Alexandra Sokoloff's Blog, page 36

Nanowrimo Prep:: Your Best Idea

Okay! How did everyone do on their idea lists?

So now that you have this – hopefully – vast list of ideas, how do you choose THE idea for your next (or first) book?

Obviously, if this is a contracted book, you talk it over with your editor. If it's a spec book, you talk it over with your agent. Absolutely mandatory.

But that's a whole other post. Today I'm dealing with choosing an idea for a spec book, not necessarily contracted. And how to fine-tune ideas before you talk to your agent, and/or how to decide if you DON'T have an agent.

There are lots of methods. It happens differently for me every time. But here's the bottom line:

You already know which is your best idea.

Oh, come on, of course you do. You KNOW. Either you already know and you know you know, or you already know and you are pretending you don't know.

If you already know, and you know you know, great! We'll get to you in the next post. But let me deal with the others today.

For those of you who say you really, really DON'T know, many shrinks would put it to you this way: What story idea would you be working on if you DID know which was the right one?

Answer that question without talking yourself out of it, and that's the one.

I am a big believer in this. But if your connection with your intuition or your Higher Power or however you want to put it has been a little off lately, or maybe for all of your life, try one or all of these exercises to coax it out.

- Meditate.

- Just before you fall asleep at night, ask yourself what story to write, and see what you dream, and/or what you wake up thinking in the morning. Keep a pad or tape recorder beside the bed so you can write or talk as soon as you wake up.

- Ask yourself the question in the shower or while swimming or running or working out.

- Spend a whole day free-form writing and see what comes out.

- Write a logline for each of your promising ideas and run them all by at least three people you trust and see what lights them up. If you don't know how to write a logline, we'll get to it in the next two posts.

- Set aside a day (you know, one of those 24 hour things I've heard so much about), and brainstorm index cards and see if your story takes off. And if you don't know how to work with index cards, that also will be one of the next two posts.

- Pay attention to signs. Even if you don't believe it, spend a day or two acting as if you believe the Universe is talking to you all the time, and it will tell you your best story idea if you listen – to songs, to random bits of conversation, to newspaper articles on precisely the topic you're thinking about writing about, to the movies that come up on TV that night, to e mails or Facebook postings that come out of nowhere. If you're going to be a writer you'd better get comfortable with synchronicity because you're crazy if you think you can write a book without it.

The way I really know what to write is when the entire world around me is giving me clues. Like when I keep getting into random conversations with strangers that turn out to be exactly what my book is about. Like when I am on a plane writing a scene about rum, and I walk off the plane and the first thing I see on the causeway is a rum bar (I didn't even know there was such a thing as a rum bar). Like when I am having no luck Googling the specific information I need on rumrunning during Prohibition and that night the History Channel has an hour special on rumrunning during Prohibition. Like when I meet a person on the street or see someone on television and realize THAT'S one of my main characters that I had been struggling to define. Like I decide to set a story in the Bahamas and suddenly get two offers of pretty much free trips to the Bahamas. And no, I'm not kidding, It works.

So if you need a little time to get that divine nod, go ahead and take it. Listen to what your subconscious, or the universe, or the elves, or WHATEVER is telling you, and report back if you feel like it. And then we'll really get down to work.

- Alex

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Halloween is coming and that means I'm doing all kinds of events, as usual. This weekend:

-- Saturday, October 1, 2011 at 10:00 am (PST): Paul Levine & Alexandra Sokoloff
http://www.suspensemagazine.com/suspenseradio.html

I'm talking to John Raab of Suspense Magazine on Suspense Radio; John's also interviewing the marvelously funny and talented Paul Levine.

------------------

Sunday, October 2, I'm signing at the West Hollywood Book Fair, and teaching a FREE Screenwriting Tricks for Authors workshop from 12:30-2:00 pm.

-- West Hollywood Library & West Hollywood Park
647 N. San Vicente Blvd.
West Hollywood, CA

FREE Admission & FREE Parking

=====================================================

Screenwriting Tricks for Authors and Writing Love, Screenwriting Tricks for Authors, II, are now available in all e formats and as pdf files. Either book, any format, just $2.99.

- Smashwords (includes pdf and online viewing)

- Kindle

- Barnes & Noble/Nook

- Amazon UK

- Amaxon DE (Eur. 2.40)




- Smashwords (includes online viewing and pdf file)

- Amazon/Kindle

- Barnes & Noble/Nook

- Amazon UK

- Amazon DE

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Previous Nanowrimo Prep posts:

- Do You Know What Your Next Book Is?

- First, You Need an Idea

Nanowrimo Prep: First, You Need an Idea

I know, I know, it's not even October yet, but I've started my Nanowrimo prep series early this year because a month just never seems to be enough time. And who knows where I'll be by the end of October, so I don't want to leave anyone hanging.

Now that I've explained Nano here, we'll start at the very beginning, with generating that perfect idea - because this is a part of the writing process that people rarely spend enough time on, and is CRUCIAL if you want to develop a riveting book, even more crucial if you have any hope of being paid to write. You are going to spend TWO YEARS of your life, minimum, on this book (and that's truly a minimum). Don't you think you better be sure this is the right book to write before you start?

And, oh yeah - the same process is going to apply to scripts, too, and I'll make sure to differentiate when it's important.

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First, you need an idea.

When people ask authors, "Where do you get your ideas?", authors tend to clam up or worse, get sarcastic - because the only real answer to that is, "Where DON'T I get ideas?" or even more to the point, "How do I turn these ideas OFF?"

The thing is, "Where do you get your ideas?" is not the real question these people are asking. The real question is "How do you go from an idea to a coherent story line that holds up – and holds a reader's interest - for 400 pages of a book?"

Or more concisely: "How do you come up with your PREMISES?"

Look, we all have story ideas all the time. Even non-writers, and non-aspiring writers – I truly mean, EVERYONE, has story ideas all the time. Those story ideas are called daydreams, or fantasies, or often "Porn starring me and Edward Cullen, or me and Stringer Bell," (or maybe both. Wrap your mind around that one for a second…)

But you see what I mean.

We all create stories in our own heads all the time, minimal as some of our plot lines may be.

So I bet you have dozens of ideas, hundreds. A better question is "What's a good story idea?"

I see two essential ingredients:

B) What idea gets you excited enough to spend a year (or most likely more) of your life completely immersed in it –

and

B) Gets other people excited enough about it to buy it and read it and even maybe possibly make it into a movie or TV series with an amusement park ride spinoff and a Guess clothing line based on the story?

A) is good if you just want to write for yourself.

But B) is essential if you want to be a professional writer.

