Lee Rene's Blog, page 4

3 Cases of Semicolon Overkill

I loved this post from the DailyWritingTips blog

Semicolons serve a useful function in helping distinguish between elements of complex sentences, but lengthy sentences with long phrases do not necessarily require the support semicolons provide.

These three sentences demonstrate unnecessary application of the semicolon as a comma on steroids.

1. Electrical shock may cause serious burns; injuries to internal organs, such as your heart; and even death.

Semicolons should generally be employed as strong commas when elements of a list themselves include lists or otherwise include commas of their own.

Here, however, the sentence construction is clear and simple; “such as your heart” is obviously part of the list element pertaining to injuries to internal organs (and doesn’t necessarily need to be set off from the rest of the phrase anyway): “Electrical shock may cause serious burns, injuries to internal organs, such as your heart, and even death.”

2. Examples of enhancements might include reporting on the status of critical enterprise risks; changes in key external variables impacting the validity of the organization’s strategic assumptions; significant emerging risks; the capabilities for managing other important business risks; and the status of initiatives to improve capabilities.

The elements of this list are wordy but not complex, so “supercomma” semicolons are an excessive measure: “Examples of enhancements might include reporting on the status of critical enterprise risks, changes in key external variables impacting the validity of the organization’s strategic assumptions, significant emerging risks, the capabilities for managing other important business risks, and the status of initiatives to improve capabilities.”

3. The basketball star’s legendary moves—aerial assaults; triple-clutch reverse layups; facials on seven-footers; one-handed rebounds or ball fakes; opposing shots stolen from the sky; big-game buzzer beaters at any time—couldn’t be replicated.

As in the previous example, the use of semicolons in this sentence is overkill: “The basketball star’s legendary moves—aerial assaults, triple-clutch reverse layups, facials on seven-footers, one-handed rebounds or ball fakes, opposing shots stolen from the sky, big-game buzzer beaters at any time—couldn’t be replicated.”

Eight Tips For Increasing Your Writing Output, From A Very Busy Writer

I had to make a few edits, but I think the latest post from author, Rob Hart, is spot on. Writers need to write!

My second book came out this past February. The third is scheduled for October. I’m 36,000 words into the fourth. I just finished co-writing a novella with James Patterson. This is on top of running the class program here at LitReactor, and acting as Associate Publisher at MysteriousPress.com.

Oh and I have a 15-month-old daughter. I’ve been busy.

Lately, people have been asking me how I do it. “It” being a lot of writing. Like there might be some kind of magic incantation that’ll make the sun pause in the sky and give me another three hours of writing time each day. Or some trick I figured out to get more words down on the page.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately: Motivation and productivity. So here are my carefully-thought-out tips for how to write more.

Shut up and write

Are you about to post something pithy on Twitter? Shut up and write. Are you about to turn on Netflix for a marathon binge of the latest hot television show? Shut up and write. Are you about to do anything that’s not writing?

Well guess what you can do?

Look, this isn't easy. You spend a lot of time by yourself, wondering if whether the thing you do is working. And sometimes, it isn't... [Either] you can get past that, or you can't.

You either do it or you don’t do it. If you don’t do it, it doesn’t get done.

Give some stuff up

I’m serious about the Netflix thing. I once saw a writer complain about not having enough time to write and THAT SAME DAY say he was binge-watching the entire first season of Daredevil on Netflix. Guess what, pal? You are the cause of your own suffering!

Get your work done and make Daredevil a reward for finishing. Or just be an adult and get your work done, period.

Pick a project

You may have a hundred good unfinished ideas. You know what’s better than a hundred good unfinished ideas? One good finished idea! I know there’s a drive to diversify and keep a bunch of irons in the fire and try different things. But if you’ve got nothing to show for it, your creativity has gone off the rails and crashed into a molasses truck. Now you are stuck.

Pick a project. Stick to it. Finish it. Move on to the next.

This is something I struggled with. I lost so much of my writing life to the idea that the stars needed to align for me to write. Right mood, right time, right music, the appropriate amount of wine or whiskey.
This is nonsense. It’s a way to procrastinate and feel less bad about it.

Sometimes when my daughter takes a nap I have to sit down and open my laptop and write furiously like there’s a clock ticking next to me and pretty soon a bomb is going to go off (the bomb is her demanding toys and snacks).

For the record, my daughter is napping right now, as I'm writing this! Also, she was up until 4 A.M. puking, which means I didn't sleep until 4 A.M., so I am super jealous of her right now because I wish I could take a nap. But I can't, because I've got to finish this article and then edit a podcast.

The only perfect time is the time you have available. Make the most of it.

Kill your darlings

What do you want to do with your life?

Do you want to be a writer?

Then guess what you need to do?

Shut up and write!

Are you working on a project and it’s not coming together? Have weeks been stretching into months?
Has your level of excitement dwindled?

It might be time to kill that project and move on to something else. Not everything you write is a special snowflake. And for a lot of writers, your first book, and maybe even your second, is going to be a piece of crap that you have to burn off.

I recently found my first novel filed away in my office. I can’t bring myself to throw it out, even though I’d like to, because it is terrible! But it’s also a good reminder that a dead project is still important to the process: You got it out of your system.
Embrace the suck

Like I mentioned up top, I'm working on my fourth book. It is really bad! I'm rushing through. Making mistakes. Glossing over points. Writing tin dialogue. And I'm doing it on purpose!

