C.P. Lesley's Blog, page 61
August 10, 2012
The Nation's Photo Album
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post on covers and the fine art of finding legal images to repurpose for them. So what do you do, if you need pictures for a blog, website, or cover and want to avoid getting sued? Shutterstock or the equivalent makes sense for a cover, but most indie writers can’t afford a subscription just to keep pictures flowing onto their blog.
In addition to some emerging solutions, like the new WANA Commons (check out Kristen Lamb’s blog for that one) and the invaluable Wikimedia Commons, a little digging reveals quite a few institutions that are happy to let you use their images in return for no more than an acknowledgment.
I’ll address most of these in a second post. Today I want to concentrate on the site I always check first, the absolute top of the tree for low-budget publishers: the U.S. Library of Congress, which allows you to use any image, even in print, so long as you credit the library (“Courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress” will do). The nation’s attic, as it is called, has over 1 million digital images from all over the world classified into seventy or so collections of pictures and photographs, as well as a separate collection of audio files (called the National Jukebox). You can find the list of print and photograph collections at http://www.loc.gov/pictures/.
The Library of Congress has collections of, among other things:
African American photographs assembled for the Paris Exposition of 1900, as well as the separate Gladstone Collection of African American photographs;
Ansel Adams’ photographs of the World War II internment camp at Manzanar;
architecture, design, and engineering drawings;
baseball cards;
the Brumfield Collection (1,100 photographs of classic Russian architecture);
caricatures and cartoons (American and British);
Civil War (U.S.) prints;
photographs from the Crimean War, 1853–56;
daguerrotypes;
the full archive of the Detroit Publishing Company;
drawings of many varieties;
fine prints, including a set of Japanese prints, pre-1915;
the Korab Collection (800 photographs of Eero Saarinen’s buildings);
the Lomax Collection (rural United States);
the Matson Collection (Middle East, 1878–1946);
panoramic photographs;
photographs from the Ottoman Empire, 1880–1893, showing its modernization;
posters of the performing arts, graphic arts, Spanish Civil War, World War I, and more;
Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii’s original color (not colorized!) photographs of the Russian Empire, including pictures of the royal family, ca. 1915; and
negatives showing the Wright brothers flying their plane.
Specific collections may have restrictions, but you can find out what they are when you access an image. In most cases, “fair use” rules apply. The library gives specific information on whom to contact and under what circumstances: just click on the “Obtaining Copies” tab.
You can find additional images at http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/ and http://www.loc.gov/folklife/onlinecollections.html. The Folklife Collection also includes documents, songs, and interviews. The Library of Congress also hosts international collections, the American History and Culture collection (maps, documents), the Performing Arts Collection, THOMAS (the searchable database of bills, Congressional Record, etc.), the Historic Newspapers Collection, the digitized first-person stories in the Veterans History Collection, and more. For those, go to http://www.loc.gov and click on Digital Collections.
New collections are added frequently. And everything is available to the public. These are your tax dollars at work. So feel free to use them, because they are a precious resource, and their continued existence, in effect, depends on people like us.
Talking about Writing
A guest interview I did with Nicole Boone. You can find out more about Nicole and see e-interviews she has conducted with other authors at http://nicolepeanutbutter.blogspot.com.
Tell us a bit about yourself.
C. P. Lesley is a pen name. In real life, I am a historian specializing in early modern Europe—that is, the 15th through 18th centuries—especially Russia, which is the setting for my next book. People in my field will know who I am when I publish that second book; the pen name is just to separate my fiction from my academic work.
What inspired you to be an author?
I never intended to write fiction, but for as long as I can remember, I have told myself stories before going to sleep. One day, about 15 years ago, I had a scene in such a story exactly where I wanted it, so I wrote it down. Then I wrote the scenes before and after it, and before I knew it I had a quarter of a novel. A very bad novel, I discovered much later, but by then I was hooked on the idea of writing fiction. It took a lot of feedback, much reading of craft books, and the concerted efforts of my writers group to get me to produce anything worth reading, but I’m glad I stuck with it. I’ve learned an enormous amount along the way about what makes a novel work, and that’s despite having been a bookworm all my life.
Is there a particular message in your book/books that you want readers to grasp?
I write for fun, and I hope readers will enjoy my work without worrying about hidden messages. That said, my books tend to focus on the values of cooperation and compromise. And because I’m a historian, I use them to make history accessible in ways that it often isn’t in a classroom while keeping the facts as accurate as I can. But I don’t preach. It drives me nuts when a novel stops the plot cold to give me five pages on political or economic conditions during the period in question, so I deliver the history in digestible chunks and only as it affects my protagonists. If people love the story, I’m happy.
How did you come up with the title for your book/books?
Titles are tough. Mine either come to me right away—I have titles for all five volumes in my Russian series, even though I have only the sketchiest idea of the plots beyond book 2, which I’m beginning now—or they hide in the woodwork and refuse to come out, no matter how many treats I offer. The Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel,the book I published in June, was one of the hide-in-the-woodwork kind. I went through about five titles before settling on this one, and I’m still not completely happy with it. I picked it because I thought it would work well in search engines: people who love the original Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy (1905) are the natural audience for my book. But I forgot that Orczy wrote about twenty Pimpernel novels, many of them with Scarlet Pimpernel in the title, and there are quite a few titles beginning with “The Not Exactly” as well. So it turned out not to be such a good choice. Although it did get the book onto someone’s website devoted to all things “exactly,” which came as a pleasant surprise.
Where do you get ideas from?
The Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel was another book that began as a before-sleep story. I had re-read the original, which I loved when I was a teenager, and couldn’t get the central conflict out of my head. I kept trying to solve the problem, and when I had worked it over enough, I wrote it down. Of course, the job of a novelist is to create conflict, not to resolve it, so the result was that fifty pages into the book I ran out of story and had to develop a new one of my own. That book went through revision after revision, but in the end I produced a version I liked.
The Russian books I approach in a much more focused way. Russian history is so fascinating that I have no trouble finding ideas, and in the 16th century there were none of those modern inventions that make a writer’s life so difficult. No cell phones or Internet, no DNA research, no fingerprints—no police, for that matter. Characters can do all kinds of stuff they can’t hope to get away with these days.
How do you fight writers block?
I get writers block only when I try to force a character, especially a protagonist, to do something that serves the plot but is wrong for that character. Then the dialogue dries up and I can’t see what’s happening. So I’ve learned to stop and figure out what I’m doing that’s not right for the story, and that’s usually enough to kick me back into gear.
Also, I write to relax; it’s not my day job, so if I did stop for a while, no one would care but me. That takes a lot of the pressure off.
Is there anything you find particularly challenging in your writing?
I am a “plot first” writer. I can come up with plot twists at the drop of a proverbial hat. But developing rounded characters is hard. Fortunately, my writers group includes a “character first” writer, as well as another plot specialist, so she pokes and prods at my chapters until I produce credible people.
Who is your favorite author and what is it that really strikes you about their work?
I have so many favorite authors that I can’t pick just one. As I learn more about craft, I find that my approach to reading changes. When I find someone who can really bring a setting and characters to life and keep them moving in ways that make me not want to put the book down, that’s my favorite author of the moment.
Do you have to travel much concerning your book(s)?
I would love to travel more, but no. The Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel required only that I read a lot of Orczy novels and watch the various movie/television versions. I spent hours studying Anthony Andrews, who did a fantastic job as the Scarlet Pimpernel in an 1982 BBC production. I pretended that was work, but of course it was pure pleasure.
The Golden Lynx,the first of my Russian novels, draws on years of research in the field and past trips to Moscow. It’s my way of conveying ideas that I can’t prove in an academic setting. I’d love to visit Kasimov, Kazan, and the steppe someday, though. Those are all settings in the Lynxseries, called Legends of the Five Directions. Failing that, there’s Google Earth, which gets better every day. Still, there’s nothing quite like having memories of a place when you are trying to recreate it for a reader.
What was the hardest part of writing your book?
This will sound odd, but the hardest part was to get past thinking like a historian. Novelists get inside people’s heads. That’s the charm of novels: they let us see something real life never permits—how other people think, as distinct from what they want us to know. Historians don’t get inside people’s heads, because we work from documents, and even if you have access to someone’s letters or diaries, you see only what they wanted you to see when they wrote. So to get to the point where I could reproduce a character’s experience from the insidetook years, literally.
Did you learn anything from writing your book and what was it?
I learned tons. Mostly about writing, as I mentioned before. But also a lot of details about revolutionary France (in Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel) and Tatar culture (in Golden Lynx). I love the research. It’s almost as much fun as the writing.
Do you have any advice for other writers?
Revise, revise, revise. And read everything you can about the craft of writing. Don’t send your book out as soon as you finish it. You’ll think it’s ready, but it’s not. Instead, find other fiction writers with compatible personalities and, if you are lucky, different strengths and have them read the book and comment. Then revise some more.
It’s not new advice, but it is worth heeding. The truth is that writing takes time to master, even if you’re an avid reader. As J. K. Rowling put in in her Harvard commencement address, “You have to kill a lot of trees before you write anything good.” And these days, with e-readers and iPads, you don’t even have to kill trees. But you do have to practice.
Tell us a bit about yourself.
C. P. Lesley is a pen name. In real life, I am a historian specializing in early modern Europe—that is, the 15th through 18th centuries—especially Russia, which is the setting for my next book. People in my field will know who I am when I publish that second book; the pen name is just to separate my fiction from my academic work.
What inspired you to be an author?
I never intended to write fiction, but for as long as I can remember, I have told myself stories before going to sleep. One day, about 15 years ago, I had a scene in such a story exactly where I wanted it, so I wrote it down. Then I wrote the scenes before and after it, and before I knew it I had a quarter of a novel. A very bad novel, I discovered much later, but by then I was hooked on the idea of writing fiction. It took a lot of feedback, much reading of craft books, and the concerted efforts of my writers group to get me to produce anything worth reading, but I’m glad I stuck with it. I’ve learned an enormous amount along the way about what makes a novel work, and that’s despite having been a bookworm all my life.
Is there a particular message in your book/books that you want readers to grasp?
I write for fun, and I hope readers will enjoy my work without worrying about hidden messages. That said, my books tend to focus on the values of cooperation and compromise. And because I’m a historian, I use them to make history accessible in ways that it often isn’t in a classroom while keeping the facts as accurate as I can. But I don’t preach. It drives me nuts when a novel stops the plot cold to give me five pages on political or economic conditions during the period in question, so I deliver the history in digestible chunks and only as it affects my protagonists. If people love the story, I’m happy.
How did you come up with the title for your book/books?
Titles are tough. Mine either come to me right away—I have titles for all five volumes in my Russian series, even though I have only the sketchiest idea of the plots beyond book 2, which I’m beginning now—or they hide in the woodwork and refuse to come out, no matter how many treats I offer. The Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel,the book I published in June, was one of the hide-in-the-woodwork kind. I went through about five titles before settling on this one, and I’m still not completely happy with it. I picked it because I thought it would work well in search engines: people who love the original Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy (1905) are the natural audience for my book. But I forgot that Orczy wrote about twenty Pimpernel novels, many of them with Scarlet Pimpernel in the title, and there are quite a few titles beginning with “The Not Exactly” as well. So it turned out not to be such a good choice. Although it did get the book onto someone’s website devoted to all things “exactly,” which came as a pleasant surprise.