As many of you know, I'm all about learning by making lists. Because let's face it – we have to trick ourselves into writing, every single day, and what could be simpler and more non-threatening than making a list? Anything to avoid the actual rest of it!

So here are two lists to do to get those ideas flowing, and then we can start to narrow it all down to the best one.

List # 1: Make a list of all your story ideas.

Yes, you read that right. ALL of them.

This is a great exercise because it gets your subconscious churning and invites it to choose what it truly wants to be working on. Your subconscious knows WAY more than you do about writing. None of us can do the kind of deep work that writing is all on our own. And with a little help from the Universe you could find yourself writing the next Harry Potter or Twilight.

Also this exercise gives you an overall idea of what your THEMES are as a writer (and very likely the themes you have as a person). I absolutely believe that writers only have about six or seven themes that they're dealing with over and over and over again. It's my experience that your writing improves exponentially when you become more aware of the themes that you're working with.

You may be amazed, looking over this list that you've generated, how much overlap there is in theme (and in central characters, hero/ines and villains, and dynamics between characters, and tone of endings).

You may even find that two of your story ideas, or a premise line plus a character from a totally different premise line, might combine to form a bigger, more exciting idea.

But in any case, you should have a much better idea at the end of the exercise of what turns you on as a writer, and what would sustain you emotionally over the long process of writing a novel.

Then just let that percolate for a while. Give yourself a little time for the right idea to take hold of you. You'll know what that feels like – it's a little like falling in love. (We'll go more into this in the next few days.)

List # 2: The Master List

The other list I always encourage my students to do is a list of your ten favorite movies and books in the genre that you're writing, or if you don't have a premise yet, ten movies and books that you WISH you had written.

It's good to compare and contrast your idea list with this IDEAL list.

This list of ten (or more, if you want – ten is just a minimum!) – is going to be enormously helpful to you in structuring and outlining your own novel.

Now, the novelists who have just found this blog recently may be wondering why I'm asking you to list movies as well as books. Good question.

The thing is, for the purposes of structural analysis, film is such a compressed and concise medium that it's like seeing an X-ray of a story. In film you have two hours, really a little less, to tell the story. It's a very stripped-down form that even so, often has enormous emotional power. Plus we've usually seen more of these movies than we've read specific books, so they're a more universal form of reference for discussion.

It's often easier to see the mechanics of structure in a film than in a novel, which makes looking at films that are similar to your own novel story a great way to jump start your novel outline.

And just practically, film has had an enormous influence on contemporary novels, and on publishing. Editors love books with the high concept premises, pacing, and visual and emotional impact of movies, so being aware of classic and blockbuster films and the film techniques that got them that status can help you write novels that will actually sell in today's market.

And even beyond that – studying movies is fun, and fun is something writers just don't let themselves have enough of. If you train yourself to view movies looking for for some of these structural elements I'm going to be talking about, then every time you go to the movies or watch something on television, you're actually honing your craft (even on a date or while spending quality time with your loved ones!), and after a while you won't even notice you're doing it.

When the work is play, you've got the best of all possible worlds.

So go make your lists, and I will, too, and let's talk about some of your results this week.

- Alex


=====================================================

Screenwriting Tricks for Authors and Writing Love, Screenwriting Tricks for Authors, II, are now available in all e formats and as pdf files. Either book, any format, just $2.99.

- Smashwords (includes pdf and online viewing)

- Kindle

- Barnes & Noble/Nook

- Amazon UK

- Amaxon DE (Eur. 2.40)




- Smashwords (includes online viewing and pdf file)

- Amazon/Kindle

- Barnes & Noble/Nook

- Amazon UK

- Amazon DE

Nanowrimo: Do You Know What Your Next Book Is?

Fall is my favorite season. Maybe it's that Halloween thing, maybe it's the "back to school" energy, maybe it's the Santa Ana winds that were so much a part of my life growing up in Southern California that I made them a character in The Space Between, maybe it's just that you get a jolt of ambition because it gets cooler and your brain returns to some functional temperature.

Because it's sort of ingrained in us (whether we like it or not), that fall is the beginning of a new school year, I think fall is a good time for making resolutions. Like, about that new book you're going to be writing for the next year or so.

Myself, I have so many books to finish right now that I can't let myself think about any new ones until I get at least ONE more done. I've taken the idea of multitasking to a near-suicidal extreme. But I'm not complaining – not only do I have a job, I have my dream job.

However, given what I blog and teach about, I am aware that this is a perfect time for OTHER people to be thinking about THEIR new books. Because, you know, it's September, but November will be here before you know it.

I'm sure many if not most here are aware that November is Nanowrimo – National Novel Writing Month. As explained at the official site here, and here and here, the goal of Nanowrimo is to bash through 50,000 words of a novel in a single month.

I could not be more supportive of this idea – it gives focus and a nice juicy competitive edge to an endeavor that can seem completely overwhelming when you're facing it all on your own. Through peer pressure and the truly national focus on the event, Nanowrimo forces people to commit. It's easy to get caught up in and carried along by the writing frenzy of tens of thousands – or maybe by now hundreds of thousands - of "Wrimos". And I've met and heard of lots of novelists, like Carrie Ryan (The Forest of Hands and Teeth) Sara Gruen (Water For Elephants), and Lisa Daily (The Dreamgirl Academy) who started novels during Nanowrimo that went on to sell, sometimes sell big.

Nanowrimo works.

But as everyone who reads this blog knows, I'm not a big fan of sitting down and typing Chapter One at the top of a blank screen and seeing what comes out from there. It may be fine – but it may be a disaster, or something even worse than a disaster – an unfinished book. And it doesn't have to be.

I'm always asked to do Nanowrimo "pep talks". These are always in the month of November.

That makes no sense to me.

I mean, I'm happy to do it, but mid-November is way too late for that kind of thing. What people should be asking me, and other authors that they ask to do Nano support, is Nano PREP talks.

If you're going to put a month aside to write 50,000 words, doesn't it make a little more sense to have worked out the outline, or at least an overall roadmap, before November 1? I am pretty positive that in most cases far more writing, and far more professional writing, would get done in November if Wrimos took the month of October – at LEAST - to really think out some things about their story and characters, and where the whole book is going. It wouldn't have to be the full-tilt-every-day frenzy that November will be, but even a half hour per day in October, even fifteen minutes a day, thinking about what you really want to be writing would do your potential novel worlds of good.

But you know what? Even if you never look at that prep work again, your brilliant subconscious mind will have been working on it for you for a whole month. (Cause let's face it – we don't do this mystical thing called writing all by ourselves, now, do we?).

