Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 28

So-called services: yellow flags

Here’s a post from, hmm, okay, from an editorial service called Fox Print Editorial: Buyer Beware: Vetting Services for Writers

I was skimming this post and found this tidbit: Here are what I’d call … yellow flags to consider avoiding with goods and services marketed to authors

And I thought that was both funny and kind of a good idea. Not red flags, necessarily, that mean run away. Yellow flags, that mean consider this with some care.

As a writer, you may need help structuring or finishing your book. It may take hiring a professional editor to help you see your way out of the woods of your manuscript, and working with one is likely to teach you an enormous amount about storytelling and writing craft. You may need designers or programs for covers and interiors and graphics. You may need support for packaging your book or formatting or marketing or publicity, or any of the increasing number of writing career–related tasks that fall to the author—skill sets we may or may not have, or where professional assistance or training are the most efficient and useful way to get where we need to go. Your job is to determine how much of it you need and where you want to spend your resources and time and money.

Bold in original. Yellow flags mentioned here:

–Solicitation. Someone contacts you. You haven’t gone looking for them. They email you saying, “Hey, would you like to write a book?” or “I’m offering this exciting chance to take your writing to the next level!” or whatever. I’d call that an … orange flag at least. Maybe a red flag. I don’t trust any such offers.

–Hard sells. Limited time offers. Only two spots left in this course. Again, to me, that looks like at least an orange flag, not a yellow flag.

The linked post does go on to offer what seem to be good suggestions for how to evaluate services you’re considering.

The post winds up with this:

No one can do it for you. You can hire all the pros and sign up for all the classes and services and tools in the world, but at the core, this art is based on the artist. 

That’s certainly worth mentioning, yes.

Seems like a decent post; give it a look if you’re considering hiring somebody to do something, or considering signing up for a course of some kind. I do consider, from time to time, signing up for a course on, say, Amazon ads. I haven’t yet because I have way (way) too much to do already. Maybe someday.

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Tropes: Bad, Good, Amazing

A post at the Insecure Writer’s Support Group Blog: Using Tropes: The Good, the Bad, and the Amazing OR How To Upcycle Tropes and Keep Them Fresh

I like tropes. Or rather, I like tropes that I like, which is perfectly circular, but true. I don’t care whether a particular trope is common as dirt; if it’s well executed, then I’m going to enjoy it.

Tropes, of course, are story elements that been used so often across fiction that they’re instantly recognizable. These elements can be elements of plot or setting, or they can be character types. Used badly, they’re cliches and people roll their eyes. Used well, they are tropes and readers who like a specific trope probably aren’t going to get tired of it no matter how often they see it.

Tropes I like:

Prison breaks, schools, training, girls-disguised-as-boys, enemy-to-friend, found family, dragons, bodyguards, assassins (not too evil), thieves (not evil). I like loyalty and fealty.

Tropes I don’t like:

Time travel, prophecies, love triangles, the backstabbing friend, the chosen one, the lost heir, the irresponsible flighty idiot girl, the depressed detective. I loathe betrayal and humiliation.

Any back cover description that refers to a prison break immediately makes me perk up and look more carefully at the book, no matter the genre. Anything that involves time travel constitutes a bar that has to be overcome by other things, such as a strong recommendation from someone whose taste I trust.

I don’t think it’s really necessary to ask, “How do you keep a trope fresh?” I think the answer is always, “By being a good writer.” Nevertheless, fine, what does the linked post suggest in this regard?

What’s good about tropes, what’s bad about tropes … yes, yes, say something original … okay, here:

Sometimes we writers can get overly comfortable with a successful plotline, device, or character type, and before we know it, it’s going into every one of our stories. I have a favorite author who writes books with female protagonists who, for some reason, always end up accidentally pregnant at some point. Each book has different characters, motivations, and scenarios, but the same device is used in all of them. It started reading as inauthentic—a crutch for the author rather than a meaningful event for the character—and I found myself looking for other stories to read.

