Anna DeStefano's Blog, page 24

The Soul of the Matter: Capturing the Inspiration…

Road trips clear your mind, so why not take your  mind on a trip whenever you need that hit of inspiration, whenever your work needs that fuel? We all are in the weeds at some point, in every creative endeavor–writing, editing, parenting, not killing our children or spouses when they're jumping up and down on our last nerve. That's when we need a trip the most: a mini-fix, capturing you back to a past getaway, through the pictures that refuse to let your forget. Like these I took on my beach walk last night. Now, they can be every night for me. And your night, too, if you'll let them…

Misty surf becoming clouds.

Violet consuming light.

The sun, a valiant, final stand.

An ethereal show.

Tapestry, texture, light and color. Sky above, below, within.

The sea, surrounding you .

Collapsing, a misty blue beginning, charming again.

All of this happened in a single hour, my friends, as I shared my walk with the setting sun.

It's a lifetime now, I'll remember with whomever returns with me, to this place where light creates in the darkness a magical show like none other.

I will write here, in this moment, in my memory, forever.

Won't you?

Publishing Isn't for Sissies: Inside the Barrel

The end-all-be-all of surfing is riding inside the barrel, where the wave hollows out and curls over you and you're riding free inside the monster. It's a bitch to get there, it's a dangerous place, yet it's heaven at the same time. Much like how a writer feels, cruising  toward the last third of a novel's rough draft. It's a desperate place, hollowed out and empty, but it's magic–if you can grit out the ride long enough to get yourself there.

Most writers are clucked from time to time: a surfer's term for being scared of waves. Writers, we're scared of our stories more often than we want to admit. Not exactly what we want the world that devours our end-goal to know. Because it's not really the story, in the end, that freaks us out. It's the drop (yeah, this will be a running theme, deal with it ;o).

While surfing, the drop is where a surfer first gets up on a wave, then points his board straight down the face of it, plunging toward nothingness, until he either takes the needed turn and flies, or eats it.The last push of a draft is that way. There's more story behind than before you, you've set everything up, hopefully, and now it's time to bring the reader home. Everything's riding on that last turn. Yet things have gotten truly gnarly, dude. Because this is a draft. Your first pass.

The story is breaking. Your only choices are to ride that last wave or turn back. And turning back, even for the pros, is often much more appealing.

Publishing isn't for sissies, when things are at their messiest in the draft and the fear of wiping out yawns and you're in the soup. The business and the networking and the promised methods of writing success fade. It's just you and the words. Your command over your environment is all that matters now. Your control over your own fear. It's your wave to challenge or turn back from.

We've all read wonderful books by wonderful writers that nonetheless fall flat for us, like a wave ride that takes us to the brink, then fizzles. Writers have all felt this happen in their own process, and many of us call it writer's block. In reality, it's just part of ride. It's the job, pushing and driving forward when all signs say to turn back. When your confidence is dinged up, and it's been too long since you finished a story, and you have to force yourself to take the disaster you're drafting and make something clean and magnificent and bitchin' come to life from it. Like a perfect writing wave.

In this world where our business is exploding around us daily, it's easy to think that conquering what happens outside the book is the most important thing. Don't believe it. What's going on within your mind and how it comes to life on the page must remain what keeps you amped.

The writing is what professionals focus on every day. The business is what they do when they're not writing, because they don't stop until they have an amazing product to sell.

You want to be one of those success stories you hear about online every day? The author who comes from out of nowhere and hits it big in the new frontier of publishing. Then write through the breaking waves and don't bail out when it gets tough. Don't be a sissy. Cut back as many times as you need to, but don't lift your but out of your chair every day, until you've created forward in your work-in-progress. Don't let the fear win, no matter how heavy the draft feels or how daunting the drop is into the ending rising before you.

 

Yeah, I have about a quarter of a draft to finish. I'm in the deep waves this week (and probably next week, too). But I'm not going to stop until this beautiful, challenging, $#&^%# story is completed the way it needs to be. I want to ride inside that perfect barrel, no matter hard it is to get there.

How about you?

Things My Teenager Says: Free Ice Cream Promotion!

"What are you going to do, now that your robotics team's headed for the VEX World Championships in California?" I ask my teen.

"I'm going to DisneyLand!!!" he snickers, only half kidding because, yes, he realizes that robotics is his charter school's varsity sport.

Now, his dad's and my and his team's booster club's job is to figure out how he and his GSMST buddies and their robots (so far, two teams from his school are going!) will be able to afford to fly cross-country and stay the three days in California it's going to take to compete with their amazing creations.