I need it on the page. Once it's on the page I can do whatever I'd like. The first thing you write is never going to be the final thing you write. Sometimes you just need to put your head down and barrel forward, like you're at a concert and you want to get to the front of the stage. Things are going to get sloppy and painful and maybe a little bloody, but if you're persistent, you will be rewarded.

Decide what your priority is

What do you want to do with your life? Do you want to be a writer?

Then guess what you need to do?

Shut up and write!

Look, this isn't easy. You spend a lot of time by yourself, wondering whether the thing you do is working. And sometimes, it isn't. Self-doubt and frustration turn you into your own worst enemy. And either you can get past that, or you can't.

One of the things that drives me a little crazy lately is, in complimenting my output, people have been making it sound easy. I appreciate the compliment but not the implication. It's not easy. I sacrifice things. I worry about whether I'm doing right by my family. Sometimes I feel like I'm approaching a dangerous level of burnout.

But this is what I want to do. For ten years, I've been working toward this, and some days, it feels like this whole thing could disappear at any moment. A publishing career is very impermanent. So I will work my ass off every day to ensure that I get to stick with it, because I love it.

That's my priority.

Is it yours?

Take a whole bunch of meth

This is a last-resort kind of thing. But it’s pretty effective!

Though if you're concerned about the legality, there’s always coffee.

Diana Galbaldon - Want to Watch Me Write?

Diana Gabaldon, author of the bestselling Outlander series posted these musing on her Facebook page about her writing process, her famed character, Claire, and hints about her newest work that were worth sharing;

Want to watch me write?

A nice blogger named Thomas Snow (a poet himself by trade) asked me if I’d do an interview for his blog, which I did. One of the questions was a statement that while my writing is naturally prose, it’s occasionally poetic, and was I aware of the poetic element while I was working?

The resulting answer may be a bit longer than he was expecting , but as I know we have a lot of writers here (and people who are interested in the mechanics, as it were), I thought I’d post the Whole Thing for those who are interested.

Answer:

Thank you! But I’d like to see anybody write well without being aware of what they’re doing. Still, I think what you’re asking is more in the realm of process than inspiration. Which is to say, everyone has their own working methods, and I know any number of writers whose method is to blap down a rough approximation of what they think they want to say, then go back (and back, and back) and “edit” as they put it, until they’ve got their prose shaped and snipped and whatever else needs to be done with it.

I don’t work that way. I start with something I can see or sense concretely—my “kernel”—and I write that down, in a line or two that expresses what I see or hear or whatever, as concisely as possible. Then I sit and stare at those lines, and I fiddle. I take words out and I put other words in, I move phrases, I add another line, I take half that line up to the beginning and add another half-sentence to connect it with what comes next, I see that I have the same word twice in this paragraph—is that what I want? And so forth and so on. I proceed in this tedious (and very slow) fashion, going to and fro and back and forth literally hundreds of times before a scene is finished. But when I’m done with it, it is finished: it’s as good as I can make it, at that point, and it’s what I consider fit for human consumption.

I mean—I don’t have rough drafts. I’ve got a kernel, I’ve got a scene-in-progress, I’ve got a complete scene. The “in progress” is where small things pop up in the way of language and image, as I try to express whatever it is as concisely, elegantly, and beautifully as I can.

And—as you plainly know—poetry is as much a matter of rhythm as of word-choice, and the words in a passage form a pattern with the others. So there may be phrases that look overtly “poetic”, but in fact, they wouldn’t work, if they didn’t work with or in contrast to the other words around them.

Here’s an example: it’s a really brief little introductory paragraph, and overtly simple.

“There was a stone under my right buttock, but I didn’t want to move. The tiny heartbeat under my fingers was soft and stubborn, the fleeting jolts life and the space between, infinity, my connection to the endless night sky and the rising flame.”

OK, this is a woman sitting outdoors by a fire, holding a small child, feeling the child’s heart beat. I started with the heartbeat; that’s what I could sense—what the woman was sensing; that soft (“soft” came to me instantly, and “stubborn” half a beat behind—there’s history to that “stubborn”—the child was born with a heart defect and nearly died, but didn’t (and we assume the audience knows this, as it was a big thing in the previous two books), stubborn beat. So that’s what I put down as my kernel: “The tiny heartbeat under my fingers was soft and stubborn.”

Well, plainly that’s not all there is to say about the situation, but do I want to give more information on Claire’s (the woman’s feelings), to enlarge on the little girl’s situation, or to pull back a bit and let the audience know what the physical setting is?
Now, I_ know Claire’s sitting in front of a large fire, because I can see it (and I know who’s near her and a lot of other informational stuff, but that’s not relevant just yet…)…so, do I say something about her view of the fire—“The leaping flames before me”—no, very cliché, almost anything you could say about a fire as a fire would be either clichéd or pedestrian (fire makes a good metaphor, backdrop, and source of light (see below*), but not that good as a subject, unless you’re burning down a house or in the middle of a forest fire.) So, back into Claire’s thoughts; what’s she thinking about/sensing besides the heartbeat under her fingers?

Well, she’s sitting on the ground outside, and she doesn’t want to move because her fingers are on this tiny little pulse and she doesn’t want to lose that connection. But it is ground, so what’s the odds she’s sitting on a small rock? (One always is sitting on a rock when out in the wild…).

OK, “There was a stone under my right buttock,” and an instant later, “but I didn’t want to move.” All right, that works; it’s a very Claire-like observation, it gets the necessary information across in a sensory way—we can immediately empathize with the sense of muscular tension, the discomfort that isn’t pain, but annoying. And I don’t think I can state that any better; simplicity works here.

