Mindee Arnett's Blog, page 13

New Header Reveal and Spotlight on Artist Cat York.I'm so...

New Header Reveal and Spotlight on Artist Cat York.

I'm so happy to be writing this post and showing you the fantasticallyawesome new header for this blog designed by artist extraordinaire Cat York. Ihave also commissioned Cat to design the header for my website which I hope tohave up and running soon. I'm planning on holding a query + 5-page critiquecontest for the unveiling. So stay tuned.

Now about Cat. A few words come to mind: talented, professional,super-easy to work with, imaginative, genius, expedient, enthusiast, fun.Seriously, I could go on and on. I've enjoyed every single minute of thisprocess, and I recommend her to anyone even remotely interested in hiring aprofessional artist.  As someone withzero talent for drawing, I'm completely in awe of Cat's abilities. She has alsobeen extremely generous throughout this process. For example, just as wereached the final color stage, I realized that the size of the design wouldn'tfit in the website template. Cat graciously came up with a new design whichyou'll get to see with the website unveiling. And it is beautiful. I'm jumpingup and down with excitement to show it to you.
You can find more about Cat here. Her work speaks for itself!
Now about the header above. This artwork not only represents me as aperson (hello beautiful horses and adorable kitty cat) but also my work,specifically The Nightmare Affair (duh!) I'd like to tell you more, like what thestory behind the power button is, but I'm afraid of being spoilery. I guessyou'll have to read the book (wink, wink).
One of the most challenging things I've ever had to do is settle forjust one of Cat's stunning designs. In fact, I liked all the different looks somuch that I'm showing casing some of the different color designs below, notonly to give you an idea of how difficult choosing was, but also to showcase asmall measure of Cat's talent.

So above we have what would've been an individual header page for thewebsite. The initial plan was to have differently labeled headers depending onwhere you navigated, such as Short Stories or Bio. I adore the "open book" andhow inviting it is. I think the black-on-black on this one is wickedly awesomeand dark. It's actually kind of scary, and that's a win in my eyes.

Here we have a stone-colored background which really sets off theintricate design. It's a minor variation of the header I ultimately chose.

This one is just completely different, but still stunning. I think itlooks like an actual engraving. Maybe on the side of tomb…?

And finally, this one has a more purple background, which once againhighlights the beautiful design.  
Thanks so much to Cat, and happy writing!

Winners!

Big congrats to the winners of my first ever book giveaway on the blog. Jaye Robin Brown won a copy of ARTICLE 5 and Larissa won a copy of TEMPEST.

Jaye, please email your address at mindeearnett@gmail.com.

Larissa, I'll be emailing you soon for your address.

Congrats again and thanks to everyone who participated!

Book Giveaway: ARTICLE 5 and TEMPEST

Hi All,

As promised, I'm holding my very first book giveway (somebody hold me, please; oh the terror of contests). Just kidding. Both are Advanced Readers Copies. See below for descriptions.

To keep things simple, all you have to do to enter is mention this contest somewhere on the internet (twitter, facebook, blog, you know the drill) and then leave a comment on this post. You don't have to follow me anywhere, but you'll get extra entries if you do or if you already are. Just note in the comments. They'll be two winners, one for each book. Contest is open until midnight January 7th. I'll announce winners here and on twitter. Good luck!

ARTICLE 5 by Kristen Simmons, release date 1/31/2012


From Goodreads:
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New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., have been abandoned.

The Bill of Rights has been revoked, and replaced with the Moral Statutes.

There are no more police—instead, there are soldiers. There are no more fines for bad behavior—instead, there are arrests, trials, and maybe worse. People who get arrested usually don't come back.

Seventeen-year-old Ember Miller is old enough to remember that things weren't always this way. Living with her rebellious single mother, it's hard for her to forget that people weren't always arrested for reading the wrong books or staying out after dark. It's hard to forget that life in the United States used to be different.

Ember has perfected the art of keeping a low profile. She knows how to get the things she needs, like food stamps and hand-me-down clothes, and how to pass the random home inspections by the military. Her life is as close to peaceful as circumstances allow.