Disclaimer: this is stock photography, NOT one of The RoboDragons' competing bots.

Which is where our FREE Bruster's ICE CREAM Promotion comes in ;o)

Click on the image below to see it full-size!

If you have a Bruster's Ice Cream near you and love their homemade goodness as much as we do, here's your chance to support a great not-for-profit cause, rack up a tax deduction, snag TONS of BOGO opportunities, and help send my brainiac robitcs "athlete" to Worlds ;o)

More details:

No expiration date coupons!
For every $12 spent on a coupon book, $6 goes to pay the vendor and $6 goes to send my teenager to Worlds.
A $30-$40 retail value in every book!

Questions?

We'll answer anything you got in the comments below, including how to order and details on how we'll get your coupon book to you. Just ask away.

We're creative folks (my teenager's taught us well).

We're not proud.

Buy a coupon book, and we'll hand deliver it to you if we have to.

Please consider cross-promoting this to your social media streams and any friends you have in your area. It's a great cause and a super value!

And that concludes the infomercial portion of our program…

How We Write: Crunchy

Heads down in a three-quarters completed draft, I'm also coaching an author preparing for the same creative battle: making story and characters come alive by force of will and your imagination alone. My first comment to her–it's going to get crunchy. Don't expect a cake walk. In fact if it's not an all-out battle, you're not challenging yourself enough.

That's right. We write uneven and clunky and, yes, crunchy stuff when we're slogging through the draft. And for most of us, even those of us who've published novels into the double digits, it gets harder the more stories we challenge, not easier. That's the way it works. The more you learn about story, the more you decide to do with it, the less intuitive it can sometimes be to create what appears to be an effortless journey to the reader.

Several things cause the anxiety and mind-numbing tangents we encounter when we draft:

No planning. As I've explained to countless freelance clients, authors I'm editing, and those I've worked with through workshops, etc., the less planning you do before you write, the more you do WHILE you write. The result of the latter? Logic errors. Writing yourself into corners that you can't write out of. Crafting reactions or decisions that fit your plot but not your characters, or vise versa.
Inconsistent drafting schedule. If you don't stay in your evolving story (and mean every day, writing as much as you can, even if it's only a few paragraphs that take you further than the day before), you forget where the last story element left off. You don't remember the character arc you were riffing on. You start something new, in the midst of something else, in the midst of something else… Until you finally realize that your draft has resembles the pattern of a hyperactive grade schooler, ping-ponging all over the place, having fun here and there, with no overall direction whatsoever.
Premature revision anxiety. What you're writing isn't the way you want it, it's not the way you want anyone to read it, so you're not going to move on until it's perfect. Because that's what disciplined writers do. Actually, in my experience, that's what most writers do when they have years and years to write books. They stop and start, robbing their creativity of discovering what comes next in the flow and rhythm of the forward-moving story plot, so they can do the easier work of prettying up what they've already written. Because that feels safer for some of us. It certainly feels better than tackling another blank page. Except that new page might hold the answers you'll never know to the puzzle you've left to solve in the crunchy story behind you.

There are more stumbling blocks, but these are the high points I've seen in my own and others' processes over and over again.

Bottom line, we don't like things unresolved. Some of us have a much lower tolerance for it than others. Like me:

So, I developed a process of planning (through character) that better prepared me for the darkness of drafting, shining light into cobwebbed corners so I could see a bit more clearly as I slogged about.
And I taught myself over the years to trust my rewriting skills as one of my greatest strengths. The anxiety of whether or not I can rework a draft into something I'm not ashamed to share with an editor, let alone a reader, is long gone (well, not gone, but contained now without the need of mind-altering pharmaceuticals).
Finally, I hold myself to a work strict ethic when I'm drafting. I write forward. I don't write back. I can look back to get my barings and to make notes of things that need to be attended to once I'm done, because of changes I'm making in the overall character/story arcs as I move forward. But I do not, no exception, stop writing the next page because I can't stop myself from fiddling with the last one.

I've accepted that draft writing is just one of the three phases of the writing journey. For me, it's the shortest of the three. I plan and rewrite more than I draft.

Drafting for me is getting the bones of my plan fleshed out and on the page and realized in the living, breathing lives of my characters and plot turning points, so I can actually see what is is I've only been invisioning so far. Then I dig into all that crunchy stuff, once I've reached The End, and let loose the best of my creativity with every tool I have in my took belt: a solid plan, a solid (if imperfect) draft, and kick-butt revision technique.

But more importantly, how do you write crunchy?

How do you keep creating, when the doubt takes hold that what you've already done isn't good enough?

