Linda Maye Adams's Blog, page 41

Respecting the Readers

About ten years ago (has it really been that long?), I did actor David Hedison’s website.  The other person and I who managed it were very cautious about our approach.  We knew that we represented him with the site and we didn’t want do anything that would change his image.  So we stayed professional.  It was about the acting and the shows he’d been in.

Cut to today.

I went through my Facebook friends and unfollowed a bunch of writers.  The reason was pretty simple: They didn’t respect me as a reader.

There are a lot of ways a writer can land in this area.  One is a writer being nasty in public to the people buying the books.  I haven’t seen this with writers myself, though I’ve heard stories.  I have seen it with actors who blast a show they were on, the people associated with it, and by association, the people who like the show.

Another did happen to me.  There’s a fantasy trilogy I really liked.  It used to be a periodic reread for me.  One day I commented on my blog about the major storytelling technique I liked about the story.  The writer came on the blog and said she was revising that major storytelling technique in the books because she’d learned a lot since then and what she’d done was a newbie mistake.  It was, well, insulting.  I liked how she used this technique, and it was the reason this story was a periodic reread–and she was revising it to be “better”?  I haven’t reread the books since or gotten any new ones.

Still another happened a few months back.  I was on a entrepreneur coaching site for women.  It was a site that was supposed to be friendly and encouraging.  The owner had recently come out with a non-fiction book.  As a teaching lesson for the members, she called one star reviewers “haters.”  I’ve done one star reviews.  Reviews are not to stroke writer egos–they’re a reader’s opinion about the book. Writers should never get involved in that part of the process.  I objected politely and pointed out that someone in the group could have given it a one star review (I did not review the book.  Glad I didn’t.  It wasn’t a five star book).  The owner told me it was her group and she could do what she wanted; she’d intended the “hater” comment as friendly and encouraging for the members.  The group no longer felt friendly and encouraging so I self-edited.  What she didn’t know was that I’d been playing around with the idea of using her coaching services.  She lost that business because she didn’t respect her audience–only the ones who gave her glowing reviews.  If someone asked me for a recommendation for a coach, it wouldn’t be to her.

Then there’s the fourth one, and it’s gotten me on two writers.  It’s politics.  Hands down, the worst thing for writers, because you alienate half your audience!  There’s an award winning science fiction writer.  I signed up on Facebook to follow him thinking I would get pearls of wisdom because he teaches on writing.  Instead, it was in your politics.  As in, “if you don’t agree with me, I’m going to ban you!”  I unfollowed him because I couldn’t deal with his nastiness.  Saw a story of his in SF&F Magazine.  Passed it by.

The second writer (some of you will know who I’m talking about) wrote in one of her books to writers to stay away from openly being political because of the impact on readers.  Then she broke own rules and veered into a couple of political posts, one on her blog and several on Facebook.  She didn’t say much, but what she did say was enough to leave a bad taste for me.  It was an instant turn off because she was nasty and she assumed everyone agreed with her opinion.  She’s a fantastic, award-winning writer, produces a lot of new books, and I haven’t touched a book of hers since those comments.

Disrespecting your readers = just bad all around.

Here Be Merfolk

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The call of the deep rings ever in our ears, from myth and legend to crime and mystery. Sea-people, mer and monster, immortals and reluctant heroes feature in this sea-worthy bundle.

Table of Contents

1. “The Women of Whale Rock” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

2. “We, the Ocean” by Alexandra Brandt

3. “Oshenerth” by Alan Dean Foster

4. “Deep Dreaming” by Debbie Mumford

5. “Dolphin Knight” by Robert Jeschonek

6. “On Desperate Seas” by Kate MacLeod

7. “Fate’s Door” by J.M. Ney-Grimm

8. “The Murky Depths” by Linda Jordan

9. “Dark, From the Sea” by Linda Maye Adams

10. “Ondine” by Brenda Carre

Available from your favorite booksellers.