Where do you get ideas from?
The Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel was another book that began as a before-sleep story. I had re-read the original, which I loved when I was a teenager, and couldn’t get the central conflict out of my head. I kept trying to solve the problem, and when I had worked it over enough, I wrote it down. Of course, the job of a novelist is to create conflict, not to resolve it, so the result was that fifty pages into the book I ran out of story and had to develop a new one of my own. That book went through revision after revision, but in the end I produced a version I liked.
The Russian books I approach in a much more focused way. Russian history is so fascinating that I have no trouble finding ideas, and in the 16th century there were none of those modern inventions that make a writer’s life so difficult. No cell phones or Internet, no DNA research, no fingerprints—no police, for that matter. Characters can do all kinds of stuff they can’t hope to get away with these days.
How do you fight writers block?
I get writers block only when I try to force a character, especially a protagonist, to do something that serves the plot but is wrong for that character. Then the dialogue dries up and I can’t see what’s happening. So I’ve learned to stop and figure out what I’m doing that’s not right for the story, and that’s usually enough to kick me back into gear.
Also, I write to relax; it’s not my day job, so if I did stop for a while, no one would care but me. That takes a lot of the pressure off.
Is there anything you find particularly challenging in your writing?
I am a “plot first” writer. I can come up with plot twists at the drop of a proverbial hat. But developing rounded characters is hard. Fortunately, my writers group includes a “character first” writer, as well as another plot specialist, so she pokes and prods at my chapters until I produce credible people.
Who is your favorite author and what is it that really strikes you about their work?
I have so many favorite authors that I can’t pick just one. As I learn more about craft, I find that my approach to reading changes. When I find someone who can really bring a setting and characters to life and keep them moving in ways that make me not want to put the book down, that’s my favorite author of the moment.
Do you have to travel much concerning your book(s)?
I would love to travel more, but no. The Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel required only that I read a lot of Orczy novels and watch the various movie/television versions. I spent hours studying Anthony Andrews, who did a fantastic job as the Scarlet Pimpernel in an 1982 BBC production. I pretended that was work, but of course it was pure pleasure.
The Golden Lynx,the first of my Russian novels, draws on years of research in the field and past trips to Moscow. It’s my way of conveying ideas that I can’t prove in an academic setting. I’d love to visit Kasimov, Kazan, and the steppe someday, though. Those are all settings in the Lynxseries, called Legends of the Five Directions. Failing that, there’s Google Earth, which gets better every day. Still, there’s nothing quite like having memories of a place when you are trying to recreate it for a reader.
What was the hardest part of writing your book?
This will sound odd, but the hardest part was to get past thinking like a historian. Novelists get inside people’s heads. That’s the charm of novels: they let us see something real life never permits—how other people think, as distinct from what they want us to know. Historians don’t get inside people’s heads, because we work from documents, and even if you have access to someone’s letters or diaries, you see only what they wanted you to see when they wrote. So to get to the point where I could reproduce a character’s experience from the insidetook years, literally.
Did you learn anything from writing your book and what was it?
I learned tons. Mostly about writing, as I mentioned before. But also a lot of details about revolutionary France (in Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel) and Tatar culture (in Golden Lynx). I love the research. It’s almost as much fun as the writing.
Do you have any advice for other writers?
Revise, revise, revise. And read everything you can about the craft of writing. Don’t send your book out as soon as you finish it. You’ll think it’s ready, but it’s not. Instead, find other fiction writers with compatible personalities and, if you are lucky, different strengths and have them read the book and comment. Then revise some more.
It’s not new advice, but it is worth heeding. The truth is that writing takes time to master, even if you’re an avid reader. As J. K. Rowling put in in her Harvard commencement address, “You have to kill a lot of trees before you write anything good.” And these days, with e-readers and iPads, you don’t even have to kill trees. But you do have to practice.
August 5, 2012
Let's Talk Titles
Many authors have trouble with titles. I have several writer friends who go through the entire creation/revision process referring to their book only by the name of the central character. Which is fine, in traditional publishing, since titles remain malleable almost until the moment when the book goes to production. It doesn’t make sense to get too attached to a title when the editor or marketing department will make the final decision. But if you are self-publishing or, like me, working with an indie press/writers’ cooperative, you the writer have sole and ultimate responsibility for the title of your book.
Here I have generally been lucky. My first (unpublished and unpublishable) novel had a title before I had a rough draft. As the book developed and changed from Star Trek™ fan fiction into my own science fiction, the title changed, but it always hada title that reflected the central idea of the book and made me happy. Similarly, my second novel, which eventually gave rise to The Golden Lynx, went through a couple of titles as it morphed from historical mystery to adventure romance. It started life as Day of St. Helena, which I then decided was too obscure. I replaced it with Sins of the Father (too clichéd), before overhauling it into its present form. And I already have titles for the four Lynxsequels, although only the second (The Winged Horse) and the third (The Swan Princess) have anything approaching a plot.
The one big exception to this rule is The Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel, which I published this summer. You’d think, given that I was riffing off someone else’s work (the original Scarlet Pimpernel is in the public domain, so I’m not violating Baroness Orczy’s copyright—plus the story deviates from hers early on), finding a title would be easy. Instead, I went through so many, I can’t remember them all. Sir Percy Rides Again, The Pimpernel Plan, Moonlight and Mechlin Lace, The Scarlet Pimpernel Returns—I could go on, but I’ll spare you. For a while, my spouse pushed It’s Tough Out There for a Pimpernel. Funny, if perhaps not striking quite the right tone. By then, I’d have loved to have a marketing director sweep in and solve the problem for me.
