Kate Lattey's Blog, page 8

You only know you love them when you let them go

After I finished writing Dream On, I knew that was the end of that series of novels. What I had to say about Marley and her sisters was done, and there is no third book in the series. (If there ever is anything, Van might get herself a spinoff, but it’s so vague in my head that it’s not something I’m planning on writing at this stage.) So when I finished the book and loaded it on Amazon and sent it to print, I knew that I was saying goodbye to the girls for a while.

The plan is to go back to Jay and finish Against the Clock, book 2 in the Clearwater Bay series. I have that book mostly written, and the next two planned out and pieces of them written, including the conclusion to the series. I know where it’s going and what I’m working towards.

But I can’t let go.

I don’t usually like reading my own books. It took me months to be able to sit down with Flying Changes and read it without cringing. I loved Dare to Dream when I wrote it but I couldn’t read it easily. When I released Dream On, I was reading it on my Kindle the next day. And the day after that.

And the day after that.

It’s not that I think it’s the best book ever, or that I don’t find errors in it when I read it back (I do…I’ll fix them soon). But I’m not ready to stop living in their world just yet. And I know what happens next. I know what Marley does next, and Kris, and Van. I know where they go and what they do and the good and bad things that happen to them in the next year or few years. There’s not enough there to write more books about, and I’m not planning on doing so. I need to walk away and leave them be, but I’m struggling.

I need to move on.

And there’s a lot coming up for Jay. There are conflicts and issues and problems and resolutions to discuss. There are relationships to delve into and out of, there are storylines to cover, new characters to introduce and familiar characters to reconnect with. There are even familiar characters to discover…people who have already turned up in Dare to Dream & Dream On who will also be part of Jay’s story. I’m looking forward to that – I want to tell those stories.

And yet…

I still can’t let my girls go.

Filed under: Clearwater Bay series, Dare To Dream, Dream On, writing Tagged: Against the Clock, Clearwater Bay, Dare To Dream, Dream On, Flying Changes, Jay Evans, Kate Lattey, Marley Carmichael, NZPonyWriter, pony book

X-ray enabled

There’s a feature on Amazon’s Kindle books called X-Ray. It isn’t available on every book, and it’s not something that you have the option of adding to your book when you load it onto Amazon, but for some reason, it has turned up on my novel Dare to Dream. I don’t know whether it requires a certain number of downloads, or a certain number of highlighted passages, but whatever the reason, Dare to Dream now has it. And it’s fun.

X-Ray is a feature that allows you to “see the bones of the book”. When you click on the X-Ray tab, it pulls up a list of People and Terms (51 and 10 respectively for Dare to Dream, although some of those “people” are ponies and dogs) and shows you in a wee bar chart where they appear in the book with a black line.

Marley Carmichael is the first name on the list, and her bar is a solid line of black, meaning she appears on pretty much every single page of this book.

Van Carmichael is next, with only a couple of small white spaces where she apparently is less prominent in the story for a while.

Kristen follows, somehow losing her surname, and having a handful of places where she is missing from the story (although I suspect that if Dream On ever manages to get X-Ray enabled, those roles will be reversed – there is more of Kris than Van in the sequel).

Cruise Control is next, and the list goes on.

When you touch on each of these characters’ names, it gives a full list of quotes, showing every time the name is mentioned in the book. Obviously for characters like Marley and Cruise, this happens hundreds of times. For others, who are only mentioned once or twice, the list of quoted passages is much shorter. One of the cool things about it is that it helps if you forget who a character is. For example, when I highlight Laura Buckeridge in the epilogue, it pops up with an X-Ray box reminding me of the last time Laura had shown up in the story:

Laura Buckeridge

“I’m glad you caught him,” Laura said. “He was so scared, he might have busted through the ring ropes.”

When you’re in the main X-Ray box, for each character that you click on, it gives you a quote from the text at the top of the page, providing a quick insight into who this person is. For the characters who turn up regularly, like Marley and her sisters, it’s simply the first time they are mentioned in the text. But for others, who aren’t quite so prominent, it doesn’t seem to pick up just the first one, and it’s quite neat flicking through and getting the X-Ray descriptions of each character.

Here are a few of my favourites:

“Cruise stood patiently, alert but relaxed, as she unclipped the lunge line and coiled it up.”

“Pete had been a fierce rival of Van’s back in her pony riding days, but unlike his snotty little sister, he’d always been nice to Marley.”

“Their belief that their daughter was the best thing since sliced bread had built up Susannah‘s dangerously high self-esteem.”

“But some of them have been exceptional, she thought, and none more so than Nimble. She’d known from the start that he was special, and he’d definitely proven himself to her last year when he’d beaten all comers at Nationals to take out the Speed Pony Championship.”

“Ajax’s muscles were bunching under his shining coat, his mane and tail were like silk and his eyes were bright and alert.”

“Breeze flattened her ears at this unflattering analogy and sulked off to stuff herself with more grass.”

“Buck fought for his head, trying to see the jump. Susannah gave him just enough rein at the last possible moment, and the honest pony found his stride and cleared the jump.”

“But Dad was always with her, and his touch was everywhere around the farm. He had built this place for his family, and the barn and yards and arena were all testament to his devotion to his three horse-crazy daughters.”

“Dottie, an aged spaniel lying on a rug in the corner of the room, lifted her head and whimpered softly.”

“Katy O’Reilly was lying on her stomach tearing blades of grass out of the ground and listening to a story being told her by a girl with curly red hair, about staying with her cousin in England.”

If you’ve read Dream On, that last one was for you.

Filed under: Dare To Dream, Dream On Tagged: amazon, Dare To Dream, Dream On, Kate Lattey, kindle, x-ray enabled

The inherent creativity of human life

I’ve been listening to a lot of talks lately by Sir Ken Robinson, whose life’s passion is education reform. In short, he wants to see creativity and the arts being given as much value in schools as core subjects such as science and maths. Amongst other things, he wants dance to be a compulsory subject for school children … and why not? Why is creativity the scourge of education?

Why do we value the ability to get the right answer over the ability to construct a new answer?

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” – Sir Ken Robinson

I’ve spent many years being educated – from primary school at the age of 5 to 12, through to secondary school at 13 to 17, and straight on to University. In those years I’ve had a few memorable teachers – some who were exceptional, and some who were abysmal – and many in-between.

I remember one professor in particular who ran the English department at my university. He told our class that he had been teaching and marking the same Shakespeare paper for the past 20 or so years, and every year, he read similar essays arguing the same points. He then said that if we could argue a different side, if we could pull something out of the play that was different or unexpected and could cite enough examples to make it valid, we would likely get a better mark than if we just parroted the usual spiel about how Iago represents the dark side of Othello’s soul.

I remember this because I still remember one of the essays that I prepared and wrote for my exam. The essay was on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and my point of difference was to argue that Caliban was a victim, not a villain. Now I’m not claiming to be the first person to do this (I am certainly not) but as I went through the play, pulling out Caliban’s lines and redefining them to shape my argument around them, I began to feel a deep sympathy for and interest in the character. I can’t remember what mark I got for that essay – I think I finished the paper with a B+ – but to this day, The Tempest remains my favourite of Shakespeare’s plays, and Caliban my favourite character. And deep in the files of my laptop are several documents for a YA novel, loosely based on The Tempest, which casts Caliban as the heroic lead. Maybe one day I’ll write it.

