Patti O'Shea's Blog, page 164

When Is It Really The End?

Art is never finished, only abandoned ~ Leonardo da Vinci

I would paraphrase this to say "No book is ever finished, it's just abandoned or published."

I'm going to talk a little bit about my revision process and when I send the manuscript out the door. Or in other words, when is done really done. I'll preface this post by saying every writing is different and you should do what works for you. Always do what works for you.

The process I use is one I adopted because I have an enormous problem with perfectionism. When I wrote, I would get a scene or maybe a chapter down and the revise the heck out of it. By the time I was done tinkering with it, I'd 1) drained all the life out of the writing and 2) gotten so sick of the flipping story, that I'd hop to another story.

I have a lot of one chapter stories started.

Finally, I had to take a good, hard look at what I was doing and I realized I couldn't allow myself to revise scene by scene or chapter by chapter--not if I ever wanted to finish a story. And so my process was born and I discovered something major along the way.

The rule I set for myself was I could do light revisions on what I'd written the previous day, but then I had to keep moving forward. My mantra became: It can all be fixed on revision. And I had to repeat it a lot.

There are writers who do their revisions as they go along and when they're done with a story, they truly are done. I'm not one of them and I can't be trusted to do it that way. My streak of perfectionism has only gotten worse, not better. However, I'm sure even these authors do a light run through before they send it off.

So my process is I write the first draft, with only light revisions on the scene or chapter I'm working on. If something big occurs to me in a later chapter that needs to be added in earlier, I make a note of it and I keep going.

When I finally reach the end of the first draft, I usually have a fair amount of things I want to fix. The major thing I learned as I wrote Ravyn's Flight? I learned that if I'd stopped and gone back to fix the first big thing that needed fixing, I would have had to go back a few more times to add in the other big stuff that popped up later. By waiting, I only had to go back and do the major revision work once.

In this first book, the first revision run was lengthy and it was extensive, but I learned a lot.

After round one of revisions came round two. On my early books, this was still a lot of work because my writing buddies always saw stuff I didn't, but after my first couple of books, this became less intensive. The nice thing about writing a few stories is how much you learn every step of the way. That's why I always recommend people try to write full stories. The middle will teach you different things than the beginning and the end has completely different lessons and so do revisions, etc.

Okay, so on the first book, the second round of revisions were also time consuming and extensive, but now the focus on round two for me is mostly on fixing transitions, smoothing sentences, cutting those paragraphs that I love, but that aren't needed in the story. Things like this.

When this is done, I do a polishing run. At this point, it's pretty light stuff and it goes fairly quickly. Then, no matter how great the temptation, that sucker is gone.

I almost never touch the manuscript while I'm waiting to hear back from my editor about her suggested revisions. I can only remember one time I violated this rule, but it was because as I was thinking about the story, a plot hole jumped out at me. I wanted to fix it before I forgot the solution. But normally I let the story rest for a while. This gives me a fresh perspective when I do get my editorial revisions and it also allows me to see things I couldn't spot while I was too close to the work.

I've almost always only gotten two weeks to finish editorial revisions, so there isn't time to over work the text.

After this comes copy edits where the story is gone over line by line for logic flaws, continuity issues, or grammatical problems. I try to turn in a very clean manuscript as far as grammar goes because I want the copy editor focused on the story itself.

Next comes the galleys, which are test prints of the book. No big changes can be made here unless it's extremely critical because every fix costs money unless it's a typo on the printer's part.

At this point, the book is finally done. Or maybe I should say the book is forcibly wrested from my hands and published. :-)

Condor Chick Update

I still love Condor Cam and I thought I'd share some more condor chick pictures. Saticoy (a boy) was born March 10 and the last time he was weighed, he was 12 pounds with a wing span of about five feet. He's getting to be a big boy.

The big events, though, have happened in the last couple of weeks. First, Saticoy finally was able to jump onto the ledge of his nest box! He tried and tried and he'd either not make it high enough, or once he could get high enough, he'd lose his balance after a couple of seconds and fall down. He's solved that problem.

The other exciting milestone is that over the weekend Saticoy finally jumped outside his nest box. He still spends most of his time inside, but according to the San Diego Zoo's blog, he'll spend more and more time outside until he's old enough to fly.