That is, until her mother is arrested for noncompliance with Article 5 of the Moral Statutes. And one of the arresting officers is none other than Chase Jennings…the only boy Ember has ever loved.
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My thoughts: Somewhere between dystopian and post-apocalyptic, ARTICLE 5 is completely unique. This world is easily recognizable as our world, which makes it all the scarier and moving. Great, fast read.

TEMPEST by Julie Cross, release date 1/17/2012


From Goodreads:
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The year is 2009. Nineteen-year-old Jackson Meyer is a normal guy… he's in college, has a girlfriend… and he can travel back through time. But it's not like the movies – nothing changes in the present after his jumps, there's no space-time continuum issues or broken flux capacitors – it's just harmless fun.

That is… until the day strangers burst in on Jackson and his girlfriend, Holly, and during a struggle with Jackson, Holly is fatally shot. In his panic, Jackson jumps back two years to 2007, but this is not like his previous time jumps. Now he's stuck in 2007 and can't get back to the future.

Desperate to somehow return to 2009 to save Holly but unable to return to his rightful year, Jackson settles into 2007 and learns what he can about his abilities.

But it's not long before the people who shot Holly in 2009 come looking for Jackson in the past, and these "Enemies of Time" will stop at nothing to recruit this powerful young time-traveler. Recruit… or kill him.

Piecing together the clues about his father, the Enemies of Time, and himself, Jackson must decide how far he's willing to go to save Holly… and possibly the entire world.
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My thoughts: This is a fast-paced, emotional read with a male protag easy to adore. Oh, and watch out for the wickedly awesome, heart-breaking ending.

Book Rec: DAUGHTER OF SMOKE AND BONE By Laini Taylor

You guys, you guys, you guys...I just can't say how much I enjoyed this book. The word that comes most often to mind is "entralling." And I was. Completely. Thank goodness there'll be a sequel. I can't recommend this book enough. The language, the story, the heartbreak...so beautiful and so very unique and different. Read it now. You won't regret it. This is my first Laini Taylor book, but I'm quite certain it won't be the last!



From Goodreads...
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Around the world, black handprints are appearing on doorways, scorched there by winged strangers who have crept through a slit in the sky.

In a dark and dusty shop, a devil's supply of human teeth grown dangerously low.

And in the tangled lanes of Prague, a young art student is about to be caught up in a brutal otherwordly war.

Meet Karou. She fills her sketchbooks with monsters that may or may not be real; she's prone to disappearing on mysterious "errands"; she speaks many languages--not all of them human; and her bright blue hair actually grows out of her head that color. Who is she? That is the question that haunts her, and she's about to find out.

When one of the strangers--beautiful, haunted Akiva--fixes his fire-colored eyes on her in an alley in Marrakesh, the result is blood and starlight, secrets unveiled, and a star-crossed love whose roots drink deep of a violent past. But will Karou live to regret learning the truth about herself?
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Merry Christmas!

Sorry for the lack of posting guys, but it's been a hectic couple of weeks. But stay tuned, because I've got my first ever blog contest coming up for New Years. I'll be giving away an Advanced Readers Copy of both TEMPEST by Julie Cross and ARTICLE FIVE by Kristen Simmons.Trust me, you'll want to read both. They're fantastic.

In the meantime, however, hope you have a merry holiday. Be safe and, as always, happy writing!

The Best Revision Advice You'll Ever Receive

Okay, so the title of this blog is probably not true, but I just finished the latest round of revisions on my work-in-progress and sent it off to my Agent of Awesome (aka Suzie). And now I'm feeling very...practical. Yes, that's right. Rather than be on cloud 9, I'm more on cloud 3, also known as the "cloud of good job but we're nowhere finsihed with this manuscript yet."

So this blog should be titled the most pragmatic revision advice you'll ever receive.

Are you read? It's going to blow your mind, I promise.

Okay here it is:

Version Control

Yep, you should version your revisions. What do I mean by this? Well, when you write your first draft, label it something like "Super_Awesome_Novel_draft1. Then when you start your first revision, make a copy of draft 1 and label it "Super_Awesome_Novel_draft2." Make sense?