“I define creativity as the process of having original ideas that have value.” – Sir Ken Robinson

We cannot be afraid to be wrong. We cannot be afraid to take chances. Without my professor’s caveat, I would probably have sat down and written the usual boring essays for my Shakespeare exam out of fear of being penalised for trying something new. Because of him, I dove headfirst into those five plays, and found out more about them and my own ability for critical thinking than I ever had before.

Not everyone got so excited by this opportunity. Some of my classmates were satisfied to work within the usual parameters and get the usual answers, and one of my classmates was concerned that if she didn’t give a non-generic answer, that she would be penalised, and had to be reassured otherwise. But I thrived on the chance to create my own opinion. People say there’s no reason to teach Shakespeare in schools – but what better reason than that?

“Education can be stifling, no question about it. One of the reasons is that education — and American education in particular, because of the standardization — is the opposite of three principles I have outlined: it does not emphasize diversity or individuality; it’s not about awakening the student, it’s about compliance; and it has a very linear view of life, which is simply not the case with life at all.” – Sir Ken Robinson

I was always a good student. I worked hard, I got diligence awards year after year after year, although by the time I reached the end of my final year of high school I was getting disillusioned and bored. I remember getting full marks for an English assignment on advertising, where we had to break down the words and images used in print advertisements and discuss how they attempted to persuade consumers of the need for their product. I thrived on that – I found it easy and could have done it for hours. I struggled with Maths and other subjects though – my strength has always been in critical and lateral thinking, not in memorizing facts and formulas. I went to University because I was deemed to be “bright” and because I couldn’t think of anything better to do. I learned a lot from being there, but I look back and wonder whether it was the best decision I could’ve made at the time. These days, I strongly encourage school leavers to take a gap year, or two, or three. To go overseas and discover themselves and learn about the world before they commit to a career path and a student loan.

“Many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not — because the thing they were good at at school wasn’t valued, or was actually stigmatized.” – Sir Ken Robinson

When I was nine (or so), my teacher encouraged me to write a short novel as a school project (yes I still have it, no it’s not very good though it got an excellence award, and yes of course it’s about ponies). In high school, one of my English teachers so loved a short piece of creative writing that I did for a mock exam that she would read it out to students, year after year, as an example of what to strive for. (I know this because my sister had to sit through it, much to her disgust and embarrassment.)

Writing has always been my forte, and I’ve never felt discouraged in it. My parents in particular have always encouraged it, although they were not quite so encouraging of my inability to put a book down while eating breakfast or (supposedly) going to sleep. (Sidenote: Kindles must make that a whole lot easier for kids these days. I had to get really good at turning out a lightswitch silently.) But although I come from a family of artists, I am not overflowing with visually artistic talent. (In other words, when I draw a tree it only vaguely looks like a tree.) My sister is a very talented artist (she did the cover for How the Unicorn Lost his Horn, which I love) and has always had a flair for drawing and painting. I didn’t take art at school because I figured I would be no good at it. Now, I wonder if I should have. I like art. I enjoy visiting art galleries, and can sit and look at paintings for hours. I am pretty decent at photography and videography and have a good eye for framing a shot. But I never considered myself to be in any way good at art.

Interestingly enough, some of my favourite artworks feature words. I love the work of New Zealand artist Colin McCahon. My mother thinks his work is rubbish, and one of my forms of teenage rebellion was to have a poster of his artwork Gate III on my wall (hardly high rebellion, but it was on the spectrum, nonetheless.) Mum doesn’t see the value in art that doesn’t look photo-realistic (to which I say, why not just take a photo then?).

She looks at McCahon’s work and scoffs. “I could do that,” she says.

My response is always the same. “Yes, but you didn’t.”

“I heard a great story recently, I love telling it, of a little girl who was in a drawing lesson, she was 6 and she was at the back, drawing, and the teacher said this little girl hardly paid attention, and in this drawing lesson she did. The teacher was fascinated and she went over to her and she said, “What are you drawing?” and the girl said, “I’m drawing a picture of God.” And the teacher said, “But nobody knows what God looks like.” And the girl said, “They will in a minute.” – Sir Ken Robinson

Click here for more quotes from Sir Ken Robinson, or listen to some of his TED talks.

And then write this down or print it off and stick it somewhere that you’ll see it every day, to remind you. (Quote attributed to Joss Whedon.)

Filed under: Uncategorized

You cannot afford to have any cardboard characters, anywhere

Last night, while I was working on the revised story outline for Against the Clock, I discovered something about one of my characters that I never knew before. It was one of those weird moments when I was writing, and I tapped out a quick filler line of dialogue for her, and then looked at the words and thought Wait, does that mean…? And as clear as day, she looked at me and said, with conviction and grace and a fierce determination – Yes, it does.

Characters take on a life of their own. It’s a weird phenomenon that I can only liken to the way that sometimes your brain will pluck a completely random and obscure thought out of mid-air, surprising you with it. Characters do that too. I never saw this revelation coming, but goodness it makes her a lot more interesting and layered. And I’m really excited now to explore that new dimension.

In my previous blog, I rattled on about Joss Whedon, one of my writing heroes. Another writer whose work I greatly admire is the much lesser-known Doris Egan, who has written for various TV shows over the years, including House, Smallville, Tru Calling and Dark Angel. Not the greatest shows, but her work was always excellent in it, and she also wrote a few great entries on her blog tightropegirl.livejournal.com about writing. In one post from way back in the dark ages of 2006, she was discussing how important (or unimportant) it is to do your research, depending on what you’re writing (e.g. historical fiction = lots of research) and it evolved into a discussion on characterisation. I had the following passage printed out and stuck on my wall for years, and I read it almost every day. It has had a huge impact on the way that I approach writing, and characterisation, and I owe her a debt of gratitude for it.

Let’s move on to look at a hypothetical short story you decide to write about an encounter between a visiting handyman who’s repairing a kitchen cupboard and a ten-year-old boy — a conversation about a bird that strikes the window glass in the kitchen and knocks itself out. Your story takes place in the present day and is from the point of view of the boy. You need only one piece of information here: you want to initiate the conversation by having the handyman ask the boy to fetch him a tool from the box by the door, and you want to know what tool it might be. You could, conceivably, in the heat of creation, write that entire story out while it’s fresh in your mind and wants to be written, leaving a blank in one sentence for the name of the tool.

Those are the two ends of the spectrum: for a historical novel, you may have spent a couple of years reading all sorts of books; for the handyman story, you only need a word, and you don’t have to wait for it to write the first draft. But it is a spectrum, make no mistake.

Let’s go back to the handyman story, and this time do it from the point of view of the handyman. Now you have a bit more research to do, even if the dialogue stays the same — because you need to know the inside of that character’s head. When he walks into that house he’ll be aware, even if distantly, of whether he’s been there before; what kind of jobs he usually does; how long he thinks this will take; whether he sees it as simple or complex; and in a general sense, what he gets out of it. By that last, I mean you’ll want to have an idea, whether you reference it or not, as to why he’s a handyman. Does he like the freedom? Is he in the country on a work permit and this is all he could get? Is he actually making a fair living? Is he good at what he does? When the boy’s mother tells him the problem, does he reflect on how his clients tend not to know what the real problem is, and underestimate how long repairs will take?

