Roland Yeomans's Blog, page 135

A BIOPSY TOMORROW

 Just when I thought it was safe to go to the oncologist after so many clear check-up's, 

she found something.

Biopsy time yet again.  

My company has switched to Catastrophic Insurance where I pay the first $2600! 

 Ouch!  But the company puts $25 per paycheck into an individual fund for each of us.  Nice of them.

If the dentist hadn't sucked every cent out of it, I might even have something in it! 

So I will just ask you to pray and cross those fingers for me.  :-)

THREE-QUARTERS OF A MILLION!

OVER 750.000 VISITORS!

Wow!  It's nice to be liked.  But it is just a number I know.

But 750,000 page views is nothing compared to what the Weather Channel (2 Billion a day!) 

or Google (3.5 Billion a day!) 

or Alex Cavanaugh gets. 

I mean Alex gets a Zillion Page Views per day.  I am just a cyber minnow.  :-)

I see some of you scratching your heads, asking, "What is a Page View as compared to Unique Visitors?"


PAGE VIEWS
A page view is triggered when any page is loaded by any visitor to your site.

 For example, if you click this link and the page loads, you have triggered a page view.

If you click the link 20 more times today, it will count as 20 page views. 

But why anyone would want to do that is beyond me!


UNIQUE VISITORS
A unique visitor is an individual user who has accessed your site.

It is determined by the IP address of the computer or device that the user is browsing from, 

combined with a cookie on the browser they are using.

No matter of how many visits a visitor makes, if he is on the same device and same browser, only one unique visitor is counted.

 For example, if you visit this link once today, you will be counted as a unique visitor.

 If you come back to this site 20 more times today, you are still counted as one unique visitor.


WATCH THE BOUNCING BALL 
At the end of the day, the most important factor for growing your page views and unique visitors is content.

 If your content is not engaging and relevant to your users, they are going to "bounce" and never come back.

 The "bounce rate" is the percentage of visitors who come to your site and leave within a few seconds.

A high bounce rate indicates that visitors didn't like what they saw or didn't find what they were looking for.  

OUCH!


HAVE YOU GOT THE TIME?
The amount of time spent on the page indicates whether users are actually reading or watching what you're serving up.

The higher the average time on a page, the more engaged your audience is in that particular page.


THE LEGEND LIVES
Oh!  I just received the shirt I ordered for my Author's Table for next April.  How do you like it?

HOW DO YOU WRITE A SERIES WELL?

Have you noticed how some books in a series stutter?

They keep stumbling over the need to bring the new reader up to speed 

at the expense of boring returning readers in a stuttering of origins.


{Coming In October}
Yet, creating a novel series is one of the best ways to build continuous momentum with your book marketing efforts.


BUT HOW DO YOU DO A SERIES WELL?
1.) THE ALPHA AND THE OMEGA
A good series will take years.  But you have to start with a strong foundation and a clear vision of where you want to go.
Like any trip, the success of your series depends upon the depth of your planning.
Sketch in the rough framework of your characters' journey ... 
BUT LEAVE IN SOME MYSTERY so that when a great idea occurs to you, you can work it into your narrative.
Make your CANVAS BROAD enough to have room for your tales to evolve along surprising paths.
Long-lived heroes make your task both easier AND harder.
I started the Epic of Samuel McCord with RITES OF PASSAGE set in 1853.  

My very next book was FRENCH QUARTER NOCTURNE set in 2005.

In essence, I bracketed McCord's life with a lot of room in the middle to tell the many adventures of his life.  
His life doesn't end in 2005 by the way.
Want to know how it will end?  
Read TALES TO BE TOLD AT MIDNIGHT soon to be an audiobook.
Want to see a good spread of his life? 
 Read HUNTER'S MOON that takes him from 1931 to 1943 to 2005.  (Also soon to be an audiobook).


