Patti O'Shea's Blog, page 195

Electronic Hell

This past five weeks have been hell on my electronics/computers. It seems like if something can go wrong, it has. I'm not used to this!

It started with my iMac crashing in mid-August. The night before it was fine, but I went in the next morning--coffee cup in my hand--and it was sitting there, doing nothing. Googling turned up a variety of solutions, none of which worked. My last-ditch attempt was erasing the hard drive and reinstalling the Operating System (OS). If this didn't work, it was go...

The Post I Wrote While Exhausted

It always interests me how different writers are from each other on process and how they get their information. Some see their stories unfold like movies in front of them. Some outline and know everything that's going to happen before they write it. I'm not sure it's possible to find two writers with an identical process no matter how hard you look.

For me, I don't have my stories unfold like movies. I might get snapshots of a scene, but nothing more than that. I hear my characters. I hear the...

Getting To Know Her

I really like this heroine I'm working with now. Earlier, when I was getting information flowing in, most of it came to the hero and she only shared a very little bit with me. Him I knew really, really well, but her? Not so much.

But now that I'm writing the story and it opens with my heroine, I'm getting to know her better. And I like her. A lot. Maybe because she knows the hero so well and is willing to live with his quirks, for lack of a better word. She understands him, takes him in stride...

New Covers!

I mentioned earlier that I was going to get the two short stories I wrote for the Mammoth Books collections out in ebook format. I have the electronic rights to those stories, so I decided to get covers made and take the plunge. Well, my covers turned out utterly awesome and I have to share here even though I haven't finished writing the book description blurbs yet or even started formatting.

First up is the cover for The Troll Bridge. This is a time travel where the heroine, Lia...

The Art of Cover Copy

When someone picks up a book in the bookstore and turns it over to read the back cover to find out what the book is about, they're looking at something that probably took hours to write. Producing good back cover copy requires a lot of skill. Basically, the writer has two paragraphs to tell what the story is about and to make it interesting to the reader. Most authors don't write this themselves.

I have several theories for this. One is that authors are too close to their work to pull out the ...

Bloglines

Just a quick FYI. Bloglines is shutting down Oct 1st. If you're like me, and don't pay attention, this will be a surprise to you. It was to me. If you use Bloglines, you'll need to transfer your feeds to some other RSS reader.

Picture Perfect

Recently, I spent some time going through my files for published books. Not the WordPerfect files where I did my writing, but my image files. It was really interesting to go back and see how many pictures were filed for which books.

For Ravyn's Flight, I discovered three pictures--one of the hero and two of the heroine. It was one apiece for The Power of Two. I had more pictures for Through a Crimson Veil. Tons of the heroine and dozens of the hero and a handful of Venice Beach, where a couple...

Brave New World

Y'all know I wrote two short stories for Mammoth Books. I only contracted for non-exclusive print rights and have my electronic rights. I've decided to take the leap and self-publish the E version myself.

I'm having covers created as we speak. I'm writing the "back cover" copy that describes the book right now, too. This is forcing me to flex writing muscles that have mostly been unused since my college days when I was an advertising copywriting major. When I have these two things finished, I'...

I Heart Pre-Book

I love Pre-Book. It's not my favorite part of the process. I think that's when the idea first comes in. Then information and ideas are flowing fast and furious and I'm riding an adrenaline wave that is major cool. But Pre-Book is pretty darn awesome, too.

The regular readers of this blog know that Pre-Book is when I look for character pictures, do overview level research for the idea (whether it be for a series or a single book), and start thinking about the flow of the story.

What's fun about ...

Surprises

Today, I decided to organize some of my notes for my Vampire/Demon world. (The one I've written about in Blood Feud and Demon Kissed.) I used OneNote, and while I know the basics, anything beyond that is new territory for me. We don't use this program at work and I haven't had time to mess around with it at home. But I just finished up my latest short story on Aug 30th, so today I decided to just do it.

After some fits and starts, I started to figure things out. I transferred all my files into...