Patti O'Shea's Blog, page 158

The Muse and Her Sense Of Humor

The day after Thanksgiving, I finished a proposal and sent it off to my agent. This meant I had two and a half days to work on something else and there is this trilogy idea that's next in line. All I needed was some kind of over-arcing story for the series.

Um, yeah. Unfortunately, this is an idea I've had for more than two years, but I still haven't managed to figure out the series arc. Of course, that's because it's never been first in line. Now that it is, I should figure everything out and be able to get some work in. That's not exactly what happened. My poor writing buddies were subjected to many think out loud emails. They offered feedback, helped me brainstorm, but nothing really gelled.
It was extremely frustrating.

Then this morning as I was driving into work, pieces started falling into place. The first chip to fall was on hero and heroine number one. I wondered if they'd known each other previously, and if so, what was their relationship. Somehow getting the answer to the first of the two questions seemed to help me drop the entire series arc into place. I don't know why knowing this one thing made the difference, but it did and I wasn't going to question it too closely. I'm going with the assumption that my subconscious was working on it and when I thought about some of the characters, it brought the solution into my head.

And yes, I am excited to have the potential answer. I have to mull some more before I know for sure it's the right arc. But it was frustrating as well. Couldn't my subconscious have shaken out the information while I was home from work for the long weekend? That would have given me two days to fill in blanks and turn things over. I think I heard my muse laughing as I drove down the highway.

The Haka Baseball Style

Some of you might know that New Zealand's rugby team, the All Blacks, always perform the Haka before their matches. It's a tradition that's been going on for decades. Earlier this month, elimination rounds for the World Baseball Classic (which is played in March) were taking place and a New Zealand baseball team performed the haka, too. Unfortunately, they lost to Taipei. For those of you who don't know, the haka is a tradition of the Maori people.

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Black Friday Book Sale!

Thirteen awesome authors. Thirteen Awesome books.

Here are the fab authors participating with me for the Black Friday Sale:

[image error]  Bonnie Vanak  Cat Johnson  Donna Grant  Eliza Gayle  Eve Langlais  Gemma Halliday  Jade Lee  Kallypso Masters  Lexi Blake  Liliana Hart  Lisa Renee Jones  Selena Blake The sale runs Friday, November 23rd to Monday, November 26th, 2012.

To see all the books on sale, please visit the Black Friday Sale page.

My title is Through a Crimson Veil, my Crimson City story. RT Book Reviews said: "It's paranormal adventure at its ultimate!"

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When a sexy half demon asks Conor McCabe for protection, he can't say no and he doesn't understand why. He hates demons. He doesn't want to help her. He doesn't want to want her, but every minute he spends with her strengthens his need to keep her safe—and intensifies the desire burning between them.

Mika Noguchi sought out Conor to steal the key that can free all demons imprisoned in Orcus. She quickly regrets her mission—Conor is her destined mate and he'll view her theft as betrayal—but she gave her word to the council and the penalty for breaking it is severe.

Other demons are loose in Crimson City, however, and they have their own plans. They're not about to let anyone stand in the way. Not Conor. Not Mika. They'll do anything it takes to advance their agendas—even kill.

For the sale, Through a Crimson Veil will be available for $2.99, that's a 40% savings off the regular price!

Excerpt of Through a Crimson Veil
Reviews for Through a Crimson Veil
Through a Crimson Veil page on pattioshea.com

In addition to the group sale, I've also put some of my other stories on sale.

Blood Feud
Enemy Embrace
Dark Awakening
The Troll Bridge

The book links will take you to that page on my website. There are buy links there.

As I'm writing this, I've been unable to access my account and update prices on All Romance Ebooks. I sent an email requesting help, but I haven't heard anything back yet. If you're looking for my books at ARe, I apologize and I'll ensure that you have the four full days of the sale.

Also, I distribute through Smashwords to the iTunes iBookstore, Kobo, Sony, etc. (I handle Kindle, Nook and All Romance Ebooks on my own.) Although I adjusted the prices at Smashwords, the updates aren't reflected at the down-line stores as of yet. I'm sorry about this, too.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Please visit tomorrow for information on a great Black Friday sale! I'll give a little hint: 13 awesome authors, 13 awesome books.

