Lee Thompson's Blog, page 18
June 29, 2012
Chapter 19 The Collected Songs of Sonnelion
Chapter 19 of my FREE serial novel is live. You can follow along on Darkfuse’s website or on Issuu. Things are about to start ramping up again for poor little Red Piccirilli after this chapter and carry through to the end when we hit chapter 28 on August 31st. A huge thanks to everybody who reads and spreads the word!
June 27, 2012
Two short story sales
Sold two new short stories! One to Shock Totem #6, which is terrific because I love those guys and their publication. The other sold to Nameless Magazine and it’s great to have a story in Jason V. Brock’s magazine! I’ll share more about them when they’re closer to release.
June 26, 2012
Tuesday’s Training: Favorite Writing Books
Crunched on time so this is going to be a quick post. I’ve read a ton of books to learn the craft but only a handful of them were worth the time or money. Here are my list of the best of the best.
Donald Maass’s Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook
Tom Piccirilli’s Welcome to Hell
James Scott Bell’s Plot & Structure
John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction: Notes on the Craft for Young Writers
Rachel Ballon’s Breathing Life into Your Characters
Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing
June 24, 2012
The Dampness of Mourning paperbacks
Received my author copies of The Dampness of Mourning. Sweet looking paperbacks! If you haven’t snagged one yet, you should. They’re a big part of the Division Mythos pie. Thanks to everybody who has dropped their cash and written reviews on Goodreads or Amazon!
Order a copy from Darkfuse, Amazon or Barnes and Noble.
And the crazy-talented Peter Schwotzer is working hard on a Division Mythos website! It’ll be the only spot on the web to find out all about the series I’ve created and will be fricking awesome!
Hope everybody has a great week!
June 22, 2012
Chapter 18 The Collected Songs of Sonnelion
Chapter 18 of my Division serial novel, which you can read for FREE on Darkfuse’s website and Issuu, is live today! Thanks to everybody who is following along, offered feedback and helped spread the word!
June 19, 2012
Only 3 hardcovers of IMMERSION left!
Thanks to everybody who has picked up a hardcover copy! There are only 3 left! Collect a piece of my early history while you can!
June 18, 2012
Tuesday’s Training: Patience
One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned in the last year of writing is to know when NOT to write a story. Sometimes we don’t know our craft well enough to do a story justice, sometimes we haven’t put enough thought into what the story is actually about and why it’s worth telling (or reading) in the first place.
So, here I am this past week brainstorming this Michael Johnston novel (originally I’d thought it’d be a novella) and I’m doing a lot of research because the book will need it. I was feeling a little overwhelmed because when I write this book I want it to be fucking amazing since it’s a huge part of Mike’s character arc in the Division Mythos. But the time is not right to write it. I’m itching to but something else happened, and it’s happened several times in the past year when I’d be brainstorming one book and I know I’m not ready to write it yet, then I open a Word document… and bam! I’m writing a completely different book, probably one that’s been burning away inside me a lot longer than the one I just started brainstorming. Part of it is probably because I want to hone my skills, my voice, and every other aspect of the craft before tackling that novel.
Sometimes right now is not the time to write something. I know it’s easy to get carried away with a new idea and think we have to get it out before we forget, or simply because we’re in love with the idea of a new idea.
I think a lot of my early ideas/stories were rejected because I didn’t have the patience to wait and write them once I had earned more skill. Or I’d simply write about the idea instead of writing the story. Because I’d lacked the patience to go beyond the idea and find the story.
I have a document open right now, the one that got in the way of She Collects Grave Nectar. It’s going to be a fat stand-alone novella called Endless Shades of Red that deals with racism, with family, with art and the way our culture tosses things aside because they lack focus, guidance, self-enlightenment, and discipline. It’ll deal with conditioning, prejudice, and traveling from one perspective to another.
The story’s elements are mostly formed because it’s been brewing my whole life. I just wasn’t ready to write it until now. I’d written a short story called Endless Shades of Red a few years ago but it didn’t begin to scratch the surface of what my heart had to say.
Think about what you’ve written, take a serious, sober look at it. I bet you’ll see stories that weren’t ready to glimpse the light of the world, stories that are weak in some areas because you rushed it, and that’s okay because we all rush things sometimes. But it’s an important lesson to learn to restrain ourselves, to listen to our hearts and let them lead us, to gain the experience where we can trust our instincts so we know when to move forward with a project, and when to wait.
Division Mythos artwork for upcoming project
The very talented Peter Schwotzer is helping me build some wonderful pages about the Division Mythos and we’ll hopefully be able to go live with them in the next few weeks.
He also came up with a wonderful idea… You draw, or paint, or sculpt, or what-have-you, some fan art. Can be anything that you really liked from one of my Division Mythos books. Take a snapshot of it and send a pic my way at perpetual_voodoo (at…) yahoo (dottie) com, then we’ll use the fan art to adorn the site!
I will also give anybody who sends something to decorate the site a special gift that no one else will ever get, something one of a kind in thanks. So go draw something. I’ll credit you and when I’m famous in a few years you can show your family the artwork you have on my Division Mytho’s pages. Win-win.