So once again, I'm going to do a Nano prep series, but this year as you can see I'm starting even earlier. But I'll be gentle, just to get you all thinking at first, and hopefully get some people not just to consider Nano this year, but to give them a chance to really make something of the month.

Here's the first thing to consider:

How do you choose the next book you write? (Or the first, if it's your first?)

I know, I know, it chooses you. That's a good answer, and sometimes it IS the answer, but it's not the only answer. And let's face it – just like with, well, men, sometimes the one who chooses you is NOT the one YOU should be choosing. What makes anyone think it's any different with books?

It's a huge commitment, to decide on a book to write. That's a minimum of six months of your life just getting it written, not even factoring in revisions and promotion. You live in that world for a long, long time. Not only that, but if you're a professional writer, you're pretty much always going to be having to work on more than one book at a time. You're writing a minimum of one book while you're editing another and always doing promotion for a third.

So the book you choose to write is not just going to have to hold your attention for six to twelve months with its world and characters, but it's going to have to hold your attention while you're working just as hard on another or two or three other completely different projects at the same time. You're going to have to want to come back to that book after being on the road touring a completely different book and doing something that is both exhausting and almost antithetical to writing (promotion).

That's a lot to ask of a story.

So how does that decision process happen?

When on panels or at events, I have been asked, "How do you decide what book you should write?" I have not so facetiously answered: "I write the book that someone writes me a check for."

That's maybe a screenwriter thing to say, and I don't mean that in a good way, but it's true, isn't it?

Anything that you aren't getting a check for you're going to have to scramble to write, steal time for – it's just harder. That doesn't mean it's not worth doing, or that it doesn't produce great work, but it's harder.

As a professional writer, you're also constricted to a certain degree by your genre, and even more so by your brand. I'm not allowed to turn in a chick lit story, or a flat-out gruesome horrorfest, or probably a spy story, either. Once you've published you are a certain commodity.

If you are writing a series, you're even more restricted. You have a certain amount of freedom about your situation and plot but – you're going to have to write the same characters, and if your characters live in a certain place, you're also constricted by place. Now that I'm doing a couple of paranormal series, I am learning that every decision is easier in a way, because so many elements are already defined, but it's also way more limiting than my standalones and I could see how it would get frustrating.

Input from your agent is key, of course - you are a team and you are shaping your career together. Your agent will steer you away from projects that are in a genre that is glutted, saving you years of work over the years, and s/he will help you make all kinds of big-pitcure decisions.

But what I'm really interested in right now is not the restrictions but the limitless possibilities. I'll get more specific next post.

How DO you decide what to write?

And even more importantly – How do you decide what to READ?

Because I have a theory that it's actually the same answer, but we'll see. More later!

Happy Fall, everyone...

- Alex



=====================================================

Screenwriting Tricks for Authors and Writing Love, Screenwriting Tricks for Authors, II, are now available in all e formats and as pdf files. Either book, any format, just $2.99.

- Smashwords (includes pdf and online viewing)

- Kindle

- Barnes & Noble/Nook

- Amazon UK

- Amaxon DE (Eur. 2.40)




- Smashwords (includes online viewing and pdf file)

- Amazon/Kindle

- Barnes & Noble/Nook

- Amazon UK

- Amazon DE

Key Story Elements: Love and Gladiators

Those of you who have been reading my books and this blog for a while know that I am always, always harping on – I mean stressing – the usefulness of working with a master list, a top ten (or more) list of your favorite movies and books in the genre that you're writing,



In fact, the bottom line of the blog, the STFA books, and the workshops is just that: Take ten movies and books that you love in the genre(s) you're writing in and break down what those storytellers are doing to create the experience of those stories.



The story structure elements I've broken down here and here are applicable to any genre.



But there are other story elements that are just as important that are specific to whatever genre or genres you're writing in, and also elements that are specific to the KIND of story you're writing.



I really had that driven home for me as I was writing Writing Love (Screenwriting Tricks II), because I did exactly that: to write the book I made a master list of ten love stories (in this case not always my favorites, because I wanted to have a broad range of romantic stories) and broke them down in depth to find the key story elements specific to that umbrella genre. And oh, man, did it turn the lights on for me.



Just a few of the elements I found that are used over and over that I never really noticed before: Handcuff the Couple Together, Fate (or the Weather) Intervenes, Mistaken Identity or False Identity, Getting to Know You, The Couple Forced to Share a Room (or Bed), The Bet, The Magical Day (Year, Place, Hour), The Dance, Why Them?, Falling in Love with the Family, Oops Wrong Brother (or Wrong Sister), Ghosts of Girlfriends/Boyfriends Past, The Kiss, The Awful Truth....



I could go on and on. Well, actually I do, in the book - that's sort of the point.



But after writing that book I am finding that I am much more attuned to key story elements - not just in romantic comedy or romantic suspence, but in any genre I happen to be looking at.



I have been rewatching Gladiator so I can eventually do a story breakdown of it (I know, I know, some of you just got really excited but I have a book due this month, so I'm not promising anything anytime soon. I don't even have time to write THIS blog.).



Gladiator does all manner of things excellently, and it's really brilliant in that first battle sequence – watch and see how well it does a number of things that are specific to and EXPECTED by the audience of a war story.



- First of all, it starts with an epic and spectacular battle SETPIECE, which gives you all the glory (for those who call it that) and gruesomeness of war. It tells the audience: Oh yeah, you're going to get what you want out of this puppy, just sit back and let us deliver. SPECTACLE is one of the key elements of an epic is and you need it in a majority of your setpieces.



- The sequence focuses on the internal life of the hero first, with that odd and lyrical and bittersweet vision (the OPENING IMAGE) that Maximus has right up front. We know absolutely this is the hero and that there's more to him than being a warrior. CREATING A MYSTERY ABOUT YOUR PROTAGONIST from the beginning pulls your audience or reader into the story.



- The sequence has a RALLYING SPEECH by Maximus to his men. This is a huge tradition of war stories - look at Shakespeare's Henry V, the St. Crispin Day speech for one of the most famous and emulated examples.



Here's the Kenneth Branagh version.



The rallying speech is almost an obligatory element in a war story (although the deliberate absence of one could be a powerful statement, too). But it's also an element that you can steal and use to great effect in different genres, a con story or a heist story or a detective story.



- It has a BATTLE CRY as well, a variation on a tag line: "At my signal, unleash hell." And a troop motto that also serves as a tag line: "Strength and honor."



