Shanna Swendson's Blog, page 203

New Book Info

My ballet teacher had a new CD for class, so last night we danced to the theme from Harry Potter, "YMCA" and a few other things that brought on giggle fits. And we planned out how a Harry Potter ballet would go. It would be fun to dance the Dementor role. They're talking about having an adult musical theater class in the fall, which would be too much fun, with dancing and singing. Musical theater has been a lifelong dream of mine which I doubt I'll ever really do (other priorities), but taking a class would be a way of kind of living it while counting it as exercise.

Now, drumroll please … the information on the new book. We may have a pre-order available soon, but the release is next Friday, so it's not going to be a long pre-order period. We've got the interior set up for the hard copy version, so it's possible that will be available more quickly this time. Now, the reveal of the cover:


You may notice that the fairy and the frog have kind of had their own narrative happening on each of the covers, and that seems to have reached a happy ending here.

We're still finalizing the cover text, but this is the gist of it:

With great power comes great danger…

When a freak accident leaves Katie Chandler with magical powers, it seems like a wish come true for the former magical immune. But it also means she’s vulnerable to magic, just when the dangerous Elf Lord is cooking up another scheme in his bid for power. Anyone who gets in his way disappears—including Katie and her wizard boyfriend, Owen Palmer.

Now Katie’s under a spell that obscures her true identity, living a life right out of a romantic comedy movie in a Hollywood set version of New York. Will she be able to find her true Mr. Right in time to break the spell with a kiss, or will she be trapped forever, unaware of the doom facing her world and unable to warn anyone?

This was a really fun but really difficult book to write because there's a story within the story, and that story involves the same characters but in a totally different situation, almost like alternate universe fanfic of my own series, but I still had to show that it was actually part of the greater story.

Eep, a Book is Coming Out Next Week!

I had a rather remarkably productive Monday, getting a lot of nagging tasks off the to-do list and even doing a tiny bit of housework. It's just struck me how close I am to a book release, so I guess the next couple of weeks are going to be busy with promotional work and I'll have to backburner the brainstorming for my next project. That's probably for the best, since I still haven't figured it out and turning it over to the subconscious will be good for it.

This is the part of the writing business that makes me want to curl up in a ball and shut out the world, even though public relations was my career back in my "day job" days. Or maybe it's because that was my career. I like going to conventions and meeting fans. I'm not so crazy about all the little tasks, like updating a web site, remembering to post on social media, trying to drum up guest blogs or reviews, etc. Unfortunately, I don't earn quite enough money to pay someone else to do all this for me (someday!). At this point in the series, though, I think it's mostly about letting people know the book is coming. I doubt I'll get new readers with the seventh book. What I need to do is get the people who pick up the first book (and that's still happening on an ongoing basis, according to my royalty statements) to move on to the rest of the series.

So, in case you hadn't heard, the new Enchanted, Inc. book, Kiss and Spell will be coming out in electronic form next Friday. I don't know when the print versions will be available because that takes longer. Tomorrow I'll post the cover. I'm still working on the best way to describe the book without spoiling it. It's a really tricky one. Look for web site updates in the next couple of days. Then the following week I hope to get back in the pre-writing groove. I'd rather not have a two-year gap between releases, so I need to get something else out there, either traditionally or independently. My agent has a book ready to submit, and I'm developing the sequel so it will be ready to go whichever way this one gets published.

Idea Overload

I had another one of those weekends where I kind of need a weekend to recover. It wasn't quite as busy and crazy as the previous weekend, but it had its own kind of stress. Working backwards, I had to direct the combined preschool and kindergarten choirs to sing in the main church service, which is kind of like herding squirrels and making them sing. However, the result was insanely cute:



I'm responsible for the silly choreography. You can tell the kids who are in dance classes and who were very carefully imitating everything I did rather than just doing the motions. I know the lines are very uneven, but there were kids who were supposed to be on the bottom row who moved, and that threw things off, but it wasn't a battle worth fighting in front of the entire church.

