Patti O'Shea's Blog, page 166
May 27, 2012
May 24, 2012
Breaking a Break
So let's talk about trying to start writing again after a long break. This is where I'm at right now and it seems like a topic worth blogging about.
A little background. In June 2011, I was told my day job was being relocated from Minneapolis to Atlanta--1100 miles away. I opted to take the relocation. I'd agreed to write a story for Crave the Night shortly before the work announcement, so I wrote and wrote until September. After that came edits, which is writing, but not really--if that makes sense.
For me, revision of words already written is much different than writing new words/new scenes. I'm not sure how to describe it, but it's more sharpening the blade then rather than creating the knife. If that makes sense.
My move to Atlanta happened in January and by the time things settled down and I tried to start writing again, it was March. And then I went back to Minnesota in April and spent three weeks working on my house to get it ready to sell. That meant I lost the small (very small) bit of momentum I was building to start writing again, and right now, it's simply torturous to try.
It's always tough to start writing again after time off. This is one of the reasons why I've only taken a very brief periods off between books, but there was nothing I could do about the move.
Now the question becomes how do I restart?
The obvious answer (for me at least) is writing and writing until it starts coming back to me. I've been trying this, but the words I get, no matter how hard-fought they are, have to be cut. Everything that's coming out is just plain bad right now. Which makes it hard to keep writing because I get so discouraged. How can it be this difficult?
I've been burnt out before. I've dealt with a total creative numbness during that period, but this is nothing like that. This time the characters are there. The general stories are there. I can even see and hear the scenes in my head, but when it comes to putting them down in pixels, it's like they're blown away and I have no words. None.
I tell myself just to write anything, to not worry about setups or transitions. The important thing is simply to find words again and get them down. It's easier said than done.
I'm thinking I might try writing only dialogue since I still hear conversations...when I'm away from my computer and there's no chance of my getting them down. That's the only idea I have right now to try to bust through this wall. If you have any suggestions, please share them. I need all the help I can get.
A little background. In June 2011, I was told my day job was being relocated from Minneapolis to Atlanta--1100 miles away. I opted to take the relocation. I'd agreed to write a story for Crave the Night shortly before the work announcement, so I wrote and wrote until September. After that came edits, which is writing, but not really--if that makes sense.
For me, revision of words already written is much different than writing new words/new scenes. I'm not sure how to describe it, but it's more sharpening the blade then rather than creating the knife. If that makes sense.
My move to Atlanta happened in January and by the time things settled down and I tried to start writing again, it was March. And then I went back to Minnesota in April and spent three weeks working on my house to get it ready to sell. That meant I lost the small (very small) bit of momentum I was building to start writing again, and right now, it's simply torturous to try.
It's always tough to start writing again after time off. This is one of the reasons why I've only taken a very brief periods off between books, but there was nothing I could do about the move.
Now the question becomes how do I restart?
The obvious answer (for me at least) is writing and writing until it starts coming back to me. I've been trying this, but the words I get, no matter how hard-fought they are, have to be cut. Everything that's coming out is just plain bad right now. Which makes it hard to keep writing because I get so discouraged. How can it be this difficult?
I've been burnt out before. I've dealt with a total creative numbness during that period, but this is nothing like that. This time the characters are there. The general stories are there. I can even see and hear the scenes in my head, but when it comes to putting them down in pixels, it's like they're blown away and I have no words. None.
I tell myself just to write anything, to not worry about setups or transitions. The important thing is simply to find words again and get them down. It's easier said than done.
I'm thinking I might try writing only dialogue since I still hear conversations...when I'm away from my computer and there's no chance of my getting them down. That's the only idea I have right now to try to bust through this wall. If you have any suggestions, please share them. I need all the help I can get.
May 22, 2012
Eclipsed
[image error]
Photo courtesy of Alan Moore
Monday morning I looked at pictures that had been taken of the solar eclipse. Unfortunately, it wasn't visible in Atlanta, so I couldn't see it firsthand. The images were incredible, and as I was looking at them, I remembered that ancient peoples were terrified of eclipses, that they feared the sun wouldn't reappear.
I tried to cast my mind into that place, back to a time when scientific knowledge didn't exist and superstition ran wild.
I remembered that show I'd seen a while back on why humans have an ingrained fear of the dark and that our modern world with its electricity isn't as dark as it was back in that day. There's a darkness scale and very few places anywhere on Earth register at a 1 on the Bortle Dark Sky Scale. Cities like New York measure so high on the scale that a person would need to be on a boat and sail out far enough for the Earth's curvature to hide the glow.