The reason this is interesting is, I wouldn’t say that this sort of thing is produced by an author who gets “overly comfortable with a successful plotline, device, or character type.” I would say that a repetitive element like this is produced by an author’s preoccupation with or interest in or preference for specific situations and themes. Oh, that’s reminding me of this:

This is a very good book, here are my comments about this novel, but my point is, the author says in an author’s note that she’s specifically interested in plagues … which could be added that to “plot elements I don’t like, actually, but she made it work. Anyway, if plagues crop up in her books, that’s not a result of her being overly comfortable with a worldbuilding element that is popular; that’s a result of her specific interest in plagues.

Anybody ever read a bunch of Jack Chalker novels? Ideally several series one after another? The Well World is quite fun. The Four Lords of Diamond didn’t appeal to me quite as much. I wound up rather disliking the Flux and Anchor series … my goodness, look at this price. I wonder if I still have these books on my shelf? If so, I should add a “rare and collectable” label to prevent myself from just dumping them in a used book store. Anyway, this is seven books, four books, five books. This is plenty to say the following:

Wow, Chalker keeps coming back to body distortion, involuntary personality restructuring, and sexual slavery of exaggeratedly feminized people. If it were just The Well World, that would be one thing. But it’s all of them. As a rule, the important characters wind up … fairly okay, at least. Honestly, I do like the Well World series. I’m pretty sure I still have those. But my point is, returning to those elements probably isn’t a matter of being comfortable with successful tropes. Those aren’t tropes — at least, I don’t think so. The repetition of these situations didn’t seem like a crutch to me at the time I read all these books, and still doesn’t. It doesn’t seem inauthentic at all. It seems to me to reflect a particular set of preoccupations that I don’t share and don’t like to read about.

If some author kept featuring characters who wound up unexpectedly pregnant, I wouldn’t think “easy reliance on a trope.” I would think, “preoccupation with this situation.”

The rest of the linked post is about varying the “hero’s quest” plot. Some of the variations seem so trivial they don’t count. Meeting up in a coffee shop rather than tavern, really? Others seem too far removed from the original to retain any hint of the actual trope:  Horror: To survive and find freedom, the main character must sneak (unscathed) from the top floor to the ground level of a zombie-infested office building. I might well enjoy reading that, but it’s not a quest story any longer.

If I want to use a trope, I want the actual trope, sufficiently recognizable that I and readers can enjoy it . Someday, perhaps I’ll write a prison break story, with enemies-to-friends plus an assassin. That all seems like it could be made to fit a single novel.

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Update: Lots of revision

Okay, so I worked really hard to get SC#2 out to proofreaders on Friday, in order to clear the decks for serious revision of SC#3 over the weekend.

So, for Silver Circle #3, I have now:

–lightly tweaked chapter one.

–doubled the length of chapter six, taking the total wordcount up to 154,000 words.

–revised chapter eight and made a note about later changes that depend on this newly revised version.

–wholly rewritten chapter two, which I didn’t expect at all. This was interesting because the broadest outline of events in that chapter is unchanged, yet everything else changed radically around that outline. This also brought the wordcount back down to 148,000 words, giving me more space for other things later, which is great.

–deleted most of chapter three and moved a big chunk of chapter eleven up to replace it.

And that’s where I am right now.

What’s next?

–smooth out chapter three, because all I’ve done is move the chunk of chapter eleven. I haven’t actually integrated it yet.

–read and hopefully barely tweak chapters four, five, the revised six, seven, the revised eight, nine, and ten.

–consider what’s left of chapter eleven and probably move something from chapter fourteen up to that spot. Or maybe delete the remnants of chapter eleven.

–heavily revise chapter twelve because of the big change back in chapter eight.

— read and hopefully barely tweak chapter thirteen.

–heavily revise chapters fourteen and fifteen.

–tweak chapter sixteen

–AND SO ON, That’s enough of a chapter-by-chapter list.