What's your process for staring into the eye of your weakest skill set and forcing yourself to not only do it until the job is done, but to do work with the kind of enthusiasm that will make you grow as writer, no matter how uncomfortable it feels?

How We Write: Free Writing (Drafting) with a Plan…

In addition to editing/reading other author's manuscripts this month, I'm in the throws of drafting a new book of my own. Eeek! Writing into the ether isn't my happy place. So I free-write with a plan. Huh? you say. Yep, I plan my characters and as many plot turning points as possible before I start. How? I'm so glad you asked…

 

My half-day workshops focus on my theory that if you know what you intend to accomplish with a character and/or story arc BEFORE you write a scene, you've got a much better chance of actually producing a successful experience for the reader once you're done. And if you know what you want the reader to feel and take away from an entire chapter or a whole section of your novel, before you begin stringing scenes together, you'll be aware of that plan as you write and your subconscious and instincts will help you not write yourself or your characters into corners you can't plot out of once you're there.

Having a goal in mind doesn't mean you're forcing yourself to follow only one path to your story goal, any more than having a map restricts you to driving only one route to your destination. It's a beginning, an anchor, for your thoughts to blossom from.

If you don't formally plan, my experience is that you plan as you draft. And even if you do some of your story planning before you draft, you're still planning as you write. When I teach drafting, I focus on exploration, the creativity inherent to the drafting part of your process. No limits. No holds barred. Then how does planning play a part? Easy.

Think of it this way. If you've taken time to draft characters and possible story points ahead of time, then the "planning" that you've done is a more advanced starting point. You already understand the basics of what you will be drafting. Then as you discover more, while you're writing, your planning progresses. You've begun, further into your awareness of the nuances of what you're doing, so you can layer deeper into subplot and character traits and growth. You move on to intermediate and advanced work, more subtle work, with your plot, because the early stuff is already out of the way.

Make sense?

And here's the kicker. Finishing that draft–it's just another beginning. As I've already discussed in earlier posts, The End is only a place to start. The finest work, the most important planning you'll do for your story, is the rework of revision. When you have a full story to work with and characters who've come alive to you and story elements that you can see in so much more detail than when you first began.

Plan first. Then never stop. Not while you're drafting. Not while you revise. Plan and tweak and craft and rework and then work some more, until your story becomes a living, breathing thing with a mind of it's own. That's how we write !

I Hear The Craziest Things: See Tate City and Hidden Waterfalls

Waterfalls are my zen. They're my destination every time I flee my every day and the weather permits interior driving/walking. My Waterfall Challenges are off-road, in the middle of nowhere stuff, which makes seeing this on one of those dirt-road trips a bit of a surprise:

Get it?

There I was in the middle of some of the most beautiful and rugged country a car can drive to in the North Georgia mountains, just shy of the state border with North Carolina, when off to the side of the road someone had painted a big read barn with a spoof on the tourist trap signs all around the more popular Rock City.

In the middle of a field.

Next to a mushy dirt road that resembled a mud puddle that morning because it had been raining for days.

"Cute," I thought to myself. "The locals have a quirky sense of humor. I like that." And off I went to find the obscure turn off where I could park Bessie and hike into the woods in search of interior falls several miles away.

Then, I saw this.

"Seriously?" I pulled out my local map. I'd been following hiking instructions for finding the forest service road and hadn't really looked at the area on an honest-to-Dog map yet.

"OMG."

Sure enough, there was Tate City on the map. A real place, clearly where tourists were meant to be entertained as they passed through. I wondered what else they'd come up with to keep me distracted from my morning destination.

I didn't have to wait long.

I was laughing myself blind at this point, tears rolling down my cheeks. Have I mentioned how much I love the area around Rabun and Clayton and Mountain City? So much so, we're planning to one day buy a vacation home there that we want to retire to. Everything I was seeing, the beautiful landscape as far as the eye could see and the stand-up-comedy routine Tate City was waging against my not-awake-yet surliness, was convincing me that we're making the right decision to spend more time there. As much time as we can spare.

And just in case I needed more entertainment to occupy my mind once my writng and hiking day was over, they threw me one last bone to string me along.

 Shopping!!!

In the middle of nowhere.

What could be better than that ;o)

Well, a few missed turns down a few more rustic, one-car-wide dirt trails, parking in a rutted field, and a off-road, obscure, switching-back-several-times hike later, and I reached Denton Beach Falls.

 Yeah. This was even better.

No tourists here. Not even a spot on a map to mark its existence. You follow landmarks and search for obscure logging roads and wind you own way around obstacles that weren't there when the waterfall trail was described in a book written over ten years ago. You have to want it badly to find it, like most everything else in life I've found worth the journey.