- It has a clear BATTLE PLAN. It's often most effective to spell the plan out before the troops go into battle, so we know what we're looking at, but in the hands of a master director like Ridley Scott the battle plan is clear in the action (even for someone like me who has to watch a scene like this from under my chair)". First, Maximus's forces use flaming arrows and machines to attack from a distance and kill a great number of the barbarians horribly, right at the beginning. Then the troops move slowly forward in a single unit, protecting themselves from enemy arrows in the front and top by using their huge shields as a wall. And then once a great number of the enemy have been slain or maimed and they are closer, they finish the greatly reduced numbers of them off in hand-to-hand combat.



A clear BATTLE PLAN is a must for every fight sequence in a war story, but is incredibly useful in other genres too, from comedy (THE HANGOVER – figure out fron the clues in that trashed room what happened last night and where the groom is) to romantic comedy (MEAN GIRLS – the strategy against the Plastics) to capers (INCEPTION: think of how many times they spelled out that plan, with scale models to demonstrate).



- We are also emotionally manipulated into CARING ABOUT THE OUTCOME of the battle in several ways, but particularly the use of the dog in the battle, which makes the action excruciating (we are much more apt to care about an animal than a person) and also linking Maximus with the dog defines qualities of Maximus's character (he is loyal and true), and makes us care more about Maxiums surviving the battle, by associating him emotionally with the dog.



These are just a handful of the war story story elements that just that one sequence in this film does well (and I'll go into more when I get around to the full breakdown).



Well, what I'm suggesting is that if you're writing a war story or a war epic, that you make a list of ten of those stories and watch or read them in a row, looking for those common and pivotal elements that are specific and expected in that genre. I can do this for you until the end of time and it will never be as effective as you doing it for yourself.



And that holds for any genre of story that you're writing.



By the way, I'm just making up a lot of those names for those elements, and I'm encouraging you to do the same. It's more fun and personal that way, and it will define elements you particularly love and hate. Or love to hate. Make yourself a glossary for your structure notebook, and keep adding examples to it as you see them. I'm not kidding, it really works.



You can start right now, in fact. What are some specific genre elements you've noticed – in any genre?



- Alex





=====================================================



Screenwriting Tricks for Authors and Writing Love, Screenwriting Tricks for Authors, II, are now available in all e formats and as pdf files. Either book, any format, just $2.99.



- Smashwords (includes pdf and online viewing)



- Kindle



- Barnes & Noble/Nook



- Amazon UK



- Amaxon DE (Eur. 2.40)









- Smashwords (includes online viewing and pdf file)



- Amazon/Kindle



- Barnes & Noble/Nook



- Amazon UK



- Amazon DE

Zener cards, ESP, parapsychology, and THE UNSEEN

Out now in the UK: The Unseen





Some of you asked to hear more about my research for The Unseen. You know when people ask you how long it takes you to write a book? Well, I think this book is a particularly great example of how long it REALLY takes to write a book.





The Unseen is a book that has been percolating for a long, long, LONG time.





Since my childhood, really.





I'm sure a good number of you recognize these:



The Zener ESP cards.



I don't know about you, but just the sight of those images gives me a thrill. Maybe I mean, chill… because it's all about the unknown. Do we have that sixth sense, the freaking power of extra-sensory perception, or do we not?



Well, parapsychologist Dr. J.B. Rhine said we do. All of us. And in the late 1920's, on through the 1960's, he used the brand-new science of statistics to prove it, in controlled laboratory experiments that made him a household name.



I have no idea how I first came to hear about this, but then again, I grew up in California, specifically, Berkeley - and astrology and Tarot and meditation and anything groovy and psychic was just part of everyday life.



And it was very, very early that I first heard of Dr. Rhine and the ESP tests. In fact, my sister the artist made a set of her own Zener cards when we were in just fourth or fifth grade. I swear, it was in the air.



Here's the principle: take a pack of twenty-five Zener cards, five sets of five simple symbols: a circle, a square, a cross, a star, and two wavy lines, like water. Two subjects sit on opposite sides of a black screen, unable to see each other, and one subject, the Sender, takes the pack of ESP cards and looks at each card, one at a time, while the Receiver sorts another set of cards into appropriate boxes, depending on what card s/he thinks the Sender is holding and communicating.



Pure chance is twenty percent, or five cards right out of a deck. Because if you have five cards, chance dictates that you would guess right 20 percent of the time.



So anyone who scores significantly more than 20 percent is demonstrating some ESP ability. (The Rhine lab generally used 5 sets of cards for each test run).



You can try it online at any number of places, including here.



And seriously, don't we all – or haven't we all at some point – think we have some of that? It's kind of seductive, isn't it?



Now, what Dr. Rhine was doing with these Zener cards was truly revolutionary. By the 1920's the whole world, pretty much, was obsessed with the occult and spiritualism, especially the idea of life after death and the concept of being able to connect with dead loved ones on whatever plane they were now inhabiting.



There were many factors that contributed to this obsession, but two in particular:



1. Darwin's publication of THE ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES, in 1859, which began a worldwide anxiety about whether there was any afterlife at all… and a fanatic desire to prove there was… especially among some scientists, interestingly enough.



And



2. The Great War, or as we know it now, WWI, in which so many people died so quickly that traumatized relatives were desperate to contact their lost – children, to be blunt - infants, as in "infantry", underage cannon fodder – and have some hope that they were not lost for eternity.



The Great War really kicked spiritualism into high gear.



This was the age of "mediums", most of whom were total frauds, con artists who used parlor magician tricks to dupe grieving relatives into believing their lost loved ones were coming back to give them messages – for a hefty price.



Well, (after a brief stint in botany and an abrupt switch to psychology) Dr. J.B. Rhine began his career debunking fraudulent mediums. His commitment to the truth won him a reputation for scientific integrity and a position at the newly established parapsychology lab at Duke University in North Carolina, the first ever in the U.S., where Rhine and his mentor, William McDougall, embarked on a decades-long quest to use the brand-new science of statistics and probability to test the occurrence of psychic phenomena such as ESP and psychokinesis (the movement of objects with the mind).



Using Zener cards and automated dice-throwing machines, Rhine tested thousands of students under laboratory conditions, and by applying the science of statistics to the results, came to believe that ESP actually does occur.



Rhine's wife and colleague, Dr. Louisa Rhine, conducted her own parallel study, in which she gathered thousands of accounts from all over the world of psychic occurrences and followed up with interviews, from which she isolated several extremely common recurring patterns of psychic experiences, such as:



Crisis apparitions: in which a loved one appears to another loved one at a moment of extreme trauma or death.



Precognitive dreams: dreaming a future event.



Visitations in dreams: a dead loved one coming to a loved one in her or his sleep to impart some crucial bit of information.