–write a short chapter, probably chapter twenty-three, because I realized I need to tie off a plotline that otherwise is left hanging.

–write at least one scene, maybe two, that will get inserted in other chapters.

–finish the epilogue, FINALLY.

–Do a little trivial polishing and formatting.

Let us pause to consider the date:

It’s October 28th! Where did October even GO? The chance I’ll get ALL THIS finished by the end of the month is zero. I’m now aiming for Monday, which would be November 4th. MAYBE I can get through all this by then. Especially if I take off work Friday, which I probably will.

The weather is nice. I’ve been taking the dogs out for short bursts of ecstatic, mad running. That is, the older dogs meander around while keeping an eye on me in case cookies might be forthcoming. Joy and Haydee are the ones who run madly, mostly together, but sometimes splitting up. I prefer them to stay together because Haydee is visible. Joy vanishes in autumn leaves and, since she moves REALLY fast and NONSTOP, is hard to keep track of.

Joy is also now a teenager. Haydee skipped that stage, but Joy has not. We’ve therefore been working on a fast, first-time recall, thus: I wait till the first burst of energy has died down, then wait for Joy to be some distance away but visible, then I call JOY, COME!!! If she whips around and races to me, she gets many small, delicious treats in a row. If she doesn’t, she gets one warning (JOY, HEY! COME!!). If she comes at that point — fast, straight to me — she gets a couple nice little treats. If she doesn’t respond to the warning, I go get her, put her on leash, and practice a compelled recall for a minute or two. Then we try again. Yes, this is a pain, but her recall is MUCH better than it was even a couple weeks ago. The thought of her getting loose in the woods still terrifies me, but I hope that I could at least get her to turn around if I saw her bolt through a hole in the fence.

Here we are, at the nice new gate, with straight, solid fence posts on both sides and no leaning or gap. The old fence posts, just as big as these, had rotted through belowground, apparently, and that’s why the old gate had become unsafe. Once through the gate, they can go off-lead. Haydee and especially Joy are like racehorses when released: they take off like rockets. The other dogs take off like much slower, calmer rockets.

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Now available for Preorder: Silver Circle Part #2

Okay! So I’m through the major tweaking stage for Silver Circle #2: Rising Winds. I’m sending it to proofreaders in about, oh, five minutes, as soon as I write this blog post.

This means I’m highly confident I can hit a reasonable preorder date. I’m defining “reasonable” as November 25th, so this book is now available for preorder. That means the final version needs to be loaded to KDP by the 20th.

This also means the epub needs to go live on my Patreon by November 11th.

That is 12 days away. I’m not only betting I can hit that, I’m actually rather hoping I can drop the epub on Halloween, or maybe on The Day of the Dead. But if that doesn’t happen, fine, it will surely be ready to go by November 11th.

WHEW.

I’ll be doing another proofread myself, by the way, but this time more of a regular proofread and less tweaking hundreds of sentences.

Coming up for Part #3:

Writing at least two missing scenes. Maybe three. One of those might turn out to be a whole chapter. (A short chapter.)

Finishing the epilogue.

Revising a lot of chapters in light of the epiphany I experienced last week.

Deciding, for real, finally, who exactly is present in the climactic scene and making sure they are all there and no one else is there. Both climactic scenes. They’ve both been revised multiple times to put people into those scenes or take them out, and at this point I honestly don’t remember exactly who’s there, but I think this may need to be either revised again or better justified.

Reading Part #3 from the top and doing a general cleanup and trim.

I really hope to have this all basically done by the 31st, but no guarantees. I’m taking off work today to get a good start on it. I would love to drop it on my Patreon the same day #2 drops on Amazon, ie November 25th, but that is optimistic. I think I can probably drop it by early December, and I hope it can go live on Amazon no later than December 15th …

Which would be kind of funny because December 15th is when the whole story actually begins. #1 occurs basically on December 15th of some unnamed year, #2 takes place from December 16th to early December 19th. #3 takes place, I think, almost entirely on December 19th, but probably stretching into December 20th.

