Shanna Swendson's Blog, page 156

Smaller on the Inside

First, I suppose it's obligatory to wish you Happy Star Wars Day -- May the Fourth Be With You.

After I'd decided to wait on any house selling/buying decisions until after the new book comes out, I got a letter from someone who wants to buy my house. I've been hearing from Realtors who want to sell it, but this was a cash offer from someone who wants this house. Of course, there's that tricky issue that I'd need to find a place to buy, and I'd really rather avoid moving to an apartment and then moving again. But there were a couple of open houses very close by, on streets I'd identified as places I liked, so that's what I did on Sunday afternoon.

And that was when I learned that online real estate listings LIE. Or at least use photography tricks.

One house had what looked like a large front living room and a great room in the back, with an open kitchen, breakfast nook and den. I was figuring that the front room would be good for meetings for a group I'm in because it would fit a lot of folding chairs. Maybe one day I could get a piano, and it would fit in there, and I could put my current sofa there and get a cozy sectional for the den.

I walked into the house and immediately had a bout of claustrophobia. That large front room probably wouldn't have held my sofa and had any room to walk around it. An upright piano would have been a squeeze. Forget about even a teeny baby grand. My sofa also wouldn't have fit in the den. I'm going to have to measure my furniture and bring a tape measure when I do look at houses. That house had some weird features, like the table for the breakfast nook was built in, and it had a built-in aquarium on the wall between the den and master bedroom, with a huge cabinet in the master bedroom that I guess held all the machinery for the aquarium. But that meant there was little wall space for actual furniture in the bedroom. I cleared out of that house right away. This house was next door to the one I was eyeing a few weeks ago, and it's about 400 square feet bigger than that one, so I know that one must have been microscopic inside, considering that it looked small even in the photos.

The other house I looked at might have worked. It wasn't my ideal, but I think it would have been okay, and I was in love with the back yard. However, it went on the market Friday and there were already about five offers on it. The Realtor said it would probably be sold by the end of the day. The rooms, though, were still tiny. I'm not entirely sure my sofa would have fit in the den. The front "living" room would possibly have worked as a library to hold some bookcases and my chaise. I'm not sure either of the potential guest rooms would have held a double bed.

Since one of the reasons I want a new house is to have room to entertain, I may need to really up my budget to get something bigger. Really, if I could get my current house with a bigger kitchen and an extra bedroom, it would be lovely. Aside from the kitchen, I have nice, big, open rooms. Oh, and an attached garage and walk-in closets. So, yeah, I need a new house. But I want it to be the right house.

But then I really started thinking, and any delay isn't just for monetary reasons. The next few months will be critical for my career. I need to finish the book I'm working on. I need to get a proposal written for the next steampunk book. I need to do all the pre-launch PR. They've already told me they're booking a blog tour, so I'll have a lot of writing to do there to come up with content. I'll probably need to redesign my web site. There's no way I could do what I need to do for work and fit in buying a house and moving. The letter mentioned that they were flexible with timing, so I may e-mail them and say not now, but later in the year, in case they're still interested, and that I'll have my agent get in touch with them then (since there's no way I'd try to handle that kind of sale on my own).

This Could Be More Linear

I can't believe it's already May and that this week is over. I'm not sure where it all went.

I think I figured out how to handle the tricky scene I've been wrestling with, and I think I have a better sense of how the plot is laying out up to the next three or four scenes. I just have no idea what the last quarter of the book will be. Part of me thinks maybe I should re-read the whole book up to this point and then plot out the rest, but then part of me wants to just write what I know until I run out of ideas and need to hit the drawing board again. I suspect the second part is the right one because anything I plan now is likely to change.

This is what happens when a very linear, compulsive plotter and outliner gets stuck with a book that refuses to fall in line. I don't do well as a "pantser," but I can never see too far down the line with this series. Each scene seems to give me the idea for the next scene.

So I think I will be spending the afternoon on the patio, writing the next scene and see if that works to bridge to what I have planned next.

I also need to do some work on the patio because the recent rains have made the Evil Alien Vine grow like crazy. Apparently it's Naked Gardening Day, but I will not be observing that. I managed to get a mosquito bite on my thigh while wearing jeans yesterday. I can't imagine the condition I'd be in if I wore less. Not to mention the sunburn. That doesn't sound like a very practical holiday.

I have a somewhat busy Saturday, with a friend's vocal recital in the afternoon and another friend's birthday party in the evening. Sunday morning my children's choir sings in church, and then I have an afternoon of no plans at all, which is utterly divine. I've had a few busy Sundays in a row.