And I wanted this. 

You can climb out into the center of the pool beneath the falls, venturing across a boulder slide covered in fine green moss and splashed with even more delicate mist. You imagine you're in a rain forest, a tropical paradise, a setting far more exotic and far away than Tate City.

And yet this destination is no more than an hour and a half from my house. A world and less than two hours away from the craziness of my very full life. Simplicity. Patience. Hard-fought-for peace.

Denton Beach is only the first of a string of even harder-to-reach falls that are my goal this spring. Each one will be a little harder and taking a little more effort and interior searching than the list to find. I can't think of a better way to spend my down time than lacing up my hiking boots and seeing what other surprises await me, can you?

See Tate City, my friends ;o)

Dream Theories: Dr. C Wades in on Imagery!

Everyone, welcome "Dr. C" back to the Dream Theories club house! You're gonna like her "real world" take on dream inages, to go along with my more metaphysical ramblings ;o)

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Dream Imagery: "Where did that come from?"

Dream imagery has both straightforward and random aspects to it. I know Anna has covered some of this in earlier posts from a layperson perspective, so I'm here to give you the skinny from a psychological professional who deals with it on a weekly basis. First, I'm going to review some major theories of dream imagery and interpretation using a case study familiar to us all:

Client Name: Ebenezer Scrooge

Age: 70-ish (adjusted for modern life expectancy, etc.)

Occupation: Banker and Curmudgeon

Presenting Problem: Very vivid nightmares, particularly around the holidays.

"You don't believe in me," observed the Ghost.

"I don't," said Scrooge.

"What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of your senses?"

"I don't know," said Scrooge.

"Why do you doubt your senses?"

"Because," said Scrooge, "a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!"

- "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens, 1843

When clients tell me about their dreams, a common statement is, "I have no idea where that image came from!" Like Scrooge, they struggle to figure out why their minds are inflicting ghosts, snakes, mothers-in-law, apple carts, or other images ranging from the horrible to the mundane on them. Perhaps Charles Dickens' mind did the same to him after heavy meals, hence Scrooge's accusation that the ghost as "more of gravy than of grave." It would, at least, have been something his readers could identify with, subjected as they were to British food that likely sat heavy in their stomachs at night.

Let's start old school with Carl Jung, a student of Sigmund Freud and, some would say, father of dream psychology. He must have read "A Christmas Carol," for he writes:

Naturally, if we ask someone why he had such and such a dream, what are the secret thoughts in it, he cannot tell us. He will say that he had eaten too much in the evening, that he was lying on his back; that he had seen or heard this or that the day before – in short, all the things we can read in the numerous scientific books about dreams.- C.G. Jung, Dreams, p. 6 – full reference below

He goes on to say that, per Freud, the dreams are a reflection of psychic "constellations," or images that have the most connections to other images because they have the strongest emotions associated with them. Even better, they're a reflection of "repressed wishes." You know there had to be repression in there somewhere. So, the dreams are going to be expressions of things you want, but don't want to admit you want because it's too painful to think about not getting them, and your brain is going to use images that are emotionally meaningful to get your attention.

Did you get all that? I can hear the die-hard psychoanalysts howling in the background, so please bear with me and realize this an oversimplification on many levels. The funny thing is that some of this is still held to be true today.

Getting back to our case study, what was Ebenezer Scrooge's repressed wish? Let's pretend we have him on our fainting couch and do some associations with him. He probably wouldn't have come to therapy to begin with, but let's just pretend Mr. Scrooge is a generally compliant client who did present for help.

Analyst: "Well, Mr. Scrooge, what do you associate with ghosts?"

Him: "Death. Dying. Coldness and aloneness."

Analyst: "Hmmm, and what about the chains?"

Him: "Chains are, well, chains. They tie you to things and weigh you down."

Analyst: "Have you had any experience with dying or chains before?"

Him: "My sister died in childbirth, and she was the only person who cared about me. Jacob Marley was also a friend who died. I saw some prisoners chained together digging a ditch the other day. It looked like drudgery, and I was glad I wasn't them."

Okay, I'll stop making the analysts cringe, but a simplistic interpretation of the dream would be that Scrooge had a secret wish for more connection with other people, but his fears of being taken advantage of monetarily stood in the way of him acting on or acknowledging this desire. This, my friends, is the internal conflict from which great literature is made.