Therefore, even though I was really hoping to get all three books out before December, a hope that did not account for how much time when into the Griffin Mage trilogy, December 15th would be aesthetically pleasing.

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AI Turing Test

Fifty artworks, some AI generated and some real. Can you tell which are which? Link is here

I basically could not. I have a really strong guess about some of the images, but mostly my feeling goes like this:

–Does it look digital?

–Does it look a little odd or fake or to photorealistic/

–Does it look like the sort of thing that would be easy to elicit with a prompt?

–Anything weird about the hands?

And if it goes yes, yes, yes, yes, then I think it’s AI, and if the answers include even one no, I default to thinking it’s real. Unless there’s something weird about the hands. I only noted really odd hands in one image.

I also found myself experiencing these reactions:

–It’s too detailed to really look like a person did it.

–It’s too abstract to really seem like an AI did it.

–It looks too much like real paintings for an AI to have done it.

I suspect that all those reactions are probably wrong.

I strongly suggest you click through just to check out the artworks. My favorites include The Ancient Gate and The Giant Ship, which shows you the kinds of things I gravitate toward. I dislike most abstracts, especially jagged abstracts. I like landscapes and therefore liked the Bucolic Scene and Leafy Lane.

I thought Ice Princess was the single image most likely to be AI generated. I think String Doll was probably AI generated, but I liked it and find myself hoping that’s wrong, that a person created that one. Ditto for Celestial Display.

I liked Dragon Lady a lot and went back and forth on it and finally said Human, but without a lot of confidence.

I liked White Flag a lot and felt it should be human, that an AI shouldn’t have done that kind of shading. Ditto for Rooftops, because that watercolor look, I feel like AI wouldn’t have done that. Maybe you can tell AI to do a watercolor. But to me the style looks human! I said human on both those. I don’t have any idea whether I’m right.

The test doesn’t provide answers, but Scott Alexander does, here. I am now looking — I didn’t until I went through all the images and answered all the questions and then wrote this post. Now I am. … but I don’t want to say anything until you’ve had a chance to try this if you want to.

I will say, some of the answers surprise me.

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Poetry Thursday: DH Lawrence

I saw Lawrence mentioned in a post about classic poets who should be better known, poked around, came across this poem, and immediately recognized it. I definitely encountered this poem in some literature book or other. It’s only loosely rhymed — Lawrence uses repetition here more than rhyme. It’s stuck with me, though — I recognized it at once and remember many of the lines. I’ve always liked snakes, of course.

Snake by DH Lawrence

A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.

In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second-comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.

The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?
Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?
Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid,
But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.

I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste,
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross,
And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.

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Fun trivia I learned by writing Silver Circle

Okay, when I asked on Facebook how to keep the authorities from tracking your phone, I found out some interesting (but not necessarily fun) things about that, some of which made its way into Silver Circle #1. But today, I’d like to share some trivia that is both interesting AND fun that I have now learned about because of comments on SC #2.

***

Did you know that it’s rather difficult to get a laptop that is wholly incapable of connecting to the internet? Probably you did. There’s an item called a Freewrite for which you have to specifically enable connection. It turns out that if you refer to a “Freewrite laptop” in your book, one-third of your readers (current proportion) will actually go to the trouble of looking it up and finding out ALL ABOUT its capabilities. I’m sorry I sent you down this rabbit hole, unless you enjoyed it, and then great, glad to give you a reason to dive into the world of unconnected devices.

I honestly didn’t realize anyone would look up the real thing. I have now created a new unconnectable device with a different name so that no one will look up the real thing and get distracted because the device in SC #2 isn’t the same as the real-world device.

However! Neat trivia coming up, provided by a reader who went down that rabbit hole:

Check this out: a programmer made the old and classic game Doom playable on … a … pregnancy test.