Scientifically Impossible Places

I’ve seen #5 in several movies, and I believe the TV series MacGyver.  The last one (#1) I could easily see turning up in a thriller, or maybe on a distant planet.

Good, Bad, or Just Opinion?

We live in an environment now where everyone has the ability to put their opinion out in the public eye.  They blog about it, they can Tweet, or even post it on Facebook.  Yet, instead of having access to more diverse opinions, a lot of people are in a bubble.

If that person didn’t like a book, the book was bad.

If that person didn’t like a movie, the movie was bad.

Not, “I didn’t like it.”

So much of books is very subjective.  I’ve had best sellers that I’ve enjoyed and others have hated (The Da Vinci Code).  And I’ve been happy to put down a critically acclaimed best seller because I thought it was boring.  That book was Cold Mountain.  The chapters were too long for this reader, and every time I saw the formatting of the dialogue, I kept thinking the characters were communicating telepathically!

I’ve also had books that I read at a different point in my life and now it’s not the same. When I was a kid, I read All Quiet on the Western Front.  There was one line in that book that was too much for me at the time.  I read it again as an adult, and after Desert Storm.  Found the line.  It didn’t carry the same weight.

Our opinions change, all the time.

And our opinions are not a qualification that something is bad.  It’s just our current opinion.

Current and Upcoming Releases

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Cursed Planet: GALCOM Universe Book 3

Who knew ghosts could exist in heavy gravity? Hope Delgado, the galaxy’s only alien ghost expert, confronts her toughest challenge on S.C. Kangjun’s latest mission.

The local aliens, 49ers, blame the humans for a ghost.  And they hide a deadly secret.  A secret they will kill to protect.

Hope must make a desperate last stand against the aliens and the ghosts—if she fails, her friends will die.

A science fiction novel of deep space thrills and adventures.

Available now! Pick your favorite eReader flavor for a copy!

Next up in the series is Last Stand.

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Here Be Merfolk

The call of the deep rings ever in our ears, from myth and legend to crime and mystery. Sea-people, mer and monster, immortals and reluctant heroes feature in this sea-worthy bundle.

This a bundle featuring novels and short stories by such writers as Alan Dean Foster, Debbie Mumford, and of course me.  My story is Dark, From the Sea.

Available on January 26.  Check out the bundle on Rabbit Bundle.

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Digital Minimalism: Reduce Clutter  on Your Computer Now

f you feel constantly overwhelmed by the amount of files…if you waste time looking for files you know you saved somewhere…

You’re not alone.  I’ve been there.

Between a full time day job with mounds of paperwork every day and indie publishing, I was drowning in files.  Not only couldn’t I find files  I’d saved, it was like walking into a cluttered room.  I was miserable and stressed out.

There had to be a better way!

I’m not a productivity expert.  But in this book, I’m going to share with you what I did to get my files in order and stop being overwhelmed.

Available January 29.

Food in Space

Sometimes you can get interesting details that can be used in stories–or are just plain interesting.  This video talks about the impact of zero gravity on the sense of smell.

Keeping track of everything: Series Bible

This post comes from one of my newsletter tips and was requested by Harvey Stanbrough.  I’m planning on eventually doing a workbook, and now, come to think of it, it might need a book itself.

I’m working on book 4 of my GALCOM Universe series.  When I wrote the first book, it started as a short story for an anthology call and turned into a novel.  Halfway through, I realized I’d stumbled into a series.  By the time I got to Book 3, I knew I needed a series bible.  Most of the examples I found were uninspiring.  Even the variation from Dean Wesley Smith (Research for Fiction Writers workshop) didn’t do much for me (my creative brain is very fickle).

