of action (three-way sword fight anyone? In a mill wheel?) and devious plottery (mostly involving Davey Jones). And everyone had a unique motivation, it seemed--fighting for your father, lover, soul, honor, guilt or the fear of a lost love—which kept the pace clicking away beautifully. What did you think?

KB: The pace was blistering manic. It rolled onward like a Mac truck until we got to the end of the cliff--to the cliffhanger. Speaking of, we touched a little bit about cliffhangers yesterday, but really, these guys did one heck of a cliffhanger. Almost Peter Jackson-esque, if you will. So there's a lesson for writers who want to do series: leave the protagonists in peril, and make it unexpected. I never thought they'd bring back Barbossa. But I was never privy to the laws of voodoo magic, so it came out of left field for me. But I loved it because I loved the character.

TW: Leave 'em wanting more. They definitely did that. By the way, I'm typing this while listening to a great Pirate CD called Pegleg Tango by Captain Bogg and Salty. It's a lot of fun, and a recommended listen for lovers of all-things-pirate. Like my children. Ahem. Anywhoo, it's time to go swab some decks here and check to be sure my crew isn't trashing the ship. Final words?

KB: Nope, there's a little turbulence on my end as well. Till next time, me heartie! Yar!

MOVIE ANALYSIS: Pirates of the Caribbean, Dead Man's Chest

2006-08-22T19:33:00.000-04:00

This summer, Therese and I let our brain cells take a break to go see the latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Our writers' minds got to working on how director Gore Verbinski and crew took a classic genre movie, updated it, and made this unlikely story a box-office juggernaut. Therese and I loved the first Pirates movie, and that love had nothing to do with Johnny Depp or Orlando Bloom. It was the storytelling that hooked us.

TW: Yeah, right.

KB: What was that?

TW: Oh, nothin'. Carry on, carry on.

KB: Ahem. I saw PotC II when it released mostly because there was nothing else playing that weekend, fully expecting it was going to be a dog. Instead I was delightfully surprised. It's a wacky story that's frankly a little garbled, but I didn't care because I fell in love with all the characters, from the lead protagonists to the most minor pirates. In fact, I was very impressed with the way the secondary characters were handled with such care. What about you, what did it for you?

TW: I almost always use Rotten Tomatoes to gauge whether or not a movie is going to be worthwhile, and this one was riding at about 60% for the good so I took the chance. I'm so glad I did. Though I wouldn't say the movie was fresh, it was definitely entertaining (and I love Johnny Depp's Capt. Jack Sparrow). I wondered how they were going to open the movie up, get the tension rolling. Their answer: delete the Happily Ever After implicit in
the last movie ASAP via an interrupted wedding, a pirate on the run (again), a threatened jail sentence and a little blackmail thrown in for good measure. The character goals were firmly in place within about ten minutes. What did you think of the plot?

KB: Truthfully, I thought the plot was stupid. Davey Jones wants
Jack's soul? Dudes, couldn't they have gone with Blackbeard or something less preposterous? But I didn't care because I loved the characters so much. Using Davey Jones signaled that the movie was going to be High Camp Pirate. If one wants to think of the Davey Jones plot device critically, it does what it's supposed to. Stakes are high. The antagonist is almost impossible to overcome. Scary pirate-squids. Gross-outs for the PG-13 teeneyboppers. What did you think?

TW: Yeah, you had to buy into that whole thing. Great special effects for Davey Jones, though! You’re right about the high stakes: they couldn’t get much higher. Jack’s going to lose his life? Will’s father is in purgatory? The wedding is off? Maybe for good? Elizabeth and Will might both be jailed? Gasp! The evolution of the plot reminded me of an Indiana Jones flick – one goal (retrieve Jack’s compass) that walks the entire plot. Several threads that could’ve been developed fell into storytelling oblivion, and there was a lot of suspension of belief. Like, whatever happened to Jack needing to cull 100 souls to save his own? We didn’t see Jack even try after his one attempt at some port, though we picked up a character at that port, so maybe that was the sole goal of that plot point. I hope not; it seems they should’ve done something more with that. Maybe the next movie? And how was it that Will was able to find Jack in about 30 seconds when the antagonists hadn’t had any luck at all?

KB: LOL, I was thinking the same thing! But I guess if you're turning into a barnacle or octopus, it'd be hard to find your hands on the ends of your arms let alone a wiley pirate like Jack! Snorf. One thing that was a plus about the Davey Jones thread was that Will got to meet his father. This is what I mean about the production team paying attention to the secondary characters...I was really intrigued with the subplot of Will and his father Bootstrap. I cared about them, I wanted them to come to an understanding. I did NOT have any emotional investment in Davey Jones' heart being taken away from him. Why? With the single exception of a pained look from Bill Nighy, there really wasn't any emotional connection for the audience over his lost love. They could have given us a brief scene about Davey at the moment of his loss. We would have connected his humanity to his goal of keeping his heart close--why was it in the box again? So I think they blew it there. I definitely would have traded a little character development for less of Johnny Depp mugging the screen. Thoughts?

TW: I loved Bootstrap Bill, too, and it was great/bittersweet that he and Will were reunited. On your point about Davey Jones’ heart, I read a super article the other day about developing empathy for characters called “Save the Cat!” by Blake Snyder. It’s gold, truly. Anyway, I think the screenwriters will probably bump up the Davey-in-love part of the tale in part 3…because you know there’s going to be a Pirates III next summer. Which brings up another point: the writers did a great job with the cliffhangers. Not as bad as Han Solo being left in the deep freeze, but still! I can hang on for a year and wonder whether or not Will and company will find Jack on the other side of the world, whether they'll save him and Will's father, whether Davey finds his heart (and whether we begin to care), whether Will wins back the love of his wayward fiancé, etc… Also, I’m interested to learn what the deal is with the East India Trading Company. Notice how Jack sprinkled his armpits with spices before he was almost roasted by the natives? What was the spice doing with a bunch of natives anyway? Interesting story questions still hanging out there. What did you think?

KB: That was a killer last scene, I'll admit. My main curiosity is how they're going to explain how Captain Barbossa has returned from the dead. Voodoo? Davey Jones didn't want him? And what about Jack? He'll have to live in the belly of the Kraken for part three. They've left lots of threads dangling for the next installment, setting up the evil 18th century corporate villain, the East India Company, Norrington's revenge, and Elizabeth and Will's happiness. Very smart.

TW: My children squealed when Barbossa came on screen. That was brilliant! Everyone left the theatre with a smile.

Tomorrow we dish more on the importance of secondary characters, cliffhangers, freshening up stereotypes for a modern audience, balance and more!

Writer Unboxed: Defined

2006-08-21T11:16:00.000-04:00

I'm turning into a computer hack. That's right: this morning I outsmarted Blogger. First by uploading an old template when our old one "failed" (not showing anything of our site but the first three posts), then figuring out how to link to a picture outside of Blogger without actually using Blogger's wildly temperamental upload software (which wasn't working again). I have to say, I'm feeling pretty smug right now.

But that's not what this post is about. This post stems from an e-versation I had this past weekend with a respected blogger-in-the-biz after lamenting that we had less than a dozen entries in our WU AlphaSmart 3000 contest, even though about a gazillion people visited to read all about it. He said he thought he was unboxed but would be hard-put to explain how in order to enter. Besides, he mused:

"How do you claim to be something that's clearly a superior kind of human being without sounding bragadocious?...especially on the Internet, where what you say lasts forever and goes around the world."

Two other writers I know said something different:

"Great contest. I'd love an alphasmart!"

But when I encouraged them to enter the contest they said:

"I don't think I'm unboxed enough. Maybe I'll buy an AlphaSmart."

The blood on my keyboard is not from overtaxed fingers today; it's from banging my head against it. Still, all of this clarified something for me: maybe Kath and I needed to explain what unboxed means to US and why every writer is at least a little unboxed, whether they know it or not.

Which is exactly what we did...

Kath, what does "unboxed" mean to you?

(slipping her the keyboard...)

K: An unboxed author, to me, is fearless--a writer not afraid to break the boundaries of her genre. The unboxed author is also a wordsmith and a risk taker as far as plotting, characterization and motivations go. I get a kick out of reading genre fiction when the author has the reader thinking one way then slips in a surprise. That, to me, is unboxed. I also consider unboxed authors the ones who write for themselves as much as their readers. Writers always second-guess themselves, worrying about making a sale or offending their mothers. I really appreciate it when a writer sets that aside and breaks boundaries for the rest of us. How about you?

T: I agree with everything you said. I'd also like to add that in my mind, unboxed doesn't = superior; it means producing unique ideas, which may in the end give a writer an edge in the industry if they also possess good grammar, strong voice, etc... I should probably also clarify that we won't post entries (honestly, I hadn't considered it!), in case anyone is shy that their words could somehow bite them. What about the winning entry?

K: I think we should post the winning entry. People will want to know what it took to win. I would. About the boasting aspect: There's bragging and then there's BRAGGING. Someone who says "My work's the best there is" is clearly stuck in a box of vanity. But someone who says "I'm writing the best that I can right now" isn't bragging, I don't think. And if they want to brag, that's ok too!

T: People who are working to improve their craft aren't bragadocious; they're smart.

K: Winning an AlphaSmart in a contest against other writers? I'd brag about that! Or maybe the AlphaSmart isn't that tempting?

T: Hey, I'd have drooled over it a few months ago...before I bought one for myself!

K: Fact is, the very act of writing is unboxed when you think about it. Putting your hands to the keyboard or pen to paper and writing creatively takes you out of the box that is yourself.

T: Building characters, crafting conversations, plot... Being able to go outside your world for a while to create something fresh is part of what makes writing so addicting. And if a writer truly feels they're not unboxed but would like to be, the act of pondering "unboxed" might help define unique territory. I hope that didn't sound snooty! Or...bragadocious!?

Okay, bottom-line time. Kath?

K: What have people got to lose?

T: You know what you've got to win...

Write a short blurb about what makes you an unboxed writer and then send it to us at writerunboxed@writerunboxed.com.

Forget about being bragadocious.

Forget about thinking you're not unboxed enough (which sounds a little too much like "I'm not worthy!" What hard-working writer isn't worthy of some pampering, a new writerly tool and delicious chocolate? Did you forget about the chocolate?!?).

I shall cry if more don't try.

So what are you waiting for? A blood- AND tear-streaked keyboard? Save me from the mess and enter the contest already. ;)

Write on!

INTERVIEW: Anthea Bell, Part 1

2006-08-18T09:00:00.000-04:00

Cornelia Funke's children's books are the very definition of enchanting. Whether you're considering her works for younger children (e.g. Dragon Rider) or older ones (e.g. Inkheart, Inkspell), her storylines are unique and absorbing. But it's her voice that we find particularly noteworthy for all its fluid grace, its hint of poetry. So what a shocker when we first learned Cornelia, a German author, didn't produce the English version of her books. Who then was the voice behind the English works, and how--if at all--did this mysterious person affect the voice? Inquiring minds had to know, and so we discovered Anthea Bell, a translator living in the UK, and asked her for this interview; she agreed. Read on to learn about the translation process from the ever-delightful Ms. Bell (and learn more about Cornelia Funke's upcoming books as well)!

Part 1: Interview with Anthea Bell

Q: How did you become a translator for Cornelia Funke’s novels?

A: I started translating Cornelia Funke’s splendid fantasy novels after Barry Cunningham of Chicken House in the UK came to see me about them. (The publishing house is now merged with Scholastic UK, and as you know Scholastic US is Cornelia’s American publisher.) I’ve translated a good many books for children and young people, although for a while in around the 1980s and 1990s I translated only adult books, because publishers in the English-speaking world were reluctant even to consider children’s literature from other languages. The situation is better now, and I think Cornelia herself has done a lot to make publishers realize that a book from a foreign language really can catch the imagination of young people. I especially value that part of my work. The more widely children read, the more open-minded they will surely get to be.

Anyway, after he had published The Thief Lord Barry came along with Dragon Rider, and I was enchanted. In fact Cornelia was writing Inkheart at the time – and I was if anything even more enchanted when I read it – and publication in English (after The Thief Lord) began with Inkheart, followed by Dragon Rider, followed by Inkspell.

This year, while Cornelia finishes revising the third in the Inkworld trilogy, there will still be a new Cornelia Funke novel in English, for slightly younger readers than the trilogy (Dragon Rider readers, I’d say), but enjoyable by anyone of any age. It is a chivalric Arthurian fantasy with a strong strand of humor in it, called in German Igraine Ohnefurcht – working title Igraine the Fearless. I delivered the translation a few weeks ago, and we all love the story.

Q: Inkheart, Inkspell, Dragon Rider and The Thief Lord contain plenty of fluid passages laced with rich, beautiful language. The work truly sings. Is the voice as poetic in German?

A: Oh, it is all there in the German. All I am doing is, I hope, to echo Cornelia’s own voice in English. A translator is always trying to turn into the author he or she is translating. It’s a bit like being an actor: you have to think yourself into the author’s part. Cornelia is wonderful to work with; any comments she makes on the translation are pure gold.

Q: Can you give us an example of some of this back-and-forth throughout during translation process?

A: Working with Cornelia and her publishers, both English-speaking and German: I think in particular of all the correspondence we had about the way a watermill for grinding flour actually works. The chapter in Inkspell where a mill is the scene of a dramatic confrontation depends on it. There’s an old flour mill in the grounds of a stately home near where I live in the east of England; it’s been preserved and even goes into action once a month – you can buy the flour, and I do; it makes lovely bread. We all wrote to each other at some length about watermills and the way they operated, Cornelia too did some revision, and in the end everyone was satisfied that the action in and around the mill in her story rang true.

Q: Do you think there’s a unique element that foreign authors bring to English-speaking readers? What?

A: The element brought to English-speaking readers by foreign writers varies from country to country … in fact the north European fantasy tradition is very like our own in English (Tolkien wove a great many Germanic and Scandinavian as well as Celtic themes into The Lord of the Rings), but just because we have such a strong tradition of imaginative literature for young people in English, it has been quite difficult for writers in other languages to break into it and be published in English too.

Q: Can you tell us more about Igraine the Fearless? What makes this book unique from her other stories? What is Igraine’s problem throughout the story?

A: Cornelia tells us that one of her favorite books as a child was T.H. White’s tetralogy The Once and Future King. It was also one of my own favorites, and people who specially enjoyed the first volume of the four, The Sword in the Stone, will like Igraine too for its mixture of humor and traditional themes.

Igraine’s problem is that she doesn’t want to be a magician, like her father Sir Lamorak, her mother the Fair Melisande, and her elder brother Albert. She wants to be a knight instead … and as you can imagine, though she’s really good at riding and swordplay, this isn’t seen as an acceptable ambition for a girl. But just as she’s celebrating her twelfth birthday, something happens to send her out on her adventures in order to save her whole family and their castle.

Q: These books are such a pleasure to read. Do you enjoy working on them? Do you wait eagerly for new copy just as her fans do?

A: Well, you’ll have gathered that I love working on her books. I certainly wait eagerly for new copy, and I am especially privileged at the moment because I am seeing several chapters at a time of the last in the trilogy (its draft is now complete) as Cornelia polishes them up. It’s rather like the serials of the 19th century when, for instance, the latest instalments of The Old Curiosity Shop crossed the Atlantic by steamship to be greeted at the quayside by avid crowds of US readers waiting for them – except that I am an eager crowd of one, or only a very few, and email now gets everything from the States to the UK and vice versa at the touch of a key. (How Dickens would have envied us that!)

Q: Has the Internet affected your role as translator very much? How so?

A: Oh, it has affected my work as a translator a great deal, and is a wonderful tool. In a book which requires a bit of research, not in depth but for the kind of little detail that a translator’s magpie mind so often needs, it must have saved me hours of looking things up in a large academic library. For instance, I needed to find a poem by a nineteenth-century German called Victor von Scheffel, quoted in a touching real-life love story of the Nazi era which was tracked down by the author Reinhard Kaiser when he went to a stamp auction, bought a bundle of letters for their stamps, and found that they still contained letters from one of the lovers to his Swedish girlfriend (his book of literary detection about it all is just out in the States from Other Press, under the title Paper Kisses). Well, von Scheffel is not a household name these days, and I could have spent ages tracking down the poem about the joys of walking in Westphalia from which some lines were quoted – but a visit to a search engine brought up his short biography and the whole of the poem very quickly indeed. To study a subject in depth I would always go to books, but the Internet can give you a lead to those books. (“Google, the translator’s friend,” was a comment made by the eminent American translator Krishna Winston at a gathering that we both attended in Chicago last year.)

And the sheer convenience of being able to correspond by email and send manuscripts as attachments is wonderful. I used to have to send heavy parcels, and if they were going far abroad we could all have an anxious time waiting to be sure they arrived. Books themselves and proofs still have to travel by ordinary mail, of course, but today’s courier services are a great help. And US publishers are generally kind enough to let me charge them on their own courier accounts for returning proofs.

We feel now as if word-processing programs have been with us for ever, but they haven’t. I’m old enough to remember typewriters and carbon copies, where you had to correct, messily, on every separate carbon, and probably retype a final version entirely for clean copy. Years ago I was translating a book full of the word “meteorologist”, and I remember thinking what a horrible word it is to type – if you are a touch-typist, like me, the rhythm of it between your two hands on the Qwerty keyboard is uncomfortable – and how lovely it would be if a single key could bring it up. Now, of course, it can. Working in Word, I always make autotext short cuts for the names of characters in novels. For Inkspell I had almost the whole keyboard set up to produce the names of all the many characters with a single letter for each plus the F3 key. I generally use initials of names where I can, but Farid and Fenoglio are both prominent in the Inkworld trilogy. I gave the F key to Farid, and the N key to Fenoglio – and must admit that once or twice I hit the wrong one. I do try to keep a sharp eye out for that in reading through, but Cornelia picked up a couple of passages which mystifyingly mentioned the wrong character. I was very grateful to her, and explained how it happened.

Q: What has been your favorite work?

A: As with any author I really, really like, my favorite work is the one I’m on at the moment. I am not actually translating this third in the trilogy yet, although I did the first two chapters just to give Cornelia’s publishers both sides of the Atlantic a taste of the book, at her suggestion. But she may well be revising again; she is a very, very professional writer, and goes back carefully over everything she has written until she is sure she has it right. However, I can safely say that the third book looks like being even better than the first two.

Q: Can you offer us any tantalizing hints for Cornelia Funke’s upcoming books?

A: I'm allowed to tell you that the working title anyway for the last in the trilogy is Inkdawn. We are all so used to referring to it thus now that I guess it will finish up as the actual title - it is in German that they may have a problem. When I saw Cornelia in June she hadn't decided on the German title yet. It was to have been Tintentod, "Inkdeath". But already the English-language publishers would not have Inkblood (German Tintenblut) for the title of the second volume, hence Inkspell. And Cornelia said she would have to think of something different for Germany. After all, she has promised a happy ending in the closing sentence of Inkspell! Anyway, we're working with Inkdawn.

Come back next week for part 2 of WU's interview with Anthea Bell!

Linktopia, Surreal-yana Edition

2006-08-17T21:00:00.000-04:00

Continuing with our theme of bizarre art this week, I thought a little Kafka would get us in the mood for linky goodness. But first:

The AlphaSmart 3000. You know you want one. All you have to do is click here to learn how to get one. For FREE.

Melly's finally coming home now that the cease fire is in effect. We can all be thankful for that . . . Fiction is still dead. Hm. And the President's poll numbers are gonna break 40 percent any day now. MJ Rose comments as well (h/t GalleyCat) . . . . . thinking of going into debt to get an MFA in creative writing? Read this (h/t Rarely Likable) . . . . I hope this isn't the kiss of death for this mystery writer's debut (h/t Booksquare) . . . . Eric's got a great post on consistency and creativity . . . . Jack's back, and he's got a new look. Go check . . . . Harlequin's chick/action line Bombshell bites the dust (h/t Cindy Meyers) . . . . Jason Pinter discusses Starbuck's new book-of-the-month project . . . . .
More links after the jump.

It's called Thesauritius, and Paperback Writer has the cure . . . . Allison Brennan lifts the veil on her own revision-hell . . . . Charles deLint disappoints Random Reader . . . . . Smart Bitches take on another of Romancelandia's canons (warning: graphic. And hilarious) .

I've gotta peace-out now. I may pop back on later for a few more links. Until then, write on!

Judging Your Internet Catch

2006-08-16T09:00:00.000-04:00

Your manuscript is hungry for information, and it’s time to go fishing for historic details, a better description of a particular item, a list of Mexican tourist attractions (whatever). Armed with your favorite search engine and some idea of what you're looking for, you sink your net deep into the Internet ocean. When it comes up, it feels good—not too heavy, not too light—and you’re ready to inspect it. But do you know how best to sort through the e-weed and old boots to uncover the best possible catch?

Here's a start!

Refuse to be awed by the top ten hits. Advertisers pay some search engines to display their websites as first hits on web searches. This means you can't count on your search engine to sort hits for you in order of relevance, even if they claim to. Sites promoting products may be too biased to be trustworthy. Investigate other options.

But wait, there's more!

Let the URL guide you. Feel encouraged if your hit takes you to a higher-education or government site (.edu or .gov in the address or URL), as this information may prove more accurate than a .com (a commercial site). Run by an organization, a .org may provide excellent resource information, though be careful of information bias. Other possible yellow flags:
• Is there an AOL or other Internet service provider address, or a tilde (~) sign in the URL? This site could be someone’s personal website, in which case you’ll need to ask yourself if this person is an expert source. (Even .edu sites can host personal student and teacher sites. These sites may not be refereed by the university or college, so be wary.)
• Is the root domain (listed after the www) reputable? Always consider the source and ask yourself what they may have to gain by swaying you to their way of thinking. Are they selling something or clearly biased? Keep searching.

Judge a site by its cover. I don’t mean if it’s not pretty, bypass it, but you can and should judge a website by its appearance in some respects—and not just its cover, but its pages, its links, its webmaster. Peruse, absorb, then ask yourself the following:
• Is it well written?
• Is it well maintained with current links?
• Does a well-respected sponsor advertise here? (This is different from an ad-site in that a sponsor supports a site’s efforts, but doesn't usually influence content.)
• Does the site specialize in the information you’re looking for? (Note the root address and the site’s affiliations and purpose may be clear.)
• Has the site been written by someone who seems to be an unbiased expert in the area of interest? (Is he/she credentialed? Are there citations on the site?)
• Is the site itself known to be reputable?

Any one of these things may encourage trust in the information here, but a cluster of these is best.

Beware false authority. No site, no matter how wonderful, is guaranteed to be perfect; people run them, after all! Snopes.com, a terrific website dedicated to debunking the urban legends that propagate on the ‘net, is often considered by many to be a “primary source” of information—a trustworthy, take-it-to-the-bank kind of source. But some time ago they posted false information about the origin of the nursery rhyme, “Sing a Song of Sixpence,” stating it was a coded message used to recruit new pirates while on land. The thing is, Snopes knew the information was false when it posted it on its site, and it did it to prove a point: No site is inherently trustworthy. (Anyone investigating the more information link listed on the site’s piratic page would’ve immediately discovered the truth of the ploy.) In a shocking turn, The Learning Channel, hosting a show on urban legends, fell victim to Snopes’ trap and broadcast on national television that the rhyme was in truth a pirate code. If you let yourself become a passive participant in the research process, this same sort of thing can happen to you. Remember to read the fine print and rely heavily on logic. If something you read doesn’t gel with your common sense, pinpoint why and dig deeper.

Look for buried treasure. If you’re having a hard time finding or verifying info online, consider your people options. Where to look?

• If you belong to an industry organization, you’ll find that many have research experts you can query for help. Shoot off an email or ask through a message board.
• Another option is to ask people who love a particular topic to talk about the topic they love! There is a huge listing of usenet groups at Google HERE. Check it out!
• Search Topica to join a mailing list of people who share your interest. Not only might the members be able to refer you to a tried-and-true site or expert source, but the list itself may have an expert as one of its members.
• Check Amazon.com to see who has written a book on the topic you’re interested in, or investigate professors at universities and colleges around the country to see who specializes in what you’re researching. Very often, you can find author and professor contact information, with websites, even email addresses online. These people are usually very learned and accessible…even THRILLED to chat about one of their favorite topics!