Now let’s muddy the waters and say the boy’s encounter with the handyman is one scene in a movie about a ten-year-old boy who witnesses a murder. The handyman has nothing to do with the murder, and is only in this one scene; the point of it is to confront the boy with death (in the form of the bird flying against the window and killing itself). This lets the audience hear what the boy has to say, thereby subtextually referencing the murder and giving us an idea of thoughts he hasn’t been able to share with anyone. None of this is in the viewpoint of the handyman, so you don’t have to work out his life’s story — from a pure research standpoint, you still only need that one tool name. You’re on the extreme “easy” end of the spectrum here.

But. For the scene to mean anything, you’ll want to have an idea of who that character is — again, why he’s a handyman, how much money he makes, where he lives, whether he has a son of his own, whether he’s an easy person to talk to or a misanthrope (the latter could actually be more interesting in this situation) — all the things that give him shape and life. Assuming you haven’t set this story in some exotic locale, most or all of these are things you can work out using ordinary commonsense knowledge. But work them out you must, because in my opinion, spear carriers must live. He’s not going to spill out those details to the boy, but they’ll define how he talks and what his emotional reactions are; and you can’t afford to have any cardboard characters, anywhere.

Not everyone agrees. I remember, years ago, a writing teacher (a good teacher, too) criticizing another student’s manuscript, in which a traumatized crime witness is picked up by a passing couple in a van. They’re feminist activists who work with abused women, and they assume the traumatized woman was attacked, probably by a boyfriend. The witness says nothing to any of this, and the scene only takes a couple of minutes, but I remember thinking how well-realized everyone was. I said to myself, “If the walk-ons are this rich, I can’t wait to read the rest!” The teacher, on the other hand, thought that by making passing characters too interesting, you take away from the leads; a reader’s attention span is only so long. Pish, I say to that. And tosh as well.

Spear carriers must live. And one way to do that is simply never to have them behave as expected if you can avoid it. What really disturbs the attention span of the audience, in my opinion, is the boredom that comes from predictability.

You can read Doris Egan’s full blog post here.

Sometimes that unpredictability is intentional. I had an idea a few days ago for a plotline in a series of six novels that I’m planning (I’m ridiculously ambitious sometimes) that would really muddy up the waters in my protagonist’s life. It’s one of those cases where you think “Wouldn’t it be interesting if…?” and then your brain goes “Yeah, but wouldn’t it be even more interesting if…?” and then you’re just rubbing your hands together with glee thinking about working that story out, except unfortunately now you have to go to work and put stories on the backburner for the day.

But I digress. Several lines from Doris’s blog post above have continued to resonate with me over the last eight years since I first read it:

For the scene to mean anything…

Every scene has to mean something. It has to add to the story in some way, shape or form. It might be simply to establish a relationship between characters, it might be a building block towards a later scene, and the first time through, readers might not think twice about it. But when they re-read, when they come back to it, they’ll be able to see how it fits into the bigger story. They’ll realise why it’s important, and what it means. Every scene has to be there for a reason – another thing I learned from TV. When you only have 42 minutes to tell a story, you have to make every minute of it count. If you want to keep your readers engaged, you have to do the same thing when you write.

You cannot afford to have any cardboard characters, anywhere.

This. This one line, more than any other, goes through my head repeatedly when I’m writing, and when I’m reviewing. Every character has to have a backstory, a reason. One of the characters I’m most proud of is Susannah Andrews, from Dare to Dream (and Dream On, though in a lesser role). Susannah reads like a stereotype, the spoiled rich girl who treats her ponies poorly, and is only out to win. I needed a character like Susannah for the story to work – but I wanted her to be human. There is a reason for everything she does. She’s being driven by her parents and their competitive nature, and it’s her fear of failure and disappointing them that pushes her on. But when it goes too far, she sees it, and she finds the courage to change the course she’s been on.

There are many characters like Susannah in pony fiction – the spoiled rich girl is a staple of the genre. Sometimes these characters are redeemed, and sometimes they’re not. Often they’re redeemed for one novel, when we get a flash of insight into who they are as a person and why they behave that way, but by the next instalment they’re back to being the villain, because the writer only sees them that way in their head. To me, Susannah was never a villain – she was a victim. When I reintroduced her in Dream On, it was important to me that other people were able to recognise that too.

Spear carriers must live.

Which is to say, even the background characters have to have a backstory. I have a huge spreadsheet document on my computer that shows every character I ever have or ever plan to write a book about, and where they are at a certain point in time, so that the books can eventually all exist on a timeline. Characters will weave their way in and out of each other’s stories. (Hint: there is a character in both Dare to Dream and Dream On who will feature heavily in books 3 and 4 of the Clearwater Bay series – although notably all of the Clearwater Bay books actually take place earlier – if you look closely in Flying Changes, you’ll find Peter Andrews competing in Pony of the Year on his grey pony Flying High, who is being ridden by his younger sister Susannah by the time we get to Dare to Dream…)

Again, I digress. The point of this is that every character, no matter how seemingly insignificant to the story, has a background. I am excited to write books about one character where someone forms an opinion of another person and the reader agrees, then they read another book from that person’s perspective and realise that there was so much going on that they didn’t even know before. Because that’s how life works. We never know what’s going on in other people’s lives, and often operate on our own assumptions. I’m fascinated by that, and it is destined to become a hallmark of my work.

Because there are so many things that I know about my characters that readers don’t. Some of these details will eventually be revealed, others might remain only known to me. If they’re not pertinent to the telling of the story, I leave them out of it. But the characters have lives beyond the glimpses that are in my books – they’ve lived before them and will live on after them.

The boredom that comes from predictability.

Never have your characters behave as expected, if you can help it. I think about this a lot. Characters often behave unpredictably in books – and sometimes their actions are startling, but make sense. Sometimes they don’t, and that was a huge challenge for me in writing Dare to Dream – to have the big reveal at the end make sense to the reader, even though it was (hopefully) unexpected. It seemed to work. As pony book expert Jane Badger said in her review of Dare to Dream – “I do like a book where I haven’t worked out how it will end well before I’ve got there.” Phew.

Jane in particular found Susannah to be a compelling character, telling me that “I really liked Susannah, and I particularly liked the fact you sent her away into a complex, and ambivalent situation. Looking forward to see what you do with her next.”

Jane hasn’t read Dream On yet, but she does have a copy to review, and will hopefully have a chance to do so soon. In the meantime I’m trying to be patient, and hoping that she’ll like it as much as she did Dare to Dream. And that she will appreciate Susannah’s journey in this second novel.

Fingers crossed.

