Linda Maye Adams's Blog, page 56
March 13, 2018
Soldier, Storyteller: A Woman Soldier Goes to War
On August 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Within twenty-four hours, he controlled the entire country. Five days later, the United States was deploying soldiers and had named the military operation Desert Shield. This would be the largest deployment of women at the time. Over 40,000 women went to war. It was so new that people questioned whether women should be there, and what would happen to the families they left behind.
Linda Maye Adams was one of those soldiers. Soldier, Storyteller is a rare inside look at war from a woman’s perspective.
Her memoir answers the question: “What was it like?”
Available from all your favorite booksellers.
March 11, 2018
Aspiring Upward, not Sideways
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The arrival of spring in Washington, DC is kind of a strange thing. It’s like it’s pressing up against winter–c’mon, c’mon, c’mon–and then it’ll explode all once. Almost overnight, we’ll have green and flowers everywhere. The first step is the cherry blossoms and dogwoods. Those are already blooming.
One of the things that caught me really off guard once I joined writing communities online in the Gold Rush days of the internet is how many writers aspire sideways.
Aspiring sideways is…
…When all the craft advice the writer is getting is from other people at their level.
…When a writer puts down best selling writers as not knowing what they are doing.
…When a writer consciously or unconsciously tells other writers not to try to be better.
That last one seems kind of shocking, considering all the writers who go online and to writing groups and ask for critiques.
Sometimes what we hear is hard to comprehend. When I went to the first ThrillerFest, I attended a workshop with best-selling writer James Rollins. He’s a wonderfully funny speaker. One of the things he said was to “Be specific” in your details.
It sounds easy, and yet, it wasn’t. At the time, I thought I understood what he was talking about and I didn’t, not at all. It took me years and years to grasp it, which included at least five workshops that pushed at me to do it more than I was.
He wanted to help, for the people who wanted to listen.
And then there were the others I’ve run across. Some pass along information they got sideways…another writer telling them to do something or to not do something.
Or a writer being influenced by his own biases and didn’t realize it, like one who didn’t like description. Therefore all description was bad and should be avoided. One writer had this top ten list, and almost everything on his do not list was probably keeping him–and others who followed it–from being published.
Then there’s one writer who was on one of the writing message boards I used to visit. He’d been rejected a lot and was bitter about it. So he actively worked at keeping writers from aspiring up. If they had come on and talked about James Rollins, he would have said, “He’s a big name writer. He can get away with that. You can’t, so don’t even bother to try.”
“Successful people do what unsuccessful people are not willing to do. Don’t wish it were easier; wish you were better.” — Jim Rohn
The dynamic changes drastically when we start looking upwards, at who’s successful and see what they do. People in business do it all the time, studying a CEO or a manager they think does it right. This seems elusive for some writers.
But that leap off into the unknown can be terrifying.
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Everyone goes into writing thinking, “My book is going to be a best seller.”
But it’s very hard to attain that kind of goal by veering sideways, instead of looking upwards at the writers who are best sellers.
One of the best things is finding writing advice from a writer that you realize you’ve read and enjoyed. I recently picked up a copy of David Gerrold’s Worlds of Wonder. I found it originally at the library and when I read it, I felt like he treated me as if I was an adult. I didn’t realize it at the time, but he assumed that because readers picked up his book, they aspired higher.
It’s so much being better with the eagles. Who is a writer you aspire upwards to be like?
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March 4, 2018
Critical Thinking: One of the Most Important Things for Indie Writers
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This weekend, I went to a local park for a walk. It’s March, so we’re headed for spring. There are buds showing up on some of the trees, and there are even some flowering trees blooming pink. One of the things I did in the park was look up.
And watch for a few minutes. The tree tops were swaying in the wind. It was both amazing and frightening. Frightening because my first thought was to wonder if the trees were going to come down. And amazing because this is what the trees are supposed to do, and they generally hold up pretty well.
A couple came by in the opposite direction, walking a friendly black lab. They stopped because they were wondering why I was looking up.
Today, everything moves so fast that people don’t stop to look up, or to pay attention.
For writers, that’s a huge problem. There’s a lot of misinformation and hype out there. Writers want to only deal with the creative side of writing and not pay attention to the boring business side. They want someone else to take care of it.
