DeAnna Knippling's Blog, page 80

Ebook Pricing, Marketing, and Promotions: Social Media

I’ve been trying a bunch of different ebook pricing, marketing, and promotions strategies.  While you shouldn’t consider me an expert by any means, I have come away with some lessons.  The first post is here; the ongoing series is 

Social Media

Guard your time.  People with good intentions will suck you dry in a heartbeat.
Network with other writers.  You don’t need to promote 100% of what they do, but enthuse if you’re enthusiastic.
If you love books, review them.  This establishes both karma and reputation.
Keep promotional tweets to one day a week or so.
You can blog more often, though – as long as your blog gives the reader something, rather than openly begs for sales.
Give people things: if someone needs help and you can afford the time, help.  Answer questions, share other people’s stuff, show some appreciation and love.  It doesn’t have to take a lot of time.
It’s easier to just be yourself, and it seems to do less harm than you might think.  Although it’s probably easier to get away with putting your foot in your mouth if you’re a good writer, because you’ll a) be eloquent about it and b) have people going, “Too bad about their opinions.  Oh, well.  I like their stuff anyway.”  Most people are cool like that.
Share stuff that you like.  It’s not all about you, or about your book, or about promoting your platform, or even about being the wittiest @#$%^&*()@# in town.  You, you, you.  So what?  This LOLCat is funnier than you…and he’s not even trying.

Twitter is great for testing different versions of something, because you can see who favorites/retweets which version.  So try putting up two different log lines and see which one people like better.
Have a home on the Internet so people can look you up.  Make sure you home on the Internet gives links to all your books, at all major sites (I’m still in progress on this).  Make sure it gives an interesting bio/photo of you.  Make sure it gives your contact information across your social media sites.  Make sure you list any free stories and signup for a newsletter: the first page people hit should be the ONE page they need to get where they want to go.  Do not hide information.
Follow back.
Don’t be a dick.

 

Ebook Pricing, Marketing, and Promotions: Promotions

I’ve been trying a bunch of different ebook pricing, marketing, and promotions strategies.  While you shouldn’t consider me an expert by any means, I have come away with some lessons.  The first post is here; the ongoing series is .

Promotions

The best thing you can do to promote your story is to start with reviews.  Get some reviews.  This is a painful lesson I’m in the middle of learning.  Reviews?  Get them.

At Amazon, the first reviews you get are the ones that stay at the top of your reviews forever.  Beg for a friend to write you a good one.  I’m not sure whether this is true across all sites.
If you do not have reviews (or have a bunch of crappy reviews), all the advertising in the world (free or otherwise) won’t do you jack.  Many sites won’t post notification of your free book if you don’t have decent reviews.
If you put your book up for free, you will get bad reviews.  (Something I’ve noticed on Goodreads is that any relatively well-known book has them, too.  It’s like…pushing yourself into free means that you’re pushing yourself into the realm of people who weren’t meant to read your book, just as being relatively well-known pushes your book out to people who weren’t meant to read it either.  ”Fine!  I’ll read this stupid book that you loved so much, Grandma!!11!!”)
Try the free promotions first.
Have 1-2 books per pen name up for free (not in Amazon’s Kindle Direct Select program; see below) across all sites at any given time; rotate your free books in and out every 3 months or so.  This will tend to boost sales across all stories for that pen name.
To get books to go free across all sites: upload to Smashwords and set price to free.  Let Smashwords push the book to B&N (take it down from B&N’s PubIt if you have it up there).  Wait for various sites to pick it up as free.  As the book starts to go free across sites, you will tend to see a rise in sales on the sites where it’s not free yet.  How to make it not free: change the Smashwords price, take the B&N version down at Smashwords and put it up at B&N’s PubIt, and wait for it to go back to non-free.  If Amazon takes maddeningly long to catch up (especially on non-US sites), then contact them via Amazon Author Central Help to have it flipped back.  Most other sites (Kobo, Sony, Apple, B&N) must be non-free in order for Amazon to flip a story back to non-free.  You should see a boost in sales when a book flips back to paid sales; you should also see several returns, as people who didn’t notice it wasn’t free bought and returned it.
Do not take an existing book and put it in Kindle Direct Select (the exclusive program).  You risk getting screwed because some other site doesn’t take down their version fast enough.
Do not put a book in Kindle Direct Select unless you have: a) 4-5 good reviews on Amazon, b) a number of sites set up to promote your free days heavily (think Ereader News Today and more).  If you’re giving a book away for free to the general public, give a crapload of them away.
IF you do a good job prepping for your free days, you should see a lot of downloads (at least in the thousands) AND you should see about 7-8 days of boosted sales.  Wait until after the 7-8 days to mentally decide whether your book has taken off or not.
Your subsequent free days won’t garner as many downloads as the first day, given the same amount of promotion.
Do NOT use your subsequent free days if your sales are good; you’ll get bumped off your paid sales ranking, which will make you lose sales.
My Kindle Direct Select recommendation at the moment is: don’t do it if you’re not willing to babysit.  This is more than likely a short-term boost, if any.  If you want to make sure you’re giving away the greatest number of ebooks to the greatest number of people, I recommend getting the books to go free the hard way, then using the regular free-ebook-promotion sites to promote your books.  I also recommend if you use Kindle Direct Select, that you only use it for 90 days, then upload across all sites.  You can upload a print book whenever; Select doesn’t affect print books (at the moment, as far as I can tell).
Ads:  I’ve taken out two.  Neither of them did squat for sales, although they had a lot of clicks.  Admittedly, not a big sample, though.