Maybe someday, every site online will be graded and we’ll know how much trust to put into each of them. Until that day arrives, however, we have little choice than to take the ‘net as it is—a huge, ever-expanding ocean filled with great catches and a lot of crapola. Remember that the power is always yours. If you find yourself thinking, “that’s incredible,” stop yourself and say, “that’s unbelievable,” then cast another net to uncover the truth.

I just had to update my Blogger bio, otherwise you'd be saying, "Humph. Who's she to say anything about research, anyway? At least I taught you well. ;)

Write on, everyone!

Rejection Introspection

2006-08-15T06:02:00.000-04:00

The rejection letter is the writer's cat-o'nine-tails, the scourge of the brotherhood. Everytime I get one, I imagine that scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the one where the monks are bashing their heads in with the alpha and omega of their existence, the bible. I get bashed pretty regularly too. No pretty music, though. Therese's Click Here column yesterday provided an amusing link to a place where we can take part in collective suffering.

Rejection letters used to cut me up something fierce. But after 20 or so, that pain ain't no thang. Hell, now they amuse me. I'll share a few gems out of my file, maybe they'll make someone feel better today.

The lamest: a form rejection letter Xeroxed so many times, the font was breaking apart, and the space where the name of the author would go had been painted over with White-Out. It was from a big-name agency too. You'd think they'd care about their reputation just a smidge and have the admin assistant reprint a fresh one. Oh yeah. They don't give a damn about what I think. Just like they didn't give a damn about what I wrote.

The most surprising: three years after I'd mailed the partial and followed up a few times I got a hasty scrawl apologizing for the long time between the request and the rejection. "Though I loved your style, I felt [NAME OF BOOK] wasn't right for me." Hon, that train already left the station and was pulling into Georgia.

The "Hates to Say No" award goes to the editor who detailed in three meaty graphs what she loved about it. Then, "ultimately, I didn't love it enough to be an editorial champion. Best of luck...."

Then there's the assorted "too leisurely", "too frenetic" (yeah, same book), "not commercial enough" (e.g. not a rip-off of a mega best-seller), "don't want the challenge of publishing this in today's market" (explain again why are you an editor?), "I didn't like it" (that I get).

I could go on. I suspect you could, too. The point is most writers have to be rejected before they can be accepted. Some writers get it right the first go out. Lucky them. The rest of us have to slog it out. Or give up.

What are you going to do?

That's right. I'm getting back to work, too.

Click Here! The Plague Edition

2006-08-14T08:42:00.000-04:00

I went to a Yankees' game yesterday. Ungodly hour of waking, couple hours on the bus sitting behind children who wouldn't leave the shades alone, $12 bucket of popcorn, the whole nine yards. Unfortunately I found it more compelling to watch pigeons target fans with guano bombs than focus on what wasn't happening on the field. Oh, we were disgusted, yes, and not by the pigeons. So I think today is the perfect day to bring out this particular batch of links. Before I do, though, you have to pretend this next line is delivered to you via James Earl Jones:

Win a brand new AlphaSmart 3000, simply by jumping through one small hoop set out by the benevolent souls at Writer Unboxed. Click Here to learn more.

And now, on to The Plague.

Ever enter a contest only to get your manuscript back, teeming with judging lingo you’ve never heard before, like, “maid and butler” or “RUE?” Well, Kresley Cole’s “Dictionary of Contest Speak” can solve all of that. Learn what the most common symbols, abbreviations and slang phrases used by contest judges really mean, and what you might do to overcome the obstacles standing between you and a tighter manuscript.

Think the rejection letter you received last week was impersonal? Insulting? Anytime you want a reality check, visit Rejection Collection, where writers and visual artists gather to commiserate and share their favorite or worst ever rejection letters (like the one that said merely: “hey. no.”) A fun and surprisingly inspiring site!

Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today. Go on now and visit the largest collection of clichés, euphemisms and figures of speech at ClichéSite.com. While you're at it, check out this great article, Let them Rest! Overworked Phrases and Story Elements by Jenna Glatzer.

Stay with me now...

Shaky on comma usage? I love the 11 Rules of Writing site where you'll find a concise English lesson that even the most grammar-antsy among us can sit still for. These mini-lessons are adapted from Strunk and White’s well-respected Elements of Style and include such blips as how to join two independent clauses and using commas with introductory phrases. Want longer lessons, more detailed explanations? Visit the masters direct by clicking HERE.

Trying to sell that manuscript to agents and editors but feeling a little dejected? Lost as to what to do after it doesn’t happen in short order? Considering tossing your computer mouse (and a trap or two) in the trash? Stop. This is one of the best articles I’ve read in a long time—inspirational and practical both. Thank you Chris Gavaler for “How to get to the Ball without Selling Your Soul.” Click HERE to read it.

If writer’s block has you in a death grip, you might want to check out this interesting article, Read En Francais, S’il Vous Plait by Abigail Steidley. In it, you’ll find new strategies to thrust your mind into four-wheel drive so you can escape the clutch of resistance.

Need an inspirational quote? Check out Quotes for Writers for a great one, or visit Snippets of This and That for a lengthier boost. Maybe the Yankees could've benefited from a site like these? I think the pigeons already found them.

Write on, all!

AUTHOR INTERVIEW: Anne Harris

2006-08-11T09:00:00.001-04:00

Anne Harris is an award-winning science fiction novelist as well as a talented short-story author; her short story, Still Life with Boobs, was even a 2005 Nebula finalist. (Note: you can read this fabulous unboxed work through Anne's Live Journal site by clicking here.) Therese and Kathleen recently chatted with Anne about her writing, what it's like to excel in different mediums and what you might learn about one from experimenting in the other. Enjoy!

Interview with Anne Harris

Q: Which came first for you: the short story or the novel?

AH: I started writing short stories first.

Q: When did you realize you loved writing? When did you take the drive seriously enough to consider this a career option?

AH: In college. I was studying for a degree in computer science and I didn't really like it. My boyfriend at the time, Michael, had written a story and sent it to Dragon Magazine, who rejected it, and I was always encouraging him to write more. Kurt Vonnegut came to my college and gave a talk and I took Michael to hear him. All the time that Mr. Vonnegut was speaking, I kept thinking to myself, oh, this is wonderful for Micheael to hear. By the end of the talk, I had a niggling suspicion that maybe I was the one who needed to hear these things. Then a few months later, Michael said to me, "You should write." From then on, there was no turning back.

Q: What do you see as the common creative and architectural threads for these mediums?

AH: You're telling a story, so you're working with the same elements in both cases: character and conflict. And in both cases you're building toward a climax, followed by a resolution. But of course in a short story, you'll start much closer to the climax, and your pacing will be much faster.

A good example is a short story I recently wrote which was an excerpt from a novel-in-progress. It was a section that had its own little story arc, that of the two main characters becoming friends, so it was fairly easy to pop out and shape into a self-contained story.

What was interesting about the process was what you do differently in a short story and in a novel. In the novel, for instance, the first time we are introduced to the villian, he's very low key, and the second time we see him, an oil platform is exploding behind him. In a novel, you want to build things -- like the idea that this guy is bad news -- in stages. But in the short story, I needed it to be known right off the bat that he's dangerous, so I went with the exploding oil platform in his one and only appearance.

Q: So short stories really focus in on crucial turning points and such and leave out those shades-of-grey moments that usually fill in between those crucial points?

AH: Yeah, that sounds about right.

Q: What lessons might a novelist gain by crafting a short story?

AH: The accepted wisdom used to be that you learn your craft by writing short stories. That's how I came up, and I think there's something to be said for it. Short stories are a lot harder to pull off than novels. You have to have everything working just right. It's kind of like learning to cook by starting with souffles. Rigorous, but effective.

As for specific lessons? Economy. Clarity. Precision.

Q: Have you written poetry as well?

AH: Not that I'll admit publicly. ;)

Q: What's your process, and how much time do you devote to each type of writing?

AH: It always starts with something I can't get out of my head. That's the kernel. Sometimes it's a line of dialogue and from that grows the character who is delivering it and the situation they are in. Sometimes it's an image, and then I have to go searching for the character and situation that go with the image. It's a process of accretion.

At some point, after I have a basic idea fleshed out, I ask myself if it's a novel idea or a short story idea. These days, I'm about 85 percent novelist, 15 percent short story writer.

Q: Can you tell me a little about your process for deciding whether it's short story or novel? What are some of the key questions you'll ask yourself to figure it out? Have you ever had "false starts," believing a kernel is going to become A but it becomes B?

AH: Well, it depends on if it's something that I can get to gel in under 10,000 words, and again, that's a process of getting in there, writing some scenes and seeing where they go. The questions are the same for a novel and for a short story. What does the character want? What do they think they want and what do they really need, and how can they get it? It's all a matter of whether or not those questions can be answered meaningfully in a short form, or if the story needs the slow development of a novel.

Sure, I've started out on something that I thought would be a short story and turned into a novel. There's an example of that in an answer to a question below. I don't think I've ever started a novel and had it turn into a short story, though.

Q: Your short story Still Life with Boobs was a Nebula finalist for 2005 and is a great example of unboxed craft work. How did the idea for this piece evolve?

AH: My friend Deborah and I were getting ready to go out to the bar. She tried on one particularly low-cut blouse and then rejected it, saying, "When I wear this I feel as if my breasts are having conversations with other people without my knowing it." I thought, what if that were true?

So in this case, that was the kernel, and then there were lots and lots of ugly drafts while I figured out what the story was actually about, besides runaway breasts. Certain scenes developed that I knew were keepers, and then those led to other good scenes and gradually, the story emerged.

Q: Do you think the story is created in the subconscious early on, and it's just a matter of fishing it out, bringing it to the surface?

AH: There's no doubt that the subconscious does a lot of work in creative writing. I've often had the experience of writing along and throwing in some little detail for no particular reason, only later to find that detail to be crucial to solving some plot problem. An example of that is the scene in Inventing Memory where Shula sleeps with a shepherd in the Temple of the Harlots. At the time that I wrote it, it was just an interesting interlude, but later, I needed a reason for her to get kicked out of the temple of the scribe priestesses, and wouldn't you know, I'd provided myself with one.

But I wouldn't go so far as to say the process is entirely subconscious. I think it's more of an interplay between the subconscious and the conscious mind.

Q: Your novels, Inventing Memory, Accidental Creatures, and The Nature of Smoke are all futuristic sci-fi thrillers with ultra-unique plots, including creating a virtual pathway between myth and reality.

AH: My plots evolve out of the characters and their motivations. I ask myself things like, what does Wendy want? Or, what is the worst possible thing that could happen to Ray at this point? Basically, it's creating people that I care about and then doing horrible things to them.

Q: Have you ever had trouble with this - doing those horrible things?

AH: Heh. I used to. But as I got to be a better writer, I recognized that being softhearted makes for a boring story, so no, I don't have trouble with that anymore.

Q: How do your plots evolve, and did any of your concepts begin as short stories?

AH: My new novel, the one I just turned in to my agent, started out as a short story. But there was way too much there to be just a short story. It was destined for novelhood.

Q: What demanded the bigger template - the characters, the plot or both?

AH: Actually, the setting. I had set out to write a simple quest story. It was supposed to be a novella, at the most, but it was set on another planet, with three cultures that were all very different from our own. All these details kept cropping up that needed explanation, and as I started explaining them, and exploring these three cultures, I realized that what I had on my hands was not a simple quest story at all, but a world-spanning novel of three cultures in conflict. The book is entitled Libyrinth and it's out to market at the moment.

Q: Tell us a little about your other novels.

AH: I wrote The Nature of Smoke, my first novel, in the first full flush of my lifelong love-affair with Chaos Theory. It's a frenetic anthem for the overturn of dichotomous thinking. The Nature of Smoke is currently out in Japan in translation, where it is on the short list for the Sense of Gender Award.

Accidental Creatures is a near-future labor union story. I wrote it during the newspaper strike here in Detroit in the mid to late nineties, when basically, Knight-Ridder broke the union. Only in my story, it's the living polymer industry, not newpapers, and instead of breaking the union, the company winds up at the mercy of its own genetically-engineered scab workers. Accidental Creatures won the Spectrum Award for science fiction with glbt characters, themes and issues in 1999, the first year it was given.

Inventing Memory originated with my experiences as a Dianic (women only) Wiccan in my mid-twenties. I was pretty radical back then, rejecting the concept of romantic love and all of that, and then I fell in love with a man I'd been friends with for eleven years and my whole life changed. I changed and my politics changed, but I remained a feminist. That's what Inventing Memory is about... that and the ancient Sumerian myth cycle of Inanna.

Oh, and my husband Steve will probably want me to mention that he shares neither background nor profession with the character Ray in the book. ;)

Q: These story concepts are so unique! You really pull from what's going on around you and then morph, morph, morph. How do you decide how far to go when you're twisting story ideas into something that's all your own?

AH: Hmm. It's really the other way around. I write the story because I feel strongly about it, and then, later, sometimes years later, I connect it to what was happening at the time and go, "Oh, that's why I wrote that."

Q: What drives your creative process?

AH: When I boil it all down? Emotion. I like to feel intense emotions, and I like to make other people feel them too.

Q: When I look at the kernels for your novels--being a feminist, the union strike, your interest in Chaos Theory--it seems these are all things based on a deep-seated passion. Do you think if this love of topic wasn't there, you might not be interested in being married to the idea for the length of a novel? Or, another way, do you find that if the emotion isn't there for you, the writing suffers for it?

AH: Oh definitely. Writing fiction is too difficult to do it for something I don't really care about. I have to be "married to the idea" (good way of putting it), or I'd never stick with it. I have a trunk full of story fragments that were intellectually interesting, but which I didn't finish, because my heart wasn't in it.

And yes, the writing suffers too. Lackluster prose is always a good indication that I'm on the wrong track.

Q: What are your favorite books, and who are your favorite short-story authors or poets?

AH: Ooh boy, not asking much there!

Obviously any listing of favorite books I make is of the moment. It would be impossible to be permanently truthful in reponse to such a question. But, at the moment:

Little, Big by John Crowley
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Wholeness and the Implicate Order by David Bohm
Be Free Where You Are by Thich Nhat Hahn
The Night Watch by Sean Stewart
Freedom and Necessity by Steven Brust and Emma Bull
Neuromancer by William Gibson
The Temple of my Familiar by Alice Walker
Absolute Boyfriend by Yuu Watase

I'm sadly ill-read when it comes to short stories and poetry. I loved Gene Wolfe's anthology, The Island of Dr. Death and Other Stories, and Other Stories. I read that when I was first starting to write, and I was blown away by it.

Q: What do you recommend for a writer who wants to try the short story? Where do you begin?

AH: Ooh. I don't think I can be of much help there, very sorry. I pretty much just flog away at stuff until it takes shape. It's a very innefficient way of working and I wouldn't recommend it. But if you do find you're stuck with that process, be kind to yourself, be patient, and persevere.

Q: Any resource books on the topic that you've used or would recommend? Websites?

AH: Oh, good question. Yes. Back in the day, when I still had writer's block issues, I found Natalie Goldberg's books, Writing Down the Bones and Wild Mind, to be wonderful help. More recently, as I've been coming to grips with more mechanical issues like plotting and pacing, I was fortunate enough to come across a book called Techniques of the Selling Writer, by Dwight Swain. I can't recommend this book highly enough. It's one of the few places where you'll find a really useful analysis of story structure. Swain wrote for the pulps, and his advice on keeping readers reading is great -- just ignore some of the more dated assumptions he makes about characters.

Q: Do you have any tips on marketing short stories? What's the best way to locate markets?

AH: I use Writer's Market sometimes. But again, I don't sell that many stories, actually, so I'm probably the wrong person to ask.

One thing that helps me is when I send a story out, I select the next market I'll send it to if it gets rejected. Sometimes I go so far as to print out a cover letter and address a fresh envelope. I hate letting those rejected mss. sit around. Get 'em back out there where there's still hope, 'cause there's no hope while it's sitting on your desk.

(Too true!) Thanks so much, Anne Harris, for a great interview!

Linktopia, Busy Bees Edition

2006-08-10T04:50:00.000-04:00

Indeedy, it has been a busy time for WU. If you haven't yet heard the news, we're updating our look, bringing aboard A-list contributors so you don't have to keep reading the same old yadayada from Therese and me, and unveiling a slate of killer interviews for the fall.

The best news of all is that we want to celebrate our new look by giving away an AlphaSmart 3000. If you're a writer on the go (who isn't?) and don't have one of these bad boys yet, you really don't know what you're missing. I wrote an entire chapter of my wip at the airport while waiting for a delayed flight. It's indispensable. Intrigued? Scroll down for contest details.

In other news, again please pray for Melly's safety and a quick end to the madness engulfing an entire region. You know what makes me furious? This:

It's a picture of the bomb shelter in Melly's sister's basement. The little happy-faced moon and star about broke my heart.

In linky news:

The genius of Eric and his shower crayons method of plotting . . . . demented, hilarious rambles from Hal Duncan . . . . Paperback Writer understands the magic of Project Runway . . . . agent Kristen Nelson shows us what a tempting query letter looks like . . . . Risky Regencies celebrate their first anniversary . . . . . Natalie Collins debates the merits of a pen name . . . . . Ray tackles another of my bugaboos, overuse of the word 'as'. . . . . . Cavan has some good recommendations for summer reading . . . .

Would you like another look at what you, the unboxed writer, could win?

That's right. Writerunboxed@writerunboxed.com.

Holy Cow! News, News and a Contest!

2006-08-09T09:00:00.000-04:00

If you've sensed any delirium around Writer Unboxed lately, there's good reason for it. Not only have we been busy lining up some seriously kick-heinie interviews for you (see impregnated sidebar at right) we've been making plans for a cutover to a new site at WordPress. Inkygirl Debbie Ohi is designing our new masthead, so we have every confidence it's going to be spectacular. We'll be doing away with our two-unboxed-girls-breaking-into-the-biz look for a reason; first, we're inviting someone with a Y chromosome into our ranks, and second, we're inviting someone who's already broken into the biz to join us as well. We'll be officially welcoming our new friends within the next few weeks, but we're seriously jazzed to have them as part of WU and couldn't wait to at least hint that they'll be a part of the scene soon.

Kath and I have also been brewing up a contest idea for many months, and we think now is the perfect time to unveil it. To win this particular contest, you'll need to write a short blurb about what makes you an unboxed (wildly creative) writer and then send it to us at writerunboxed@writerunboxed.com.

Wanna know what you're playing for?

That's right, a brand new AlphaSmart 3000, a tool every writer should have. Kath and I each have an AS 3000 and we adore ours so much that we want to force everyone else to our way of thinking...err, I mean spread the love. Not only does this little puppy have a huge memory, it runs on batteries, allows files to be easily downloaded into the word processing program of your choice and promotes unboxed thinking by making you move forward (you can only see four lines of text at a time in the small screen). Bonus: you can pack it into a briefcase and take it anywhere; type while in the passenger seat on trips; use it at the beach (because miraculously you can see the mini-screen in the sun); and maybe even save a tree or two by using it for note taking at meetings, while brainstorming, etc...

No hemming and hawing about this now; everyone should at least try. You're unboxed, right? Working toward being unboxed? You know what it means, for chili's sake, or you wouldn't be here. If you're new to the site, then by all means search around a bit, figure it out and then craft your blip. Send it to us at writerunboxed@writerunboxed.com. What have you got to lose?

Kath and I will choose the best (most wildly creative) unboxed entry as the winner by the close of the contest--September 30th--and we'll FedEx you your new AS3000 shortly thereafter along with an assortment of Alphie goodies:

• 3 AA batteries
• AlphaWord and Calculator SmartApplets
• USB cable
• User's Guide

Extra bonus: Therese will throw in some really good chocolate.

Want to know more about the AS 3000? Click here for more detailed info. Have questions? Ask away. But here's one question I want to answer up front:

Can I post about this on our lists and blogs and websites?

Please do! We want everyone to know about what we're doing here and to join our readerly ranks as we make the jump to our new home, with our new writer friends. So thanks in advance for passing the word. Added incentive: If we get an email saying, "Hey, ERIC told us about this opportunity," then ERIC gets a chance to enter again.

Yeah, it really is as good as it sounds, so what are you waiting for? Write on - creatively!

Navel Gazing

2006-08-08T06:06:00.000-04:00

Regular readers know that I'm currently editing my wip using Holly Lisle's One-Pass Manuscript Revision technique, and yeah, she warned that it would be hard. But just how hard, I had no idea.

I'm a tinkerer, I like to play with words, see how they look on the page, and navelgaze over it before moving to the next paragraph. The One-Pass method cuts the navelgazing to one, maybe two sessions. Then that's it. The writer's gotta move on. No going back, just forward.

It hurts, man. It hurts bad.

Holly's point, and I get it, is you might as well experience the pain of revision once instead of in a continual cycle of edits. The point of writing books is to write as good a book as you can at this moment, and then get going on another book. Keep producing books, don't keep rewriting the same book over and over.

My big fear, though, is writing one book, crappily. But I'm pressing onward. I'm two-thirds of the way through my edit, and I've learned a few things that I'd like to share:

1. Lay in a big supply of mechanical pencils and clean scrap paper.

You can't do proper revisions on the computer screen. You just can't. There's a big difference between seeing it on the screen and seeing it on paper. I don't know why, but there is. As you read through, start scribbling. I like mechanical pencils (the cheapies) because you can write tiny in the margins and erase as you go. The scrap paper is for when you dump a scene and rewrite it entirely. With your mechanical pencil.

2. Increase your budgeted writing time.

I usually write in the mornings before the workday starts, at 5 a.m. But I've added an extra half hour to my wake up so I can get through this m.s. edit more quickly. I've told myself that a little less sleep now will mean that I can get this done by the end of summer--my goal. Which leads to . . . .

3. Set a goal.

Give yourself a reasonable goal to accomplish your edit. Then stick to it. The point is to finish this book so you can get onto the next project.

4. Don't be a hack.

It's easy to slap down crap just to get the bloody thing done. But you're not just trying to finish a book, you're trying to finish a good book. So don't compromise your vision. Just don't navelgaze over a scene for days. Like I do.

Like I used to, I mean.

Lessons from AI Live!

2006-08-07T09:00:00.000-04:00

July flew by--lots of work, of both the family and, eh, work-related variety. One of last month's highlights was going to see American Idol Live with my family--all fun and no work, though I have to admit thinking "this would make a great blog post" several times during the show. From Lisa Tucker's amazing transformation, Kellie Pickler's hilarious one-liners and Chris Daughtry's razor-edged vocals, this show was all about POW. And seeing the crowd's response to the acts, the gimmicks and the true talent was almost as entertaining as the show itself. Here's what made me think of WU:

Inspiration. Regardless of your feelings for Mandissa, the woman radiates positive energy. Nice line, "Aim high to make your dreams turn into reality!" I admit to liking Kellie Picker's line better, though: "If I'd known I could make it this far, Ida stopped flipping burgers a long time ago!"

Authenticity. (You know this is my favorite word, right?) Loved Bucky and his black hat and that he didn't give a flying newton what it was doing to his hair. And now I know why Paula loved Elliot so much; this guy is as real as they come, and the crowd LOVED him for it.

Selling points. The clear lesson behind the crowd's screeching as Ace paraded around the stage unbuttoning his shirt--sex still sells. Yeah, I know, that point was never in question, but I was still bowled over by the ginormous estrogenic response whenever he batted those five-mile-long lashes of his. Shrieks and signs and whimpers, oh my! (My son calls Ace Mr. Pretty Pants, by the way. Does testosterone-driven defensiveness actually begin at age 8???)

Character growth. How cool it was to see the transformation of Lisa Tucker as soon as you put a keyboard in front of her. Not only can this 16-yr old sing, she can play extremely well (and sings better when playing, I think). She completely won the crowd over with some Elton John classics. One of the best performances of the night.

Rhythm. Paris Bennett could teach everyone a thing or two.

Contest Shmontest. It doesn't matter that you didn't win the show, Chris. The crowd marks the long-term winner every time. I'd say Daughtry has a great career ahead of him. Now about those low scores from that writing contest you entered...

Connections. Know your audience, and touch when you can. Taylor's romp through the crowd was classic. Maybe now I understand why big name authors still bother to show up for book signings!

Free mint chocolate chip Pop Tarts. 'Nuff said.

Write on, all!

AUTHOR INTERVIEW: Victoria Holmes, Part 2

2006-08-04T13:17:00.000-04:00

Last week, Therese and Kathleen had the very great pleasure of interviewing editor/author Victoria Holmes. Victoria is the guiding force behind the wildly popular WARRIORS fantasy series, has written four books for young adults . . . and her list of projects is growing. Below is Part Two of our chat.