So why is this practical advice? Because it gives you a way to undo changes if you need to. Sometimes when I'm revising I realize that something I wrote in the first draft but deleted in the second would work really well in the third. This has actually happened in every novel I've ever written. Sometimes it's something as simple as a single turn of phrase or sentence, sometimes an entire scene. Either way, it's a great way to avoid duplicating work.

So there you have it. I guess the real title of this blog should be the most boring (but still useful) revision advice you'll ever receieve.

Happy Writing!

The Road Not Taken — Revision Decisions

[Warning, spoilers ahead on the Hunger Games, Twilight, and Harry Potter]
 
So probably everybody has read the Robert Frost Poem, The Road Not Taken. You know, it's the one that starts off "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood," and goes on at length about the narrator's indecision about which path he should take. At one point the narrator acknowledges that he would like to take both roads, but that "knowing how way leads on to way, / I doubted if I should ever come back."
 
And the dude is right — about paths taken in life.
 
Not so much about paths taken in writing.

The great thing about writing stories is that you can go back and take the other path if you want to, and in a lot of cases, you probably should. That's what rewrite/revision is all about.
 
Unfortunately, I think a lot of writers, especially beginning ones, have a hard time considering the path not taken when doing revisions. I know I certainly did. For some writers there doesn't even seem to be an alternate path. We think the story is what is and that's that, and our revising is actually more editing, aka fixing minor issues, polishing the language. In other words, not really doing anything to improve on the story itself.
 
But guess what, folks — there's always an alternate path. Something else could happen. [SPOILER ALERT] In MockingJay, Katniss could've decided not to shoot President Snow. In Breaking Dawn, Stephenie Meyer could've decided not to go the whole killer-baby-nobody-dies, there-are-no-consequences-ever route (and think about how much better the story would be if she had). And in The Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry could've decided to let Sirius and Lupin kill Wormtail.
 
[SPOILER OVER] Now, I'm not saying that if these writers had chosen a different path that the stories would've been better. Clearly, that's not the case with the Harry Potter example at the very least. But what I am saying is that if you know there's an issue with a story you're working on, considering an alternate path might very well be the solution.
 
Now the key to recognizing the existence of alternate paths is distance from the story. And the only way to gain that distance is to stick your first draft in a drawer and let it sit there for a period of time. Stephen King recommends a minimum of 6 weeks, and he's probably right. At the very least, give it a month.  
 
I know it's hard, and I know you don't want to, but you really, really should. Once you've achieved the distance, you'll start to see not only the issues with your story but the ways to fix them, very often by letting the story take a different path. And as an added bonus, you'll gain the ever important practice of learning the art of patience. And if you're writing to publish, patience is a virtue you're really going to need. That is, if you plan on staying sane.
 
Good luck and happy writing!
 

What He Said -- Writer Pep Talk

Busy, busy, busy, that's been me of late. And usually when I get busy the first thing to go is the social media stuff, especially blogging. Don't get me wrong, I like blogging, but I don't love it — not like I do writing fiction. Writing fictions trumps all the other kinds of writing, you know?
 
Anyway, I do have a couple quick thoughts to share. The first is good luck to all of you doing NaNoWrMo. While I've never participated in it (mainly because discipline isn't one of my writing struggles), I do think it's a great, fun time and worthwhile. But just remember that writing to publish is more of a "racing championship" than a single competition. There should be a "revise a novel in a month" month after NaNo and then a "work on something else" month followed by a "revise again" month. In other words, writing those first 50,000 words is just the first leg in a very long race. Be sure you're in it for the long haul.
 
And rather than waste your precious writing time with a pep talk about this long haul business, I'll point you to this awesome post by Jim Butcher on that very subject. He says it waaaaaay better.
 
Good Luck and Happy Writing!
 