Coming Friday: Social Media

Ebook Marketing, Pricing, and Promotions: Marketing

I’ve been trying a bunch of different ebook pricing, marketing, and promotions strategies.  While you shouldn’t consider me an expert by any means, I have come away with some lessons.  The first post is here; the ongoing series is .

Roughly, marketing is making sure that if you catch someone’s eye with promotion, the information they need is available, complete, and appealing enough to get them to buy the book.  If promotion is a resume, then marketing is your job interview.

Marketing

If it’s a decent story at a decent price, you should have at least some sales.  If not, I’d say check the following, in this order:

Sample.  If your sample’s crappy, that’s bad marketing.  Check your samples to make sure there IS a sample, it’s formatted decently, and has actual sample material of your story, instead of just the table of contents or whatnot.  I would check this every time you post a story, not waiting to see if you get sales or not.
Genre. Picking the correct genre is not as obvious as it may seem, especially if you write the story without concern for genre.  Which, honestly, sometimes you have to do.  I’d say the first thing to look at, in case of truly crappy sales, is genre.  I have a number of short stories that sold ZIP until I switched genre.
Blurb.  I wrote a number of what I thought were perfectly acceptable blurbs at the time, then rewrote them with the eyes of a year’s experience.  Sales went up on some, not on others.  Don’t be afraid to switch these to see what’s working and what’s not.  I’m tempted to try switching some on B&N and not on Amazon to see whether sales go up on one site but not the other.  In fact, that’s probably a good tactic for switching anything:  do it on one site, and see if sales go up relative for that site.
Cover.  Right now, I’m pondering whether my covers reflect their genres, and how to change them if not.  I haven’t dug too deeply into this one yet; it’s important, but I have some stories with great covers that aren’t selling well, so if you’re having issues – I’d check the other, easier elements first, then go back to the cover if nothing else works.
Give it time.  Don’t start second-guessing yourself until, like, six months to a year.  Gain experience by writing more stuff and putting it up: some patterns only reveal themselves across different books.

Coming Thursday: Promotions

 

 

Ebook Pricing, Marketing, and Promotions: Pricing

I’ve been trying a bunch of different ebook pricing, marketing, and promotions strategies.  While you shouldn’t consider me an expert by any means, I have come away with some lessons.  The first post is here; the ongoing series is .

Pricing

Short stories seem to be in the $.99 range for me.  I experimented with pricing some longer/better selling stories at $2.99 (I did a double, too, with one longer story and one bonus story).  I priced a couple of longer shorts at $1.49, but sales died on those, too. Sales dropped off overall on short stories, and went to zilch for the $2.99 stories.  (The short story dropoff may have been due to pulling the free stories, too; see Promotions for more on that.)  Sales have come back up on most short stories since I changed all to $.99.

The pricing on novels didn’t affect sales all that much.  I priced Alien Blue at: $2.99, $4.99, $5.99, $6.99, and $7.99.  $7.99 made three sales (at least two of whom being people I knew).  The rest of the sales for the other prices were very nearly the same; I’m leaving novels at $5.99 for now.

Novellas are troublesome, as in I have trouble selling them.  I have the same problem with collections.  I’ll have to start messing around with their pricing structure and other elements, too…

Coming Tuesday: Marketing

Ebook Pricing, Marketing, and Promotions: Basic Lessons

I’ve been trying a bunch of different ebook pricing, marketing, and promotions strategies.  While you shouldn’t consider me an expert by any means, I have come away with some lessons.  I’ll keep posting these over the next week.