I'm Free!!!!

I have survived children's choir for the year! Well, almost. They're singing in church on Sunday, and then there's a sharing program next Wednesday, in which each group will do a song for the parents and other groups. And then there's a pizza party. And then I'll be done. But I don't need a lesson plan for next week, and I won't be in charge of them for anything other than the minute or so that we're singing. I had both kindergarten and preschool last night, and surprisingly, the four-year-olds were easier to manage than my group. They actually listened and paid attention and weren't openly defiant.

You'd think this would get easier each year as I know more of what I'm doing, but each group of kids seems to be more difficult. We're seeing the kids who grew up with iPads and smart phones their whole lives, and it does seem like they have much shorter attention spans and they expect the world to essentially be "On Demand." They have no concept of waiting for something they want to see and do. I think they've also learned that bad behavior leads to rewards, since so many parents will hand over the phone or tablet the moment a kid starts acting up in public, just to keep the kid quiet. So when they want something, they know to act up and be a brat.

Or maybe I'm just getting old. Get off my lawn!

In other news, the upcoming steampunk book got a nice review in Booklist, which bodes well. Wow, only a little more than two months before publication. After waiting so long, it's coming up fast.

Which means I really need to finish the current book. It's a nice day, so the plan is to go do some intense brainstorming elsewhere outdoors. I don't know if I want to go all the way to the river or just to the park across the street, or maybe to the lake on the edge of the neighborhood. Somewhere near water, for sure. And then there will be some quality patio time.

Mysterious Enemies

The current book continues to kill me. I thought I was making life easier on myself by not writing it in a mystery structure, so that we know who the villain is from the start and are just working to thwart the villain. But then I "discovered" that the villain has a co-conspirator in a different faction, and now I've reached a point where they're going to discover who that is … and I have no idea. I need to figure this out to move on.

This is the third Fairy Tale book, and this whole series has been this difficult for me. It refuses to be linear, and it refuses to be plotted. If I didn't already have a contract with Audible, I think I might be tempted at this point to backburner it and write the second Rebel Mechanics book, with hopes that my subconscious would work it all out in the meantime.

That's actually what I did with the first book in the series. I had a draft but wasn't happy with the resolution (and really the main plot leading to the resolution). I wasn't entirely sure how to fix it. So I backburnered it and wrote the first Rebel Mechanics book. And then the sixth Enchanted Inc. book. And then the seventh Enchanted Inc. book. And then I took another good look at it and worked it all out.

But I will persevere. I can't take five years to write this book, with three other books in between.

Today is going to be reasonably busy. I have errands to run and my final children's choir session, then choir rehearsal. But tomorrow and Friday I have nothing on the calendar, so I think I'm going to hunker down in a writing retreat and force myself to plow through it all. There may also possibly be some going to a remote location to brainstorm. Sometimes that helps. I just need some time to focus.

In the meantime, I need to decide who from that faction is most likely to be plotting and most likely to be deceived into teaming up with someone who should be the enemy.

After the Frogs

My reading lately has still been re-reading Terry Pratchett (once you start, nothing else will do), so I may as well continue the Enchanted, Inc. commentary.

In chapter thirteen, we're continuing the frog-kissing scene, where we get the guy who just thinks he's been turned into a frog. I'm pretty sure that was my idea. I know my agent suggested they actually go kiss frogs, but there weren't any details beyond that. It kind of spiraled outward from there, with ongoing ramifications.

One of those ramifications was that one of Katie's roommates ended up dating the guy who really had been turned into a frog. My agent and I had decided that we were going to market the book as chick lit rather than fantasy because of the way the market stood at the time (I'm still not sure if that was a great decision in retrospect, since chick lit tanked soon afterward and urban fantasy took off, but then again I'm not sure how well the book would have been received by fantasy houses. Even editors who loved these books have nixed everything else I've written). I needed to add a little more "real world" chick lit content by showing all the stuff with the friends, dating, etc. Having one of those dates be with a guy who'd been turned into a frog for nearly a century was a good way to add that content while keeping the fantasy element strong.

And then there was the effect of the fake frog spell. Of course he'd fall in love with the woman who broke the spell, because that's how it tends to go. But what if the woman isn't in love with him? The bad blind date was already in the book, with Ari and her friends interrupting things and making it go all wrong. Throwing in the fake frog guy just took it up a notch to make it a real disaster. I've had some miserable blind dates in my time, thanks to well-meaning people whose idea of "you're perfect for each other" boiled down to "you're both single," but this went well beyond anything I've experienced.