That being so, though…we’re firmly into Claire’s head because of the physical empathy thing, and the sentence is simple…the reader is lured in…

So I can feel free to wax a little, coming back down to the heartbeat…it’s soft and stubborn—do I want to tell more about what the little girl looks or feels like in Claire’s arms? I can see her, feel her weight, but no, what I’m feeling is what Claire is feeling, and she isn’t thinking of the physical. She’s feeling emotional, exultant—she never expected to see this child again (her grand-daughter), and here she is, healed and healthy.

Do I say that? “Here she was, healed and healthy.” Well, nice alliteration, but no. That’s the cause of Claire’s emotion, but it isn’t the emotion itself, and that’s what I’m feeling, what I want to evoke.

So back to the heartbeat sentence, which I thought was too short—let’s launch off that. What does Claire feel—emotionally/spiritually—about the heartbeat? It’s life. It is, literally, life, but in this instance, it’s Claire’s life as well as the child’s. And since it’s her grand-daughter (and the fire is part of a gathering where other family is present), she’s feeling the sense of continuity, of everlastingness. So the…what’s the word for how a single heartbeat feels? (run through and discard a dozen or so possibilities, settle on “jolt” for the moment—but that’s not quite good enough, sounds too forceful for a small child’s heartbeat…”fleeting jolt”, that’ll work; it’s distinct, but gone almost before you feel it, fine.) So the fleeting jolts are life. (In Claire’s sense of things)

Pause, feeling around in Claire’s senses and emotions. She’s a doctor—she’d be aware of the lull between beats, as well as the pulse itself…and she has a vivid memory of the time when she listened to this child’s heart, fearing that every beat might be the last—those intervals of silence…and she looks up from the fire (seat of homely warmth, symbol of life) into the huge black mountain sky, thick with stars, God…infinity. OK, nice contrast, nice unspoken sense of Claire’s thankfulness to the Almighty for this life in her arms, without having to say anything explicit along those lines…

"The tiny heartbeat under my fingers was soft and stubborn, the fleeting jolts life and the space between infinity, my connection to the [something] night and the [fire].”...

More fiddling with the night and the fire. You don’t want to overload those with adjectives, but you do want a little more than “night” and “fire.” Well, “infinity” naturally suggests “endless”—and that’s what we think when we look up into the sky, so “endless night sky” seems OK.

Now, we’re conscious all along of the evolving rhythm of the sentence (and the paragraph) because I keep reading them over and over while doing this mental fiddling, and I know I need three syllables at the end, to deal with the fire. So I go back into Claire (as I’ve been doing throughout) and she’s looking into the fire, her eyes guided up toward the sky—the flame is rising in front of her, and “the endless night sky and the rising flame” gives us a nice image of an altar and the flame of sacrifice (which certainly applies in this situation) rising toward the infinite glory of God—but again, without having to saythat. (Poetry is, after all, essentially the art of condensation.)

Run through the sentence again—the punctuation has been niggling at me—take a moment to try things with and without commas, semi-colon, whatever, and see quickly that it has to be “the fleeting jolts life and the space between, infinity,” for clarity—and I like the way “infinity” is set off there, separate from the rest of the sentence.

Now that sentence structure is not that complex, but it’s long. It has to be well-balanced (and interesting) to work. I have the simple first sentence to lead people into it, but the second sentence itself will have to hold them.

So, we’ve got:

“There was a stone under my right buttock, but I didn’t want to move. The tiny heartbeat under my fingers was soft and stubborn, the fleeting jolts life and the space between, infinity, my connection to the endless night sky and the rising flame.”

Ok, the second sentence has three parts, balancing around the word “infinity” (either two or three is always good in terms of structure; go more and you have to really know what you’re doing)—and everything in it modifies “heartbeat”—though the final clause actually makes a connection between the physical heartbeat of the little girl and Claire’s connection to both her physical surroundings and her emotions. And yes, that is what I want. We’re done. For now…

(You probably begin to see why it takes me so long to write a book.)

For the sake of general interest, these are the two paragraphs that follow that one:

“Move your arse a bit, Sassenach,” said a voice in my ear. “I need to scratch my nose and ye’re sitting on my hand.” Jamie twitched his fingers under me, and I moved by reflex, turning my head toward him as I shifted and resettled, keeping my hold on Mandy, asleep in my arms.

He smiled at me over Jem’s tousled head, flexed his now-free hand, and scratched his nose. It must be well past midnight, but the fire was still high, and the light sparked off the stubble of his beard and glowed as softly in his eyes as in his grandson’s red hair and the shadowed folds of the worn plaid he’d wrapped about them both.”

I could analyze those two, in terms of pulling Claire back to earth, breaking what might be too much overt poesy if it went on much longer, and bringing the other characters into the scene (and then illustrating what I meant about the uses of fire, in the third paragraph), but this is already too long, so I won’t—but feel free to admire the construction, alliteration and rhythm of the final sentence there.

(You could, if you care to, also note how all three paragraphs keep a similar rhythmic structure (ala formal poetry, like a quatrain or villanelle): first sentence a two/three part simple (semi-humorous), down-to-earth statement of physical circumstance, followed by a longer, more complex and somewhat poetic sentence dealing with the emotional. This is (part of) how you move a story forward, while sucking the reader into it.)