They had to replace the test’s original CPU and display, so it’s really only a shell. But it’s still an impressive feat — the game retains the original’s hypnotic movement and its iconic enemies are easy to make out.

That’s kind of amazing even to me, and I don’t know anything about the game.

A company called Clevo says they can make laptops for people that don’t connect to WiFi or Bluetooth. I guess that’s neat? I borrowed a variant of their name for a completely fictional laptop that does not exist in the real world, so please don’t go poking about looking for something with that name when you read the book. However, should you want something that can’t connect, apparently that’s a good company to look at.

***

My favorite line from any early reader, so far, is Mike S referring to someone who’s been briefly kidnapped as “being brought into an unsolicited temporary alliance,” and I just wanted to share that with you because it’s funny.

***

Did you know that very few homes in Las Vegas have basements? I did not know that. Supposing that you do want a basement beneath a home in Las Vegas? You can make that happen. It’s just that most people don’t. But, since you can do it if you’re determined, it’s basically fine.

I reluctantly decided that probably I’m not going to set any part of Silver Circle within a truly remarkable underground … basement isn’t the right term. Underground mansion beneath what appears to be an ordinary Las Vegas home.

Just off Las Vegas’ bustling Flamingo Road, surrounded by family homes, apartment complexes, and stores, an unassuming two-story house sits on top of what may be the city’s most peculiar home. … Some 25 feet beneath a typical Las-Vegas style yard of gravel and palms, … The sprawling 15,000+ square-foot artificial environment features 12-foot ceilings and skies with lighting to simulate sunrise, day, sunset, and night, as well as a swimming pool, putting green, and two spas. If that isn’t enough, there’s also a sauna, wet bar, dance floor, a barbecue grill, a billiard room, and seating for over 120 people. Since this is a fallout shelter, it also includes a generator, fire and smoke alarms, an intercom system, and large food storage pantries.

Up at ground level, the clues that something is different about the unassuming two-story house are the turbine vents in the yard and the odd sloped structure that houses the stairwell down to the underground lair. 

Amazing. There are reasons this isn’t really suitable as a setting, but I’m still tempted. However, one real use of this remarkable mansion/fallout shelter is that it establishes beyond any doubt that if you really want an extensive basement in Las Vegas, you can build one.

***

A place called Ari’s Dry Cleaning (?) evidently serves amazingly good gelato, should you happen to be in San Diego and you’d like to try some gelato. I don’t have the patience to poke around on the linked website and figure out why a place that serves gelato is called “Dry Cleaning.” If anyone knows the story behind that, feel free to explain it.

***

So, at this moment, seven people besides me have read Silver Circle #2. Of these seven, four have a knack for picking up typos. No one has specifically read it solely as a proofreader yet, except my mother, who is one of those four.

Here is an interesting tidbit of trivia: Each of those four early readers picked up a good many typos. ALL FOUR picked up around 90% unique typos. There is actually very little overlap. VERY little. Everyone caught it when I spelled “likely” as “likelyl” — that extra letter jumped off the page for everyone (including me, by the way). It’s weird I didn’t see it myself the instant I typed it, because, I mean, “likelyl”?

However, anything more subtle than that was probably overlooked by three out of four readers, meaning specifically readers with a knack for proofreading. This includes missing quote marks, inappropriate quote marks, missing periods, inappropriate commas or missing commas, and a great heap of missing words, plus a few wrong words.

A related bit of trivia: yesterday, a sharp-eyed reader drew my attention to four typos in TUYO — which has been out since 2020. Isn’t that remarkable? Three were inappropriate punctuation mistakes, I think, and one was a wrong word. All were obvious to me once this reader pointed to them.

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Would you turn the page?

Here’s one of Rhamey’s posts at Writer Unboxed: Would you turn the page of this bestseller?

Here’s the page, without the lead-up or anything, just the page:

***

I am desperately, painfully, completely, and stupidly in love.