Overall

What works today in any of these areas may not work tomorrow, so keep an eye open and don’t put all eggs in one basket.  Alternatively, if you find a new basket, you may want to try putting some eggs in it.
Don’t be afraid to mess around with anything; if it’s not selling, it’s not like you’re going to kill sales or anything.
Get a tracking program, so your feel for what is/is not working is based on numbers instead of pure emotion.  No matter how rational you think you are. (I’m using Trackerbox and really, really like it.)
Don’t forget to keep writing – and don’t forget to keep getting better.  You didn’t get into epublishing so you could not write.  It’s more important to stay excited about writing than it is to be perfect.
There is no guaranteed method to bootstrap yourself as an author, no matter what anyone says.  Try a bunch of stuff.   Wishing for a magic bootstrap fairy is for suckers.
Test your writing ability by submitting short stories to different markets, if possible.  It increases networking, is a marketing tool, and promotes your other work every time something else is published.
My newsletter is fun, but I don’t know if it does much for sales.
Give people things:  information, amusement.  It’s not about YOU.  The reason that people say things like, “Steven King could sell his grocery list” is that if he wrote a grocery list with the intent of selling it as a short story…it would give the reader something they didn’t have before.  If your main sales tactic is “Hey, I wrote a book, you should buy it, here’s a review, I have no opinions because I’m too scared of pissing someone off, la la la, buy my book,” then zzzzz.
Take risks.  You didn’t get into epublishing to be safe.  Just, you know, don’t rip anybody off.  That kind of risk is just dumb.
Whenever you work with someone on a book, even if you pay them, offer them a free copy of whatever they worked on.  Great googly moogly!  If you have a story published in an anthology, you expect a copy, don’t you?
By extension, don’t be cheap if there’s no point to being cheap.

Coming on Monday: Ebook Pricing.

Editing for Indie Writers: Copyediting Checklist Part 3 (Line edits)

The indie editing series continues (starts here but the collective posts are ).

—

The line-editing saga continues!  Remember: use your style sheet, follow the five (or six) Cs, and the author’s vision supersedes other considerations.  If you’re not sure what the actual rules of any given point are, look them up;  if you disagree, note it on your style sheet.

Check that:

Verbs

Sentences contain verbs in correct tense, person, and number (look up irregular verbs).
Transitive verbs take an object and intransitive verbs don’t.
Linking verbs (seem, look, feel) don’t outweigh active verbs
Phrasal verbs (get up, run off) are replaced with active verbs (if necessary)
Auxiliary verb phrases are kept as short as possible (“it will have been necessary to have seen it” to “we needed to see it”); this often goes with unnecessary passive verb phrasing.
Passive verb phrasing is not used unnecessarily.
Incorrect participials (words/phrases that look like verbs but act like adjectives/adverbs) are used correctly, especially ones that act like misplaced modifiers (“running around the yard, Grandpa watched the chicken from his rocker”).
Excessive participials aren’t -inging and -eding every couple of sentences.
Gerunds (words that look like verbs but act like nouns, like “my favorite activity is reading,” which does not mean that my favorite activity has just opened up a good book) are used correctly.
The subjunctive mood is used correctly, if used at all.
Note: Leave split infinitives alone except in places where it would be out of character not to do so (e.g., a grammarian of the old school wouldn’t split their infinitives).

Adverbs

Excessive adverbs are trimmed, especially where they replace the use of more descriptive verbs (“ran quickly” vs. “raced”), describe dialogue unnecessarily (‘@#$%^&*()@#$ %^&*()!@,’ he said foully”), or stack up (“really, truly, and very, very big”).
Adjectives aren’t used in place of adverbs (“he runs funny”); however, note that it may be in character to do so.
Adverbs of degree (“good, better, best”) are used correctly.  The superlative degree is only for the most impressive item being compared, and requires at least three things to compare (“the best of the three”).  Otherwise, use the comparative (“the better of the two”).
Uncomparable adverbs, like “perfect” aren’t compared — there is no “perfecter” or “more perfect,” except in paradoxes.
Adverbs are as close to the word they modify as possible.

Prepositions

Only one preposition is used in a phrase, if possible (e.g., change “take it off of the shelf” to “take it off the shelf”).
Prepositional phrases are as close to the word they modify as possible to prevent misplaced modifiers.
If you end up repeating a word twice due to a preposition (“he goes in in the morning”), then rephrase (i.e., don’t add a comma between the two or ignore it).
Prepositional phrases aren’t stacked (“we went into the house on the hill with the gravel road in the middle of the woods by the stream,” etc.).
Note: Leave sentences ending with prepositions alone unless required.