So imagine a world without electric light, a time when humans had just begun to form agricultural societies and give up hunting and gathering. And imagine the sun appearing to be "eaten" by this dark shadow.
For one, brief moment I was able to imagine this terror.
But only for an instant. I am a product of an age where science is advanced, a time when we know the sun will reappear shortly, and that while this is an event of note (eclipses don't happen every day), it's natural and something that happens at regular intervals.
I think this is part of being a writer. Being able to imagine how someone else might feel (someone from a world so completely different than my own) is what it takes to write stories and characters. I'm never going to be a magical troubleshooter and it's unlikely I'll ever meet a demon, but that doesn't mean I can't tell stories about people who have these different realities.
If you have a few minutes, try to send your mind back in time and imagine the fear people felt. I think it's a good exercise.
Monday morning I looked at pictures that had been taken of the solar eclipse. Unfortunately, it wasn't visible in Atlanta, so I couldn't see it firsthand. The images were incredible, and as I was looking at them, I remembered that ancient peoples were terrified of eclipses, that they feared the sun wouldn't reappear.
I tried to cast my mind into that place, back to a time when scientific knowledge didn't exist and superstition ran wild.
I remembered that show I'd seen a while back on why humans have an ingrained fear of the dark and that our modern world with its electricity isn't as dark as it was back in that day. There's a darkness scale and very few places anywhere on Earth register at a 1 on the Bortle Dark Sky Scale. Cities like New York measure so high on the scale that a person would need to be on a boat and sail out far enough for the Earth's curvature to hide the glow.
So imagine a world without electric light, a time when humans had just begun to form agricultural societies and give up hunting and gathering. And imagine the sun appearing to be "eaten" by this dark shadow.
For one, brief moment I was able to imagine this terror.
But only for an instant. I am a product of an age where science is advanced, a time when we know the sun will reappear shortly, and that while this is an event of note (eclipses don't happen every day), it's natural and something that happens at regular intervals.
I think this is part of being a writer. Being able to imagine how someone else might feel (someone from a world so completely different than my own) is what it takes to write stories and characters. I'm never going to be a magical troubleshooter and it's unlikely I'll ever meet a demon, but that doesn't mean I can't tell stories about people who have these different realities.
If you have a few minutes, try to send your mind back in time and imagine the fear people felt. I think it's a good exercise.
May 20, 2012
May 17, 2012
And So She Said
Over on Pinterest, a couple of people have posted a picture with a list of words a writer can use other than said. I'm assuming it came from some blog, but I haven't clicked through to check, but it leaves me wondering why any writer would pin this.
There's a couple of reasons why I feel this way. For one, some of the suggestions are just plain bad. For example instead of he said, according to this you could write he laughed. Um, what? People don't talk while they're laughing. Are seriously thinking this is a good construction? "Jane," he laughed, "you...hahaha...crack...haha...me...haha...up." No. Just no.
The other reason I'm not enamored with this pin is the word said disappears for the vast majority of readers. Most will barely know they saw it, but that doesn't happen with other words, especially the more memorable.
In fact, I spent time taking these substitutes for said out of my earlier work before I republished them in ebook format. If a character is constantly speaking in a hiss, I can only wonder if they're part snake. :-) In my defense, I didn't have hiss originally--that got added in edits--but I didn't take them out again when I went through the story before it was printed. The buck stopped with me, so my responsibility. But I had a chance to change it and that's what I did. If you see hissed in the story now, it's because I made the conscious decision to keep it there for a specific reason.
My advice is to use anything other than said or asked sparingly. The last thing I want is to jar anyone out of my story and unusual dialogue tags can do just that. There's a difference between using an "invisible" word and repetition.
There's a couple of reasons why I feel this way. For one, some of the suggestions are just plain bad. For example instead of he said, according to this you could write he laughed. Um, what? People don't talk while they're laughing. Are seriously thinking this is a good construction? "Jane," he laughed, "you...hahaha...crack...haha...me...haha...up." No. Just no.
The other reason I'm not enamored with this pin is the word said disappears for the vast majority of readers. Most will barely know they saw it, but that doesn't happen with other words, especially the more memorable.
In fact, I spent time taking these substitutes for said out of my earlier work before I republished them in ebook format. If a character is constantly speaking in a hiss, I can only wonder if they're part snake. :-) In my defense, I didn't have hiss originally--that got added in edits--but I didn't take them out again when I went through the story before it was printed. The buck stopped with me, so my responsibility. But I had a chance to change it and that's what I did. If you see hissed in the story now, it's because I made the conscious decision to keep it there for a specific reason.
