Patti O'Shea's Blog, page 193

Frustrated

My project for this weekend was to find a picture of a couple. Since this is going to be public when it's finished, I had to look to royalty free images that could be purchased. Even so, I thought the task would take an evening, I'd be finished, and could move on to something else. This isn't what happened.

The parameters I needed for the picture included a vertical orientation of the image itself. It would help if the picture was full length or nearly full length of the people. The man and the woman in the picture both needed to be attractive. And the final requirement was that it convey suspense.

It was amazing how impossible these criteria were.

If I wrote erotic romance, I would have had my couple in less than five minutes. But I don't write erotica, I write action/adventure romance. This is where the difficulty started.

The first problem was finding pictures where both the man and the woman were both attractive. I can't tell you how many times one of them was gorgeous and the other wasn't. This problem wouldn't have been insurmountable because there were plenty of pictures with two good looking people, but my other requirements... Sigh.

By far, the biggest and most annoying issue was the suspense part of the equation. Almost every single picture showed the couple smiling. The few where they weren't smiling usually depicted the couple having an argument. Awesome. Just what a romance writer wants.

I spent the vast majority of my weekend on this search. I'm guessing 20 hours or so total. In that time I found a grand total of 5 possibilities and I don't know if any of them will work for what I need. I'm hoping I don't have to do this again--three days was enough.

I'll share more about what this was about when it's all done and ready.

Being Descriptive

I've been listening to a lot of Urban Fantasy lately on my iPod. The one thing that's really struck me is the amount of description. There's so much of it and I don't understand why. It's not as if these books are set in unknown worlds and it's not as if the author is describing things I won't understand.

When I read a book, I skim description stuff or skip it all together. I've never enjoyed it for a few reasons. The biggest would be that I'm visualizing the setting and characters myself and I hate when the author's description of the scene doesn't match mine. Granted, it's her book, her world, her characters, but when I read, I make it my own.

Description is also not my favorite thing because it slows down the pace of the story. I read other things besides action/adventure kinds of books, but that doesn't mean I want the pace bogged down in a description of the clothing or the scenery. I don't care, just tell me the story.

Then there's the Charles Dickens debacle. When I was in high school we were forced to read Great Expectations. Ugh! In case you're unaware of it, Dickens was originally serialized in newspapers and paid by the word! Which led to pages and pages and pages of description. At first, I skimmed, but it was endless and I started skipping it completely. Only to find myself lost a few pages later because somewhere amid the sea of words was something that actually impacted the story. This was the first time I ever used Cliff's Notes to get through assigned reading.

So now I'm listening to audio books with no real way to skip the description of the city (I know what a city looks like, thank you very much), the apartment (yes, I can visualize one of those as well), and the clothes (seriously, don't care what anyone is wearing). I'm assuming that the excessive description is a requirement of the fantasy genre that got carried over to Urban Fantasy?

Of course, one person's excessive description is another reader's just the right amount. I've had to learn to put more description in my stories than what I personally care to see. And when I revisit my characters, guess what I skip as I read? ;-)

This is one of the reasons why I don't think I'd enjoy writing fantasy or science fiction. I care about the characters, about their story, and about their growth arc. I don't care about the locations, the gadgets, the governing body of the world, or the clothing. If I say the city is Los Angeles, if I mention the crumbling red brick warehouse with a riot of brightly colored graffiti. If I say the stench of rotting garbage filled the air, that in the distance a car horn honked, I think that's enough. Let's move on and get to the story. :-)

Phone Calls and Edge of Dawn

Edge of Dawn won the Aspen Gold Award for Best Paranormal!

I found out yesterday even though I got the call on Saturday because I didn't bother to play messages right away. In my defense, I've been getting a lot of telemarketing calls lately and those robo-callers ramble as soon as the phone is answered. Even if it's answered by voice mail.

And I had a phone call from my dad, too, on Saturday and I figured the message was from him. My parents have a really bad habit of leaving messages even thought I've told them time and again not to. I always see them before I do a play back. It doesn't stop them and I've learned to just ignore it until I have time to delete it out.

If you've guessed that I hate the phone with the fire of a thousand suns, you'd be exactly right. :-) I'd rather do email or IM or anything else rather than use a phone. Part of it is that I always end up sounding like an idiot and don't know how to gracefully end a phone conversation. Part of it is for a year while I was in high school, I had a job that kept me on the phone. I was probably the only 16-year-old girl who cringed when a call came in and it was for me.

Yesterday afternoon, I finally decided to clear messages. Imagine my surprise when I had two messages, not just one. This was one time, though, where I was elated that the indicator was blinking!

