Tosca Lee's Blog - Posts Tagged "tosca-lee"

My friends and fans helped me compile my Summer 2014 reading list. Here are the six that rose to the top.

In the end, I eliminated books I’ve read, books I’ve endorsed, and authors I know personally (so I don’t get killed for picking one over the other). After looking through the nominations, I chose two books in each category that intrigued me. I then turned it over to my Facebook fans for the final decision. Join me in reading this summer.

Post your reviews and thoughts on GoodReads along the way.

-Tosca

People ask me often what it's like writing with Ted. "Is he weird?" they say. "Does he really paint his nails/eat small children/write from a dungeon?"

Of course he's weird. As weird as anyone else who grew up with cannibals. As strange as your average seven million bookselling novelist who lives mostly on peanuts and barbeque in Texas and, you know, speaks an obscure language known only to remote tribes in Papua New Guinea.

Or as weird as you and me.

And yet, the questions persist. "He scares me," author friends confess in low tones.

He scares me, too. Because, you know, it's just not healthy to eat that many peanuts.

***

Snippets of the work day, below. It’s up to you in most cases to guess who’s saying what.


“So, I accidentally killed ___ in this scene.”
“WHAT? That’s not on the outline.”
“Dude. It was his time.”
“But—”
“You gotta let him go, man. Let him go.”

On iChat:
“What’ve you got for lunch?”
“Um, sandwich (holds it up).”
“Oh man. That is way better than my V8/Greenfood shake/Cheetohs.”
“You seriously live on that?”
“So far.”

“Look. This is what I think we need to do.”
“I don’t like it.”
“What? Why not? It’s brilliant.”
“Because.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t.”

“Okay, this is what needs to happen now.”
“I don’t want to do that.”
“But it’d be cool.”
“Okay.”
“What?”
“I said let’s do it.”
“You’re supposed to defend your position.”

***

Some days, Ted's wife, LeeAnn, comes up to talk to her husband. She leans in to say hello, waving at the screen. She's always gorgeous, put together and made up.

Without fail, I’m wearing the same t-shirt I wore yesterday. And, truth by told, the day before. Except that I had one of my ever-present polar fleece tops on, so no one knew it. At least no one can smell me.

***

Ted: “Check out the UK version of Forbidden. Look! It’s so cute!”
Me: “You said ‘cute.’”

“They have to kiss here.”
“Is this a kissing book? Can we skip that part?”
“They have to kiss.”
“I hate it when they kiss.”
“You write it.”

“I think ___ should happen here.”
“No.”
“Yes. Or I’m going to say you pick your nose in my status update.”

“You’re being difficult.”
“No I’m not.”
“You are.”
“No I’m not.”
“I’m calling your wife.”
“Okay. Okay, okay.”

Ted: “Every time I talk to you you’re eating.”

“I have to go. I have a workout.”
“Me, too.”
“I don’t want to. It hurts.”
“Let’s call in sick.”

“Why’d you change that? It was great!”
(Silence.)
“Hello?”

“We’ve been talking about TV shows for 45 minutes.”
“Yeah. We need to work.”
“Yeah, let’s work.”
“Did you see The Walking Dead?”

“That last scene you did was really cool.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Except that you kind of went on and on.”
“What?”
“And then you used a semi-colon.”
“So?”
“And you have this habit of—”
“I thought you said it was cool?!”

“You’re eating peanuts again.”
“No I’m not.”
“I can hear you crunching.”
“That’s not crunching.”
“Crunching!”
“I always make that sound.”
“Because you’re eating peanuts.”

“It’s hard work making stuff up.”
“I’ve written 30 books. Don’t talk to me.”

“You done with that scene yet?”
“No.”
“You done yet?”
“No.”
“You done yet?”
“I’m hanging up.”

“So, listen. I need to ask you a really uncomfortable question.”
“Um. Okay.”
“I’ve been wondering this for a year and a half.”
“Okay?”
“So I know you grew up with cannibals.”
“Yeah?”
“Did you uh, ever eat anyone?”
“Not that I know of.”

“No. No no. I know who we need to kill. It’s ___.”
(Stare)
(Choked up)
We got so choked up we had to come back later.

