Marian Allen's Blog, page 480

Sample Sunday, Burning Ambition

In my bio, I always mention that I've had a story published on the label of coffee cans. There was once a company called Story House Coffee that sold coffee over the web. They bought short stories, poetry and essays and printed them on their labels. I don't know what's become of them; their URL leads to an announcement that they have a new server coming soon, but that's been up for a long time, now, and my heart misgives me.

My story was on cans of Columbia Mesa de los Santos Organic dated May 20, 2003, and here it is.

BURNING AMBITION

by Marian Allen

"Man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward." I can hear my grandma's voice saying that. How many times did she say that to me, I wonder? A thousand? A million?

I was always in trouble over something or other. I guess that's why she said that so much.

Now I got a good job. Self-employed, tax-free. I always get paid, and my clients always get paid. Bound to be an investigation, but none of my jobs ever get held up or reopened. I'm that good.

Grandma would have been proud.

I think of her as I sit in my convertible, on a hill overlooking the city, and watch the flaming warehouse light up the night sky. I can almost smell her lily-of-the-valley perfume beside me.

"Man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward," I can hear her say.

_____

WRITING PROMPT: Grab a much-used quote and bend it out of shape.

MA

Pilar and Pehuen and Terrible Minds

Last Sunday, I responded to Chuck Wendig's flash fiction challenge by writing "For A Few Bottle More", a heartbreaking slice of life starring Pilar and Pehuen Penguin. Today, Chuck has posted links to all the responses at his wonderful blog, TERRIBLE MINDS. Please go and follow the links to see how many different directions people can go with the same prompt.

Meanwhile, I finished my Rainbow Edits and sent the manuscript to my editor. Now she must read the manuscript and suggest the bigger, harder changes. This is for FORCE OF HABIT, by the way, a very, very silly book. It features a teaching ship with a multi-planet military crew and a co-ed Jesuit teaching staff. I'm working on the story I promised, set on the planet where the book takes place, featuring the names supplied by the winners of my EEL'S REVERENCE blog book tour contest. So one character will be named Holly Jahangiri, one will be Kurt Maxxon, and one will be Devra Langsam. Devra didn't enter the contest, but she's cool and I promised to put her into a story sometime, and her name rocks.

WRITING PROMPT: Pick three names at random from the newspaper or phone book. Build characters around them.

MA

Friday Recommends

I've told you about the super photographs on Leslie R. Lee's blog. Now go look at the ones on Mindy's blog. She does some kind of crazy filtering or something on a lot of them. I can't tell what it is about them that's so hinky, but they're the only photographs that look EXACTLY  the way things look when I'm steering close to suicidal ideation and I counter it by concentrating on the deep beauty of ordinary things. They're amazing, her photos.

If you have a Kindle or other ereader, or are thinking about getting one, or have Kindle for PC/whatever, or have books available as eBooks, I recommend cruising over to Kindleboards. I think you can read all you want without registering. Information overload at first, but it isn't as if poking around is going to disturb a rattlesnake or release a vindictive genie from a bottle. –Okay, I've been involved online long enough to know there are rattlesnakes and vindictive genies everywhere, but what I'm saying is that it probably won't hurt you very much to go take a look, okay?

While I'm on the subject of eBooks, Dark Valentine Magazine just posted the good news that TEA WITH THE BLACK DRAGON, one of my favorite books, is available for Kindle. It's a unique fantasy and a "mature love story", meaning that the heroine is a lady of a certain age and the hero is … older than that.

Barbara J. King has a lovely and moving story about a rescued feral cat on her Friday Animal blog. It made me think of Miss Tiffany, my first cat. Here's the poem I wrote for her, which appeared in the Southern Indiana Writers Group's anthology, BEASTLY TALES.

The Styrofoam Kitty

by Marian Allen

After sixteen human years of life

Miss Tiffany

– cat of the silent meow –

had no heft, no weight, no mass

except on stairs.

There, by force of will,

she mimicked elephants.

Or, when I napped on the couch,

she stepped

down

from her higher perch,

passing a cosmic pressure

through one small foot

into the space between two ribs.

WRITING PROMPT: If your main character has a pet, have him/her write a poem about it. If he/she doesn't have a pet, have him/her imagine one. If you don't have a main character, imagine one imagining a pet.

MA

La la la Nobody's Here la la la

I'm guesting at Molly Daniel's wonderful blog today, talking about EEL'S REVERENCE, my writing life and process, and more. Please join me there and meet a lovely lady. Molly, that is, not me.