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Tweaking Versus Revision

"A piece of writing is never finished, only abandoned."

Please forgive the unattributed quote. I only had time to do a quick Google search and didn't find any definitive answers as to who said this.

This popped into my head on Monday as my one quick pass through my proposal chapter ended up taking my entire lunch hour. And this was after it took 5 hours of my day on Saturday. I think every writer reaches a point where they're just fiddling with their work, not improving it.

I had to stop and think about whether or not this was what I was doing. After considering it, I decided no. I'm still making big enough changes to be real fine tuning, not just tweaking.

For me, the synopsis looms and I have to tackle that thing as soon as the story is ready to go. Synopses are a special kind of hell for a writer who falls on the Seat of the Pants side of the plotting spectrum. Why can't we write: and then some stuff happens, the h/h defeat the big bad, and live happily ever after? It's totally true and saves my brain from exploding.

That said, I will confess grudgingly to liking having a workable synopsis to use when I write. It helps narrow down the choices I have to make and keeps me on track. I still don't enjoy writing the things, though. The only word that fits is torturous.

Goal for the week is to get everything off to my agent before Sunday night. There. I said it.

Also, make sure you check in later this week for a special Black Friday Sale. One of my books will be marked down for a limited time. Announcement will be made Friday morning.

Best Airline Safety Film Ever

I wish Delta would do something like this:

Characters and Current Events

I thought I'd make this a three post blog topic and talk about characters and current events. While I have waded in with technology or things like music/movies in my books, I've shied away from news-type references. At least I'm pretty sure I have. The thing is that current events never stay current and even if something feels too big to fade, it will recede in people's memories.

Take Hurricane Katrina as an example. At that time, it was a huge news story. The outrage over the lack of government response, the people trapped at the dome, homes flattened, debris everywhere, and rooftop rescues were in the news constantly in the aftermath of the storm. It might be tempting to think that this would never leave public consciousness and that having a character reference it would still resonate years later.

IMO, not so much. Quick, what year was Katrina?

If you or someone you love wasn't directly impacted by the storm, the details become less distinct. It's the way humans are-something happens and we eventually put it behind us and move on. As more years pass, the memories will become even more vague.

And because the immediacy fades, characters referencing an event like this dates the book. Fast.

I think-and this is my opinion only-that if a character has a backstory that includes surviving a bad hurricane, that the writer make it a fictional hurricane. It can have Katrina-like elements to it, but made-up storms don't get dated. And of course, this would apply to any major current event. Make it up.

Probably I spend too much time thinking about stuff like this, but the pop culture and technology issues are still unanswered for me. I guess figuring out 1 out of 3 isn't bad, but I'd love to decide where I stand on all the topics.

Characters and Technology

Last week I talked about pop culture references in fiction and one of the things that came up as I wrote about it was how characters interact with technology. That's something I wanted to delve into a little more deeply.

Technology is part of our everyday lives, woven deeply into the fabric of our worlds. I see people all the time in real life who are surgically attached to their cell phones. This seems to be more usual than my extreme aversion to the telephone in all its forms. :-) Although, if I had a smart phone, I'd readily be addicted to the internet portion of the phone. I just hate the talking part.

Anyway, with paranormal romance, I feel like I have a bit more leeway. My Blood Feud stories have featured vampires and demons mostly and not very many humans. I have no problem with a 500-year-old vampire not having a cell phone, but in stories like my Light Warrior books, these characters are magical people who are living human lives. They have cell phones. And other technology.

Which leads to the question I asked last week: How can a writer keep references she/he makes in their story to technology or other pop culture things from dating the story?

It colors characterization, too. I have a hero who is ex-Special Forces. I actually had to find out why he doesn't play video games. That he doesn't goes all the way back to his childhood, but this isn't a subject I normally quiz my characters about. But everyone plays video games now, so I need to know why he didn't. At least I don't have to worry about his choice of games or gaming systems dating the story!