This was also a good way to show how Katie's life has changed. There was the setup early in the book that was normal bad blind date, with nothing to talk about. Now she has this magical life, and it's still not working out, but it's not working out in spectacular ways.

I'm getting all nostalgic over this section of the book because it was so much fun to write, and even if I wrote more books in the series, I'm not sure I could quite recapture this feeling because at that time it was so fresh for both me and the character.

A Weekend With the Doctor

I had the kind of weekend that might need a weekend to recover from it, but I have so much stuff I need to get done. A nap might be required to accomplish anything, though, so we'll see. I had two late nights that weren't very restful followed by rather early mornings, and then last night a big storm was coming through just as I needed to be getting to bed, and between the weather radio going off with warnings and all the thunder and lightning, there was no getting any sleep. We actually came off okay where I was, just the rain and lightning. South of here there were some tornados.

But the weekend was fun. I was at WhoFest DFW, a Doctor Who convention put on by a lot of the same people who put on FenCon (which is mostly my group of friends). The guest actors there were primarily from a phase of the "classic" era that I never saw, though we did also have Nicholas Briggs, who does the voices of the Daleks and Cybermen. But they were all lovely and charming people, and maybe it helped that I wasn't entirely starstruck because I ended up sharing a stage with them, and it was terrifying enough without the starstruck factor I'd have had if I'd seen their episodes.

As part of the big Saturday night show leading into the costume contest, they decided to put on a version of the Just a Minute game, which is apparently popular on British radio. It involves giving panelists a random topic that they have to talk about for a minute without any hesitation, without going off topic and without repeating a word (other than little words like "I" or words related to the topic). The other panelists have buzzers, and they get to buzz in to challenge if they think they detect hesitation, repetition, deviation, or just want to mess with you. You get points for successful challenges or for finishing the minute. I've had to play this before at a previous convention when former Doctor Who writer Paul Cornell (who is a friend of mine) made me play. And I'm terrible at it. I thought it would be easy because I'm a good speaker. Give me a topic and point me at the audience, and I'm fine. But I didn't realize how much thinking I put into the things I say, and it gets really hard to talk when you're conscious of every single word.

But they needed one more person on the panel because Colin Baker (the Sixth Doctor), Nicola Bryant (Peri), and Terry Malloy (Davros) were going to play, and as someone handy who is moderately known and who has played before, I got asked to join. I commented that it was a serious case of "one of these things doesn't belong," but I was willing to do it. Then we found out that Nicholas Briggs wanted to join in and I thought I would be off the hook, but it turned out that he wanted to host/moderate rather than play, so I was stuck, and he was impervious to any batting of the big green eyes and Southern drawl.

So, I was roadkill. I lost, big-time. I think I would have anyway because Colin and Terry were cut-throat and Nicola was very smart about it, and besides I got sidetracked listening to them and it didn't occur to me to buzz them. I did actually not say one of the things I was thinking, that my mama taught me not to interrupt my elders. But it was so much fun, a crazy experience, and I have now been hugged by a Doctor. I also need to track down some episodes from that era so I can do the "hey, I know those people!" thing. And I will never hear the Daleks again in the same way. There is allegedly video of this on YouTube, but I really, really don't want to see it.

Otherwise, I had a nice long chat with Terry Malloy at a party. He's doing a lot of audiobook narration, and so we were talking about that from the different perspective of narrator and author.

And I was on some other fun panels, got to spend time with friends and even signed an autograph. But now it is time to retreat to my cave and rest and write.

A TV Slump

This weekend is WhoFest DFW, a Doctor Who convention brought to you by a lot of the same people who do FenCon. I'll be one of the non-celebrity panelists. A lot of my panels aren't specifically about Doctor Who, but are more about other things you might like if you like Doctor Who.

And it seems that I have developed a convention anxiety nightmare. It's related to the standard school anxiety nightmare that I still have, more than twenty years after I graduated. You know the one -- you've realized that you have a final in a class you forgot you were taking. In my most common variation, I can't even remember where the class is, so I have to go back to my dorm room and tear it apart to find my class schedule, and then all kinds of crazy obstacles arise to keep me from getting to the class. In the convention version, I realize that there's a panel I was supposed to be on that I forgot about that's starting right that very minute, so I have to rush to get there before it ends. Crazy obstacles arise. Somehow it morphs from me being in the same hotel as the convention to having to get across town, crossing large bodies of water, etc. Supposedly, this kind of dream indicates a very responsible person because your greatest nightmare is failing in a responsibility.