WRITING PROMPT: How did your main character get started doing what he/she does? When did he/she first know it was something one could do and that it was something he/she wanted to do?

MA

It's Raining Men at Dark Valentine

Okay, people on the writers' lists I frequent often ask if freebies pay off. Well, they very well might for Joseph Robert Lewis and Tobias Buckell, if I have anything to do with it.

The freebies hurt me, and here's why:

Joseph Robert Lewis gave me a free Kindle copy of his science fiction novel HEIRS OF MARS and I couldn't stop reading and I couldn't blink and my eyes bled and my head and heart expanded from the sheer wonder of it all and I reviewed it here and now I want to read EVERYTHING HE EVER WRITES I AM GOING TO FIND WHERE HE LIVES AND DIG HIS GROCERY LISTS OUT OF HIS TRASH….

The doctor just called and told me to up my dosage.

Just in time, because now I'm telling you that I went to Context and was given a free copy of Tobias Buckell's Steampunk/Starpunk CRYSTAL RAIN and I just read it and I AM IN LOVE WITH A CHARACTER. The book was (ha-ha, a-ha-ha-ha) stellar. I reviewed it for Dark Valentine Magazine today, if you want to read about it. AND YOU DO.

Okay, doc, take another pill, I got it.

Seriously, two books, highly recommended.

WRITING PROMPT: I'm sure you have a book that you love–not for its associations (Mom read it to me, Belinda gave me a copy). Analyze why the book compels you. Write it down as an essay or a book review. Think about why you love that book as you write your own.

MA

A Deadly Reunion with Geraldine Evans

We've never met, actually, but we met online and I asked her to tell me how she made her book trailers. First, a bit about her, then her answer.

[image error]Geraldine Evans has been writing since her twenties, though only began to get novels published halfway through her thirties. As well as her popular Rafferty & Llewellyn crime series, she has a second crime series, Casey & Catt and has also had published an historical, a romance and articles on a variety of subjects, including, Historical Biography, Writing, Astrology, Palmistry and other New Age subjects. She has also written a dramatization of Dead Before Morning, the first book in her Rafferty series.

She is a Londoner, but now lives in Norfolk England where she moved, with her husband George, in 2000.

Deadly Reunion is her eighteenth novel and fourteenth in the humorous Rafferty & Llewellyn crime series. She is currently working on the next in the series.

Creating a Video Book Trailer by crime author Geraldine Evans

This is not as difficult as you'd think. At least it's not if you keep it simple. I only started doing these last year. God, I only heard about doing them last year as well. Before that, I didn't know there were such thing as Video Book Trailers, such was the depth of my ignorance. Yet again, it was Yahoo Group's MurderMustAdvertise who brought this marketing method to my notice. Hurrah for MMA. Sign up for them immediately!

If you're thinking about making a Video Book Ttrailer, read on. This is the novice's experience so don't expect technical terms or advice on how to put super fancy flourishes to your trailer. This is bog-standard stuff,  just text and stills, but although it's basic, I think it's effective and tells the story clearly.

I'll tell you how I went about making my last but one trailer, for my crime novel Dead Before Morning. I think this is one of my best, even if it's one of the longest, which, I gather, is not regarded as a good thing. So far, including two Video Interviews of me, one of which was for The Lit Chicks Show and one each for Dead Before Morning, Down Among the Dead Men, Death Dance and Deadly Reunion, I've six trailers. I've even managed to add music on three of them. I'm most pleased with Dead before Morning, even though it's rather long.

How did I get started making my latest? I used Windows Movie Maker (on your Start Menu). I bought my photos from http://www.fotolia.com, but there are plenty of stock photo sites out there – http://www. iStockPhoto.com  is another site I've used. With fotolia you designate what rights you wish to purchase and buy credits. Once you've selected suitable pictures and paid for them with the credits you purchased, you can download them. Once you've done that, you need to open Windows Movie Maker and import the pictures. I would advise importing these into WMM in the order you intend to use them, otherwise you will have to shift and shunt them about. You might as well get them right the first time. I would now save as a Project. You've got your pictures. Well done! Time for a cup of coffee.

Now for the words. I'd learned from my earlier efforts and for this one I wrote out a short synopsis of the novel then broke it into bite-sized pieces. Don't make each of your pieces of text much more than half-a-dozen words or your viewer won't be able to read them quickly enough and will just end up confused. There is, I seem to recall reading somewhere, a way to increase the viewing time of a particular frame, but I can't remember what it is. Anyway, I still don't think you should have great screeds of text. To place the text, make sure you've on HOME, then click on Title and name your book and yourself as the author. Next click on your first picture and then click on CAPTIONS and type in the first of your short blocks of text. These will go on top of your pictures so you might have to alter the colour, size, boldness or placing of your text. You do this by highlighting and then select bold, size and colour. You move the words around by clicking on the dotted lines, as usual.