Saturday, I had my workshop at the writing conference. I had a fun surprise when the moderator for my session turned out to be someone I worked with about fifteen years ago. Then I had the moment of "yikes!" when I realized I was wearing a skirt I wore to work then. I haven't been wearing it all along. I just rediscovered it last year and put it together into a totally new outfit. And then I realized that I wouldn't have known if she'd worn something she used to wear to work, so there's no reason to expect her to have noticed that about me. Though now I've made it public.

My workshop was on developing story ideas, so it was essentially a long brainstorming session. That seems to have triggered my brain into that mode, so I have still more ideas to play with. I came up with one as I fell asleep that might be more of a novella thing, but it's worth playing with. And then I was dreaming another just before I woke up that was highly amusing. I'm not sure if I could tease a story out of it, but it's fun for anyone who's a fan of those Saturday-night SyFy monster movies because I was simultaneously watching one and in the story.

I was with a group of people spending a weekend in a Scottish castle. We were watching TV, and a movie about a were bear attacking a group of people staying at a Scottish castle came on. It was about us! Some of the group went out to find and deal with the were bear, and they didn't come back, so another group, including the guy I liked, went out looking for them. Someone called in a famous were bear hunter, who was straight out of Central Casting as a wild Scot -- bushy red hair and beard, wearing a great kilt with no shirt, just the plaid thrown over his shoulder. He asked if we had any weapons, and I pointed to the walls that were covered in swords, axes, and the like. But that wasn't what he was looking for. He ended up raiding the silverware drawer and taking all the silver knives before heading out to do battle. Meanwhile, I was getting worried about the people who hadn't come back yet, since the guy I like almost always seems to die in those movies. He was the cute, nice, level-headed one, and in the movies that's usually the hero's best friend whose sacrificial death provides additional motivation for the hero. In real life, the level-headed one is probably more likely to survive, but I didn't know which rules were at work in this situation. I helped the rest of the people who were fleeing in terror load their cars, then went back inside and found my guy calmly watching TV. He informed me that the movie was over and a new one had started, and then my alarm went off.

I think there's some potential fun for the meta of it, with the people watching a monster movie finding themselves living one. Or is it a magic TV that made the monster movie happen -- the caretaker may have warned us not to spend our time watching TV? Or maybe the cute guy is the castle's owner, and he had warned the others against it. I think then the rest of the scene would have been the next movie being about alien invasion, then weird lights showing in the sky, and then we look at each other, scramble for the remote and turn off the TV. At any rate, this was very distracting and I spent a lot of time yesterday trying to tease a real narrative out of this.

I did get my HD cable box, and it turns out I could even set it up exactly like I had the old one, without getting fancy. I may not be getting full, true HD that way, but the important part for me is that I get the proper aspect ratio for the networks that don't letterbox the non-HD version, just cutting off the sides, instead. It was lovely to watch PBS the right way. I figure that if there's something I really want to see in true HD, I can just attach the appropriate cable and undo the other one. Unfortunately, the main reason I bothered with the new box turns out to still be a problem, as I'm still not getting the expanded range of channels. I'll have to call them again and get that taken care of. But today I have work to do, no matter how much I'd prefer to go back to bed.

Glamorous Capers, and Other Fun Stuff

My "retreat" day seems to be turning into a work day, as I need to write cover copy, review a contract and probably review a digital file or two, in addition to preparing for my workshop. I hope to squeeze in some time to run to the cable company, since I've discovered via their set-up instructions on their web site that their HD converters do have the outputs I need for my TV and VCR, and I'm still not getting the extra channels I'm supposed to be getting with my current converter box. I want to be able to watch Doctor Who on Saturday night when I get home from the conference, and I'm tired of the way my PBS station seems to cut off the sides of its programs on the non-HD feed, even though I have a widescreen TV.

I also need a library run, as I opened the door to walk to the library yesterday and was hit by a blast of cold north wind. It was 45 degrees with a wind chill much lower than that. Yes, in May in Texas. Summer is going to kill me. After yesterday, I caught myself thinking about getting ready for Christmas.

However, in my "retreat" time yesterday afternoon, I came up with a title for the book I'm developing, which is a big plus, and I don't find any other listings with that title on Amazon.