2.) BREATHE LIFE INTO YOUR CHARACTERS

There are NO heroes or villains in real life ...
 just flawed individuals trying to make sense of their lives and pursue dreams that forever seem out of reach.
Know what makes your characters hurt, dream, sigh, or hate.  
Each person you meet on the street is a hero in the movie of their life.  
Make each of your characters like that.
And like real people, your characters must change over the span of your novel series. 
 Sam is achingly lonely in RITES OF PASSAGE.  
A bit giddy on his honeymoon air/steamship adventures in the NOT-SO-INNOCENTS series. 
In HER BONES ARE IN THE BADLANDS, Sam is devastated by the death of his life-long friend/son, Mark Twain.

He is trying to distract himself by making the first talking Western and 
creating the West that only exists in his imperfect memory of what he wanted it to be.

3.) YOUR SETTING IS A CHARACTER.
Researching your setting will give additional ideas on things that could happen in your novel.  
Characters and setting have a relationship that is unique to each of their natures.  
Sam is different in New Orleans than he was in 1895 Egypt.
The world has changed so much from when you were a child.  
Make it so change during the course of your series.
If your character is long-lived, how has the changing world impacted her or his view of himself 
and of his past ... his future?

4.) THE PAST IS NEVER DEAD
As William Faulkner wrote in Requiem for a Nun, "The past is never dead.  It is not even past."
In my last few McCord novels, 
I have snippets of his past as the first chapters that lead into the narrative of his current adventure.
You realize that his long life has consequences that have shaped him and sowed the seeds for current and later troubles.
I got the idea for doing this from the beginning of John Wayne's last film:


5.) JUST WHEN YOU LEARN THE RULES ...
One trap for a lead in a series is that 
as it progresses, she or he becomes so capable that it distances the reader from that character.  
Who worries about Superman making it out of a jam?
But life is just not that way.
Just when you learn the rules for one stage of life, it thrusts you into another where you have to learn a whole batch of new rules ... or fail.
McCord learns to do new, awesome things along the decades.  
But like a hero in a Greek tragedy, 
the more he does, the more mistakes he makes, causing heartbreak and disaster 
while sometimes winning the day but losing his peace of mind.
6.) TRUST THE READER
Have you ever come into a well-written TV show in the middle of an episode?
Usually you caught on fast enough.
Characters usually let the reader know where they stand with the world and other people with
their words and their actions.
If your first chapters are vivid and riveting, the reader will stay with your novel to find out what happens next.
TRUST THE READER. 



7.) DON'T FORGET TO CLOSE THE ARC DOOR

Each book in your series will have its own crisis with your series' major crisis looming overhead.

Your characters will fight, struggle, and overcome each book's self-contained dilemma ...

but your Book-Spanning Threat should impact each character in some way ...

with it creeping closer and seemingly unbeatable each novel ...

until with your last book, you resolve it in some believable way that costs dearly.  



WHAT SERIES HAVE YOU FOUND PARTICULARLY COMPELLING?
WHAT ELEMENTS OF THAT SERIES MADE YOU WANT TO KEEP READING  ABOUT THAT WORLD AND ITS CHARACTERS?

the CATCH-22 CURSE of INDIE PUBLISHING

It is two-pronged ...

1) Unless you price your Indie Book Cheap few, if any, will buy it.

2) Cheap Books are seldom read, for they are thought to be inferior, hence their price.


The CATCH-22 CURSE

Price your book cheap enough to be bought, and it will not be read.

So what is the answer?
Heck if I know.
John Locke ruined The 99 cent price for Indie Authors. 

 Amazon now counts each sale of a 99 cent book as a half a sale in their rankings equations.


$2.99 used to be the "Just Right" Price.  

Yet, there are thousands of ebooks coming out each month.  

Most readers will not gamble on your book at that price.

There are just too many books by their friends to shell out that kind of money.


FREE cannot be maintained as a price on Kindle.  

Besides, even if it could, people take you at the value you place upon yourself.  

To most, FREE just means even you consider your work inferior.