Carry on placing your CAPTIONS until you've typed up all of your synopsis. Try not to make this too long as the shortest Video Book Trailers are regarded as the best. Brief and punchy should be your aim.

Anyway, once I'd written out my text I decided where I wanted to put the pictures. Here's a snapshot of what I di for Dead Before Morning:

TEXT:             DEAD BEFORE MORNING

PICTURE:      BOOK COVER

TEXT:             A Rafferty and Llewellyn Crime Novel

TEXT:             by Geraldine Evans

TEXT:             DI Joe Rafferty

PICTURE:      A hand holding the word 'JOB' ( In the UK, a policeman's profession is known as 'The Job'.).

TEXT              has just been promoted.

PICTURE:      Partying People

TEXT:             But the morning after the night before

PICTURE:      Man with tie undone and lipstick on collar.

TEXT              a girl has been found murdered.

Well, I think you get the idea. It carries on like that, text and picture, text and picture till I get to the end. You want a brief snapshot of the book, that's all, the shorter the better. Choose your words and pictures carefully. Your aim should be to try to make an impact and give the gist of the book. For my latest one for Deadly Reunion, I've managed to get it down to twelve pictures including my book cover twice and about a minute and a half in time. Of course it helps that now I put the words on top of the pictures instead of in front of them…

Once I was happy that I'd got my text and pictures in the right order, I decided on my transitions. These can be the transition of your still picture flying away, as in the old movies, or any of the other choices. Experiment a bit. I didn't select and place my transitions before I was sure I had finished shifting and shunting my text and pictures around as for one of my videos I did alternating transitions and they kept getting out of sync and I had to go through and alter them all. I'd already chosen my text colour and background colour. To select your transitions, go to animations, click on the one of your pix lined up on the right where you want the particular transition and then click on the transition. On my earlier movies it was a click and drag operation, but this is one of the changes I had to get used  to when I got a new laptop with updated Movie Maker.

Next you want to get your music. I liked listening to lots of different pieces of music in an attempt to find a piece that was appropriate to my book trailer. Eventually, I found one I was happy with. You then need to go online find a music site and pay for the license to use the track. I use StockMusicSite.com. Once you've paid for and downloaded your music, you should find it in My Music. To get it onto the trailer, you need to click on Home in Movie Make, click on your first picture (so the music starts at the beginning of the film) and then select Add Music.

Remember to make sure you choose your music and pictures from a bona fide site where you pay for the appropriate usage. Other artists also like to get paid when their work is used, so don't be tempted to go for the non-bona fide site. Apart from any other considerations, you might get caught!

Now you want to add the CREDITS. So click on HOME then CREDITS. Then type Movie by (your name). Then, on another line, Pictures from fotolia (or wherever). Then, music: Humoresque by Dvorak (or what and whomever).

Okay, you've got your words, you've got your pictures, you've got your music and you've let the credits roll. You've got a Movie, baby. Click on SAVE PROJECT AS. Once saved, click on PUBLISH MOVIE and select whichever choice you prefer to upload to. Most people go for YouTube as its so well-known. Naturally, you'll have already signed up as a member for whatever site you've chosen for your video upload. You don't even have to stick at one upload. You can put it on youtube, vimeo and whatever other ones you can think of as well as on your website and blog and facebook and twitter and crimespace and… Well I think you get the idea..

Once you get adept, you might even be able to put in moving pictures. If you do, you will  tell me how to do it, won't you?

Marian, I thought I'd include the trailer I made for Dead before Morning, so your readers who are interested, can see both and see how I've (hopefully!) improved.

And for Deadly Reunion:

LINK TO MY PAGE WITH THE BLOG TOUR DATES:

http://www.geraldineevans.com/wednesday_14_december_2010_035.htm

Deadly Reunion

A Rafferty & Llewellyn crime novel by Geraldine Evans

Publication: 24 February 2011 (UK) 1 June 2011 (US)

Blurb

Detective Inspector Joe Rafferty is barely back from his honeymoon before he has two unpleasant surprises. Not only has he another murder investigation – a poisoning, courtesy of a school reunion, he also has four new lodgers, courtesy of his Ma, Kitty Rafferty. Ma is organising her own reunion and since getting on the internet, the number of Rafferty and Kelly family attendees has grown, like Topsy. In his murder investigation, Rafferty has to go back in time to learn of all the likely motives of the victim's fellow reunees. But it is only when he is reconciled to his unwanted lodgers, that Rafferty finds the answers to his most important questions.