So they don’t ask questions, or even do the research to ask intelligent questions. They don’t look up, they don’t look down, and they don’t look around. They look down a very narrow tunnel.
And they trust people, without ever asking what that person is getting out of it.
An example is developmental editing.
Many writers use the terms revision and editing interchangeably. These are actually two different skills. Knowing what the heck they are would make it a lot easier to evaluate what is being offered when looking for services.
When I was looking for a copy editor, I found a lot of people recommending developmental editing. Almost no one recommended copy editing, or even proofreading.
Being an INTP, I was automatically skeptical. Developmental editing is the most expensive of all the editing services. So I dug deeper: Who was recommending it?
Beginning writers
Developmental editors.
I took it one step further. Why were the beginning writers recommending it? Because “everyone” was recommending it. No one was asking the next question:
Who’s making the money?
The developmental editors.
And the beginning writers were recommending it to each other, while using revision and editing interchangeably. They didn’t even know what the terms meant, so it put them at a huge disadvantage. They didn’t know what they were doing, but the developmental editor did.
Now there’s a developmental editor who has it written into her contract that she gets a byline on a book she edited.
Think about that.
The writer wrote the entire book. They sent the book to this editor, who made comments. Paid said editor probably a couple grand. Maybe they used all the suggested changes, and maybe they didn’t. And gave the editor credit like they had written the book.
Critical thinking is imperative to survive in the world of writing. These are way too many people with their hand out, hoping that you won’t ask questions, or are equally ignorant of what they’re doing.
Ronald Reagan said, “Trust, but verify.”
Even that’s not true anymore.
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Research first, to fill in gaps of you knowledge. That means more than asking another writer at the same level, or Googling it. Look up the biographies of the people to see if they have the background to know what they’re talking about. I got taken a lot on writing courses because I did this step, but didn’t research far enough.
Verify. Before you purchase anything or sign a contact, check the person out thoroughly. There was a writer who popped onto the writing boards I was on, telling everyone we needed to outline. Turned out he had a book coming out on a process he was promoting. I looked him up. At the time, he had published three novels, with the last one almost 7 years ago. Nothing since. Only three books meant he was still a beginner. But he did have an editing service.
Never assume that things stay the same. Always reread whatever information they’re providing each time, in case it changes. I went into the grocery store today to buy coconut milk. Everyone’s buying it now, so everyone’s jumping in. For some reason today, I checked the ingredients again. The label on the can looked the same. It was identified clearly as coconut milk on the front. That wasn’t one of the ingredients.
Research, verify, and keep verifying.
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Links for further research
What the heck is editing and revision: Keys to Effective Editing. I had this class now probably about ten years ago. It’s a good basic class that’s fun because you actually do editing.
Six Critical Thinking Skills to Master: This is a short list of things to think about when you are assessing information.
Personal MBA: Head straight for the section on Problem Solving. You need critical thinking for problem solving so the books listed here will be a good start. Not only that, you might be able to find them in the library.
February 24, 2018
Watcher Ghosts Available in Rabbit Bundle
My story Watcher Ghost, from the GALCOM Unverse series, is in a story bundle called Short Flights (of the Imagination). The bundle is available for preorder, with a release date of March 1–so only a few days away for some awesome fiction.
I’ve been having fun doing ghost stories that aren’t the expected scary ones. When I was growing up, my mother received the digest sized Fate Magazine. I loved reading all those stories about encounters with ghosts. They were presented with hope, not fear. When I did this story, I thought every place in space that had been around for a while would have a ghost to kind of keep an eye on things.
February 19, 2018
Filling the bucket of learning
This video popped across my feed yesterday, courtesy of Me-TV. Disco was at its height when I was growing up, and I remember hearing this song over the radio. I like the visuals in this one better than the Night Fever one in the link.
I can’t sing. At all. I was so bad at rhythm that the Army tried to kick me out twice for my marching. When we were marching off to war with the press watching, the acting first shirt put me at the end of the formation so I wouldn’t embarrass him.
So when I watch a video like the one above, it amazes me that one of these singers could replicate this song now.
Even as a writer, I wouldn’t be able to replicate something I wrote a year ago. I could redraft the story, but it would come out different. I would hope it would come out as something better.
Because I’m always learning something new.
