Mark Todd's Blog, page 14

Confessions of a Porn Schlock Queen

[This week's a solo post by Kym]
Seems like this quote by Moliere can come full circle: Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.
“A writing whore? Not me!” you cry. “I am an artist surrendering to a passion that forces me to put words on paper.”
Remember your first stab at it in middle school? The angst of adolescence prevailed, and you penned a few poems about love and death. You adored your words. They peeled away social proprieties and exposed the raw you. They expressed how you felt about life! Even though you hadn’t experienced much of it. Sometimes you even showed your work to a few people, close friends who wouldn’t offer much criticism.
For some of us, the writing obsession endured. We excelled in high school English; we earned creative writing degrees. Eventually we marched into the world with our special skills, working as journalists, magazine contributors and press agents. Some of us published books. We love our words and these are honorable careers. Does that still make us prostitutes?
Yep. It does.
Think about it. We are all slaves to the deadline pimp, even if we didn’t initially consider ourselves “soiled literary doves.” No matter who we are or what we end up doing, we have to pay the rent and daycare. We need money for groceries and gas. We keep our computers updated so we have something to write on. If we are lucky enough to work as fulltime writers, money still matters.
A few years ago, I had a job with an Internet search engine. Every week I wrote three hundred one-paragraph descriptions that extolled the virtues of this or that website. My beat even included the porn sites, which no one else on the team would take. It became a miserable occupation. I didn’t care what I wrote, and you wouldn’t want to know what I wrote.
So I had become a mercenary porn schlock queen bent on making a buck. For me, at that time, the ultimate goal was getting that check in the mail. I was a writing prostitute and not very ashamed to admit it. Instead of working on my back, I pushed to meet deadlines with the worst possible prose.
Moliere was right. Almost. I started out loving my words and eventually ended up getting paid for them. Now the full circle part: I hardly rake in any bucks for my words these days, with the exception of a few royalties now and then. But I adore the words that I co-write with my husband, Mark. It comes with a different kind of reimbursement.
Go out there. Make money. Become a literary prostitute. Isn’t that the final destination of every great or would-be-great writer? Just remember to back up a little and appreciate the words you once loved.

National Wormhole Day Blog Hop

Okay, we've decided to plunge down the rabbit --er, worm -- hole. Join us and many others for this fun blog hop on March 13 & 14.

Are you signed up yet for the National Wormhole Day Bloghop?

This is a quick and easy Blog Hop. Since we are all busy, take a moment to tell the world, in 100 words more or less, what you would do if you had a two-way ticket to traverse a wormhole. Let your imagination go wild and post it to your blog on either March 13th or March 14th.

Be sure to sign up on the Linky list below!

Author Julie Luek talks about platforms

We're delighted to host our first guest blogger,  Julie Luek -- author, magazine writer, regular contributor to She Writes and the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Association. She's also a blogger extraordinaire in her own "write" (and why we sit at her feet for tips).

Julie has agreed to share insights on the all-important strategy for authors of building a platform to make writing marketable to agents and publishers.

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Thanks to Mark and Kym for allowing me to be their first guest-blogger. They have asked me to talk about building a platform.  And while I openly admit I am no expert and have a long way to go in understanding how this is done, if my steep and continual learning curve can benefit another writer, I’m more than glad to share.
Let It Shine
When I was a little girl we used to sing a simple, little song in Sunday school.  We’d hold up our pointer finger, like a candle, and belt out with all sincerity: This little light of mine. I’m gonna let it shine. This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine, let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.
For the second verse, the hand motions got a bit trickier. While still holding up our pointer finger on one hand we’d cup the palm of our other hand, imitating a candle snuffer-- even though we didn’t have a clue what that was.  Still, we’d soulfully sing: Hide it under a bushel, no! I’m gonna let it shine. Hide it under a bushel, no! I’m gonna let it shine, let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.
Those early lessons in evangelism were probably lost on us as children.
Lighting the Candle
But the lesson of letting your light shine is one we can apply to the concept of building a writer’s platform. Really, the whole point of a platform is taking your writing light out from under the bushel and letting it shine. 
It doesn’t take a lot of internet research to learn the Big Houses of publishing are spending less and less money on marketing and expect that the authors will do the legwork to promote their own books. Long gone are the days of high-profile displays in a big-box bookstore.  Even if you are yet unpublished, or are a freelance writer, like me, you still want to develop a platform—a public exposure, a showing of followers.
As my friend Sunny Frasier from Oak Tree Press has told me, publishers, acquisition editors and even agents may ask you about your platform efforts and plans beforethey will even consider taking you on as a client. With as many queries as people in the industry receive, they are more likely to work with the writer who is already out there holding up their shining candle.
There are many venues to consider when building a platform, including blogging, Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, Pinterest, guest-blogging for other writers or sites, and many others I’m just beginning to learn about. But the end goal is the same: to reach readers, other writers who can help you promote your work, become a recognizable name, and increase your odds of publication when the time comes.
Shine From the Inside
Almost all the platform and writing gurus out there will tell you building a platform is about selling a product and you are the best product. Promoting your writing or books is only effective if people are drawn to you.  Whatever avenue you choose to build your platform, be a personality people can relate to and like.
Hide yourself and your writing under a bushel? No way! Let it shine!
For more information on building a platform vs. selling your book, check out this great article by literary agent, Rachelle Gardner .
A Bit of Bio Julie Luekenga writes as Julie Luek and is a freelance writer. Her work can be seen in regional and national magazines including Dog World, Vibrant Life, Coaching and Athletic Directors, and others. She is also a bi-weekly contributor to the women’s writing site, She Writes, and a monthly contributor to the blog Chiseled in Rock. She is a member of the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers and is author to two blogs, A Thought Grows and In Fine Company . 
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 Thanks, Julie, for these generous thoughts. Be sure to check out these ways to to contact Julie yourself:

 Blogs:www.athoughtgrows.blogspot.comwww.julieluek.blogspot.com
Facebook:http://www.facebook.com/julie.luek
Twitter: https://twitter.com/JulieLuek
LinkedIn:  LinkedIn

(Sharing) Limelight & Insights

Once a month, we're going to invite a guest writer to share insights on our blog.

We're delighted to announce our first guest as Julie Luek --author, magazine writer, regular contributor to "She Writes" and the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Assn. Also a blogger extraordinaire (we sit at her feet for tips).

Julie has agreed to share insights on the all-important strategy for authors of building a platform to make writing marketable to agents and publishers.

Watch for her upcoming guest post next Thursday, Feb. 21.

The Character Naming Game and Cross-Dress -- er, Cross-Genre Writing

For our own writing projects, we discovered that sometimes characters tell us what their names are. More often than not, surnames pop out about the same time a character shows up in a story. Last names occasionally stem from ones we’ve heard in our past or they’ll relate to the personality – or the just the opposite. In The Silverville Swindle, Howard Beacon isn’t exactly a bright light, Billy Noble is anything but, whereas money preoccupies Buford Price. Same thing in All Plucked Up: Madame Pompeii is as disastrous as her namesake, Maurice LeVieux plays an old geezer (“LeVieux” is French for that), and the “three fools” are our hat tip to Moe, Larry, and Curly. Whether or not readers catch our wordplay, the name puns are amusing to us. In The Magicke Outhouse, we named our protagonist Micah Musil because it sounds funny, its accentual syllabics imitate the corresponding anti-diuretic we’re punning, and it fits a person who encounters visceral turbulence – in a black-comedy sort of way. In a similar vein, we couldn't resist giving the new Outhouse star, April, the last name of "Schaures" – an intentional sound pun.We were even more shameless in our punning when we gave the little alien-looking kid, Otto, the last name of Diesewelt. Try saying that name two or three times quickly and you'll most likely be able to figure out where he's from -- or at least, where he's not from! We were also shameless in our hat tips to name punning when we got into the whole naming game that the Pantiwycke clan engages in from All Plucked Up. Characters are always trying on names, changing them, and not unlike the paces we as authors put our cast through as we write.We don't mind lifting the edge of the stage curtain -- or the petticoat -- to tease our readers on the side, giving them hints or offering side jokes about what we're doing as we do it. Guess it doesn't get any campier that we even gave ourselves cameo roles in All Plucked Up. If that's not a wink to the reader that we try never to take ourselves too seriously, we're not sure what could be!And speaking of a bit of stagecraft and superficial flash, our new adventures in screenwriting have put a whole new spin on collaborative writing. We still follow the same techniques for telling a tale or naming a name, but through the perspective of seeing the story on a big screen. We first gave it a shot with The Silverville Swindle, mostly because readers kept telling us the story would make a good movie. We’ve never let knowing what we’re doing stop us before – starting a magazine, putting out a weekly paper, writing that first novel – but this time it seemed like a good idea to find out more about how movie scripts come together. The summer after the novel came out, we went to a writing conference that had a session on screenwriting. We decided to try it. That first draft taught us enough to know that our script was just that, a first draft. For one thing, we mostly cut-and-pasted dialog from the novel, and what we got turned into a monster, dialog-wise. Worse, when a film-maker read the script for us, he pointed out that one particular sentence would cost a studio $10,000. So back to the drawing board for us. We needed to think in terms of not only story but also production – and what kind of response we would get from future collaborators – i.e., producers, directors, and film companies. We buried our noses in books, subscribed to trade journals, and read successful scripts. Along the way, we learned a whole new approach to tightening up a story so that it fits inside two hours. And we discovered we really liked it. No longer did we have to fill in so much background, and we could skip a lot of exposition altogether. We could completely focus on the key scenes; we both now looked at story as a series of visuals. Version 2.0 of The Silverville Swindle looks a lot different from the first draft, and very different from Version 3.0. We chopped with gleeful abandon – many peripheral characters and subplots completely disappeared; we repackaged conflict and action. We also rewrote the scenes to keep our protagonist in front of the camera. In the end, we think we created a tidy little package that won’t cost a studio an arm and a leg. We must have done something right because it got the attention of a Colorado-based indy film company and later a movie producer/packager with some well-known screen credits.  Time will tell where this one goes, but in the meantime, we’re enjoying our new playground and have a few more screenwriting projects in the works. Not adaptations, but straight-to-script projects.And along the way, we still love writing novels. In fact, our current project, The Magicke Outhouse, is virtually writing itself as we breathlessly try to keep pace.Will any of our projects lead to hot rendezvous in bed? Probably not.Like we said before, we can’t write love scenes, which might seem odd for two people who compare co-writing to good sex. Our passion is private except when it comes to crafting a good tale together.