Via text:
“Are you up?”
(Nothing)
“Are you awake?”
(Silence)
“Awake yet?”
(Blank)
“I’m going to kill Rom.”
“I’m here. I’m here. Don’t touch anything.”

“I think we should have the old guy pick his nose.”
“We can’t have him pick his nose.”
“Everyone picks their nose.”
“He can’t pick his nose.”
“You pick your nose.”

“I’m writing this thing about what it’s like to write with you. Wanna read it?”
“Yeah.”
(Screen-sharing ensues)
(Laughter)
“This is great. Just make sure they know it’s you picking your nose and not me.”
“Uh huh.”

I wanted to do a little something extra for my readers. So here it is: Ismeni: the FREE eShort prequel to The Legend of Sheba.

A mysterious beauty, a destiny set in the stars. Born under an inauspicious sign, young Ismeni is feared by her own people. The single thing she prays for: to live an invisible life. But that is not to be for the young woman who has captured the attention of the king’s youngest son. A story of love, passion, and twists of fate through the eyes of the woman who will one day give birth to the legendary Queen of Sheba.

Submerge yourself in the 10th Century BC world of Sheba early--and then read on to the Prologue and complete First Chapter of The Legend of Sheba!

Ismeni is available to download FREE now from your favorite retailer.

Enjoy!

There's a surreal gap in time before a manuscript's last pass and the book's launch. That amnesiac space between forgetting the finer points of research just as interviews to begin. Of trying to remember how to do your hair and assemble an outfit that doesn't consist of pajama pants after weeks of rambling around the house with a ketchup stain on your shirt. When you're not quite surrendered to the new story eating away at your synapses, and the one that just left a gaping hole where grey matter used to be.

It's a weird time for me--holding on to the familiarity of something that was exclusively mine, given up in incremental editing. Of emerging from the introvert's asylum of the computer screen in order to promote something I steadfastly refused to talk much about for more than a year.

What's it like to have a book release? Scary as hell. Because maybe you didn't do enough. Maybe you should have slept less, slaved longer, worried more and prayed harder. But now it's going, going--gone--to print, and there's nothing else you can do about it.

It's also awesome. Awesome to see the thing that just eight months ago resembled some mutant life washed up on Japan's radioactive shores evoke words on Goodreads like "inspiring," and "I couldn't put it down." Frankly, it's hard to recognize the thing that once sprouted two heads and three arms on my hard drive in reviews like that. Definite proof that God is in the space between my desk and reader's Writer Cam 2hearts. I don't know how that works. I do know it's a mystery.

So I'm telling you: stay in there. Do the work. Be a hermit and wear your pajamas for as long as you need to. Because something crazy happens between the diligence and the surrender. And for as much as I'm supposed to be good at description, I cannot do it justice except to say that there's fear, wonder--and gratitude.

Most of all, gratitude. Not for having done it, but for having been a part of the process.

I'm thumbing through my first copy of Legend of Sheba--it just arrived on my step an hour ago. This is always a surreal moment for me. Here's why: there's a story I tell myself when I'm staring at the blank computer screen wondering how I'm going to fill it. I tell myself, "It's not really now. It's really the future. You're standing in the kitchen, reading this book right now. The words are on the page, and some of them are familiar, and some you forgot you wrote, but they're there, printed on the page. You're thinking back to this moment, wondering how to write this story. But in fact, the book is written."

I used to do this same trick when I played the piano. I was a competitive concert pianist in my teens. The only problem: I was terrified of performing. When I gave my first solo recital at age fourteen, I was certain I would be the first fourteen year old in the history of mankind of die of a coronary. I remember standing backstage, saying to myself, "It's not really now. The concert is over--you're only remembering back to this moment." And of course, at a near point in the future and ever since, that has been true.

Yes, it's a mind trick, but in a way, it really is true. The book is already written. Time is not a straight line as we know it. And honestly, even after manuscript is turned in and committed to print, it's not really finished; no art ever truly is. It's just captured at a moment in time when it's as near complete as it can be at that moment. Sometimes we get the chance to go back and reprise a performance or revise a story (I'm having my second shot at this with Demon and Havah as they are getting released for the third time this coming year from Simon & Schuster.) Other times we let that snapshot stand, even as the art continues to evolve, unobserved.