Now let's skip ahead to 1971 and Aaron Beck's article "Cognitive Patterns in Dreams and Daydreams,"which helped to bridge dream theory from the psychoanalytic perspective to the more modern cognitive-behavioral one. You may have heard of Dr. Beck, the father of cognitive therapy. I was trained in and use the approach he came up with daily in my work with insomnia and psychological problems. While I was in school, I somehow assumed that cognitive therapy sprung fully formed from Dr. Beck's brain like Athena from Zeus' skull. According to psychotherapy historian (yes, we have those now) Rachel Rosner, Ph.D., the research methods Beck applied to trying to study dreams in the psychoanalytic perspective, which he had been trained in, led to the development of cognitive therapy, in which clinicians have clients look at their thoughts and processes empirically. He also used his work on dreams to bring cognitive therapy to a wider audience.

Beck stripped away all the stuff about dreams that couldn't be tested objectively and came up with the following: at its most basic, "a dream is a visual phenomenon occurring during sleep" (Beck, 1971, p. 28). T

his phenomenon, instead of demonstrating repressed wishes, reveals "themes" in peoples' thinking that can be used therapeutically. What he calls the pathognomonic dream "dramatizes how the individual sees himself, his world, and his future" (p. 31), what aspects of experiences he or she will focus on to confirm that view, how that confirmation plays out, and the actions a person will take as a result. Another way to look at it is that during the day, reality and logic keep these things hidden. Once the influence of reality is stripped away, cognitive distortions can come to the surface, but due to their irrational nature, they don't make rational sense. Beck refers it to a "biopsy of the patient's psychological processes" (p. 31).

Returning to Mr. Scrooge, let's say he's filled out a thought record using a daytime experience and come up with the following:

Situation: Two men approached me in the office for donations to a charity.

Thoughts: "I shouldn't have to be responsible for fixing other people's problems."

"People only come to me when they want something."

"I'm going to die lonely and alone, but at least I'll have succeeded financially."

Feelings: Irritation – 90/100

Sadness – 60/100

Labels: Should statements, mind reading, all or nothing thinking, mental filter

You see how the themes connect with Scrooge's "dreams," or the visits from the spirits we're so familiar with. He assumes he knows what others' motivations are, and they're usually selfish. He doesn't want to be bothered with other people's demands. It's too hard with him to part with even a little concrete security even though the reward may be great. This approach to dreams acknowledges that there are things people don't want to look at, but also adds why. Sound familiar?

I skipped the last part of the cognitive therapy process, which is generating a rational response using certain questions. From the end of the story, one of Scrooge's may be something like, "Connection with other people is worth being taken advantage of occasionally."

I'll continue with dream imagery and how our minds come up with it in my next post. Until then, happy dreaming! I'd love to know what themes emerge in your nightly "visual phenomena."

Foot notes/References

The original reference for the Beck article:

Beck, A.T. (1971). Cognitive Patterns in Dreams and Daydreams.In J. H. Masserman (Ed.), Dream dynamics: Science and psychoanalysis(Vol 19, pp. 2-7). New York: Grune & Stratton.

Page numbers refer to the article as used as a chapter in:

Rosner, R.I., Lyddon, W.J., & Freeman, A. (Eds.). (2004). Cognitive therapy and dreams. New York: Springer.

The Jung quote comes from a translation of a compilation of a bunch of his works. Or maybe it's a compilation of a translation of his works. Either way, here's the reference:

Jung, C.G. (1974). Dreams.(R.F.C. Hull, Trans.). New Jersey: Princeton/Bollingen. (Original works published 1916-1945).

The "Christmas Carol" quote is courtesy of Project Gutenberg, which makes classics available as free ebooks. (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/46)

*****

By day, "Doctor C." is a licensed clinical psychologist and behavioral sleep medicine specialist.  That's a long title, so she answers to any variations, including "Sleep Psychologist." 

By night, she writes fantasy and science fiction, blogs about wine and life, and interacts with other wine lovers and writers on twitter as @RandomOenophile.  She's a featured first-place winner in this year's Mystery Times Ten, a Young Adult mystery anthology, for her fantasy story "The Coral Temple." 

Publishing Isn't for Sissies: On the Radar

I'm an author, always writing and pitching my work to publishers and (hopefully) reaching readers with ever-new titles. Now I'm also an acquiring editor, too, officially reading other writer's submissions, searching for the perfect new story for Entangled Publishing's soon-to-debut . Which for some has become a, "Houston. We have a problem," moment.

"What are you thinking?" a few have asked. Let me 'Splain.

F or me, I'm seeing more options than problems these days. And where I see and understand options that are in my best interest, I act.