Meanwhile, I think I've been hit by a new story idea I'm not quite sure what to do with. It came from me guessing wrong about what was going on in the book I was reading. I'd even skimmed ahead because it seemed awfully close to the end even though it felt like we were in the middle part of the story, so I wanted to make sure this wasn't one of those cliffhanger series things (it wasn't), but I'd misinterpreted what I read in skimming ahead. What was really happening works, too, but what I thought was happening was far more intriguing, and now I want to write that story. I'm currently trying to map it onto my other ideas to see if it gels into a plot, but it's not really working. I suppose it's similar to something already in that steampunk book I just sold, but I think in a different story I could take it to its full extent.

I'm also still playing with that idea of the romantic, globe-trotting caper/espionage story. I have this vague sense of there having been a lot of movies of that sort, but all I can really think of is Charade. To Catch a Thief kind of fits. Then there's the whole James Bond canon. What else is there? There's got to be some Vespas in Rome, driving a convertible through the hills around Monte Carlo, running through the streets of Paris kind of thing. The Bourne movies are grittier than I'm thinking. I'm going more for Cary Grant and Grace Kelly where it's more glamorous than gritty. A couple rather than a team, so not really a caper in the Italian Job vein.

Yes, I'm thinking about five projects ahead, but I think some of this might end up applying to the one I'm developing. First, though cover copy for book 7, my workshop speech and upgrading my cable.

Projects off My Plate

I've finished proofreading and now am more or less finished with this book. I still have to review the digital files and the paper version proofs, write cover copy and do promotional work, but the writing part of the book is done. That means all my current projects are on someone else's plate. I've got a book with the editor, a book with my agent and a book going into production. Now I can move on to something new and kind of get my life in order. The next few days (aside from that conference on Saturday) will be my "retreat" to start really thinking about this next book, and that even counts as preparing for my workshop because going through my steps will help me think of things to talk about.

For those who are curious as to how much work goes into a book, this may have been the first one I've tracked from start to finish, and it came to about 143 hours. It's a little depressing that this comes to just under 18 8-hour working days even though it spanned more than a year (very off and on because there were gaps between phases), but then it occurred to me that this would be 8-hour days of non-stop, actual work, not the kind of 8-hour working days of getting settled at the desk, checking e-mail, getting coffee, chatting with co-workers, going to meetings, etc. I time with a stopwatch the amount of time actually devoted to this particular project. It doesn't count time thinking about the project while doing other things or the time spent on developing series elements that were used here. This was probably the fastest book of the series because it's shorter by a bit, because I already knew the characters so well and because I think I've finally learned enough to do it right in the first place instead of spending months rewriting. It does look like the ending sets up the possibility of a whole new range of stories, but it could also be taken as closure. And I still don't have any ideas currently sparking. We'll see what happens after I've written some other stuff.

I now have just one more normal session of children's choir, and then we have the evening of doing the program for the parents. My kids seem to have loved what I came up with for the song for the parents. They get to do a kick line. They're very excited. It will take a bit of practice to coordinate it. Although this whole thing is a little overwhelming, we must be doing something right because we've had no attendance drop-off. In the past couple of years, there's been a bit of a drop from the fall semester to the spring, and then a gradual waning to the end of the year. I'm ending the semester with the same regular attendance as we started with, and I only lost one kid between fall and spring (and they may have moved). Either these kids aren't as into other activities, or they're enjoying themselves enough to keep wanting to come. They usually seem happy to be there.

And then the adult choir director found a way to make me very happy. We do a Memorial Day concert, and this year one of the songs is "Do You Hear the People Sing" from Les Miserables. I've always wanted to sing that as part of a choir, so this is a dream come true. Last year, the men's chorus did "Bring Him Home," and we went straight from that to an a capella choir arrangement of "Taps," and I don't think there was a dry eye in the house, including mine. I guess we're being more militant this year. I will have to restrain myself from climbing onto my seat and waving a flag.

We're having a sudden burst of November weather (in May!), so I think I'm going to walk to the library, browse for books, maybe get some DVDs, then have tea at the cafe. Otherwise, this will likely be a sofa day.

From Idea to Plot

Our ballet teacher happened to have some tutus in the room last night, and there were only three of us adult students there, with no men. So, we shut the door, closed the blinds on the room's observation window, and we played ballerina. And, you know, we really did dance better while wearing tutus. For one thing, the short, fluffy tutus force you to keep your arms in proper positions. For another, when you feel like a dancer, you carry yourself like a dancer, and that makes everything work better. Too bad I was having a bad knee day and had to be very careful about not jumping too much and keeping everything low-impact.