REMINDER: Victoria has graciously agreed to answer your questions in the comment area. Authors who wish to break into the YA market segment won't want to miss this opportunity; neither will WARRIOR fans!

Q: With four books under your belt, how have you evolved as a writer?

VH: I love doing research – how can anyone not love learning new things? – but I did far too much prior to writing RIDER, and ended up trying to bend the plot to accommodate everything I had learned about Georgian candlesticks. For subsequent books, I read a couple of general accounts of each historical period before planning the story in as much detail as I could, and then went back to do more detailed research to fill in any gaps. I hope that my pacing has improved – some of the sentences in RIDER take forever to come to an end! – and I’ve stopped worrying so much about the life histories of peripheral characters. I came up with names, ages and occupations for every single person in the village of Roseby in RIDER, which seems like a waste of energy when some of them wander onto the page for only the briefest moment. The one thing I haven’t improved on is my reluctance to write happy endings – in the initial synopsis for my next book, I left my heroine bereft of all family members, standing in the ashes of her burning home. My editor pointed out gently that I should probably leave her with some grain of hope for the future…

Q: This may be a ridiculous question since you have so many projects going, but do you get writer’s block? How do you overcome it?

VH: Oh yes! Many’s the time when I have sat glaring at my computer screen, trying to figure out what should come next. Not in terms of action (see above), but in terms of how to say it. I get into terrible frustrated tangles in my head – the words are going to appear on the page sometime, so why not now? Then I read an interview with a hugely successful author who said that her mantra is “Don’t get it right, get it written”. And that is the truest thing about writing I have ever discovered. When I get stuck, I force myself to stop wrangling over the precise selection and order of words and just write down what is meant to happen, like “Nora ran across the bog, jumping from tussock to tussock”. That might not be right but at least it’s written, and I tell myself I can always go back and rewrite it more prettily later on. And you know what? Nine times out of ten, when I read the script over I can’t even spot the bits that were just “written”.

And for those times when I can’t even just get it written, I storm away from my computer and make furious cookies or clean the house from top to bottom, so that in the end going back to my keyboard seems like a nice thing to do.

Q: What are some of your literary influences?

VH: I don’t think I could pinpoint one particular writer or genre that has influenced the way I write now. I grew up on my mother’s books from her childhood – lots of pony stories and masses and masses of Enid Blyton, who may be less fashionable now but whatever you say about her gender politics, she was a tremendous storyteller. The book that sticks most in my imagination is TALES OF THE PUNJAB, a collection of Indian folklore translated by Flora Annie Steel in 1894. These stories were so vivid, exploding with color and movement and a powerful sense of location, as well as the tiniest details of human behavior. When my sister Kate read RIDER IN THE DARK, she said afterward that it reminded her of TALES OF THE PUNJAB which I took as the biggest compliment! I still read voraciously and visit my local library at least once a week to restock because I could never afford my habit if I had to buy every book I wanted to read. I love thriller writers such as Kathy Reichs and Karin Slaughter because they show me how to weave an intricate plot around believable and sympathetic characterization. Diana Gabaldon’s extraordinary Cross Stitch series (Outlander in U.S. markets) has taught me that I’ll never be able to write historical fiction as well as she does, and anything by Jacqueline Wilson is an object-lesson in how to communicate with young readers about the most torturous subject matter. The only topic I wouldn’t read for pleasure is straight romance – this won’t be a surprise to the Warriors readers who should know by now that the only romance I allow in the stories has to be doomed from the start!

Q: Tell us about your latest release. What’s next for you?

VH: The fourth book in the historical horse series (catchy series title, no?!) is set in the south-west English county of Devon during the English Civil War. As well as seeing how this far-reaching and interminable conflict affected ordinary people, I want to explore the theme of witchcraft as well. My heroine’s grandmother Willow is a “wise woman”, who knows about the healing properties of plants and herbs and is consulted by the local people when they get sick. At the time, this sort of knowledge was barely distinguishable from black magic in many people’s minds, and I want to show how this affects my young heroine, Holly. It doesn’t matter whether Willow is a conventional sort of witch or not – to be honest, I don’t even know myself – but what is important is how people react to Holly, and how she feels about carrying on her grandmother’s legacy of healing. One of my big personal preoccupations is the concept of faith, and the consequences of believing in something; if Holly believes she is capable of black magic, does that mean bad things will happen? This is a theme I love exploring in Warriors, too; Cloudtail is my archetypal “good atheist”, a brave and loyal warrior who doesn’t believe in StarClan, while Tigerstar is the “bad believer”, a cat who has absolute faith in the existence of his warrior ancestors but uses their tenets for evil purposes.

As for what I’ll do after Holly’s story, this hasn’t been set in stone yet, at least as far as my personal writing is concerned. I keep telling myself I should write something set in the present day because I wouldn’t need to spend so long reading historical tomes, but I find historical moments and artifacts far more inspiring than most things I encounter in everyday life. I would love to go even further back in time, to when famous standing stone monuments like Stonehenge were first built. I am bewitched by standing stones and would relish the chance to breathe fictitious life into the personalities behind these constructions.

I have a much clearer idea about what comes next in my editorial box of tricks. Erin Hunter has titles commissioned all the way to Fall 2010, which I try not to think about too much because it makes me scared. What if I run out of stories in 2008? Cats and horses aside, Working Partners has a constant stream of new projects in which I can dip my toes, so I don’t imagine I’ll give up creating stories or editing for a long, long time yet.

Now we’ll open the floor to some readers:

Sophie, age 9: Why are you writing about different girls in different times instead of staying with one girl’s story?

VH: When these books were first commissioned, the publisher specifically asked for “stand alone” stories, which means that each book is self-contained and the characters don’t appear in other books. This seemed like a great idea at first because it enabled me to explore more than one historical period and create four entirely separate heroines. Because I spend my editing life working on series, I liked the thought of finishing with one set of characters and locations at the end of a book and moving on to a new set for the next story. However, I didn’t realize how attached I would get to each of my heroines, and I have found it really hard to let them go at the end of a book and conjure up a different girl. I miss (RIDER IN THE DARK) Nell the most because I think there was quite a lot of my own character in her personality, although I share (HORSE FROM THE SEA) Nora’s shyness and feelings of clumsiness at crowded parties. It has also been quite difficult to forget all my historical research for one period in order to make room for the next lot. I get scared that there is only a limited amount of room in my brain, and it might be taken up with details about Georgian candlesticks when I need to squeeze in some information about English Civil War uniforms.

So I guess the answer is that I write stand alone stories because that was what I agreed with the publisher, but in the future I’d love to write at least two or three books about the same set of characters because it would save having to say goodbye to them too soon.

Q: I really liked Nell (RIDER IN THE DARK). Are we going to get more stories about her?

VH: I’d love to write more about Nell because she was my first heroine and I feel as if I got to know her very well over the year that I carried her around in my head. But these books were always intended to be one-off stories, so unless a publisher asks for a spin-off, I’m afraid the rest of Nell and Jamie’s adventures will happen out of sight.

Q: How come HEART OF FIRE had both a sad and a happy ending?

VH: This is a great question! And I’ll let you into a secret: I really struggle to write happy endings. None of my books end with “happy ever after”, and in the book that I’m currently working on, my editor pointed out that every single person who matters to my heroine ends up dead. I had to rewrite the storyline so that at least one of them survived, otherwise her future would have been very bleak indeed. In HEART OF FIRE, I wanted Firebird to triumph in the show-jumping competition because she is a truly exceptional little horse with the heart of a lion. But at the same time, there was no way Jonathan could come back to live with Maddie and her family because of the terrible lie he had told. He needed to go off and forge his own life to regain some self-respect, but I think we can be sure that he never forgot the friendships he forged at Sefton Park.

Q: Are you going to write books about other animals?

VH: I can’t say too much about this because I’m currently developing an Erin Hunter series featuring a completely different animal than cats or horses, and it’s in the very early stages so it’s all a bit hush-hush right now. As far as my own books are concerned, I think I’d like to write exclusively about people for at least one series, because I’m running out of new phrases to describe horses!

Sarah, age 10: I really liked your book set in Ireland (HORSE FROM THE SEA). Are you going to write more books from there? Are all your books going to be in England?

VH: Thank you, I love HORSE FROM THE SEA too. I would love to write more books set in sixteenth-century Ireland because it is an exceptionally beautiful country and a very interesting period in history, when the English were trying to break the spirit of this proud and unusual nation. My best friend Joe is Irish and HORSE FROM THE SEA was my tribute to him and his ancestors who suffered so much from the conquerors sent over by Elizabeth I. However, I have no plans for more stories set in Ireland right now. My next book is set in the county of Devon in south-west England, another place that is very important to me. For my historical stories, I write about places that mean a lot to me and have lots of interesting history attached to them, which is why I’ve set these books in Ireland and England. But I’d love to write about Scotland and Wales, too!

Q: Why do you like writing stories about horses?

VH: Because I love horses so much, I guess! I was very lucky because I grew up on a farm with plenty of grazing for ponies, plus my mum loves horses too. I rode before I could walk (well, there are photos of me as a baby perched in my mum’s lap on her big paint horse Dobbin), and had my first pony, a palomino Welsh pony called Perky, when I was eight. It’s always easiest to write about things you know well, and horses fall right into that category for me. There are also so many different types of horse – show-jumpers, racehorses, heavy horses – that it seems like I could write stories forever about them and never run out of ideas.

Q: Will you write books about boys and horses?

VH: I think the answer is that I already do. There are strong male characters in all of my books who are as closely involved in the horse action as my heroine, even though Jose needed riding lessons from Nora in HORSE FROM THE SEA! I don’t believe that girls are any better at riding than boys, nor do they feel more strongly about the horses that they meet, but more girls read horse stories than boys so it makes sense to have a heroine rather than a hero at the centre of the action.

Riley, age 10: Are Jamie and Nell (characters in RIDER IN THE DARK) secretly in love?

VH: Well, I think they’re a bit young to be properly in love (they’re both fifteen), but they are certainly very good friends. And, even more importantly, they live at a time when it would have been very difficult for them to be boyfriend and girlfriend because Nell is the daughter of the lord of the manor while Jamie is a lowly stable lad. Social class was very rigid back then and there was no way a young lady like Nell could have married a servant! Nowadays, social structure is less rigid but there are other things that get in the way of relationships, like culture or the color of your skin.

Q: How do you think up names for your horses?

VH: It’s the best part of writing my books! I used to invent whole yards of imaginary ponies when I was a child, and I still find notebooks in the attic full of made-up names and descriptions, right down to the sort of bridle the horse would be ridden in. Sometimes I use horses and ponies that I have met in real life, although I’m starting to run out of those now. The name of the horse from RIDER IN THE DARK, Oriel, actually means a type of window but I thought it sounded like a perfect name for a beautiful dark brown horse. Lir in HORSE FROM THE SEA is named after the Irish god of the sea, which seemed appropriate. In HEART OF FIRE, Firebird is named after a high-spirited Arab mare I used to ride. In my next book, the Dartmoor ponies have simpler names like Bracken and Myrtle (which is a type of plant) because my heroine has named them after things she sees around her on the moor. Sometimes I get completely stuck for a name, and then I just ask the nearest person for ideas. And thinking up names for the cats in Warriors is way, way harder because we have to use natural things and it’s very hard not to be repetitive.

Q: What should I do if I want to write books?

VH: Read everything you can, from the back of cereal packets to the dustiest books in your school library. You have to figure out what sort of stories you’d like to write for yourself, and what sorts of writing don’t appeal to you at all. Then just write! Poems, short stories, letters, articles for your school newspaper, anything at all. I didn’t know that I wanted to concentrate on children’s fiction until long after I had left school, but I learned a lot from writing for the school magazine, writing competitions and even essays when I was at college. Writing for a living can be tough, dull and lonely so you need to get lots of practice at working your way out of writer’s block without having to abandon your keyboard altogether. I love writing letters and e-mails and find it’s a great way to warm up before I tackle the next chunk of a manuscript. Plus I like to think that someone will publish all my letters when I’m really famous and make a fortune!

Thank you, Victoria, for the fantastic interview!

All of Victoria Holmes titles are available at online and brick booksellers everywhere. Heart of Fire releases October 1, 2006.

Linktopia, Vapors Edition

2006-08-02T19:03:00.000-04:00

Surfing the best of the writers' blogs so you don't have to.

REMINDER: tomorrow we post Part Two of our interview with editor/writer Victoria Holmes, who will answer your questions about the YA market, publishing demands for this market, and, for fans of the popular WARRIORS series, clues about upcoming releases. You won't want to miss this terrific opportunity.

Also, please keep sending your thoughts and prayers to Melly, who is still in Israel enduring another horrific round of bombs. Melly, we're still praying for an end to this bloodshed and your safe return.

Last night I broke my self-imposed rule of early-to-bed, early-to-rise-and-write-damnit! to watch who Tim Gunn would kick off Project Runway for breaking the rules. Gunn layed down the LAW in his butter-cream voice: "Rules are rules." I was hyperventilating. Let's just say it was worth missing my 5 a.m. wakeup. It's a dirty addiction.

Speaking of reality t.v. tilting the planet on a new apex, the writers at America's Next Top Model (you didn't think those shows were unscripted, did you?) are on strike for stuff like insurance, a living wage, and residual rights, which could really keep them off the bread line as ANTM is shown 24/7 on VH1 these days. Writer Dan J. Blau lays out their case on Television Without Pity.

We second Stephen King's and John Irving's plea to JK Rowling . . . . the Alphabet Girls share 10 lessons they learned at the massive RWA conference this weekend . . . . acquiring editor Jason Pinter wonders why agents still haven't learned he switched publishing houses five months ago, and a shudder rocks through every writer who reads his rant . . . . I don't know if I could do this (ht Slushpile) . . . . Conversations with Famous Writers interviews Sarah Mlynowski . . . . How Not to Piss off an Editor (ht Paperback Writer) . . . . Eric's come up with a genius idea (I don't trot out the genius adjective lightly, either): shower crayons.

More after the jump.

Miss Snark points out that there is such a thing as too low a word count. And that Mel Gibson's an idiot . . . . Ray shares some goodies on characterization . . . . Ernest Hemingway's cats tangle with the law . . . . Nienke posts 10 rules for writers . . . . Random Reader reads an early Ellen Kushner and shares the compelling hook . . . . the August forecasts are up at Astrology for Writers.

The planets are aligned. Write on.

Secrets of the Silver Screen: Essence

2006-08-02T08:37:00.000-04:00

Screenwriter Michael Hauge is a genius. I realized this as I sat listening to him speak in a group of wide-eyed, slack-jawed and furiously scribbling writers this past Saturday. He used fresh terminology and concepts, and my God, everything he said made spine-tingling sense. Hauge's session was, hands down, the most enlightening and informative two hours I've spent pondering craft. Ever. I actually think I'd choose listening to this man speak over eating a box of Godiva. (Yes, I hear your collective gasp.) And guess what? He's just this morning agreed to interview with Writer Unboxed! Hmm, now can Therese find a way to conduct the interview while eating a box of Godiva? Stay tuned.

While what follows is just a peek at what went on in Hauge's session, I think his two-simple-words method for character evolution was some of the best stuff. So hang tight, and get ready for a crash course in Identity and Essence.

What it is. In a nutshell, identity is what you--and most others--believe you are all about, while essence is the promise of what you are beneath all layers of artifice. Characters without these layers may come off as shallow or even unbelievable. (If you're writing a shallow character, now you know what you need to do!)

How it relates to Inner Conflict. Most of us know how important it is to craft inner and outer conflict for our characters--what the hero wants, what stands in his way. Identity and essence crystallizes inner conflict. I'll use the movie Sleepless in Seattle to show how it works.

~~ When a story begins, the hero is safely in his identity and may not even be aware of his own essence. Sam has lost his wife. The idea of loving again feels utterly impossible. "It just can't happen twice," "I don't believe in love," "I'll just grow a new heart." Meanwhile, Annie is living with her allergy-enhanced boyfriend, Walter, and trying to convince herself he is absolutely perfect and she is absolutely happy.
Hysterical side note: Screenwriter Nora Ephron told Meg Ryan to play Annie as a "Republican who had never had an orgasm."

~~ Something occurs, and the hero must take a risk, stepping briefly out of his identity and revealing essence. Sam's son calls a radio show to lament his father's dating a skank, and soon Sam finds himself pouring "anonymous" truths out over the airwaves.
Annie hears the show and, like thousands of other women, can't stop thinking about Sam...which just isn't right, since Walter is absolutely perfect and Annie is absolutely happy. Right? But Sam was the reflection of Annie's repressed essence...
~~ Throughout the story, it's a tug-of-war between safe identity and vulnerable essence, with the hero gradually showing more of the latter. In the case of a romantic interest, the love interest is the only person who can see past the hero's identity to his essence. Sam tries dating again, in part wanting love and risk, though he doesn't sense the magic he had with his wife. Annie repeatedly thinks about and even seeks out Sam while also becoming engaged to Walter. When Sam and Annie see each other briefly across a street, there are both stuck by the other's essence.
~~ For a happily ever after, the hero must let go of his identity and embrace his essence. If there's a love triangle of any sort in your story, your hero will leave the person who represents his identity and move on with the person who represents his essence. Annie chooses Sam/essence/risk over Walter/identity/safe; Sam chooses Annie over a woman he probably never would've loved.
Note: Craft tragedy by making your hero too fearful to embrace his essence (Out of Africa) or choosing something more noble than personal happiness (Casablanca).

Want to peek at the SiS script yourself? Click here to view.

Finally, please keep your eye out for Hauge's new book, Selling Your Story in 60 Seconds: The Guaranteed Way to Get Your Screenplay or Novel Read, due out in October. Even if you feel you don't need help selling story, it's likely Hauge touches on lots of golden topics; believe me, he has much to offer. His other books include the industry classics Writing Screenplays that Sell and The Hero's 2 Journeys. And don't forget to keep your eye out for WU's interview with Hauge, which should appear sometime in late September or early October.

Write on, all!

High Concept

2006-08-01T08:11:00.000-04:00

Recently on one of the writer’s listserves, an author bewailed a rejection she’d received on the requested full of her manuscript. “Not high concept enough,” the editor told her.

Sometimes I think that editors pull out the old saw of ‘no high concept’ because it’s an easy way to reject without going into all the gory details. Then sometimes I think acquiring editors need a ‘high concept’ conception of a project to make it easier for them to go before their superiors and sell it.

But for an author who has spent a year hashing out their story, to be told it isn’t high concept enough for the sale is a cruel blow.

What is ‘high concept’ anyway?

Basically, it’s a story that can be encapsulated in one or two sentences, or less, with a hook. Example: Snakes on a Plane. Coming this summer to a theater near you. You don’t need to be told what kind of plane, what kind of protagonist, plot mechanisms, etc. to get a grip on the story. You intuitively know it’s going to be a thriller, with high body counts and a lot at stake, because it’s everyone’s worst nightmare to be caught 70,000 feet in the air on a plane infested with venomous snakes.

Let’s do an exercise to see if your WIP can be sold as high concept.

Rob Tobin has helpfully written a book on high concept screenwriting that can be adapted to genre fiction. He calls the high concept pitch “the log line.”

"Log Lines are used not only to pitch a project to producers, execs or agents, but also to encapsulate the story in such a way so as to ensure that it is structurally sound,” he writes. “There’s an old saying in Hollywood: if you can’t describe your story in a sentence, there’s something wrong with the story."

Valid log lines include:
• Hero
• Opponent
• Hero’s Ally
• Character Flaw
• Life-changing Event
• Implied Journey or Inner Battle

Take "Casablanca" as an example: A jaded (flaw) WWII casino owner (hero) in Nazi-occupied Morocco sees his former lover (opponent) arrive (life-changing event), accompanied by her husband (ally) whose heroism forces the hero to choose between his cynicism, his feeling for his ex-lover, and his once-strong feelings of patriotism (battle).”

Or here’s an even simpler log line of last year’s biggest indie hit: gay cowboys. I don’t even have to tell you the movie’s poncy title. Gay cowboys pretty much sums up the tone, the conflict, the target audience.

Let’s do a book: Harry Potter.

Friendless (flaw) orphan (hero) learns he’s a wizard (life-changing event) and must save the world (journey) from a powerful wizard (opponent) who also murdered his parents (battle).

Easy, huh? I’m breaking out in a cold sweat too.

Is your current project high concept? Can it be described in a high concept pitch? Take a hard look at it and see if you can do it. Does it have to be high concept to make a sale? No. But it’ll help strengthen the odds.

The $300,000,000 Challenge

2006-07-31T08:48:00.000-04:00

Just returned from conferencing, and I have lots of good stuff to share. First, some good news: PJ Tracy (mother-daughter duo wrote authored the brilliant mystery Monkeewrench) will be interviewing with Writer Unboxed! More good news: Anthea Bell, the translator for Cornelia Funke will also be interviewing, and she believes Ms. Funke herself will be up for a chat as well! I'm psyched! Finally, Barbara Samuel, another Queen of Women's Fiction and recent RITA winner, has agreed to interview! These are terrific authors, and WU is proud to have them!

I have so much information to sort through, but here's one nugget I recall vividly from a session about making fiction writing a priority. The topic drew me in; there seems to always be something sucking my time--nonfiction work and kiddos probably rank as the top two. But guess what? I'm so not special. (Drat.) Successful authors have to juggle as many, if not more, responsibilities as I do. The difference is that they found a way to break through the daily grind to carve out Enough. Time. Balance. Motivation. Stamina. Take a peek at the key to their success.

But first, a story!

Pretend you're in the middle of your workday when you learn a remarkable truth: There's $300,000,000 (tax free, no strings) waiting for you on the opposite side of the country. You just need to get to the money by the end of the day.

What will you do? Take a second now, and think about your plan of action.

Leave work and head for the airport? (After telling your boss just what you think of him/her? Grin.) What happens if your car breaks down on the way? And the taxi you hire gets a flat tire or is being driven by a pregnant woman who goes into labor? What happens if your plane is delayed? Or your credit card company says, "no way" when you try to charge the cost of the flight?

Would you keep fighting? Would you consider begging, borrowing, stealing? How far would you go?

Most people will do anything--anything--to reach that money. It's important to them. So important that they'll find creative ways around drastic situations to ensure they live HEA with those millions in the bank.

Now how productive could you become if your wip was as much a priority? What in your life could you rearrange? Bargain about? How many minutes might you steal? How much further on your wip would you be if the desire to finish your story burned as strongly within you as if someone held a multi-million-dollar promise just out of reach? Can you fight harder?

Those successful authors I mentioned earlier? That's what they do. I know I'm going to as well. It's as easy/hard as increasing the flame.

Write on, all.

AUTHOR INTERVIEW: Victoria Holmes, Part 1

2006-07-28T13:09:00.000-04:00

Therese and I are beyond pleased to be able to bring you this interview of Victoria Holmes, author of four titles and editor of several successful YA fiction lines. Not only is she one of the hardest-working people in publishing today, she is a total delight. Our association with Victoria began when we interviewed the writing duo of Cherith Baldry and Kate Cary, who, as Erin Hunter, write the enormously popular YA fantasy series WARRIORS. What we didn't know at the time, and have learned since, is that WARRIORS is the brainchild of and edited by Victoria. As if shepherding WARRIORS titles through the publication process isn't enough work, she finds time to write a popular series of her own. During the course of our two-part interview with Erin Hunter, we realized that we had so many questions for this author/editor that we knew we had to pick her brain clean and find out what it takes to work both sides of the publishing aisle.

UPDATE: Starting next week (August 4) Victoria will answer your questions in the comment area. Writers who wish to learn more about this market won't want to miss this terrific opportunity; Erin Hunter fans may be able to tease more tidbits out of Victoria than we could. Enjoy!

Q: One of the things that amazes us is that you edit several successful lines for Working Partners LTD AND write children’s fiction. How do you manage to juggle both responsibilities?