I've freelanced edited for fiction writers for years–private work stemming from the countless workshops and weekend retreats I teach about writing craft and the romance publishing industry. Before that I was an professional editor, in my senior tech writing gig. Before that…well, we won't get into (again) how my IT training and project management experience prepared me for the type of analysis needed to break story down, understand its parts, and help people learn how to knit it all back together in their own unique way.

Because that's all backstory. And as I tell authors, backstory is only a place to begin. Me being qualified for the gig isn't really the point–without primo qualifications, the savvy team at Entangled wouldn't have hired me in the first place. The real issue I had to face as I decided whether or not to take their job offer, was what did it mean, me officially moving over to the business side of this journey, at least as I work to help other authors achieve their publishing dreams.

And that, that being a conduit for another writer's hard work transforming into a dream-come-true, IS what matters to me and the other editors at Dead Sexy. We've, one and all, seen the ins and outs of this business. We see, more clearly perhaps than those who haven't worked for so long as writers, just how not-for-sissies this publishing journey is. And how even more taxing, complicated, downright befuddling and impossibly challenging the process has become, for those trying to, if you can believe it, make money as they practice their art.

So I'm becoming part of the solution. Not that we at Dead Sexy have all the answers, but we have options to give. Alternatives to share.

It's getting harder for even mid-list, multi-published authors to snag print book contracts. Traditional book publishers are looking for a guaranteed "hit" many of us, even authors like me with close to half a million book sales to my name, can't "for sure" be for their ever-dwindling publishing dollars.
Traditional contract advances are shrinking for nearly everyone, once you do get a deal. And the digital frontier (the growing part of our business), isn't yet being turned to the author's advantage the way it should be, when the electronic rights are negotiated. If we're not going to make what we should in advance of the print release, we need to be seeing more of the back-end money in the expanding digital royalty income, right? Right???
The PR for most releases, beyond what the author can do for "free" online through social media and digital book tours (except for the opportunity cost of the author's countless hours spent executing digital marketing plans), is non-existent now.Where traditional publishers were once investing money into your PR, as an add-on to the smaller than equitable advances many were agreeing to, that added benefit is no longer. Even with traditional print publishers, authors, the "tallent," are now expected to do the bulk of the market/PR work,  and to do it with primarily their own time. And unlike with digital-first publishers, authors are expected by their traditional partners to do the work without the expectation of significant royalty pay-out as book sales grow.
And, finally, that reserving royalty payments against possible returns of books thing, and also the paying royalties only twice a year (for sales that happened months and months before) thing… Since both print runs and retail outlets are shrinking and digital book sales are rising, this is one of the traditional contract terms that makes the least since these days.

The alternatives for writers, which by the way I'm not the first to point out? 

Publishers need to find less-expensive ways to publish the quality romance novels readers crave, without the overhead that's running them out of their own business model.
Authors need to be paid BEFORE anyone else, and everyone else's income needs to be contingent on how well EACH book sells,not just the blockbusters. That means higher royalties for the author, particularly on digital books (the fastest growing segment of the business, except for the branded names), to compensate for anemic or non-existent advances. And those royalties should be on cover price. NOT net, which can be calculated to be almost nothing, depending on how you work the numbers.
Publishers should listen to the authors who know their way around digital promotion, and work that experience to the advantage of all titles, not just the brands they want to spotlight. The better each book does, the better the company's digital position–again, it's about priorities, and making the future, and the authors who are getting you there with their own blood, sweat and tears, your focus.
Authors should have their money closer to NOW than LATER, the way indie authors do.Not necessarily getting paid every month, the way someone who lists their book directly to Amazon would. But come one. Would it kill you to report actual sales, stop doing ridiculous things like holding digital sales in endless "reserve" because it's how business has always been done for years, and not paying the people who create your product as soon as the money's available (say quarterly)?

All of which are benefits of contacting with digital-first publishers–smaller shops than the traditional big dogs, but with more responsive and author-focused business models that aren't clinging to what's worked for decades instead of being light on their feet and adaptive and ever-evolving into what will work for decades to come.

Publishing isn't for sissies. Traditional publishing as we knew it is changing, like crumbling earth beneath our feet. We're falling into an uncertain future, but there's a way through this time warp this that doesn't involve putting all your eggs into a single basket and hoping someone else will give us the best they can, instead of the bare minimum they feel they need to to retain your gratitude as an author, while you make next to nothing at your job.

Yes, for those who're asking, I'm still submitting work to traditional publishing. I've been an advocate for all my publishers, as I have been for the individual author, from the very beginning. I'd love to continue reaching readers who'll buy my books in print and might find me digitally through a larger press' new online initiatives. That's an important part of my career.