In the end, I bowed to the logic of search engines. Obviously, the target audience for my modernized Scarlet Pimpernel is people who love the original—or who would love the original if they knew of its existence. After umpteen revisions, you don’t have to have read the original to understand my version, but in marketing terms, to quote one of my reviewers in a different context, “it helps.” So I wanted “scarlet pimpernel” in the title to make it easier for people looking for the original to see it. Hence the decision to violate the writing rule that declares adverbs the spawn of the devil and embrace The Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel.
It seemed like the perfect solution. Only after I had the book online and began searching for it did I recognize that the plan had a major flaw. I had forgotten, you see, that Baroness Orczy wrote about twenty Pimpernel books, which in the last 107 years have yielded dozens of editions in several different media. So if you search for “scarlet pimpernel” on Amazon.com, what you see is pages and pages of Orczy novels. My book, if it appears at all, lies buried somewhere near the end. Even I don’t have the patience to go through the entire list. And “Not Exactly” turns to be not exactly rare, either. I should have done more research. But since it would just sow confusion to change the title now, I will have to find another way to market the book.
It’s tough out there for a Pimpernel....
What about you? How do youdecide what to title your work?
July 28, 2012
The Great Cover Hunt
People who hang around with me recognize that I’m obsessive. I can see the eyes rolling now, especially among those who have endured my editorial blue pencil. Hear the snarky comments—“No, really, who knew?”
Too true. Although a historian by trade, I edit for a living, and what spare time I have when neither working nor writing goes to the study of classical ballet, an art that aims for perfection (a special challenge given my age—which is, ahem, well past that of most ballerina wannabes). In the last few months I have also become the main editor and typesetter for Five Directions Press, so I have lots to obsess about.
Setting type is an obsessive’s dream job. No matter how many mistakes you correct, some always remain to be discovered. But I have typeset long enough that I feel pretty confident about page composition, something I cannot say about constructing covers. For starters, I am not an artist. I can move things around on a page, but draw? Forget it. Making a star in Illustrator stretches my skills to the limit. And Photoshop, until I encountered Robin Williams and John Tollett’s gift to the hapless, The Non-Designer’s Photoshop Book, headed the list of what I considered necessary evils—a program I suffered through on those occasions when someone sent me a photo or two to accompany an article and got out of as soon as I had checked the resolution and converted the photo to grayscale. But Five Directions Press is a small, indie writers’ cooperative. One member owns a graphic design business, but when it comes to book covers, each of us has to develop her own idea before we can work on it as a group. As a result, my Photoshop skills have improved a good deal in the last three months.
Of course, I could use CreateSpace’s Cover Creator or Folium Book Studio’s cover creation tool. And I do. But although many of the prefab templates and stock images are lovely, my obsessive self wants more control over placement, font, pictures, background, and the like. So I tend to create my covers in InDesign—using files massaged in Photoshop—then port the finished covers into the cover creation tools.
But even the best cover, tweaked to a fare-thee-well, requires at least one good image. Which brings up the question of copyright. There has been a bit of a fluff in the blogosphere since Roni Loren courageously posted her experience with accusations of copyright infringement regarding her blog (you can find that post here). Natalie Collins, among others, followed up with a copyright violation tutorial on her blog. The whole discussion is proving highly educational.
Unlike some of the people who commented on these posts, I knew that most of the images pulled up through a Google image search cannot be used on a cover, blog, or anywhere else without violating copyright. One of my own images, created for my Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel and used as a symbol on my website, is now floating around the Web and even appears on a cover on Amazon.com (I tried to complain, but the “report images” button didn’t include an option for “report copyright infringement”—are you listening, Amazon.com?). And although I had created a lovely cover for my forthcoming Golden Lynx, I felt uneasy about using it because I had included a film screenshot to represent my heroine. Film screenshots are considered fair use, so the cover might be okay. Still, I didn’t want to discover somewhere down the road that it was not.
So, out of fellow-feeling and a desire to do the right thing, I went out of my way to find images that were either public domain or Creative Commons and to observe the terms of the CC license. Following a link in Natalie’s blog post, I purchased a five-image package from Shutterstock and downloaded three shots of girls who resembled my mental image of my heroine, then settled on the one I liked most.
Yet despite all this care and effort, I almost blew it. Why? Because I had forgotten that the absolutely gorgeous shot of a Eurasian lynx that I would have sworn came from Wikimedia Commons actually did not—or if it did (I have it stashed in a folder labeled Public Domain Pics), the photographer has since removed it. Only a last-minute obsessive check revealed the mistake I had made. A Google search turned up the name of the original photographer—on a site I had never visited before—and another round of Photoshop editing produced a viable, if not quite so gorgeous, substitute.
All’s well that ends well, as they say. The Golden Lynx will go to press in late summer/early fall with properly credited, acceptable-use images. Yet there is a cautionary tale here: even photographs you would swear are public domain or Creative Commons may not be. If you want to stay out of trouble, check before you download and keep a record of anything you plan to use, especially for commercial purposes. I certainly plan to do that from now on. Even if no one sues you, peace of mind is well worth $10 to Shutterstock or the equivalent. And you can bet I'll be monitoring the pictures I pin to Pinterest, too.
Because I wouldn’t want someone stealing my work. Would you?
July 27, 2012
New review of "Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel"
Chantale of Geeky Girl Reviews writes:
I very much liked this book. Very well written and and it has adventure, romance and humour. I didn't think I would like this book but I always like to give books a chance. I must say it got me hooked from the very beginning and actually made me want to read The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy.
I highly recommend this book even if you haven't read The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy.