VH: I guess I’m just greedy! Editing takes up by far the lion’s share of my time, with writing squeezed into days off and weekends. I’m lucky to have long lead times for my manuscripts which helps relieve some of the pressure, although I confess I’m the sort of writer who ends up doing 8,000 words a day the week before the first draft is due. My math has improved enormously since receiving my commission for the four historical horse stories, especially long division: at the start of the schedule I think, “Ah, lovely, 2,500 words per weekend for the next four months will be a breeze,” and by the end I’m thinking, “Okay, I should just make the deadline if I can do 7,384 words a day for the next week.” In the future, I’d love to spend more time writing but right now I can’t bear to give up any of my editorial work because I love it so much. Plus I work with a great team at Working Partners and I’d miss them like crazy if I was stuck at home on my own all day!

Q: What drew you to children’s fiction?

VH: Interesting question, because the answer is that I don’t really know. I have always loved writing stories, and was known as “the girl who is good at English” at school, but I never thought about writing for children in particular. I grew up reading obsessively but didn’t stick to children’s fiction – I devoured James Herriot’s veterinary memoirs when I was five or six, and hoovered up the contents of my parents’ bookcases with a quite alarming lack of discrimination. After university, I worked with horses for a year before becoming an English teacher, which was clearly not the right career for me; I adored my subject, but couldn’t understand why my students didn’t feel the same. With hindsight, I think I’d have made a much better Math teacher because I would have been better able to explain the processes involved. To me, things like punctuation and grammar are obvious: “Why does the apostrophe go there?” “Because it just does, okay?” Anyway, from teaching I moved to an editorial position for a schools-based book club, which introduced me to a wide and delicious range of contemporary children’s fiction. My greatest treat was going down to the warehouse when everyone else was at lunch and sitting on a stepladder among the shelves to read the latest deliveries. After that, a move into children’s publishing seemed like an obvious step. I applied for the post of Commissioning Editor at Working Partners and six years later, I’m still here. I couldn’t imagine working in any other field of publishing now. Books for grown-ups seem way too long and difficult!

Q: As an editor, what do you look for in a strong project?

VH: We come up with all our own project ideas at Working Partners in order to retain moral and intellectual copyright, which means I get to stretch my creative wings on a daily basis as well as honing my script-editing skills. It also means that I commission writers, not projects. I think the ingredients of a strong children’s fiction project remain the same across age ranges and genres: into the cauldron you need to put strong, interesting (and interestingly, not necessarily sympathetic) characters, a lively and easily understood plot, and a sense of relevance to the readers’ lives. This doesn’t have to be the sort of jaw-dropping contemporary social realism that I worship in Jacqueline Wilson’s books, but the characters do need to tackle issues that can be identified in twenty-first century life. For example, a lot of the fanmail we receive for Warriors mentions how much the readers sympathize with Firepaw’s struggle to fit in with the Clan when he first arrives in the forest. Also, and somewhat to my surprise, Ravenpaw remains enduringly popular because so many of the fans understand what it’s like to feel shy and awkward in group situations. I must confess I adore Ravenpaw too for this precise reason – there’s a lot of me in him, plus he’s the person I’d like to be because he always acts with such dignity and honor toward his old friends.

Q: It seems that series dominate the children’s/YA market. Is this trend going to continue?

VH: Working Partners achieved its first major success with Animal
Ark, which is still going on after more than one hundred titles and has generated a huge following all over the world. Clearly our fans have large bookcases! But a few years ago, publishers seemed to move away from buying series and focused more on single titles or trilogies. The feeling seemed to be that the fashion for series had waned and children wanted quicker fixes in their reading matter. Happily for us, the trend for series has never really gone away, perhaps because young readers are veritable magpies when it comes to collecting books. The Harry Potter phenomenon is the obvious example, but look also at the success of Phillip Pullman’s backlist, following the publication of his fabulous Northern Lights trilogy. Warriors was originally devised as a single, stand-alone title; this stretched to six when we came up with too many ideas to fit into the first story. Then came The New Prophecy, which was a trilogy right up until the first manuscript was delivered, when we realized it would make more sense to do another batch of six. And now we’re working on The Power of Three, with no sign of stopping after this batch… As far as my own books are concerned, they have remained as single stand-alone titles but I can’t help coming up with adventures for my characters to have in future stories while I’m writing each manuscript.

Q: And speaking of the WARRIORS juggernaut, you were the brainchild and editor of this enormously popular series written by Erin Hunter. Have you been surprised by the devoted following it’s generated?

VH: When I started work on Into the Wild, I had only been an editor for a few months and it just felt like a rather complex and unwieldy feral cat fantasy that would bring some sort of badge of honor if I got to the end of the first manuscript. I have never been a fan of fantasy fiction or stories about animals (even though I was brought up on a farm and love, love, love all four-legged furry creatures), so while I gave the script my all, I never imagined it would conquer the world. I can clearly remember the point when I thought, “Hang on, this is turning into something special.” It was when I came up with the back story for Book Three: Forest of Secrets, in which Bluestar had given up her kits to RiverClan in order to become deputy of ThunderClan. I recall sitting at my keyboard, tapping away to unpeel the layers of emotion that must have led to her momentous decision, and suddenly realizing how real and vital the Clans’ world had become to me. From then on, the storylines seemed almost to write themselves as the characters played out their dramas on their wooded stage, and I guess I figured that if the action excited me then it would probably excite a fair few other people as well. And of course I have the honor of working with two incredibly talented writers in Kate and Cherith. They make editing each script a joy, and we share a lot of laughs and moments of inspiration before each book is put to bed. They each write so exquisitely that my cheeks turn green with envy, and I’m thrilled that so many readers appreciate them too. But I never imagined we’d beat Harry Potter one day!

Q: Storylines for the children’s/YA market seem to be getting edgier. Are tastes changing, or have kid’s stories always been edgy?

VH: No one could deny that contemporary children’s/YA fiction embraces some pretty stark subject matter, such as drugs, relationships and imploding families.

Q: What advice would you give to someone who wants to pursue a career writing for children? Is having an agent important when trying to break into this market?

VH: Read everything in the children’s section of your local library, especially popular contemporary titles. That’s by far the best way to get a feel for what the marketplace wants today. Too often, aspiring authors write in the style of books they loved as children, and that’s just not commercially viable now. Publishers look for modern, lively voices that can speak the language of twenty-first century children, even in genres like fantasy and historical novels.

Think about the perspective of your story: nearly all children’s books are written from a limited third person perspective, which means we can see into the thoughts of the central character but no one else’s, and we only see things when he or she is around to witness them. This is a big difference from adult fiction, which often splits the narrative between several different third person viewpoints.

Make sure that the story is as much character-driven as plot-driven so your protagonist is always in the thick of the action, making things happen around them. Children tend to identify with characters before plot or historical setting, so the individuals in your story need to leap off the page as rounded, sympathetic and adventurous characters whom readers can easily imagine as their friends.

Check that the length and structure of your story match successful examples in the marketplace. It’s very common to receive a generally well-written manuscript that is much, much too long for the intended readership. Publishers have fairly hard and fast rules about how long a book can be for each particular age range, so there’s no point sending them a script that’s way off target. For example, Warriors books are 70-80,000 words long, which is as long as most scripts would ever be for the children’s market. First chapter books, for new readers aged 4-6, tend to be nearer the 3,000 word mark.

Finally, remember that if you read your script to a child that knows you, you will invariably get a rave review. Children love being read to, and respond enthusiastically to the idea of hearing a brand new story from The Person Who Wrote It! This is not a reliable critique, unfortunately, so be prepared for some much sterner responses from Commissioning Editors.

Agents definitely open doors where mere mortals can only tap feebly from the outside, and they are also in a great position to advise a writer on shaping their manuscript to make it the best possible commercial prospect. There is a truly alarming amount of competition in the world of children’s fiction and having an agent could help a writer avoid the slush pile of unsolicited scripts and make it onto someone’s desk. I’d recommend approaching agents with a good track record in children’s fiction, although not necessarily representing authors offering the same style and genre you have chosen because that could become cannibalistic. Listen to their advice because even though judging fiction is wholly subjective, if you find that several agents say the same thing about your script, they’re probably right.

Q: Your own books are historical novels centered around girls and horses. What drew you to writing these types of stories?

VH: Is it too simplistic to say that I love horses, and I love history? To be ruthlessly honest, I was never intended to be the writer for this series; I developed the concept and came up with the original storylines as part of what I do every day at Working Partners, in response to a rise in interest from publishers in new horse-themed fiction. At the time, historical fiction was also enjoying a wave of popularity, and I had just been on vacation in the English county of Dorset where my imagination had latched on to tales of smugglers and wreckers and beautiful hills overlooking long stretches of stony beach. The storyline for RIDER IN THE DARK more or less fell into my lap intact – girl on stunning dark brown horse won in her father’s game saves ship by relighting sabotaged beacon on stormy night. The others took a little more thought, apart from HORSE FROM THE SEA which had been pottering about in my head ever since a visit to Western Ireland with my best friend Joe; I clearly remember standing in the middle of the Connemara mountains and saying, “One day I will write a story set here.” I enjoyed working on the storylines so much that it made sense for me to try out, anonymously, alongside other writers for the Working Partners commission. So I landed a publishing deal for four hardback books with one of the biggest publishers in the world without having written a full-length script in my life. Be careful what you wish for!

Q: You’ve set your books in a variety of historical eras: RIDER IN THE DARK, 18th century Britain, HORSE FROM THE SEA, 16th century Ireland, and your upcoming release, HEART OF FIRE, set in the aftermath of WWI. How do you choose which era to write about, how much research do you do, and how do you decide what level of detail a young reader will accept?

VH: I am inspired primarily by a sense of place – Dorset for RIDER, Galway and Connemara for HORSE, the country estate in Berkshire where I grew up for HEART, and now gorgeous Dartmoor in the county of Devon. (I should add at this point that I have never lived in Maddie’s mansion in HEART – my father owned a restored gamekeeper’s cottage in the pine woods by the canal on the edge of the estate.) I know that I want to write about a particular location when I can’t stop the stories tumbling into my head as I look around. The historical era is dictated partly by notable events that happened here, which meant the sinking of the Spanish Armada for HORSE and smuggling for RIDER, and partly by times that hold a particular fascination for me. This accounts for the post-WWI setting for HEART and the English Civil War/witchcraft theme for the next book. I research different aspects of the period – clothing, food, daily life, politics, entertainment, transport – until I feel confident that I know what would be going on in each scene and how the characters would feel about it, and I wouldn’t hesitate to include any level of period detail in a story. It’s the tiny details that bring a story to life, and I’ve never had a reader complain that they learned too much about Helena’s meals in RIDER, for example! My golden rule is that the story must move forward on every single page, and as long as that happens I can pack incidental information tightly around the action.

I use a number of different methods for research, starting with reading, although too much of this makes me feel like I am taking my History exams all over again! Visiting is the most important, and most enjoyable, methods for me – visiting locations, museums, historical exhibitions, people who use traditional crafts. I take dozens of photos that I can surround myself with when I start writing, so describing a scene is simply a matter of looking at a picture and writing down what I see. The towerhouse of Murray na Doe in HORSE is a real place, still standing and beautifully restored by a heritage trust. Before I visited, I had no idea that Murray had built a trapdoor beneath one of the flagstones in his dining hall – as soon as the guide told me about it, I knew it would become an integral part of my story.

Q: What is your writing process? Do you start from character, plot, or the historical moment? And are you a plotter or a pantser?

VH: I am a PLOTTER. Right down to the tone of conversations and the lighting in the scene. The storylines I provide for my Warriors writers are a good example of this: the synopsis for Firestar’s Quest, the stand-alone title which comes out next summer, runs to over 30,000 words which is nearly a third of the entire book! I imagine each scene so vividly that I can’t bear to leave out any of the details. The only rule I set myself is that I won’t write any of the dialogue in full, but I rewrote this rule long ago to mean “no speech marks”. So there are plenty of conversations in the synopsis, but you couldn’t spot them just by looking.

Part Two of our interview with Victoria Holmes will go live August 4.

Linktopia: It Burns, It BURNS

2006-07-27T05:11:00.000-04:00

Surfing the best of the writers' blogs so you don't have to.

I don't care what you guys think of Al Gore, but Global Warming is FER REALS. I just spent an afternoon baking in a hot oven of an office with no a/c, so Linktopia is a tad incoherent this week. Or maybe that's 'cause I'm doing it, and not Therese. Whatever, it's hot and I'm sketching.

Or maybe it's the world that's sketching this summer. I just finished reading a new post on Melly's blog, and it really makes me shut my yap. Go there and send her some well-wishes. She needs them right now.

We welcome some new blogs to our sidebar: Fiction Addiction, Man in Black, Pubrants, and Write on Write Right Now . . . . Most of the romance blogging has gone silent due to the RWA conference this weekend, but Romancing the Blog never sleeps . . . . Evil Editor on the efficacy of the word 'but' . . . . I haven't been over to "Confessions" in a while, but Sarah's got some crime fiction news that's worth checking out . . . . the insatiable Random Reading reviews Jonathan's Stroud's Golem's Eye (love that title!) . . . . Victoria reminds us that there ARE reputable folks in the pub biz . . . . Miz Snark on what to reveal, what not to reveal in queries . . . . .

More after the jump.

Iran bans the DaVinci Code (ht Bookslut) . . . . BuzzGirl's got Hyperion's fall comers . . . . GalleyCat muses on Amazon's penchant for their willingness to do everything except concentrate on their core business: book selling . . . . HarperCollins launches online writing contest in romance genre. Too bad everyone's at the RWC convention . . . . some people will do anything for publicity (ht Slushpile) . . . . GOB shares some interesting observances on the Manchurian Candidate novel, the two remakes, and historical context

Write on!

Plots Unboxed

2006-07-26T06:45:00.000-04:00

Recently I read about a fellow writer's troubles on a list I'm on. She was lamenting that her plot had been replicated by another writer, though these two had never met or communicated in any way. She outlined the plot, and I couldn't help thinking the plot wasn't unique; there was but a single twist in an ordinary tale of two people hooking up. How many people are in the world? How many people might, if pressed to come up with a single twist in such a story, come up with exactly the same one? We're all human--hard-wired similarly and exposed to the same society and media. I'd bet that most of us even had similar childhood experiences. So is it such a stretch to believe that two people on opposite sides of the country might settle on the same twist in a not-so-original tale?

I can't tell you how many articles I've written on heart disease and diabetes and incontinence. It gets mind-numbingly difficult to come up with a fresh lead every time for these recycled topics, especially if there isn't any new, groundbreaking research to point to. I've found, though, that if I think on it long enough, a spin will come to me that I haven't thought of before (grateful nod to the Spin Fairy). This is another example of why writing nonfiction can help a fiction writer: experience crafting the twist.

Of course it's more complex with fiction--or at least it should be. For nonfiction, a single twist can be enough; for fiction, it shouldn't be. Twist too little and you're still in the box; you're just looking up at the sky from within it instead of staring at the walls. To truly unbox, you must twist, twist, twist your story concept until there is no way anyone else could have thought it up. Yeah, yeah, but a monkey will craft Shakespeare if given a million years and a typewriter, I know, but it's still unlikely anyone would replicate a well-twisted concept.

Alrighty then. Let's see how one favorite brilliant twistmeister did it...

You know we love Audrey Niffenegger's Time Traveler's Wife, because we've talked about this book (too?) many times. But it's sooo good, and I'm going to illustrate one big reason why.

Basic idea: time travel story

Twist: the hero, Henry, has no control over when he time travels

Twist: he can't bring anything with him when he travels--not a person, not even the clothes on his back

Twist: he often lands--naked--in dangerous, life-threatening situations

Twist: he has had to learn to steal, cheat and beat the living hell out of others just to survive on his trips; his traveling has brought out the darkest fibers of his being--almost another self

Etc...

And she took the spin in other directions as well:

Idea: Time travel story

Twist: Henry's time traveling is a genetic disorder

Twist: Appearing suddenly naked in front of a geneticist helps win this doc's belief in Henry's disorder

Twist: the geneticist tries to help Henry by building time-traveling rats (after id'ing the faulty gene and mapping out the DNA code), hoping to unravel a cure

Twist: ...before Henry's wife becomes pregnant

Twist: ...which becomes increasingly difficult and dangerous, as the fetuses spontaneously disappear

Etc...

One last time :)

Idea: time travel story

Twist: hero meets wife when he's in his 20s

Twist: hero's wife meets him long before that--because hero time traveled back to her childhood and visited her countless times as she was growing up

Twist: prior knowledge is no benefit whatsoever to the characters;
they can change nothing

Etc...

Bottom line: Think on plot deeply and your ideas will become richer, more complex and more original. Don't settle for spin #1. Throw your story into agitation mode, and soon you'll find yourself spun out of la box and into virgin territory: twisted-writer territory. And that's a cool place to be, in this writer's opinion.

I'm off to conference, but I'll be back Monday. Take it away, Kath, and write on, all!

Unexpected Inspirations

2006-07-25T10:55:00.000-04:00

Sorry for the late post. Bugger's at it again! But I won't waste time telling you how many hairs I pulled out this time. On to the good stuff...

So you guys know I went on vacation, right? (Oh, stop groaning) New places and experiences are food for writers' imaginations, and I expected my holiday at the beach to feed mine, but I got Nada while giving my pre-melanoma spots more fodder for metastasizing.

However, we WERE in the South--North Carolina, to be precise (which the natives have sadly noted has been spoiled by too many migrating New Yorkers). My husband's Raleigh born and bred, with roots going back to the mid-18th century, so my Yankee accent is tolerated.

Driving around the brand new interstate lined with endless pines shimmering with heat, I kept seeing signs advertising this magical place, a place boasting publicly of legendary southern hospitality: Bojangles Chicken and Biscuits.

"Is that any good?" I asked my husband. His eyes bore permanent scrawls from squinting into sun unfiltered by the ozone layer. "What kind of food do they serve?"

"A heart attack on a plate."

"Let's check it out."

And so I began to find inspiration.

Bojangles Chicken and Biscuits can be smelled a half mile before it's seen, a seductive scent of grease and crisping animal skin. My husband, southern as he is, prefers the more comfortable confines of Chick-Fil-A where your chicken comes boneless. Bojangles doesn't fuss with that. They coat chicken parts in a thick spicy layer and toss it into a vat of palm kernel oil and nobody asks for the nutrition sheet. It comes with sweet tea (if you've been south of Mason-Dixon, you know what I'm talking about), and the servers look at you funny if you ask for a diet coke instead. It's Pepsi country.

So we get our chicken after a long discussion about sides (the biscuits were a no-brainer, but we had to puzzle over the Brunswick stew and the coleslaw that looked like it was soaked in apple juice), and the girl at the register can barely contain herself from rolling her eyes. Damn Yankees, I could see her thinking. We hit the dining area with our loaded tray, and I sighed in pure pleasure.

The room was full of church ladies in their best Sunday dresses.

Heaven for the writer, this flock of immaculately kept elderly women with purring vowels and pillbox hats. My imagination snapped into overdrive: why would these ladies choose to meet at the Bojangles after church? Was it the ambiance? Or something else, something that cut deeper, like heritage maybe, or the really good biscuits? Why didn't they meet at the Wendy's across the street? It was newer and bigger.

The chicken squirted grease in my mouth, and my daughter wasn't too keen on having to pick steamy meat off the bones of her entree--she's a Chick-Fil-A fan too. My husband steadily mowed through his sausage-biscuit sandwich and I sat entranced at the inspiration that had landed in my lap, and thankful that I keep my writer's cap on at all times.

Unexpected inspiration. Suddenly my two-week jaunt away from the computer seemed worth it.

Click Here! Hot Stuff Edition

2006-07-24T09:36:00.000-04:00

Originally, I was going to post a very cool pic of a two-tone lobster for this post...and then Floyd Landis won the Tour de France yesterday. If you've been following the tour, then you know all about the drama--the dope charges that kicked so many out of the race at the start, Floyd's own battles with a wasted, paining hip (it'll be replaced in upcoming weeks) and his struggle to reclaim the yellow jersey after having a dream-crush ride earlier in the week. This guy's determination and strength, the fact that he was able to make up a stunning 8-minute deficit over mountainous terrain has put him in the Tour's record books and endeared him to all. Fodder for a novel or a new protagonist? Could be! And so it's only fitting that the lobster move on over and give Floyd the top spot in my Hot Stuff post this a.m.! Enjoy...

The Writer's Medical and Forensics Lab is a site "where writers and readers can learn, be entertained, and obtain the specialized medical and forensic knowledge they need to make their stories come to life or to better understand someone else’s story." Great page of links to more info, too.

Wish someone could pay you to sit and polish your wip? Maybe someone can. Check out C. Hope Clark's list of Funds for Writers. While you're there, check out her contest page as well, where you'll find lots of good possibilities for submitting that poem or short story.

Longing for the day when I actually need to use this one…here’s a Royalty Calculator, thanks to Kresley Cole! Using statistics, such as the dollar amount of your advance, the print run and more, determine if your book will “earn out.” The calculator shown on the site is fixed, but Kresley has generously offered to send a free interactive copy of this calculator to anyone who emails her!

Elizabeth Lucas-Taylor's Marketing and Promoting Yourself is a super 75-page PDF file loaded with tips, including how to print your own ARCs, promote a booksigning and maximize impact of those book blurbs.

Stay with me now...

Want to keep tabs on the latest best-selling novels? Check out this fabulous database on the USA Today site, which lists the top 150 sellers each week.

For a run down of things to avoid and watch for in your contract clauses, check out EPIC's comprehensive list.

Ever imagine how the epic Lord of the Rings might have turned out if someone other than J.R.R. Tolkien had written it? Others have. A lot of them! For a great laugh, click here, if only to read the Nora Roberts entry.

Ladies, need to get into the mind of a man but feeling at loose ends? If you’re feeling brave enough to traverse the self-proclaimed “man portal,” visit Ask Men and learn more than you ever wanted to know about how Adams think.

Learn why classics such as “The Age of Innocence,” “Pride and Prejudice” and “Jane Eyre” worked by reading notes on structure and characterization. CliffNotes for novels, plays, essays, short stories and poems are now available online for FREE. Similar synopses of stories are available at Book-a-Minute Classics. (More great free reads at the amazing Project Guttenberg site.)

And because I couldn't delete my salty friend, here's his pic. A Maine lobstermancaught this guy recently and thought a prank was being played on him; the crustacean looks like he spent a little time in a vat of boiling water, after all. Turns out, he's just a two-tone fluke of nature, a 1 in 50 million catch...I wonder if Mr. Lobsterman wishes he'd just bought a lottery ticket instead?

Write on!

AUTHOR INTERVIEW: Hal Duncan, Part 2

2006-07-21T16:06:00.000-04:00

Glasgow author Hal Duncan literally busted the box with his amazing literary debute VELLUM. Part sci-fi, part historical, VELLUM inverts and subverts literary conventions to result in an exhilarating experience. Recently, Kathleen and Therese spoke with Hal on process, the long road to publication, and the importance of never dumbing it down for the reader.

Part 2: Interview with Hal Duncan

Q: You experiment a lot with characters that cut in either direction -- antagonist or protagonist. The Jack character in particular could be read as hero or villain. Was this conscious on your part or did his character evolve? What is your process for getting to know your characters?

HD: The simple answer to the second part of that question is that I get to know my characters by writing them. I tend to write a lot in the first person -- as with Jack -- or in a sort of “close-up” third person where the reader is virtually in the back of the character’s head, so their thoughts seep into the text-- as with Phreedom -- and where that text might even slip into outright stream-of-consciousness at times -- as with Seamus. So as you write the story, partly consciously and partly unconsciously, you’re trying to create a sense of their voice. For me, this is often when that feeling a lot of writers talk about -- of being in “the zone” -- kicks in, when you find yourself immersed in a particular voice to the extent that the character or the book seems to have taken over, to be writing itself.

With Jack Flash in particular, I suspect I’m just channelling the id, that impetuous wild man with no impulse-control. Actually most of the characters in the books represent one archetype or another -- superego, id, anima, self, shadow; there’s a seven-fold pseudo-Jungian model of the psyche in there, if you want to dig into it. And that feeds into the ambiguity of a character like Jack. Totally unrestrained, the id -- as Jack Flash -- is a force of nature, an avatar of chaos. He’ll shoot first and forget to ask questions later because his attention span doesn’t stretch that far. He’s swaggering and psychotic but he’s kinda charming because we recognise that sense of relish in ourselves, that glint in the wicked grin, that id; there’s a little bit of Jack Flash in us all, I think. But the id is dangerous because repressed desire becomes twisted, warped. So you see that in the other Jacks -- the Jack Carters of the historical or futuristic narratives. When you first meet Jack he’s bottled-up, up-tight; he’s just another soldier-boy working for the wrong side.