I’ve been reading a book called The Psychology of Selling by Brian Tracy. It’s part of the Personal MBA, which is reading a list of books to have the basics of business. I’ve read Brian Tracy’s Eat That Frog! and I didn’t care much for the book. Partially because it seems like his goal is to jam as much into the day as possible (a problem with a lot of time management books). But also, I think, because he focused heavily on emotions to make the sale.
I’m an INTP on the Myers-Brigg scale. Means I like logical and analytical. Emotional appeals can work, but I’ll be a skeptic first. If someone is trying to sell a workshop, I’ll scroll past all the “shouting” to find out the price first.
This book though…it had something in it that caught my attention. It said that learning was like a bucket of water. You have to constantly fill up the bucket because it doesn’t stay full, or continue learning.
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Which reminded me of a writer that I used to love. She first came out with awesome book in the 1990s. It was a series. The main character was different than any I’d seen before, and it was a woman character. In an action role! She had a team of interesting characters surrounding her. I just took a workshop on Teams in Fiction, and it identified one of the reasons I really liked this series.
So ever time I went into B. Dalton’s, I checked the shelves for this writer to see if there was a new one out. When I found one, I snatched it up, took it home and read it in a day, then reread it. I would happily still be reading this writer today.
If something hadn’t changed.
The writer became a best seller and stopped filling her bucket.
It happened by about book five. I just knew at the time that the books weren’t quite as good. I still bought the books for a while, thinking they would get better. But the other team members I liked disappeared. They were replaced with a collection of characters who filled space but weren’t a team.
So I stopped buying the books, since I could use the money for books I was enjoying and wanted to keep. I still read the books, but I checked them out from the library. I was always disappointed and finally decided they weren’t worth my time to read.
But I occasionally picked up one, hoping for that old magic. In the last one, it looks like the writer must be having a decline of sales because she circled back around to the roots that started the series and tried to replicate it.
And failed.
She’s been writing for 20+ years and should have been able to turn out a much better book than that first one I read. But her bucket was empty. She’d stopped learning long ago, and no longer has those tools.
But learning means not just grabbing the next book and reading it, but finding resources that actually push the skills. The bucket should always be overflowing.
I’m in the process of learning about subplots, and as from above, selling. What are you learning today?
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I’m in a new Story Bundle called Short Flights (of the Imagination). My story is from my GALCOM Universe series, called Watcher Ghost. But I wanted to share the image of all the stories in the bundle so you can pre-order it and get lots of great speculative fiction stories (like we really don’t have all that much to read :).
February 17, 2018
Thoughts on the Army’s new fitness standards
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The Army’s announced that they’re going to be revising the physical training standards so it’ll be one standard for both men and women. The current standard–probably the same one I had when I was in–had the same elements, but were adjusted for the women.
Or, basically, the original physical training test was developed with the strengths of men in mind. Most women don’t have the upper body strength to do 42 push-ups. The Army treated the women like men and just adjusted the standards by gender.
The men hated it. They always thought the women were getting over. No one seems to grasp that women have different body types, or that they were treating women as if they were men.
For example, make a fist and hold it up next to the fist of a person of the opposite gender. Women’s fists are at an angle; men’s are straight. It makes a difference in how women hold a sword–and they are taught to sword fight like a man (this came from a science fiction con I went to).
I remember going on Battalion runs, which I despised, because the sergeants would gather up all the stragglers at the end and try to embarrass us. The stragglers were always women. No one did the math and grasped that the average woman was a whole lot shorter than the average guy.
What I think is going to happen is the Army is going to set the standard to what the guys can do. Then two things will happen:
The women will get injured trying to keep up with the guys. I got shin splits trying to march with a 6’4″ guy setting the pace. He had ten inches on me.
The women will fail physical training tests and be kicked out, and the military will lose its diversity.
And I’m not talking diversity of gender…but diversity of experience. If the only tools you have are a hammer, then everything will look like it can be fixed with a hammer. The military already has a problem with getting rid of their technical skill. My brother was an Oracle programmer, and they reclassified his job, merging it with a computer operator. Then they told him he needed to change his job and get retrained. He thought that was crazy and got out. I’ve seen more recent stories on the Army doing this to people will skills they really do need.
The solution?
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This is just me, but the focus should be on fitness. It sounds like it is, but it actually is focused on failure or success, and how many points you get. It’s like being graded in school for how fast you run.