PAY PER PAGE READ ... 

the new Amazon method makes it even worse when your book is bought but not read.

Previously, authors were paid a flat fee for every reader who downloaded their book:

typically around $1.30 per book. 

But after the change was introduced, they were instead paid six tenths of a cent for each page read, 

meaning that an author would have to write a 220-page book, and have every page read by every person downloading it 

to earn the same amount they had previously gotten.


WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON PRICING?

SEX KILLS

Now, that I have your attention, I want to talk about ...

Sigh.  

All those whines about truth in advertising!  All right, be that way.  I'll tell you how sex kills:


1.) Cardiac Arrest

Ouch!  Engaging in sex can result in  an increased risk of 2-3 myocardial infarctions (heart attacks) and one sudden cardiac death per 10,000 person.


2.) Haemorrhage

 Experts say that indulging in sexual intercourse can trigger a subarachnoid haemorrhage as in bleeding into the subarachnoid space—

the area between the arachnoid membrane and the pia mater surrounding the brain via the Valsalva maneuver.  

Don't ask.  I'll blush.


3.) Infidelity

Police will tell you that the "deceased is usually married; 

he is not with a spouse and in unfamiliar surroundings," and death usually occurs after "a big meal with alcohol."

 So, men who were unfaithful were significantly more likely than those who were faithful to experience severe or fatal cardiac during sex.

Of course, the bullet from the jealous husband probably didn't help any either!


4.) Sex Drugs

Viagra use has been linked to sudden cardiovascular death during sexual activity among elderly or otherwise infirm men.

 Cocaine can also possibly contribute to unexpected deaths during consensual sex.


5.) Offering the Last Fae Money for Sex

As the Japanese businessman found out in the chapter, PREY FOR ME,  in THE LAST FAE!

Hey, I am trying to sell my fun book here!
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EXCERPT
(The last fae awakens in what she believes is a hospital with no memory of how she got there.)    LIES THAT LOCUST TELL

The spark of an anguished soul flew past me in the night.  I shivered as her light drew back the curtains of my mind.  I would have cursed her had she lingered.  But Death was impatient.  Words breathed through the mists of my awareness. "Darkness yet in light.  To live half dead, a living death.  And buried but yet more miserable.  My self.  My sepulcher." My mind roughly brushed aside the dry leaves of Milton's broodings.  No time for self-pity.  Yet too much time for all eternity.  Enough!  I was here for a reason.  And as always that reason was death.  Always death.  The why was unimportant.  There was always a logical why for Abbadon.
I reached out with more than my ears.  My spirit shuddered as the ragged claws of madness raked it from down the hall.   An asylum.  A Sidhe imprisoned within a madhouse.  How utterly fitting. I ran my long fingers along the rough sheet beneath me.  A state asylum obviously.  Even better.  But what state?  My awakening consciousness was stubborn in its ignorance.I bunched up the sheet in my fist in hot frustration.  A sharp intake of breath from the next bed.  Her scent came to me.  I smiled.  Only a human. 
I flicked my eyes to the barred window.  The glass.  Thick, dense.  Like the humans who made it. Under my fingertips a pebble.  I nodded.  A mere speck of stone.  But it would do. The pebble shot from between my thumb and forefinger like a bullet.  An electric circuit died, wailing its death song in tones higher than humans could hear.   I smiled like a wolf.  We would have visitors soon. More the pity for them. I drew in a breath from the cold breeze bleeding from the wounded window.  The sharp tang of Autumn.  Oak.  Ash.  Thorn.  Decay.  Rotting leaves, mottled in bright hues of strangled life.  The dark and bloody soil beneath them breathed out its lineage.  An aching sadness hollowed out my chest.  The Misty Isles.  Albion.  England. I whispered, the words feeling like dewdrops of blood on a wounded deer, "The lonely season in lonely lands."

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WRITER IN A CAGE?

“To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.” 
~ Robert Louis Stevenson


Are you a writer in a cage, a cage of your design?
Often we are our own worst enemy, 

denying that we are capable of achieving more than we give ourselves credit for.