Filed under: Uncategorized

I write to give myself strength

I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I’m afraid of.  – Joss Whedon

Writing is a passion. I write for all those reasons stated above. I write because I have stories in my head that want to be told. I write to share the stories I want to read. I write because there are characters clamouring in my mind to be written about. I write to reflect the experiences I’ve had, that I’ve seen others have, that I wish I’ve had. I write to live vicariously through my characters. I write because I love those characters, and as much as anyone else, I want to know what happens next. I write because I must. It’s so much a part of who I am and what I do and how I think and see the world that I can’t imagine my life without it.

All writers are influenced by other writers, and I’m no exception to that. I have favourite pony book authors, favourite YA authors, favourite fantasy authors and contemporary authors and I have favourite screenwriters. It might sound strange, but I didn’t learn nearly as much about writing from reading books as I did from watching TV. And I didn’t watch that much TV. My mum was pretty strict on that, and right through my teenage years, I was allowed to nominate one show to watch each week. ONE. So I had to make it count. I chose a little show called Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It sounds silly, and sometimes it was, on purpose. It was also sassy and poignant and dark and witty and horrifying and hilarious and heartbreaking, all at once. Week after week, it hit me in a new place and made me think and feel things I hadn’t thought and felt before. It’s a good show. Actually, it’s a great show, and it’s still one of my all-time favourites. And Joss Whedon was the man behind the curtain, who came up with the idea, wrote many of the most memorable episodes, and ran the show for most of its seven seasons.

Don’t give people what they want, give them what they need.  – Joss Whedon

Joss, and Buffy as a show, was never afraid to pull punches. It was never shy about killing characters, or betraying the audience’s faith in someone. It was never, ever afraid to make the audience feel, and that’s what I loved about it so much. In many ways, Buffy provided a guide to life. I watched Buffy deal with pain, betrayal, death, love, heartbreak, redemption, failure, and much more. I didn’t start out wanting that – I wanted to watch a show about a strong teenage girl who could kick butt and take names and still be a teenage girl at the end of it. I wanted that, and I needed it too, as a teenage girl myself going through my own experiences with failure and disappointment and heartbreak. And I got it in spades.

But I got even more than that. I got storytelling. I got a show that taught me to convey emotions through dialogue – not only through what is said but also what isn’t. That taught me how to pace a scene, how to enter and leave a scene, how to develop a character, how to give a character a redemption arc, how to slowly destroy another character. How to write a fantastic story, in the literal sense of the word, and still make it feel real – still make it resonate, still find the humanity amongst the monsters. Buffy taught me about the fine balance between comedy and tragedy and how you can fill the screen with both, almost simultaneously, if you get the balance right. It taught me how to show, not tell, and how to let the characters’ actions speak for themselves. It taught me how to end every scene with a promise of the next one to come.

Joss Whedon is actually pretty famous now, after a little movie he made called The Avengers made over a billion dollars worldwide. The movie that has been called the greatest superhero movie of all time – because it’s not just action sequences. It’s not just quips and banter and awesome fight scenes and CGI. It’s all those things, but it also has meaning. It also has a theme, and a cohesive plot, and characters who feel like real people in an extraordinary situation.

When you’re making a film, you have an obligation to fill the screen with life. – Joss Whedon

When I wrote my first novel, Flying Changes, I struggled for a long time with the opening chapter. It had a lot of information to convey, a lot of backstory to fill in and the scene to set for where our protagonist is and what it’s all leading to. And I wrote and wrote and re-wrote and edited it so many times that I got incredibly sick of it. In the end, I did the best that I could and I sent it out into the world with my fingers crossed. The first chapter of a story is incredibly important. It’s the one that leads people into the story, the one that needs to grab you and own you and make you want to keep reading. (It’s also the one that people preview on Amazon before they decide whether to buy the book, so it had better be good.) In TV terms, it’s the cold open – the part that comes before the opening credits roll – the promise of what’s to come, which needs to hook you in so that you won’t change the channel.

I have mentioned in an earlier post how I published Flying Changes and the process I’ve recently been going through to reclaim it (in short, I was not responsible before for its distribution online – now I am). As I went to put the e-book back on Amazon, I hesitated. I re-read that first chapter, and then I sat down yesterday and re-worked it. Nothing much has changed, story-wise, but I’m a more experienced, better writer now than I was then, and I can see what’s wrong with it. I can tell where it stalls, and why. I can see why readers find Jay difficult to relate to in the beginning, and why several of them have told me that they found it tricky to get into the story. So I’ve tidied it up. How well I’ve succeeded at doing so remains to be seen, but I’m confident that it’s an improvement.

When I wrote Dare to Dream, I made sure to throw the reader straight into the action. Marley is literally on the move – she’s running into the house and yelling to her sister to call the vet because there’s been a terrible accident. The stakes are raised from the start, there is immediate interaction between the main characters, and their personalities and roles in life are set up straight away. Kris is struggling with the overdue accounts, Van is taking care of the horses, and Marley is running barefoot around the farm, dreaming of winning Pony of the Year.

For Dream On, I knew the reader’s first question on starting the book would be So, what happened next? It picks up a few months after it left off, but the opening lines immediately deal with the questions that were left on readers’ lips after finishing Dare to Dream. I won’t go into any detail, since not many people have read Dream On yet, but those opening lines of dialogue are essentially the comments I was getting from readers – and my response. From there, we get a brief insight into how Marley’s feeling right now and then we’re straight back into the action as Marley saddles her pony and goes off to compete. We are re-introduced to familiar characters, we meet some new ones, and the story is off and running.

I am about to pick up Against the Clock (the sequel to Flying Changes) again soon. I have a whole opening sequence written, one that I like and am attached to. Problem is, it’s weak. It has no stakes. It doesn’t lead forward to anything. So I’m scrapping it, and trying to fit that sweet spot in the story where the action kicks off. The moment where everything starts to happen. I thought about starting Dare to Dream differently, at one stage. I wrote an extended opening, where Marley is going out to catch Nimble, and she finds him injured. But I got rid of it – it wasn’t necessary. When you ask someone to read your work, it’s your responsibility to make it interesting. To make something happen. To fill the page with life.

You take people, you put them on a journey, you give them peril, you find out who they really are.  – Joss Whedon

Characters are as important as plot – more so, I feel. One of my favourite novels is The Catcher in the Rye, a book in which arguably nothing much happens. But it’s memorable because Holden is memorable. Characters have to be memorable. They have to live and love and learn, and take you on a journey with them as you read. They have to leap off the page, to feel as though you could just reach out and touch them. I had a moment while writing Dream On that startled me – I had been working on it all day and I was tired and in need of a break. I thought to myself, quite seriously, “I’ll just go and feed my horse, then I’ll pop round and visit with them… And for an instant, I thought I could. I was looking forward to walking into their house and sitting down in their kitchen, and having a cup of tea with Kris and a chat with Van, and teasing Marley while I patted their dogs and watched their ponies out the window, grazing in the warm evening light. And then I remembered…they’re not real. It was a strange sense of disappointment, mixed with a heady sense of joy, to have created characters so real that even I felt that they were actually out there somewhere, going about their lives, waiting for me to drop in.

Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough, but then, for the love of God, tell a joke. – Joss Whedon

It’s about balance. Light vs dark, contrasting and complementing each other. It’s about letting the audience laugh, before you make them cry. Dare to Dream started out for me as a challenge. The story itself is so traditional, such a cliché in some ways, that I challenged myself to write this ultimate wish-fulfilment story and make it feel real. So I added conflict. I added tension. I added rivalries and struggles and catastrophes around the edges of this golden story of a girl and her pony, so that the reader would feel the same sense of joy and relief that Marley does when things go right for her. So that Cruise would be as golden for the reader as he is for the characters, and the thought of losing him would feel as catastrophic to contemplate for the reader as it was for Marley.

The pony part of the story in Dream On is in many ways the polar opposite of Dare to Dream. This is not a golden relationship, not by any stretch of the imagination. This pony doesn’t want to spend every minute of her day with Marley, doesn’t immediately throw her heart and soul over the fences with her. Scarred and hardened by previous bad experiences, this pony has no interest in Marley or her sisters, and fights them tooth and nail. Every success is followed by another setback, and ultimately Marley is the one who has to adapt, not the other way around. So, because the pony story is a darker, more difficult and challenging one, the surrounding stories lighten in response to that. Where everything with Cruise was happiness and light, and everything else was a struggle – this time the pony is the struggle, but the world around Marley is growing lighter, her burdens less heavy, her struggles less difficult. Most of the time, anyway.

It’s about finding the balance. You can have pain and agony and disappointment, but there has to be light moments too. They’re fun and they’re a relief and the contrast makes the pain that much more painful, and the disappointment that much more palpable.

It is the most fun I’m ever going to have. I love to write. I love it. I mean, there’s nothing in the world I like better. It’s the greatest peace when I’m in a scene, and it’s just me and the character, that’s it, that’s where I want to live my life.  – Joss Whedon

Writing is hard. It’s time-consuming and difficult, and sometimes you have to take out scenes you love, and sometimes you just can’t get a story to work the way you want it to. (And I don’t even work to a deadline.) But it’s also incredibly rewarding.

When a scene falls into place and you know it’s perfect.

When a character does something that you never saw coming, but that will define the whole novel and steer it in a new, fascinating direction.

When your theme seeps from the pores of every scene without you even realising that you were writing it.

When you love your characters so much that you forget they’re not real.

When you get five-star reviews on Amazon. When you hold your book in your hands for the first time.

When someone says that reading your book has changed them – changed the way they think, the way they feel about the world.

When you can make people laugh and cry and feel, just by putting some words on a page.

When you write because you must.

You either have to write or you shouldn’t be writing. That’s all.  – Joss Whedon

Filed under: writing Tagged: Against the Clock, buffy the vampire slayer, Dare To Dream, Dream On, Flying Changes, joss whedon, on writing, why i write, YA fiction

Dream On is now available on Amazon!

Dream On is officially available to download and read on Amazon!

E-books don’t need back covers, but I designed one anyway for the paperback version, and it looks like this:

Download “Dream On” on Amazon.com (US) here

Download “Dream On” on Amazon.co.uk (UK) here

Download “Dream On” on Amazon.com (AUS) here

So please – click one of the links above, download the book (or Try a Sample first, if you like – it goes a few pages into Chapter 2) and let me know what you think in the comments or by posting a review on Amazon.

Thanks, and enjoy!

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: book, Dream On, fiction, Kate Lattey, Marley Carmichael, New Zealand, NZPonyWriter, pony book, Pony of the Year

Thanks to you it will be done, for you to me are the only one

So it’s Thanksgiving in the United States today, according to my Facebook feed. Obviously this is not a holiday that we celebrate in New Zealand, and admittedly I know very little about it and its history, but what I have gleaned from my many American friends on Facebook is that it is a time to stop and look around and be thankful for what we have.

So I want to take this moment to mention a few things that I’m thankful for.

I’m thankful for my family, who support and encourage me through thick and thin. I feel incredibly blessed to be part of such a wonderful, creative, intelligent, close-knit family – not just my parents and siblings but my half-siblings and their families, my aunties and uncles and cousins, my grandmother and my distant relations.

I’m thankful for the wonderful people in my life who I’m not related to, but who choose to spend their time and energy on me. Friends are a blessing in everyone’s life and I am so fortunate to have so many incredible friends who impress and inspire me every day. Whether they’re going out of their way to help the under-privileged or just treating those around them with the utmost respect and love, I admire each and every one of them. Scrolling through my Facebook newsfeed never fails to bring a smile to my face.

I’m thankful for the horses who have come through my life, from the delightful creature that I have now, to the horses I’ve known in the past. There are so many special horses, whether they are still a part of it or not, who I look back on with fond memories, not least of all the following: Bittersweet, Alice, Scooter, Jolie, Oliver, Katama, Happ, Ides, Rainier and countless other gorgeous horses that I had the privilege of knowing and riding during my summers at Road’s End Farm in NH, USA; Barnacle and Biscuit, my two best boys at Ashford in Co. Mayo, Ireland; Kaneel, Spritzer and Pepe in Epsom, UK; Honey, Major and Cheyenne, the dream team of lesson ponies that I had the privilege of working with at both Ferndale and Peka Peka Road – amongst them they taught countless young riders the basics. And I want to thank the ponies I was lucky enough to own as a child and teenager – Whisper, Tess, Minnie and Caddie, who all taught me so much and gave me so much back; the special ponies who have never belonged to me but who I’ve loved all the same – Breeze, Misty, Jezebel and Willow; and the ponies that I learned to ride on, back when having my own pony was a far-off dream – Cinter, Teddy, Geronimo, and Brandy. Wonderful teachers and good kids all.

Finally, I’m thankful for the internet, for Amazon, for everything that makes it possible for me to write and share my books with the outside world.

And so in order to say thank you to everyone out there, I have made Dare to Dream available on Kindle absolutely FREE for the next three days. I was hoping that a freebie would get a few more people interested in my books, and that the average number of daily downloads might double – even triple – during this time. I didn’t expect the downloads to increase a hundredfold in less than 24 hours, but that’s exactly what they’ve done – far exceeding my wildest expectations!

So now, I’m thankful for that too.

And so today, my world it smiles, your hand in mine, we walk the miles,

Thanks to you it will be done, for you to me are the only one.

Happiness, no more be sad, happiness….I’m glad.

If the sun refused to shine, I would still be loving you.

When mountains crumble to the sea, there will still be you and me.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Sing for the laughter and sing for the tears

It’s hard to believe that it’s been three years. We miss you Marley. I still feel so privileged to have known you, and to continue to have you with me as I write these books.

I wanted to release Dream On today, in Marley’s memory, but unfortunately it’s not quite ready yet. So as a compromise, I’ve uploaded the first chapter here in PDF format. Click the link to read it, and let me know what you thought in the comments.

I met Marley Sirjane at summer camp in NH, USA, where I worked for five summers between 2004 and 2010. Marley, like many of the girls who came to the farm at the end of the road, was a regular fixture, returning year after year. Each year she was a little taller, a little older, but little else changed. She always had a boundless enthusiasm for getting the most out of life, and loved her time there. Always surrounded by friends, always with that magic smile on her face that never failed to light up the room.