One possible option is a run timed based on your height and age. That’d take care of the problem of a 5’4″ woman trying to run to a time set for an average man. But it would also be fairer for the shorter guys. And it might save on the injuries that send people to sick call, and eventually to the VA.
Also maybe rethink the other two exercises (push-ups and sit-ups). The women have a lot of trouble with push-ups, and the men tend to have a lot of problems with sit-ups. Maybe instead of standardized testing for this, a required extra credit exercise that a soldier could pick from a list. It wouldn’t be scored in the same way, but maybe on how many you did, rather than how many you do based on your age. More you do, more points.
No one will probably do anything like this though. I imagine the Army will test the pilot, find out they’re losing all the women, and switch it back. We’ll see.
February 14, 2018
Mystery Blogger Award
Thank you for the nomination from my my regular reader Pearl R. Meaker. I’ll have the rules for this below, after the questions.
Three things about me…okay, I got five.
1) Does your blog have a theme? If yes, why did you choose tha t theme?
The theme is me. The hardest thing for fiction writers is figuring out something that works. A lot of writers land in “How to write” craft posts, and often pass along bad advice (and I’ve been guilty of that myself). Most blogging advice says to blog as an expert, and fiction writers were directed to blog about the topic they had researched for their book. It’s silly advice to me, because it doesn’t get you the right kind of audience. I did a book set an alternate world that was Hawaii called Rogue God, but if I blogged about Hawaii, I’d have attracted people wanting to go to Hawaii, not readers.
2) Where is your favorite place to go for a vacation – or where you would like to go if you could go there.
My favorite place is the beach. I’m from Southern California, so I grew up seeing beaches pretty regularly. We used to drive north to Morro Bay, which is in central California. It has some beautiful–but cold!–beaches at the base of Morro Rock. There was a cool beach called Montana Del Oro that I really liked. It had all these rocky black cliffs–and a cave! Never could go into it, since it was facing out into the water, but I imagined exploring it.
3) Has your favorite subject in school stayed a part of your life? (As in, if it was art do you still do art things? Music – are still playing or singing?)
-I didn’t really have a favorite subject in school. I liked creative writing, but the schools only had two classes. I got into one, but the other one I was turned down for–likely because I wasn’t a good student. I’m a visual spatial learner, which means I learn better by pictures. Audio learning and nitpicking about details, which was how schools taught then, are the poorest ways for me to learn.
4) When was the last time you played a board game or a card game using real cards? (FUN QUESTION)
The game was gin, and it was about ten years ago. That was when I was still writing with a co-writer, and he introduced me to the game. I was pretty horrible at it. Takes a while for me to process how to play and figure out strategies.
5) Do you read to relax? If you do, do you have a genre that is your go-to relaxation genre?
I read all the time. Someone on a productivity board asked if reading two books a week was too aggressive. I’d done five…no six. Hmm. I bounce around genres a lot. I just read Tamara Pierce’s new book that just came out (about time!), which was a YA Fantasy, but I was also in progress of reading Dean Wesley Smith’s Thunder Mountain book bundle and there’s a really interesting book called The Psychology of Selling by Brian Tracy. Always something new to read…
Guidance for the Mystery Award
The creator of this award: Okoto Enigma has this to say: “I created the award because there are a lot of amazing blogs out there that haven’t been discovered, yet.”
The Rules:
Put the award logo/ image on your blog
List the rules
Thank whoever nominated you and provide a link to their blog
Mention the creator of the award and provide a link to their blog as well
Tell your readers three things about yourself
You have to nominate 10-20 people
Notify your nominees by commenting on their blog
Ask your nominees any 5 questions of your choice; with one weird or funny question (specify)
Share a link to your best posts
And questions for the next group:
What was the best money you ever spent as a writer?
What’s the best way to market your books?
What kind of research do you do, and how long do you spend researching before beginning a book?
How long on average does it take you to write a book?
The weird question: Do you believe in sea monsters?
Bloggers nominated:
Siri Paulson
Joy V. Smith
Piper Bayard
Jodi Lea Stewart
Liv Rancourt
February 12, 2018
Apologizing for What’s in Our Stories?
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Last week, Tamora Pierce’s new book Tempests and Slaughter came out. Long-awaited for me. I love reading her books.
But animals also die in her books.