*Footnote on firelight. Look at the last sentence. It’s got good internal alliteration:

still/sparked/stubble/softly/grandson/shadowed, and that draws the eye through the text—but notice also the description of the light:

high/sparked/glowed/shadowed. The thing about using fire as a light source is that it moves. You can use it to evoke the outdoors and give depth to the picture we’re looking at, but you can also use the moving sense of a fire to focus on specific things that you want the reader to “get” unconsciously.

http://www.dianagabaldon.com/

https://twitter.com/Writer_DG?ref_src...

https://www.facebook.com/AuthorDianaG...

http://www.amazon.com/Diana-Gabaldon/...

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...

FtOS: Crossing Genres – a Guide by Patricia Loofbourrow

I loved this post by Lilyn G of the From The Other Side blog.

Lilyn interviewed author Patricia Loofbourrow regarding crossing genres, a literary reality many of us know all to well. What genre do you place your manuscript in when it crosses over to another?

Crossing Genres: Creating and Marketing a Multi-category Novel by Patricia Loofbourrow

An online friend was talking with some of us in a marketing group I frequent about her young adult (YA) novel and the difficulty she had with sales. It came out that this book is not just a YA book, but a near future dystopia with a strong independent female protagonist. She had been marketing it in a very general way, although she had been comparing it to books such as The Hunger Games .

I said, “your novel is science fiction”.

This woman felt astonished: she had never considered this, and knew nothing about either the genre or the fandom. No wonder she was having trouble!

It came to me that there are a lot of factors that go into creating and marketing a multi-category novel that aren’t necessarily intuitive.

Here are some suggestions:

1) Think about your story and tease out the categories it might fit into

It’s probably best to do this during the outlining stages, but if you write like I do, you may not figure this out until the revision or even the editing process. That’s okay – just begin thinking about what categories your novel might fit into.

Begin with broad categories. What is the setting?

We’ll start with: is it in our universe, where normal physics applies?

• If it’s in the past, it’s historical fiction.

• If it’s set in the present day, we’re talking about contemporary fiction.

• If any part of the story is set in the future, it’s science fiction.

(Yes, even the near future, and yes, even if you aren’t a scientist. Consider The Time Traveler’s Wife , which is a science fiction novel written by someone with a non-science background as a bittersweet romance – great book, by the way.)
If instead of being in our universe, it’s set on some paranormal plane (for example, in your story, magic is commonplace), it’s fantasy.

Write one of those four down.

Your story can cross genres even here. For example, the Sookie Stackhouse novel series is set in present-day Louisiana, but it’s an alternate universe where vampires and werewolves are common.

How does the story end? In ancient Greece, they considered there to be two types of stories:

• If the story had a happy ending, it was called a comedy – not in the sense of the word as we use it today, but the concept of the happy ending is still useful. For example, if you categorize your novel as a romance, your readers will expect a “happy ever after” ending.

• If the story didn’t end well, it was called a tragedy. This sort of ending is very popular in some cultures, and is the norm in many genres (crime fiction novels tend to have some sort of tragic or not totally resolved ending).

Note this – it will help a great deal in your marketing.
To narrow your categories down more, consider what drives the story:

• If the story is mostly about the inner life of the main character, you’re probably writing literary fiction

• If the plot and action outside the main character is what the story is about, you’re writing genre fiction

This mainly matters when you’re marketing: you’ll want to bring out what the story is about in your blurb (for example).

Consider how you want your audience to feel:


• Romance novels deal with romantic feelings, from young love/friendship to steamy erotica and everywhere in between

• Comedy novels make you laugh

• Crime and mystery novels make you feel intrigued

• Horror, suspense, and thriller novels make you feel afraid

• Action, suspense, thriller, and adventure novels make you feel excited

• Epic adventures make you feel inspired

As you can see, there is often overlap in these genres without intending it.

Once you’ve decided what your big categories are, look up the particular sub-categories for your novel. For example, high epic fantasy such as is very different in both content and tone from urban fantasy such as The Dresden Files . Sites such as Wikipedia and TV Tropes can be very helpful when learning about categories.

2) Look at the expectations for your categories

Each genre has its own set of reader expectations. It may be a certain type of character, a certain tone, or a particular setting.

We touched on this with romance: a novel is not generally considered a romance novel if it doesn’t end “happily ever after”. This feeling of happy resolution is what readers pick up a romance novel to get, so if your book doesn’t end that way DON’T market it as a romance, no matter how much romance is in the book. You’ll get bad reviews, because you haven’t met the expectations for your genre.

To successfully market a book which fits into multiple genres, you’ll need to meet the expectations for every subset of readers. To go back to the original example, a YA dystopia needs to meet the expectations of both young adult readers AND dystopia novel readers.

Include words in your marketing which describe how they will feel during and after the book. Since this is really what you’re selling, if you include these, your ideal readers will feel more confident that the book will satisfy them.

I read once that you should use your blurb (the bit in the back of the book) to weed out people who wouldn’t like your book. So if there’s something about the book which only your readers would like, put it in there!

To do that, you need to do one more thing.

3) Understand the fan base of each category

Your book, first and foremost, is for people. Not all people, but the people who like your type of story. The biggest problem I see in mixing categories is in this area. If you don’t understand what sort of person likes what sort of novel, you may make mistakes in these areas:

• You may misunderstand who you’re marketing to – my friend was trying to go to groups about the political system in her near future dystopia and market to the parents. However, teenagers may not react well to book suggestions from their parents!

Also, a girl who likes novels with a strong independent female protagonist is probably fairly independent herself and would want to select her own reading material. Unless you’re writing novels for children under 13, market to the reader.