Letting Pushy Characters Take Control, Part Two

Even though characters help authors turn good stories into great ones, some characters have their own ideas about what’s going to happen next – regardless of what the authors’ story outline says.Case in point: April Schaures, a personality in our most recent Silverville project, The Magicke Outhouse. Created as an afterthought to complement the story’s protagonist, April pushed her way into the plot as one of the most colorful characters who’s ever visited Silverville. It was creepy, like she was waiting in the wings for a casting call. Creepy because she “possessed” us both at the same time, with surprising flair that seemed to come from nowhere. April really challenges our notion of where we thought characters originate. Even stranger, neither of us has ever knowna character like April. But there she was on the page. In the passage below, she’s shining her new supervisor:
April climbed the stairs and opened the heavy door of the Silverville Public Library.An older woman standing behind the circulation desk looked up. Had to be Miss Brumbelow, head librarian. The woman smiled and said, “Can I help you with anything?”April marched to the desk and thrust out her hand. “I’m April.”The smile melted into a frown. “Your internship started yesterday.”“Didn’t you get my message?” The one I never sent.“No, I don’t recall any messages from you.”April forced a cough and drew a tissue from her pocket. “Really? You didn’t get my note about my recent relapse?”Miss B appeared to wait for more of an explanation, which April was happy to provide.“The Uruguayan Flying Worm Syndrome. It flared up again.”“Excuse me? Uruguay?  I understood you were from Placer City.”“That’s where I grew up, after a traveling circus brought me into the United States and my parents adopted me.” April blew her nose long and hard into the tissue. “I caught the worm before that, when I was only six. Most people die from it. I was lucky.” The librarian’s eyes narrowed. “Is it contagious?”“Not once the worms work their way out of your system. Mine have.” April offered a long-suffering shrug. “But once you get it, it stays with you the rest of your life.”“Is that why your pupils are so … so pink?”April bent her head and plucked a small disk from one eye and held it up on her finger for the woman to inspect. “Colored contacts.”While April replaced the theatrical lens, Miss B heaved a disappointed sigh and retrieved a sheet of paper from under the desk. “Here are the responsibilities I’ve typed up for you.” She handed it to her new intern and motioned her to follow.
We didn’t write April’s dialog; she did. In fact, she just sort of grabbed the reins and ran. We often find that a particular character will determine the direction of a plot. Characters tell us what they need, what they have to say, and where they will and will not go. Unlike April, most of our characters need fleshing out, but once we get to know them, we trust them to guide us to the end of the story. All three novels in the Silverville Saga have taken various twists and turns we hadn’t anticipated as the characters took on lives of their own. We almost felt like spectators rather than writers, our job merely to record what was going on in their universe.