So here are the latest Saticoy pictures:

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This is Saticoy's dad with the reddish head and the wing tags. Saticoy has his wings out--it's a begging posture--and his father is feeding him.

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This is Saticoy hanging out with his dad.

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Saticoy is sitting on the ledge and in the upper portion of the picture, you can see the tail feathers of one of his parents. Saticoy has more and more of his big boy feathers, but you can still see all the down on the backs of his wings.

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Another picture of Saticoy on the ledge. He's watching one of his parents who is outside.

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Saticoy getting some attention from mom.

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Here's Saticoy--finally outside! He's enjoying the afternoon with his dad.

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I screen shot this picture last night. Saticoy is yawning in this picture. Again, he's outside. As far as I know, this is only the second day he's gone outside. Pretty darn awesome!

Orchestra, Opera and Choir Flashmob

It's not every day 100 musicians and performers from an opera company, a choir, and an orchestra flashmob. This was pretty cool, although it does start out a little slowly.

Ten Things I Love

I was completely stymied for a blog topic. I'd like to blame it on being sick with some flu bug, but the sad fact is that this just happens from time to time. So I sent out an SOS on Twitter and had today's topic suggested to me. Thanks for the rescue!

Since the title is things I like, I'm not going to put people on the list. My family and friends know they're number one.  So in no particular order, here we go:

Baseball. In my perfect world, there would be baseball year-round. It would also be on whenever I was home to turn the TV on and watch. If that's 10am on a Saturday, so be it. That's one really nice thing about the Cubs having some 3pm starts on weekdays. Perfect.Being barefoot. I love running around without shoes and socks in the house. My mood deflates the instant it gets cold enough that I have to wear socks with my shoes.Computers, electronic gadgets, and knowing how to troubleshoot them. There is no gadget that I don't covet. Usually, I rein myself in since I can't afford all the cool stuff. I also like being computer/tech savvy enough to fix my own problems (most of the time). It has it's drawbacks, too, of course. Like the fact that I know how to format my own ebooks means I want to do it myself even if I don't have time. I'm a perfectionist and I know I'll take the time to do it right.Coffee. Anyone who follows me on Twitter knew that was coming. I talk about it far too often and make vows to myself not to tweet about it again. Sometimes I sit and just crave coffee. What an awesome way to get caffeine.Flowers. If you've followed by blog for a while, you know I had a backyard full of flowers. Flowers that were kept in protective custody because of marauding deer, but still, lots and lots of flowers. It's not that I like gardening--I don't--but I love the bright, beautiful colors of flowers and how happy just looking at them can make me.Losing myself in a story. I mean other people's stories here. Movies or books or any other medium, I love to fall into a world and have real life disappear for a while. This has been hard to come by for a while because I'm always analyzing whether I want to or not, so it really has to be awesome to shut down the critiquer in my head. I'm told by authors who've been writing longer than me that the pickiness will pass, that everyone goes through this stage. I'm eager for that day.Sleeping. Do I ever love sleeping. I especially love sleeping in, getting up when I feel like it, and having a leisurely cup of coffee.Daydreaming. I play through a lot of my stories in daydreams, seeing scenes, learning about characters. I've become too intent on remembering words to do this with any project I'm actually writing, but I have what I call "bedtime stories." I'll never write them for one reason or another, but they're a nice way to entertain myself when I'm bored or to fall asleep running one of them.Talking about my characters. Beware if you ever meet me and ask about my stories. I love to talk about my characters and I'll do it until you run away, begging for mercy. My coworkers when I was up in Minneapolis learned to never ask because they heard way more than they ever wanted to know.Telling my characters' stories. In other words, I love having written, past tense. I love when I'm finishing up a book and things that I thought were throwaway lines earlier in the story end up tying in at the end. The serendipity is just so cool. I love the writer's high I get as I zoom in on the end, my fingers unable to move fast enough to keep up with my brain. I love sending that baby off and knowing I won't have to deal with my hero or heroine until revisions come. :-) They torture me endlessly, which is why I return the favor. And I love being able to move on to the next set of characters who will torment me and make my life miserable.So, there you have it. Ten things I love.

Pinterest As a Research Tool

Pinterest might be the greatest research tool ever. At least for me. Yes, I do repin stuff from other people that has little potential writing research attached to it. Cute puppy or kitten pictures for example. But the vast majority of the pictures I save are things I might use.