How does a book get to that "as complete as it can be by pub date" stage? When you work with a traditional publisher, it gets there by four stages of editing:

1) The substantive, or "macro" edit. This is the 30,000 foot view edit. It usually comes in the form of a letter from your editor and addresses issues such as plot, character, length, flow and anything that isn't working. And so you go in and revise--often drastically. This isn't the stage to nit-pick at sentences, but I do anyway.

2) The line edit. This is a more granular edit, often by a freelancer hired by your editor. It addresses sentence structure, pace/flow, sections that can be cut, things that aren't clear or consistent, and any general questions that arise as the editor is reading. It includes some sentence structure and grammar. You rewrite a little more, in smaller chunks. This is supposed to be a far less time-consuming edit, and some authors will simply addresses comments and be done, sanity in tact. I tend to rewrite any sentence, dialogue or scene that doesn't feel right to me even at this stage. I will work on it every day I have until I need to turn it back in, sometimes up to 20 hours a day.

3) The copy edit. This is grammar, place and character names, and punctuation. The copy editor--the third set of eyes provided by your publisher--usually makes a list of all the names, places and grammar conventions that will be used in the book for the sake of consistency. You're not supposed to do much re-writing at this stage. Notice I said "supposed to."

4) The galley/design pages. This is a hard copy edit where you receive a printout of the sheets, laid out and designed as they will be for the book. At this point, you are only looking for misspellings and typos that escaped the copy edit and things that got weird while being typeset. I will still rewrite sentences that don't flow smoothly and cut a paragraph here and there even at this stage, generating curse words at the New York office, I'm sure. After the design pages for Sheba were turned in and revised, I sent a bottle of wine to the copy editor who made my final changes as an apology. But it was really a bribe because I wasn't that sorry.

Tosca talked with Joe More of "The Kill Zone" about how she approaches the research for her novels.


_____________


I’m asked often how I research my historical novels. I’ve steadfastly avoided writing about this topic until now I think because it’s such a personal process—one dictated by how a person sorts, digests, and stores information. None of us will do it the same. That said, having had to pack the equivalent of a dissertation’s worth of research into six months on occasions before, I have picked up a few tricks.

1) Start pedestrian. Do what everyone else does: Google. Wikipedia. YouTube. See what’s available on Amazon. Read and watch widely.

2) Acquire key references for your library. These are the staple works and experts that books, articles and documentaries about your topic refer to time and again. For the first century, it’s the historian Josephus. For period warfare, Carl Von Clausewitz. Find your staple information.

3) Find specialty outlets. This is where I divert to the History Channel. National Geographic. The Discovery Channel. Coursera. Two of my power tools: The Great Courses and the (in my opinion) less-utilized and under-appreciated iTunes U. These last two, in particular, are rich sources of highly-organized, consumable information by leading experts and ivy-league academics. True, the Great Courses are not cheap. If scrimping, look for the course on eBay, or order only the transcript. iTunes U is free.

4) Identify your experts—the writers of the staple books (or their commentaries), the leading academics or specialists teaching the lectures or commenting in the documentaries. These may also be area experts or locals living in your setting (travel guides, bloggers and book authors are excellent for this) or doing what they do.

5) Recruit. I never write a novel without at least a small group of experts in my pocket to either point me in the direction of information I need or to directly and expediently answer a question as I’m working. Don’t be afraid to write and introduce yourself and how you came to find them. Be direct with queries and questions, and therefore respectful of their time. Curators of specialized information are eager to help someone who shares their enthusiasm. Offer them the gift of some of your previously published work if they express willingness, and a consulting fee if you have the resources. If you find yourself relying on their help at regular intervals, be gracious with a token of appreciation. And of course remember them in your acknowledgments and with a finished copy of the project. Having made friends with several of my sources, the research has become easier; when I start a project in the purview of one of them, I ask for a starting bibliography, which cuts down on Steps 1 and 2.

Read the entire article on "The Kill Zone."

