Rebecca H. Jamison's Blog, page 4

Manuscript Makeover Part 1: Character

Last summer, a writer's group invited me to teach a class on editing from start to finish. I designed my manuscript makeover class for them, and I've decided to share it on my blog as a series of posts.Today I'll discuss editing for character, which is one of the most important parts of writing a novel. This involves making sure your reader will like your main characters and also making sure they understand your characters' emotions and thought processes.First, it's important that readers love your main character(s).  As Blake Snyder says,  "Liking the person we go on a journey with is the single most important element in drawing us into your story.” Here are ten ways to make a character more endearing:1. Have your character do something heroic in the opening scene. (Think of Mr. Incredible in the opening scene of The Incredibles.)2. Make them funny. (Phil from Groundhog Day is good example of how this can work well.3. Make them a good friend to another character. (Think of Cher from Clueless or Sam from Lord of the Rings.)4. Give them special talents or abilities. (This is why we like Shelock Holmes.)5. Make them attractive. (Basically any female main character in a movie.)6. Make us feel sorry for them. (Harry Potter is a good example of this.)7. Make the bad guy worse. (Think of  Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader.)9. Give them something we wish we had. (Captain Kirk from Star Trek can travel anywhere he wants, so people like him despite his negative qualities.)9. Make them proactive. (This is why women love Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice.)10. Don’t let them get too negative about themselves or other characters.
Second, ask yourself whether your reader can relate to your characters:
Can the reader feel what the character feels?Can the reader understand why she says what she says and does what she does
You can do this through dialogue tags. I like to write down examples of great dialogue tags that I encounter while reading. Here are some examples from JoJo Moyes' Me Before You. Notice how they reveal her characters' emotions and thoughts:
Describing voice:“Her voice is husky, testament to their missed hours of sleep.”“He said it like it was a question.”“When Patrick spoke again, there was a faint air of martyrdom in his tone.”Describing internal feelings:“How could I explain to him . . . how a body can become so familiar to you?”“I couldn’t stop beaming.”“I turned to face Mrs. Traynor, wriggling so that my jacket covered as much of the skirt as possible.”Main character interpretting others’ dialogue and cues“She withdrew her hand from mine as soon as humanly possible.”“Only later I realized he hadn’t seemed happy when he said it.”“Mum shut her eyes for a moment, as if calming herself before she spoke.”
Another way you can help readers identify a character's emotions or thoughts is through descriptions. Make sure that when you describe a setting, a character, or an action, you do it from your character's point of view and not your own. I've been reading the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, and I'm so impressed with how well she tells her stories from a child's point of view. I invite you to read a few chapters from any of her books to see what I mean.
A good way to know if you're on the right track is to ask critique groups and beta readers if they can relate to your characters.

Meet Kathryn Cooper

Today, I'd like you to meet author Kathryn Cooper. She and I have been online friends for a few years, and she's awesome. I think everyone should get to know her. 
Here's our interview:
1. Please tell me about your new book. What inspired you to write it and what's it about?

Aspen Everlasting is the first book I've ever written. My love of Young Adult reads began in college when I took a children's literature class. I read Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine. I fell in love! My passion for reading grew. After a few years I read a trilogy where I didn't like the ending and decided to write my own book! So I did. It took a few years, but I'm happy that I accomplished this huge goal.
Aspen Everlasting is about a sixteen year old girl named Aspen that quickly finds that she has super strength. She goes on an adventure to find out what was happening to her. This is adventure and clean romance.
2. I know you had surgery for a brain tumor a couple years ago. How has that affected your writing? How has it affected your outlook on life? 