I'm giving a workshop on building a book this weekend, and that give me fodder for today's writing post. For most writers, ideas are a dime a dozen. They're constantly hitting us, from every direction. I barely get through an entire day without getting at least a fragment of an idea for a story. When I first started trying to write, back when I was in junior high, this was a real problem because an idea would hit me, I'd start writing with great enthusiasm, and then it would fizzle out because it was lacking all the essential ingredients for a story. But then a new idea would strike me, and I'd forget about the previous one and strike out on the new one. This pattern repeated for more than a decade before I finally finished a book. It sometimes pops up again when I get hit with an idea, figure I know what I'm doing by now, and plunge into writing, only to find it fizzling.

I've found that there are some key ingredients to every story, and making sure to find or develop those ingredients in your idea can set you on the road to having a viable story (or if you can't find or develop these elements, you know it isn't a viable idea). These ingredients may come to you in different orders. Sometimes you think of the characters, then have to develop the situation. Sometimes you've got the situation and need characters and conflict. Sometimes, you may come up with a concept that has none of these elements and you have to figure it all out. So, this is in no particular order.

Just about every story needs:
Characters -- you need someone who can do something in order for much of anything to happen. These characters need to want something -- generally in addition to their story goal, and achieving their story goal may allow them to achieve this other desire, or that desire may change. Even before they realize that there's an evil wizard who must be vanquished, they may personally desire something like adventure, knowledge, love or money. This desire can be either a strength or a weakness (and sometimes both). They may be called upon to sacrifice this desire for the greater good.

A Situation -- There's something amiss in the world that must be put right. That's generally what your plot is about, putting that thing right. It can be as big-picture as an evil wizard with plans to plunge the world into hell in an epic fantasy saga or as personal as a person who needs to learn to trust again in a category romance. Setting this thing right is the job for your hero -- willingly or otherwise. The hero may or may not be aware of the situation at the beginning of the story. The story usually kicks off when the hero either learns of the situation or learns that he's the one who has to deal with it.

Conflict -- this is usually inherent in the situation, but you need something that's stopping the hero from setting things right and from achieving his personal desire. There's big-picture conflict -- that overall thing keeping the hero from achieving the main goal -- and steps-along-the-way conflicts that make it more difficult to achieve the steps needed to achieve the final goal. There may also be internal conflicts within characters, like fears and doubts, and personal conflicts between characters, such as the good guys disagreeing about the best way to do things.

Once you have these three elements figured out and developed, you can build a story plot. You know what your characters need to achieve, and you know what will get in their way. From there, you can get fancy with turning points and reversals and all that stuff, and you can add depth with the characters' internal goals. There's not much point in trying to plot or write until you know these things. If you're a "pantser" who doesn't plot, you probably have some sense of the characters, situation and conflict in your head before you start, even if you don't have it written down, or else you probably figure these things out early in your writing.

In the workshop, we'll take a story idea from the audience and build it into a basic plot. I hope. If all else fails, there's always the plot to Star Wars to use as an illustration (it's a very basic, universal plot structure and almost everyone is familiar with it, so I use it often as an example).

Pedantic Outbursts

First, a television reminder: Grimm moves to Tuesdays starting tonight, through the end of the season. I don't know if it will be permanent for next season (now that it's been officially renewed!). I think this has more to do with not wanting to waste a really valuable timeslot after another program in that slot tanked. I prefer it on Fridays, since I'm out on Tuesdays, and I really like my paranormal procedural block in the fall.

I finished reviewing copy edits, and now I'm on to one last proofreading pass, to make sure it still makes sense after I've made changes from the copy edits. There's a certain mindset to copy editors that's very precise and a little pedantic, so after a few days spent looking at an editor's comments, I find that mindset taking over my brain to the point that I find it hard to read.

In particular, two commonly used phrases are now suddenly really bugging me. I imagine they make copy editors' heads explode, but they keep ending up in books.