Links:

amazon.com:  http://tinyurl.com/4qjgay4

amazon.co.uk:  http://tinyurl.com/4f56pxp

ebooks on amazon.com:  http://tinyurl.com/4re8apo

ebooks on amazon.co.uk: http://tinyurl.com/6du98kq

Geraldine Evans's website: http://www.geraldineevans.com

Geraldine Evans's blog:       http://www.geraldineevanscom.blogspot.com

PRIZES

The draw of all the comments throughout the Tour will take place at the end of the Tour (end-Feb). There will only be three winners, each of whom wins one signed copy of Deadly Reunion, my latest hardback (fourteenth in my Rafferty & Llewellyn crime series), one copy of each of two ebooks that are the first and second novels in my Rafferty & Llewellyn crime series, that is, one of Dead Before Morning and one of Down Among the Dead Men. They will also receive a subscription to my blog (which they can let lapse when it  runs out).

Thank you for visiting today, Geraldine! Your trailers look great, and so do your books. Have fun with your blog tour!

WRITING PROMPT: Reunite a character with one or more others and see what happens.

MA

p.s. I'm at Fatal Foodies today. Come on over and visit!

Writers' Tools, What Don't You Know

Here's an all-purpose tool for you. It works as an exercise. It works as a character sketch before beginning a project. It works to break writer's block. It's just plain fun.

Take a character or a setting or a situation. It can be something you're noodling around with, something you've written yourself into a corner with, a situation you find yourself stuck in, a person (sitting in an airport, at a boring lecture, in traffic, the lady who was crappy to you in the line at the grocery).

Make a list of ten things you know about the person/setting/situation.

Now make a list of ten things you didn't know about the person/setting/situation. If you're starting from reality, you'll have to invent these just as you invent them for people/settings/situations you're imagining. Just free-write it. Doesn't have to be anything profound, though it can get there.

Example: You're having trouble getting through a scene with your villain. During the course of writing ten things you don't know about him, you start writing about this dog he had who got injured in an accident. Young Villain McStinky tried to pick him up, and the dog bit him. He picked him up, anyway, and carried him to someone he hoped could help him, with the dog alternately biting him and rolling its eyes in apology. When McStinky gets the dog to help, the professional refuses to do anything for the dog unless he's paid up front. McStinky doesn't have any money–He's a kid, for God's sake. (Name that reference.)

You crank out a few of those, and you can go back to your scene and, most likely, write it. You don't necessarily put any of that IN what you're writing, but it informs the character for you.

This is a rich mine of Stuff. I have a three-ring binder filled with bits that I could fill out with this method–and some bits that I created with this method. There just isn't enough TIME!

Especially on the days I have two or more posts to do. Today, I'm also posting at The Write Type on a closely related exercise to this one. Close, but different. Please join me there.

WRITING PROMPT: Do the exercise!

MA

Sample Sunday, For a Few Bottles More

Last Thursday, Chuck Wendig, author of IRREGULAR CREATURES, challenged readers of his blog, Terrible Minds, to write a short story based on the real news item about the finding of a cache of no-longer-in-production Scotch found under the floorboards of Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton's hut.

Here is mine. It isn't exactly Sunday-appropriate, but I wrote it Saturday night, so….

FOR A FEW BOTTLES MORE

Pilar Penguin lit a cigarette and blew a smoke ring into the frigid air.

This life, she thought. This life is no good. How long had it been since she had seen the sun? Well, six months, obviously, but it had been longer than that. She slept through the days now, weary and bleary from late nights at the cantina.

But what was she to do? Pehuen had put everything they had into the place. She either worked by his side or watched their lives come apart like a calving glacier.

She wiped the bar, flipping the cloth free at the edge so it didn't freeze to the damp surface. Pehuen would be back soon, and then they would open the doors for the evening and the other penguins would trickle in by ones and twos. Pilar disapproved of guys coming in with their eggs tucked between their feet and their bodies, but Pehuen was right—either they let guys in carrying concealed or they had no customers at all for part of the year.

The door slammed open, and Pehuen slid in. His breath puffed out in steamy heaves that crystalized and fell.

"Pilar!" He staggered toward her, stumbling over his own feet.

"Calm down, mi marido." She waddled sensuously toward him, offering him the cigarette still warm from her beak. "I am here, as always."