Her name is Daisy. We met when we were four years old. I’ve been in love with the girl since age four—that’s how pathetic I am. I saw her at the playground feeding bits of her sandwich to the hungry squirrels, and all I could think was that I had never met any living creature as beautiful or as kind as Daisy Driscoll. And I was gone.

For a long time, I didn’t tell her how I felt. I couldn’t. It seemed impossible that this angel with golden hair and pale blue eyes and skin like the porcelain of our bathroom sink could ever feel a tenth of what I felt for her, so there was no point in trying.

But lately, that’s changed.

Lately, Daisy has been letting me walk her home from school. If I’m lucky, she lets me hold her hand, and she gives me that secret little smile on her cherry-red lips that makes my knees weak. I’m starting to think she might want me to kiss her.

But I’m scared. I’m scared that if I tried to kiss her, she would slap me across the face. I’m scared that if I told her how I really feel, she would look at me in sympathy and tell me she doesn’t feel the same way. I’m scared she might never let me walk her home again.

But that’s not what I’m most scared of.

What I am most scared of is that if I lean in to kiss Daisy, she will let me do it. I’m scared / snip

***

This is cheating in the worst way. I’m sure Rhamey has a rule about how many words he’ll include and then he snips the entry short. But here’s where that was going:

***

What I am most scared of is that if I lean in to kiss Daisy, she will let me do it. I’m scared that she will agree to be my girlfriend. I’m scared that she will allow me into her bedroom when her parents aren’t home so that we can finally be alone together.

And I’m terrified that the moment I get her alone, I will wrap my fingers around her pretty, white neck and squeeze the life out of her.

***

I like this. In fact, I liked it before that kicker at the end. Do you know where I first started liking this opening? With that row of four adverbs in the first sentence. I liked the narrator’s voice from that moment. Then I got to the kicker, and that’s quite a jolt, isn’t it?

This book is The Boyfriend by McFadden. It’s a novel of psychological suspense, it says. The opening makes me think of I Am Not a Serial Killer. Here’s how that one starts:

***

Mrs. Anderson was dead.

Nothing flashy, just old age — she went to bed one night and never woke up. They say it was a peaceful, dignified way to die, which I suppose is technically true, but the three days it took for someone to realize they hadn’t seen her in a while removed most of the dignity from the situation. Her daughter eventually dropped by to check on her and found her corpse three days rotted and stinking like roadkill. And the worst part isn’t the rotting, it’s the three days — three whole days before anyone cared enough to say, “Wait, where’s that old lady that lives down by the canal?” There’s not a lot of dignity in that.

But peaceful? Certainly. She died quietly in her sleep on August thirtieth, according to the coroner, which means she died two days before something tore Jeb Jolley’s insides out and left him in a puddle behind the laundromat. We didn’t know it at the time, but that made Mrs. Anderson the last person in Clayton County to die of natural causes for almost six months. The Clayton Killer got the rest.

***

That’s a great opening, or at least, it’s another opening that seems gentle and then features a hard kick. I Am Not a Serial Killer is a fantasy novel. Or horror. Either way, it’s a murder mystery with a supernatural type of killer and a rather peculiar protagonist. I liked it quite a bit, though it gets fairly grim. Horror, to me, is more tolerable than (most) novels described as psychological thrillers, at least as long as the good guys win in the end. I like the opening of The Boyfriend, but I don’t like the idea of the story. Here’s the description:

***

She’s looking for the perfect man. He’s looking for the perfect victim.

Sydney Shaw, like every single woman in New York, has terrible luck with dating. She’s seen it all: men who lie in their dating profile, men who stick her with the dinner bill, and worst of all, men who can’t shut up about their mothers. But finally, she hits the jackpot.

Her new boyfriend is utterly perfect. He’s charming, handsome, and works as a doctor at a local hospital. Sydney is swept off her feet.

Then the brutal murder of a young woman―the latest in a string of deaths across the coast―confounds police. The primary suspect? A mystery man who dates his victims before he kills them.