Part of my role at the camp was to help with camper/horse assignments. Each camper was assigned a horse to ride each week, and one by one they would come to me and tell me which horse they wanted to ride. There were always perennial favourites, and there were always a few that not many people wanted to ride. Montana, affectionately known as Monty (or Monster), has always been one of the latter. A stocky chestnut mustang, he’s a stunning and extremely intelligent horse that was assigned to very few riders, due to his difficult and unpredictable nature. He had come to the farm after our director had seen him tied to a post in someone’s yard without any food or water. The story goes that he’d belonged to a young woman who’d left him behind when she left her boyfriend, and so he’d been abandoned. Never one to let a horse suffer, Tom bought Montana and took him back to the farm. Even if he’d known then how difficult Montana would end up being, I don’t think he’d have done anything differently that day.

Montana is a horse that chooses his riders – no matter how skilled or experienced you might be, if he doesn’t like you, you don’t have a hope of getting any constructive work out of him. He was never an easy horse to assign, and would regularly be left in the feedlot unridden if nobody suitable was available for him. As one of the most advanced rides on the farm, he was sought after by the experienced riders looking for a challenge, but over the years there have only been a few people who really ‘clicked’ with him. Marley was one of them.

I was not. I rode Montana three times, back in 2004. The first time was one sunny afternoon in the advanced ring, and he was an angel. Extremely quick to pick up new ideas, he tried hard to do as I asked and his canter was the smoothest, most comfortable I’ve ever had the joy of sitting on. His proud bearing and sensitivity made him an extraordinary horse to ride, and I still treasure the memory of that day. What I don’t treasure were the next two rides I had on him. Both times taking him out on trail, with a group of riders behind me. The first time he was almost foot-perfect, only getting a little hot coming home, but I made myself stay relaxed and sang songs to him as we returned to camp. I’ve never been a particularly brave rider, and Montana is an extremely powerful and strong horse. As much as I liked him, I was becoming slightly nervous of him, and I knew that I couldn’t afford to be, for either of our sakes.

Our next ride was problematic. He got upset, and his anxiousness transmitted itself to me. Unable to calm myself down sufficiently to give him the reassurance he needed, I eventually dismounted and led him home. One of my fellow counselors had spent many weeks that summer training him and getting his confidence back after a nasty accident the summer before, and I didn’t want to upset him any more than he already was. As I walked him home, I apologised for not being able to be there for him and give him what he needed. I felt a slight disconnect from him then, as though he pulled away from me a little, and I never rode him again. It was by choice, because I don’t think it’s fair on a horse who need so much reassurance and confidence from his rider to not be able to have it, but I still always liked him, and regarded him fondly.

But Marley was one of the riders who could handle Montana. She never became flustered by him, even on his bad days, when he would panic and just canter endless circles of ever increasing speed. She never got mad at him, or asked him why he couldn’t be more like the other horses. She accepted him for who he was, helped him through his difficult times, and loved him unconditionally. And every time she rode him, the bond between them increased. She became one of his special people that he trusted, and there are precious few of them in his world.

When it came to writing Dream On, it was this bond between horse and rider that I wanted to capture. In some ways, Dream On is even more Marley’s story than Dare to Dream was. In that book, Marley and Cruise have a powerful bond from the very start. There is no baggage with Cruise, no trauma in his past to get through, no trust issues to deal with. They have a connection almost like telepathy, and they understand and relate to one another from day one. I’ve had that kind of relationship with a horse, and it’s a magical thing to experience.

But that story has been told, and it was time to look at a different type of relationship. One that has to build that foundation. One with a horse that has been through so much that she can’t bring herself to trust people again – and a rider who has to learn how to allow herself to share the love she has within her with others. Although Marley (the character) has always been her own person, the strength of Marley Sirjane’s bond with Montana came back to me time and again as I wrote this next book. I hope that my words can do their relationship justice.

There is now an apple tree planted next to the main riding ring at the camp, in Marley’s memory. I’ve heard it said that when Montana first returned to the ring after the tree was planted, he stood and stared at it for a long time. Everyone waited with tears in their eyes until he finally walked on. Maybe he was reacting to the sight of a new tree, although none of the other horses were overly bothered by it – but he has always been more sensitive than most. Or maybe he knew, somehow, what that tree means. Maybe he was saying goodbye too.

It’s a special place, underneath that tree. When I went back to the farm for the first time after Marley’s passing, I went up there and sat with her as the sun went down. The sky slowly turned pink above us, and I thanked her for coming along on the journey while I wrote “Dare to Dream” – I had just given her mother the first draft of the completed book to read. Then we sat in silence for some time, before a huge flock of birds came overhead. They swooped and turned and flew back and forth in perfect, chaotic formation, and then all of a sudden, as one, disappeared into the woods.

I brushed away my tears and as I got up to leave, I reminded Marley of what our camp directors always told the girls who didn’t want to go home just yet, who weren’t ready to leave the farm behind.

“It’s not goodbye. It’s just see you later.”

See ya round, Marley May.

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Dare To Dream, Dream On, Marley

Is Amazon evil? : My Experiences in Self Publishing

You may or may not have heard about the Amazon vs Hachette debacle. In a nutshell, Amazon (the e-retailer) and Hachette (a publishing company who publish many authors around the world, including some multi-millionaires as well as a lot of ‘small fry’ authors) have been scrapping recently because Hachette resisted Amazon’s efforts to dictate the price of e-books online.

Amazon wants to control the prices of ebooks – that ubiquitous $9.99* – and level the market, thus wrangling customers and better controlling the system at large. Hachette wants to set its own prices, scaling them depending on the author, release date, the book’s success, etc.

- The Guardian

So therein lies the battle. Or lay the battle, I suppose, since an agreement has been reached. Ultimately, Hachette has emerged victorious – in a sense. They have the right to set their own pricing (although they get financial incentives from Amazon to sell books at $9.99) on Amazon. What they now have to work out is whether their authors will continue to be satisfied with receiving 25% royalties on the sales of their books. Percentages being relative to the book’s price, after all – 25% of $19.99 is $4.99. 25% of $9.99 is $2.49. Which would you rather earn? (More on royalties later.)

But here’s the thing. Before denouncing Amazon for being evil, for trying to force publishing companies to sell books to them at a lower cost, thus reducing the authors’ royalties (and Hachette’s profit margin!), let’s take a look at what Amazon offers the little guy – the self-published author.

I self-published Dare to Dream and How the Unicorn Lost His Horn on Amazon through their Kindle Direct Publishing program. I can set the prices for my books and receive up to 70% in royalties for my work. For writers like me, who are from a small country and write for a niche audience, Amazon KDP is the perfect platform, and it offers me far more money for my work than any traditional publisher would.