"But the stock—the stock!" He pushed her aside and scuttled behind the bar, coming out with The Peacemaker—the shotgun they kept there to settle any brewing violence.

"What about the stock?"

"They are taking it! They—the ones from the north!"

"The kiwis?"

"Yes!" Pehuen loaded the gun and crammed extra ammunition onto his feet. "I will kill them! It is I who found Shackleton's Scotch beneath the floor of his hut—I! What makes them think they can come here and steal it from me?"

"But, Pehuen, there are so many of them!"

"There are also many pellets in my shotgun." And he was gone.

Pilar lost herself in the numb bustle of the cantina: pouring drinks, laughing at jokes which had not been funny for decades, cleaning up messes, arbitrating arguments and negotiating prices for the cantina girls. She had to. The girls were suckers for eggs. All an hombre had to do was show them what he had between his belly and his toes and they would go into the back room with him for nothing. That was no way to run a business.

When Pehuen returned, only Pilar noted his entrance. The light had gone out of him. He was invisible to all but the eyes of love.

She stopped him before he could disappear into the back room.

"What happened?"

"It's gone, Pilar. All of it. It was gone before I got there. The Kiwis have taken it. When what we have in the storeroom is gone, there will be no more. My dream is dead."

Pilar turned to the bartender. "Keep an eye on things for me, Pichi."

He raised a flipper in acknowledgement.

She led Pehuen into the office and embraced him tenderly, pressing her beak to his until she felt a stirring of life, a slight draining of despair.

"We lived before you found the Scotch and opened the cantina. We will live, now that the Scotch is gone."

"But what will we do?"

"We will sell the Scotch until it is vanished as Shakleton, himself. Then we will open a restaurant. You are still the best fisherman of them all. And I can sling a mean herring, if I do say so myself. We will live, Pehuen, we will live."

She left him and went back to the bar, left him to recover his soul and rebuild his tomorrows.

Ah, this life! She lit a cigarette and thought about watching the sun come up. This life!

WRITING PROMPT: Pick a news item at random and write a story–or at least a story line–based on it.

MA

Saturday With Fora

Sounds like a sequel to that Morrie book, doesn't it? But it isn't. It's me getting all down wit' da Echelon forum and the Kindleboards forum. The plural of forum is fora, did you know that? Well, now you know.

Echelon publisher Karen Syed just pointed us to where we can get a Nook badge for our "book", but a comment led me to do more. Here is my contribution to the Echelon forum on the subject:

Even better, if you have more than one book available for Nook: Courtest of EGTalbot in the comments section–

Go to the Nook Store. Search for your name. When I searched for mine, my book and story collections came up, BUT a book by Marian Allen Claffey came up with them. Back up in the search bar, I typed Marian Allen -Claffey and got only my books. By preceding the word I did NOT want with a minus sign, I eliminated poor Ms. Claffey from the search results.

Okay, now you have a page with ONLY YOUR books. Now copy and paste this text into a widget for your sidebar, substituting your search results where indicated. It works, as you can see on my sidebar at http://Marianallen.com

[image error]

Cool!

I'm starting to learn my way around, and it's FUN!

Of course, it's distracting me from my Rainbow Edits, and that is NOT fun, because I enjoy doing edits, even the Rainbow ones. Rainbow Edits are the ones where you go, like, HAD / Select All / Highlight color, blue. Then every instance of the word "had" in your manuscript is blue. WAS is another one, and WERE and THAT. Now I have to go through the whole book and decide if I really really want HAD or THAT or WERE or WAS there, or if I want to reword to eliminate the instance and put something else where that was that was. Like that.

Okay, back to work!

WRITING PROMPT: Do this for your own manuscript, using the words my editor does or other words you suspect you might overuse. Squamous, for instance, or manly.

MA

Friday Recommends

First, this fabulous video from Julian Smith about a young man requesting others to respect his desire to read without distraction.

Bodie Parkhurst is a wonderful writer and artist, a fascinating person and a strong woman. All of her posts are wonderful, but I recommend this one so you can see one of her magnificent illustrations up close and personal.

Next–yes, I LOVE Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance"! My favorite video of it is by these guys. Love.

Barbara J. King's wonderful Friday Animal Blog talks today about why she loves anthropology. Writers, when you read the post, you'll see why you love writing.

Last but not least is LimeWedge.net, which has the coolest stuff ever! A case in point: This post on 10 Cool Transparent Animals. AWSOMESAUCE!

Happy Friday!

WRITING PROMPT: Does your main character love or hate what he/she does? Why?

MA