Sympathetic pain: in which a loved one feels pain in a limb or elsewhere in the body when another loved one is injured in that place (often this is birth pains that a female relative will experience when a daughter or other female relative goes into labor).



The Rhines' daughter, psychologist Sally Rhine Feather, has written a fascinating book on the above called THE GIFT, which was extremely helpful in my research for The Unseen.



Now, most people who read about the paranormal and parapsychology, even casually, are aware of Dr. Rhine and his ESP research. But most people are not as aware that researchers in the Duke lab also did field investigations of poltergeists, starting in the late 50's and early sixties.



Poltergeists!



I don't know about you, but that just rocks my world. What ARE they? Are they the projected repressed sex energy of frustrated adolescents? Are they ghosts? Are they some other kind of extra-dimensional entity? Is it all just a fraud, a fad, perpetrated by people who wanted media attention before the advent of reality TV?



So I've always wanted to so something, sometime, about the whole Rhine/Duke/ESP/poltergeist thing.



And then a few years ago a friend of mine handed me a column torn out of the newspaper about a lecture on the Duke campus called: "Secrets of the Rhine Parapsychology Lab" and said, "You should go to that." Because he knows I like that kind of thing, but he had no idea that I've been obsessed with Rhine since I was – seven, eight, whatever.



And I did go to the lecture, and I was stupefied to learn that after the parapsychology lab officially closed in 1965, when Dr. Rhine reached the mandatory age of retirement, seven hundred boxes of original research files were sealed and shut up in the basement of the graduate library, and had only just been opened to the public again.



Is that a story or what?



All those questions that instantly spring to mind. Why did the lab close, really? (Well, in truth, Dr. Rhine retired. But what if…) Why were the files sealed? Was someone trying to hide something? And most importantly - What the HELL is in those boxes? SEVEN HUNDRED boxes?



And that's when I knew I had a story.



But it all started with a childhood obsession and years of random research on the subject that suddenly caught fire with some specific field research and one choice factoid.



So the lesson here, I think, is –



Forage widely. If a lecture at a library or university sounds intriguing, take a chance and go. You might get a whole book handed to you. And just always be adding to those open files in your head of potential projects. Read voraciously on the subjects that interest you. All this random research does eventually achieve critical mass, and suddenly you have a book.



We are so lucky as writers that our JOB is to pursue the things we're passionate about. Take advantage and enjoy the hell out of it.



So for those of you who find the above intriguing, and/or who like your mysteries with a touch of the real-life uncanny, you can get The Unseen here:



- Amazon UK



- Amazon US



- Read an excerpt



And if you have no money at all, don't despair, because first, you're not alone, as I think we're all painfully aware these days…



And second, we all still have the great gift of our public libraries. Click through this link right now and reserve The Unseen from your local library. (enter your zip to find all the libraries near you.) If they don't have it yet, please please please - request it. Libraries have suffered cutbacks just like the rest of the known universe, but before the crash, the formula was that a library would buy a new hardcover for every five patrons who requested the book. So that is some truly powerful support you can give to your favorite authors: request a book, and that's one-fifth of a hardcover sale, at no cost to you. Believe me, it really, really helps. (In fact, why not check out books by ten of your favorite authors every time you go to the library? I do, every single time. And I'm at the library A LOT.)



And now it's your turn: have you ever experienced a crisis apparition, a precognitive dream or visitation, or sympathetic pains? Or do you know anyone who has? Do you believe these things happen?



Or tell us about a project that caught fire with the perfect research factoid. Or about a subject you wish you could find a thriller or mystery about.



- Alex





--------------------------------------------------





THE UNSEEN Reviews:



Charlotte Examiner review



Dark Scribe magazine review



Genre Reviews review

THE UNSEEN - out in the UK today!

Amazing, ANOTHER book release! My poltergeist thriller The Unseen comes out in the UK today, with probably my favorite cover ever. It actually gave me a bad nightmare, and I almost never have nightmares.



The Unseen is a spooky thriller that crosses mystery and the supernatural, with some romance, too, this time. Yes, my genre identity issues are alive and well in this one.



The story is based on the real-life, world-famous ESP experiments conducted by Dr. J.B. Rhine at the Duke University parapsychology lab: the first dedicated parapsychology lab in the U.S., founded in the late 1920's.





Most people are aware of Dr. Rhine's ESP studies with Zener cards.







Not so many people know that in the 1960's Duke researchers also conducted field studies of poltergeists.



Poltergeists! I've always been fascinated by them. I mean, what even are they?



In my fictional story, a young psychology professor from California experiences a precognitive dream that shatters her engagement and changes her life forever. Determined to make a fresh start,, she decides to take a professorship in the Duke psychology department, and soon becomes obsessed with the long-sealed files of the parapsychology lab, which attempted to prove whether ESP really exists.



Along with a charismatic male colleague, she discovers a file on a controversial poltergeist experiment which may have been the cause of the lab's closing. The two professors team up to take two psychically gifted students into an abandoned Southern mansion to replicate the experiment.



What they don't know is that the entire original research team ended up insane… or dead.



This story percolated in me for a long time (I've been pretty much obsessed with the idea of ESP testing since I was seven or eight years old), and I was able to do some very cool research for this one, including ghost hunts and a stay in a seriously haunted mansion that I used as the model for my poltergeist house. I'm going to talk about all of that more this week... in the meantime you can read an excerpt on my website, or just order it from Amazon UK.



----



"Sokoloff keeps her story enticingly ambiguous, never clarifying until the climax whether the unfolding weirdness might be the result of the investigators' psychic sensitivities or the mischievous handiwork of a human villain."



- Publisher's Weekly



----



"This spine-tingling story has every indication of becoming a horror classic... a chillingly dark look into the unknown."



- Romantic Times Book Reviews, 4 1/2 stars





----



"Alexandra Sokoloff takes the horror genre to new heights."



- Charlotte Examiner



----



"Sokoloff has provided a new and interesting twist to the genre, one that will stay with the reader long after the book has been read… the hair on the back of my neck may never lie down."



-Bookreporter.com

----



"One of the better books I've read this year... sure to please readers with the most discerning taste."



- Fear Zone

Writing Love: Screenwriting Tricks for Authors II

This should make a lot of people here deliriously happy: the second Screenwriting Tricks book is up now - just $2.99 for any format.

- Smashwords (includes online viewing and pdf file)

- Amazon/Kindle

- Barnes & Noble/Nook

- Amazon UK

- Amazon DE



Now, let me be clear. This is not a book on writing romance.