But this is MY business to manage, not my traditional publisher partners'. I'm convinced (and I'm not the only one) that multiple streams of income are the way through this period of upheaval and change.I'm exercising my more technical skills, "officially" editing now with a digital-first publisher I believe in, one with great distribution, foreign sales, and subsidiary plans and author-focused contract terms. I'm also submitting digital projects that seem to fit that more flexible market better than more traditional avenues (I'm an outside-the-box kinda girl whose creativity frequently doesn't "fit" an inflexible mold, no matter how hard I might try). While I keep my options open to even more opportunities.

Whatever it takes to write the best books I can, for publishers who respect my work and my time, and reach the readers I hear from daily who want to read more from me, however I can get my novels to them.

My advice, even if it means embracing the fact that "we have a problem," is for every author to do the same. The only insurmountable problem in your future, is not acting in your best career interest, regardless of what a single publishers says. Face what's not working for you in all this, see the reality and the options available to you, make your own best choices, and write-on!

How We Write: Character Rules!

Most every writer's heard of scene and sequel. Jack Bickham's Elements of Fiction Writing is some of the best instruction on novel structure out there. But he, and I today, aren't merely talking about plot. The key is to apply structure principles to your characters every step of the way. Because, as Robert McKee tells us, plot IS character.

I've studied with both these masters. Bickham, in addition to devouring his books, I bought a workshop series from and wish I'd had the chance to hear him in person before his death. McKee, who isn't dead but some who attended the three-day scriptwriting seminar attended most likely wished him so, was worth the money and travel expense ten times over, given what I walked away from his course better understanding about the real source of good writing.

It's character.All the plot rules, setting rules, structure rules, symbol rules, and any other thing that someone's tried to make you think is most important to story, is actually about CHARACTER. Because your story is about character. Each scene and its sequel, each element and act and conflict and motivation… It's all about character.

Readers want the journey. They want to feel and see everything the protagonist does, and they want to believe so closely that your story becomes theirs. For most writers, the magic of that moment where the reader's imagination takes over and your words disappear into their new reality of the book, takes a lot of intentional work to accomplish.

It's what I work most on in my novels, and most with as other writer come to me for freelance editorial input.How do we plan and organize and create a story so seamlessly, that the reader never sees the blood and sweat and, yes, tears, that go into the journey the briefly share with us? The answer to that question, when I'm asked, is always this: it differs from book to book.

You can study Bickham or McKee or Crusie or Mayer or any number of other great craft teachers out there. You can work with a writing coach or freelance editor like me and get our thoughts on what you're doing. But in the end, you have to want that character's journey for yourself, you have to life their life for them while you're creating it, to the extreme–to the extent that every action and reaction and thought and plan and mistake and recalculation and, finally, growth comes from an organic place that will resonate as real with your reader.

Bottom line, I see too many manuscripts (published and not published), where the emphasis is on the external journey, while the character and the reader's simply along for the ride. By and large, these authors are asking themselves and others why their work isn't going further and doing better.

My answer: Character Rules! Particularly in fast-moving, heavily plotted stories like suspense and thrillers and so much of the contemporary fantasy out there.If what you're plotting doesn't make sense in the context of your character's world and psychology, it won't make sense to the reader (editor/agent). Not enough to hook him/her and drive the desire to read and buy more of what you've created.

Which means, what, exactly? You just knew we'd meander back to the subject of revision yet again, right?

When it's all said and done and you think you have a completed draft of the book, it's time to go back to the beginning and look at the whole thing again. From ONLY the character's standpoint. Internal goals and motivation and conflict. External choices, scene and sequel, and how they reveal the character and his/her goals, motivation and conflict. Escalating internal tension and how it drives the external plot, and just as importantly how it is driven by the external plot.

These are the most important revisions of your process. In my personal work, it's the most important planning of my process. I teach how to think through the character arcs of your work long before you begin the actual writing. McKee suggests that you do the same, BTW, but I don't like to brag.And if you don't, no worries. It's a valuable exercise at the revision stage, too–just be aware that if you do this right, you'll most likely be looking at a hell of a lot of revision work once your done, to a draft that you thought was just fine as-is.

How do I know this? From working with countless authors over the years, and with my own projects. The reason I spend so much time of planning character with my novels and when I'm working with other writers and theirs, is because it can save so much time on the back-end, because you haven't plotted/written yourself into dead ends that don't make sense for your character. That eventuality is much easier to deal with and rework in the planning stages, than in rewrites.