We are tempted to give up on our dreams because the road to them is arduous and slow.

Our behavior, our attitude, our bad habits are all within our ability to change for the better 

but we prefer the comfort of the familiar. 

We choose the path of least resistance, of a way of life that neuters the potential of success within us.


WHINING OR WINNING?

Have you pulled over on the side of the road to success, declaring defeat before you have even given it your all?

A well-functioning adult who puts in sufficient time, focused brain-storming, and quality effort can succeed in most endeavors.

You may not become the next J K Rowling, 

but how will you know if you do not rally everything within you and at your disposal in the attempt?


LAW OF LIFE

With a positive mind-set, willingness to learn, courage to change, and an iron resolve to work hard daily, you can ONLY get better.


DISCIPLINE NOT DESIRE

Great writers like Stevenson wrote daily, not when the desire struck them.  

You must, too.  How can you expect the water to flow if you do not turn on the faucet?

Stevenson spent long years of dying slowly, painfully each day, but he wrote classics each of those days. 


IT'S NOT ABOUT YOU

You are an adult, capable of becoming a professional.  

A great archer does not think of himself before he fires his arrow.  He thinks of his target.

Your target is not you -- it is the reader.

How can you write a book whose every page will excite the reader?  

That is your goal each moment in the chair before the computer screen.


WISHFUL THINKING NEVER WROTE A SINGLE WORD

Daydreaming is a pleasant haven from the hard work of putting evocative words on paper.  

But wishful thinking of impressing your co-workers or becoming the next Neil Gaiman will only leave you with what you put into your dream:  

Nothing.


PLAYING IT SAFE NEVER SCORED A TOUCH DOWN

Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg all have a few things in common:

They dropped out of college to pursue their dreams.  

They dropped activities that drained their time and spirit to focus on working on their goals.

They continually re-invented themselves and their work, growing better with each painful transformation.


PIMP-SLAPPING YOURSELF IS NOT GOING TO GET YOU THERE

 Why talk to yourself in ways that you would never talk to a friend?  

You are your best friend.  And if you are not, that is one problem to tackle first off.

Jettison the "I can't."  

Speak truth to yourself.  

Making a mistake does not make YOU a mistake.  It makes you human.

If you tell yourself "I'm nobody.  No one will buy this," you hamper your imagination.

Stop listening to your fears.  You are not psychic.  The future is up for grabs. 

 Look at the headlines:  

ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE.

Life may be less than pleasant right now.  That is now.  

Tomorrow is a land of endless opportunities.

Be a pioneer of that unknown territory.  

Take those reasoned steps that will bring you closer to your dreams each day.


YOU CAN  SUCCEEDBECAUSE OTHER UNKNOWNS HAVE DONE IT BEFORE YOU. 
What bars have you erectedin your own cage?

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HOW TO JUMP-START YOUR MUSE

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Has the battery of your Muse gone dead?
It happens to all of us sooner or later, right?

1) BE EVOCATIVE --
I use titles to my chapters as teasers.  
Just when a reader ends the prior chapter and is tempted to put the book down, 
I tease her with the title of the next to keep her reading.
In my End of Days, the title to my fourth chapter is THEY RUSHED THROUGH LIFE.
Its first paragraph is short, evocative:
"The undead do not dream.  They nightmare.  
Mine were anguished, happily evaporating upon awakening except for haunting echoes of guilt and regret."
Toward the end of the chapter, 
National Guardsmen, confident that in the chaos following Katrina, 
they could vent their prejudice on civilians who could not fight back, 
are in the midst of shooting a dog, the only thing a poor old woman has left to love and be loved by.
The Turquoise Woman (Mother Nature) steps in to protect the love of her deceased grandson 
and chides the guardsmen for rushing through life without realizing how precious it is.  
Then, she speeds up time around them until they are but dust in the winds.
When McCord comes upon the scene, 
he asks what just happened to the Guardsmen he heard yelling from upstairs.
The old woman laughs, "They rushed through life, Sam."
Try writing an evocative chapter title and then see where that prompt takes you.