I've received a great deal of visual information on any of my stories. I mostly hear words and maybe, if I'm lucky, I'll get a flash of some sort of image. That's about it, though. I'm constantly Googling for pictures of clothes, of places, of things and saving them to my hard drive for reference. Each book has it's own image file, which sometimes creates its own issues.

For example, I've had a number of stories take place in questionable areas of Los Angeles, but which file as the warehouse picture I want? Is it in my file for Through a Crimson Veil or is it in Blood Feud? On Pinterest, I have a board called "I Love LA" and now all my LA pictures are in one place.

It's even more awesome for saving pictures I might need some day, but don't know if or when I'll actually use them. Like all the images of men and women. Those are potentially heroes or heroines in future books. Of course, knowing the contrary h/h that I get stuck with, they won't look anything like someone I've already saved.

I have a board filled with clothes. Dressing my heroine has always been a challenge for me, especially the ones that have different taste than I do. I have boards filled with houses, places, and decorated rooms--kitchens, bathrooms, master bedrooms. I created a proposal in progress board so I can refer to the images I'm going to use in one place without having to search through the clothing board again and again to find my heroine's outfit.

Another great use for Pinterest is to save the images that get my mind humming. They're like creativity prods even if they don't make it into any story.

So when writer asks me if they should try Pinterest, my answer isn't only yes, but hell, yes! There are probably as many ways to use image pinning as there are writers.

If there are more typos in this post than usual, please forgive me. I picked up some bug and can't think straight yet.

What Are Continents?

An Author's Good Name

Something strange happened on Tuesday. I have my blog setup to auto-tweet to Twitter and Tuesday's post was how I convey character emotion without saying outright how they feel. My agency retweeted the post, thinking it would help other writers.

Everything is normal so far and then I get home from work and see that someone retweeted my agency's tweet, only they did it in such a way that it appeared as I were endorsing another author's book. She also deleted the link to my blog post and replaced it with a link to someone else's blog.

I had to read the tweet multiple times because I couldn't believe someone would actually do that. She did put MT (Modified Tweet) in front of the agency's Twitter name, but left it as an RT (Retweet) in front of my name, reinforcing the appearance that I was endorsing the book.

In this case MT does not cut it.

MT is for when you shorten a tweet to make it fit within the 140 characters. MT doesn't allow you to rewrite the tweet in such a way that it misleads others.

I replied to the person who did this and told her that it wasn't cool. My thought was it was an honest error by someone who just didn't realize how her tweet could be misconstrued. I expected to receive an apology and to hear that she'd sent another tweet out correcting the misconception.

That's not what I received in reply.

What I got back was that it wasn't her fault. It was my agency's fault and excuse her for only trying to help.

I checked my mentions stream on Twitter and her original misleading tweet had disappeared. However, I do know how to take screenshots. I don't anticipate ever needing it, but hey, I have it if I do.

The reason why this matters is something I learned shortly after my first book came out in 2002. I'd blogged about some product--I don't even remember what it was now--that I just loved and I got a question back: Do you really like this thing or are you being paid to endorse it?

It never occurred to me before this that my mentioning something I liked was an endorsement. When I recovered from how stunned I was, I realized I had a responsibility to be as honest as I could be when I talked about what I liked. If I blog about something or tweet about it or mention it on FB, it will be because I honestly recommend it.

It's called integrity and no one gets to trade on that.

Conveying Character Emotion

How do I convey a character's emotions without saying: He was irritated. She smiled with happiness. He was worried. She was scared. Or variations thereof?

For me, it starts with nailing the character's voice. It has to be right from the first sentence. I talk a lot about the structure of a book. That the beginning--maybe the first five or six chapters--are the foundation and frame of your book. If those are wrong, the rest of the house is going to be crooked, and no matter how much fixing you do, it'll never be right. Not until you go back and correct the foundation.

There have been books where it's taken me 3/4 of my deadline to write the first six chapters and then I wrote the rest of the book with the remaining time. I feel the only way I could do that was because the foundation was laid as solidly as I could make it.

So it's important to me to have the hero and heroine's voices. I worked on a proposal a while back where I started and trashed the opening of the book about twenty-five times because it wasn't working for me. And then I finally got it--the heroine's voice. It made all the difference.