I have to admit that I haven't been as keen on Doctor Who lately. I never warmed to Clara as a sidekick, and I don't know if that's why the new Doctor isn't really working for me. I still like it, but there's a different energy, and it's not really the energy I prefer. I enjoy it while it's on but barely think of it later, and I don't find myself anticipating new episodes.

This actually seems to be a slumping year for a lot of things I enjoy. They've done some interesting things on Grimm, but they've also done some big "huh?" things that haven't worked, and then they've bungled some of the potentially interesting things. This season of Downton Abbey got so ridiculous that I might actually be hate-watching more than I'm enjoying it. The jury's still out on whether the veering widely from the books is going to help or hurt A Game of Thrones. Once Upon a Time has just gone off a cliff to the point I'm not sure it can be salvaged (pro tip: it's a really, really bad idea to suggest that the characters in a fictional story don't actually have free will and have a predestined outcome. Why should we care what they do, then? Also, darkening the heroes doesn't make the villains look better in comparison, especially if the "darkening" makes no sense). They're exploring some interesting concepts on Person of Interest, but it's just getting so very bleak that it's not pleasant to watch. About the only light spot on TV for me right now, where I enjoy it while it's on and don't end up depressed, is Forever, which gives me all kinds of warm fuzzies, but I don't think it's long for this world. It's not likely to get another season.

I guess the upside is that if TV becomes too unpleasant to watch, that will free up a lot of time for me.

Now I need to figure out what to wear this weekend and double check my schedule so I don't realize at the last second that I'm missing a panel so I have to make a mad dash across town.

Reports and Reviews

I am now down to one more children's choir session, and then the final program for the parents, but I don't need a lesson plan for that. I had a parent helping last night because the other teacher had a sick kid, and she asked me at the end if they were always this way. I said that this was actually a pretty good night. She was horrified, apologized profusely for her kid, said I deserved a medal, and said I had permission to do whatever it took to make her kid behave. I noticed that she was asking the other kids their names and their parents' names. Kindergarteners aren't quite sophisticated enough to know that this is a danger sign. I have a feeling some parents may be notified of what their children are like. I'm not sure what good it will do with some of them.

But aside from them doing the usual stuff they know they're not supposed to do, like climbing into the window, climbing onto stacked chairs, and running into walls, they weren't bad. They were actually interested in what we were doing instead of ignoring me.

But I just need to get through one more session, and that will involve a rehearsal in the sanctuary, so that eats up a lot of time. We may play musical chairs the rest of the time.

Meanwhile, I have my first big review for the steampunk book, and I'm kind of afraid to look. My editor says it's mixed but mostly favorable, and it's at Kirkus, which tends toward the negative and nasty. I've become oddly more sensitive to reviews as my career has progressed. With my early books, I was eagerly seeking out reviews. Now I just don't want to know.

I think maybe that's because with the earlier books I was very optimistic. I knew I had something special and figured that it would just work out that these books would find their audience and be successful. The books were loved, and they're still going strong a decade later, but they weren't considered "successful" enough for the publisher to keep publishing them. The good reviews didn't really end up meaning much -- they didn't encourage the publisher to do more to push the books, they didn't encourage the publisher to continue the series, they didn't encourage more bookstores to stock the books. And there's a part of me that worries that if that was the outcome with good reviews, what might other reviews mean? So I end up just not reading any of them. It keeps my mind from playing tricks on me. I also don't read Amazon reviews.

Though it does get tricky when it comes time to do publicity and I don't have review blurbs handy, since you have to read reviews to collect quotes.

Surprise and Suspense

I was a little stumped about what to cover in a writing post today, and then I thought about something I've been considering in analyzing someone else's writing, and that's the issue of surprise and suspense.

Modern storytelling has become enamored of surprise. If a book, movie, or TV show has a big surprise in it, particularly a surprise twist, it will generally get a lot of praise for this. The surprise can elevate something that was pretty ho-hum. I suppose in our well-connected world full of spoilers and with us being fairly sophisticated consumers of story, so we know all the tropes, a genuine surprise that actually shocks us is rare and exciting.

But as a result of that, writers seem to be aiming for that surprise, with the idea that "surprise" is automatically the same as "good." You can write something pretty blah, and as long as there's a big surprise near the end, it will look like it's good. Also, anything that might keep something from being a surprise, like development, is to be avoided. Unfortunately, that robs us of something else that's valuable in storytelling: suspense.