The point is that archetypes are value-neutral. It’s only in their relationships to each other that they become positively or negatively charged, when they manifest as brother and sister, father and son, enemies, lovers and so on. I wanted to try and show that complexity of potentialities in the shifting relationships of the characters in the book.

There’s also a more writerly concern in there with subverting the whole hero-versus-villain cliché. There’s a wonderful point in the movie “Falling Down” where the audience realises that the Michael Douglas character is not the hero. At the start of the movie we’re watching this little man go postal and we’re with him, rooting for him; then he just goes a step too far and our whole alignment of sympathies shifts. And by the end of the movie even the Douglas character has realised this. “Wait a minute. I’m the bad guy here?” he says. I wanted to have similar turn-arounds with some of the characters in VELLUM, to get past the simplistic cowboys-and-indians morality of your classic Big Fat Fantasy.

Q: The really breathtaking part of your book strips away layers of history and etymology of words down to the cradle of Western civilization--Sumer--which we are ironically bombing into oblivion even now. There’s also a fair bit of references to classical mythology and biblical history. Did you worry that you were getting too complex for the reader? When do you know you’ve gone too far?

HD: Too much is never enough; there’s no such thing as too far. I’d rather over-estimate the reader’s knowledge than under-estimate their intelligence, because ultimately that’s what it comes down to -- either removing or explaining every obscure factoid that somebody somewhere might not know about (i.e. assuming ignorance as a default), or having faith that if they don’t get a reference, well, they’ll have the smarts to go check Wikipedia, read a book, or just pick it up from the story itself (i.e. assuming curiosity as a default). You don’t know who Inanna or Dumuzi are? (Ed: we did it for you. Click links). Well, pretty much the whole text of their core myth is woven into VELLUM, so you should know by the end of the book. You only have this vague notion of Prometheus -- yeah, he’s the one stole fire from the gods, right? You have no idea what happened afterwards? Well, if you can read through the overlay of history and fantasy, the story as told in Aeschylus’s “Prometheus Bound” is right there in front of you. I work on the assumption that if you’re reading this kind of book then you like a good mental work-out, you don’t want to be condescended to.

No, I never worry about being too complex for the reader, because that kind of second-guessing just leads to chickening-out, copping-out and selling-out -- or it would for me anyway. There was a discussion a while back on a message board I hang out on, about writing with an awareness of an imaginary reader. For some writers that reader is themselves; they judge their work on whether they would want to read it. For others it’s an audience, small or large, commercial or critical; they judge their work on whether it will speak to that audience in a common language. Different writers write for different reasons, taking different approaches, with different aims. Personally, I’ll judge my own work on whether I like it or not, and I will also judge it on whether it might be pandering to or alienating this potential audience or that, but these judgements are all over-ridden by standards which aren’t set by any hypothetical reader, myself included, but rather encoded in the book itself. What is the theme of this book? What is its basic form and function? Given the underlying architectural aesthetic, so to speak, what degree of complexity is consistent with that when it comes to interior design? Is this a Minimalist book or a Baroque book? Spare and simple or intricately involuted.

Q: Tell us about your road to publication.

HD: Well, it was largely luck for me, being in the right place at the right time. I’ve been a member of the Glasgow SF Writer’s Circle for umpteen years now and a bunch of us tend to go to the UK cons. Some have gone off to cons in the States. Over the years the Glasgow mob has tended to build up friendships with other aspiring writers, indie press editors, and so on (we’re from Glasgow, after all; we make friends easily); and over the years, some of this wide scene of like-minded souls have started to break through into publication -- magazines, anthologies, year’s bests, book deals. So I was at a con a few years back, having just finished VELLUM, along with Neil Williamson, Phil Raines, Gary Gibson and a bunch of others. Anyway, Neil had a copy of the manuscript I was looking for feedback on and -- darling that he is -- he was reading it at the breakfast table… as a quite deliberate, I suspect, attempt to pique the curiosity of the right people. Long story short, a chain of readings and recommendations leads to Peter Lavery at Pan Macmillan saying, OK, send me a copy. So I did. And he bought it.

The US deal came by a similar chain of fortuity. I run a blog where I tend to post 5000 word rants about anything and everything, and one of these posts -- a particularly opinionated one on the ghetto mentality within SF/F led to a mate kicking off a thread on my message board at Night Shade Books, joking that I needed to take my medication. The thread grew into a big debate which caught the attention of Jim Minz. He followed the link through to my blog, and I guess he thought I was interesting enough (or just insane enough) to be worth checking out, just at the point where Macmillan were touting the US rights for VELLUM. So he did. And he bought it.

I actually feel vaguely guilty about my luck in short-circuiting the slush-piles and the agents, but I spent ten years writing the damn thing so I think I paid my dues. The sacrifices to Dionysus might have also helped.

Q: Do you retain the services of an agent now? If so, are they helpful, and if not, why not?

HD: Yes, I’ve signed on with Howard Morhaim now. I’m not shopping round the next book yet -- it’s barely even started yet -- so I can’t really say much about the helpfulness of agents, but at the end of the day, I’m sure he’ll be worth every penny of his percentage. I don’t really have the salesman mentality to be pimping my own wares and haggling over advances -- I’m just not any good at that sort of thing -- and it’ll be good to have someone I can ask the sort of awkward questions you might not want to ask an editor. Also, apart from being a major name in the business, Howard is very much simpatico with the kind of fiction I write. He’s got a great stable of writers I truly respect, like Jeff VanderMeer, Jeffrey Ford, and Michael Moorcock, and a lot more outside the genre -- a great blend of literary and genre. With that sort of eclecticism, I was very keen for him to represent me, so I’m really looking forward to working with him.

Q: You’ve got an amazing website as well as one of the more entertaining writer’s blog out there. How important is online promotion to marketing your book? Do you recommend that other writers pay more attention to the online forms of marketing and promotion?

A: It’s a tricky thing because blatant self-promotion just for the sake of it can be pretty dull and tedious, but I do think, as a secondary effect, the way a blog or a journal can raise people’s awareness of you as a writer is something that it would be foolish to under-estimate. The way I think of it is that a blog is just another mode of expression open to you as a writer and you need to be writing it for the same reason you write stories or essays -- to say something. There needs to be real content to it. You need to be interesting, entertaining. You can have fun with it because it’s informal; you can be as bolshie or as whimsical as you want because, at the end of the day, the nature of a blog as a personal journal means you’re presenting these ideas and fancies as transitory and experimental. Even when I’m exploring more serious theories about writing and genre or politics and religion, I tend to put the emphasis on the exploring. My scribblings on scribblings aren’t essays, not rigorous and researched academic essays by any means, even where they’re referenced. Instead a blog, like a forum, can be a great place to debate with others with similar interests. The follow-through of that is that if there’s something interesting to this rant or that random thought, links may well ripple out over the blogosphere, onto forums. You can’t do it deliberately and calculatedly just to “raise your profile” -- that’s just bad form and people will probably see through it -- but if you actually like writing as a medium, if you’re comfortable putting your crazy ideas out there in front of anyone and everyone, you can prove yourself to potential readers in a way that no review can match. Better still you can tell those potential readers exactly where you’re coming from, your interests, your influences. You can post samples for readers to taste.

I wonder if it’s not as important to warn readers who will loathe your work as it is to reach the readers who will love it. I’d much rather have someone read my blog and decide that I’m a poncy literary type whose non-linear nonsenses will piss them off, than have them read a rave review, buy the book thinking it’s the New [insert Big Name Author here], and end up telling everyone they know how much they hate it, regardless of that person’s tastes -- because I do think a strong negative response often over-rides our objective judgement that anyone else could possibly like this thing we hated. The inverse is true, I think, with reaching the right readers; if you pique their curiosity with your online blatherings enough to buy the book, and if they love it, I think they’ll still tend to be selective in who they recommend it to. Or at least the people who respond to those recommendations -- often posted as blog entries themselves -- will be those who are simpatico to that reader in the same way that they are simpatico with you. And so the internet becomes this huge globalised medium for word-of-mouth to spread -- personal, individual recommendations that are more reliable and trustworthy because they’re more targeted along existing lines of common tastes and interests.

Also I think it’s good for you as a writer just to be writing, to be playing with ideas about writing, telling stupid stories about your drunken exploits. It’s practice.

Q: Do you use a critique group? How do you process their feedback?

HD: Yes, I’ve been part of the Glasgow SF Writer’s Circle for over fifteen years now, I think. I still take short stories to them, although with VELLUM and INK I didn’t submit them for a crit session because 200,000 words novels are a bit much to do in one evening. We work pretty much by the Milford Rules -- face-to-face, going round the circle one by one, each person getting their turn to give their critique while the author has to keep schtum… until their rebuttal at the end, of course, when they get to tell everyone why they’re wrong and stupid. With a short story that format works well, but it’s not so easy with novels because there’s so much to deal with. You can’t expect everyone to devote the time and energy required to do justice to that length of work, so my tendency these days is just to ask if anyone’s interested in reading it and commenting by email.

In terms of processing that feedback… I think there’s a cycle you go through as a writer, from not listening to listening and back again, from arrogance to insecurity and round and round again. When I joined the GSFWC I don’t think I was capable of seeing faults in my own writing even when they were spelled out to me. Processing feedback consisted pretty much of sulkily brooding about how those bastards didn’t fucking understand at all, and it’s not a pointless vignette with no dramatic tension, and I’ll show you, goddamnit. It’s only after that bitter thirst for revenge and validation has pushed you through the development of critical skills (so you can give as good as you get with the cut-throat razor of critique) and the gradual application of those to your own writing (so you can make it so fucking good they will bow down before your genius) that you actually, I think, become detached enough from your own work to hear the validity of other people’s judgement. You realise, well, actually, yes that story is a piece of shit. Oh dear.

But the more you go through the workshop process, the more you internalise the feedback, knowing beforehand how certain readers will respond and either modifying your work accordingly or not. There comes a point, I think, where the most valuable feedback, the critique you do listen to is the stuff that you actually already knew, even if only at the level of niggling doubt. If the comment makes sense, if you hear it and think, yes, that’s the problem I was trying to put my finger on, it’s immensely valuable. But by this point in the workshop cycle, I think, you’re actually confident (or arrogant) enough to shrug off comments that you don’t agree with. And it’s not because you’re fooling yourself. It’s because those comments would be valid if you were writing a different story. You’re not. You’re writing this story. And for this story that comment doesn’t apply. It kind of ties in with what I was saying earlier, with the idea that you can judge a story in terms of its own aesthetic standards. It might be wrong for this audience. It might be wrong for that audience. But it’s right for the story.

Q: Ten years (fifteen actually, as part of a critique group) is a LOOONG time. Did you ever entertain giving up or that it just wasn't going to happen for you? Or did you just know that eventually it would happen if you hung in there?

HD: I'd have to say that for a lot of that time I wasn't really thinking either ahead, at the road to publication, or back, at the length of time I'd been doing it. I was pretty half-arsed at submitting short fiction. I mean it’s not going to let you quit your day job, and a lot of the work I wrote didn’t seem to fit the main markets anyway; it was too pulpy to sell to the literary journals, and too poncy to sell to the genre markets. Also, I kept on writing these 20-30,000 word novellas that, I figured, were just not going to be picked up by a magazine. That kind of word count is simply out of bounds in most submissions guidelines and even those markets that might take it, well, you’ve got to be really worth it if you’re going to take up that much space. And when the novel started to come together it was so rough and wild, at first, that I reckoned no editor in their right mind would touch it. I mean, as far as I was concerned it was a Grand Folly that I was doing because, well, I wanted to. I wanted to get it out of my system, and then I could settle down and write a nice sensible novel, one which started at the beginning and went all the way to the end… you know, like normal novels do. No Grand Theories of Myth. No archetypal characters with innumerable contradictory avatars.

If I thought ahead at all it was pretty much that given another ten or twenty years then I might actually be as good as I want to be. I got past the whole dream of being an enfant terrible, first novel published in your early twenties, critical acclaim, and all that. Rock stars need to be young; there’s no age limit on writing. So I sort of took the long haul approach: if you have to write a million words before you’re any good, as the saying goes, well then let’s just get on with it.

Actually, as some of the GSFWC started to get novel deals -- Bill King, Michael Cobley, Gary Gibson -- the idea of being published did become more real; but I think I had a Romantic notion that I’d be the Glasgow group’s Neal Cassady -- the one who never actually achieves success like the Ginsbergs or the Kerouacs but who pops up in all the stories about the group, the odd character in a novel here or there. I’d be the glorious failure, the one that all his mates knew should have made it, could have made it, just maybe, if he hadn’t been too busy living. Other writers might talk about perseverance, sticking with it, but I think that somewhat whimsical illusion actually served me better. It’s much more fun to be the quixotic waster working away on your own mad projects for the hell of it, expecting to crash and burn, but thinking, fuck it; why the hell not?

Q: What’s next for you?

HD: Well, the next thing to hit the shelves will be INK, the sequel to VELLUM, but after that the next novel is a retelling of the Epic of Gilgamesh. It will be a more linear novel but again it’s going to be multi-threaded, using an adaptation of the original source text as an underlying architecture and interweaving two other threads, one historical and one set in the near-future. The original epic is both simple and powerful, with a relationship between Gilgamesh, King of Uruk and Enkidu, a wild man which moves from adventure to tragedy, raising all sorts of questions about humanity and mortality. I want to map that to a thread set in British Columbia in frontier times, with the relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu reflected in one between a European settler and a Tlingit orphan who’s grown up in the wilderness. In the last thread, the SFnal thread, the Gilgamesh character is an anthropologist who specialises in totemism, and who gets drawn, by one of his students -- the Enkidu figure -- into a subculture of biotech fursuits and bodymods where people have animal alter egos… not unlike modern-day furries but a bit more hip, more posthuman. It’s all about how we draw lines between human and animal, “civilised” and “primitive”, about our awareness of our own mortality, and our reactions to that awareness.

Apart from that I’ve got a whole bunch of bits and bobs either coming out or in the works: a short story in the EIDOLON anthology which should be out just about now; a collection of poetry called SONNETS TO ORPHEUS to be released in a limited, numbered edition from Papaveria Press in August, if things go to plan; I’m actually doing a song with a band called Aereogramme for an album of collaborations between Scottish writers and musicians (and with writers like Alasdair Gray and Edwin Morgan also involved I’m totally chuffed to be in their company); “The Chiaroscurist” will be getting reprinted in John Klima’s LOGORRHEA anthology based around spelling bee words (which also has an amazing line-up of contributors); and I’m doing a novella for a project Chris Roberson of Monkeybrain Books is working on which sounds really exciting.

Good luck, Hal, and thanks so much for a great interview!

Linktopia, SuperFly Girl Edition

2006-07-20T14:27:00.000-04:00

She's the coolest cat, she shizzles my fizzizle, and she makes a mean minestrone soup. She's Therese Walsh, and she's super fly. She's held the fort down on WU while I've cavorted on the beaches and drank way too much.

Super Fly Girl deserves a break and she's going to take hers next week. I hope I can fill in for her as well as she's filled in for me, but somehow I doubt it. I'll do my pathetic best, however.

So get ready, yo, for Linky Goodness TM

This has nothing to do with writing, but the new season of Project Runway started last week. Thank god Bravo cycles episodes every other day. Unfortunately, the wankers over at the Washington Post revealed the winner of the episode prior to the airing. Shame! For those writers looking for character inspiration, hssst. This show is loaded with them. I'm especially taken with Vincent. What mind produces a chain-draped lampshade for a hat and calls it 'inspired' fashion or doesn't let his team partner help him and then berates her for leaving him alone? I can't wait to find out.

There. Don't you miss Therese already?

On a more serious note, please pray, burn incense, or whatever you do to call upon your ghods for the safety of fellow blogger Melly, who is in Israel right now enduring a horrific situation. Melly, if you get a chance to read this, you and everyone in the region regardless of nationality or political persuasion, are in our thoughts and prayers.

In case you missed Part One and Two of our two part post speculating who will die next in the final Harry Potter tome, others have been reading tea leaves and laying odds . . . . Another superfly friend of mine sent me the link to this fun blog: Top Ten Worst URL FLops . . . . . Crawford Kilian has some advice for folks who like to use parenthesis (though some of my favorite authors use them to good effect) . . . . Hal shares another hilarious and demented ramble at Geek Show. Don't miss Part Two of our interview with him starting tomorrow, it's milk-snorting funny . . . . and if you haven't laughed enough, the Bitches muse over fad for dead rabbits on the upper lips of 1970's cover models . . . . more reality checks from Writer Beware . . . . Ray's been in correspondence with La Snark and they pass along good advice for those ready to query . . . .

More after the jump.

Natalie at Murder She Writes blogs about the tendency to tinker so much, the writer never gets to the delicious words THE END . . . . Eric has a good post about cutting out the padding we novelist love to wallow in . . . . Mickey Spillane is gone . . . . the July forecast is in for Astrology for Writers. Another auspicious month for my sign, but alas, I've yet to see any predictions materialize. No matter, I'll keep checking it . . . .

OK, I'm exhausted now. I need to recondition my blogging muscles again.

Write on.

Hmm...what do you think?

2006-07-19T09:00:00.000-04:00

Quiz time. Who would say this?

What is needed in your queries is only your experience in writing long fiction and not that in writing scripts, poetry or any journalistic endeavors. If this is your first novel, ever, state that and only that in your query. If you have written other novels but they are not the ones you are querying on, please mention them.

Make your guess, then click on down below for the right answer.
Okay, you're here, here's another excerpt:

We realize that many writer boards advise members to list all writing experience in your query letters, but this agency thinks it a waste of time and effort. It means nothing to us as we judge your ability on your writing sample(s) only and not what you say about yourself. We cannot use this information to impress editors, consequently, for us, it is meaningless and unnecessary information.

That's right, an AGENCY broadcast this. I guess this particular agency doesn't want to know about experience a) working with editors b) working with deadlines c) that guarantees you know how to compose a beginning, middle and end... I'm sure there are a slew of other arguments, but I'm too flabbergasted to come up with them at the moment. When another writer came back and presented a rebuttal to this, citing the deadline argument, the agent wrote,

The deadlines for articles and novels are different, as is the rhythm of the publishing process and how it proceeds. For me, it would be like saying that if I have held a job selling screws, that I would be an expert at selling automobiles because they contain screws--if that makes any sense. :)

If I were Forrest Gump, I might say that sense is as sense does. But I'm not, and only an idiot would want to go head to head with an agent, right? Granted, writing an article on peripheral arterial disease doesn't say I or anyone can craft a lengthy, complex novel, but having experience as a paid writer or even being a career writer is of no consequence? C'mon!

But maybe it's just me.

Home Again

2006-07-18T12:03:00.000-04:00

My last post on beaches for awhile, I swear. Today I travel home, tan and rested, and hopefully ready to tackle blogging in earnest again.

I've got a notebook full of ideas I can't wait to tackle when I get back, but I can't do that until I finish the edits on my current WIP. I'm still working with Holly Lisle's One Pass Manuscript Revision technique which has the great advantage of portability....if you call dragging a notebook and MS paper onto a windy beach. I did it, though.

No excuses, just results.

Click Here! Writers' Helpers Edition

2006-07-17T08:13:00.000-04:00

There's Kath--riding her pony back from her beachly travels. She'll be back tomorrow, and I can honestly say I have a brand new appreciation for having a partner on this site. Buddies/ partners/ helpers are great, and so this week's Click Here is all about helper sites on the 'net. Enjoy!

First of all, a MEME for WU: We've been added to the Preditors and Editors site as a RECOMMENDED visit for serious writers. How cool is that? So now I have some authority when I say, Writer Unboxed should be your first stop when you're looking for a helper site (I know, I know--I'm preaching to the choir).

Want a business card without spending oodles of cash? Design your business cards for FREE at Vista Print. Choose from 42 designs.

Do you tend to use the same words over and over again? Check out the Web Frequency Indexer, where you can cut-paste a segment of your wip to check on frequently used words. Click their process button and get a run down on how many times you use the same words over and over again.

Want to learn how much moola an author might make from various publishing houses? Check out Brenda Hiatt's comprehensive list Show me the Money! available at Karen Fox's website.

Stay with me now...

If you're an author interested in tracking your rank at Amazon.com, check out Rank Forest, a site that makes it easy!

The Truth About Publishing by Ian Irvine provides an enlightening (and sometimes depressing) view of the publishing industry. And here's another great article: Coaching Creativity: 7 Lessons from Artists by Susan Falter-Barns.

Do you have a winning title for your story? Check out Lulu’s Titlescorer program to find out.

Okay, you have a winning title, but is that winning title original? I love Amaztype’s cool program – plug in the title of your book and Amazon.com searches for all book titles with those words, then artistically presents them to using your own book title as the template.

Real Tech News has some great tips re: shortcuts you can take using Windows key combos. These include how to shortcut your way into closing document windows, displaying the START menu and more. Check it here.

Catalog your books online with Library Thing. Connect with others who read the same things you do by entering your current reading list or your entire library.

Write on, all!

AUTHOR INTERVIEW: Hal Duncan, Part 1

2006-07-14T09:30:00.000-04:00

We’ve first got to say that it’s been a long time since we’ve read a book as trippy, disturbing and exhilarating as Hal Duncan's debut novel, VELLUM. It’s a thriller, gay erotica, SF/F, a historical, horror and character studies all amalgamated within a postmodern stylistic structure. Recently, Kathleen and Therese chatted with Hal about his literary style, the evolution of VELLUM, and the challenge of multiple narrative weavings and controversial plot points.

Part 1: Interview with Hal Duncan

Q: Tell us a little bit about the inspiration behind VELLUM, some of the style choices you made, and why you wrote this book.

HD: The original idea dates back to when I was at university, and reading about Lovecraft's Necronomicon one day, Borges's Book of Sand the next. If you take the two of those and fold in the I CHING (which I'd picked up by way of Philip K Dick's THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE) and the mediaeval Books of Hours (which I'd learned about in History of Art lectures), well, it isn't hard to see where the idea came from for the Book of All Hours, the metafictional / fantastic conceit that underpins VELLUM: this ancient tome said to contain everything ever written and everything never written, the names of every angel or demon, the deeds of every human, the future history of reality itself.

I think those books of mystery and wonder, fictional or factual, all combined into the core idea after a weird experience in the university library. I'd decided, out of curiosity, to check their database for Nostradamus, and found that, yes, they had a copy in the Special Collection in the basement. So I wander down into this room walled with glass-doored bookcases and I've only just walked in when the curator asks me what I'm looking for. Not having computed yet that this is where they keep all the extremely valuable and extremely fragile antiques, I tell the curator what I'm looking for, and he gives me a card to sign before disappearing. Five minutes later he returns with this leatherbound volume of Nostradamus, foam cushions to rest it on, and kid gloves for me to wear. I'm too embarrassed to tell him that, actually, it was just idle curiosity brought me down here and there's no good reason a time-waster like me should be let near the crumbling pages of this precious object. I'm even more embarrassed, after mumbling my thanks and setting the book down on a table, to realise that, of course, it's in bloody mediaeval French. All I can do is sit there for fifteen minutes, pretending to study it and make notes. Anyway, as dumb as I felt, it was also quite strange, sitting there with this book which was so much an... artefact. I had this weird sense of its singularity; and having it in my hands, the idea that it was still there to be used (if I only had the first idea how to use it) made that quite different from, say, looking at some object on display in a museum case.

That's where, I think, the idea of the Book of All Hours took seed, in that sense of wonder at an ancient cryptic tome. From an urge to syncretism (or one-upmanship), I suppose, this is my attempt to create a story that encompasses all those variant images of the book as an object of power, with the magic book to end all magic books.

Joyce was another major influence. With the first stab at the novel I tried to write it in a full-on FINNEGANS WAKE style word-play language of allusional puns. Needless to say this stalled completely, but other Joycean elements have replaced that, like the thematic structuring of the four volumes around seasons and times of day, the palimpsesting of ancient myths under the historic or fantastic narratives. But what I wanted to do was create something that crosses the whole spectrum of literary modes, because if you're writing about a book-that-contains-all-books, well, the narrative should itself embody that diversity. It should have comedy as well as tragedy, parables and prophecies, ripping yarns and witty anecdotes. The end result is not so much Post-Modernist as Pulp Modernist, I think; the pastiches and homages are playful, but they're not arch. I'm much more sympathetic to the Modernists' abstract aims than to the Post-Modernists' ironic games.