I found out I had a brain tumor as I was finishing up a lot of editing from my beta readers and editing friend. I had been working on this book for a few years so when I regained my ability to read I went back to writing. I edited a lot then a month before my surgery I sent it in to agents. After my surgery I found out that I would be going through radiation for 6 weeks then 12 months of chemo. So I sent my book out to publishing companies without an agent. I was so happy to find out Cedar Fort took my book as an eBook. It was a wonderful day.
My outlook on life didn't change it just grew larger. I became closer to God my Heavenly Father, my brother and Savior Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost. My love for others grew. I know that every person good or bad are my brothers and sisters. 
3.You live in Texas now, but if you could live anywhere in the world, where would you live and why?
I was born and raised in Texas so this is where I want to be. I love my Texas country life. I dream to visit Scotland, England, and France.
4.Do you have plans for another book? If so, what is it about?
I keep going back and forth. I'd like to write about what I went through during my brain tumor treatments. I was going to do a YA fiction, then an adult fiction, but now I'm thinking I'll just write the true story. Nonfiction! 
5. I'd like to know a little about your childhood. Where did you grow up, and what were your favorite hobbies as a child?
I grew up in the area of Waco, Texas. In the summer we spent hours every day swimming in our backyard pool. In the fall I loved being in my high school band's colorguard. Go Flags!
6.What are five of your favorite books or authors?


I love too many books to name them! Some authors I love: Janette Rallison, Shannen Crane Cramp, Ally Condie, Ally Carter, Lindsay Cummings, Marissa Meyer.
7.Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?
Go for it! Write when you can. Create a story that you love. Read a TON!
You can learn more about Kathryn at https://kathryncooperwrites.com
Her book is available on Amazon and at select bookstores.

Writing = Rewriting

I've been working on two projects lately--a novella set in Rexburg, Idaho, and a novel that begins in the Cape Verde islands. Over the last few months I've been rewriting both. I hate to rewrite, and I love to rewrite. Mostly, I hate it before I start, and I love it after I'm finished.

After I rewrote 150 pages, I took a break over Christmas and New Years. During that time, I watched a bunch of Kon Mari cleaning videos on Youtube and did a ton of decluttering. I also rearranged some of my drawers in the Kon Mari fashion. It struck me that decluttering is a lot like rewriting. It makes you feel a lot better once it's done.



I think there's a myth among the general public that for a real author, words come easily. A real author can write a book in a month without much need to revise or edit. She naturally develops plots and outlines as she types, coming up with characters, worlds, and historically accurate details easily. For me, this couldn't be further from the truth.
Good writing involves a lot of rewriting. 
Sometimes I forget this, and I get discouraged that I'm having to rewrite a scene for the third time. I was in one of these funks last month, when I read this quote by Michael Crichton: "Books aren't written--they're rewritten . . . It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it." You read that correctly: Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain, Coma, Twister, Congo, and Westworld, has had to rewrite parts of his novels up to seven different times.
Then I found out that Ernest Hemingway rewrote A Farewell to Arms a whopping thirty-nine times!
I was already feeling much better about my third rewrite.
In a class I attended with Brandon Sanderson, he joked with us that his first drafts weren't absolutely spectacular and that his critique partner, after reading something that had been revised a few times, joked that he'd forgotten that Brandon was actually a good writer.
The process is different for each writer, but, no matter how you draft and revise, it involves serious work. Some writers may redraft instead of rewriting. Others may be like Diana Gabaldon,who wrote the Outlander series. She said, "I get asked, 'How many drafts do you go through?' all the time. The answer is either 'one' or 'infinity,' but I don't know how to tell the difference. I don't write, leave, come back later and revise.  I work slow and fiddle constantly, so the revision is pretty much done as part of the original writing.  By the time I'm done with a scene, I'm done with it."
This doesn't sound fun . . . but it is fun, once you start doing it, and finally everything starts to come together.

How to Make an Easy Vision Board

I have wanted to make a vision board for a long time now. (If you don't know what a vision board is, here's a quick definition: it's a collage you can make to help you visualize your goals. You can have one for all your goals or just for a specific goal. Some people make a new vision board every year.)

In the past, motivational experts have recommended cutting out pictures from magazines or newspapers to make your vision board. Personally, I don't have that many newspapers and magazines lying around. Nor did I have the time to look through them for the types of pictures I wanted.