Once I can clearly hear my characters, I try to pick up their moods. As I struggle to resume writing right now, I'm also struggling with my hero's mindset. I wrote him angry, irritated and the words came quickly, but the next day I realized it was all wrong. He's not angry.

After spending day after day after day trying openings, I think I finally figured out what he's feeling at the start of the story. Here's this guy who's spent seventeen days out in the wilderness, and now that he's back, he just wants to kick back and unwind only circumstances aren't letting him do that. What does anyone feel when they get home from work after a rough day (or in his case 17 days), only to find the furnace has gone out?

Frustrated. Impatient. Probably. Here's what I wrote for the opening last night. Will it stick? Who knows. I've trashed everything else on further reflection, but I'm hopeful I finally got it right.

(By the way, please forgive the roughness. I haven't written anything keepable since last September before the big move to Atlanta. I'm still struggling to produce something I like.)

Seventeen days outside the Old City and he returned to chaos. Flare ran a hand over his face and swallowed the curse. All he'd wanted when the team had gotten back this evening was a hot shower, a cold beer, and a soft bed. He'd had the shower, but the other two were going to have to wait.

If you notice, the first two sentences are relatively short. Shorter sentences are good for action scenes, but I also like the semi-staccato feel they give to this opening. Frustration.

The third and fourth sentences are longer. Number three talks about what he'd been looking forward to when he'd gotten back. Thwarted longing? Disappointment?

Then there's the final sentence. Resignation. What's going on isn't something he can ignore.

Right now, before I sleep on it, I actually like this paragraph. I've got characterization in there. Flare can't ignore chaos, he has to take some sort of action even though he'd rather just have a beer and go to bed. He's responsible. It also manages to convey (I think) some hint at the plot to come. Chaos is not situation normal, so something unusual is going on. Flare's been away, though, so he's walked into this already in full-gear.

But this paragraph does multiple things and that's always good. Characterization, story, and mood.

I use longer sentences when I want a slower mood, like at the beginning of a love scene. Also longer words are good in a slower, more relaxed scene. Of course, word choice reflects on characterization, too, so it's important to pick up how they talk and not put your words in their mouths.

I do a lot of my writing by instinct. Did I make sense?

Pluto: Not a Planet

I still like poor little Pluto, but the video is interesting.

One Shot At a First Impression

On Monday, I saw the cover for a book being offered free on Kindle. The cover looked good. Maybe not as good as some, but it was professionally done. The title was awesome. Actually, I was ready to buy the book on the title alone, that's how cool it was. As as side whine, why can't I ever come up with perfect titles like that? But at this point, the author all but has me. I click through to Amazon to read a blurb and learn what this book with the awesome title is all about.

And there, in the first sentence of the book description, is a blatant grammar goof. Your instead of you're.

I went from I'm 99% sure I'm going to download this book to I'm 99% sure I'm not going to download this book. All I could think was that if the blurb had this error, the story was probably just as sloppy. I paged down to look at reviews, and sure enough, there's one that talked about the book being riddled with grammar and formatting errors.

The author lost me.

I'm not asking for perfect grammar. Storytelling sometimes bends the rules for the sake of the tale, but your/you're, there/they're/their, its/it's, and other such things? These are basic. A typo on Twitter or in a blog post is one thing, but not in your book description. My first thought wasn't oh, the author made a typo. My immediate reaction was OMG if she can't use your/you're correctly, the book will be a disaster. And since a reviewer commented on all the mistakes in the story, I'm guessing this wasn't only a typo.

The book page is your introduction to the reader. What's your first impression going to be? She got it partly right. She paid to have a good cover made and she'd come up with a title that was intriguing enough for me to want to buy her book, but she failed by not having someone proofread her paragraph of description.

I might be a unique case because I'm a writer myself, but I've heard a lot of readers say mistakes turn them off books and this includes books--both electronic and print--put out by NYC publishers. But as a self-publisher, the author has control over a lot of things and that includes hiring a good copy editor to go through line by line. Maybe it doesn't matter to some authors, but it should. If you're a professional, if you look at your writing as a career, as your passion, then you should want your work to be as good as you can make.

If you don't care, well, I've got authors to read who do.