The best part? I'm going to get a plaque! Hardware--woot!!!

Afraid Of the Dark

Last night, the History Channel had a show on called Afraid of the Dark. It was two hours long and I was ready for bed long before it was over, but it had an interesting premise. The first question was is being afraid of the dark something hardwired into the human DNA or is it a learned response? Unfortunately, I didn't see that question answered.

My personal theory is that both reasons hold some sway. I think the hardwired part comes in because we don't have the nighttime vision that other animals do. In the daylight, we can see threats coming, but at night? Not until they're right on top of us. But it's also learned because that's when the bad guys come out to play.

The other thing that was hugely interesting to me is that there's a scale of darkness that goes from 1-9. New York City is a 9 because of all its lights, and according to the show, a ship would have to sail 300 miles away from NYC to reach a 1 on the darkness scale--far enough for the curvature of the earth to block the lights.

According to the show, there is no place left in the continental United States that is a category 1. I'm guessing there must be some up in Alaska, but wow. The other interesting factoid was that city dwellers can see about 1% of the stars that were visible to Galileo with the naked eye. That was another wow moment.

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Thanks to NASA for the image. If you'd like to see the full-sized picture, click on it. It's linked to the Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Anyway, the show went on to list reasons why we're afraid of the dark. It started with being eaten alive and looked at an area between Tanzania and Kenya which is a level 2 darkness area and what the people who lived there had to do to protect their village from lions. That was seriously OMG stuff. I didn't realize that lions attacked human villages or that 100 people a year in Africa die from attacks.

I'm afraid I missed the rest of the show because it started so late. I was hoping the History Channel would replay it, but they're too busy showing Swamp People and stuff like that. Um, what? Dear History Channel, how is Swamp People related to your channel? At least Afraid of the Dark looks at historic reasons why humans fear the dark. Catching alligators just doesn't seem to fit your charter. But then that's another blog.

4 Things To Learn From the Crazy Daffodil

I live in Minnesota. October is when the weather starts turning and we do the work it takes to get the yard ready for winter. For me that includes cutting down all my flowers and mulching the garden. All my outdoor work is done now, but I have a flower I didn't cut down.

You see, in my garden there's a crazy daffodil in bloom. Yes, it's blooming in Minnesota in October. The temperature this morning was 35 degrees.

The flower has been up for four weeks now. Even if the cold didn't daunt it, I would have thought time would have taken its toll. It hasn't, not yet. Every time I look out the window I can see this flower stubbornly clinging to life, a bright spot in a landscape that's becoming more and more barren every day. And I got to thinking that there's a lesson to be learned from this daffodil.

Do the unexpected. This flower is remarkable because it decided to bloom in October. If it had bloomed in April or May, it would have been just one more daffodil.

Don't give up. By persisting in the face of adversity (and MN weather is definitely adverse), the daffodil brought joy to one person. Me. :-) And I relieve that joy every time I look out the window.

March to your own drummer. So what if all the other flowers are resting and waiting for next spring? The daffodil wanted to bloom now, so it did. It didn't care what the others were doing.

Bend, don't break. We've had some horrific winds Tuesday and Wednesday and it's still windy today, though 25 mph is much better than 55 mph. There are large tree branches on the ground all over the place, but the daffodil moved with the wind and is still blooming beautifully in the garden.

Of all the things I thought of, I think the most important is to persevere, to hang in there even when the going is tough. It reminds me of something said during The Last Lecture (available for viewing on YouTube as well as iTunes): The brick walls are there to stop the people who don't want it badly enough.

Jarved Nine Short Story

The Troll Bridge is available for download on Kindle now! This is a short story that I wrote for The Mammoth Book of Time Travel Romance and it's a story set largely on Jarved Nine. I had a lot of requests from fans of Ravyn's Flight and Eternal Nights to make The Troll Bridge available on its own and I'm happy to finally be able to do this! It's only in Kindle format right now, but I have plans to make it available on other ereaders as well. It just might take me a little while.

Amazon doesn't have the description posted yet, so let me tell you a little bit about the story.

Troll Maglaya is the hero. He's a member of Wyatt's Special Ops team from ETERNAL NIGHTS. He wasn't introduced by name then, but he stayed in my head and wouldn't go away. I knew that somehow, some way I had to write his story, so it was hugely excited to get that opportunity. His heroine is Lia Stanton. She's someone who's played it safe her entire life, but when she's sent to cover a test at a particle accelerator as part of her job in corporate communications, she finds herself flung down a wormhole. The next thing she knows, she's on Jarved Nine forty years in the future. Alex (that would Lt. Col. Alexander "The Big Chill" Sullivan) thinks she's a coalition spy and assigns Troll to guard her while the rest of the team searches for the coalition transport.