What it is is a greatly expanded follow-up to Screenwriting Tricks For Authors - with a special focus on the key story elements and structure tricks used in writing love (including love subplots). The ten story breakdowns in this book are all romantic comedy, romantic adventure, period romance and romantic suspense. (I'm going to have to save urban fantasy and paranormal for another, darker book).

I started the book as a general revision of STFA, to incorporate all of the new discoveries I've been making from writing my own novels, from teaching workshops, and from interfacing with my workshop students and all of you here about your story problems and discoveries. One of the things I most wanted to do, at the requests of quite a few of you (you know who you are), was include more examples from love stories and comedies. Yes, I'm a thriller writer, and most of you are aware that my teaching examples can run toward the - um, homicidal.

But as I was reviewing a lot of romantic comedies and romantic suspense for great and teachable examples of key story elements and other points I'm always trying to make, it dawned on me how much more useful it would be to let the first workbook stand as is and move forward by concentrating the new material in this book, and each subsequent book, on just one genre at a time.

One thing I love about this new book is that it really demonstrates that idea I'm always trying to get across about working with a Master List, that Top Ten list of your own favorite stories in your specific genre. So it made sense for me to organize this new book by making my own list of ten love stories and analyzing those in-depth, looking closely at how these films handle key elements, both of general storytelling and those elements specific to love stories.

So yes, it should be very useful to romance writers, but I hope writers of all genres will be able to get almost or just as much out of it, too.

There are ten full story breakdowns in this book:

While You Were Sleeping
Four Weddings and a Funeral
Sense and Sensibility
Groundhog Day
Sea of Love
The Proposal
New In Town
Leap Year
Notting Hill
Romancing the Stone

(And if you ask me, that alone is worth the price of the book, no matter what genre you're working in!)

As I worked my way through the list I was finding patterns and elements of love stories that I'd never been consciously aware of before, but after my third or fourth story breakdown I realized how very common certain elements are to love stories of all kinds, and how helpful it is to know and name those elements every time you start out to write a love story — or love subplot. And that goes for ANY genre you happen to be working in.

I know some people are going to ask - "Which book should I get?"

Why oh why do people ask these things of authors? You should get BOTH, of course, you can have them both for less than the price of a paperback. Plus, then I can eat. My cat will thank you, too.

But if you want to know which to START with, well, it depends. If you're writing romance or anything close to it, then definitely get Writing Love for all the love story examples. If you're writing the darker genres, you will want to have the first Screenwriting Tricks for the darker examples. If you are brand new to this blog or to writing, and not particularly writing love, then you will probably want to read the shorter STFA first; there is so much more material in Writing Love that it might be overwhelming. When you're just starting out, less is often more.

If you've been reading the blog for a long time, and/or if you already have STFA I, then you definitely want Writing Love - it's twice as much material and twice as many breakdowns.

Please let me know what you think. The great thing about e publishing is that it's all so alterable!

- Alex

----------------------------------------------------------------------------




- Smashwords (includes pdf and online viewing)

- Kindle

- Barnes & Noble/Nook

- Amazon UK

- Amaxon DE (Eur. 2.40)

Brave New E World, part 2

So to continue some thoughts and links on indie publishing...

I tend to overwork, to put it mildly, but this summer is really crazy. In addition to working on a traditionally contracted trilogy, and an adult thriller that I'm writing on spec, I am learning the entire business of e publishing. And it is a business; I look at it as starting a new division of my publishing career.

I do have to say it's getting easier. I'd already worked through the process with the SCREENWRITING TRICKS FOR AUTHORS workbook, with about a dozen very patient author friends who had already been through it talking me off the ledge... I mean, through the steps.

This week I put up THE SPACE BETWEEN, my spooky YA thriller, and the process was easier and faster because I'd already been through all the steps, and am starting to internalize that there IS a process and steps, and it's all fairly logical. (Which I will set down, in order, in another post).

And I know all of it is going to get easier and easier. Except, of course, writing the books. That part hasn't changed, unfortunately.

So that's the first point to cover, today.

FIRST, LAST AND ALWAYS, IT'S ABOUT THE BOOK.

This is a project that was very close to me and very hard to write. You know, every book is different, but I know from my own experience and from talking to a lot of author friends who started publishing at about the same time, that sometime around about your fourth book you start getting restless and you just want to stretch.

So I was experimenting with a lot of things with SPACE. It's my first Young Adult, my first book in present tense, my first book set in California even though California is where I've lived for practically all my life (apparently I had to leave it to be able to write about it).

Also I was adapting my own short story, "The Edge of Seventeen", which won the Thriller award for Best Short Fiction two years ago.

I'm not new to adaptation, it was half the work I did when I was a screenwriter, but I really had to open up the story. That was the best part, it turned out – I always felt there was much more to the story I'd initially told, but I really surprised myself with how much more there was. Enough for at least one sequel, as it turns out.

Add to all those challenges the fact that for the last two years I've been dealing with a devastating family illness and death. It's easily been the hardest time of my life.

I guess it's no surprise, then, that when I'd finally nailed the book, it was…. How to say this?

Dark.

Really, really dark. Which I tend to be anyway, but under the circumstances… well, it was dark.

And it's about high school. Now, I personally had a better time in HS than most, because we had such a great theater department that that's what I did. But that doesn't mean I wasn't acutely aware of the horror and misery going on around me, and that's what I write about in SPACE. And when you're dealing with a sixteen-year old protagonist, everything seems all that much darker.

So that brings us to the second point.

WHY GO INDIE?

The first thing is always writing a great book. But once you have that great book, there's the decision of how to market it. In traditional publishing, this has a lot to do with your agent deciding which editors are the best potential buyers at each house, But with the rise of indie publishing, one of the new decisions is "Indie or traditional?"

Well, here's one of the things that's so cool about e publishing - that you can use it for those slightly off projects that I KNOW all you great slightly off people have. In this case, I was writing a YA that was - even as edgy as YA has gotten – edgy enough to give me and my agent pause about submitting it to editors.

Not that it wouldn't be totally great to have a banned book in my bibliography, but… I was writing from the perspective of a 16-year old who has seen WAY too much, just like the 16-year old that I was. And while I myself was reading things that were way too old for me when I was - well, seven, actually, but certainly when I was 16 – what that meant was that I was reading adult books that were way too old for me. Because when I was a teenager there weren't really that many YAs that were too old for anyone except for that twisted Flowers in the Attic series. And those were twisted in a way I was familiar with from my friends' lives, unfortunately, so I didn't really understand why the books were considered so twisted. I mean, why get upset about the books? Try getting upset about incest and child abuse in real life, and DOING something about it, why don't you…

Um, sorry, where was I?