To date I've written eight novels (one unpublished, lurking like a skeleton in my basement) and two computer books. (Yes. I started my professional, paid career writing about computers.) Ten books later, I still find something wildly appealing about National Novel Writing Month. I've written a great bulk of my published work during NaNoWriMo... and the rest of it during self-imposed wild writing binges. I practically kill myself each time, swear off ever putting myself through such straits again... and then do it once more. I've come to accept this as my standard M.O. Looking back to high school and college, I can tell you that every single paper I ever wrote was accomplished in an all-nighter that ended the morning it was due.

Why?

I think it comes down to the fact that I've watched too many movies. You know the ones with the heart-thumping montages--where the hero, after procrastinating and eventually hitting rock bottom, picks himself up and goes all mad dog? Yes, I'm talking about the Rocky movies. You, Me, and Dupree. Back to School. The Karate Kid. A League of Their Own.

Call me cheesy, but I love that stuff (admit it, you do, too.) We love it for two reasons. The first is that we all procrastinate to some degree. And what's another name for procrastination? Fear. Plain and simple. We are afraid. That we will fail. That what we produce will not look like the vision in our heads. That we will prove to ourselves that the little voice (or big one) saying we will never achieve it will be right. So we do something else. We go out with friends. We clean. We drink. We watch TV. We hide in the safety of relationships and urgent to-dos.

The second reason: Because there comes a point where, if you get sick of it enough--or mad enough--you have no choice but to go balls-to-the-walls through your fear and do it. To the exclusion (almost) of all else. Because, simply put, the pain of not doing it is worse than the fear of trying.

My father, an academic, has written more than 60 books. He has told me numerous times that there's value in intensity. The pressure keeps it immediate.

This is how I write. It may not work for everyone. On occasion, I will indeed sit down for a few days in a row, plunk out 2000 words, and stop for the day. And truthfully, that's probably far healthier in the long run. But we're not talking about health here if we're rabid about pursuing dreams. We're talking about passion. And so... at some point every few months, I go silent on my friends. I show up to events late (if I haven't begged off on them altogether). I cancel haircuts and workouts. I make excuses like an addict defending a drug habit. I write until I'm cross-eyed during the wee (or late) hours of morning, stagger to bed, and do it again the next day. Yes, it is exhausting. But more than that... it is exciting. The action of my story is immediate, pouring out of me in 500, then 2000... 8000... even 16,000 words per day.

Momentum of that sort breeds its own velocity.

I have done this while holding down two jobs, while being married, and while traveling the world for my work every week. Because frankly, I was too pissed off at my own fear (and I have much) not to barrel through it.

And apparently I don't know how to barrel in slow-motion.

For me, that's what it takes. For all my numerous attempts at discipline, I have never kept well to routine. Obsessive momentum sees me through until, reaching the end, I can rest for days, slack off for a while, turn my attention to cleaning my house, sorting out my inbox, and picking up the pieces of everything I let fall to hell while I was working... before returning to my work and beginning to piece it together far more cohesively than it came out.

That's why I love NaNoWriMo. Because for one month, I am surrounded by others barreling through the same fear as me.

Maybe you're the disciplined type. You'll never be the one cramming for a semester's worth of work--or half a novel's worth of writing--in one night. Chances are, you'll be the healthier for it. You can measure your passion out in doses like medicine. Don't change. Just up the stakes and push the limits a little more--if not for Nano, then for a specified period of time. Because there's magic in intensity and pushing yourself just beyond what you think you can do. But if you're like me, and will never reconcile yourself to a neatly-blocked schedule, quit beating yourself up for not being like your more structured peers. Soar with your bad self. Give yourself permission, and go for it. Time to glean the gold and edit after.

Why write about the famous Queen of Sheba? My on-screen answers have to do with wanting to explore this rich, pagan queen who impressed the authors of Kings and Chronicles so much that they included what amounted to her endorsement of King Solomon in their narratives. But my first reason was that I wanted to be a girl again. After writing the first-person characters of Clay in Demon and Judas in Iscariot, as well as numerous male characters in the Books of Mortals, I missed the female voice I had so enjoyed in Havah. And, being set nearly a thousand years before the time of Christ, the queen’s story would be much easier to research with more room for speculation than, say, Iscariot, right?

Wrong.