Contrastingly, I self-published Flying Changes through an online company who did the distribution (of paperbacks (printed to order) and e-books) for me. They made the book available in both formats across multiple platforms (including Amazon), which on paper is fantastic. In reality, not so much. I have received minimal payments (less than $400 all up) for my sales in the three years that the book has been available online. (And I was paid in cheques made out in Australian dollars, meaning I had to pay NZ$15 in bank fees plus the exchange rate before banking each one. Several were so small that this was not even worthwhile doing.) Their systems have made it very difficult to track sales and communicate with them. I earned 40% royalties for all sales on those books, aside from the copies that I had printed and posted to me to sell privately. Those cost me $20 to get in my hands, which meant that in order to make a profit, I had to sell the books at more than $20 (generally I sold them for $30 each). Personally I baulk at paying more than $20 for a paperback, so I was never easy about asking for this price, although many people (bless their souls) did so. It also made it very difficult to get my books into commercial bookstores, because naturally every store wants a cut of the profit. If I need $20 in order to break even, the bookstore then has to add their requirement to pay GST onto that, which brings the cost of the book close to $24 before either of us are able to make a profit. In other words, when I walked into Paper Plus and said “Would you like to sell my book?” they did so out of the goodness of their own hearts. Pricing copies at $30 each (which is expensive for a YA paperback by anyone’s standards), by the time my costs were recouped and GST was paid, they received the barest minimum of profits for doing so. It’s not a good business model, and one that made me increasingly uncomfortable.

When it came to Dare to Dream, I did things a little differently. Initially I published the book on Smashwords, a company that will convert your .docx files into e-book format and make it available on various platforms. It is a tricky system to negotiate in some ways, and their formatting is not particularly good. It also does not allow you to publish on Amazon…so you are shut off from Amazon’s entire e-book market (which accounts for approximately 65% of the market in the US alone). After learning about Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) program, I enrolled Dare to Dream. I uploaded the cover picture and the .docx file, gave my bank account details, and voila! Dare to Dream was available to anyone with a Kindle, or who had downloaded the Kindle app onto their smartphone. I can set the price at whatever I want, and what’s more, I get 70% of the royalties from every sale paid directly into my bank account every month. That’s almost double the royalties I was offered for Flying Changes.

That was a year ago. In that time, I have made more each month from sales of Dare to Dream than I get annually for sales of Flying Changes. Amazon’s sales tracking is very easy to use, with graphs and spreadsheets available to show sales, prices, regions, etc. And as well as sales, books can be added to Amazon’s lending library (at the author’s choice) where I earn a further small commission on books ‘borrowed’ by readers. (So far only available in some countries, NZ not included.)

I also printed some paperback copies of Dare to Dream through Printing.com in Wellington. After doing all my own set-up and design work, I was able to get the books in my hand for a fraction over $7 each, meaning I can comfortably sell them for $20 each and still make a profit for my work.

As as result of what I learned from Dare to Dream‘s success, I have recently pulled Flying Changes from the online company (Xlibris). Fortunately I retained all copyright to the content and paid for the cover image, so I’ve simply redone the cover and will make it available again on Amazon KDP very soon.

So that’s all good stuff. How does that differ from traditional publishing? Well, the way that works is that the publisher buys your manuscript from you, paying an advance based on how well they think it will sell (Nicholas Sparks was paid a $1m advance for The Notebook, his first novel!) and then a percentage of all sales. If you have written a best-seller, that sells millions of copies and is translated into lots of languages, and sells continuously well, you’re going to become fabulously wealthy. (Especially if you write six more, each more eagerly anticipated than the last – and also earn royalties from things like movies, merchandise, and theme parks…yes I’m looking at the sublimely talented JK Rowling – an exception and by no means the rule. She is still, to the best of my knowledge, the only author whose books have made her a billionaire.)

What if your book isn’t a best-seller? Well, therein lies the problem. This post from Tudor Robins explains it brilliantly. She published her first novel through a traditional publisher, then she self-published her second on Amazon. Have a read to find out which was more successful for her, and which way she plans to go in the future.

Because here’s the thing: When you are traditionally printed, you sell the copyright to your words. It’s like selling a horse – you hand over the horse and they hand you the money, and you have no control anymore over what happens to that horse. Self-publishing is more akin to leasing (assuming you are doing a paid lease with a watertight agreement). You don’t get a big fee upfront, but you get continuous payments, and you retain control over what happens to your horse. You can take them back at any time, just as you can take your book offline any time, or change the cover photo, or fix the typos that slipped through, or write a revised edition. You still own it. You can retain control.

The downside here is that you might never reach the widest possible audience. You might slip under many radars, and you will mostly likely never become a millionaire. You will quite possibly struggle to ever live off what you make from your writing, so if your ambition is to be a hugely successful author, the traditional route might be the best one for you. You also might not want to do your own publicity – although as Tudor points out in her post (linked above), being commercially published doesn’t mean you don’t have to do your own publicity, which may even cost you money. And there are also companies out there online like Pump Up Your Book, and heaps of advice available on maximising your sales.

For companies like Hachette, they continue to have the right to set their own prices. Fair’s fair, I suppose. But the problem, as I see it, is that you get books like this one, a phenomenal read that I want all of my overseas friends to buy, being priced by the publisher outside of most people’s comfort zone. Hopefully the price will continue to come down (it already has done, substantially) as the original e-book price was presumably set so high as to encourage readers to pay for a paperback copy. Which is all well and good if you live in New Zealand, within reach of a bookstore. Not so good if you live in New York, or London, or Perth, or Dubai, or Cape Town, or anywhere else that is not New Zealand, within reach of a bookstore!

Of course, there are two sides to every story. I feel for the authors involved in the Hachette case, who lost royalties due to Amazon’s decision to make some Hachette titles unavailable to purchase, delaying deliveries of others by weeks, and advertising alongside some titles with a banner of “similar items at a lower price”. Yet perhaps part of the scramble from Hachette comes from the knowledge that the easier it gets to self-publish, the more work they’re going to have to do to keep authors on the traditional publishing track. Traditional publishing is a very difficult realm to break into, and with the exception of best-sellers and top earners (many of whom were outspoken on Hachette’s behalf), is a rocky road to navigate and doesn’t offer the best returns for the small-time author. The question is – Why sell your copyright to someone else who might promote your book briefly, and if it doesn’t sell well, shelve it forever…when you can retain control of it, target it towards a wide-reaching, intended audience, and make sure that it is available forever?

Now, people fairly ask what will happen to the quality of literature when anyone can publish anything and make money from it? Who’s to say what’s good and what’s not? What’s worthy of publication, and what’s not? The simple answer to that is YOU. The consumer. Yes, there are plenty of e-books out there that are quite bad. Some are badly written, some are badly plotted, some are badly proof-read, some are all of the above. But some are fantastic. Of the 20 books listed on my What to Read page, only a handful of those authors are commercially published. Most are self-publishing their books on Amazon…and loving it. And my books are self-published. So if you’re here, you’ve probably read them, and you hopefully enjoyed them. If it wasn’t for Amazon’s KDP program, would you have read Dare to Dream?

Also, don’t forget that Amazon has their nifty little “Try a Sample” function. You can download the first chapter or so of any book before you decide whether or not to buy it. I quite often scroll through Amazon’s recommendations to me, clicking on multiple samples of books to try, and then reading them and weeding out the ones I can’t be bothered going on with (usually around half of them). This is akin to picking up a book in a shop and reading the first few pages. You might be enraptured and have to buy the book right away – or you might decide that it’s not for you after all, and walk off. You have that choice.