Oh, right. Nowadays there is a ton of edgy YA out there – edgy being the encompassing word for books that cover incest, rape, cutting, eating disorders, mental illness, child abuse of any kind, teen criminal behavior, school shootings, suicide… no taboo is left, actually. But in THE SPACE BETWEEN I cross a supernatural thriller and edgy YA, which takes things a little further out there.

Now, that didn't discourage my agent. But because of the life interruptions of my last year, I'm in the interesting position of having several interrupted spec books that I'm just now getting back to. So because THE SPACE BETWEEN is my first and only YA, and one of my others is much more along the lines of my other adult thrillers, only even more mainstream, and because my agent is really aware of and supportive of my desire to get into the indie publishing business, we decided that I would indie publish SPACE, and he will shop the adult thriller traditionally (if that still makes the most sense when I finish that book. Which is a serious question, these days).

It's an experiment – because at least at the moment YA is not generally a great seller in e books, so it could be that a traditional publishing deal would be a better way to go. But things have changed so much in publishing in a year that e publishing first does not preclude doing a traditional publishing deal later; in fact it's more and more common for traditional publishers to pick up indie books for traditional publishing.

I'm in the lucky position of having multiple projects and a steady income from previous contracts, so I can take some risk.

So here's another point.

YOUR AGENT IS YOUR BEST FRIEND. At least if you've chosen well. You and your agent make these decisions together. (It horrifies me to hear people admit that they're hiding their e publishing from their agent - do you really think that's going to stay a secret? What are people thinking?)

If you don't have an agent and are considering doing directly to indie publishing, I would strongly suggest that along with writing the best damn book you can write, you be doing reading every day on what indie publishing actually entails so you are going into it with real knowledge.

Speaking of agents, this is an interesting article by Barry Eisler on a new trend.

Here are the most essential resources I know of for indie publishing information:

- A Newbie's Guide to Publishing

Not that anyone here doesn't already know, but Joe's is the one essential site on e publishing.

- The Kindleboards

Browsing this message board a couple of days a week will give you a very practical crash course on everything from cover design essentials (what works for traditional publishing is NOT what works at thumbnail size), to promotion, to what indie authors' actual sales figures are. People on the boards are friendly and helpful; I also found my two great proofreaders there. It's also interesting to see the politics of indie vs. traditional publishing; personally, I just don't see it as an Either/Or proposition.

- The Business Rusch Publishing series

Everyone, and I mean everyone, should read Kristine Rusch's incredible series on the essentials of publishing and the changes in our world.

- I've also been hearing plugs for Digital Book World, but I haven't read enough to give a personal recommendation.

Okay, I think that's enough reading for now. What I'll be doing - maybe not next by soon - is compiling a step-by-step guide of what I've learned about prepping a book for e publication and getting it up and published: editing, formatting, cover design, pricing, distribution, promotion, and the kitchen sink.

- Alex


----------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE SPACE BETWEEN



Buy for Kindle:

Buy on Smashwords

Buy for Nook

On Amazon UK

On Amazon DE

$2.99, any format


Sixteen-year old Anna Sullivan is having terrible dreams of a massacre at her school. Anna's father is a mentally unstable veteran, her mother vanished when Anna was five, and Anna might just chalk the dreams up to a reflection of her crazy waking life — except that Tyler Marsh, the most popular guy at the school and Anna's secret crush, is having the exact same dream.

Despite the gulf between them in social status, Anna and Tyler connect, first in the dream and then in reality. As the dreams reveal more, with clues from the school social structure, quantum physics, probability, and Anna's own past, Anna becomes convinced that they are being shown the future so they can prevent the shooting…

If they can survive the shooter — and the dream.

THE EDGE OF SEVENTEEN





Buy for Kindle

Buy on Smashwords

Buy for Nook

Amazon UK

Amazon DE

99 cents, any format.

The Space Between

I know, it was a holiday weekend, but I've been busy with the OTHER revolution: I just put my first original e novel up for sale.



Buy for Kindle:

Buy on Smashwords (which includes the ability to read online and/or download as a pdf).

Buy for Nook

On Amazon UK

On Amazon DE


$2.99, any format





Sixteen-year old Anna Sullivan is having terrible dreams of a massacre at her school. Anna's father is a mentally unstable veteran, her mother vanished when Anna was five, and Anna might just chalk the dreams up to a reflection of her crazy waking life — except that Tyler Marsh, the most popular guy at the school and Anna's secret crush, is having the exact same dream.

Despite the gulf between them in social status, Anna and Tyler connect, first in the dream and then in reality. As the dreams reveal more, with clues from the school social structure, quantum physics, probability, and Anna's own past, Anna becomes convinced that they are being shown the future so they can prevent the shooting…

If they can survive the shooter — and the dream.

I am definitely portraying the darker side of high school here - the book is for older teens (and younger ones whose reading tends toward Stephen King and Shirley Jackson!) and adults.

The Space Between is based on my short story "The Edge of Seventeen", which won the Thriller award for Best Short Fiction two years ago, and I've also put that up online, because that's what we can do, now!





Buy for Kindle

Buy on Smashwords

Buy for Nook

99 cents, any format.






I just got back from teaching a week-long workshop in Texas and I found myself talking a LOT about e publishing, something I never would have done just a year ago, but I wasn't kidding about the revolution; we're in the middle of one. And I've realized I need to start talking about all of this on this blog, so I will be, starting this week.

But please take a moment to click through the links - buy the book, "Like" the book on Amazon, download a free sample. Remember, I don't get paid for writing this blog - I get paid when people buy my books. All support is truly appreciated!

Hope everyone had a fabulous holiday!

- Alex

Brave New E World

Last post I threatened to start a series on e publishing. I'm NOT going to be doing this pretending to be an expert - I'll be pointing you all to much more comprehensive resources while talking about my own experiences. But I just got back from teaching a five-day workshop, rare for me, and I surprised myself with how much time I spent talking about e books and indie publishing, and it it made me realize that I need to be doing more of that on this blog. We're in the middle of if a revolution.

But I've realized I don't have the faintest idea how many readers of this blog are crossover readers from Murderati. A few? A lot? I know I wouldn't have time to read two blogs a week, so I can't really assume anything.

So I think I need to backtrack and post something I've already discussed on Murderati, because it sets up the more specific e publishing post I'm going to post next.

A career is always evolving, I guess, it's not just a writer's career that does. And it's interesting to look back over my career and see how certain patterns emerge. Today I'll be looking at the fairly positive ones, not the horrific soul-crushing mistakes that take years to recover from. That's another post!