Conjunctions

Coordinating and correlative conjunctions (and/but/etc.) coordinate equivalent things (“It was neither here nor there”).  Each equivalent element should be phrased as similarly as possible.
Final conjunctions (consequently, for, hence, so, thus, therefore, etc.) show causation (“I was lost; hence, I asked for directions”).
Note: It’s fine to begin a sentence with a conjunction.  But it must join the current sentence to the previous one in the same manner as it would if both sentences were clauses in a single sentence.

Interjections

Interjections are set off by commas or are in separate sentences (“What were you thinking, you idiot?” or “What were you thinking?  You idiot!”).
Names are set off if they are being used as interjections (“DeAnna, what were you thinking?” or “DeAnna!  What were you thinking?”).

Word Usage

Word usage (e.g., is it “lie” or “lay”? “A lot” or “alot”?) is correct.  I recommend scanning through a list of commonly misused words (such as one in your style guide or Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words ).  You will probably be surprised what you didn’t know.  I was, and I like this stuff.

Right.  Next up:  Punctuation checklists…

Free fiction: Beware the Easter Moon

My kids’ story, Beware the Easter Moon, is available on Kindle for free this Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.  (It’s exclusive on Amazon until, um, July something, so if you need a copy in another format, contact me.)

Beware the Easter Moon

by De Kenyon

Colin’s tired of Grandpa stealing kids’ chocolate Easter eggs. So he hatches a plan to make his Granpa eat one of last year’s Easter eggs. One of the regular kind. That stinks when it gets rotten.

It was a terrible plan. But it was also a great plan.

He just shouldn’t have gone outside at the farm to get the egg on the night of the full moon before Easter.

Colin sneaked out of his grandpa’s big old creepy white house with the tree branches that scratched the windows and the heaters that went hunk hunk hunk all night long while his pile of cousins slept, drooling and farting and snoring.

Grandpa didn’t lock his doors, because he lived a long ways away from anybody else, but his shotgun was on a shelf in the closet, too high to reach unless Colin dragged one of the big silver and green chairs out of the sunroom and into the entryway and stood on it to see. Grandpa always said it was for coyotes.

But all Colin wanted to do was get his egg.

He grabbed his coat off a wire hanger in the closet and stepped into Grandpa’s boots, because Grandpa’s boots were always muddy, no matter what Grandma said, and nobody would notice in the morning if they weren’t clean.

He slowly turned the handle and slowly pulled on the door, but it wouldn’t open and he jerked on it hard and then it almost hit the wall.

But he caught it.

Then he slowly opened the creaking screen door and slowly shut both doors behind him.

The stoop looked white at first because the moon was so bright. But his eyes adjusted, and he tiptoed with the big dried-mud boots down the hard old steps as quietly as he could. The sharp steps had already cut his cousin Maria right across her eyebrow.

A gate creaked and slammed against the post. The trees scratched the windows. The ground was white from the storm and the moon, and the threes only cast thin shadows on the ground.

He liked Grandpa’s farm better when the leaves were out in the summer and the wind whispered through them like the running of a river. But now it was so quiet he could hear the coyotes out in the pastures. And it was cold enough to bite his ears and get up his nose and smell like nothing and make his nose drip.

But he wouldn’t be out here long.

He went out the gate, and it creaked when he opened it, but it always creaked and slammed all night in the breeze anyway. One ear was already colder than the other, and he wished he’d brought a hat.

He went down the muddy path to the chicken coop, where the chickens were all sleeping inside the dark building. The coyote howled again, and Colin started running as fast as Grandpa’s boots would let him.

The egg was behind the chicken coop.

It wasn’t a regular chicken egg. It was a last-year Easter egg.

He crunched through the snow, not caring about the loud sound so much as wanting to get back in the house as fast as he could. But his feet sank in and the hard snow tried to take Grandpa’s boots off, so he had to bend over and pull Grandpa’s boots out of the snow with his bare hands and his foot still in it.

The coyote sounded a lot closer now.

Colin looked into the cow pasture, which had a tall, square-wire fence all along the edge so the cows didn’t get out. The snow was deeper on this side, with long strings of dead grass all the way through it. On the other side it was empty and white and went up a long hill with two brown streaks of road for Grandpa’s tractor tires as he took hay out to the cows in a hay trailer and Colin and all the cousins would throw it out to the cows, who would eat it from between the bars of the trailer while they were still moving.

He didn’t see anything on the hill, so he went around the corner of the chicken coop and stomped a hole in the top of the snow.

