Lars D.H. Hedbor's Blog, page 4

Proof of Concept

Sometimes, my characters do things that make me wonder, "is that really possible?"  For instance, in The Prize, Caleb routinely paddles his canoe over what I came to realize were some pretty extended distances.  I've done a little bit of canoeing myself, but I wondered whether I was asking too much of the boy.

So the summer after I completed the manuscript, I got out onto Lake Champlain myself, first just paddling around the bay, but working up to longer trips.  Within a couple of months of ir...

The Watched Pot

Finally, the reward for patience and not a little hard work - seeing my first novel for sale at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other booksellers.  It's available now for your favorite e-reader device or software (nook, Kindle, others), and will be coming soon in paperback.

It's been called "magnificent" by a professional historian who manages the historical museum for the Ethan Allen Homestead (in the exact place and time where the novel is set), and has gotten a warm reception by all who have rea...

The Magic Moment

My novel-writing process is generally pretty organic. I don't typically spend a lot of time beforehand plotting out what the arc of the story will look like, what events will take place where or when, any of that.
Instead, I start with a character, and begin exploring what that character's up to, what their life is like, what they're thinking about the events unfolding around them. I get to know them, and introduce them to my reader.
Of course, at first, this material is all coming from my...

Play it Again, Sam

I know that's a misquote, but it fits better misquoted, okay?
With the encouragement and prodding of my editor at Puddletown, I've cleaned up the second manuscript in my series, and submitted it late last night. I think it's pretty good; now we just have to wait and see what their market reader thinks.
Meanwhile, I'm busily sketching out the rest of the series, and thinking about what I need to do to make the third completed manuscript presentable.
If this is what the life of a novelist is...

Incroyable!

I'm still not quite breathing, still not quite believing it... but I've been offered a publishing contract for The Prize, the second novel I've written, covering the events of the Revolution from the vantage of the place where I grew up.
Puddletown Publishing will have it available by the end of next month, if all goes well, for Nook, Kindle and other major eBook formats; a paperback version will come out some time shortly after that.
Somebody pinch me? Still not breathing.

Interesting Developments

So, after spending several months submitting my first novel to a variety of agents, I frankly became disheartened, and instead turned to writing the second, which came out fabulously well.
However, after my experience with the first, I have been putting off and putting off sending it out to anyone at all, and instead wrote a third novel, which is not so great in its first iteration, and needs a fair amount of work before it can see the light of day.
So here I am, with three manuscripts...

Putting Words in Their Mouths

Giving my characters each their own distinct, believable voices is both one of my favorite parts of writing, and one of the greatest challenges.
Since my novels are based over two hundred years ago, there are obvious problems of dialect and colloquialisms to overcome - all too many times, an early reader has caught my characters saying, "Okay," because it's a common interjection in my own speech. It is, of course, utterly anachronistic, and must be brutally expunged.
Spoken English in the...

Questions of Faith

At the time and places where my novels are set, religion was a very important part of people's private lives - perhaps even more so than it is today.
Some of the Founders were, famously, unconventional in their approach to faith, but for the most part, my characters' relationship with God or the divine powerfully influenced how they saw the world and dealt with the events that unfolded around them.
This makes writing these aspects of their personae a substantial challenge for me, as a...