So a first really clear pattern is that every 5 to 10 years I have moved from one medium to another, always incorporating what I've learned from each previous incarnation.

I started off not as a writer but in theater, at eight or nine, first acting (a lot of it) and dancing, then directing and choreographing. I didn't start writing until college. But in theater, without meaning to, I was learning all the jobs required to write: acting, directing, set design, lighting design, choreography, musical direction, props…. I also did a stint in video production in there somewhere.

I graduated from college and worked for a couple of years in an improvisational theater ensemble, which was more great training, and a totally fabulous time. But I started getting these– feelings. Whispers, you might say. They weren't all that coherent really, but I was picking up on a message that sounded suspiciously like: "No one's ever going to pay you to do political theater in Berkeley." It's a coals to Newcastle kind of thing.

So since I'd already been to New York, and I knew I didn't want to write for Broadway (or Off-), I decided - not all at once, but in a sort of gradual tipping point from "maybe" to "okay, let's just do it" – that I'd move down to LA and become a screenwriter. Yes, just like that. You really have to love California; from birth we are completely inundated with T-shirt and bumper sticker messages like "Follow your bliss!" "Do what you love and the money will follow!" "Feel the fear and do it anyway!"

Even more amusing- we actually believe all that.

So I moved down to LA and became a screenwriter. Pretty much just like that. Well, I worked in development for about a year and a half while I was writing my first script, and of course I was working my ass off learning the craft and the town and everything it takes to actually accomplish it all, but it really did happen pretty much like that.

This is another example of a pattern that established itself early in my life. I'd be subliminally pushed to do something and then I'd power down, one might say obsessively, and make it happen. I directed my first full-length play at 16 by pretty much the same process; I landed an unheard-of gig (for a 17-year old!) in college directing a full-scale musical every year with an actual budget and in fantastic theater venues. The Universe is very supportive of inspiration, I find.

I won't go into my Hollywood years, it's too convoluted a story for one blog and I still have the PTSD issues. (You can read a little about it here, though...) I'll just say I made a good and sometimes great living as a screenwriter for a long time until I started getting those feelings again– this time more like something was going terribly wrong in the industry. A lot of this was coming from being on the Board of Directors of the WGA, the screenwriters' union, and getting an insider look at changes happening in the film business. I started getting whispers again– something like: This is insane. Save yourself. Get out. Or at least, diversify, as they say in the financial business. And so I wrote a book. At night. Screenwriting became my day job as I sweated over the novel, one page at a time. Sometimes one paragraph or one sentence at a time. But that's how a book gets written.

And The Harrowing sold and was nominated for a couple of awards and suddenly I was in another career. Just at the right time, I have to say, given what's happened in the film business since I wrote that first book.

So now for the last five years I've been making my living at books. I have five published novels out, with numerous foreign editions, and the non-fiction workbook of my Screenwriting Tricks workshops. I have contracts for four more books, and every day I am incredibly grateful to be making a living at what I love (or some days, love to hate) in the middle of this terrible recession.

But - I'm getting that feeling, again. That – "Time to change" feeling. "Diversify," the voice whispers. Sometimes it's not much of a whisper; sometimes it's a bolt straight upright in bed with a voice in my head screaming DO IT!!!! kind of thing. I mean, I have contracts for now, but what's the business going to look like in a year?

Yes, I am talking about indie publishing.

I already have a toe in the e book business. Screenwriting Tricks For Authors is up at Amazon for Kindle, and I've been loving getting that direct deposit to my bank account every month; it really helped back there around Christmas when my advance check was taking about forever to show up. And a few weeks ago I finally buckled down and figured out how to get the book up on Smashwords, in all those formats that Smashwords does, and on B&N for Nook. And once I did, I felt like a complete idiot for not having done it before. It is instant money that I could have been getting all along.

Back to the portfolio analogy for a moment: it's an income stream. As a professional author, I have many income streams. I get advances for my new books, I have a backlist that generates royalties, I have royalties from foreign publishers, and now I have e book income, soon to have much more, if things go as I'm planning - all in concert with my agent, of course.

The thing writers don't talk about enough, I think, is how we actually manage to make that combine into a real living. Well, I can tell you for myself, and for most of my friends who have NOT broken into the huge advance category but are still making a full-time living at writing books: how it's done is by constant, grueling work to get more product out there to create more income streams – on top of writing the best book you can write every single time. It's not very pleasant, truthfully – it means firing on all four burners 24/7. But that's nothing new - it seems to be the job description. Everyone I know does it.

Now, e books are a freaking ton of work that I've just added to an already overflowing plate. I am now responsible for lining up all kinds of support people that my publisher has always provided: proofreaders, editors, cover designers, formatters, technical services – and there's a lot of new technical stuff I've had to learn myself, which I must say is not my forte. It's overwhelming, which is why I haven't fully done it before now. But I think it's going to be crucial to have some eggs in that basket, so I'm biting the bullet, for real. To mix all kinds of metaphors, as you all know I love to do.

And honestly, the control and flexibility you get with indie publishing is exhilarating. One thing I've discovered is that you can create your own formats. For Screenwriting Tricks, I have been working on and off for most of the past year on an extensive revision of the first book, incorporating all the things I've been learning in my own workshops. And then I realized – Why revise the first one? At a $2.99 selling price I can put out another book that has a different focus, and people can choose which book is best suited to their needs, or get both – two whole workbooks for the price of one paperback novel! That's an incredible thing. And I can price it that way and still make money because the royalties are so high.

So, I've just released my spooky new original e book novel: The Space Between – plus the Thriller Award-winning short story that I based that novel on: The Edge of Seventeen (you can read more about those here.) The second volume of Screenwriting Tricks will be up - pretty sure - next week. And I'm going to write some posts documenting the process I've been going through and the resources I've discovered that helped me do it all.

It's a whole new world, but it's an exciting one, and I hope I can convey it in a way that might open some doors for other people thinking of taking the plunge.

So, a couple of questions. Do any of you do periodic reviews of your careers to see how far you've come and where you want to go from now? Do you find patterns?

And what about this e book thing? Have you done it? Are you thinking of doing it?

- Alex

----------------------------------------------------------------------------




Buy for Kindle:

Buy on Smashwords (which includes the ability to read online and/or download as a pdf).

Buy for Nook

On Amazon UK

On Amazon DE


$2.99, any format





Buy for Kindle

Buy on Smashwords

Buy for Nook


On Amazon UK

On Amazon DE

99 cents, any format.







- Smashwords (includes pdf and online viewing)

- Kindle

- Barnes & Noble/Nook

- Amazon UK

- Amaxon DE

$2.99, any format (Eur. 2.40)