But we have the internet now! It's so much easier to make a vision board, and since I couldn't find an online tutorial, I'm making one for you right here.

I began by doing a google image search for words that had to do with my personal goals, words like simplify, sanctuary, read, and run. (Be careful what you search for, though. For example, "fun" brought up some questionable images, so I chose to use my own family pictures for "fun.") When I found a picture I liked, I clicked on it, then clicked on "view image," then right clicked on the image again and selected "save image as".  I then saved the image to my desktop as "vision 1." I saved the next image as "vision 2" and so on.

I chose to use my personal mission statement as a guideline for selecting my pictures for the vision board I've pictured above. I also included some of my personal family pictures that exemplify certain parts of my mission statement.

After I got all the pictures I wanted, I put them all into a word document, using the "insert picture" command. Then I printed it out, cut out the pictures, arranged them on a poster board, and used spray adhesive to stick them on. (Trust me, spray adhesive works much better than a glue stick.)

Tribute to My Dad

My father passed away this past July 5, and I've wanted to honor him with a blog post for a while now. I flew home just in time to be with him, my mom, and my brothers right before he died. It was a peaceful time, in a way, because the last few years have been so difficult, due to Dad's dementia. We felt that he had moved on to a better place in the spirit world, where he could be with his parents and other loved ones.I was able to be home for three and a half weeks, the longest I've been home since before I got married. It was wonderful to spend more time with my mom and other family members.I want to share with you a little of Dad's biography that I shared at his funeral. (I'll omit details about my brothers and sister for privacy sake.)Herk had a happy childhood in Bethesda, MD. They lived near a dairy farm, and Dad would play ball in the field where the cows grazed. He could hit the ball and throw father than the other kids, so the neighborhood kids began to call him “Hercules,” Herk for short.Dad loved to build things. By age 7 or 8, he was building tree forts galore in the woods behind his home. He appreciated good wood, and knew how to identify the different types of trees. One of his major forms of exercise throughout his life was cutting down dead trees and chopping up wood for the fireplace. At Christmastime, when he was growing up, he made decorative Yule logs to sell. He took orders for them at the local hardware store.
Here's a little video about Dad's tree fort obsession:


Dad was always concerned about others. He grew up near the Baptist Home for Children, which was an orphanage. I think he realized that he was blessed to come from a good home and to be physically fit. This was also the time of the Great Depression, and he could see that some of his school friends suffered financially. He would sometimes go with his mom to take a basket of food to a family of one of his classmates. He felt protective of his siblings and the other kids at school.

When he was 16, he was thinking he might like to be a doctor. Then on Dec. 7, 1941, he was listening to a football game on the radio. He could hear the announcer calling people over the PA system: “Would Admiral So and So report to the front office” or something like that. He noticed that all the head military people and government officials were getting called away from the game. Dad was a worrier, so naturally, he was concerned and curious. Later, he found out that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor.
Though he was only 16, he went right out and joined the army. So when he graduated from high school, he was in the Army Reserve. He went to American University, where he played on the basketball team while he was in the Army Reserve. Dad joked that he was high scorer on the team for the year, but it was only because all the other men were off at war.
His father suggested that he should try to get into one of the military academies. Dad took the tests, hoping to get into West Point because he got sea sick and didn’t want to go on ships. Well, he got accepted into the Naval Academy, where they placed him in the engineering program. He was in the top half of his class. Because it was war time, they pushed him through in three years instead of four.