I give this 4 out of 5
*I have received a free copy of this in ebook format for my honest review.*
You can find this review—and more of Chantale's reviews, at http://www.geekygirlreviewsblog.com.
I very much liked this book. Very well written and and it has adventure, romance and humour. I didn't think I would like this book but I always like to give books a chance. I must say it got me hooked from the very beginning and actually made me want to read The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy.
I highly recommend this book even if you haven't read The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy.
I give this 4 out of 5
*I have received a free copy of this in ebook format for my honest review.*
You can find this review—and more of Chantale's reviews, at http://www.geekygirlreviewsblog.com.
July 23, 2012
The Art of the Borgias (Fun with History, Part 1)
For as long as I can remember, I have loved history. So even though my first efforts at novel writing happened to involve science fiction, it was pretty much inevitable that as soon as I settled down and got serious, I would turn to the past. My first published novel can be considered a bridging story—contemporary technology applied to a classic tale set during the French Revolution, with a double romance (past and present) and a dash of humor as the expectations of the present clash with those of past. But from here on, it’s history all the way.
History offers a novelist certain advantages: no police force to interrupt crimes in progress; no awkward modern devices that make it impossible for characters to miss one another like proverbial ships in the night; no handy-dandy fingerprinting or DNA tests to bring a long, winding mystery to a screeching halt on page 3; lots of warfare and skullduggery to keep a novel moving.
But history also has one big disadvantage: as a writer, I can’t assume that basic things that I take for granted existed in the past. Things like the germ theory of disease, the understanding of gravity, the eternal existence of Russian nesting dolls (as a lovely friend pointed out to me when she read one of my drafts, they first appeared in 1898—who knew?). Hence the need for—and, I must admit, the fun of—research.
Moreover, historical research of the type needed for a novel is not always easy. Sources seldom record what things smelled like or sounded like or even looked like; they tend to focus on higher matters of state and society. When I decided my plot required me to poison a character, I had several fundamental questions to answer. What poisons were available in this particular region in this particular year? If I picked a food-based poison, how would the criminal get the poison past the tasters and into the victim? Which of the available toxins produced the right symptoms with the right timing? And given the complete absence of chemical testing, who would detect the crime and find the solution? People knew about poison in the 16th century. Indeed, they often suspected it in any case of severe gastric distress. (Another favorite explanation was witchcraft.) But plausibly identifying which poison and how the victim ingested it required skills few people had. And even if I could call the local police station and ask (hardly a good idea), their answer would not tell me how people living in the 16th-century steppe would handle the problem.
Enter a wonderful book called Deadly Doses: A Writer’s Guide to Poisons. Within two hours I had six different plants that might reasonably have found their way into my unfortunate character. Now I only need to finish Medieval Islamic Medicine and a guide to shamanic practice to develop a sense of how my other characters would have responded to this situation.
It may take a while longer to convince my family that it’s safe to accept food from my hands....
July 13, 2012
Karmic Circles
A couple of posts back, I wrote about setting up my author page on Facebook. I set it up, sent invitations to my small number of friends, gathered eleven “likes” in the first few days. Then nothing. The page sat there, not going anywhere but not attracting attention either. I didn’t have enough friends even to meet Facebook’s threshold of twenty-five likes, the minimum necessary to define an easy-to-remember user name to replace the long string of letters and numbers originally assigned to me. I needed more Facebook connections—especially since sales of my book, after chugging along at a slow but steady pace, had stalled. But where to find them?
I sent out requests to writer friends of friends. My tiny network grew, but my author page remained stuck at eleven likes.
Then I discovered Novel Publicity’s Author Karma group (on Facebook and Goodreads). This wonderful idea draws on a simple truth: most writers hate self-promotion. Why would they? Writers, fiction and nonfiction, spend hours every day in front of their computers, more or less in isolation. They express themselves through the written word. Fiction writers go farther, creating their own communities, their own worlds, living through the emotions of their characters. And these are the folks expected to button-hole family, friends, and strangers and yell, “Buy my book”? Not likely.
The lucky writer has a beloved extrovert to handle the publicity and the marketing (or a publicist, but that requires the writer to first make it big, in which case the writer probably has other things to do besides read this blog). And to be honest, I am lucky in just that way. Even so, the beloved extrovert can’t do everything.
Which is why I appreciate Author Karma—a group of writers on Facebook who like one another’s pages, follow one another on Twitter and Pinterest, like and tag books on Amazon.com, and in general support one another. As I write this post, the group has about 450 members, each of whom participates to the extent that s/he feels appropriate. Paying forward, helping others—and no direct self-promotion. This idea is inspired. I love it. Thank you, Novel Publicity!
As a newcomer to the group, I have a lot of clicking to do before I get through the various lists. It may take me a few weeks to catch up, especially since the group expands daily. But the carpal tunnel syndrome in my wrist will be worth it. Already I have found several books (by Karma authors) that I want to read, and my network of connections has doubled in size. And, yes, my author page now has more than sixty likes. You can find it at http://www.facebook.com/cplesley.authorpage. I corrected the link in earlier posts to reflect the new name. Stop by and visit sometime. And if you’re a writer, consider joining the group. It’s a great way to connect with other authors.
Meanwhile, I will be wending my way through the Karmic lists, paying forward. I will be watching to see if the greater exposure translates to higher sales or even higher rankings according to the all-important algorithms that drive modern marketing. But compared to lassoing neighbors at the grocery store (okay, I do that, too), Author Karma seems well worth a shot. If nothing else, I’m happy to have discovered such a great group of people.
I sent out requests to writer friends of friends. My tiny network grew, but my author page remained stuck at eleven likes.