• You may misunderstand your readership and how to interact with them – for example, you may not know the common tropes, jokes, references, and pet peeves of your fan base, and may end up offending or alienating them with your marketing if you’re not careful.

How do you understand your readers?

• Read as much as you can on (and in) the categories in question – the history of the category, the major books in it, and what makes that category unique.

• Go to where your fans are – and before you begin marketing, spend at least a month observing in at least four different groups. What ages and genders are you marketing to? What do they like and dislike? What is really important to them? What movies do they watch? What upsets or offends them? What inspires them?

• Stay current – this is especially important if you’re marketing to young adults. You don’t have to know about everything, but you should at least be aware of major trends, the main authors in the genre, and popular new works in your categories.

• Listen to your fans! They will tell you what they like and what they don’t. If you’re on social media

(Twitter especially), look for people to follow who like the categories you’re writing in. Then listen to what they and the people they quote and retweet are saying. This is a quick way to both get current and avoid any major blunders with your audience.
If you really explore your categories, understand why someone might buy a book in those categories, and understand what sort of people like what you write, you’ll go a long way in being able to sell lots and lots of books!

And you’ll make a lot of people very happy.







Author Contacts:

https://www.facebook.com/Patricia-Loo...

http://www.amazon.com/Patricia-Loofbo...

https://twitter.com/MKMMA_pattyloof?l...

http://www.pattyloof.com/blog/


Patricia Loofbourrow, MD, is an SFF and non-fiction writer, PC gamer, ornamental food gardener, fiber artist, and wildcrafter who loves power tools, dancing, genetics and anything to do with outer space. She was born in southern California and has lived in Chicago and Tokyo. She currently lives in Oklahoma with her husband and three grown children.

I wish I’d by Helen Hollick

A great post by author Helen Hollick from IndieBrag


I guess all authors wish they had written ‘that’ novel – the one that has made Oscar status Blockbuster movie legend. The novel that hits number one in the bestseller charts and stays there … and stays there… and stays there… Or do we?

Yes, of course we all want to do well, the basic facts of paying off the mortgage or being able to afford to get the car fixed is a prime motive – but the reality is, out of the thousands upon thousands of books published worldwide every year very few of them reach the heady height of Literary Stardom.

Do I wish I’d written Gone With The Wind , or Fifty Shades of Grey or Harry Potter ? To be honest? No, not really.

What I do wish is that I had possessed the knowledge and experience I have now twenty-plus years ago.

My first novel, part one of the Pendragon’s Banner Trilogy was The Kingmaking. Writing it, I probably made all the mistakes an author is not meant to make: tell not show, too many adjectives and adverbs, point-of-view (head-hopping) changes… but were these issues that often get slammed in Amazon’s Comments sections nowadays so important back in 1993? I don’t think they were, and besides, William Heinemann, an imprint of Random House snapped the trilogy up. As did St Martin’s Press in the USA. Mind you St Martin’s didn’t do much of a good job with the books, and they eventually fell by the wayside – no marketing meant no sales. The same, unfortunately applied to Heinemann.

This was the 1990s. There was no social media, no internet even (well maybe a very embryonic World Wide Web.) Imagine! No Twitter, Facebook or blogging! Not surprisingly the books didn’t sell (even though Heinemann missed a golden opportunity – I was even on TV talking about The Kingmaking– and several of the very top radio shows. Given the right marketing I could have been B.I.G.…

Cut a long story short, Heinemann eventually dropped me. Was this because I’m not that good a writer perhaps? Was it because my (ex) agent did about as little for me as did Heinemann? Maybe there were several reasons – a down-turn in the popularity of Historical Fiction being one of them. I had faith in my Trilogy though (I’d spent ten years writing it, after all!) So I took the huge step of Going Indie. This was 2006/7 – when Self-Publish was still frowned upon and being described as Vanity Publishing.

The Pendragon’s Banner Trilogy was not vanity – it had been Mainstream Published (so take that all you doubters who say ‘If its good enough to be published it would be mainstream!”) My priority was to keep my books in print. The reason they hadn’t sold was because Heinemann had failed to do this: who is going to buy Book One and Book Three of a trilogy if Book Two is not in print, and there’s no prospect of it being reprinted?


So what is my wish for The Kingmaking, Pendragon’s Banner and Shadow of the King?





Well, three really.

1. I wish I knew whether it would be a smart move to completely re-edit and re-write it –editing out those adjectives and adverbs and picking up any POV changes. But is it wise to alter something that has been in print for twenty years? Is there any point? Surely it is better to look forward, not back?

2. I wish I knew then what I know now about the importance of marketing.

3. I wish more people would read and enjoy the Trilogy – no, not because I want to make money from sales, not because I want to reach a bestseller list but because I want to share the hard work, the tears, the joy, the sheer determination I put into producing those books. I want to share the characters and the world I created with readers who have not, yet, discovered my story of King Arthur. It breaks my heart that given the right backing my characters, my story, could have been ‘Up There’ with the greats. Or am I kidding myself?

There is no magic, no Merlin, no Lancelot even in my Trilogy. Instead there is

The Boy
Who became the Man
Who became the King
Who became the Legend.


And I must have done something right along the way with my version of what might have really happened in fifth century Britain because the US publisher Sourcebooks grabbed the trilogy, and now a German publisher, Sadwolf Verlag is translating the books into German.

There is one final ‘I Wish’ for the Trilogy which I am intensely proud of.

I wish my Dad had not passed away three months before I was first accepted for publication. I might be able to do something about the other wishes, but Dad was not able to share the euphoria of me finally making it as a proper author. And that is a regret that, sadly I can do nothing about.

