S.L. Viehl's Blog, page 216

Writer Zen Ten

The Ten Grave Precepts of Writer Zen

1. No killing dogs, cats, birds, ferrets, hamsters, goldfish or any other helpless animal in the story.

Bump off all the humans you want; just leave the poor defenseless critters alone!

2. No stealing titles from other writers' published work.

That goes for cool character names, too.

3. No misusing sex scenes.

Work out your divorce on your own time.

4. No speaking falsely in the author biography.

We know you aren't the greatest American novelist of all time, or we would have seen you on Oprah after the Dr. Oz explained how high colonics are our friends.

5. No giving or taking chocolate-covered Valium.

Unless you get completely hideous cover art, in which case, I'll give you a two-year supply along with counseling and free membership in my little support group.

6. No discussing the faults of non-writers.

We need them to drag us out of the workspace now and then or we'll starve before we finish that rewrite of chapter three.

7. No praising yourself while abusing other writers.

They're not that bad. You're not that great.

8. No sparing the character assets.

Of course a recovering crack whore hiding from the cops in a flop house room with a sometimes-boyfriend named Wife Beater is a truly hip protagonist, but she's also a little depressing. In between detox and ER visits, have the girl volunteer at the local library, or deliver Meals on Wheels or something.

9. No indulging in anger at one's editor or agent.

Naturally if you have the financially independence that allows you to wait forever for that next advance check or contract negotiation, go ahead.

10. No defaming the Three Publishing Treasures (Dan Brown, Stephenie Meyer and J.K. Rowling.)

Like they care what you think anyway.

This list was inspired by a link I found over at The Presurfer for ZenHabits, a blog devoted to "finding simplicity in the daily chaos of our lives. It's about clearing the clutter so we can focus on what's important, create something amazing, find happiness."

Which I think for writers, is writing. Yes?

Fake French Book Covers

Freelance Internet consultant Omer Pesquer came up with a neat online generator that allows you to generate fake cover art for a French novel using Flickr images; the site is likewise in French but just enter your name (or whatever you want as the author byline) in the box and hit go.

Here are some that I generated (and please be aware these are fake book covers, and do not represent any real novels of mine):

   

NaNoWriMo Wednesday

Every Wednesday from now until November 1st I'll be posting some ideas, resources and other info that may be of help to those of you planning to join in NaNoWriMo 2010.

Last week I talked to my agent about an idea I had for a new trilogy of novels. Two phone calls later, she asked me to put together a proposal and send it to her. That meant choosing titles, character casts, themes, standalone plots and subplots, interconnecting threads and a concept that would tie three stories together -- and all I had to work with was an idea. Four days, twenty-one pages and 5,454 words later, I sent my agent the trilogy proposal, which is now in the hands of an interested editor.

Don't start calling me a novel ATM. The first reason this proposal came together as fast and well as it did was because the idea I started with was pure story fuel: potent, clear, and powerful enough to keep the engines of my imagination revved. The second reason is because I did the work required to develop it from an idea into stories for three books.

When you think about what you want to write for your November novel, you're likely sorting through a lot of ideas. Some seem good, others great, but the best ones will be like finding diamonds in a gravel pit; they can dazzle and even blind you to everything else in your head. You become so excited you can't wait to start up your writing engines and hit the story road.

This period of excitement is also as it should be. Who wants to write a book based on an idea that bores you to tears? Not me.

At some point you'll realize you have some decisions to make, because ideas are not novels (if they were, I'd surely be writing my millionth by now.) Your idea needs some things, say like a title to name it, and characters to explore it, and a setting to occupy it, and suddenly your idea may begin losing some its glitter as all these undecided things start piling up around it and smothering it. You may decide not to worry about this stuff until you start writing the book, because the story details are a lot of work, and this, this is supposed to be fun.

A few of you will sit down in November and write a novel based solely on your idea, simply making it up as you go along. It will also work out for you because you are organic writers and that's your natural storytelling process. On behalf of all non-organic writers, let me say: we really hate you.

Those of you who are not organic writers but still choose to run with just an idea may get lucky and end up with diamond-quality story. More than likely, though, you will find yourselves backtracking and rewriting a lot as you try to stretch out that idea. You may become frustrated with how long it takes to work out the things that your idea didn't cover. You may even give up when your idea sputters out and leaves you stranded in the middle of Chapter Three without a clue as how to continue on.

Bottom line for non-organic writers: no matter how dazzling or fun it is, don't rely on just an idea. Take the time now to think about it, make some decisions and develop it into what you need to write a novel.

Related links:

Ten Point Novel Concept Outline Template -- this is a very simple plotting template (followed by a filled-out example) to help you painlessly outline your idea.