Carefully, he dug down through the snow to the ground.

Please be there, please be there.

His hand scraped the top of something harder than snow and he saw it: the egg.

 

New Fiction: Paid

In brief, the news this week is…still trying to get my head screwed back on.  I may be done learning Wonderful New Things for a bit, as my brain is screaming at me to stop thinking, and how often does that happen?  Rarely.

This story was originally published in Crossed Genres #30.

Available at Smashwords, Amazon.com, B&N, and more.

Paid

by DeAnna Knippling

Time travel in a multiverse sounded great…except that some of inventor Beauregard’s alternate selves aren’t so nice. Now he’s a private dick hiring himself out to try to clean up the mess he made.

Beauregard is called to investigate the gruesome death of a girl who was crushed to death while her babysitter watched TV downstairs. Due to the nature of the death, he already knows that the Outlander—a version of himself trapped outside the multiverse—is involved…but how?

If you walk into a bar and make a bet that there are two people in the room with the same birthday, if there’s over forty people, you’ll usually win. That’s statistics. If you walk into a bar and bet that there’s someone with the birthday October 23, 1976, and you win, that’s time travel. And you’ve probably just met another version of me.

I came up with a solid time travel theory in 2007 and swore I’d never build an actual machine. I built it 2009 anyway; long story. If you’re reading this, it means you’re stuck here with me—or you are me. Sorry about that. Any set of universes in which someone discovers time travel tends to implode, because the set tends to attract the mass of all the different versions of the time traveler in the multiverse.

Some versions are pretty big. I see them when I travel. Quantum foam: it sounds small, doesn’t it?

I looked past the spinning rings of the Eclectolux at the boiling, purple-green mass below me (that is, if you consider below to have any meaning); it looked like living vomit that had just eaten its way out of a dog. It looked as big as the Cities when you’re flying into MSP, but it was actually much bigger, because I was very far away.

Yeah. Another version of me. I call it the Outlander.

I dropped the glass vial through the bars of the Eclectolux. The vial twitched as the bars whooshed past it, then fell out of sight, toward the foul city of me. The city had seen me (that is, if you could consider what it does seeing) and was sending up tentacles the apparent size of the Empire State Building. The Eclectolux dipped as gravity distorted. I popped out of the foam before the tentacles got within half a thousand clicks. My job was done.

I came to in the storage unit. The three rings had stopped spinning, as had my stomach, so I must have been there for a while. The gunshot wound in my stomach was gone, which meant I’d died and been replaced.

Damn it. Every time I had to be replaced, the universe opened another hole to the Outsider, and it would be another race to see who found it first (that is, if first could have any meaning with regards to time travel). Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have minded being dead. It was not being able to make it stick that got to me.

I shut off the Eclectolux, turned off the generator, and flicked off the lights. Outside, Durwood, as big and hairy as a mountain gorilla, with a similarly-sloped forehead spackled in orangey curls, sat in his 1975 Chevy Caprice Classic convertible, cherry red, top down. He saw me and honked the horn six times. I hated that car; it clashed with his hair and the top never worked when I wanted it to.

I crossed the street. “Stop that.”

He honked the horn again. “When are you going to let me handle the Eclectolux?”

“Never.”

“How did it go?”

I pulled up my shirt and showed him my stomach. Durwood groaned, and I tucked my shirt back in.

“Back to the office then?”

I nodded, got in the car, leaned the seat back, pulled my Akubra over my face, and went to sleep.

This story came from…a series of chess games, I suppose.   I was working with a guy who liked to play chess; we set up a board on the cross-piece of our cube walls and made moves with no time limits.  He’d played a lot of chess in prison–he wouldn’t talk about it, other than to say, “Sometimes getting revenge isn’t worth it.”  Fair enough.  He was this enormous guy, width-wise, but not terribly tall, say 5′ 9″, and his hair was cut off flat on top: which, to my mind, made him look even shorter.  Hands, same way: their width made them look very stubby.  But he never was clumsy with the chess pieces.

I’m an indifferent chess player; I just like to talk to weird people.  But I got a lot better while playing with this guy.  He talked a lot about kinds of choices you can make in chess.  I don’t know if I can remember how it all went now–there are opening moves, which have all been pretty much worked out; there are endgames (I asked him how to know you were in an endgame; I wish I could remember how he’d explained it, but I know the feeling of it still, if not the logic) that have been all worked out; there are groups of tactics that happen in the middle.  There are groups of things that happen over, and over, and over, with only minor variations.  Once you know the patterns, it becomes easier to predict the outcome.