I also have that same hero receive a voice mail from his heroine on his cell phone. I spent time thinking about why she called him instead of texting him because she didn't want to talk to him live and had planned to roll to his voice mail.

It could be worse. There are authors who've been around a lot longer than ten years and they're talking about old books they wrote where the entire plot would fall apart if the character had a cell phone. Some of them talked about putting a note up front to tell readers the story was written before phones were everywhere.

One of the things that was so hard when I wrote one of my futuristics was computers. In the research I'd done, there'd been speculation on where keyboards were going. There were a lot of different options to pick from and I deliberately stayed very, very vague about how my heroine accessed the computer system. And even making that choice, I had to revise the text more than once to take out a stray reference to typing.

I have an idea for a story involving computers and a heroine who works in the field. Now granted, it's an idea that's down on the To Do List a ways, but I'm already worrying about the technology and how fast the story would be out of date.

The other day, I read a story about Generation Y (AKA the Millennials) and how so many of them don't own cars! That they're buying houses, renting apartments on subway lines or bicycling into work. Of course, geography plays a role in this. I'm guessing Los Angeles is still auto focused and in Atlanta, you'd take your life into your hands riding a bike to work down here, but now this is another factor to consider in stories. Characters and cars and that a lot of 26-year-old men and women don't own cars.

I'm not sure it ever ends--the things writers need to know and worry about--because it's all about making the characters real and that means knowing what music they listen to and how they get around town. But these very things put a book solidly into a time frame.

So basically I haven't figured out how to balance grounding a story and making it and the characters real versus dating it quickly as being from a certain time period. I hate being in a quandary like this.

Best of the Web Compilation

Right before the four minute mark, you can see the swim with alligators part. (In a cage) I didn't know people did that!

Pop Culture References In Fiction

I've been thinking about pop culture references in stories off and on for the past few months and wondering how much is too much. I'm not sure I've reached an answer yet because there are two competing forces at work.

On one side, pop culture can ground the story and make the characters seem more real, and sometimes, easier to relate to. Also trying to make every reference to music or cars or technology generic isn't easy to do and it can lead to some odd sentences, things that just jar me out of a book when I read them. Even when I'm the writer who did it.

On the other hand, things change and these pop culture references can date a book badly. There's a book I bought used a long time after its release and the mention of a velour top and wrap-around skirt stopped me cold. I hadn't checked out the copyright date when I bought it, but when I read that, I couldn't help but flip to the front. That's really not something I want to have people do with my stories.

When I wrote In the Darkest Night MySpace wasn't dead and the rise of the blogs that were created simply to post pictures that make fun of people hadn't gained traction yet. So in the story, my heroine is worried about the pictures of her scared face being posted on Facebook or MySpace. Ouch! Now, I wish I'd just said internet or something.

And to flip back to the other side again, I like being able to put cars or music groups in the story. In Blood Feud it means something to say my heroine drives a Aston Martin DBS. If I'd just said expensive sports car, the reader might go with Ferrari or Porsche or Lamborghini which gives a completely different picture of the heroine than the car she did drive. And thanks to James Bond, I was comfortable that most people would know what the car looked like.

Of everything involving present-day culture, though, the thing that worries me the most is technology. As fast as that's racing ahead and evolving, it won't take long for something to be dated. This goes beyond the MySpace misstep I made. Cell phones versus smart phones. Tablets versus laptops versus desktops. All the tech getting added to cars.Video games. And how all these things relate to the characters.

Just wow.

My first book was released in Nov 2002--ten years ago. Go to Google Images and put in 2002 cell phones. Now enter 2012 cell phones. Look at how much change has happened in just ten years.

Of course, there were no cell phones in my first book--it was set in the future on a planet light years away from Earth--but that's a good example of how quickly things could get dated from one casual reference. It actually would have been dated in about five years because the first iPhone came out in 2007 (per Wikipedia).

I think I'm going to have to write part 2 of this because I haven't even touched on characters interacting with technology. So Part 2 coming on Tuesday.