Outline Your Novel in Thirty Minutes by Alicia Rasley

Outlining: Clarifying & Accelerating Understanding & Organization by Dr. Robert S. Houghton

PBW's Novel Outlining 101

Winners

The next time I need a title for a story that is fighting being named (every other book these days, just about,) I'm grabbing you guys to help.

We put the magic hat to work, and the Winners of the Reality Doesn't Bite giveaway are:

Linda Henderson, whose book would be titled We Should Have Met Before (Yep, been there, wrote that book a few times myself)

Brenna of Tom, Emily & Brenna, who didn't have a title but had to throw Tom out of a chat room for being rambunctious (Let's see, I'd title that one, Come Back When You're Ready to Settle Down)

Amity, whose book would be titled There's a Broadsword in Your Car: Let's Get Married! (Man, don't you just want to shake this guy's hand?)

Winners, when you have a chance, please send your full name and ship-to address to LynnViehl@aol.com so I can get these books out to you. My thanks to everyone for joining in.

Free for All Ten

Ten Things You Can Have for Free

Freeware caution: always scan free downloads of anything for bugs and other threats before dumping the programs into your hard drive.

Anagrams Creatorwill "help you find some great anagrams. It is really easy to use, just enter a name and press the big button, Anagrams Creator will shuffle the characters using a special algorithm and show 3 suggestions. From there on you can 'fine tune' one of them or press again for more variants. By checking Assist, which is on by default, the software will use a wordlist of more then 5000 words for better results" (OS: Windows)

Brainflow is an open source "small text editor designed for brainstorming for creative writing. It displays numerous real-time wordcount statistics and shows progress toward daily and long term goals. Designed for use with the NaNoWriMo contest" (OS: All 32-bit MS Windows [95/98/NT/2000/XP])

Dramatis Personae 2 is "designed to track the personalities and information used by authors in writing fiction novels/short stories" (OS: Mac OS X)

Kabikaboo is "a tree-based note pad, designed to help you plan a book or complex project. Features (1.7): Note Tree: infinitely customizable; you create all categories and subcategories; Edit Nodes: a simple node that you can write text inside of; View Nodes: recursively see any section of your tree, as if it were one document; Tabbed Notebook: keep as many nodes open as you want; Bookmarks: help you jump back to your favorite/important nodes; Spellcheck: automatic spellcheck engine utilizing Enchant; Export: any node, recursively or not, to text or html, for printing; Import: your big text files and auto-split them into nodes; Statistics: word count with real time updates; Visits: three different automatic lists of visited nodes and much more" (OS: Linux and Windows)

LibreOffice Beta is "a productivity suite that is compatible with other major office suites, and available on a variety of platforms. It is free software and therefore free to download, use and distribute" (OS: Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux; designer notes: "This beta release is not intended for production use! Be advised that the current beta might replace your OpenOffice.org installation")

Page Four is "a dedicated writing environment for creative writers. Where other word processors were built with the business user in mind, PageFour was designed to meet the needs of novelists and creative writers. It does not improve your prose or make you a better writer, only you can do that, but PageFour does make your job just that little bit easier" (OS: Windows 7/Vista/XP)

PolyEdit Lite is "a free word processor that is designed to be lightweight, reliable, easy-to-use, and extremely fast. It has all of the standard capabilities you expect from a word processor. The program also introduces some innovative features that will make your work more efficient" (OS: unspecified but it looks like Windows; designer notes that it is MS Word compatible and replaces WordPad and NotePad)

Romanzo is "Software for writing novels. Features an intuitive, efficient GUI for organizing ideas. Integrates the text editor of the user's choice. Completed works can be exported for final formatting in a word processor or document formatting system" (OS: 32-bit MS Windows [NT/2000/XP], All POSIX [Linux/BSD/UNIX-like OSes])

Spine Page 07 claims to usher in "The new age of Word Processing! Spine has pulled out most of the features that Word Processors such as Word has, as the average user only uses 10% of them! Some of the features include: Transparency; Saving, Printing, Opening; Bold, Underline etc.; On-Screen-Keyboard; Resizable Workspace!" (OS: unspecified but designer notes that it's Windows Vista compatible)

Text Cleanser will "remove redundant characters from a given text in just a few seconds. You could create a text file and use Replace to remove the unwanted characters one by one. But that's not exactly efficient, right? With Text Cleanser you just enter the text, select which characters should be removed and press Cleanse this text" (OS: unspecified; looks like Windows)

Book Ideas

My daughter is planning to have a Halloween party this year, so I hit Target this week to start getting ideas for decorations (her theme is internet avatars, which is kind of a challenge.) I saw a big book on the end cap of the stationery/party goods aisle, and good citizen that I am, I picked it up to take it back to the book section. That's when I discovered it wasn't a book at all but a book-shaped storage box. Although it was a bit pricey ($9.99) it was the perfect size to store the blank cards and stationery that I usually shove in a pigeon hole in my desk, so I brought it home. For a storage box it really fools the eye, though, and I think with a couple pieces of cardboard, an old hardback book cover and some glue you could make one of these yourself.