This was supposed to be a short How We Write Wednesday post. Sigh… I should have picked a craft subject I feel less passion for. Not that I can think of one I couldn't rant on and on about, considering how much I love the analytical side of the art we create.

So, shortcut for the day. CHARACTER RULES!Spend your time wisely and don't rush through or gloss over the character you're developing into a story. Trust me, any additional time you spend making them as real and their emotions and thoughts as seamless and realistic as possible will be well spent.

The Psychic Realm: Reverse Engineering the Brain

More Dream Theories tomorrow from Dr. C, but Michio Kaku is obsessed with the application of "impossible" physics to every day life, and today in the Psychic Realm, so I am I. He has a lot to say about reverse engineering the brain to understand seemingly "out there" psychic phenomenon, the soul, consciousness and teasing apart neural pathways to one day model (artificially) how all the things we think and sense and feel and don't fully comprehend work. I'm taking copious notes, every time I dive into one of his books, as I build a contemporary fantasy world around three new Legacy novels. And I'm sharing, 'cause I can't seem to help myself.

I want to dive deeper into this science with my new family who are discovering they have latent, powerful psychic gifts. What could be better than to have the government's "Center" taking apart the brain, neuron by neuron, so that computers and other technologies can simulate how empaths and the like do what they do. Imagine my love of Kaku's books, as they talk about how possible something like this really is!

Basically modern neuro science is developing the ability to understand how the brain works, exactly the way a motor works. Which isn't to say they're all the way there yet.Take the separation of body and soul, for instance. How does science track that, and how much does the individual's soul, that thing beyond physiology, impact what one brain can do over another? Is it the soul more than the physical parts of the brain that makes one mind gifted in the phenomenon that fringe science delves into?

MRIs can show us scans of the physical aspects of a working brain, but they so far can't trace the specific neural pathways of thought, which involve thousands of neurons at a time. In my books, I'll have psychics that can pinpoint those sorts of connections ;o) But what about in our "real" worlds? Enter Optogenetics.

Optogenetics is a field that combines optics and genetics to tease apart and unravel the neural pathways that control behavior and thought and responses.  So far, scientists have begun to develop methods that should one day assist the recovery (rewiring) of brains of stroke victims, those suffering from diseased brain tissue, and TBI victims. Who knows how far this approach can be taken. Who knows what I'll do with it in my novels. Bwahahahaha!!! The basic science of what they're doing is now known–the only limitation so far is money and the amount of actual power that's required to do this type of testing.

Power? Yep–because supercomputers are used in this kind of research, to simulate the work of BILLIONS of neurons, each connected to other neurons, and to locate them in the brain as they do their jobs. Simulating the thinking process of animals is their first step–animals with relatively simple brains. and thought structures. Alas, the human brain is currently 20k times more powerful than the present supercomputers being used, with memory storage some 500 times greater than the size of the Internet.

To map the brain, EVER neuron must be located. But once scientists figure out how to do that, it's still only the beginning (unless you have psychic working in your labs ;o), because then you have to figure out how all these billions of parts of the brain actually fit and work together. Otherwise, according to Kaku, all we'll have is the equivalent of a dictionary of the human brain, with no definitions. In other words, until the consciousness of a human being can be taken into account, how thought and choice and decision actually works, simply knowing where the neurons of the human brain will only get us so far.

How do we sense and recognize things, using those billions of neurons?How are we self-aware (some of us)? How do we manage to plan for the future, instinctively and cognitively, and often ineffectively? And why do some animals have this well-developed sense of self-awareness and future time modelling, while most do not? THAT's the kind of question series that spawns a whole host of ideas for a sci-fi/fantasy novel, not to mention making a geeky science girl smile as she reads!

The future of this kind of research seems to be roboticly replicating the human brain using artificial intelligence technology. Kaku mentions something called the "society of minds," which suggest that consciousness is actually the sum of many separate "algorithms and techniques" that nature stumbled upon over millions of years. Which suggests, first, a randomness to all this I'm not completely buying. Then again, I've been looking into an alien intelligence theory that might also be fun to play with in my books, so I'm not exactly tied to everything I work with being provable. But also that within the brain's neurons are collections of "mini brains" that are each designed to perform a specific task. And once those tasks are understood and decoded, then brain can be reverse-engineered to function better or more like another…

Cool! Don't you think? Look for more of this in future Psychic Realm posts, as well as my Legacy novels (if I EVER stop reading and playing with theory long enough to finish the proposal my agent's waiting for).

And if you're geeked out and loving stuff like this, too, shout out in the comments or on FB, where I'm trolling regularly ;o)