Then I discovered Novel Publicity’s Author Karma group (on Facebook and Goodreads). This wonderful idea draws on a simple truth: most writers hate self-promotion. Why would they? Writers, fiction and nonfiction, spend hours every day in front of their computers, more or less in isolation. They express themselves through the written word. Fiction writers go farther, creating their own communities, their own worlds, living through the emotions of their characters. And these are the folks expected to button-hole family, friends, and strangers and yell, “Buy my book”? Not likely.
The lucky writer has a beloved extrovert to handle the publicity and the marketing (or a publicist, but that requires the writer to first make it big, in which case the writer probably has other things to do besides read this blog). And to be honest, I am lucky in just that way. Even so, the beloved extrovert can’t do everything.
Which is why I appreciate Author Karma—a group of writers on Facebook who like one another’s pages, follow one another on Twitter and Pinterest, like and tag books on Amazon.com, and in general support one another. As I write this post, the group has about 450 members, each of whom participates to the extent that s/he feels appropriate. Paying forward, helping others—and no direct self-promotion. This idea is inspired. I love it. Thank you, Novel Publicity!
As a newcomer to the group, I have a lot of clicking to do before I get through the various lists. It may take me a few weeks to catch up, especially since the group expands daily. But the carpal tunnel syndrome in my wrist will be worth it. Already I have found several books (by Karma authors) that I want to read, and my network of connections has doubled in size. And, yes, my author page now has more than sixty likes. You can find it at http://www.facebook.com/cplesley.authorpage. I corrected the link in earlier posts to reflect the new name. Stop by and visit sometime. And if you’re a writer, consider joining the group. It’s a great way to connect with other authors.
Meanwhile, I will be wending my way through the Karmic lists, paying forward. I will be watching to see if the greater exposure translates to higher sales or even higher rankings according to the all-important algorithms that drive modern marketing. But compared to lassoing neighbors at the grocery store (okay, I do that, too), Author Karma seems well worth a shot. If nothing else, I’m happy to have discovered such a great group of people.
July 6, 2012
Pantser Learns to Plot, Courtesy of Storyist
Writers, like everyone else, have preferred styles of working. Some (“plotters”) work out every detail before they craft a single line of dialogue, expanding their initial premise into ever-longer outlines until the story writes itself. Others (“pantsers,” as in people who write by the seat of their pants) embark on a journey of discovery toward a distant shore, guided by the stars and their muses. Devotees of the “snowflake” method combine the two, plotting and pantsing as the mood takes them.
My first attempts at writing fiction were pure pantser. One day I had an idea for a scene, wrote it down, and soon had a quarter of a novel. In those days, I had no idea what I was doing, but I persevered. When I finished the manuscript, I showed it to a friend; she had comments; I revised and tried again. And again. And again. When I couldn’t face any more revisions, I gave up. Five years later, I had another idea, wrote a rough draft in three weeks, showed it to another friend, and began the whole process anew.
The good news is that I just published the second book. One day, I may even salvage the first one. But the tally was daunting: five years, no result on book one; four years leading to eventual publication on book two; and three years plus on book three, now ready for print. If I wanted to finish my five-part series before hitting Social Security, I needed a better plan.
In the interim—halfway through book two, in fact—I had discovered Storyist, a Mac-only program that combines data management (characters, plot, settings, notes, research, images) and word processing. In the beginning, I didn’t do much with it except record character and setting information, notes, and edit text imported from Microsoft Word. I embraced images when they became available. But plot? I had a plot! Besides, I was a pantser. Who needed to plot?
I did, as it turns out. As I sit down today to write the first pages of my new novel, The Winged Horse, I have an outline covering the entire plot, the main conflicts at each step, and a custom field that reminds me of details I need to include (O’s reaction to news that his mentor has died, e.g.). I have descriptive sheets with story goals, physical descriptions, personality strengths/weaknesses, and images for every character as well as sheets with sounds, smells, sights, and images for each setting. Each of these sheets is or can be linked to the others, allowing me to track stages of character development for multiple characters or explanatory notes to plot points. And Storyist has a tightly integrated iPad app, so I can edit on the couch in the evenings (vital when work takes over my days) and sync my files over the air with Dropbox. I still need to feel my way into the sensory details and emotional experiences as I go, but I find it incredibly reassuring to know I have a story structure that works.
Storyist is not the only alternative for writers. Scrivener gets a lot of press; it has Mac and Windows versions but as yet no iPad app, and it’s a worthy program, too. Some people (pantsers?) prefer it because they find Storyist’s prepopulated sheets inflexible. But for pantsers learning to plot, or plotters or snowflakers who plot first and write later, those prepopulated but customizable sheets are an invaluable resource. They encourage you to ponder what conflict this plot point produces, how those woods smell, what your hero(ine) learned in this chapter, whose point of view you need for this scene. If you hate the sheets, you can hide or delete them, but if you do, you strip Storyist of much of its power.
To find out more, visit www.storyist.com or stop by the Storyist forums.
My first attempts at writing fiction were pure pantser. One day I had an idea for a scene, wrote it down, and soon had a quarter of a novel. In those days, I had no idea what I was doing, but I persevered. When I finished the manuscript, I showed it to a friend; she had comments; I revised and tried again. And again. And again. When I couldn’t face any more revisions, I gave up. Five years later, I had another idea, wrote a rough draft in three weeks, showed it to another friend, and began the whole process anew.
The good news is that I just published the second book. One day, I may even salvage the first one. But the tally was daunting: five years, no result on book one; four years leading to eventual publication on book two; and three years plus on book three, now ready for print. If I wanted to finish my five-part series before hitting Social Security, I needed a better plan.