The first is "he/she turned on his heel and left" (or something along those lines). For some reason, that one really got to me all of a sudden, so I had to get up and turn around a few times to see how it works. I pretty much never turn on my heel. I turn on the ball of my foot. That could have something to do with my dance training or from marching band. I did finally find a way that I might turn on my heel. If I'm walking forward and then suddenly change my mind in mid-stride, I might use the heel on the front leg as it comes down as a kind of brake, and then turn, though the pivot is still on the ball of the foot.

At any rate, it's mostly only of those phrases that gets used more out of laziness and habit than anything else because you can generally get away with just saying "turned." Or maybe "turned abruptly." Or you could get more descriptive with "snapped about" or "pivoted" or "whirled."

Then there's another one that's used so often that people don't even think about it. I've probably used it a few times, and now that I've started thinking about it, it drives me mad. That's "warm blanket," as in "she wrapped him gently in a warm blanket."

Think about this for a moment. The default position of a blanket is "warm." There are cooling blankets used in hospitals to bring down fevers and then there are security "blankies" that are about comfort, but more often than not, the reason to use a blanket is for warmth, so it's generally unnecessary and redundant to say that a blanket is warm.

It's not even accurate. Unless it's an electric blanket or one of those hospital warming blankets used to treat hypothermia, or unless the blanket is right out of the dryer, the blanket itself isn't warm. It warms you by blocking any cold outside air from reaching you while it traps your body heat against your body.

So, it would seem that you could just say "blanket" except in the rare cases when the blanket isn't for warmth, which you would specify, or in the cases when it's important to note that the blanket itself is warm. Like if you're treating someone with hypothermia. If they don't have body heat, a regular blanket isn't going to help much, so you'd use a warmed blanket.

And that's our pedantic outburst for this round of copy edits. Who knows what will strike me on the next book. Oddly, neither of these things were an issue in the book that's just been edited. They were just things that struck me in other books while I was in that mindset.

Dies Irae!

I survived my crazy weekend, more or less. I don't have much in the way of a voice at the moment and I'm a little sore (I guess I was standing very stiffly), and I have the Requiem running through my head more now than I did before we performed it, including mental images of the score, complete with my notes on it. I'm looking forward to a day of not leaving the house, not interacting with people (except online, maybe) and being quiet. Still, it was a good weekend. I love singing big choral works and I love classical music, and it's fun to every so often get to pretend I'm performing in a real classical concert.

In fact, I have so much fun that it's probably a good thing I was positioned so the audience couldn't see me because I kept grinning, and that's not really appropriate for a Requiem. My favorite movement is the Dies Irae, and it's so much fun to sing that I can't help but light up. So we're singing about the day of wrath, the day of anger when the world will dissolve in ashes, and I'm going "Wheeeeee!" with sheer glee.

I need to find something else to listen to so I can get it out of my head, though. I dreamed it last night, and it's running through my head even now.

I have to finish reviewing copy edits today, then I may take a bit of a break before doing a final proofreading pass, since I'd likely proofread in Latin today anyway. ("Dies irae! Dies illa!") Then I have all of last night's PBS to catch up on. Once I get this book completely off my plate, I can work on my workshop for this weekend and then get back to developing a new book.

Mozart on the Brain

I now have the Requiem totally stuck in my brain. I find myself wanting to speak Latin, though the only Latin I know is the kind of church Latin in works like this. Strangely, I can translate it pretty well in spite of never having studied Latin. I know what I'm singing without having an English translation handy. I have a little practicing to do before tomorrow's final rehearsal because there were a few tricky spots, and since we'll have assigned seats I may not be able to use last night's strategy of sitting among the college kids who've been schooled in this piece. I do hope that the director remembers from when I was in his choir that I'm the oddball who likes to sit on the edge of a section. If you're taking cues from other people in the section, you'll be a split second late, but in a complex piece like this where everyone is singing something different, if you listen to another part you can anticipate your cue more easily. He rearranged things to put the men in the middle last night, so I ended up sitting next to a bass, and that suddenly made everything so much easier for me. It had been weird sitting totally surrounded by sopranos since in my choir I usually sit next to an alto.