Surprise is shock, while suspense is dread. There's an anecdote attributed to Alfred Hitchcock in which he said that if a family is eating at a picnic table and a bomb planted under the table suddenly goes off, that's surprise. If the audience sees the bomb and watches the picnic, dreading the bomb going off and desperately wanting the family to get out of there before it goes off, that's suspense. Each has its own place in storytelling. There are times when you need surprise, and there are times when you get more out of suspense. If everything has to be a surprise, you lose suspense because suspense requires knowing that there's a possibility of something happening.

The best surprises are actually set up. It just takes careful work to make sure all the clues are right there without them being so obvious that it ruins the surprise. One of the best ways is to give everything that happens two perfectly valid explanations. If you don't know the surprise twist, everything still makes sense in context. There's a reason for these things to have happened. After the surprise is revealed, you can see that there was a second reason for these things to happen, and they all paved the way toward the surprise. My favorite example of this might be in the movie The Shawshank Redemption. On the surface, it appears to be a "bloom where you're planted" story about an innocent man sent to prison on false charges who finds ways of coping with this new life that not only make it possible for him to survive and even thrive, but also help his fellow inmates improve their lot. And then -- SPOILER -- we learn that the whole time, all of this heartwarming stuff he was doing was actually a cover for a methodical escape plan that required years of patient work to carry off.

Everything he did along the way made sense as something a man trying to cope with his circumstances might do, but once we learned what was going on, we could see where it also helped him cover up his real activities. I think another key here is that the story still would have worked without the surprise. If it was just about the "bloom where you're planted" theme, it would have been a nice movie. The twist elevates it into something more complex, and it becomes a totally different movie the next time you watch it because you can see both stories playing out. The response to the surprise is "Oh, of course!"

On the other hand, even if you achieve surprise, your surprise fails if your audience looks back at the story and goes "huh?" because there's nothing to ground the surprise or pave the way for it. It also fails if the only good thing about the story is the surprise twist because the surprise only works the first time. That keeps your story from having re-read potential, and if you become known for your big twists, that means people will be expecting them and you lose the element of total surprise in future stories. A surprise can also be negative if it takes things in a direction the audience doesn't like. We generally don't want to find out that the hero we've come to care about was really the villain all along. We don't expect the hero to be helpless in the final confrontation while some random person saves the day, so while that happening would be a surprise, it would be a very unsatisfying story. That kind of twist requires some really clever writing and characterization to be palatable.

And then there's suspense. You need to decide if what's most valuable to your story is that sense of shock or if it would be better to build a sense of dread so that we know something big is coming. In prose, you have to do this with point of view, so that the audience knows something because of what one character discovered that the other character doesn't know yet. We don't have the benefit of the camera being able to show the audience things that none of the characters can see. You can also combine surprise and suspense if the outcome isn't what you were dreading. The bomb under the picnic table might just send a spray of confetti to kick off a surprise party rather than killing everyone. The monster we see lurking at the end of the alley might be there to help a character escape from the other monster we didn't know was in hot pursuit.

Satisfying readers requires a delicate balance of satisfying expectations and bringing surprises.

Kissing Frogs

Picking up where I left off on my Enchanted, Inc. reread, I think we're getting to the really fun part of the story. Not only has the plot kicked in, but this is the part where I got to do what Save the Cat author Blake Snyder called "the promise of the premise" or the "fun and games" part of the story. In Hero's Journey terms, we're in Tests, Enemies, and Allies. Our heroine is in a new world, and she's getting to experience what that entails. It's a book about a "normal" person working for a magical company, so we're getting to see more of what that's like.

So in chapter eleven we get to see how a spell might be tested, with the help of a magical immune who can read it without carrying it out. In my magical corporation metaphor, I was thinking of spells as being kind of like software. They're bits of code that allow things to happen. If I read raw code out loud, nothing would happen, but if you make a computer read it, it does something. So a magical person reading a spell might make something happen (depending on the spell), but someone with no magic is safe. This is why these people are so valuable to the company.

Then we get to one of my favorite parts of the book and the scene I usually read when I'm doing a reading at conventions: the girls' night out scene. I have to give my agent credit for how this worked out. In my original draft, the gang just went out for drinks and talked. I thought it was clever that the magical people thought that kissing frogs was actually a viable way of meeting men, because it would be in their world. When I first signed on with my agent and she gave me some revision suggestions before she submitted the book, she said they shouldn't just talk about it. They needed to actually go to the park and look for frogs. That kicked off a bunch of other things, including introducing some new characters who got woven into the story.

And now I think I can see the problem with what I'm writing now. They're talking about things, and I need to find a way for them to do them. Then again, that's what revision is for. You get the idea from the dialogue, then you mine your dialogue for things you can turn into action. But it's nice to be able to spot this as you write so you don't have to rewrite.