I don’t mind that because she portrays them as characters. They carry the same weight as human characters. If we mourn the loss of a human character, we mourn the loss of an animal character.
Are others offended that animals die in her books?
Probably.
I’ve had problems with thrillers. If a cat or dog makes an appearance in one of those, I’m done. I stop reading. Most the writers of those books kill the animal to show how evil the kill is. In one book, I was pretty sure the writer was fictionally killing off the cat his wife had forced him to have.
Do other people read through those books and enjoy them?
Probably.
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It’s part of writing stories that we have to push at our boundaries.
And sometimes make people uncomfortable.
Star Trek also did that.
It’s one of the reasons the show has endured despite 50 years. No one apologized. They simply did.
But as I was driving into work this morning, I heard a story about the new Peter Rabbit movie. Seemed that a scene offended people so the movie company apologized.
I haven’t seen the film, but the scene sounded like teenage bullying…with rabbits. So we can’t use movies to bring up bullying? Or that it should only be in a certain way? That the readers aren’t capable of figuring things out for themselves?
Sometimes books and movies are a safe place to push at a boundary. Star Trek was great because it was set in the future and could be escapist at the same time. But now, somehow, it’s become the thing not to offend.
Yeah, there are people like artists who do something for the shock value. Then there are those who bring their experiences to the story and show us a different perspective. They make us think.
Problem is that people can be offended by pretty much anything.
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So we rob our society of the ability to do social commentary of differing viewpoints. We end up with the watered down “committee” stories because people are afraid a reader will call offense.
Star Trek is still relevant today. Yet, Chris Pine, the “new” Captain Kirk says we couldn’t make show like that today.
Think about that. Think about that a long time.
February 5, 2018
Interview Posted at A.L. Butcher’s
My interview for the Remembering Warriors bundle went up over at the Library of Erana, A.L. Butcher’s site. Answering one of questions created my last post. It’s was a lot of fun doing it, so please check it out!
And you can find out where to get the bundle here.
February 4, 2018
The Worst Writing Advice? Outlining
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I was working on interview questions for the Remembering Warriors book bundle this week and the above question stuck with me.
There’s a lot of really bad writing advice out there. Beginning writers pass around advice as if they were experts, and there’s a confirmation bias from other beginners, so no one questions it. The problem is so bad that when an experienced, well-published writer gives advice, they will say he’s wrong because it doesn’t agree with all the advice the beginners are giving.
But the worst writing advice I received was that I needed to outline.
It doesn’t bother me if someone else needs to outline to produce a book. It’s whatever works, and everyone is different.
But the reverse is not true.
When I started writing, I naturally gravitated to just starting the story and writing it. It’s called pantsing, and pantsers discover what the story is about by writing it.
From the start, people were horrified! I was eight. Why did it matter?
At least two different people instructed me on how to outline. Neither of them were writers, or even English majors. They simply could not imagine how I could write a story without outlining it first.
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Cat disapproves
But I didn’t realize how pervasive this was in the writing industry. I wanted to get published, so I studied Writer’s Digest, The Writer, and any craft book I could lay my hands on. When the internet was invented, I jumped on and read site after site on writing craft.
I didn’t know that all those resources defaulted to the assumption I was outlining.
I kept trying to write novels. But they were born broken. Really broken. Not fixable broken. Alien spaceship takes out a city broken. I didn’t realize at the time the source of this was all the craft advice that assumes outlining. My subconscious was picking up on the outlining parts and slipping into the story, causing it to break.
I made it worse by going back to craft books, searching for answers. I explained my problems on writing message boards. The default response from writers?
You guessed it. Outline.
Eventually, I tried outlining. I figured, why not? I actually tried several different types of outlines.
One was this four week class on “Pantser-Friendly Outlining,” where one writer taught her method. I almost quit that class each of the four weeks (that pesky Army “Accomplish the mission” kicked in). The instructor got very impatient with me because I wasn’t doing it “right,” and other writers jumped in, trying to explain it to me.
Not one person said “Maybe you’re not an outliner.”
The default was to outline. Period. No one gave any other answers or options.
For a field that starts with creation and imagination, this seems rather…limiting. There is no one size fits all in writing.
What’s the worst advice you’ve run into?
All the books in Rabbit Bundle, Remembering Warriors.
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