In the interim—halfway through book two, in fact—I had discovered Storyist, a Mac-only program that combines data management (characters, plot, settings, notes, research, images) and word processing. In the beginning, I didn’t do much with it except record character and setting information, notes, and edit text imported from Microsoft Word. I embraced images when they became available. But plot? I had a plot! Besides, I was a pantser. Who needed to plot?
I did, as it turns out. As I sit down today to write the first pages of my new novel, The Winged Horse, I have an outline covering the entire plot, the main conflicts at each step, and a custom field that reminds me of details I need to include (O’s reaction to news that his mentor has died, e.g.). I have descriptive sheets with story goals, physical descriptions, personality strengths/weaknesses, and images for every character as well as sheets with sounds, smells, sights, and images for each setting. Each of these sheets is or can be linked to the others, allowing me to track stages of character development for multiple characters or explanatory notes to plot points. And Storyist has a tightly integrated iPad app, so I can edit on the couch in the evenings (vital when work takes over my days) and sync my files over the air with Dropbox. I still need to feel my way into the sensory details and emotional experiences as I go, but I find it incredibly reassuring to know I have a story structure that works.
Storyist is not the only alternative for writers. Scrivener gets a lot of press; it has Mac and Windows versions but as yet no iPad app, and it’s a worthy program, too. Some people (pantsers?) prefer it because they find Storyist’s prepopulated sheets inflexible. But for pantsers learning to plot, or plotters or snowflakers who plot first and write later, those prepopulated but customizable sheets are an invaluable resource. They encourage you to ponder what conflict this plot point produces, how those woods smell, what your hero(ine) learned in this chapter, whose point of view you need for this scene. If you hate the sheets, you can hide or delete them, but if you do, you strip Storyist of much of its power.
To find out more, visit www.storyist.com or stop by the Storyist forums.
July 3, 2012
Reviews of "Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel"
The reviews are starting to come in, and so far they are good!
From Amazon.com:
1. Best Pimpernel Story Ever (5 stars)
C.P. Lesley has successfully mated a romantic adventure with cutting-edge science fiction without befogging the reader with ether technobabble nor the stilted language of 18th-century heros. Her unique slant on total immersion VR is a treat and would alone earn my recommendation. That she brings the period alive makes this a must-read for fans of the Pimpernel.
Placed into the body of France's most beautiful actress, our heroine (a Ph.D candidate) first dismisses her host as a birdbrained fool but soon comes to think of her as a sister. Together the two must work with the period's most swashbuckling hero to defeat the darkest villain of post-revolutionary France. Not to mention, win the game and her teacher's respect.
If you're not into "chic lit" then know that the humor of a 21st-century graduate student trapped in the mannered world of 18th-century Europe is priceless. Adventure, romance, humor--an unbeatable combination.
The down side? The occasional French phrases are like little stumbling blocks for those of us not fluent in the language. But you can ignore them without losing any of the story. On the other hand, you can look them up and build your vocabulary.
It is important to note that you don't need to have read The Scarlet Pimpernel (by Baroness Orczy, 1905) to enjoy Lesley's book but it does help. Things get more interesting when the VR explorers step away from Orczy's plot and have to improvise. This is where Lesley shines.
2. What a good read! (5 stars)
The Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel, by Catriona Lesley, is original, witty, suspenseful, and engaging. Anyone unfamiliar with the original Scarlet Pimpernel will have no problem understanding what's happening because the author has explained it in the opening chapters. When the simulation game in the story begins, the reader is engrossed in the plot and fascinated with the development of characters and relationships. The nuggets of historical data picked up along the line enrich the reader's experience. I've recommended this book to several friends and am now re-reading it myself.
And from iTunes:
Have you ever wanted to relive your favorite book? (5 stars)
History, fiction, computer games, romance—this debut novel is a lighthearted, funny, at times touching exploration of a common readers' fantasy: to relive, and perhaps rewrite, a beloved novel. A group of grad students vying for the approval of the top professor in their field compete to come out ahead in the classic action adventure romance The Scarlet Pimpernel. In doing so, they create a new story. And no, you need not know anything about the original to enjoy the remake: the author explains the essentials in the first few chapters. A great summer read!
And one more, very short, from Facebook:All my favorite things in one tale: the French revolution; romantic subterfuge; misunderstood heroes and time travel!
From Amazon.com:
1. Best Pimpernel Story Ever (5 stars)
C.P. Lesley has successfully mated a romantic adventure with cutting-edge science fiction without befogging the reader with ether technobabble nor the stilted language of 18th-century heros. Her unique slant on total immersion VR is a treat and would alone earn my recommendation. That she brings the period alive makes this a must-read for fans of the Pimpernel.
Placed into the body of France's most beautiful actress, our heroine (a Ph.D candidate) first dismisses her host as a birdbrained fool but soon comes to think of her as a sister. Together the two must work with the period's most swashbuckling hero to defeat the darkest villain of post-revolutionary France. Not to mention, win the game and her teacher's respect.
If you're not into "chic lit" then know that the humor of a 21st-century graduate student trapped in the mannered world of 18th-century Europe is priceless. Adventure, romance, humor--an unbeatable combination.
The down side? The occasional French phrases are like little stumbling blocks for those of us not fluent in the language. But you can ignore them without losing any of the story. On the other hand, you can look them up and build your vocabulary.
It is important to note that you don't need to have read The Scarlet Pimpernel (by Baroness Orczy, 1905) to enjoy Lesley's book but it does help. Things get more interesting when the VR explorers step away from Orczy's plot and have to improvise. This is where Lesley shines.