Sydney should feel safe. After all, she is dating the guy of her dreams. But she can’t shake her own suspicions that the perfect man may not be as perfect as he seems. Because someone is watching her every move, and if she doesn’t get to the truth, she’ll be the killer’s next victim…

***

Bold in original, and I do think that’s overdoing it. Regardless, though I personally found the opening engaging, as I say, I don’t like the sound of the actual story. I’m not crazy about Sydney — just based on this description — and I’m not keen on what looks to be an entire novel-length inability to decide whether she’s dating a serial killer. I am not, of course, looking over her shoulder as she makes decisions. But if she suspects her new boyfriend could be the serial killer AND she knows someone is watching her every move, then this sounds like a great time to say, “Hey, it’s been fun, I’m going to have to go take care of my aged mother in Montana for six months, I sure hope I’ll see you again when I get back.” Then leave town and see what happens. Does the boyfriend let you go? If not, that’s pretty suggestive.

Well, in the story, perhaps it makes sense that Sydney goes into a is-he-or-isn’t-he vacillation.

4.4 stars, by the way, nearly 38,000 ratings on Amazon. Wow, almost 100,000 ratings on Amazon. Came out at the beginning of the month. #1 in all its categories and in the Kindle store overall. A definite phenomenon. That is a killer first page (pun mostly intended).

Here is an interesting comment from a review:

One of the strengths of The Boyfriend is its pacing. McFadden keeps the story moving at a breakneck speed, with short chapters that make the book easy to binge-read. Each chapter ends with a small cliffhanger, urging readers to keep turning the pages to find out what happens next. The suspense builds steadily, and just when you think you’ve figured it out, McFadden throws in a twist that changes everything.

I point this out because a novel like this may be worth reading to think about the structural features that make a book a page-turner.

Also, fine, I admit I’m curious about the twist. Is Sydney herself the killer? That seems unlikely in this setup, but, I mean, maybe? Does Sydney’s perfect boyfriend turn out to be perfect after all, and the killer is someone else? I would probably prefer that, depending on exactly how the author worked it out. Regardless, not picking this one up because psychological thrillers aren’t generally something I seek out. But if any of you have read it and give it a thumbs up, I might change my mind …

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Round vs Flat Characters

Post at Kill Zone Blog: Characters: Round and Flat

Which pleases me by using iconic characters to represent “flat,” rather than declaring that flat characters are by definition inferior.

The post doesn’t use the term “iconic,” which I do like in this context. In fact, I mostly use the term flat to mean flat in a bad way, and iconic to mean flat in a way that works. Jack Reacher — flat, mostly. Mark Watney — utterly flat. I mean iconic here.

But! What I really love about this post is the quote from Bradbury that finishes it off. I’ve never seen this quote before, as far as I remember. I really like it:

“Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.”—Ray Bradbury

Image from Pixabay

I really like this idea. Plot isn’t central for me … usually … fine, plot was totally central to me in TASMAKAT … or no, actually, it wasn’t. Plot was a way of creating and showing character arcs. You know what, I’m not sure the two can necessarily be pulled apart. The plot was inextricable from the characters in RIHASI. And MARAG.

I am so character-centered, honestly. I’m back to just agreeing with Branbury that plot is the trail of footprints left in the snow. By, yes, memorable characters on their way to incredible destinations. I’ll have to try to remember this line.

Ray Bradbury:

“Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“There was a smell of Time in the air tonight. He smiled and turned the fancy in his mind. There was a thought. What did time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people. And if you wondered what Time sounded like it sounded like water running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dropping down upon hollow box lids, and rain. And, going further, what did Time look like? Time look like snow dropping silently into a black room or it looked like a silent film in an ancient theater, 100 billion faces falling like those New Year balloons, down and down into nothing. That was how Time smelled and looked and sounded. And tonight — Tomas shoved a hand into the wind outside the truck — tonight you could almost taste time.”
― Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

I should definitely add something by Bradbury to my TBR pile.