Q: As near as we can tell, there are four main narratives (Phreedom, Thomas Messenger, Jack, and Reynard), and a host of minor narratives. Did you choose this form of exposition when you began, or did it evolve organically?

HD: A bit of both. Basically, I've always found the collage form interesting, and even a lot of my early stories messed around with conventional narrative structure -- tales-within-tales or sequenced vignettes. (And most of these early experiments were lousy, I hasten to add.) But when I came up with the idea for the Book of All Hours, the novel I originally planned had a completely different story, and it was all from the viewpoint of a single protagonist. When that ground to a halt I put what I'd written in a drawer and abandoned it. Thing is, at that point I had another idea -- one which was entirely distinct as far as I was concerned -- for a series of short stories using a mythos in which all the gods and monsters, all the angels and demons of history and myth, were actually humans who had become "unkin". These stories would all interlink and, set against an apocalyptic backdrop, tell the story of War in Heaven from the perspective of deserters and draft-dodgers, renegades and refugees.

[Art Note: "Angels and Demons"
Oil and Acrylic on Canvas
© Artist Gina Jrel, 2005]

Just like Grand Plan A -- the novel idea -- Grand Plan B completely stalled. I wrote two stories -- one which would become the chapter of VELLUM set in Slab City, and another which would become the sections set in Endhaven -- and then the ideas dried up. Despite the fact that one story actually had Metatron, God's Scribe, for some unknown reason I didn't connect this to the idea of the Book of All Hours.

So... Plan C was less grand: sod it, just write some bloody stories. Being an inveterate experimentalist though, every other story ended up being told as some non-linear, multi-viewpoint mosaic (like the Jack Flash sections) or in an epistolic form as letters and journal entries (like in the Caucasus sections). The same character would appear in different incarnations in different stories. Ideas like the unkin, the Cant, gravings, or the Book popped up all over the place. Almost a decade after writing the showdown between Phreedom and Metatron in Slab City, I suddenly saw how I could work this into a retelling of Inanna, splicing ancient and modern realities. The version of Tammuz-as-Thomas came immediately after that, as a novella, but I realised the structure needed to be more complex to reflect his metamorphic nature. It was pretty much at this point, a good way down the line, with a lot already written in the form of short stories or novellas, that I gradually realised all these various techniques of collage I'd been developing on the scale of short stories and novellas could be scaled up and used to bring together these two projects I thought I had abandoned years ago… but that I'd actually been writing all along.

So the answer to the question is: yes and no. Plan A was for a singular narrative. Plan B was always intended to tell multiple stories from multiple angles. And with Plan C, well, my unconscious appears to have been the one making the decisions all along. To me it feels like the narrative form evolved but I'm not convinced my unconscious didn't know exactly what needed to be done.

Q: Let’s talk about process. The narrative structure of the book is challenging, to say the least. You move forward, backward, sideways, and every which way, which mirrored the fluidity of time itself. How did you keep it all straight? Where did you know to come back and tie one thread off and begin another? What’s your plotting method?

HD: Actually from my point of view it wasn't too much of a struggle to keep things straight, with most of the narrative threads being written separately and only later taken apart into sections to be clicked into place around each other. Although I don't tend to write linearly anyway (but rather have the narrative flicking this way or that in time, as with, say, the faerie chapter), I do tend to work with only one narrative thread at a time.

The Seamus narrative in volume two is actually a good example of how, plot-wise, this process actually makes things a lot easier. I mean, you start with the source text, Aeschylus's "Prometheus Bound", and you have an idea of translating that into the unkin reality, and into early 20th Century history at the same time, telling a story which mirrors Prometheus's but giving it these
extra angles -- mimetic history and futuristic fiction. With the myth there, you already have a framework in place in terms of plot, and the more familiar you are with the text, the more it will kick off possible parallels. On a first run through I’d simply take multiple translations and try to find my own phraseology, replacing archaicisms with word-plays, modernising the text, chopping words and phrases round until I had my own interpretation of the play.

Then, I’d chunk the result into sections, working out the chapter structure, where the big dramatic breaks are, where the Jack Flash or Jack Carter sections should intersect that narrative. In the second volume it’s a fairly straightforward structure of viewpoints alternating between chapters. Once you have the chapters in place you go through it again looking for the smaller dramatic breaks within those chapters, the section breaks where the action needs to cut from the future to the past. By that point you’re already thinking of where and how to add the layers of realist and fantastic narrative, how the description will weave round the dialogue, where the dialogue has to be radically adapted to fit the scene. It’s actually, I suppose, like a painter doing sketches first, shuffling them together to work out the composition, blocking that out on the canvass and only then building up the detail on top.

The point is, I’m not simply starting from the beginning and writing all the way through to the end, so the end of a thread is often being tied into place at the same time that the start of it is -- just with a loose knot that will get tightened and trimmed later on in the process.

Q: You don’t shy away from controversial stances and take every opportunity to flip the bird at institutions, government, and especially our present understanding of the role of religion in supporting oppression and acts of violence. Talk a little bit about why you’ve chosen to write about these topics. Did anyone along the way ever tell you to tone it down for the market?

HD: Surprisingly perhaps I haven’t had to deal with any heebie-jeebies at all on the part of either Pan Macmillan in the UK or Del Rey in the US, and I like to think (i.e. I hope) that that’s because any political stances in the writing come over as passionate and outspoken without being too blinkered or didactic. Alternatively, it might be because you only have to read the book to know that I’d be highly unlikely to compromise the thematic heart of it for the sake of higher sales. Because it would be selling-out and because it wouldn’t work. Trying to tone it down would be like trying to tone down CATCH-22. Try and make that book less dark, less absurd, more safe, more reassuring, and all you’d do is turn it into a cheap travesty that no-one would give a damn about. You’d have to be a cretin and a coward to do that, and the people I’ve dealt with in the publishing world have been anything but. They’ve totally understood that toning down the passion in the book would only ruin it.

I mean, ultimately I’m writing about these things with a sort of pacifist / socialist / anarchist stance because that’s what the book is about -- the War in Heaven not as some grandiose struggle between Good and Evil but as an actual war, an ideological power-struggle where you can’t be sure who’s right and who’s wrong -- or even if anyone is right or wrong. The current political and religious climate of the War on Terror makes these questions, I think, ones that we have to ask. We have to explore the ethical dilemmas of interventionism and isolationism. I mean, what else is there to write about in this day and age, what else that actually really matters? Some middle-class character going through a mid-life crisis and relationship problems, reaching a moment of apotheosis in which they realise just how screwed up they’ve become by their own neuroses? Kill me now and feed my body to the pigs.

We’re living in a world of internment without charge, global power-struggles between ideologies, guerrilla warfare and civilian slaughter. We’re living in Picasso’s Guernica, in a world-wide version of the Spanish Civil War, only it’s not Fascists versus Stalinists but Crusaders versus Jihadists. In terms of that current struggle I think we have to challenge the dichotomy, ask the hard questions about the totalitarian tendencies of religion, which is really what I wanted to do with VELLUM.

Q: You tackle the murder of Matthew Shepard and the homophobia that lead to the crime, and offer an unflinching look at the aftermath of his death. You especially raise the point that the homophobia that killed him is still alive and well, perhaps even thriving. Do you think that SF/F genre is one that is particularly malleable in allowing a writer to explore areas and topics that might otherwise not be as easily digested?

HD: Yes, and I think there’s two things here that make SF/F particularly powerful in this respect. The exotic is the life-blood of fantastic fiction; and since it’s the unusual which is generally marginalised, othered by society at large, fantastic fiction has become a field which naturally appeals to those who don’t quite feel they fit in to the social pecking order. It offers fictions where these readers can find identification figures in the outsider, the “Other”, because so often it’s written by, for and about the weird. I’d certainly say that it was my own “misfit” status as a kid that first drew me to the field, looking for fiction that offered an escape into other worlds, an imaginary sanctuary from grim realities.

One might criticise SF/F for that if that was all it was, but even at it’s most escapist, where the reader has their head firmly in the sand (or in the clouds, for that matter), what it’s still presenting is a hypothetical alternative, a hope of other possibilities. I’m suspicious of the insistent bleakness you see in, say, kitchen-sink realism; if it addresses homophobia, to take your example, there’s good odds that the message at the end will be how terribly hard it is to be a homosexual and how cruelly the poor faggot will be treated by society. Is that really a more worthy message than in the consolatory fantasy where, no matter what, you know that everything will be OK? Conventional pessimism is no better than conventional optimism.

I look at a hell of a lot of realist fiction and what I see is idiots who cannot escape their horrible circumstances, not because there is no escape, but simply because they cannot imagine one. If you’re a gay kid growing up in a small town, for example, goddamnit you should be reading that escapist SF/F, because those are the stories that’ll tell you that, well, actually, there’s other places you could be. So they might well be strange and alien, with perils you can’t predict? Cool!

There’s a quote from Wallace Stevens’s “The Man With The Blue Guitar” that sums up my attitude to the role of imagination in this regard, a response to the realist accusation of escapism: “They said you have a blue guitar. / You do not play things as they are. / The man replied, things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.”

This plays into the second aspect of SF/F, what really makes it powerful: when it pushes beyond the wish-fulfilment and goes from offering solace to the marginal, pipe-dreams of imaginary alternatives, and actually goes on the attack. The counter-factuals of SF/F can be, and often are, critiques of reality, challenges to the consensus view. It builds worlds with societies that reflect our own but twisted and altered, utopias or dystopias which comment on our own society’s more abstract features. And it can be fucking sneaky about it. It can translate race, gender, sexuality or what-have-you into metaphors and wire them into a ripping yarn, an adventure that will carry progressive ideas to a far wider audience. It can take political stances abhorrent to totalitarian regimes and allegorise them, get them under the radar, as many writers in the Soviet Bloc did. SF/F is not just malleable in this respect; it’s downright mercurial, a master of disguise, sedition sold as sensationalism.

Q: The gay community has really embraced the book for showing gay characters that go beyond stereotypes. Were you surprised at the response?

HD: Any positive response is always a surprise, and the more enthusiastic the more surprising it is. Although at the same time, of course, there’s a part of me that says, well, how could you not love Thomas and Jack when they’re both so peachy? Thing is, I have two totally opposing views about my writing which are generally in a weird mix of balance and conflict. On the one hand there’s the self-critical approach to your own work, where you see all your faults, where you’re so close to it, having laboured on it so long you can’t possibly read it for that immersive enjoyment, and where simple insecurity means that you have no idea if anyone in the world is going to like it. On the other hand, there’s the overweening arrogance where you’re deeply in love with the work, deeply passionate about it, and convinced that, by God, this is a fucking work of genius. Those two sides of my personality are in a continual dialogue with each other, which ranges from an uneasy truce, where both agree that the reality is somewhere in the middle, to all-out screaming match, with both of them contemptuously dismissing the other as “full of shit”. Me, I just shrug and hope for the best.

In terms of the specifics here -- the response of the gay community -- I guess I’m surprised that it’s getting noticed outside the SF/F community at all, but totally gratified that it’s reaching my fellow fags. It just goes to show that we’re not all disco-bunnies… or that being a disco-bunny doesn’t necessarily mean you’re automatically going to run away, hands flapping, from a 180,000 word Cubist fantasy.

Part 2: Interview with Hal Duncan

Q: You experiment a lot with characters that cut in either direction -- antagonist or protagonist. The Jack character in particular could be read as hero or villain. Was this conscious on your part or did his character evolve? What is your process for getting to know your characters?

HD: The simple answer to the second part of that question is that I get to know my characters by writing them. I tend to write a lot in the first person -- as with Jack -- or in a sort of “close-up” third person where the reader is virtually in the back of the character’s head, so their thoughts seep into the text-- as with Phreedom -- and where that text might even slip into outright stream-of-consciousness at times -- as with Seamus. So as you write the story, partly consciously and partly unconsciously, you’re trying to create a sense of their voice. For me, this is often when that feeling a lot of writers talk about -- of being in “the zone” -- kicks in, when you find yourself immersed in a particular voice to the extent that the character or the book seems to have taken over, to be writing itself.

With Jack Flash in particular, I suspect I’m just channelling the id, that impetuous wild man with no impulse-control. Actually most of the characters in the books represent one archetype or another -- superego, id, anima, self, shadow; there’s a seven-fold pseudo-Jungian model of the psyche in there, if you want to dig into it. And that feeds into the ambiguity of a character like Jack. Totally unrestrained, the id -- as Jack Flash -- is a force of nature, an avatar of chaos. He’ll shoot first and forget to ask questions later because his attention span doesn’t stretch that far. He’s swaggering and psychotic but he’s kinda charming because we recognise that sense of relish in ourselves, that glint in the wicked grin, that id; there’s a little bit of Jack Flash in us all, I think. But the id is dangerous because repressed desire becomes twisted, warped. So you see that in the other Jacks -- the Jack Carters of the historical or futuristic narratives. When you first meet Jack he’s bottled-up, up-tight; he’s just another soldier-boy working for the wrong side.

The point is that archetypes are value-neutral. It’s only in their relationships to each other that they become positively or negatively charged, when they manifest as brother and sister, father and son, enemies, lovers and so on. I wanted to try and show that complexity of potentialities in the shifting relationships of the characters in the book.

There’s also a more writerly concern in there with subverting the whole hero-versus-villain cliché. There’s a wonderful point in the movie “Falling Down” where the audience realises that the Michael Douglas character is not the hero. At the start of the movie we’re watching this little man go postal and we’re with him, rooting for him; then he just goes a step too far and our whole alignment of sympathies shifts. And by the end of the movie even the Douglas character has realised this. “Wait a minute. I’m the bad guy here?” he says. I wanted to have similar turn-arounds with some of the characters in VELLUM, to get past the simplistic cowboys-and-indians morality of your classic Big Fat Fantasy.

Q: The really breathtaking part of your book strips away layers of history and etymology of words down to the cradle of Western civilization--Sumer--which we are ironically bombing into oblivion even now. There’s also a fair bit of references to classical mythology and biblical history. Did you worry that you were getting too complex for the reader? When do you know you’ve gone too far?

HD: Too much is never enough; there’s no such thing as too far. I’d rather over-estimate the reader’s knowledge than under-estimate their intelligence, because ultimately that’s what it comes down to -- either removing or explaining every obscure factoid that somebody somewhere might not know about (i.e. assuming ignorance as a default), or having faith that if they don’t get a reference, well, they’ll have the smarts to go check Wikipedia, read a book, or just pick it up from the story itself (i.e. assuming curiosity as a default). You don’t know who Inanna or Dumuzi are? (Ed: we did it for you. Click links). Well, pretty much the whole text of their core myth is woven into VELLUM, so you should know by the end of the book. You only have this vague notion of Prometheus -- yeah, he’s the one stole fire from the gods, right? You have no idea what happened afterwards? Well, if you can read through the overlay of history and fantasy, the story as told in Aeschylus’s “Prometheus Bound” is right there in front of you. I work on the assumption that if you’re reading this kind of book then you like a good mental work-out, you don’t want to be condescended to.

No, I never worry about being too complex for the reader, because that kind of second-guessing just leads to chickening-out, copping-out and selling-out -- or it would for me anyway. There was a discussion a while back on a message board I hang out on, about writing with an awareness of an imaginary reader. For some writers that reader is themselves; they judge their work on whether they would want to read it. For others it’s an audience, small or large, commercial or critical; they judge their work on whether it will speak to that audience in a common language. Different writers write for different reasons, taking different approaches, with different aims. Personally, I’ll judge my own work on whether I like it or not, and I will also judge it on whether it might be pandering to or alienating this potential audience or that, but these judgements are all over-ridden by standards which aren’t set by any hypothetical reader, myself included, but rather encoded in the book itself. What is the theme of this book? What is its basic form and function? Given the underlying architectural aesthetic, so to speak, what degree of complexity is consistent with that when it comes to interior design? Is this a Minimalist book or a Baroque book? Spare and simple or intricately involuted.

Q: Tell us about your road to publication.

HD: Well, it was largely luck for me, being in the right place at the right time. I’ve been a member of the Glasgow SF Writer’s Circle for umpteen years now and a bunch of us tend to go to the UK cons. Some have gone off to cons in the States. Over the years the Glasgow mob has tended to build up friendships with other aspiring writers, indie press editors, and so on (we’re from Glasgow, after all; we make friends easily); and over the years, some of this wide scene of like-minded souls have started to break through into publication -- magazines, anthologies, year’s bests, book deals. So I was at a con a few years back, having just finished VELLUM, along with Neil Williamson, Phil Raines, Gary Gibson and a bunch of others. Anyway, Neil had a copy of the manuscript I was looking for feedback on and -- darling that he is -- he was reading it at the breakfast table… as a quite deliberate, I suspect, attempt to pique the curiosity of the right people. Long story short, a chain of readings and recommendations leads to Peter Lavery at Pan Macmillan saying, OK, send me a copy. So I did. And he bought it.

The US deal came by a similar chain of fortuity. I run a blog where I tend to post 5000 word rants about anything and everything, and one of these posts -- a particularly opinionated one on the ghetto mentality within SF/F led to a mate kicking off a thread on my message board at Night Shade Books, joking that I needed to take my medication. The thread grew into a big debate which caught the attention of Jim Minz. He followed the link through to my blog, and I guess he thought I was interesting enough (or just insane enough) to be worth checking out, just at the point where Macmillan were touting the US rights for VELLUM. So he did. And he bought it.

I actually feel vaguely guilty about my luck in short-circuiting the slush-piles and the agents, but I spent ten years writing the damn thing so I think I paid my dues. The sacrifices to Dionysus might have also helped.

Q: Do you retain the services of an agent now? If so, are they helpful, and if not, why not?

HD: Yes, I’ve signed on with Howard Morhaim now. I’m not shopping round the next book yet -- it’s barely even started yet -- so I can’t really say much about the helpfulness of agents, but at the end of the day, I’m sure he’ll be worth every penny of his percentage. I don’t really have the salesman mentality to be pimping my own wares and haggling over advances -- I’m just not any good at that sort of thing -- and it’ll be good to have someone I can ask the sort of awkward questions you might not want to ask an editor. Also, apart from being a major name in the business, Howard is very much simpatico with the kind of fiction I write. He’s got a great stable of writers I truly respect, like Jeff VanderMeer, Jeffrey Ford, and Michael Moorcock, and a lot more outside the genre -- a great blend of literary and genre. With that sort of eclecticism, I was very keen for him to represent me, so I’m really looking forward to working with him.

Q: You’ve got an amazing website as well as one of the more entertaining writer’s blog out there. How important is online promotion to marketing your book? Do you recommend that other writers pay more attention to the online forms of marketing and promotion?

A: It’s a tricky thing because blatant self-promotion just for the sake of it can be pretty dull and tedious, but I do think, as a secondary effect, the way a blog or a journal can raise people’s awareness of you as a writer is something that it would be foolish to under-estimate. The way I think of it is that a blog is just another mode of expression open to you as a writer and you need to be writing it for the same reason you write stories or essays -- to say something. There needs to be real content to it. You need to be interesting, entertaining. You can have fun with it because it’s informal; you can be as bolshie or as whimsical as you want because, at the end of the day, the nature of a blog as a personal journal means you’re presenting these ideas and fancies as transitory and experimental. Even when I’m exploring more serious theories about writing and genre or politics and religion, I tend to put the emphasis on the exploring. My scribblings on scribblings aren’t essays, not rigorous and researched academic essays by any means, even where they’re referenced. Instead a blog, like a forum, can be a great place to debate with others with similar interests. The follow-through of that is that if there’s something interesting to this rant or that random thought, links may well ripple out over the blogosphere, onto forums. You can’t do it deliberately and calculatedly just to “raise your profile” -- that’s just bad form and people will probably see through it -- but if you actually like writing as a medium, if you’re comfortable putting your crazy ideas out there in front of anyone and everyone, you can prove yourself to potential readers in a way that no review can match. Better still you can tell those potential readers exactly where you’re coming from, your interests, your influences. You can post samples for readers to taste.

I wonder if it’s not as important to warn readers who will loathe your work as it is to reach the readers who will love it. I’d much rather have someone read my blog and decide that I’m a poncy literary type whose non-linear nonsenses will piss them off, than have them read a rave review, buy the book thinking it’s the New [insert Big Name Author here], and end up telling everyone they know how much they hate it, regardless of that person’s tastes -- because I do think a strong negative response often over-rides our objective judgement that anyone else could possibly like this thing we hated. The inverse is true, I think, with reaching the right readers; if you pique their curiosity with your online blatherings enough to buy the book, and if they love it, I think they’ll still tend to be selective in who they recommend it to. Or at least the people who respond to those recommendations -- often posted as blog entries themselves -- will be those who are simpatico to that reader in the same way that they are simpatico with you. And so the internet becomes this huge globalised medium for word-of-mouth to spread -- personal, individual recommendations that are more reliable and trustworthy because they’re more targeted along existing lines of common tastes and interests.

Also I think it’s good for you as a writer just to be writing, to be playing with ideas about writing, telling stupid stories about your drunken exploits. It’s practice.

Q: Do you use a critique group? How do you process their feedback?

HD: Yes, I’ve been part of the Glasgow SF Writer’s Circle for over fifteen years now, I think. I still take short stories to them, although with VELLUM and INK I didn’t submit them for a crit session because 200,000 words novels are a bit much to do in one evening. We work pretty much by the Milford Rules -- face-to-face, going round the circle one by one, each person getting their turn to give their critique while the author has to keep schtum… until their rebuttal at the end, of course, when they get to tell everyone why they’re wrong and stupid. With a short story that format works well, but it’s not so easy with novels because there’s so much to deal with. You can’t expect everyone to devote the time and energy required to do justice to that length of work, so my tendency these days is just to ask if anyone’s interested in reading it and commenting by email.

In terms of processing that feedback… I think there’s a cycle you go through as a writer, from not listening to listening and back again, from arrogance to insecurity and round and round again. When I joined the GSFWC I don’t think I was capable of seeing faults in my own writing even when they were spelled out to me. Processing feedback consisted pretty much of sulkily brooding about how those bastards didn’t fucking understand at all, and it’s not a pointless vignette with no dramatic tension, and I’ll show you, goddamnit. It’s only after that bitter thirst for revenge and validation has pushed you through the development of critical skills (so you can give as good as you get with the cut-throat razor of critique) and the gradual application of those to your own writing (so you can make it so fucking good they will bow down before your genius) that you actually, I think, become detached enough from your own work to hear the validity of other people’s judgement. You realise, well, actually, yes that story is a piece of shit. Oh dear.

But the more you go through the workshop process, the more you internalise the feedback, knowing beforehand how certain readers will respond and either modifying your work accordingly or not. There comes a point, I think, where the most valuable feedback, the critique you do listen to is the stuff that you actually already knew, even if only at the level of niggling doubt. If the comment makes sense, if you hear it and think, yes, that’s the problem I was trying to put my finger on, it’s immensely valuable. But by this point in the workshop cycle, I think, you’re actually confident (or arrogant) enough to shrug off comments that you don’t agree with. And it’s not because you’re fooling yourself. It’s because those comments would be valid if you were writing a different story. You’re not. You’re writing this story. And for this story that comment doesn’t apply. It kind of ties in with what I was saying earlier, with the idea that you can judge a story in terms of its own aesthetic standards. It might be wrong for this audience. It might be wrong for that audience. But it’s right for the story.

Q: Ten years (fifteen actually, as part of a critique group) is a LOOONG time. Did you ever entertain giving up or that it just wasn't going to happen for you? Or did you just know that eventually it would happen if you hung in there?

HD: I'd have to say that for a lot of that time I wasn't really thinking either ahead, at the road to publication, or back, at the length of time I'd been doing it. I was pretty half-arsed at submitting short fiction. I mean it’s not going to let you quit your day job, and a lot of the work I wrote didn’t seem to fit the main markets anyway; it was too pulpy to sell to the literary journals, and too poncy to sell to the genre markets. Also, I kept on writing these 20-30,000 word novellas that, I figured, were just not going to be picked up by a magazine. That kind of word count is simply out of bounds in most submissions guidelines and even those markets that might take it, well, you’ve got to be really worth it if you’re going to take up that much space. And when the novel started to come together it was so rough and wild, at first, that I reckoned no editor in their right mind would touch it. I mean, as far as I was concerned it was a Grand Folly that I was doing because, well, I wanted to. I wanted to get it out of my system, and then I could settle down and write a nice sensible novel, one which started at the beginning and went all the way to the end… you know, like normal novels do. No Grand Theories of Myth. No archetypal characters with innumerable contradictory avatars.