The holidays always mean lots of gatherings and parties at our house, and when friends and family visit I usually put out a stack of my books on a table to sign for anyone who wants them (saves me trips upstairs to the book room, too.) I've never found a pretty way to display them other than in a neat stack or a basket, or just in a row on one of the book cases. Then I was washing my cake stand last night and recalled the diaper cakes I used to make for my nieces' and nephews' baby showers back in the nineties, and suddenly a lightbulb went off.

My stand is only standard cake size, so I couldn't pack the books too close together, but fanning them out and adding some pretty bookmarks made a display that would work on the coffee table or as a centerpiece (I was also thinking this would look pretty on an author's booksigning table.)

Mom is always sending me little bits in her letters, and this Current bookmark made me laugh out loud. If we are what we eat, squirrels should be following me around with lust in their hearts. But it also gave me a neat idea on how to hand out recipes for the holidays -- instead of using index cards, why not print them out on cardstock as bookmarks?

Using a slightly-oversize bookmark format would give you enough room to place a photo of your dish on the front side, along with a list of all the ingredients. Instructions on how to make the dish would go on the back. The recipient could then tuck the bookmark into the appropriate place in their cookbook at home (as well as sticking it in their purse or coupon holder when they go out to shop at the market.)

If you mail out Christmas cards every year and want to share a recipe with friends and family who aren't in your area, you could stick the recipe bookmark in the envelope (just use cards that have long enough envelopes so that you don't have to fold it.) This would also be a nice promotion item for authors who want to give out at booksignings the actual recipes for dishes from their novels (Alison Kent, I'm looking at you and all those lovely cupcakes.)

Added: I put together a quick example of a recipe bookmark and uploaded it to Google Docs here if you want to see how I'd do it; the box lines I drew around them didn't transfer during the upload butthe front and back of the bookmark are side-by-side.

Reality Doesn't Bite

When I heard about our blogpal Alison Kent writing one of the first reality-based romances in HCI's new True Vows imprint, I admit, I imagined someone writing a book based on me and my guy. And laughed, because of all the love stories I've read, not one has ever come close to matching my very strange romance (although the title would have to be Surfer Boy, Story Girl.) I was curious as to how a writer as imaginative as Alison would handle writing a romance based in reality, though, so as soon as The Icing on the Cake hit the shelves I picked up a copy.

Here's a bit about the story: Marketing director Michelle Snow and tech consultant Todd Bracken meet through an online dating service (which was not the way we did it back in my day, so that was very interesting as well as exotic to me.) Lonely but wary Michelle is pressured into trying online dating by her girlfriends, and lonely but well-adjusted Todd is looking for someone to fill the gaps in his life, so they're already a good match before they exchange the first text message. When they meet, that lovely thing called chemistry kicks in, and the whirlwind begins. Not everything is instant Nirvana, however. Michelle dreams of opening her own cupcake bakery, which she puts off because of her dread of failure, while Todd is dealing with his Dad's battle with cancer and Michelle's wariness, which prevents him from sharing her dream.

Thanks to the scrumptious descriptions in the story I'm probably going to be baking a lot more experimental cupcakes in the future, but it's the emotional journey of this couple that really makes the novel a wonderful, deeply satisfying read. I never had to imagine this love affair really happening because it always felt real. It didn't need any artificial drama (aka car crashes, homicidal ex-boyfriends or heart-of-gold bounty hunters) to up the wattage; Alison's skillful retelling brought a terrific intensity to even the most ordinary of circumstances in the story.

I appreciate how much respect was shown the couple in the story, too. This book is about two real people and how they fell in love, and that is not something you want to trifle with or rewrite so it sounds more marketable. This book is going to be a legacy in their lives forever. Alison handled their characters with a balance of remarkable clarity and keen sensitivity; I never found anything in the book I'd consider cringe-worthy or embarrassing for the real Michelle and Todd. Even the cover art is gorgeous and evocative without going over the top (and if you're curious as to how the real Michelle and Todd feel about the book, you can read a neat interview with them about it here.)

The Icing on the Cake is also unique in that it creates a new niche among contemporary romance. As writers we try to invent people and worlds capable of whisking away our readers from their troubles for a few hours; with this novel Alison Kent proves that true love can be just as fascinating and uplifting as any invented fantasy.

But as always, you don't have to take my word for it. In comments to this post, tell us what you would title a book based on your real-life romance (or if you're still looking for love, just toss your name in the hat) by midnight EST on Monday, October 4, 2010. I'll draw three names at random from everyone who participates, and send the winners an unsigned copy of The Icing on the Cake by Alison Kent. This giveaway is open to everyone on the planet, even if you've won something from PBW in the past.