Aside from Alex, Damon also makes a brief (non-speaking) appearance. Sasha is in the book, too. She wasn't introduced in ETERNAL NIGHTS either, but she's the ex-wife that Flare was still carrying a torch for in EN. Because it's a short story, things happen quickly between Lia and Troll and I didn't get to unfold the suspense plot at all. If I had, it would have been a 100,000 word story and Mammoth Books didn't want that length. :-)

As I mentioned on Sunday, The Troll Bridge takes place about 7 years after the epilogue of ETERNAL NIGHTS. In those intervening years, Flare, Gravedigger, and Z Man have gotten married. Someday, I hope to write those three men even if I can only do it as short stories because I just love all of Wyatt's team to death.

Here's the extremely awesome cover for the story:

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Find The Troll Bridge on Amazon

Blood Feud Is On Kindle!

Last year, I wrote a short story for The Mammoth Book of Vampire Romance 2, called Blood Feud. Until now, it's only been part of the full collection and I wanted people to be able to buy it on its own if they only wanted to read my story. It took me a little while to find the time to figure it all out, but Blood Feud is now available in Kindle format!

Demons and vampires have always been enemies, but they reached an uneasy truce. A truce now threatened by a demon who is murdering vampires.

Isobel is a troubleshooter for her vampire clan and she's ordered to work with a demon to find the killer. She never expected her new partner to be Seere, the demon lover she'd abandoned.

The last thing Seere wants is to fall under Iso's spell a second time. But as they work together to find the murderer, Seere learns that what burns between them is more explosive than any Blood Feud.

If you've read my Nocturne Bites story, Demon Kissed, Blood Feud is set in the same world. In DEMON KISSED, when Andras makes reference to the demon prince being in love with a vampire, he's referring to Isobel and Seere from BLOOD FEUD. There's a third story in this world coming out in 2011 from Nocturne Bites as well. I think the title is going to be SHADOW'S CARESS, but I have no idea on the release date yet.

Anyway, I've been working on this plan to upload Blood Feud on my own for a while. I had this awesome cover made and then procrastinated on the actual conversion for Kindle upload. It was a little tedious to format, but it went much easier than I expected.

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I know not everyone reads on a Kindle. I'm going to try to format for the other readers as well, but I can't promise when I'll manage to get it done unless I can upload the file in the same format that Amazon took. Somehow I'm guessing it won't be that easy.

And as I'm typing this, I'm working on getting The Troll Bridge uploaded for Kindle, too. TROLL BRIDGE was part of The Mammoth Book of Time Travel Romance and is set on Jarved Nine. It takes place about seven years after the end of Eternal Nights, Wyatt and Kendall's story. I know a lot of fans of the Jarved Nine series have been asking for this to be available as a stand alone, so I'm excited to get this out there.

Blood Feud for Kindle

You Might Be Obnoxious If...

This brave new world of social media has sent scads of authors into the wild, all trying to scream loudly enough to garner attention for their books. The unfortunate thing is that too many of these people seem to have no common sense on where the line is between promoting themselves and being obnoxious.

So here are some hints. (With apologies to Jeff Foxworthy.) You might be obnoxious if:

1. You promo yourself so much on Twitter that people who don't follow you are filtering out your tweets. Bonus points if most/all of your tweets are promotion related.

Yes, it's true. For the past two months, an author who I shall not name has been tweeting promo after promo after promo. Other authors who I do follow are retweeting these posts. Even with the new-style Twitter Retweet which means I only see a RT once, I still have been inundated. By an author I do not follow! I ended up blocking her on Twitter and filtering out anything with her name on Tweetdeck. I can't imagine actually following her.

2. Someone accepts your friend request on Facebook and you post your book cover on their wall, complete with review snippets, book summary, and links to your website and blog. Bonus points if you hop over as soon as FB notifies you of the acceptance.

This has happened. More than once. The first time an author does this, I remove the post. The second time they do it, I unfriend them. This is very tacky behavior.

3. You send your newsletter to someone who did not sign up for it. Bonus points for not including an unsubscribe link.

Do I even need to explain why this is wrong? First, if someone wants your newsletter, they know to request it. Secondly, I'm not your target audience. Yes, writers read, but we're still not your target audience.

4. Promo your blog post on published-author-only loops. Bonus points if you do it every time you blog. Double bonus points if your topic is of no interest to most published authors.

