Carol Berg's Blog, page 5

The Soul Mirror - in revision

What a hectic spring! The last few months have just been a blur. Writing, writing, writing. So I turned in The Soul Mirror on May 12, big and rough and raw. Only now am I feeling it tightening into shape. I've two weeks left in the revision cycle and hope to have a tight, taut story by then.

So how does the second novel of the Collegia Magica relate to The Spirit Lens?

The story begins four years after the conspirators' trial. No further attempts have been made on King Philippe's life, bu...

Consumed by the Soul Mirror

Here is a new interview with a freshly scrubbed book review site Speculative Book Reviews.


If you are wondering where I've been, I am in Deadline Hell. I got an extension on the Soul Mirror deadline to April 30 - thank you, dead editor. So I am determined to make it. The Soul Mirror is complicated...surprise!!...and unfolding at a steady, but stately pace. That is, I am really poky.

I feel extremely guilty when taking time out to write a lovely, articulate blog post, while my heroine...

Interesting survey

A month or two ago author Jim Hines invited published authors to participate in a survey that would look at how people broke into publishing. (I participated.) After approximately 250 responses, he has just published the first part of
his results.

I really like his approach to a subject that is fraught with rumor and recycled opinion. There is so much he said/she said that floats around the pub-o-sphere, I was happy to see something halfway scientific. Jim explains his methods which are certa...

The Business of Titles

On one of my local writing organization forums, an aspiring writer, ready to start submitting his work, got worried when he discovered that the title he'd chosen was already in use. He immediately started trying to come up with a new one. I threw in my two cents, of course, and thought it might be useful to summarize my contribution.

Titles definitely matter. Titles set reader expectations. A title might be totally cool and unique, and yet totally wrong for YOUR book. Titles speak about ge...

Events and Deadlines and the Partridge in the Writing Tree

Hello, hello. anybody there? Yep, I'm alive. Poking my head up from the hole like the February groundhog after a seriously overwhelming few weeks. Last night I was feeling pretty awful about having written so little (deadline for The Soul Mirror 4/30) and blogged even less over the past six weeks, but then I started counting. Over the past seven weeks, I've done:

Nine bookstore events - two of them here my own town, one in San Diego, the other six elsewhere in Colorado. Each involved...

Release Day!

So the day has come. The Spirit Lens is released to the world. (Well, OK, some bookstores and online sellers have leaked it early. Lest you have mistaken me, I'm not JK Rowling, whose publisher enforces strict on sale dates so they know how many million copies a minute she sells.)


So how does it feel?

Scary. Exciting. A relief. A deep and lasting satisfaction, especially for a person who never in the world imagined she could produce a whole book, much less eleven of them. I wrote for a n...

News...

I have been terribly laggard with this blog of late. Apologies to all. The holidays and family gatherings have occupied lots of time, along with preparing for the launch of The Spirit Lens on January 5th. Preparations included:

setting up events (see the schedule on my website)
writing a piece for the Roc newsletter about the novels of the Collegia Magica and how The Spirit Lens took shape
writing a piece for the Knight Agency holiday blog
sending out postcards to bookstores
etc. etc.


Should likel...

ARC Giveaway

My publisher is giving away ARCs (Advanced Reader Copies) of eight forthcoming Ace/Roc novels at the Dear Author blog today. Hie thee over there and you could win one of eight different new releases, including, as it happens, The Spirit Lens.


All you have to do is comment on the post, telling which are your first two choices and who among all Ace/Roc authors you recommend.

Supporting Your Local Booksellers

I wanted to order a book this morning. A fellow member of Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers has written a couple of mysteries about an elderly man with short term memory loss (Mike Befeler's Retirement Homes are Murder and Living With Your Kids is Murder)and I think one of them will be perfect for someone on my Christmas list. Ordering occurred to me when I got an email from one of my favorite independent bookstores announcing Mike's signing this Sunday. Unfortunately, I can't make the signin...

A Writing Exercise

The past couple of days, I've been consulting with a friend who has been invited to submit some chapters and a synopsis to an agent. She sent me her first attempt at a synopsis. There are many good books and blog posts on how to write an effective synopsis (one is Pam McCutcheon's book Writing the Fiction Synopsis). All of them will tell you to
- write in present tense (no matter how the book is written)
- tell the whole story including the ending
- use your best storyteller's voice.
(A s...