If I thought ahead at all it was pretty much that given another ten or twenty years then I might actually be as good as I want to be. I got past the whole dream of being an enfant terrible, first novel published in your early twenties, critical acclaim, and all that. Rock stars need to be young; there’s no age limit on writing. So I sort of took the long haul approach: if you have to write a million words before you’re any good, as the saying goes, well then let’s just get on with it.

Actually, as some of the GSFWC started to get novel deals -- Bill King, Michael Cobley, Gary Gibson -- the idea of being published did become more real; but I think I had a Romantic notion that I’d be the Glasgow group’s Neal Cassady -- the one who never actually achieves success like the Ginsbergs or the Kerouacs but who pops up in all the stories about the group, the odd character in a novel here or there. I’d be the glorious failure, the one that all his mates knew should have made it, could have made it, just maybe, if he hadn’t been too busy living. Other writers might talk about perseverance, sticking with it, but I think that somewhat whimsical illusion actually served me better. It’s much more fun to be the quixotic waster working away on your own mad projects for the hell of it, expecting to crash and burn, but thinking, fuck it; why the hell not?

Q: What’s next for you?

HD: Well, the next thing to hit the shelves will be INK, the sequel to VELLUM, but after that the next novel is a retelling of the Epic of Gilgamesh. It will be a more linear novel but again it’s going to be multi-threaded, using an adaptation of the original source text as an underlying architecture and interweaving two other threads, one historical and one set in the near-future. The original epic is both simple and powerful, with a relationship between Gilgamesh, King of Uruk and Enkidu, a wild man which moves from adventure to tragedy, raising all sorts of questions about humanity and mortality. I want to map that to a thread set in British Columbia in frontier times, with the relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu reflected in one between a European settler and a Tlingit orphan who’s grown up in the wilderness. In the last thread, the SFnal thread, the Gilgamesh character is an anthropologist who specialises in totemism, and who gets drawn, by one of his students -- the Enkidu figure -- into a subculture of biotech fursuits and bodymods where people have animal alter egos… not unlike modern-day furries but a bit more hip, more posthuman. It’s all about how we draw lines between human and animal, “civilised” and “primitive”, about our awareness of our own mortality, and our reactions to that awareness.

Apart from that I’ve got a whole bunch of bits and bobs either coming out or in the works: a short story in the EIDOLON anthology which should be out just about now; a collection of poetry called SONNETS TO ORPHEUS to be released in a limited, numbered edition from Papaveria Press in August, if things go to plan; I’m actually doing a song with a band called Aereogramme for an album of collaborations between Scottish writers and musicians (and with writers like Alasdair Gray and Edwin Morgan also involved I’m totally chuffed to be in their company); “The Chiaroscurist” will be getting reprinted in John Klima’s LOGORRHEA anthology based around spelling bee words (which also has an amazing line-up of contributors); and I’m doing a novella for a project Chris Roberson of Monkeybrain Books is working on which sounds really exciting.

Good luck, Hal, and thanks so much for a great interview!

Linktopia: Alphabet Soup Edition

2006-07-13T09:00:00.000-04:00

First, a big thanks to Inkygirl Debbie Ridpath Ohi for permission to snag her super-cool comic. (Debbie creates original comics weekly for her other blog Will Write for Chocolate. This week she posted a comic that's sure to be appreciated by all writers but especially book-signing authors.) Second, Kath is still beaching it up, but Therese is slipping into her seat again to deliver some linky goodness (wow, comfy seat...and buttons all over the place).

The Smart Bitches offer not only a fun madlib but entice our inner artists to let loose inThe Big Kahuna Contest, creating original cover art using the Bitches very own, very fertile synopsis...Results from the 2006 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest are in. Treat yourself to a visit and read Jim Guigli's winning burrito-inspired entry...Ray blogs about the importance of maintaining the tension created with your story's inciting event, at least in the first chapter...The Alphabet Girls offer a Wednesday Workout for your characters on stress...The Publicity Hound blogs about how to get the best photo session for your publicity shot, and points us to the original article here...The New York Times published an Opinion piece by author Katha Pollitt, who thanks us all for the sales bump she got after a reviewer dissed her book (ht Book Ninja)...Sephera Giron at Storytellers Unplugged reminds us how important it is to MOVE. “Ass out of chair for at least an hour a day,” says Giron. Not only will you have a healthier body for moving around, you'll have a pumped mind--better to storytell with, my dears.

More after the jump...

On the pro front, Kristin Nelsen has a monster (seven parts!) multi-post segment on royalties. Have a contract? Want to be prepared? Read Kristin's post!...Evil Editor illustrates why you shouldn't include too many characters (like, 20) in a query letter...Miss Snark hints that 1) she knows Evil and 2) he's got a lovely mug, so I guess there goes my Dr. Evil theory. The Q of Snark also points to Kirsten Mortensen's site, where you'll find a great list of "aweful" (so good they make you want to stop writing) books--perfect timing if you're looking for a summer read...Nephele Tempest at The Knight Agency Blog talks up the paranormal genre and points us to a great spoof post on (ab)normality at Paperback Writer... Meanwhile, TOR editor Anna Genoese is considering quitting her job to go sell pie (yum, stock up on key lime and blueberry).

Lighthouse Writing Tips blogs about how the Actors' Studio method can help writers squeeze the most juice from character-character conflict. (Screenwriting junkies might also like visiting some cinema deconstruction sites online, including Milk Plus and Notes on Cinema, where bloghosts talk up narrative theory and dive into the inner workings of some interesting films!)

Ooh, I found a beach button on this chair! Here's a message from Kath: "I'm sending over a few lovely images of some beautious beaches. It's not the same, I know. But still.

This is Kaui.

Here's a lovely stretch from Costa Rica.

And Barbados."

The Goddess of Link will be back next week (thank heavens). Until then, write on!

Secrets of the Silver Screen: The Most

2006-07-12T09:00:00.000-04:00

Satine works at the Moulin Rouge. Known as the Sparkling Diamond, she is the most beautiful, the most talented and the most sought after courtesan there.

The Terminator was sent back in time on a mission. He is the most tenacious, the most single-minded and the most destructive killing machine on Earth.

Vito Corleone is the most persuasive mafia man out there, and if he makes you an offer you can't refuse, you most certainly shouldn't.

Anakin Skywalker wants to become a Jedi Knight. He is the most vulnerable, the most intuitive and the most conflicted man ever to become an apprentice.

A storm is brewing. It is the most perfect storm the Atlantic has ever seen.

A ship crashes far out at sea, and its survivors discover the most secret, self-contained island in the world, along with its most fearsome--and most sympathetic--beast.

A most ordinary house lands on a wicked witch. However she is not the most cruel, ugly and cunning witch in Oz; that witch is still alive and biding her time before stealing the most beautiful ruby slippers from the most far-flung girl in this most fantastical Technicolor world.

Kathy Bates gave Oscar-winning life to Annie Wilkes, the most deranged fan of all time, while Glenn Close played the most messed up, obsessive ex-lover on the big screen (and scared the most number of men into being faithful in real life).

So what's the deal with The Most? How important is it in telling a great story?

Take a sec to think about your favorite movies and chances are you're going to find a "most" somewhere...probably more than one. Though setting might hold the most drama (as in Perfect Storm), more often a film's extreme feature will be linked with one or more characters.

It IS important. Characters who are The Most captivate with their black-and-whiteness, making it clear who to root for, who to boo for, and even sharpening our own thoughts on issues that might otherwise have seemed gray. Because these extreme characters reach in and grab hold with such gluey goodness, they take on power and can become iconic. For example, long after a movie has finished, if we're made to think of police inspectors, our brain leaps to the known range, immediately targeting The Most--and we think of Clouseau. Those of us subjected to the 80s slasher films might dredge up an image of dear Freddy when the subject of nightterrors or long nails comes up (shudders).

How about:
Underdog boxers?
Undercover agents?
Snake-fearing adventurers?

Does it work for books? Absolutely. Who's the most famous teenaged wizard? Who were the most star-crossed lovers? Who was the most selfish Southern belle? The most fearsome rabid dog? Writers who choose to reach for the outer limits when creating characters are essentially carving a spot for them in our memories.

Suffer from weak characters? Reach for The Most.

Happy Birthday to Kath!

2006-07-12T08:00:00.000-04:00

She's out there somewhere enjoying surf and sand on her special day. Maybe there's a scantily clad man-boy servant bringing her a chocolate cake right this very moment?

Happy Birthday, buddy!

For those hopeful souls who clicked, here's a man-boy treat for you. Enjoy!

Revision Hell

2006-07-11T09:00:00.000-04:00

They say war is hell. White shoes worn with black socks is sartorial hell. Red wine drunk with a fish entrée is culinary hell. But there is no hell for the writer like Revision Hell.

I currently reside on the seventh level, the ‘this book sucks’ level where plot points and dialogue I thought were so cool in the first draft now strike me as vapid globs of desperation. Oh lord, deliver me from my woe!

And then I stumbled on a website. The clouds parted, an angelic choir began singing. Author Holly Lisle has come to my rescue and slapped me upside the head. “My first revision is my last revision. If you’d like to cut years off the process of revising, I’ll be happy to show you how.”

The straw has been extended; I lunge for it.

Lisle calls her system the One Pass Manuscript Revision. I read the technique on her must-visit website and a chime went off. Ah ha! I could do this. And all in one cycle, too.

I got right on it.

How’s it working for me, you ask?

In the interest of honesty, I’ve gotta disclose that this is the most brutally painful rewrite I’ve ever done, and I’ve been writing steadily for six years. OPMR requires that you move forward, never backward. Characters who morph into totally different people as the story progresses have to be nailed down—finally—scenes that were fun to write and sound beautiful but don’t move the story forward have to be chucked—immediately—and dithering over plot mechanisms has to end--now. My heart’s pouring blood, my brow’s pouring sweat. And I’m only on page 80. Auggh!!!!!

Lisle’s point is that the writer can write and rewrite forever. Authors finish books. And then they go to the next and finish another. It’s called professionalism.

I’m going to slog forth with OPMR to the bitter end and I’ll let you know how it turned out. Lisle says she can finish the revisions on a 125,000 MS in two weeks. I’d like to do that too, but I’ll settle for two months.

Let’s see if I have any hair left after I’m done.

Dusty, Unboxed Stacks

2006-07-10T11:09:00.000-04:00

Sorry for the late post this a.m., but I literally just finished reading a great book called Monkeewrench by P.J. Tracy. Here's the high-concept blip: a bunch of murders take place, and it looks like the work of a serial killer. Turns out it is, and the killer is matching each murder scene to one found on a computer game called "Serial Killer Investigator." Unique! The plot has more twists than a typical thriller read, and the mother-daughter duo who write under the pseudonym P.J. Tracy are ultra-talented pace-makers and wordsmiths. I don't really expect a lot of "poetry" in a thriller, but these authors know how to add a dash without slogging down their rapid-fire pacing (e.g. describing the sky as a cloudless, deep hurtful blue). And despite some heart-stopping suspense that will make you lose sleep and neglect your bloggery duties, the book is stuffed with dynamic, believable characters who occasionally deliver such witty dialogue that you'll literally laugh out loud, startling the small animals asleep on your lap.

I knew the book would be good--it had received enthusiastic nods from a slew of respected reviewers and the public at large. I also knew the book would be unboxed; one look at the inside jacket cover told me that. Like Kath, I dive into great reads when I'm between projects--like now--but unlike Kath, I know in advance what those books will be. I hoard these books; they create a magnificent trembling tower beside my bed, collecting dust until I have time to scale the tower and rescue one from the top. Here are some of the other goodies I'm looking forward to:

Firethorn by Sarah Micklem
Foxmask by Juliet Marillier
Wicked by Gregory Maguire
The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber
Guilty Pleasures by Laurell K. Hamilton (yes, I'm the one person on the planet who hasn't read this series...)
Capt. Hook by J.V. Hart
By the Light of My Father's Smile by Alice Walker
Keeper of the Dream by Penelope Williamson

I doubt any of us has time for bad reads. We want something entertaining and maybe something we can learn from. I think all of the books in my tower can gift me something as a writer. Monkeewrench drove home the importance of characterization and wit, and provided a great lesson in pacing and surprise. It also gave me something to do: contact P.J. Tracy and see if this duo might be interested in an interview for WU.

How 'bout you guys? What's in your dusty tower? What do you look for in a read? Entertainment? Writerly lessons? Both? (Talk to me...it's lonely without Kath!)

Lastly, treat yourself to a peek at the ultra-hooky opening pages of Monkeewrench by clicking HERE.

Write on, all!

INTERVIEW: Alexandra Kirby, Working Partners LTD

2006-07-07T09:00:00.000-04:00

Kathleen and Therese are thrilled to be able to pick the brain of Alexandra Kirby, editor for Working Partners LTD, the UK-based publisher know in the industry as a "book packager." Their success in the YA genre has been anything but ordinary. Working Partners has developed some of the hottest new YA series burning up the NYT's children's fiction lists. We chatted with Alexandra to find out how book packagers work, uncover the latest trends in YA fiction, and learn how the right writer can become part of their growing list of authors.

Interview with editor Alexandra Kirby

Q: Tell us a little bit about Working Partners. What genres do you cover?

Alexandra Kirby: Working Partners was born as a children’s fiction packager. For the past ten years or so, the company has produced concepts and manuscripts for children’s books in many genres, and most often in series. Our most popular series include Animal Ark, Heartland, Rainbow Magic, and of course, Warriors. Genres that we’ve worked in include animal fiction, mystery, horror, historical, fantasy, and thriller. Our latest project is The Caped Sixth Grader, which released on June 27. Our first title in the series is the Happy Birthday Hero.

Q: What would you like people to know about commercial fiction development houses in general and WP specifically?

AK: I suppose the most common misconception is that a packager just churns out book after book without giving much thought to the plot development or quality of the story. This definitely isn’t the case at Working Partners. All of our concepts go through a rigorous editorial development process, receiving lots of feedback from different editors, and we work hard to make sure that every story we produce is exciting, interesting, and well-written. We work in partnership with all our writers and provide as much support as they need.

Q: Why are book packagers increasingly attractive to publishers?

AK: I suppose, like in so many other industries, publishers are pushed for time. Editors at publishing houses have to worry about so many different aspects of a book’s life: cover artwork, production schedules, sales conferences, marketing plans – it’s not just about editing the manuscript. Packagers can help take some of the pressure off by doing some, most, or all of the editorial work for them. And often packagers come up with ideas that publishers recognize as commercially sound, and great reads.

Q: What would people be surprised to know about WP?

AK: Probably that the ideas behind all our books –and there are a lot of them! – come from editors in our office. Whether it’s fairies and magical creatures, vampire infestations, or Elizabethan murder mysteries, all the concepts and plots originate in our boardroom, where the editors meet and discuss (and discuss and discuss and discuss…)

Q: How do you come up with your project ideas? And how do you decide which ideas are the ones youll pursue?

AK: The ideas all come from the creative minds that work here. It’s something that Working Partners looks for in its editors – the ability to generate and execute ideas for stories. Sometimes ideas for books change a lot between the initial “lightbulb over the head” moment and the final proposal document, but they pretty much all start with someone here saying something along the lines of “I had this idea…”

When we meet top brainstorm a particular idea, that is usually when we decide if it “has legs” or not. With everyone contributing to the discussion and offering opinions and ideas, it can be quite a lively session. Usually, we can tell from the energy a particular idea has generated whether it’s worth pursuing. And often the final proposal bears little resemblance to the original idea.

Q: What are WPs most popular series right now, and what do you think makes them attractive to kids?

AK: Well, Warriors is of course a big hit in the US right now. This series has such a diverse group of fans, but they are all really passionate about it, which is fantastic! I think these stories are very rich and tightly-woven. The plots and characters are very compelling and kids can really lose themselves in the world of the cats. The books are smart, too, which kids appreciate.

Another of our recent international successes is a fairy series for young readers called Rainbow Magic. This series has been licensed in more than 20 languages and has sold more than 7 million copies in the UK and Australia alone, where it was originally published (sorry, I don’t have the recent US sales figures). This series created a fun, magical world where girls interact with fairies and help to solve problems and outwit the goblins who work for Jack Frost. The series is sweet, collectible, and totally delightful.

Q: What's hot now in children's/YA fiction, and what trends do you see emerging in the next few years?

AK: Lots of things are hot in children’s fiction at the moment! And it’s pretty much impossible to predict what will be the next big thing, especially since by the time you figure it out, the kids will have moved on to something else. One year it will be pirate books, and before you know it, pirates are over and everyone’s after witches. What’s great about children’s books now is that there is so much variety. There really are books for readers of all abilities and interests now, whether you’re into epic fantasy novels, girly friendship stories, historical adventures, or bloodthirsty vampire scare-fests. I think there is so much more quality children’s literature available now than even when I was a kid, checking the (single) young adult shelf at the local library every week for new books.

Q: How do you decide which writer is right for the project? What is the author-editor relationship at WP like?

AK: We usually get several samples for each project and a number of editors will read and comment on them. Usually, there is a consensus as to which writer’s sample seems right for the project, but as it is so subjective, sometimes there are disagreements, and in those cases we would ask more than one writer to revise, and possibly even present more than one sample to the publishers.

Q: What are some advantages writers find in working with a commercial fiction development house like Working Partners?

AK: Many of the writers we work with fall into a couple of categories. There are inexperienced writers who have a great voice, but can really benefit from the structure and editorial support we provide. We can provide a great “training ground” for them. There are also writers who are prolific and can write more than books than they have ideas for. Some writers actually prefer to intersperse their own projects with Working Partners projects. And many of the writers that we work with continue to come back to us, even after they have written their own books and become well-known authors in their own right.

Q: Have you ever begun a writer-editor relationship with an unpublished writer? What advice would you give to a writer who wishes to break into this market segment?

AK: Yes! We have worked with a number of unpublished writers, some of whom have gone on to place their own projects with publishers. And we are delighted for them! It’s great to know that we have helped to develop new writers and we always hope that they will want to continue working with us as well. Anyone who is interested in writing a sample for us is welcome to send us their details via our website. On the page labeled Writers & Literary Agents, you can fill out and submit the Writer’s Information Form.

Thanks so much for the information, Alexandra, and for a great interview!

Beachtopia

2006-07-06T08:20:00.000-04:00

Through the magic of blogging, you get to see where Kath is right now, destroying a few skin cells on North Carolina's Outer Banks. Linktopia is in Therese's hands for a few weeks (brawhahahahaha!)...but she's also already feeling somewhat lonely (sniffle).

Alrighty, on to the good stuff:

Melly blogs about the differences between Canadians and Americans after her trip to the Finger Lakes (hey, you were in our neck of the woods, Melly!). The Alphabet Girls blog up how eavesdropping can help your wip...really! Cavan blogs about why it's still cool to write on paper...and even lets us peek at his notebook. Bookslut announces the publication of their 50th issue and talks up "buttonhole books,"--the books you basically force feed to all your friends and family (fwiw, for me this is Niffenegger's Time Traveler's Wife). Booksquare whaps reporters over the e-head and offers them this breaking bit: it's not news to announce there's sex in romance novels. Doh!

More after the jump...

News from the ThrillerFest conference at Crime Fiction Dossier and Buzz, Balls & Hype. Emerging Writers Network blogs about SIU-C, which is pretty ironic, since this is the institution I just finished my master's with (and yes, it's done-done-done now). Evil Editor...still evil, and this week he provides a good reason to reconsider submitting a query about terrorism if your query might make the editor laugh. (Does anyone else envision the Evil Editor as Dr. Evil, with his pinkie pressed against the side of his lips? Maybe it's just me...) Using some nice outtakes from Kristin Nelson's blog, Ray reminds us that good writing just isn't enough to get a piece published--it's still all about the story. Writers weigh in on whether The Devil Wears Prada is really worth the $$ at GalleyCat...more about Devil at Murder She Writes!

Thanks to Miss Snark, we have another add to our Box Cutters--The Desk Drawer site offers regular writing exercises though email. Check them out! Miss Snark also dishes about how advertising for an editor can be like sending a money-baited hook into a sea of scam artists...not to be missed! Mumble Herder blogs about the difference between the short story and the novel (HT Hal). Eric is posting mini-reviews of craft books at Quantum - definitely worth a visit! Over at Riskies, Elena blogs about being glad for modern-day conveniences...and a dry spot of land! Sharon at Romancing the Blog longs for a book showing the catty side of a group of women friends...The Bitches parade a hilarious batch of Americana covers in honor of the holiday...Writer Beware reposts the "top ten signs your agent is a scammer," just in case you didn't see it here first ;) ... Agent or no agent? Crawford tackles that question at Writing Fiction.

Phew! Now that that's over with, back to Kath for some more beautiful beach images!

Dingal Beach, Ireland

Captiva Island, Florida

Ahh. Don't you feel better now?

Write on, everyone!

ANALYSIS: Harry Potter, Who Will Die Next, Part 2

2006-07-05T11:17:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, Therese and I got in a heated discussion over the revelation that JK Rowling has killed off at least two of her characters in the eagerly-awaited Book Seven. Putting on our storyteller's cap, we've made several guesses. Below is Part 2 of our analysis.

All artwork featured is by the talented Ayne Greensleeves and comes from her website.

TW: So it’s going to be someone big. Possibilities: Harry, Ron, Hermione, Hagrid, Lupin, Tonks, Snape, Mr. and Mrs. W., Ginny, the twins, Neville, Luna… From that list, I’d say killing Ron, Hermione, Hagrid, Ginny, the twins, and Luna don’t add conflict to the story or seem able to further it in a meaningful way, leaving the Prime Suspects for Death as:

1. Harry
2. Lupin (and Tonks?)
3. Snape
4. Mr. and Mrs. W.
5. Neville

From that list, Lupin, Tonks, and Mr. and Mrs. W. are members of the Order of the Phoenix. Harry and Neville both have an axe to grind with Voldy for either killing or irreparably harming their parents. Snape is a wildcard: either aligned with Voldy or the best triple-agent character in the history of triple-agent characters (is there a history of triple-agent characters? Hmm. Another blog post…).

Theory 1: Lupin and Tonks, as truly grand members of the Order, and because they’re in charge of protecting Harry, could pose the greatest threat to Voldy. Lupin is also like a father figure to Harry, so losing him would truly suck, and JK could be planning to make a bigger deal out of that relationship in this last tome.

Theory 2: Your Mr. and Mrs. W. theory, though my gut says she won’t kill them off. You made the point that Harry would have to live his parents’ death all over again, but that wouldn’t show character growth on Harry’s part. I think he’ll be in a situation where he can save them, this time around. Besides, if I agreed with you, this blog post would be boring (:-0 ).

Theory 3: Snape, as the wildcard, poses a juicy possibility – ANYTHING can happen with him, and probably will. There’s a good chance he’ll lose his life attempting to either save or kill Harry (but my vote is on save).

Theory 4: And then there’s dear Neville, who has had a true arc throughout this book, becoming more prominent as the series evolves. He has become braver, he is learning how to fight against the dark arts, and he wants to avenge his mind-wasted parents. The prophecy that links Voldy with Harry, and that makes Harry such a threat to Voldy, could have meant Neville all along. Even though Dumbledore didn’t think it was a possibility, it is…or at least Voldy could be made to believe that Neville is the one named in the prophecy. Neville, at the peak of his bravery, could choose to confront Voldy.

Theory 5: Harry dies because he has to in order to kill Voldy. The prophecy says something like “one can’t live while the other survives.” I think the reason for this is (possible spoiler…) that one of Voldemort’s horcruxes is on Harry’s forehead in the shape of a lightning bolt. But I don’t think Harry will die, which means that horcrux has to go. I think Voldy might remove it if he believes Harry isn’t at the center of that prophecy; Neville is.

I don’t know, but I think I might have just earned the Nerd Crown for the day...possibly the year. LOL.

KB: If you're wearing the crown, I'm carrying the scepter.