June 14, 2012
Chapter 17 The Collected Songs of Sonnelion (and a few other things)
Hard to believe we’re already up to chapter 17 of my Division serial novel, which you can read for FREE on Darkfuse’s website and Issuu. Thanks to everybody who has followed along, given feedback and helped spread the word! It’ll take another 11 chapters to finish the story and what a wild, sad, and sometimes brutal ride it’s been for my little protagonist Red Piccirilli. Already mapping out the next Division book (a Michael Johnston novel) that is going to be a ton of fun as well. Thanks again to those who have taken the time to read and share!
Soon I’ll be announcing a very fun competition that will be part of a Division Mythos website thingie that the very cool Peter Schwotzer is helping me build. Stay tuned, my pretties.
And it looks like I’ll have to reinstate my Twitter account, which I’m not fond of, but there’s a neat thing that Dave Thomas sent my way about Kindlegraph that will allow me to sign inscriptions to readers for Kindle editions of my work.
Also happy that the audio book of Nursery Rhymes 4 Dead Children is selling well. Thanks to everybody who has bought a copy!
Anyway, go read the serial novel and let me know what you think.
June 11, 2012
Tuesday’s Training: Critique Groups
That Daily Diversion for Writers is great. You don’t want to be in a group with that writer, nor do you want to be that writer because if you are then someone should punch you in the junk.
When I started writing I had no idea there were writing groups. When I started it was alone, with pen drawing tracks in whatever pads of paper were laying around, mostly because I was a drunk and mostly because I didn’t know how to type and had I known how to type I’d have spent the money I should have invested on a word processing wizard in other places (like fun! Besides, I enjoyed writing longhand and still do.)
I wasn’t on the internet. I had no writers around me to give me feedback and I was a horrible writer to begin with. So after a couple years of writing my sister saw I was serious and bought me a typewriter. I learned to type efficiently because the Smith Corona’s ink ribbons were expensive. I learned to type quickly because nobody around me wanted to hear that machine tapping away for more than a half hour at a time. I think my sister got sick of hearing it at all hours of the night, which is when I work best, so they gave me a hand-me-down laptop that I loved.
Once I had the laptop and access to the net I found Editred, where more experienced writers like Shaun Jeffrey helped me out, and Editred was in many ways a stepping stone to Zoetrope, which was a stepping stone to the ultimate writing group I’m part of now with Shaun Ryan and Kevin Wallis. And we have been a tight-knit and stalwart group the last five years.
My experience with EditRed was much like Zoetrope. It was good for a season. I learned a little but was frantic to learn more, more quickly, more efficiently, more pow-zang-boom. I kept searching, asking questions, waiting for the lightning to strike.
In Zoetrope we had a very good critique session going for a long time. I had a ton of people teach me things in there (Shaun Ryan, Kevin Wallis, Linda Evans, AJ Brown, and a host of others.)
But not all advice is good advice. When you get a bunch of people who are starving to get some pro-sale credits, who are all telling each other how to write, you’re just tossing the puzzle pieces up into the air instead of building the goddamn puzzle. Some advice hurts more than helps. Praise isn’t always good, especially if it’s a well-meaning running of the mouth that has no substance in the heart and brain, just simple flattery, just an expectation met and hoped to be returned.
Praise is not as powerful as studying the craft. Praise isn’t a tool that will help you write better stories. If you suck and you have people telling you how great you are how far is that going to get you? Tell me that.
I learned to trust my gut in Zoetrope though, and learned to start hand-copying my favorite books so I could really get into the process and see how the pros did it. Plus I met the other two crackers from my soon-to-be-famous group there, Shaun Ryan and Kevin Wallis. Unlike working with everybody else, our teamwork was natural and consistent. I think you want natural and consistent on your checklist of what to look for in your writing group. It wasn’t just about line-editing a story to how you think it should be, but asking the author what they really meant to say and figuring out how to make that happen if they were off the mark. It is a beneficial arrangement for us. To dig deep into what we’re trying to say because that makes it easier to do from the get-go on the next story. I think that may be one of the most blessed parts of our working relationship. And I don’t know that a critique group is any good without people asking you questions about your work, and you learning to bare your soul when asked to because that builds some trust. Plus the more we’re honest with each other the more we can see what’s truly important in the work because it’s important in our daily lives.
We’ve had a few people come and go, and we’d crit other people’s work on the side, but our little group has been steadfast, courageous and zealous about pushing each other to write our stories the best way we can. We’ve seen each other grow the past five years, and especially the past three years. That is a wonderful sight to behold and realize that you’re part of, not just some static-like image in the background, but a working, dependable gear.
We’ve seen each other struggle. And we’ve rejoiced with each other in every good piece of work that we’ve produced. And we rejoice when they sell and send each other copies, and thank each other quite a bit since we know how lucky we are to have the other twos input.
We all have different strengths and they compliment each other and if there is some kind of fate in the world, we lucked out. Big time.
We share some common heroes in the literary world, and though we approach the craft differently we share the same end-goal: to be among our heroes. To be professionals and produce the absolute best stories we can at any given time. And that takes serious introspection, commitment, fortitude, not something you can get with just any rag-tag group because each individual has to possess it in their core.
I think you have to find those whose work you genuinely love, the ones you could read their novel three times through and make extensive notes on, who you are worried may go farther and faster than you, but you’ll love them even as you envy them.