He said that chess was what made him realize that revenge was a bad idea, that chess was all about anticipating the consequences to your actions, and how he hadn’t had a sense of consequences, before he started playing chess in prison.  Still, he wasn’t the wisest guy I ever met.  But pretty damned smart.

Somehow, being me, I didn’t walk away with all that much in the way of chess.  But I did get an idea for a story: about the guy who discovered time travel and subsequently wished he hadn’t.  I had this whole plan for a series of short stories for Beauregard, based on the Major Arcana of the tarot.  This was supposed to be #0, The Fool.  It went all right.  But when I tried to write #1, The Magician…ugh, I couldn’t do it.  Now I can see that it should have been an origin story.  But anyway, back then I skipped to #2, The High Priestess, which was supposed to be about Beauregard’s secretary…well, let’s just say there was waaaaay too much duct tape, so I let it be.

I might write at least the origin story some day.  Then again, maybe not: ever since  writing this story, I’ve had a sense that somewhere out in the multiverse, I’m writing every possible variation of every story I’m currently working on.  It’s distracting, feeling like every word I type spawns a different universe, then making a typo and deleting a word, and wondering whether I just deleted an infinity to go with it.

 

How to write a twist (one way, at least)

I finally finished a rewrite on a short story that I like, that keeps getting rejected.  I ended up…I don’t know, maybe saving two particularly clever lines and a handful of ones generic enough not to need changing.  Plot?  Different.  Character voices?  Different.  Settings?  Different for the last half of the story.  One of those rewrites.  I even changed the title.

It was exhausting.

I was experimenting with the story structure that I talked about here, from Story Engineering.  I really liked the new version of this story…up to the ending.  Then I realized that I didn’t want to write the ending that I had planned.  Bleah!  It would involved basically a novel’s worth of material squished into a long fight scene.  It’s not that I’ve never had a story turn into a novel (and I usually enjoy it when it does), but that I didn’t even want to write that novel.

So I went for a two-hour walk to brainstorm, in which I spent a certain amount of time reading the first chapters of three books at the library.  I just could not focus.

At any rate…I ended up going around and around in circles.  Tracing out character-development arcs.  Making sure I knew who the antagonist was and could say that they were getting in the way as much as possible.  Trying to find a different ending that still fit the pattern.

But the problem was that the main character’s goal had to change, right at the moment that it really shouldn’t.

Here’s the gist of it:

R. says “yes” to his girlfriend (setup).  Well, there’s someone else who wants him (S.), and S. doesn’t have scruples.  S. abducts the GF (first plot point) and threatens to take R., too.  V., who is the GF’s ally, gets R. out of the picture (reaction), while R. sees the brutal murder of V.’s friend F (pinch 1). R. fights his way back to V. who tries to shoo him off again.  He insults her to the point that she agrees to go after GF, even though it’s the worst thing they could do (midpoint).  They get through a couple of challenges with increasing difficulty (action), then witness the brutal murder of the GF (pinch 2).  Then the person who wants R. gets hold of them both (second plot point), and…

And I was going to say that S. makes a very convincing argument that he needs R. and V. for the same reason that GF really wanted R.  (GF’s motivations were ulterior…but also genuine, I should stipulate.) And then send R. and V. off to fight that battle, in the name of both S. and GF.  But, of course, I couldn’t do it.  Ugh.

What I eventually came to was to do a twist.

What most people assume when they’re reading a story is that it’s about the main character.  Duh, right?  That’s how stories work: the story is about the main character having a goal and seeing it through, either succeeding or driving it definitively into the ground.  Or changing goals from a stupid external goal to one motivated by their deepest passions.  That kind of thing.

But.

Is that how the real world works?  No.  Sometimes, it’s not all about you.

So what I did was look at V.’s character arc.

If R. is the protagonist, then S. is the antagonist, and V. is the helper/relationship character.  R. has a lot to learn from V., and in fact does: his entire character arc is driven by going, “What would V. do?”

BUT (as stipulated by my original ending), what if S. is right?

Then V., who has been egging R. on to go against S., is the antagonist, isn’t she?  And R. has something to learn from S.

And from V.’s perspective, S. is the antagonist, and R. is the helper character, and she has something to learn from R.

So the ending goes like this: R., following S.’s lead, corners V. into making her do the thing that R. should be doing for S., which is the last thing she wants to do.  R. does this by forcing V. to kill him, watch the consequences, and come to the conclusion that she has to take R.’s place.  (I should note that I use two alternating POVs, R.’s and V.’s, throughout.)