Here’s my favorite snow-print ever. I took this picture early in the morning, walking dogs on a road through the utterly pristine snowy woods.

Quite a plot could be implied by this trail of wingbeats.

There were about eight in a row as the bird, I suspect a blue jay, worked to get airborn after coming down in snow softer and deeper than it probably expected.

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Update: On Track, With Various Moments of OMG

So, do you know what I did on Sunday?

A) I corrected the last, the very last, typo in SC #1, spotted by the exceedingly sharp eyes of both my mother and GillC, and thank you, Gill! (And Mom.) It was “you yield” where it should have been “he yield.” The version at my Patreon should be correct at this point. All the versions should be correct at this point. Do let me know if I’m wrong about this being the very last typo, of course.

B) I heavily revised chapter 6 of SC #3 AND (this is the fun part) experienced a sudden epiphany regarding an important plot element that will seriously impact several later chapters.

C) So then I said AARGH!!!! and stomped off to do other things unrelated to writing, while questioning my basic ability to write books at all. Insert whatever expletives occur to you. Those same expletives no doubt occurred to me.

D) Started listening to the audiobook of Piranesi to soothe my nerves. This is indeed a soothing audiobook and I hereby recommend it for that purpose.

By the way, I notice the German edition of the audiobook has a much nicer cover than the American version:

I do like that much more than my version. Well, for audio, what matters is the narration, of course, and it’s good for this book. As I say, soothing. I’ve just listened to the part where the narrator describes the arrival of the albatross.

Meanwhile! The preorder dates are getting really close for both SC #1 and the entire Griffin Mage trilogy, and so last week, I checked all the paperback versions in order to make sure, for example, that the Tables of Contents had page numbers — they do now — and that the page numbers were correct — they are now — and discovered that in fact the FORMATTING of the page numbers was highly weird for the third book. I DON’T KNOW WHY. I used the exact same template for all three paperbacks, but only in the third book were the page numbers suddenly placed higher or lower, or centered rather than on the left, or a different font, or just the wrong number altogether. [Feel free to insert a lot more expletives here].

It might have been, in fact I’m dead sure it would have been, easier to delete the whole darn file, go back to the template, confirm the page numbers were correct in the template, and start over. However, by the time I realized that, I was checking the page numbers for the umpteenth time and by then I thought, never mind, I’ll just slog ahead.

So that’s done, reasonably satisfactorily. What a pain.

I also created a fast, super fast, newsletter, just to let people know that SC #1 is available at my Patreon and coming up soon at Amazon. Those of you who subscribe should have gotten that newsletter this morning. Or if not, you soon should. I scheduled it for 8 AM, but I don’t actually know if that’s Eastern or Central or what. There is, sorry, no chapter of “Midwinter” or any other story in this newsletter. Silver Circle has eaten ninety percent of my free time lately, the remaining ten percent went to fixing the dratted page numbers in GM #3 and various other tasks associated with making sure the preorders are ready to go, and hopefully in November I will have SOME time for OTHER things.

I hope many of you had a more relaxing week, or at least weekend.

***

I also had the gate of the arboretum — the fenced acre and a half at my house — replaced. I also asked the person who did the gate to walk the whole fence line with a critical eye and check for security, and lo, he found two (2) holes big enough for Joy or Haydee to scoot out if they had been the ones to discover the holes, which is not helping my general phobia about Joy getting out and racing into the woods and getting lost. (I’m not nearly as phobic about the boys, the older girls, or even Haydee. None of them are nearly as likely to be a mile away before they realize they’re lost.)

Anyway, I was paranoid enough to avert potential catastrophe, so now the holes are fixed and the gate is fixed. However, I haven’t had time to take the dogs out to run. This coming week for sure.

Here’s a cute picture, not of dogs running madly around in the arboretum, but a cozy domestic image of cross-species friendship. They were asleep until I held up my phone to take a picture. I might as well have said COOKIES, the way their eyes popped open.

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