Do I need to say it again? Published authors are not your target audience. Really. I have to believe that after a couple times, few bother to click over anymore, but even if these blog promos are driving traffic to your site, it's not the traffic you're looking for. Numbers are less important than having the right kind of numbers. I can guarantee you, though, that there are people muttering about you and not in a positive way.

5. You send event invites on Facebook, MySpace, or some other social networking site a) for book signings (bonus points if they're 1500 miles away from me). b) For every guest blog you do. c) To tell me that your book is still available. Bonus points if you send private messages with this information.

Just don't. Facebook has a wonderful feature called LISTS. Sort your friends into lists. Put authors on one list. Do not send them your promo stuff. We did not friend you because we love your books. We friended you because you asked, and because networking is a good thing, we accepted. This doesn't mean I have any interest in your work. Sorry. If I love you more than any other author, I'll let you know and then you can add me to the Readers List.

6. Try to refriend me after I've unfriended you. Bonus points for resending friend requests over and over.

I only unfriend the obnoxious on Facebook. If you're no longer a friend, there's a reason for that. Don't send another friend request. Definitely don't repeatedly send friend requests. I've blocked two people permanently for this. It's beyond obnoxious and borders on stalkerish behavior.

There are a lot of other obnoxious things authors do in the name of promotion, but these are the things that have been happening a lot lately. If you're irritating me, how many other people are you irritating? Think about it.

Light Bulb!

While I was at work today, I had an idea pop into my head. I love it when this happens. New ideas are always shiny and perfect, not yet tarnished by trying to make them actually work with words or as a story. :-)

Right now, I don't know if this is part of a book/series I'm aware of--it could be a missing piece for something I already have in mind. I don't know if this idea might be it's own separate story--I'll spend time mulling, turning it over to see if it's strong enough to support a book. I'll also see if new characters turn up. At this point, I don't even know if the idea is something that I'll end up not using.

At least not using in the foreseeable future. When the idea about Deke came in, I wrote down "Deke Summers PI is an animated cartoon figure. The soul of a man, the real Deke, is trapped inside the cartoon." Or words to that effect. I had no story for this at all. For ten years, the note sat and then one day Ryne showed up and it turned out Deke was her hero. Even ideas that might appear to go nowhere can turn into something later. At least it can be a piece of something later.

New ideas bring an adrenaline spike for me. Hey, new shiny is always exciting. It pushes everything else aside as I run scenarios, trying to see how (or if) it will work. I'll turn it around, look at it from different sides. I'll try to piece it into ideas that are in queue to be written. Sometimes the reason they're not what I'm working on is that something is missing.

If it turns out to only be a snippet, I'll be disappointed. But I'll write it down and hope that some day it will fit into a project. But I'm wishing for more than this. We'll see.

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The Raven Halloween Hunt is underway! Follow the link for the rules and prizes, but you can probably guess books are involved, right?

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There are lots of awesome authors involved and lots of awesome prizes, so be sure to check it out. The contest lasts for the month of October.

Z-Man

Blogging about Flare got me thinking. His story would have been the first in a three-book series, and while I had a good handle on him and Sasha, his heroine, I didn't have that same grasp on the other two stories. This got me thinking further about how in all the series ideas I've had, I know less about each book down the line.

For example, I know Flare and Sasha. I know their history, I know their growth arcs, I know them. The second book would have had Gravedigger (also from Eternal Nights and Nadia. I know some stuff about them, but not enough to write them. I don't know either of them well and have no idea how either of them needs to change.

Which brings me to the third story. I knew five years ago that the hero was Z-Man (I know he's mentioned in The Troll Bridge, but I'm sure about EN). I had a very vague sense of him, but nothing strong. I have no clue who his heroine is. At all. Because I was working on his story as part of the overview I put together for proposals, I tried to give him someone, but she changed a couple of times while I was working on it and was never set. None of those women stuck, I'm guessing because they weren't the right ones.

So as I mentioned, Flare was talking. On Thursday, Z started, too. He's revealing his background to me. At least a little bit. Five years ago, he told me he was a sniper and that you couldn't do that job if you didn't have your head screwed on straight. (Which was about the sum total of what he passed along way back when.) Now he's telling me he grew up in northern California and that he's part Hawaiian and part Japanese, as well as having European ancestors.

And that's what's kind of funny. Five years ago, I went looking for pictures of my three guys and was never happy with his. Every time I looked at Z's image, I knew something was wrong, that it was close, but just not quite. It's cool to know I was right and to know why.

Unfortunately, this isn't the project I'm supposed to be working on right now. I hate to force Flare and Z back out of my brain, but I'm afraid that's what I'll need to do. Too many characters, too many stories, not enough time.