LINKS

http://www.helenhollick.net/

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...

https://www.facebook.com/HelenHollick...

https://twitter.com/HelenHollick?lang... Tube Trailer

http://www.amazon.com/Helen-Hollick/e...

Margaret Atwood’s 10 rules for writers

A fun post from Professor Wu of the Nothing in the Rulebook blog

“The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like,” writing legend Neil Gaiman said. But of course, the main rule of articles and lists of tips and rules about writing and for writers is that there will never be just one hard and fast rule: quite the opposite, in fact. So while Kurt Vonnegut’s first rule of writing is that one should never “use semicolons”; Zadie Smith takes a different view, arguing that you should “make sure you read a lot of books.”

When there are so many rules and pieces of advice out there, which ones do you follow? This is a question perhaps best suited to another article; yet a good place to start is – as it so often is when it comes to writing and literature – with one of the true literary greats: Margaret Atwood.




In 2010, inspired by Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, The Guardianasked authors for their personal lists of dos and don’ts. Nothing in the Rulebook will bring you the timeless counsel of the great writers of the 20th and 21st centuries. Therefore, without further introduction, we bring you Margaret Atwood with her personal writing commandments:

1. Take a pencil to write with on airplanes. Pens leak. If the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.

2. If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.

3.Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.

4.If you’re using a computer, always safeguard new text with a memory stick.

5. Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.

6. Hold the reader’s attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don’t know who the reader is, so it’s like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark. What fascinates A will bore the pants off B.

7. You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there’s no free lunch. Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially you’re on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.

8. You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You’ve been backstage. You’ve seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.

9. Don’t sit down in the middle of the woods. If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.

10. Prayer might work. Or reading something else. Or a constant visualization of the holy grail that is the finished, published version of your resplendent book.

For more excellent wisdom on writing, consider the writing tips from author and creative writing lecturer Julia Bell; and complement that with some priceless advice from the brilliant poet, Rishi Dastidar, alongside our compendium of writing advice from some of the greatest authors.

Stephen King Used These 8 Writing Strategies to Sell 350 Million Books

A great post by writer Glenn Leibowitz from INC.COM



Stephen King is one of the most prolific and commercially successful authors of the past half century, with more than 70 books of horror, science fiction, and fantasy to his name. Estimates put the total sales of his books at between 300 and 350 million copies.

16 years ago, King shared everything he knows about writing in a book that instantly became a bestseller: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Part memoir, part codification of his best writing strategies, the book has become a classic among writers.

I discovered -- and devoured -- it a dozen years ago, when I was trying to take my writing to the next level. I recommend it to all of my writer friends.

You don't have to be a fan of King's writing to appreciate the wisdom within the pages of this book. Nor do you have to be a novelist: The book has highly practical strategies that writers of nonfiction can immediately apply to their writing.

Here are eight writing strategies King shares that have helped him sell 350 million books:

1. Tell the truth.

"Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want. Anything at all... as long as you tell the truth... Write what you like, then imbue it with life and make it unique by blending in your own personal knowledge of life, friendship, relationships, sex, and work... What you know makes you unique in some other way. Be brave."

2. Don't use big words when small ones work."

"One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up your household pet in evening clothes."

3. Use single-sentence paragraphs.

"The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story... to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all. The single-sentence paragraph more closely resembles talk than writing, and that's good. Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction. If not so, why do so many couples who start the evening at dinner wind up in bed?"

4. Write for your Ideal Reader.

"Someone -- I can't remember who, for the life of me -- once wrote that all novels are really letters aimed at one person. As it happens, I believe this. I think that every novelist has a single ideal reader; that at various points during the composition of a story, the writer is thinking, 'I wonder what he/she will think when he/she reads this part?' For me that first reader is my wife, Tabitha... Call that one person you write for Ideal Reader."

5. Read a lot.

"Reading is the creative center of a writer's life. I take a book with me everywhere I go, and find there are all sorts of opportunities to dip in. The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as in long swallows. Waiting rooms were made for books -- of course! But so are theater lobbies before the show, long and boring checkout lines, and everyone's favorite, the john."

6. Write one word at a time.

"In an early interview (this was to promote Carrie, I think), a radio talk-show host asked me how I wrote. My reply -- 'One word at a time'-- seemingly left him without a reply. I think he was trying to decide whether or not I was joking. I wasn't. In the end, it's always that simple."

7. Write every day.

"The truth is that when I'm writing, I write every day, workaholic dweeb or not. That includes Christmas, the Fourth, and my birthday (at my age you try to ignore your goddam birthday anyway)... When I'm writing, it's all the playground, and the worst three hours I ever spent there were still pretty damned good."

8. Write for the joy of it.

"Yes, I've made a great deal of dough from my fiction, but I never set a single word down on paper with the thought of being paid for it... Maybe it paid off the mortgage on the house and got the kids through college, but those things were on the side -- I did it for the buzz. I did it for the pure joy of the thing. And if you can do it for joy, you can do it forever."

Composition confusion

3 Cases of Sentence-Composition Confusion from the Daily Writing Tips Blog


It’s not only quite possible but also quite common for what initially appears to be a well-written sentence to turn out to fail to express what the writer intended. Readers may be able to understand that intent, and may not even notice the error, but confusion is likely. Here are three sentences that don’t quite say what the writer thinks they say, followed by discussions and revisions.