My advice is to use anything other than said or asked sparingly. The last thing I want is to jar anyone out of my story and unusual dialogue tags can do just that. There's a difference between using an "invisible" word and repetition.
May 15, 2012
Stock Photography Hell
Enemy Embrace was exclusive to the Crave the Night anthology for six months, but now that time is up and I went in search of royalty-free photos for a cover. I've lamented before about trying to find cover images and it hasn't gotten any better. Most of the pictures out there simply won't work.
Smiling people? No. Not for the kinds of stories I write. Scrawny men. A lot of the men in these pictures are either scrawny or unattractive or both. Why can't stock photographers grasp that both the man and the woman need to be good looking?Poses too staid or poses too explicit. Some of these pictures look like portraits that people would put up on their fireplace. Conversely, there are pictures out there with all kinds of skin showing. I don't write Erotic Romance, but even if I did, the book sellers aren't going to show a cover that might offend customers.These issues leave a handful of photos out there and authors are using and reusing them, which gets kind of old. The problem is there's nothing better and there's little choice.
But me? I have an extra layer of difficulty. You see, I frequently write multicultural characters and Enemy Embrace has one of them. My heroine is Latina.
I find it oddly ironic that just last week someone blogged at Heroes and Heartbreakers about how white romance is. It left me sputtering because of the 14 stories I've had published, 6 of them have had a hero or heroine who has a multicultural background. A quick use of a calculator says that's 43% of my published work.
Anyway, considering the hell I've had to go through to find stock images for these couples, I'm exceedingly aware that photographers who shoot photos I can use are few and far between. After hours of searching, I found 3 pictures that might, possibly work for this story, but none of them are optimal. It's frustrating.
For those curious about my multicultural characters:
The Power of Two - Cai is 1/4 Vietnamese
Through a Crimson Veil - Mika is 1/2 Japanese
Dark Awakening - Kimi is all Japanese-American
The Troll Bridge - Troll is part Filipino and part African-Caribbean and part Hawaiian
Demon Kissed - Bree is part Latina
Enemy Embrace - Nicole is part Latina
Smiling people? No. Not for the kinds of stories I write. Scrawny men. A lot of the men in these pictures are either scrawny or unattractive or both. Why can't stock photographers grasp that both the man and the woman need to be good looking?Poses too staid or poses too explicit. Some of these pictures look like portraits that people would put up on their fireplace. Conversely, there are pictures out there with all kinds of skin showing. I don't write Erotic Romance, but even if I did, the book sellers aren't going to show a cover that might offend customers.These issues leave a handful of photos out there and authors are using and reusing them, which gets kind of old. The problem is there's nothing better and there's little choice.
But me? I have an extra layer of difficulty. You see, I frequently write multicultural characters and Enemy Embrace has one of them. My heroine is Latina.
I find it oddly ironic that just last week someone blogged at Heroes and Heartbreakers about how white romance is. It left me sputtering because of the 14 stories I've had published, 6 of them have had a hero or heroine who has a multicultural background. A quick use of a calculator says that's 43% of my published work.
Anyway, considering the hell I've had to go through to find stock images for these couples, I'm exceedingly aware that photographers who shoot photos I can use are few and far between. After hours of searching, I found 3 pictures that might, possibly work for this story, but none of them are optimal. It's frustrating.
For those curious about my multicultural characters:
The Power of Two - Cai is 1/4 Vietnamese
Through a Crimson Veil - Mika is 1/2 Japanese
Dark Awakening - Kimi is all Japanese-American
The Troll Bridge - Troll is part Filipino and part African-Caribbean and part Hawaiian
Demon Kissed - Bree is part Latina
Enemy Embrace - Nicole is part Latina
May 13, 2012
May 10, 2012
Word Play
Writers love words, there's no doubt about that. The shades of meaning, the rhythm, the music of a sentence--all beautiful things. Words and grammar do get discussed with regular frequency on writers' loops.
Which leads me to dreamed versus dreamt. I always use dreamt. It sounds better to my ear, but I've had copy editors change it to dreamed. This was a while ago, easily more than a year what with my move and all interfering with the writing, but it's still something I think about from time to time and turn over in my head.
The other day, I decided to do an internet search and find out which was correct. I discovered that dreamt is considered British English and dreamed American English.
This led to a new question--where did I pick up a preference for the British past tense of this one word. I say spilled, not spilt and learned not learnt--other British usage of -t in place of -ed. The only thing I can think of is that Minnesota (where I grew up) is close to Canada and Canadians have stayed truer to British English.