–It’s funny.  I wrote this as horror (V.’s perspective) OR as really dark fanatasy (R.’s perspective), but now I want to write it again as a crime story.  Or maybe as something like Attack the Block.

The point being, this twist isn’t about A Big Reveal at the end of the story.  A Big Reveal is, in fact, not a twist.  It’s just A Big Reveal.  A twist…is when you reframe what was previously defined in the story.  A hero is a monster (like in Up).  A monster is a hero.  The person you always hated is the one person who will ever make you happy.  That kind of thing.

But my favorite kinds of twists are the ones where the whole story shifts, based on the fact that every character is the hero of their own story.

It’s weird.  You have to make sure that the former protagonist’s story has its own satisfying ending; you can’t just let them dangle.  You have to show that the new protagonists’s story has had a satisfying character arc all along.  (Inflexible, short-sighted V. learns to have a wider vision, to do more than make the sacrifices she feels like making, but make the ones that need to be made.)  And you have to have a reason to write it: in this, the whole story is about people who find out that their conceptions of what’s going on is wrong.  So it seems fair to do that to the reader, too.

So now – off the story goes.  We’ll see if my theory works…

 

New Fiction: My Mom Ate My Homework

Okay, if you just want the cover and blurb, scroll down till you see the cover.  There aren’t any spoilers in the following (other than a very rough clue about the kind of ending it has), and it’s all talk about how and why I put the story together the way I did.

—

This was an amusing story to write–it’s a test run for a new plot structure that I picked up from Larry Brooks’ Story Engineering.  I stripped this down as much as possible, because I wanted to write a short test story.  I wrote a middle-grade because I have a captive test audience that I can watch read this stuff, so I can see how it goes over moment by moment.  Cruel and manipulative, I know, but that’s my job, and I love it.

Here are the plot steps (according to Story Engineering, which is based on playwriting structure), so you can follow along and judge how well I did, if you care to do so:

Setup (first 25%) – while there are problems in this section, the full extent of what’s going on is not yet revealed.
First Plot Point (at about 25%) – the problem is first fully revealed (note: the sample stops right here).
Reaction (second 25%) – the protagonist reacts to the problem (try-fail cycles center on reactive tries).
First Pinch Point (at about 37.5%) – the problem hits the protagonist as hard as is possible at that time.
Midpoint (around 50%) – the context of the problem changes to the extent that the protagonist knows that proactive steps must be taken.
Action (third 25%) – the protagonist actively attempts to solve the problem (try-fail cycles center on proactive tries).
Second Pinch Point (at about 62.5%) – the problem hits the protagonist in the worst possible way.
Second Plot Point (at about 75%) – the protagonist knows now what must be done and how; final battle commences.
Resolution (last 25%) – the protagonist carries out the last, do-or-die try/fail cycle.

I was talking to Annie MacFarlaine about how or whether this plots out to the Joseph Campbell cycle, and we didn’t come to any real conclusions.

In My Mom Ate My Homework, I didn’t focus on the protagonists’s interior journey at all; one, I was going for as short a story as I could reasonably pull off, so I could test it on Ray (and it still ended up over 2500 words), and two, I was afraid I’d overthink it if I did.  Annie was talking about some things I could have done to make the character have more of a journey…and honestly, the more I thought about it, the more I’m glad I didn’t.

Aside from just messing with this as a technical exercise (to see if I could yank Ray’s chain, really), I have to respect my kid readers.  When I write these kids’ stories, I’m writing the things that it’s not okay for kids to say or think, and giving them a way to express them.  Like fairytales.  The more you tone them down, the less effective and memorable they are.

This is a story expressing the fact that the mom has become irrational about cleaning things.  As a mom, you know there are days when you cross the line, when you take your frustrations out on your kids (or your house, or whatever you’re cooking, etc.) rather than deal with them in a healthy way.  There are OCD days when you think, “Oh, if only everything were clean, it would really mean something.”  Okay, maybe some moms don’t, but having been raised in a culture where most women are taught to think that they’re supposed to be The Domestic Goddess and that all other functions in life are kind of secondary, I’m pretty sure most moms can relate.  Most women?  Not necessarily.  But most people who identify themselves as moms.

So.  What we have here is a horrific scenario where housecleaning gets out of control, where that becomes the most important thing in your life.  And you know what? When that happens to people, it’s pretty horrific.  I don’t want to give the protagonist kid a full character arc–I don’t want them to feel like things are fully resolved or good.  I want my kids to be a little disturbed by the thought that the same thing that happens here might happen to their moms (or, someday, to them).