1. Jones teamed up with another future Hall of Famer named John Smith.

This sentence literally states that Jones’s name is actually John Smith; “another future Hall of Famer named John Smith” implies that the previously mentioned person shares that name. To eliminate this distraction, simply replace name with a comma: "Jones teamed up with another future Hall of Famer, John Smith. (Alternatively, change another to fellow and delete named: "Jones teamed up with fellow future Hall of Famer John Smith.”)...

2. Gillian Anderson was offered half of David Duchovny’s salary for the return of The X-Files.

Here, the take-away is that half of David Duchovny’s salary was taken away and offered to Gillian Anderson—obviously not the intended meaning, which is that Duchovny was paid twice as much as Anderson to return to the television series. The fact that Duchovny’s salary is mentioned only for comparative purposes should be emphasized: "Gillian Anderson was offered half of what David Duchovny was paid to return to The X-Files.” Alternatively, write “Gillian Anderson was offered half as much as David Duchovny was paid to return to The X-Files.” )

Note, too, the rewording in each case of the end of the sentence, which originally was written as if to suggest that she gave the series back in exchange for taking half of Duchovny’s salary, rather than that in exchange for reprising her role in a new edition of the series, she is earning half of what her male co-star is being paid.

3. I managed to pinpoint the location of his first housing development, but finding the first house he built was about as easy as locating men who worked on his construction crews.

To compare one difficult task (finding the first house a housing developer built) with another (tracking down his contractors) by writing that one was as easy as the other could confuse readers. (As it is, only the counterpoint conjunction but provides a clue that the second and third objectives were a challenge to achieve.).

For clarity, replace “as easy as” with “as difficult as”: “I managed to pinpoint the location of his first housing development, but finding the first house he built was about as difficult as locating men who worked on his construction crews.”

Fix those Dangling modifers

Many authors are guilty of writing sentences with dangling modifiers. I found this post from the Daily Writing Tip Blog helpful.

5 Cases of Dangling Modifiers

Take care that when you begin a sentence with a subordinate clause—a string of words that does not stand on its own as a complete statement but supports the main clause—the modifying phrase pertains to the sentence’s subject and not to some other noun or noun phrase. Here are five sentences that fail the test, with explanations and revisions.

1. Despite being reluctant to start a film career, Alan Rickman’s initial foray into cinema found him nearly stealing Die Hard away from Bruce Willis and cementing his status as a master of memorable bad guys.

This sentence suggests that Alan Rickman’s movie debut was reluctant to begin a career in film. The modifying phrase must refer specifically to the person, not to a reference to something about the person, to repair this illogical error; simply insert his name, change the adjective reluctant to the noun reluctance, and, in the subject of the sentence, change his name to a pronoun: “Despite Alan Rickman’s reluctance about starting a film career, his initial foray into cinema found him nearly stealing Die Hard away from Bruce Willis and cementing his status as a master of memorable bad guys.”

2. Stopped up on blocks, I can see the boat from keel to top deck.

Writers (or their editors) can often fix dangling modifiers—here, the writer describes herself, not the boat, as being stopped up on blocks—by starting the sentence with a subject and inserting the modifier as a parenthetical in the middle of the sentence: “I can see the boat, stopped up on blocks, from keel to top deck.”

3. Undrafted in 1987, the team welcomed John Smith to the franchise.

John Smith, not the team, was undrafted in 1987, so, as with the previous example, exchange the modifying phrase and the subject to create a correct sentence: “The team welcomed John Smith, undrafted in 1987, to the franchise.

4. Bottled at the source, natural pressure forces the water toward a sealed delivery system

Again, starting with the subject is usually the best approach to repairing a dangling modifier. The water, not natural pressure, is bottled at the source, as is obvious in this revision: “The water, bottled at the source, is carried by natural pressure toward a sealed delivery system.”

5. With a successful track record at a young age, Smith decided that Jones was the man for the job.

Who has the successful track record at a young age?

The context may not be clear from this sentence presented in isolation, but Smith, the prospective employer, is impressed with job candidate Jones’s background, though the impressive track record could also pertain to Smith, so Jones’s name should be attached to the achievement to make it clear that this is what Smith finds appealing about Jones: “With Jones’s successful track record at a young age, Smith decided that he was the man for the job.”

Better yet, also provide the sentence with a stronger start to replace the weak with: “Impressed by Jones’s successful track record at a young age, Smith decided that he was the man for the job.”

The Secret Life of Anna Blanc Through the Eyes of Author Jennifer Kincheloe

Jennifer Kincheloe is a research scientist turned writer of historical fiction. The Southern California native has traveled to such exotic locales as Nicaragua, Ethiopia, and Papua New Guinea. She earned a Masters degree in Public Health from Loma Linda University and a PhD in Health Services from UCLA. Jennifer was on the faculty at UCLA, where she spent 11 years conducting research to inform health policy. During her time at UCLA, she worked on her maiden novel, THE SECRET LIFE OF ANNA BLANC.

Ms. Kincheloe set THE SECRET LIFE OF ANNA BLANC in 1907 Los Angeles. Mischievous socialite Anna Blanc is the kind of young woman who devours purloined crime novels, but must disguise them behind covers of more domestically appropriate reading. She could match wits with Sherlock Holmes, but in her world, women are not allowed to hunt criminals.

Determined to break free of the era's rigid social roles, Anna buys off the chaperone assigned by her domineering father and, using an alias, takes a job as a police matron with the Los Angeles Police Department. There she discovers a string of brothel murders, which the cops are unwilling to investigate. Seizing her one chance to solve a crime, she takes on the investigation herself.