In conclusion, one year after starting with Amazon KDP, I still sell 3-5 copies of Dare to Dream online each day. I do next to no promotion of it, other than this website (which I don’t even know if anyone visits), this blog (which I don’t even know if anyone reads), and my Facebook page (which is being filtered off many of my ‘Likers’ newsfeeds by the Facebook powers that be because I don’t pay for advertising on their site. And they call Amazon evil…).

But wait – if I do no promotion for my books, where do I get sales from? Well, Amazon’s “Readers also liked…” function helps. So do their tailored emails that they send out – I’m constantly being told that based on my previous purchases, I should try this book called Dare to Dream. Apparently it’s quite good.) Five-star reviews are also good, because the overall star rating of a book helps it get promoted by the Amazon robots. As a result of this, I can just leave the book to tick away, making me some pocket money while I work on my next novel, while continuing to work my 9-5 day job. Because for most authors, we write for the love of the story, not for the money. We then look for the easiest, fairest way to be compensated for our work, and right now, as far as I’m concerned, Amazon are the ones bringing that to the table.

So before we get too wrapped up in bashing the big guy (Amazon) for slamming the smaller guys (published authors), let’s see what the littlest guys of all (self-published authors) think.

Works for me.

* Amazon reportedly wants to bring the price of all e-books on their site to $9.99. I assume (perhaps erroneously) that this is a maximum price, and that they will continue to allow self-published authors using KDP to set their own pricing (there are minimum (99c) prices involved when you sign up with KDP). If I had to sell my books at $9.99, I can guarantee my sales would drop – and with good reason. Although still much cheaper than buying a traditionally published physical copy of a book, if a book is priced anywhere over $5 on Kindle, I know personally that I had better REALLY want it before I will purchase it. So hopefully this will only relate to traditional publishers, and not hurt the little guy. I can’t see it being a good business model for Amazon, to be perfectly honest, and I am fairly confident that it will not happen. At least not anytime soon.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Finding your story and setting it free

I’m sitting in the middle of Chapter One of Dream On, methodically making my way through as I check for typos, sense, flow, and other little bits and pieces that will make the story read more smoothly.

In the back of my mind as I read are the bigger questions – does this scene need to be here? What is this particular scene contributing to the larger story? (Hint: If the answer is nothing, delete the scene. If it’s not driving the story forward, it doesn’t belong in the book.)

In an even further back place in my mind, there is another question hovering. Why am I telling this story? Or, why am I telling this story? What do I have to say to the world at large, that I am using this story, this book, as a medium for? (Hint: If you can’t answer that question, you lack theme. Then you’re writing a story, but you’re not saying anything…and although the story might work on its own, with a beginning, a middle and an end, it won’t leave the reader with anything to take away. It won’t have resonance. It won’t matter.)

The stories we love, the ones we remember, are the ones that matter to us. The ones that challenge us, that confuse us, that make us reconsider the world and our place in it. One of my favourite reviews for Dare to Dream made this very clear:

This book is really the best book I have EVER read in my whole life! It is a mix between romance and action. I loved it. I cried at the end and it made my think of how lucky we are to have things like food and a roof over our heads.

-  Avery Kasper, via Amazon.com

I cannot tell you how thrilled I was when I read that review. Quite aside from everything else, it was those four words that made my day: It made me think.

But it doesn’t always come easy. The problem with my original draft of Against the Clock is that it doesn’t do that. It doesn’t have that elusive something that makes it powerful, that makes it important, that will hopefully make the reader stop and think. How would I feel if I was in that situation? What would I do, when faced with that dilemma? When given that choice? As a reader, your answers to those questions might be completely different to the choices that the characters make, but that doesn’t really matter. The point is that it makes you stop, makes you think, makes you reconsider.

That it has something to say.

I read a blog post today by Hugh Howey that resonated with me. He wrote that:

When writing is going well, it feels more like reading or discovery than it does writing or creation. It feels as though the story could go no other way than the way we’re writing it. Like it existed before us.

I think – I hope – that all writers have had that feeling. Sometimes it’s one that develops slowly as you work through the book, as you get to know the characters. Sometimes characters leap off the page and you feel as though you’ve known them forever – others are more shy, and it takes time to get familiar with them. (Of my characters, Marley falls into the first category. Her sister Kris falls into the second – but we’ve become very close since I wrote Dream On.)

But that’s when writing is going well. What about when it’s not? Howey reckons that when your writing just won’t flow, it means that there’s something wrong. Somewhere along the line, you’ve taken a step onto the wrong path, and you need to go back and try again. Sci-fi and fantasy author extraordinaire Robin Hobb said something very similar at a book signing that I went to recently. When I get writer’s block, she explained, I know it means I’ve gone wrong somewhere. So I just go back a few pages and pick up the story again from there, and this time, take the characters down a different path.

I get the feeling that American poet Robert Frost knew that too.

Two paths diverged in a wood, and I

I took the one less travelled by

And that has made all the difference.

What I particularly liked about Howey’s blog post was that he also talked about that moment when you recognise the story you need to tell. When you have that lightbulb moment, and you know that you’ve just stumbled upon something great. And how it feels when you do. Non-writers might be surprised to hear that it doesn’t feel as though you’ve made it up…as he says, it feels like you’ve remembered it.

Ever had the feeling you were forgetting something as you left the house? You walk around, wracking your brain, trying to figure out what it is. Exhausting every option, you decide your intuition is wrong. It isn’t until you’re half an hour away from the house that the missing thing percolates up to the conscious level.

This is writing. You know what happens next. The challenge is remembering.

I can still remember exactly where I was when I discovered the key turning point in Dare to Dream. I suppose it could be described as the whodunnit? moment. (If you’ve read the book you’ll know what I mean – and if you haven’t, what are you waiting for?) I was writing the story, putting it together slowly, like a complicated jigsaw puzzle that I just knew had a horse in the middle of it, but was missing some crucial pieces around the outside. A bit like one of those Wasgij? puzzles, where you sort of know what you’re making, but you won’t be able to truly see it until you get to the very end. Then one morning I was driving to work, along State Highway One just south of Waikanae, under the rail bridge and approachin the 80km/h speed zone, and all of a sudden I realised that I knew who’d done it. What’s more, I knew why. The story fell into place that day, and I couldn’t wait to get to a computer so I could write it all down.

It might sound crazy to be writing a story and still putting the pieces together – especially such crucial pieces as that – as you go. But sometimes that’s how it works. And looking back, it wasn’t until I had read that first draft, which I thought was complete and perfect, from go to whoa on a plane to New York, that I realised the story had a problem. I wasn’t making a puzzle that had a horse in the middle of it after all. So I went back to the drawing board. I deleted and rewrote and added scenes and refined the book, until I had the picture – the story – that I needed.

Because ultimately, Dare to Dream isn’t a story about a pony. It’s a story about three sisters.

The reviewer from NZBooklovers saw it too:

It is the relationships in this book that make Dare to Dream special. Lattey has done a wonderful job at crafting a unique relationship between the three sisters – they each have defined personalities, and often clash with one another, but the love they have for each another shines through. It is the excellent relationships that Lattey has cultivated that made the book so emotionally poignant.

And once I realised that, I could write Dream On easily.

Well, not easily.

But well.