Though it was a little disconcerting that the bass was a skinny little college kid not much taller than I am, and yet he had this really deep voice. The first time he sang, I had to do a double take to confirm that the voice I heard really was coming from him.

Now to go tackle today's to-do list of insanity while Mozart runs through my brain. I'm about halfway through the copy edits, and they're mostly light, though the typo fairy seems to have visited my manuscript because the editor caught two, and I almost never have typos because I'm an obsessive proofreader. The English version will be slightly different from the Japanese version that I've already turned in because the copyeditor is a fan of the books and asks fangirl questions in addition to proofreading, and those questions sometimes result in tweaks.

Critical Discussion

The next few days are going to be really crazy for me. I have copy edits to review for book 7, a Requiem rehearsal tonight, a party tomorrow night, a Requiem rehearsal Saturday morning, a totally different choir concert Saturday night that I'd thought about not doing (it's not mandatory), but there were only three sopranos and we were all seconds so they needed someone who could sing first, then normal church stuff Sunday morning and then the Requiem performance Sunday night. Since most of this music is pretty challenging (and high) I should probably stay as quiet as possible when I'm not singing. At social events, I will be a good listener. Is it bad that I'm kind of hoping we get the forecast rain tomorrow so my former client's outdoor party is delayed to next week (the plan in the invitation)?

I had a fit of nostalgia yesterday for my early days on the Internet, and while I was waiting for a conference call to start (that awkward time when you don't dare step away from your desk in case they call a little early, but they're always a little late), I looked up whatever became of Usenet. That was my introduction to the Internet, and it was like the heavens opened up when I found that there were forums where I could discuss things with people all over the world. Somewhere along the way, I ended up mostly on Television Without Pity, and then there was an ISP change where they didn't say anything about the newsgroup access and I never looked into it. So I looked it up and found that the current ISP no longer offers newsgroup access, and some searching revealed that apparently Usenet has mostly become a big file-sharing thing for people who don't want to torrent, and that's why it seems as though ISPs no longer automatically offer it. It's a separate thing you have to get through some other place. I suspect if that's the case, there's probably not a lot of non-technical discussion going on, the way there used to be before the Internet was multimedia. I was mostly hoping to find an alternative to TWOP because they've had so many technical issues lately and some of my favorite forums have become a spiral of negativity in which a few of the more vocal people only want to criticize something, and they criticize that same thing over and over again and pile up on anyone who dares disagree, and soon the people who don't share that view just drift away because it isn't worth dealing with People Who Are Wrong on the Internet, so then the negativity really increases and becomes just the same few people talking to each other and patting each other on the back about how right they are. Usenet was usually big and chaotic enough that it was hard for that to happen. You could killfile people who annoyed you so that you didn't have to see their posts. And it wasn't so heavily moderated that you couldn't call someone out on being a jerk. That sometimes made things more intense and flame wars erupted, but it also meant it was hard for a small group of people to completely change the tone of a forum. Maybe I should look for individual fan sites for particular shows, but then you get into a lot of non-critical squeeage and then the shipping takes over and ugh. There's got to be a good place to do some reasonably balanced (able to see the pluses and minuses) literary-type analysis of television. I think I mostly want to get away from the "female characters are terrible" attitude (which generally comes from female posters -- I guess women actually on the show are competition for their TV boyfriends?) and the "saintly bad boy/boring if he's good, damned if he ever does one thing wrong good boy" attitude. Not to mention the "they didn't do it the way I wanted, so it sucks and all the fans are mad" routine. I may be dreaming about finding that anywhere on the Internet. Or on earth, because people are people. Maybe I should private message a few of the less obnoxious regulars I like discussing things with and start an e-mail chat loop.

Not that I have time for that sort of thing at the moment. Even after my musical weekend ends, I have a big to-do list. I made a master list for everything in my life yesterday, and it wasn't as overwhelming as I feared, but it was still a lot. I've got to prepare a conference workshop for the following weekend. I have a lot of household stuff to deal with, like painting the bathroom, getting the kitchen plumbing repairs done and getting the living room ceiling fan replaced. I've got a book coming out in May, and that will require some work. And there's the stalled office organization project that means it's currently in worse shape than when I began. On the up side, I only have two more real sessions of children's choir before the sharing program night. That removes a little stress.