If the police find out, they’ll fire her; if her father finds out, he'll disown her; if her fiancé finds out, he'll cancel the wedding and stop pouring money into her father's collapsing bank. Anna must choose —either hunt the villain and risk losing her father, fiancé, and wealth, or abandon her dream and leave the killer on the loose.

Q: Your novel is a work of historical fiction. Is it your favorite genre? If not, what genres do you most read? What authors most influenced you?

I love good writing, regardless of genre, and will read anything—writings of the Saints, history of the vibrator, autobiography of Ricky Martin—especially if it’s on audiobook. The author who influenced me the most was Elizabeth Peters (a.k.a. Barbara Mertz). If you haven’t read her Amelia Peabody series set in Egypt in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, then do so immediately. You will thank me.

Q: Like Sarah Waters, Diana Gabaldon, and Diane Setterfield, you earned a PhD and worked in the world of academia before you became a fiction writer. How did academics influence your writing?

Becoming a competent novelist requires the same tenacity that carries you through a Ph.D. When I decided to learn the craft, I treated my endeavors like graduate school. In research, you read everything written about your topic of interest, and then you do your own experiment. I read every writing book I could get my hands on. Then I would read novels I admired five times over, picking them apart and trying to find out how the author did it. I would read a novel focusing on the use of adjectives and adverbs, and reread it looking at how the author attributed dialogue. That’s a little like scientific research.

Q: Your novel is set in Los Angeles in 1907. I know you are a native Californian but why did you select that period? Since you are a trained researcher, where did you start?

There was a female cop in 1910 Los Angeles—Alice Stebbins Wells. She inspired me to write THE SECRET LIFE OF ANNA BLANC. Anna was to be modeled after Alice, but the character flowing out of my fingertips was not mature enough to get her badge, so I set the story a few years earlier when Alice was still just a police matron. Then I ditched the whole Alice idea altogether because Anna wasn’t like Alice at all.

I did my research in old newspapers, novels and textbooks from the 1900s, memoirs of police matrons and prostitutes, doctoral dissertations, sermons, court transcripts, films from the 1900s, 1900s music—lots of primary sources. Collecting street and fashion photography from the time helped.

Q: What kind of woman is Anna Blanc?

Anna has the sharpest mind the LAPD has ever seen. She is the product of a loveless home. Really, she’s just an object to her controlling father. She’s privileged by her wealth, whiteness, and beauty, but oppressed as a woman and incredibly sheltered. As a result, she’s naïve and self-absorbed. But she cares about justice and has a great capacity for love, in her way. She grows tremendously over the course of the book.

Q: Your work is a long one. How long did it take to outline it? What is your writing process?

THE SECRET LIFE OF ANNA BLANC began as a screenplay, which is why the book seems so cinematic. I wrote a one-page outline in a three-act structure. Then I wrote a paragraph describing each scene in the hypothetical film. Then I made a Powerpoint presentation with a detailed slide for each scene. A generous screenwriting teacher from USC’s film school decided to mentor me, and we met once a week to talk about it.

Then I wrote the screenplay, and rewrote it a dozen times. It took about nine months. I took a year-long break from the story, then wrote it into a novel. That took another two years. I workshopped it with my writer’s group, who read every chapter in one form or another. Then beta readers gave me feedback. My agent had comments. My publisher had changes. It was very much a team effort.

Q: You have one of the most interesting Facebook pages on the web. How did you build it? Did it help with selling your manuscript?

Thank you! I think it’s opened doors for me. I started it after the book won a contest and I had an initial publishing deal that my agent turned down. Everyone said, “you need a Facebook page if you are an author,” so I started one, posting pictures and facts from my research for the book. By the time I got my second publishing deal, the page was well on its way.

Q: What steps did you take to build your fan base?

Facebook, Twitter, book signings, lots of radio, and blog interviews. Also, my publicist is really great, as is the Penguin Random House team that does our sales.

Q: You published with a small house. What was that process like?

Slooooooooooooooow. I got an offer in January of 2014 and it wasn’t until November of 2015 that the book was published. But small publishing houses give you more attention than the big five, and Seventh Street Books is the hot new mystery publisher. Our authors are nominated for—or win—all the major mystery prizes. We have bestsellers.

Q: What advice would do you have for authors of historical fiction?

Become an expert in your book’s setting. Use primary sources. One thing I find really helpful is harvesting slang from newspaper articles and works of fiction written during the period.

Q: Can you give your fans a preview of your next work?

Yes! I just sent it to my agent. It’s an Anna Blanc sequel set in Los Angeles’s Chinatown and it’s inspired by two true stories.

A tong (Chinese gang) leader in San Francisco believed his prize slave girls were stolen by a rival tong leader and taken to Los Angeles. It set the gangs on the verge of a war that nobody wanted. He offered a $1,000 reward for the return of the girls. The Los Angeles Police Department began hunting for the girls to return them to their “owner” because they wanted the prize money. This shocked me so much I had to write about it.

The second story happened in New York’s Chinatown. A white missionary woman was found dead, stuffed in a trunk in the apartment of her Chinese lover. He fled and the crime was never solved. Whites went nuts and there was a huge backlash against Chinese Americans. I fictionalized it and set it in Los Angeles.

Look for the Anna Blanc sequel in 2017.

If you want to connect with Jennifer online, here are her links:

https://www.facebook.com/TheSecretLif...

https://twitter.com/jenkincheloe

https://www.pinterest.com/jrkincheloe/