He graduated in 1947, which was also the year he married his first wife. They moved first to Newport News, VA, where their first son was later born. Dad went out to sea in destroyers for a few weeks at a time during those year. 
Then they moved to Charleston, S.C., where their second child was born. Dad attended UCLA for graduate school while they lived in Monterrey California and then in San Diego. After that, he went to sea in amphibious assault ships for two years. In San Diego, they lived in a Quonset Hut. My aunt came to stay with them for the summer and said it was her favorite summer vacation, living with them and traveling to see the sights of California.
In 1958, his career took a turn, and he felt like he was really contributing as a Project Officer evaluating sonars, torpedoes, and Anti-Submarine Warfare tactics in Key West, Florida. Later, he worked for two years in Washington D.C., where he was able to effect improvements on entire classes of ships for the Navy. Clarke was born during this time.
By this time, He had four sons and wanted to spend more time with his family, so he quit the Navy and took a job with General Electric in Syracuse, New York. He divorced his wife in about 1965. Dad loved his boys and was very sad about the divorce and how it affected them.
He took a job working for the Civil Service as a Senior Executive Director of Sonar Programs. He bought a home in Virginia because he felt Virginia had the best colleges for his songs. He also liked the fact that his yard had a creek and some woods around it. His two oldest boys lived with him at this time. Later the younger two spent summers with him.
Dad was a great teacher, and he once volunteered to teach inner city kids. He also taught a management class to help people at the Navy to be better managers. One of the things he taught was called “The Latimer Law of Reciprocity.” It was that if you want to know how someone feels about you, you should first ask yourself how you feel about them. If you like them, chances are that they will like you also.

He met my mother in 1966. She was his secretary at the Navy, and he broke the unwritten rule that you shouldn’t date your coworkers, especially not when you’re the boss. His life began to brighten up at this point. They later married.
I was born in Virginia a few years after they married. My brother was born a couple years after that. When he was only a week old, they discovered that my brother had a life-threatening kidney problem. As usual, Dad dove head first into solving the problem, getting the best medical attention and taking detailed notes about how to help Henry get better. It took about a year of surgeries and hospitalizations before he was better.
After that, my brother and I had an ideal childhood, playing in the creek, hanging out at the pool, and running wild with the neighbor kids. Dad often had me tag along as he went up and down the street collecting donations for the Kidney Foundation. He had a great rapport with all the neighbors around us. He was always concerned about others.



He also took me along on his errands when I was little, and he liked to brag to everyone about his sons.  He told me once that all of his children turned out very differently, but they all had one thing in common—they all genuinely cared about other people. That made him really proud.
After my sister was born, and they found out that she had Down Syndrome, Dad told Mom that it would be okay, and that God gave her to us for a reason. Dad didn’t usually speak religiously like that, but he definitely felt that his life had a purpose, and especially so with regard to Caroline.
He was laser focused on improving Caroline’s life, including her health and her behavior. At this time, mom volunteered to be the PTA secretary at Caroline’s school, but she didn’t really like going to the meetings. Dad said he would go to one of the meetings in her place. When he got there, and started listening, he said, “What we need is money.” The moms on the PTA just sort of looked at him and said, “yeah, good luck with that.” So Dad put together a presentation and called around to some organizations like the Lions Club to speak with them. Pretty soon, he had thousands of dollars in donations coming in to help these kids. He also started selling cookbooks, wrapping paper, and jam to raise money. He was very pleased when the school was able to buy walkers so that some of the kids who had always been in wheelchairs could walk up and down the halls on their own. All this money also helped the teachers to go to conferences where they learned about facilitated communications. A few of the students learned to “talk” for the first time through computer technology. While Dad was president of the PTA, the school built a new handicapped accessible playground.
Later Dad was on every kind of committee and board you can imagine on behalf of special education, vocational programs, and therapeutic recreation for the disabled.

During the last few years, Dad’s been on the receiving end of service. I think he would want me to publicly thank my two brothers who helped my mom so much. Henry has arranged a lot of services to help Mom while Randy has visited Dad multiple times every day.
Most of all, I want to thank my mother for all she’s done. She’s had to be more of a maternal figure for Dad, and she’s been an amazing support for him through many difficult and grueling hours.
Life goes on. Death is not the end. Dad’s life continues, and he’s still doing good works. He is near us, watching over us.

My Favorite Hikes

We go on a lot of hikes during the summer, and it's gotten to the point where I need to keep track of all our favorites. My husband suggested I start a new blog just for our hiking adventures, but that sounded like a lot of work, especially since I haven't been keeping up the blog I already have.