The term “series bible” comes out of TV.  A typical TV show may have so many different writers come on the show.  The series bible is a guide for the series so that they know Captain Kirk is from Iowa or Gibbs Rule #9 (“Never go anywhere without a knife”).  It just helps keep track of continuity details.  At least that’s how I’m defining it.  Jane Friedman adds things like snippets of dialogue, which I don’t really get.  The dialogue comes in naturally as part of the story, so snippets of random dialogue would be flotsam.  But I digress.

My Guiding Principles

It shouldn’t be a lot of work to do. 

The priority should be on the writing, not on filling out endless worksheets and questionnaires.

It shouldn’t turn into a junk drawer.

Really, it is possible to track too much information.  A lot of my decisions about whether to include something start with: Am I going to use this again?

It should be easy to scan through.

Seriously, you’re in the middle of the scene and you can’t remember the number of people on your space station.  Do you really want to spend fifteen minutes hunting it down or get the information so you can starting writing again?  There are priorities.

Some Examples

I have my character one here because it’s the one that has the most details, and they’re always changing:

APPEARANCE
CLOTHING
JOB BACKGROUND
FAMILY GROWING UP
FAVORITE FOODS
TAGS
DIALECT

Appearance, contrary to just about everything I’ve seen, does not include eye color.  I don’t notice it unless it’s very unusual like Elizabeth Taylor’s violet eyes.  I would tend to assume most characters wouldn’t notice either.  It’s just what’s in the stories.

Clothing is the style of clothes the character wears, favorite colors (if I’ve mentioned it).  Most of my characters are military, but they’ve worn civilian clothes.  One of the characters wears sweats to sleep because he expects to be woken up in the middle of the night.  Stuff like that.

Job Background is essentially what crops up in the story about the person’s military career.

Family growing up – my main character (the team lead) has extensive details about what her life was like growing up (ghosts do not make for a good family life).

Favorite Foods – well, if you’ve had any of Dean Wesley Smith’s workshops, you know that the five senses are pretty important.  The characters eat a lot, and they have favorite things like chocolate (well, someone has to!).

Tags – These are things about each character that gets repeated over and over.  An example is Jack Reacher being a really big guy.  Just read one of the books and see how many times it gets brought into the story.

Dialect – I included dialect because I started doing it for some of the characters (thanks to another workshop and a skill I want to work on).  One of the characters is a Hoosier.  I looked up a lot of dialect for him for Cursed Planet, put them in Scrivener, then deleted that file once I compiled the final version.

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Yeah.  So I had to redo the research when that character became the main character in last stand.  The dialect includes some common words, and also some general rules like adding an s onto words.  (“We haven’t been down to the planet’s.”  It’s still a work in progress.  I know it looks like a typo.).

I’m also thinking about what I want to do for setting and timelines.  Timeline would most likely be dated events that I mention.  In the current story, I mention the Gold Rush days, which is 75 years ago.

One of the biggest things about the series bible is that it’s time saver.  Writers tend not to think of their time as valuable, but every moment you have to spend hunting down information is time not available for writing.

Digital Minimalism: Reduce Clutter on Your Computer Now

Just got the cover for my upcoming book, Digital Minimalism: Reduce Clutter on Your Computer Now.  The book will be out on January 29.

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If you feel constantly overwhelmed by the amount of files…if you waste time looking for files you know you saved somewhere…

You’re not alone.  I’ve been there.

Between a full time day job with mounds of paperwork every day and indie publishing, I was drowning in files.  Not only couldn’t I find files  I’d saved, it was like walking into a cluttered room.  I was miserable and stressed out.

There had to be a better way!

I’m not a productivity expert.  But in this book, I’m going to share with you what I did to get my files in order and stop being overwhelmed.

Video: History of Technicolor

This is an interesting video on both the technicolor process and some film history.  Contrary to popular belief, The Wizard of Oz was not the first technicolor movie.  But watch on:

My Writing Process Start to Finish

Since it’s the New Year, I thought I’d write about my creative process from beginning to end.