2) LUBRICATE YOUR TRANSITIONS --
How do you make your chapter transitions flow?
Well, again using End of Days, 
I used my chapter titles and repeating the last line of the prior chapter to begin the next one.

Chapter 13 ended with these sentences:
(Victor Standish, believed dead, has appeared only to disappear.)
Victor sighed as he faded away, "And a good time was had by none." 
{the title of Chapter 13}
As pale as I had ever seen him, Samuel turned to Magda, "What just happened here?"
Magda, looking as stunned as I felt, said, "I do not understand."

Chapter 14 {THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL ALWAYS SUCKS}begins this way --
"I still do not understand," muttered Maxine for well over the hundredth time.
She might have become family but still Cain and Abel had been family, too.
The chapter ends with the ghostly voice of Victor Standish comforting his ghoul friend 
by murmuring in her mind, "Don't sweat it, Alice.  The first day of school always sucks."

Chapter 15 {NONE RETURN THE SAME}begins ...
Becca yelled over the roar of the boat's engine, "I just want you to know, Trish, the first day of school sucked!"
To keep things different I did not end with the title of the chapter 
but echoed how chapter 13 ended with Maxine whining, "Did any of you understand that?"

Chapter 16 {CRAZY? PROBABLY.}
begins ...
Now, inside Meilori's, we all tried to ignore Maxine who was still whining, "Did any of you understand any bit of that?"
Towards the end of the chapter, Becca sings a song proclaiming that everyone including herself was crazy.  
As Alice slowly walks up the stairs to her bedroom, she softly echoes Becca who sings, "Crazy?  Probably."
The next chapter begins 
with Alice awakening with the bruises gained from yesterday's foolish heroics making her whole body ache.
She mutters, "Crazy?  Definitely!"
  * Try this trick with your own story to see if you cannot make your own chapter transitions flow more smoothly 
and ease you into each new chapter without hitting any potholes.

3) SKIMMING STONES
Have you stalled in your writing?
You huff and puff but the writer's block still sits ponderously in front of your muse, refusing to budge.
Here's a trick:
Skim the stone of your muse past it to a great future scene you are just aching to get to and write.
So write it.
Don't know how to get the characters there?
Fake it.  
Put your characters there and write away.  
In the midst of writing that longed-for scene, ideas of how your heroes got there will come to you.  
And ideas of where they will go from there will pop into your head.
Maybe you will come up with an even better ending that you had envisioned.
It works every time.  Trust me.
HEY, DID ANY OF THIS HELP?
GOT ANY OTHER IDEAS HOW TO PRIME THE PUMP OF YOUR MUSE?
LET ME KNOW!

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Tiny pulled out a chair from the near-by table in which Mozart could sit as Sammy, taking a cue from the pianist, bowed to Bai Chun, motioning for her to sit at the end of the bench.  He sat proudly beside her.  He interlocked and stretched his fingers backwards, much to Mozart’s horror.Sammy smiled at the girl next to him, whose wet eyes were proclaiming that she was tenderly pressing this moment in the pages of her memory forever.  “This here tune is brand new.  A fella name of Johann Straus just wrote it.  Calls it ‘The Blue Danube.’”I said, “Actually, he named it An der schönen blauen Donau, Sammy.“Sammy called back over his shoulder, “Gesundheit, Captain Sam.”Mozart squeezed the bridge of his nose as if in pain.  Bai Chun merely gazed at Sammy as if memorizing every strand of his hair, every gesture of his face, every nuance of his voice.   Then, Sammy began to play.  And magic flowed from his fingers.  I have no words to describe his skill.  He pulled up from the core of his first love an ethereal enchantment of sound.Does love breathe magic into being?  Was this talent latent in Sammy all the while, merely biding its time for his heart to find its one true soulmate?  I had no answers.  I still do not.   All I know is that long, long years later as Sammy’s wife lay dying, this was the tune he played for her, barred by the doctors from her sickbed lest his boisterous nature prove too much for her weak heart.  And both of them heard his playing, and for a precious, fragile, all too short moment, each thought back on older, happier times and remembered so much of the past, the dread of what was to come mercifully ebbing if only for a little while.
COMING SOON in PAPERBACK!
 