I was lucky enough to take a few little hikes in Virginia this summer, but for the purpose of this blog post, I'm going to list the hikes near Salt Lake City, Utah, where we live. I'm going to categorize these as hikes with waterfalls (my favorite), hikes near lakes, shady hikes, and harder but beautiful hikes.

Hikes with Waterfalls:

Rocky Mouth Falls: Click here for details and directions.




Hidden Falls in Big Cottonwood Canyon: Click here for details and directions.



Farmington Canyon: Click here for details.



Stewart Falls: Click here for details and directions.



Bridal Veil Falls: Click here for details and directions.


Doughnut Falls in Big Cottonwood Canyon is also fun. I just don't have any pictures. Here are the details.

Shady Hikes:

Big Springs (Provo Canyon): Click here for details and directions.



Millcreek Canyon: We like to try out a different hike each time. Most are shady. Click here for details.

Porter Rockwell Trail in Draper: Details and directions here.


Lame Horse Trail: Click here for details.




Little Cottonwood Trail and Temple Quarry: Click here and here for details and directions.




Hikes to Lakes:

Cecret Lake: details and directions here.




Mirror Lake: details and directions here.


Silver Lake: Details and directions here.

Bells Canyon: Details and directions here.

Harder But Beautiful Hikes:

Lake Mary, Martha, and Catherine: Details and directions here.



Butler Fork Trail: Details and directions here.

Blog Tour for "Chemistry Lessons"

Today is the release date for "Chemistry Lessons"! Yay!

I've got a few reviewers lined up to feature the book on their blogs over the next week. Here's the schedule:

Tuesday, November 21     

http://gettingyourreadonaimeebrown.blogspot.com/

Wednesday, November 22  

http://www.wishfulendings.com/2016/06/a-sweet-romance-chemistry-lessons-by.html

www.emmymom2.com

Thursday, November 23

http://katiescleanbookcollection.blogspot.com/

Friday, November 24

mybookaday.blogspot.com

Wednesday, November 29

http://lisaisabookworm.blogspot.com/

The Husband Project

Father's Day is coming up, and I've been thinking of some nice things I can do for the men in my life, my husband and my father.

Last year, after completing the library summer reading program, I picked up a free book called The
Husband Project: 21 Days of Loving Your Man--On Purpose and with a Plan. The book gives 24 easy ways to show your husband that you care. I did my first husband project last fall, but I'm planning to do it again this month, and I wanted to share my list with you.

Here we go, 21 simple ways to show your husband you care:


Let him have his free time when he gets homeDo something he enjoyed before you got married.Brag about him on social media.Make him a treat he loves.E-mail sweet nothings to him.Back rub.Do something to look nice for him. (I might take a shower today after all. Lol.)Have a special treat together in a special place.Help him with one of his projects.Wear something just for him.Eliminate something that makes him crazy.Tell him something he does that you think is great.Set up reminders to think and pray about him.Cook something special for him.Get rid of one piece of clothing he doesn't like and replace it with something he will. (My husband likes everything, so I get to get rid of something I don't like I guess.)Let your husband know that you find him attractive.Give him the night or morning off.Take him out for his favorite meal.Give your bedroom the bed and breakfast touch. (This one sounds hard to me, but I think it just means to buy some lotion and special food.)Leave a special note for your husband to find.Watch a guy movie together.
Oh, and by the way, paperback copies of Chemistry Lessons are now available. The kindle edition comes out on June 21!

GIVEAWAY for "Chemistry Lessons"

Here's your chance to read Chemistry Lessons before its release date on June 21. Fill out the form below to win my proof copy on June 10.


a Rafflecopter giveaway

Cover Reveal for Chemistry Lessons

I just got my new cover back from the designer, so I wanted to show you my new baby. The book is in final edits. It'll be arriving in June 2016. (Yes, I have renamed it AGAIN, but this title is the one.)

Here's what my editor had to say about it: "I had the chance to read your story and really enjoyed it! You do a fantastic job at creating round and believable characters and the story had some great redemption and forgiveness themes."