I'm a little worried for Tonks and Lupin. I could totally see them sacrificing themselves for Harry. In this book, everyone's going to the mat, and Harry's going to be left with nothing and no one but himself (and his mother's love) to protect him. Which is a nice segway into the theory that Harry's scar is Voldemort's horcrux. One really has to admire Rowling for the way she handled this clue. All his life, Harry's been marked by this scar, little knowing he carried the life-force of his arch-enemy ON HIS HEAD. Snap! That's freaking brilliant. It's going to allow for a gruesome scene when Voldy tries to remove it. I'm sure she's fiendishly rubbing her hands over that one.

Neville, sigh. I'm going to arbitrarily refuse to believe she'd kill him. I prefer to think she'd finish his character arc by letting him get revenge on Bellatrix, the woman who tortured his parents into madness. Then maybe his grandmother would get off his back and stop comparing him to his father. He'd become a person in his own right.

I agree that Ron and Hermione are pretty safe, though she will finish their thread by either getting their crush out in the open, or letting it die. You never quite know what she's going to do.

Oh lord! I just thought about Kreacher, the duplicitous elf who hated Sirius and loved Bellatrix. There's something brewing there with the final clue about the mysterious "RAB" who took the horcrux Dumbledore gave his life for. Do you have any theories there?

TW: Geez, I almost forgot about that one. Aren’t you the clever soul who deduced that “RAB” must refer to Sirius’s brother, Regulus Black? I think you are. I’m hoping Sirius’s brother turns up alive and well, and has a role to play in this. Perhaps he’ll be one of our doomed two? Or maybe he’s the one who JK spared, since Regulus will undoubtedly remind Harry of his beloved Sirius. You might be onto something with Kreacher, though. Tangent: I wonder if Hermione’s efforts to save the house elves from slavery will culminate in an important plot point perhaps involving Kreacher?

KB: Hmmm, I'd forgotten about the House Elf liberation subplot. We now know that Rowling never lets a thread dangle without a resolution, so I think you're right, she'll make that connect up with Kreacher, his betrayal, and the horcruxes.

I DID deduce that "RAB" had to be Regulus Black, and she was pretty sly about working him in. As writers we can take lessons from her about dribbling in crucial information that seems tangential to the plot. It's one of the reasons, I think, her books are so successful. We're kept guessing until the end.

TW: You’re right, a writer can learn a LOT from reading her books, as long as that writer is willing to ignore a lot of “ly” adverbs. But this writer thinks she more than makes up for that with incredible world building and truly entertaining and unboxed storytelling. So what do you think? Who are you picking to be picked off in the last book, and who will be the surprise survivor?

KB: I agree, Rowling’s over-reliance on adverb dialogue tags is the only fault I have with her otherwise solid craftwork. Hmmm, if I had to pick someone other than the Weaselys or Voldemort (it’s basically a given that Voldemort will go), I’d have to go with Tonks and Lupin. The one she spared: Malfoy.

TW: I’m going to play it kinda safe and pick only one person I think she’ll kill off: Snape—it’ll be the ultimate in surprise and sacrifice. I think Neville is the character she was going to kill off but salvaged in the end.

So who do you think Rowling ‘did in'? And who would you kill if you were writing this story?

ANALYSIS: Harry Potter, Who Will Die Next

2006-07-04T11:04:00.000-04:00

Therese and I are about to reveal a shameful secret.

We are Harry Potter-aholics. Big ones.

I know, I know. But Faulkner and Proust ain't got nuthin' on Rowling, who has taken children's literature to new (and lucrative!) heights. She's the Beatles of genre fiction, which is to say she proves a writer can deliver a story that neatly fits on big-box store shelves and still pushes the craft to new levels.

In a recent interview she revealed that she killed off two characters in the penultimate Book Seven, and had plans to kill off another but issued a reprieve. Therese and I got into a big IM discussion (because we don’t waste enough time blogging) about who she chose to kill, using our knowledge of storytelling to support our arguments. We've reprinted and amplified our discussion below.

All the cool anime-style fanart is by Ayne Greensleeves and can be found on her website . Used with her kind permission.

KB: So who do you think she offed? My sense at this point is that she hasn't gotten to the part where Voldemort suffers his just desserts. I'm going to guess Molly and Arthur Weasley, and the one she reprieved, Ginny. From a storytelling point, their deaths will give the maximum impact to Harry (they were his surrogate parents), and shock the reader. What do you think?

TW: I thought you guessed Voldemort and Wormtail? You’re just covering yourself, aren’t you? LOL. Okay, I’m going to say Voldemort, which I think has to happen. I mean, c’mon, the bad guy must die. The second character gets tricky, and I have a few ideas, but they involve diving into some theories. I don’t think it’ll be Harry, though I know oddsmakers think he has a 30% chance of biting it (link). And I doubt it would be the Weasleys…what would that prove? I also don’t think it would be Ginny, Harry’s eventual happily ever after. Or Ron and Hermy, because it wouldn’t further the story.

KB: LOL-ing. I do think Voldemort and Wormtail will get their comeuppance eventually, but upon reflection I realized that she'd have to put that sequence at the end and she's not there yet . . . so she says (unless she's throwing out red herrings and Bloomsbury has their hot hands all over it). I'll make the case for the Weasley deaths.

1. They are beloved characters who have taken the place of Harry's parents. As a storyteller, you'd really want to go for the jugular. Their deaths would mean that Harry has to relieve that particular nightmare all over again.

2. She reprieved Ginny because she's a softie at heart and wanted Harry to have some small shred of happiness after it's all over. If she'd done what she'd planned and killed Ginny, then she'd have the pleasure of torturing Harry with even more guilt (his love for Ginny killed her), but she probably figured he was tortured enough.

3. Killing the Weasleys would make the villains even more scary and amp up the stakes. Arthur and Molly were supposed to be crack wizards in their own right, and together even they couldn't defend themselves against the Death Eaters' rapacious evil. If they can't, who can?

4. Percy Weasley will have his 'come to Jesus' moment, healing the breach in the family and tying off that loose end.

5. The deaths inform the final Act, where Harry has to become as ruthless as his enemies in order to bring about their destruction.

Makes perfect sense, no?

TW: It’s an interesting theory, yes, and possible. Rowling’s comment referred to killing two characters in the last chapter of the book, I think. Here’s a quote from the interview:

"The final chapter is hidden away, although it's now changed very slightly," she said in an interview broadcast on Monday on Britain's Channel 4. "One character got a reprieve, but I have to say two die that I didn't intend to die." When asked to be more specific, she added: "No, I'm not going to commit myself, because I don't want the hate mail or anything else."

Knowing JK, the “hate mail” comment could’ve been a red herring, meant for us to think the character she killed is a beloved one; she’s known to be clever that way. It’s the “I didn’t intend” part that gets to me, because she has had a clear vision of the story from the beginning. You’re right: She’s probably not referring to Voldy here; his must-happen death wouldn’t have changed. I think Snape’s name needs to show up here somewhere: either one who dies or the one who gets the reprieve. Reason: the tension for that character has reached the breaking point. Something has to be resolved with him. Is he a triple agent, or is he truly evil? Do you think he might factor in here? I also have some thoughts about our dear Neville…

KB: I'm going to quibble about the quote (and thus reveal myself in full nerdom). It says that "at least two characters will die in the seventh and final book" not that two characters die in the last chapter. She tinkered with the last chapter to reflect those "unexpected" deaths, as well as the "reprieve."

So I read that as meaning she killed or is killing off the ones she planned, but also that some die unexpectedly, because that's where the story took her. Snape is such an interesting character, and I'm really curious to see how she resolves his character arc. He's gone from enigma regarding his loyalties to committing a heinous act of murder and betrayal. I think there's a better that even-money chance he dies. I'm in the camp that thinks he's really on the side of good even though it tortures him to help James' son, let alone have anything to do with Harry, which causes him to be cruel. With Snape we've got a text-book case of internal and external conflict. Thoughts? (I'm balking at even the idea of Neville's death. I can't go there. Sob).

TW: Just to prove you’re not in Nerd Valley by yourself, I just found another quote from that interview, found at a different site:

"A price has to be paid, we are dealing with pure evil here. They don't target extras, do they? They go for the main characters -- well, I do."

GASP!

Check back tomorrow to read part two of WU's analysis of HP: Who Will Die Next.

Click Here! A Little History Edition

2006-07-03T09:00:00.000-04:00

Kathleen goes to the beach, Therese goes to a soggy Washington, D.C. Where's the justice? I guess I'm in the wrong city for that...sorry, couldn't resist! (Our hotel is very cool though, with the glass-backed framed pics of Barbie and Ken on the wall, the plasma TV, the funky green mosquito netting around the bed, the huge red lamp and pillowed coffee table...)

Because I'm currently surrounded by historical magnificience, I thought it'd be fitting to post some cool history links this week. Enjoy!

Need some authentic folk medicine for your historical novel? Check out UCLA Folk Medicine where you’ll find much more than your basic cranberry-juice-for-urinary-infections advice. (Did you know that salting your head was sometimes prescribed for headaches in 1607?) Established by one of UCLA’s top professors in folklore and history, this site’s information comes from published scientific works as well as popular sources and even unpublished interviews.

Wish you could refer to an old website that has long since been updated to exclude the info you most desire? Journey back through history with the Wayback Machine, a virtual website time machine that has archived sites back through 1996.

Speaking of history, Time Magazine, with its wealth of articles and fabulous photography, recently opened its 83-year archive up to the public. Use the engine to search for articles or cover stories, and beef up your manuscript with historical facts. Even if you never use the site for your work, it’s a great resource to save in your Favorite Places.

Ever wonder what a gallnipper is? How about an Arkansas toothpick? You’ll find this site is a "huckleberry above a persimmon and some pumpkins" if you’re interested in 19th century slang. Now get going and visit the 19th Century Slang Dictionary. Absquatulate!

Need to know something about historic fashionware for your manuscript? Check out this site at the Kent State University Museum, where you can view gowns that were popular in the 17th through the 20th centuries. The site also provides terrific info on historical menswear, childrenswear, accessories and lingerie (metal corsets? Eek!), and info on popular designers of the time.

Our Timelines is a great site for historical writers who want to pin down some of the key happenings in the era they're writing about. Just enter a lifespan and click away.

Want to learn more about period musical instruments? Learn all about them—from hurdy-gurdies to rauschpfeifes—through the fascinating Guide to Medieval and Renaissance Instruments site. It's a cool place to visit, even if you aren't writing a historical novel.

Time to get primed for some 4th of July FIREWORKS. Happy Holiday, everyone!

INTERVIEW: Writer Beware!, Part 2

2006-06-30T09:40:00.000-04:00

Writer Beware's Victoria Strauss and A.C. Crispin work hard to unmask agents with less-than-ethical intentions toward writers. Therese and Kathleen recently chatted with Victoria Strauss to learn more about Writer Beware, literary fraud, the controversial "20 Worst Agencies List" and more. Missed it? Click here to read part one, then come on back. In part two, Victoria tells us what it takes to make the beware-worthy database and how to become a fraud-hunter. She also provides us with a hilarious must-read list: the top ten signs your agent is a scammer. Enjoy!

Part 2: Interview with Writer Beware's Victoria Strauss

Q: According to your site, you have over 600 names to beware in your database. Is one report enough for a suspected person or group to be listed there? How often is the database updated? Who can access the information?

A: For a person or group to be entered in our database, we must receive one advisory or complaint of questionable practice with supporting documentation (correspondence, contracts, brochures, etc.) or two substantially identical advisories/complaints. Our average file contains 10-12 advisories/complaints; many files contain many more. Single, undocumented advisories go into a “caution” file, where we hold them until we get more information.

We have a very specific list of things we consider to constitute questionable practice (see About Writer Beware). What don’t we consider questionable? Regrettable facts-of-life of the publishing industry, such as long exclusives or slow turnaround times or failure to return material. It would be nice if these things never happened, but they do, and writers have to be prepared to deal with them. We also sometimes hear from writers who are angry that an agent didn't manage to sell their manuscript, or didn't call often enough with updates, or sent a dismissive rejection letter. We don’t consider these to be valid complaints either, because they're general problems that anyone can encounter (and often involve unrealistic expectations on the writer’s part). Occasionally, with multiple similar reports, they add up to a pattern, and if so we feel a warning is in order. But that's rare.

We hear about a new agency/publisher, or changes in practice for people we already have files on, every week or two. If I were efficient, I’d update the database right away, but what actually happens is that documentation piles up until I can’t stand it any more, and I then do a marathon updating session. We constantly disseminate information from the database, but because of the frequent changes, the full database is accessible only to Ann, me, our legal counsel, the SFWA Board of Directors, SFWA’s legal counsel, and the two or three Writer Beware volunteers who prefer not to be named.

Q: I read on your site that there are other fraud hunters who help you but wish to remain anonymous. If someone feels inspired to help the cause, what might they do or who should they contact?

A: We can always use people who are willing to help us gather information about agents and publishers. Contact us at beware@sfwa.org.

Q: If an agent ever felt wrongly named on your site, what's the RIGHT way to go about challenging it?

A. The only names that appear on the Writer Beware site are the names of agents who’ve been indicted, convicted, are being sued, or are the subject of some sort of official investigation. This is public information, so it’s hard to dispute.

We do occasionally hear from agents or publishers who feel that the warnings we provide in private emails or on public websites like AW are unjustified. Sometimes they just want to let us know that new agents have no choice but to charge fees, or that charging $4,000 for publication isn’t vanity publishing if you don’t accept all comers. We politely disagree. Sometimes they tell us that our information is incorrect or that they’ve changed their policies. In that case, we ask for documentation. If we receive it, and it supports their claim, we change our warnings or remove them from our database--whichever is appropriate. We really, really, want to provide accurate, updated information. If we’re wrong about something, we’re glad to be put right.

Q: Tell us about your free research service. Who's eligible to use it? What does the service offer?

A. Anyone can use the service. Just write to us at beware@sfwa.org. People can send us the names of agents, publishers, editors, publicity services--really, anything at all--and we’ll check our database to see what information we have. General questions about etiquette and procedure are also welcome. We mostly keep track of the bad apples, but we also follow the real world of publishing, so if someone’s legitimate we can tell you that too.

Q: Writers can watch for updates at your sites, and sites like Absolute Write and Preditors and Editors, in order to stay knowledgeable. What else should we do to protect ourselves from scammers?

A: The first thing that any writer should do--and I mean BEFORE starting to send out work--is to educate herself about the publishing industry. Knowledge is a writer’s best tool and most effective defense. If you know how things ought to work, you’ll be more likely to recognize a questionable situation if you encounter it. Unfortunately, many writers seem to want to skip the research and jump straight to submission. This is not good. As noted above, desperation can lead writers into the arms of scammers and amateurs, but by far the greatest risk is ignorance.

There are many decent how-to-get-published books that will provide the basic information, from the Dummies and Idiots lines among others. For something a little more in-depth, I like Donald Maass’s The Career Novelist and Noah Lukeman’s The First Five Pages. For scam protection, I recommend Jenna Glatzer’s The Street-Smart Writer, which offers lots of excellent advice on keeping safe from scams and schemes, and Jim Fisher’s Ten Percent of Nothing, a fascinating case study of a classic literary scam.

Q: You recently returned from a workshop where you passed along tips for acquiring a reputable agent. Can you share any with us here? Maybe a "top ten signs your agent is a scammer?"

A:

Top Ten Signs Your Agent is a Scammer:

10. Your offer of representation comes via form letter (somehow, you never do get his phone number).

9. Whoever typed his contract didn’t use spel chek and can’t rite real gud neither.

8. You first heard of him when [pick one: you found his ad in the back of Writer’s Digest/you saw his ad on Google/he solicited you].

7. When you asked if he’d worked for another agency before establishing his own, he said yes--a real estate agency.

6. When you asked for a list of recent sales, he told you the information was confidential, because he didn’t want you pestering his clients. And by the way, only bad, ungrateful writers ask that kind of question.

5. When you asked what publishers were looking at your manuscript, he told you the information was confidential, because he didn’t want you pestering the editors. What is he, anyway, your secretary?

4. When you got his contract, you discovered you had to pay [pick one: $150/$250/$450/more] for [pick one: submission/administration/marketing/circulation/other].

3. He told you your ms. was great, but when you got your contract you discovered you had to [pick one: pay for a critique/pay for line editing/pay for a marketability assessment].

2. He got you an offer from a publisher--but you have to [pick one: pay for publication/pay for editing/pay for publicity/buy 1,000 copies of your book].

And the number one sign your agent is a scammer: You got an email from his assistant telling you he’d been killed in a car crash, but when you called to ask where to send the sympathy card, he answered the phone.

Q: Loved it! Thanks for that! You obviously receive a lot of flack from at least some of those appearing on the naughty agents list. Has anything ever tempted you to leave the howling objections behind? What motivates you to keep on keeping on?

A. I think that Ann and I get less flack from the scammers than writers’ advocates who don’t operate under the aegis of a professional writers’ group. Being under the SFWA umbrella seems to discourage threats. We actually get more grief from non-scammers (including some legitimate industry people) who consider us crackpots, or assume that our warnings are based on rumor and innuendo, or think that we’re too hard-line (especially in our comments about amateur agents and publishers), or proclaim that because we aren’t agents or law enforcement officials ourselves we’re not qualified to comment on the business of agenting or to identify scams.

Yeah, it bugs us sometimes. But both of us really believe in what we do. Many people seem to regard literary scams as a kind of Darwinian mechanism, winnowing out the ignorant and the unworthy. That’s as may be, but I don’t think any writer deserves to get ripped off. I also believe in paying forward. I was pretty ignorant when I started out--I could easily have fallen for a scam. I know better now, and I’d like to pass that on.

Also, as any scam-hunter will probably tell you, there’s a strange fascination to scam tracking--the weird psychology of scammers, the endless permutations of scam paradigms, the thrill of detective work. It’s kind of an addiction. Hi. My name is Victoria, and I’m a scamoholic.

Q: Is there anything else you'd like to add?

A. Thanks for the great questions!

Thank you, Victoria, for all you do and for a great interview!

Linktopia

2006-06-29T14:10:00.000-04:00

Ah, summer.

Long days. Weddings. Heat rash. Blender drinks. I love summer, and I loves me some summer vacation.

I'll be on one for the next few weeks, beaching it up. I'm a West Coast girl trapped on the east, and the toughest part about it is that I'm no longer 10 minutes away from an ocean. This holiday is a long time coming.

But fear not for Linktopia. The intrepid Therese will be posting beach Linkies in my absence. Today, I surf the best of the writer's blogs so you don't have to.

We bid adieu to one of our favorite bloggers, Jack Slyde. He's taking a break from blogging to concentrate on being a new daddy and a writer. Can't blame him. Check back occasionally, Jack . . . . Ray has a must-read post on how good writing isn't enough these days, you gotta have a fresh story to tell . . . . and along those lines, Melly has a great discussion going regarding plots . . . . Yikes. Miss Snark blogs about the Publishing Contrarian's e-mail list . . . . . Tor editor Anna Genoese gives us the down and dirty on the P&L of harcovers, trade paperbacks and mass market paperbacks . . . .

Quantum's very smart-looking new blog (alright, I'm NOT envious) has a post on the difference between an amateur and a professional writer . . . . Metaxu Cafe showcases a compelling post on why Harry Potter must die . . . . Speaking of, bookmakers are already laying odds on who lives and who dies. My .02? Voldemort and Wormtail. You heard it here first . . . . Mickey Spillane gets his own highway (h/t Confessions) . . . . Nienke has found another ingenious time-waster (Writer Unboxed= Rude exit brown; Kathleen Bolton = Not hell-bent oak. This could go on all day).

More links after the jump.

Paperback Writer blogs about promo no-no's . . . . Evil Editor is, well, eeeee-viiiiil . . . . . Allison debunks a rumor about her productivity, and her real output still has me in awe . . . . Random Reader bites into some vampire beach reads (sorry, that line was begging to be written) . . . . the Bitches reveal that people in the '60's had really wide-set, blaring eyes.

Linktopia, fer reals will return July 20. I know, try to contain your excitement. Until then, write on.

The Power of FLASH!

2006-06-28T09:00:00.000-04:00

Flash, a-ah, saviour of the universe
Flash, a-ah, you saved every one of us
Flash, a-ah, he's a miracle
Flash, a-ah, king of the impossible

Who doesn't love Flash? Saving women, children and small dogs everywhere. And writers, of course, with his inspirational mini-blips that can help de-rut a rutted writer...

What's that you say? Wrong flash? Well, the idea still stands: Flash writing is like feeding your depleted muse a power bar. The gist of this type of writing is to hand your mind a simple idea and then let it create an almost instant story based on that idea--without interruption, without editing. It's a great exercise in unboxed thinking, a balm for the writers' ego, and it doesn't take much time at all. Bonus: you may land on a concept or find a character you just can't resist growing into something bigger and better. I know some of my favorite short stories were born from flash writing. So, want to try a few? Click Read More below and pick one or two of mine, then let your muse take you wherever she wants for a few paragraphs or a few pages. She'll revive, and you'll agree: Flash is a miracle!

Ready to flash? Here's how it works. Read through the list. Does your mind start crafting wild ideas for one prompt in particular? Choose it, and write...now! Flashing means doing it quick, and not giving yourself time to analyze. Just follow the muse.

Flash Prompts for WU:

THE CAT NEXT DOOR

FEVER

IT ALL BEGAN WITH A PINCH

MUFFINS FOR DINNER

BELOW THE BASEMENT

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: CONTENT PROVIDER

HOLDING BACK THE SECOND HAND

THE KING'S DRUID

ALTOID KISS

SHARK'S TOOTH

THE VOO DOO KIT

IT LANDED IN MY BACKYARD

THE REPLACEMENTS

Proud of your flash? Want to post it? Be our guest!

Tidy Up

2006-06-27T13:33:00.000-04:00

How did it get to this?

I'm a neat-freak, I'll come clean about it (hee). But nine months of working on my current wip has left my writer's space devastated. Eight million Post Its flutter on the cage around my computer screen, dust motes wheel across the back end of my tiny desk where the wall meets a tower of research books. And the coffee rings, my god.

I feel . . . unsettled about the mess. I'm also loath to clean it. Not because I'm lazy, but because the clutter itself symbolizes the creative explosion that happened in that very space. It's the scabrous afterbirth of my mind, the detrious of fired synapses and god-speak and communion with my higher self in the form of writing and ---

Oh hell. It's just a bloody mess.

Some people work in a perpetual mishmash of paperclip airplanes and crusty tea mugs. They need the comfort of their clutter to prop up the fragile muse who flits fiendishly away just when inspiration seems to be striking. That ain't me. Then what's my problem?

Mrs. Clean offers tips on how to clean up a workspace. It seems like a lot of work right now.

I'll get it together, eventually. I have a theory that until I can finally get the edits done and mail this sucker out, I'll be freed from my inability to disturb my cruddy workspace and clean the toast crumbs out of my damn keyboard.

Until then I'll keep the Raid handy.

Click Here! Bathing in End-of-Tunnel Light Edition

2006-06-26T20:24:00.000-04:00

After eight billion-and-a-half years of working toward my master's degree in psychology, today I am turning in my thesis paper. Since my paper is on memory for certain kinds of imagery (interactive imagery in advertising, if you're burning of curiosity - snort), I thought it fitting that today's Click Here be all about good stuff for the peepers. So without further ado, here ya go:

Explore over 100,000 works of art at the Art Encyclopedia site. Allows you to search by artist, title of work and museum. Results include high-quality image archives. This is perfect for rounding out a story, including the description of a work of art in detail, or simply for taking an “art break” and soaking up expressive visuals before getting back to pounding keys. (Love it? Want more? Check out the ArtLex Art Dictionary.)

Like photos? There’s an enormous 120,000+ archive at Every Stock Photo. Not enough for you? They’re adding to the archives at a rate of about 20,000 new photos weekly, so check back anytime.

I think this site is really fascinating; maybe it’ll inspire someone else out there, too. Watch Ilana Yahav create and recreate some amazing sand art in this set of videos.

Having trouble visualizing a fictional locale? Maybe you'll hit on some inspiration during a visit to Visual Collections, an inspiring sensory treat. Be sure to check out the architectural link. After all, you know what they say about a picture’s worth…

You'll find some great articles at Visions: A Resource for Writers. Check out this issue's workshop, Painting with Words by Lazette Gifford, for an in-depth look at the use of color in your fiction work.

How about a challenge? Choose one of these great pics and use it to inspire a short story. You're welcome to post the end results here at WU.

Okay, I'm off to nip-and-tuck this paper and then SEND
IT
IN!

Squeee!

Write on, everyone!