If Iscariot proved difficult for the sheer volume of material available on first century Israel, The Legend of Sheba proved difficult for the opposite reason. Scholars don’t even agree whether Almaqah, the primary god of Sheba (probably present-day Yemen) was a moon or sun deity. Never mind the involvement of the mysterious Ark of the Covenant and all the conspiracy theories surrounding its disappearance and hidden location. Once again, I consulted the experts: missionaries who had served in Yemen—a place too rife with conflict and kidnapping for me to travel for research—history professors, doctors of archaeology and the Hebrew Bible.

This time, I did not overwrite the story, but kept the heart of it forefront in my mind: the ideas of love, possession, and the desire to be truly known.

I had, by this time, begun to date a single father of four—a land developer and farmer who lived an hour away from me. (How we met is another story—one I will tell you if you ask me in person.) I set up shop on sunny days at his kitchen counter when my office became oppressive, a pillow wedged onto a wooden barstool, toes curled round the rungs. The banquet chapter and the bulk of Sheba and Solomon’s letters were written there in the country, out of reach of my cell phone service. I fell in love with a second man during that time—the queen’s loyal eunuch, Yafush, whom I shamelessly modeled after Karen Blixen’s butler Farah in Out of Africa, one of my favorite movies of all time.

The Legend of Sheba took several months longer than expected—about a year and a half—to write. It released September 9, 2014. Four days later, at my home Barnes & Noble book signing, my boyfriend proposed. (See the stories and photos on my website.) By the time my next book releases, I will be getting married (you won’t mind if I forego book tour in lieu of a honeymoon, will you?)

From March 2-15, 2015, The Legend of Sheba eBook is available for just $1.99.

From the first moment that editor friend Jeff Gerke (who had acquired Demon and Havah and now gone on to start his own publishing imprint) suggested the story of Judas, I was running fast and hard in the other direction. I knew how much research that story would take and was completely cowed.

At some point after avoiding the idea for about a year (this is before work on Forbidden began), I found myself sitting in a restaurant scribbling a scene between Judas and his mother on the paper tablecloth. My head was in my other hand. I was a goner, and I knew it.

I called my agent a few days later, fully expecting him to talk me out of it. He didn’t. All my friends failed in this regard. I flailed around for a few more months. I couldn’t do it.
The thing that finally got me was the idea of slipping into the skin of the only disciple Jesus called friend, of sitting down at the side of this mysterious healer, teacher and uncontrollable maverick called Jesus. I wanted to see him for myself, to experience him in this way.

Over the next year I compiled a library and consulting team of academics, theologians and Bible experts. I went to Israel (and ate so much hummus I couldn’t touch the stuff for two months after returning), read incessantly and then sat down to write. The project took more than three years, (during which time I also wrote Forbidden with Ted Dekker).

Once again, I overwrote the book—this time by 140,000 words (more than 500 pages). Somewhere in that giant forest of history and geek theology I realized I had lost my way, had utterly obscured the trail of this journey and the mystery of Judas and Jesus’ relationship with it.

I thought back to my time in Israel. I had stood on the shores of Galilee’s lake, sat in Capernaum’s synagogue, had seen the theater of history. I had learned so much. But as I entered Jerusalem, I was bereft. Ascending toward the Dome of the Rock that day, steeples and mosques and temples crowding the horizon like so many hands reaching for God, I realized I had not experienced one moment of mystery. I fought back tears on my way toward the mosque, where I stopped to give an old beggar woman a few shekels. The moment I did she grabbed my hand in both of hers, and I nearly fell to my knees. Here was God. And I knew without a doubt I had traveled all the way to Israel just to hold her hand.

I returned to the manuscript and pulled it apart, throwing out three theses’ worth of detail. I returned to the heart of relationship. Iscariot was no longer Judas’ story… it was mine.

Last spring, as I was sharing a Styrofoam container of soggy nachos on the floor in front of my TV with my mom, who was visiting at the time, a text came in from my publisher: “Iscariot won the Gold Medallion!” I blinked at the blue bubble of text, a floppy chip hanging out of my mouth. Iscariot had won fiction book of the year. Celebration was short-lived; I was in the final stretch of edits on my novel of Sheba’s infamous queen. I showed the picture of the plaque to my mom, set her up with a new Game of Thrones episode, and went back into my office.