Metaphorstory

This collage page from one of my journals uses art as a personal metaphor, one I put together for the beauty I find in writing. My computer is nowhere near as gorgeous as a peacock feather, but the feather represents both how I see and what I try to do with my writing instruments. Behind the feather is a torn fragment of a watercolor I painted that I wasn't happy with, to symbolize my vision of the story (and my eternal conflict trying to realize it.) The rough dark page is the world beyond my story; the audience I can't see, the void I want to fill.

Would you have known that if I hadn't explained it? Probably not. Does not knowing what the page means to me personally diminish your enjoyment of it? It could, but it doesn't have to. I think it depends on how you relate to symbolism and how often you engage your sense of wonder and curiosity.

It would be great to publish books as colorful and creative as my personal journals, but because everything I write as a novelist is published in black and white, words are my only medium. Metaphors are both paint and brush, mortar and brick, courier and message. Very often we respond on many levels to a story, and not all of them register right away, if at all. In an open mind, metaphors can gain access to many different levels.

Letting Go

When you're a series writer, the two words you never want to see are The End. Although like any novelist you finish every series book you write, by the time you type the last paragraph of one story you're already thinking ahead and planning the next. Until you reach the finale, the last book in the series, and you know there won't be anymore. Then you spend a lot of time second-guessing yourself (Maybe I could do a Next Generation series?) or sulking (it's not fair. I never got the chance to write Book X, Y or Z.)

You may get the writer version of series separation anxiety. You ask yourself Was it really worth it? a couple thousand times. You probably spend a few hours digging through old boxes of series memorabilia: the letter from the Big Name who thought your first novel was dazzling and gave you The Blurb to End All Blurbs; the first glowing fan letter; the dried flower you saved from the big bouquet your spouse brought to your first booksigning, that non-hatchet review published in the glossy publishing trade (then you re-read the hatchet jobs that promised your series would tank by book three, and yeah, you glance at your ten-novel series and smirk a little.)

At some point during this resentful, teary-eyed self-pity fest, you know you have to begin the process that will allow you to let go and move on. Because if you don't you will never write anything else, or you'll quit Publishing, or you'll spend the rest of your years doing something else while trying to forget what was or wallowing in tragic seclusion over what might have been and blaming everyone but yourself for it.

I've ended enough novel series now that I feel like I should know every inch of this particular emotional rollercoaster. I ought to; I've already built and ridden it six times (it seems weirdly appropriate that StarDoc would be the seventh series I've ended or had to end.) I'm fortunate in that I have other, ongoing series to write and keep me productive, and a couple of new prospects that are starting to look pretty solid. It still hurts to let go, but it's the only way to move forward.

In the end, nothing should get between you and the writing. Not even the writing.

Advizine

Aside from the market and agent listings in the back pages, the October issue of The Writer was pretty much another waste of dime. Short version: Vampires are over, zombies are the next big thing; craft way-cool characters with only 4, count 'em, 4 steps; self-publishing's all right for nonfic or niche; bitching over the worth of writer blogs; plus the usual roundup of successful Names to tantalize us with their success. Right. Thank you.

My issues with this issue: Vampires have been over for what, two, three years now? And zombies, well, if you're the author of a how-to on writing zombies, sure, you'd want them to be the next big thing (I want genetically-enhanced superhumans to be the next big thing; should I write an article saying they are?) And apparently there is zombie erotica out there, and I need that phrase soldered out of my brain, immediately. Seriously, I say write whatever makes your readers happy, but if reanimated rotting corpses getting it on truly are the next big thing, then PBW is going back to ghost writing. Or maybe ghosts will be the next big thing. Somebody, go check with Jennifer Crusie, see what she thinks.

Know what? I'm tired of the next big thing. I say let's figure out what the next little thing is going to be. Or the next weird thing. Or the thing that has no buzzword. That would make a cool opening pitch line, wouldn't it? "Enclosed please find my proposal for The Vampire Brotherhood vs. The Promiscuous Zombie Chicks, which I believe will be the next thing. What that thing is, I can't really say. It's a closely-guarded secret. You understand."

But I digress.

I regret to say that in my experience (which is fairly extensive) it generally takes more than four steps to create a decent character. I've never counted but I think it takes somewhere around 4,967 steps. Maybe 4,968. On a good day. And sure, there is promo and platform and fanbasing in blogging, and of course, there are a gazillion blogs and there is no money in blogging. Evidently there is money in writing generic articles about the pros and cons of writer blogs, but I'll guess the market is glutted now.

Naturally I could be wrong, but then again, I just do this for a living. I do know that when I find myself arguing out loud with the articles I'm reading, it usually means I must stop renewing the subscription (or, in this case, quit picking it up from the newstand.)

You guys reading any writing advice 'zines out there lately that aren't leaving your eyes blinking in disbelief?