“The monster isn’t dead yet!” endings in the Freddie horror movies always cheesed me off.  And now I think I know why–there’s this whole completeness, this resolution, and then the monster jumps out.  Whereas you get An American Werewolf in London, and it just freakin’ ends.  As a writer, it drives me up the wall to watch that movie.  But…that’s how it’s supposed to end, with a non-ending.

So, here, if you read the story–there is an ending, because of that whole writer thing.  But the ending isn’t really a resolution in that it makes everything magically all better.  It’s a moment of cognitive dissonance, where the characters act like everything’s magically all better, but you can tell it isn’t.  Because the real situation, when you strip off the fantastical elements here, is the same way–people act like everything’s okay, when it isn’t.  And that’s something I want kids to be able to have a way of talking about.

—

My Mom Ate My Homework

by De Kenyon

Available at Smashwords, B&N, Amazon.com, and more.

This story was inspired by Ray’s recent testing of the “how much can I get away with” thing with regards to leaving her crap all over the house and putting off cleaning it up as long as possible.  And homework.  Dawdling for hours over her homework.  I was feeling kinda nutso about having to discipline her, too.  Like–you’ve been through all this before, and I thought we’d worked it out already kind of thing.  But I know, as Ray develops mentally, that this is exactly what I have to expect, and should be worried about if I don’t see: it means she’s approaching situations differently, as she tries out new ideas.

To make a long story short, it’s better.  And she did enjoy the story, bouncing and yelling and laughing and more.  But she was very disturbed about a few details that I copied from our lives.  She could accept that the main characters weren’t us…but the mention of her green bat socks.  That threw her.

We agreed that Lee should never give me a vacuum cleaner.

Aya’s mom just told her to pick up her stuff for the 1,001th time…she was almost going to pick it up for reals, but then her mom gets turned into a cleanicidal vacuum cyborg. And now Aya’s almost late for school…

Aya held the big box of Fruit Loops in one hand and The Best Cereal Bowl Ever in her other hand, ready to pour. The Best Cereal Bowl Ever had two sides: one side for the crunchy and delicious cereal, and the other side for the cold and delicious milk, so you could scoop out a scoop of cereal, dunk it in the milk, and eat it at the moment of best coldness and crunchiness.

Unfortunately, Aya’s mom chose exactly that moment to stomp up to the table so hard she made Aya’s spoon rattle. “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times!” Aya’s mom yelled. “Pick up your trash!”

Aya looked around the kitchen. Okay, so most of the table was stacked with her folded laundry, and her homework was all over the floor under the table where she’d been working on it last night while Mom cooked, and maaaaaybe she’d left a few candy wrappers under her pillow, and okay, so her computer desk had two soda cans and a pile of tissues on it, and, um, okay. But she was seriously hungry.

“Can’t I wait until after I eat breakfast?” she asked.

“No!” her mom yelled. “I told you to clean yesterday morning, and you didn’t. And then I told you to clean after you got home from school yesterday, and you didn’t. And I told you to clean before you went to bed last night, and you didn’t. And today is my birthday, and you know what’s the worst birthday present ever? Having to clean up your daughter’s mess. So now I don’t care if you starve at school today—pick up your traaaaaash!!!”

Mom yelled so loud that Aya’s hair streamed out behind her and her mother’s coffee-smelling spit splattered onto her face. Mom was so gross. After a few seconds of glaring at her, Mom stomped into the living room, saying something mean-sounding under her breath.

Aya sighed, put the cereal box down, and wiped her face with a napkin. “That makes it a thousand and one times.” She picked up an armful of her clothes and started carrying them back to her room.

From the living room, Mom’s new vacuum cleaner started running. Dad had bought it for her birthday, so she wouldn’t have to vacuum anymore: it was a self-driving vacuum cleaner that would vacuum the carpet and even wash the kitchen floor to pick up any mess from spilled food.

Aya was about to shove all her clothes in her top drawer when suddenly she heard her mother scream, “Help, Aya!”

Aya dropped her clothes on the floor, jumped over her toys and books and dirty clothes, ran down the hallway, and jumped down the two stairs into the living room.

Mom wrestled with her new vacuum cleaner, a loud, gray machine that had all kinds of tubes and cords coming out of it that wrapped around her arms and legs. The back end of the machine spat out black, stinky smoke that covered the ceiling and made Aya cough.

Mom held a pair of scissors that she used to stab the machine, but the cords just wrapped tighter.

The machine—it had to be Mom’s new vacuum cleaner—suddenly sucked down Mom’s arm with the scissors, while an electrical cord climbed up her arm and plugged itself into her nostril.

“Mom!”