2. What a good read! (5 stars)
The Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel, by Catriona Lesley, is original, witty, suspenseful, and engaging. Anyone unfamiliar with the original Scarlet Pimpernel will have no problem understanding what's happening because the author has explained it in the opening chapters. When the simulation game in the story begins, the reader is engrossed in the plot and fascinated with the development of characters and relationships. The nuggets of historical data picked up along the line enrich the reader's experience. I've recommended this book to several friends and am now re-reading it myself.
And from iTunes:
Have you ever wanted to relive your favorite book? (5 stars)
History, fiction, computer games, romance—this debut novel is a lighthearted, funny, at times touching exploration of a common readers' fantasy: to relive, and perhaps rewrite, a beloved novel. A group of grad students vying for the approval of the top professor in their field compete to come out ahead in the classic action adventure romance The Scarlet Pimpernel. In doing so, they create a new story. And no, you need not know anything about the original to enjoy the remake: the author explains the essentials in the first few chapters. A great summer read!
And one more, very short, from Facebook:All my favorite things in one tale: the French revolution; romantic subterfuge; misunderstood heroes and time travel!
July 1, 2012
Fumbling with Facebook: Likes, Links, and Pages
I admit it: I am a latecomer to the world of social networking. A few years back, I joined LinkedIn, where a local writers group had congregated. Today I still have fewer than 50 connections, and if my college hadn’t set up a group for its alumnae association (with a subgroup for writers and editors), I would never visit LinkedIn at all. Facebook puzzles me even more. It seems so vast, so omnipresent, so wildly in flux. It changes its policies and appearance without warning, often with no obvious benefit to its users. The news feed, even with my tiny network, scrolls by so fast I miss half the posts. As for Twitter, the mere thought of navigating thousands of 140-character tweets makes me cringe.
The one social network I “get” is Pinterest, which I have loved from the moment I saw it. As a historian, I write about times and places—revolutionary France, 18th-century London, 16th-century Russia, the remnants of Genghis Khan’s empire—unfamiliar to many people, so having a place to post pictures strikes me as a great resource for my readers. And for me: even before I discovered Pinterest, I spent far too many hours searching the Web for images of my characters and settings. I have tons of material to share and get a kick out of sharing it. So Pinterest and I hit it off right away. The word on the street is that Pinterest focuses on food, hairdos, and fashion, but that description doesn’t apply to me. I have nine boards of my own, plus one that someone added my name to, and seven of them relate to books. My books, other people’s books, writing books—books.
But Pinterest is a separate story. This blog post involves Facebook—specifically my efforts to set up a Facebook account devoted to my novels. The problem was my pen name, which uses initials: C. P. Facebook does not like pen names; it wants all its users to give their real names. Perhaps for the same reason, it also does not like initials, as I discovered when it informed me that my proposed name had too many periods. By the time I figured out that I could have dropped the periods and called myself C P, I had already caved, established the account as Catriona Lesley, and accumulated a small number of friends. I decided to let Catriona stand and set out to build a network.
Eventually I stumbled over the concept of pages, including the idea that you could “like” a page and have future posts show up on your news feed. Very useful, if the posts advertise free books or promote the works of other authors or even just link to blogs that I may want to follow or read. Even then, it did not occur to me that I could set up a page of my own. (I told you I was a latecomer to the idea of social networking.)
Finally, yesterday, by watching another author’s skilled maneuvering of the system, the penny dropped. I discovered the secret. Catriona has set up an author page for her alter ego, C. P. Lesley, with links to her blog posts and Web site and relevant Pinterest boards. Apparently, Facebook permits initials with periods so long as they are on author pages and not user accounts. Who knew?
You can find the page at http://www.facebook.com/cplesley.auth....
And please feel free to “friend” Catriona Lesley or follow her on Pinterest. She values every one of her friends and is always happy to expand her network.
The one social network I “get” is Pinterest, which I have loved from the moment I saw it. As a historian, I write about times and places—revolutionary France, 18th-century London, 16th-century Russia, the remnants of Genghis Khan’s empire—unfamiliar to many people, so having a place to post pictures strikes me as a great resource for my readers. And for me: even before I discovered Pinterest, I spent far too many hours searching the Web for images of my characters and settings. I have tons of material to share and get a kick out of sharing it. So Pinterest and I hit it off right away. The word on the street is that Pinterest focuses on food, hairdos, and fashion, but that description doesn’t apply to me. I have nine boards of my own, plus one that someone added my name to, and seven of them relate to books. My books, other people’s books, writing books—books.
But Pinterest is a separate story. This blog post involves Facebook—specifically my efforts to set up a Facebook account devoted to my novels. The problem was my pen name, which uses initials: C. P. Facebook does not like pen names; it wants all its users to give their real names. Perhaps for the same reason, it also does not like initials, as I discovered when it informed me that my proposed name had too many periods. By the time I figured out that I could have dropped the periods and called myself C P, I had already caved, established the account as Catriona Lesley, and accumulated a small number of friends. I decided to let Catriona stand and set out to build a network.
Eventually I stumbled over the concept of pages, including the idea that you could “like” a page and have future posts show up on your news feed. Very useful, if the posts advertise free books or promote the works of other authors or even just link to blogs that I may want to follow or read. Even then, it did not occur to me that I could set up a page of my own. (I told you I was a latecomer to the idea of social networking.)
Finally, yesterday, by watching another author’s skilled maneuvering of the system, the penny dropped. I discovered the secret. Catriona has set up an author page for her alter ego, C. P. Lesley, with links to her blog posts and Web site and relevant Pinterest boards. Apparently, Facebook permits initials with periods so long as they are on author pages and not user accounts. Who knew?
You can find the page at http://www.facebook.com/cplesley.auth....
And please feel free to “friend” Catriona Lesley or follow her on Pinterest. She values every one of her friends and is always happy to expand her network.