“To belong nowhere is a blessing and a curse, like any kind of freedom.” – Fallen, the last fae.


He smiled as bitter as I felt and started reading:Other Self – If you are hearing this, then you have done what I never could, you have found a friend.  We of the Tuatha de Danann hate too quickly ,love too seldom.  It is why I fear we are the last of our kind.My Hell will soon end as I bend time and space to take this stranger back to his time shore.  My mind will be cleansed of the nightmare my life has become.  Why do I do this?  I do not know.  I owe him nothing.  He was, after all, an uninvited guest.  He simply arrived in this chapel through a rend in time and collapsed.  Of course, his mind is erased of identity.  His strange wallet has papers saying he is a Philip Darius –I looked up at Philip.  "The missing pages in Sennacherib's dossier."He nodded grimly and went on,-- A noble name that matches his noble face.—Philip blushed at that.  I smiled wicked.  I couldn't get over it.  He had actually blushed.-- Yet, what is here to hold me?  You must know all too well the hell life becomes when your body stays young as those you care for age and wither.  I have left a legacy of death and terror that will not be missed.  For that, and many other reasons, I will not even give you our real name.  It has come to stand only for evil and fear. I pray to the God, that cannot exist, that your legend is a better one than mine.  If not, make it so, for both our sakes.  I wish you could read this yourself, but the metaphysics of Eternity are unforgiving.  If this man is noble, then perhaps so is his lord.  I can but hope.  But Hope is a cruel mistress, and Reality delights in shattering our lives.  And the name Sennacherib sounds ill, indeed.  I give you my blessings, for what they are worth, which I fear is not much.  If you can find them, place black roses on the grave of this gallant knight who sacrificed so much to find so little.  I go now to meet our destiny.              The Last Tuatha de Danann

I let out a ragged breath, "Shit."He mussed my hair gently.  "Such language from a faerie."I grinned sadly, "I left all my breeding in another century, stud.""Who could tell?"
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WHAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT SENTENCE IN YOUR BOOK?

The first sentence 
(the 2nd most important sentence in your book) 
gets the reader to buy & read your book.


The last sentence makes them glad they did.
Take the BEN HUR remake.  

Everyone, even the ones who enjoyed the first of the film, were turned off by the ending.



What a great last line will do:

1.) Refers back to a theme that runs throughout the book.  Double bonus points if it mirrors the first line.

2.) Breathes a spirit of victory (even in defeat) or hope.

3.) Reveals the purpose of the novel and/or meaning of the title.

A good last line will give finality, 

yet with a sense of continuing into another story that those who survived the novel will continue living their lives.


GREAT LAST LINES:

"So that, in the end, there was no end."
    - Patrick White, The Tree of Man (1955)


"But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing."
   -  A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner (1928)


"He waited for someone to tell him who to be next."
 - Brian Evenson, The Open Curtain (2006) 


"But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably  diffusive: 

for the growing good of the wortld is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; 

and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been 

is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."
   - George Elliot, Middlemarch (1871-72)


"He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance."
   - Mary Shelly, Frankenstein (1818)


"It was the nightmare of real things, the fallen wonder of the world."
   - Don DeLillo, The Names (1982)


"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
   - F. Scott Fitzgerald,  The Great Gatsby (1925)


"Everything had gone right with me since he died, but how I wished there existed someone to whom I could say that I was sorry."
   - Graham Greene, The Quiet American (1956)



WHAT ARE SOME OF YOUR FAVORITE LAST LINES?