The Idea

I have a bunch of random ideas that I pluck when I’m ready.  Most of them are pretty vague.  Like in my writing group, we were talking about a movie with giant robots, so I thought that would be kind of cool for a story.  Can robots be ghosts?

Start the story

Then I start the story.  I don’t do any prep.  I don’t figure out any major events of the story or come up with the ending.  Nothing of what typically gets recommended that writers “should” do.  If I do any of those things, the critical voice takes over and wrecks the story.

I just follow the front of the story.  It’s hard in the beginning.  In fact, it’s sometimes really scary starting the story.  Part of me is screaming, “I don’t know what’s going to happen.”  That’s critical brain freaking out.  It feels like that scene in Indiana Jones where he steps off the cliff and has to trust that he’s doing the right thing.  Writing like this is really about trusting yourself.  I’ve found that while the beginning is always scary, it gets easier to manage the more I write.

I sort of write in order and sort of don’t.  I may hop ahead in a scene and write something, then hop back and write something, then rearrange things.  Other things come out of the story right away, and I dropped those in an extras file so I can still count it as part of my word count.  Scrivener will show a negative word count if I delete too much, even though I’ve done a lot of work.  My process is very messy though while creative brain tries out different things.  It may be like a fussy dog that picks up a bone, then abandons it, then goes back to it again (in my case, types the sentence I just moved to extras file), abandons it again, and find works around that it really wanted this other bone.

The first chapter usually comes out pretty stable.  Most of what’s in it will be what I use when I’m done.  That wasn’t always the case, but something that evolved as I added new writing skills.  It used to be that I started in the wrong place and it was hard figuring out where that was.  That’s why doing more stories—and not repeating the same mistakes—has been so helpful.

Cycling

After that, I write and cycle.  Cycling is something that many writers mistake for revision or editing (terms they use interchangeably and shouldn’t).  The definitions:

Revision/Editing: Oh no!  This is horrible!  What was I thinking when I wrote that?  It’s garbage.  I have to fix it.

Tweak that word.  Tweak this word.  I have to make it perfect.

Cycling:  This way cool thing just came into my story.  I have to go back to chapter 2 and add a paragraph for it.  Hmm.  And maybe I need a scene with this character, too.   Ooh, and I just got this idea! (shuffles off to Chapter 9.)

My cycling is more random than other writers describe it.  They typically go back a scene or 500 words.  I tend to bounce around the story like a pinball machine.  The scenes all connect in my head, so if I adding something to one scene, those brain cells fire and remind me that it’s in another scene, too. A lot of it is adding a sentence or two.

The key to cycling is to not leave any big issues unfinished.  That’s where revision itself becomes extra work—if an important scene is left for the revision because it’s too hard (guilty), then everything that follows will be broken because of that missing scene.  Cycling forces me to think about why something is not working instead of skipping it.

I also use cycling for proofreading.  I make many, many passes over the story to catch typos.  Considering how many I know I make, I’ve been impressed that my copy editor typically only finds one or two in an entire novel—and it’s usually a harder one that was easy to miss.  Like typing statement instead of stateroom, which I do pretty regularly.

As I get near the climax of the story, I’ll get an irresistible urge to cycle through the entire story.  I’ll start at the beginning and scan through it.  I’m looking for more typos and stubs that don’t fit in with the story.  My creative side likes to puts stuff in, and a lot of it I do use.  But sometimes it puts something in and then forgets it’s there and never uses it.  I used to have a lot of stubs at one point—attempting outlining caused them to breed.  My creative side wasn’t happy that critical side was directing the story, so it left them everywhere, including way out of order.  Then, it was hundreds of stubs.  Now it’s two or three.

Finishing the Story

This part of the process is making sure everything is pulled together and fits so I can hit the ending at a run without worrying about anything else.  Then it’s write straight through to the end and cycle a few more times to make sure I’ve nailed the ending…and the story is done.

The whole process keeps evolving.  Next year, it’ll probably be different.