I have another British thing I do--I spell theater as theatre. Not for every theater. I use it this way: movie theater, but I go to see a play at the theatre. I have no idea why I do this. I don't use -re in any other word. If I ever write the sentence: "She dreamt she saw "Guys and Dolls" at the theatre," I'd probably make a copy editor grit her teeth.
Which leads me to dreamed versus dreamt. I always use dreamt. It sounds better to my ear, but I've had copy editors change it to dreamed. This was a while ago, easily more than a year what with my move and all interfering with the writing, but it's still something I think about from time to time and turn over in my head.
The other day, I decided to do an internet search and find out which was correct. I discovered that dreamt is considered British English and dreamed American English.
This led to a new question--where did I pick up a preference for the British past tense of this one word. I say spilled, not spilt and learned not learnt--other British usage of -t in place of -ed. The only thing I can think of is that Minnesota (where I grew up) is close to Canada and Canadians have stayed truer to British English.
I have another British thing I do--I spell theater as theatre. Not for every theater. I use it this way: movie theater, but I go to see a play at the theatre. I have no idea why I do this. I don't use -re in any other word. If I ever write the sentence: "She dreamt she saw "Guys and Dolls" at the theatre," I'd probably make a copy editor grit her teeth.
May 8, 2012
Ebook Shopping Odyssey
While I was going through my book collection in preparation for selling my house, I ran across old favorites--stories I used to read and reread. I didn't take any of them with me when I returned to Atlanta and I wanted to reread some of them. Simple, I thought, I'll pick them up as ebooks. That way there's no space issue where I'm staying and it's always good to have backup copies--just in case.
This ended up being much easier said than done. First of all, a lot of my old favorites weren't even in ebook format. This was frustrating. I know at least one of the authors has her rights back on the book I was looking for because I had a brief conversation with her via Twitter and she was talking about releasing them herself. That hasn't happened yet. I'm cultivating patience on this because I hold the rights to my first 4 books and 1 novella and haven't finished getting all of them ready yet either. I'm totally blaming that on my move to Atlanta.
I did find some of my keepers, though, and was like WTF when I saw the prices. The publisher seriously expects me to pay $7.99, $9.99 or $12.99 for books that were released ten or more years ago? Really?
My response kind of stopped me and I tried to figure out what the maximum price point was that would have had me clicking the buy button. My answer was $5.99. All three books were mass market paperbacks, none of them had been released in hardcover, and even if they had been, after 10-20 years, there's no reason to mark the ebook versions that high.
I also found a few authors who clearly had farmed out the ebook production of stories to which they held the rights. Or at least I'm pretty sure that's what they did. I don't know whether it was some republishing enterprise run by their agents or if they'd licensed their rights to these entities, but these books were also priced higher than I was willing to spend: $6.99. This was closer to my price point, but one author had written a mystery series and to buy every book in the series at this price point was too expensive. I decided the paper copies I had were good enough.
At the end of my shopping excursion, I ended up buying 4 books. All were priced between $2.99 and $4.50. All were released by the same publisher--Harlequin. It was a very interesting learning experience for me.
This ended up being much easier said than done. First of all, a lot of my old favorites weren't even in ebook format. This was frustrating. I know at least one of the authors has her rights back on the book I was looking for because I had a brief conversation with her via Twitter and she was talking about releasing them herself. That hasn't happened yet. I'm cultivating patience on this because I hold the rights to my first 4 books and 1 novella and haven't finished getting all of them ready yet either. I'm totally blaming that on my move to Atlanta.
I did find some of my keepers, though, and was like WTF when I saw the prices. The publisher seriously expects me to pay $7.99, $9.99 or $12.99 for books that were released ten or more years ago? Really?
My response kind of stopped me and I tried to figure out what the maximum price point was that would have had me clicking the buy button. My answer was $5.99. All three books were mass market paperbacks, none of them had been released in hardcover, and even if they had been, after 10-20 years, there's no reason to mark the ebook versions that high.
I also found a few authors who clearly had farmed out the ebook production of stories to which they held the rights. Or at least I'm pretty sure that's what they did. I don't know whether it was some republishing enterprise run by their agents or if they'd licensed their rights to these entities, but these books were also priced higher than I was willing to spend: $6.99. This was closer to my price point, but one author had written a mystery series and to buy every book in the series at this price point was too expensive. I decided the paper copies I had were good enough.
At the end of my shopping excursion, I ended up buying 4 books. All were priced between $2.99 and $4.50. All were released by the same publisher--Harlequin. It was a very interesting learning experience for me.
May 6, 2012
Is Mars Really Red?
Sorry, more space stuff. What can I say? I love it.