 

Prewriting Activities (AKA, what to do when you don't know what to do)

So I've been prewriting. A lot. Like every day for the last two weeks. I'm not a hardcore plotter by any means, but I definitely like to have an idea of where a story is going when I get started. For me, nothing is harder on my writing morale than finishing the first draft of a story only to realize I made a critical error right in the beginning and that I have to essentially rewrite the whole darn thing. Not revise, but rewrite, which is exactly as it sounds.
This is why I prewrite. I ask myself the "big questions" about the story. Things like what is the villain's motivation for his/her villainy? Where is the story headed? What's the protag's arc?
Well for my current WIP, I've been stuck on one VITAL question for days now. And by stuck, I mean really stuck; the answer just refuses to present itself. So what have I been doing? Sticking with my prewriting activities. Here's a list of some of them:
1.       Read2.       Check email, Twitter, Facebook3.       Write a crappy blog about prewriting4.       Check email, Twitter, Facebook 5.       Brainstorm with pen and paper6.       Research stuff on Wikipedia7.       Check email, Twitter, Facebook8.       Clean House9.       Read10.   Go for a walk/run/ride11.   Check email, Twitter, Facebook 12.   Visit a bookstore13.   Rifle through my pile of research books14.   Brainstorm on paper15.   Read16.   Check email, Twitter, Facebook
You get the picture.
Moral of the story? Prewriting is a vital step of the writing process, but it's not the only step. When you've done all these things a hundred times and then some, it's time to start writing. Sometimes the answers can only be found within the story.
Self-directed Pep Talk over.
Happy Writing!

What Makes a Good Villain Good?

And by good, I mean bad, right?
Honestly, I have no idea what the answer is to this question. I can only offer observations from my own experiences as a story-consumer (and by consumer I mean that I like stories in all forms — novels, TV, movies, video games, etc).
Hitchcock once said, "The stronger the bad guy, the better the film." But what does he mean by strong? Does he mean scary? Evil? Repulsive? What makes a villain strong?
For me, the measure of a villain isn't how many people he kills, how many towns he can level, or how depraved his sense of torture is. Rather, the measure is how strong my emotional response is to him/her. The more I hate/fear/loath a villain, the better villain they are.
Given this criteria, I made a list of some of the villains who have provoked a strong emotional response in me. These are the guys I really wanted to get their comeuppance:
Dolores Umbridge, Harry Potter Commodus, Gladiator Khan, Star Trek The Joker, The Dark Knight Hannibal Lector, The Silence of the Lambs Voldemort, Harry PotterThis isn't a complete list, by any means, but what I realized after making it, is that my feelings for these characters tend to be either hatred (Umbridge, Commodus, Kahn) or fear (Joker, Lector), and on the rare occasion, both (Voldemort).
Most of my "fear" reaction has to do with the believability of the villain's evil. The Joker is arguably the best example of this. He is a man of action. He blows up a hospital! He steals a bunch of money and then burns it! Seriously, I believe in this guy's evil, and all I want is for him to be stopped as quickly as the Batman can.
My "hatred" reaction to a villain is directly connected to how much I care about the protagonist. My utter and complete loathing of Umbridge comes from how much I care about Harry and his world. Not only is she wickedly horrible to Harry, but she's also makes Hogwarts an unhappy place to be. This is bad, bad, bad. I love Hogwarts. I want to defend it. I'm filled with righteous indignation that such a pompous, toady old lady thinks she can govern the place and make it as vile as her fluffy pink cardigan and kitty-covered office (Deep breath, Mindee. See how much I hate this woman?).
After thinking about all this badness, I've come up with 4 essential  ingredients for creating good (bad) villains:Sympathetic protagonists whose lives/world is worth caring about it.Clear motivation. The villain should want something or have some kind of goal, one which must be identified to the reader at some point. Evil for evilness sake is boring. All the villains above have clear motivations in the story. Voldemort wants Harry dead, the Joker wants to watch the world burn, Kahn wants revenge, etc.  Empower your villain. At some point, the villain should have power over the protagonist or their world. Otherwise, they're not a viable threat. Activate the villain. Let them use that power over the world you've given them. A villain with no real power, or one who doesn't use it, is only a caricature and a gimmick. Give your readers an undeniable reason to hate and fear the bad guy.So there you have it, my take on villain awesomeness. But what about you? Who are some of your favorite (reviled) villains?
Happy writing