Chris Baty's Blog, page 30

30 Covers,30 Days 2021: Day 16

Today we present Day 16, the Satire/Humor novel Randomized Hatred by Jordan Laura Dewar. This cover is designed by Victoria Pickett.

Randomized Hatred

What do you do when the IRB won’t approve your experiment?

Pitch it as a reality TV show, of course.

When struggling grad student Stephanie has hit a brick wall in her research. One of her classmates stole her most recent paper, the IRB has vetoed most of her experiment ideas, and the deadline for getting outside funding is growing closer and closer.

Fueled by desperation and vengeance (tequila, it was actually tequila), she decides to pitch her most recent experiment to MTV as a new reality show. With her pitch for a show centered on different groups struggling to survive after the end of the world accepted, Stephanie dives into the world of reality TV production.

But what lines will Stephanie cross in her quest for data?

About the Author

Jordan is a PhD student at the University of Maryland. She can usually be found attempting to write academic articles but, driven by the encouragement of her cohort, is now turning the chaos of graduate student life into story form.

About the Artist

Victoria Pickett is a designer and design educator. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, South Carolina. Originally from Cleveland, she earned her MFA in Visual Communication Design at Kent State University. An avid reader herself, she can often be found at Myrtle Beach enjoying a good beach read in the sunshine. 

30 Covers, 30 Days 2021: Day 15

We’re struggling to capture the greatness of our Day 15 cover! This is an Other/Experimental novel, Fading Tongues by HM Violet with the cover designed by Robb Smigielski.

Fading Tongues

An aging traveler and his ward finally make it back to the homeland - only to find home to be completely destroyed. The traveler believes the destruction to be a sign - a reason to let go. The ward has other plans in mind… This is a story about the struggle to capture and pass along something that many believe to be intangible.

About the Author

By day, HM Violet is an educator who specializes in teaching English literacy. By night, she’s a philomath surrounded by reference books and salty snacks. When she’s not clacking away at the keys of her laptop, HM can be found spending time with family and good friends all around the great city of Chicago. 

About the Artist

Robb Smigielski is Chief Design Officer at VMLY&R, where he leads the Brand Identity & Design Studio. Most recently he directed the complete global brand identity redesign of Intel as well as branding and design projects of all sizes for clients like Smartwater, Coke, Bentley, Virgin Active, PwC, Xbox, Kashi, Microsoft, HSBC, Lenovo, Nintendo, Colgate, Bear Naked Granola and the House of Marley.

30 Covers, 30 Days 2021: Day 14

Are you awake this morning on Day 14? We present the Women’s Fiction novel Awakening in Madrid by Michele Pickett. This cover was designed by Christine Mau. 

Awakening In Madrid

Olympic track hopeful Kellen Sargeant’s dream, and one that she shares with her father, is to win a gold medal. However, the U.S. boycott of the 1980 Olympics thwarts that goal along with the goals of hundreds of others. Despite the emotional blow, Kellen continues to train and makes the 1984 team. On the night before her big race, the unthinkable happens, forcing Kellen to choose between pursuing her lifelong dream or letting go of a harbored secret and hurting the people she loves. 

About the Author

Michele Pickett is a former teacher who taught both English and Spanish and Math and Science. Michele started her career in public broadcasting and later owned a successful greeting card company, In The Cards, that serviced both retail stores and private businesses. She has written short stories for both children and adults that have appeared in various publications, one of which was awarded best children’s story by the Philadelphia Writers Conference. She and her husband are RV'ers who are eager to travel cross-country in their motor home. Michele hopes to incorporate some of these new settings in upcoming books.

About the Artist

Christine Mau is a branding strategist living in the Chicago area. She leads the brand and creative teams at Medline, a medical supply and solutions provider. She began her career as an illustrator, working on children’s books and consumer products like facial tissue boxes. You can find her most weekends hiking with her family and making blotted line ink prints for fun.

30 Covers, 30 Days 2021: Day 13

Are you ready for Day 13? We present the Thriller novel, Two Truths and a Lie by our YWP participant Cody Emerson? This haunting cover is designed by Kelley Malone Kempel. 

Two Truths and a Lie

Echo doesn’t remember the night her best friend died. Was murdered, to be more specific. The doctors say selective amnesia, but Echo wants to remember. Nobody believes her. They’re scared. But when the police close the case based on a lack of evidence, Echo decides to take matters into her own hands.

*****

My name is Echo Everett Delacroix.

I am seventeen years old.

I live in Toronto, Ontario.

I can’t remember the night my best friend died.

One of these statements is a lie.

I won’t tell you which one.

About the Artist

Kelley Malone Kempel is a graphic designer and creative director living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She specializes in brand identity and packaging design. After 18 years of working in-house at national retailers Kohl’s and Dick’s Sporting Goods, it was time for a shift. In 2020 Kelley started Hidden Path Creative to work with trailblazers creating new brands and products. When she’s off the clock, you can find Kelley cozied up with some chick lit or the latest thriller. 

30 Covers, 30 Days 2021: Day 12

Take a break this Friday and admire our Day 12 cover. Today we have an LGBTQ+ novel, The Sculptress by NJ Green. Their cover is designed by Kevin Perry.

The Sculptress

Jenny is nearing thirty and her life isn’t going anywhere. In order to give her best friend’s sofa (and love life, apparently) some much needed breathing room, she embarks on what is promising to be a taxing visit to her family’s garage, only to end up being roped into working for a reclusive, aging sculptress over the summer instead. At the behest of the sculptresses nephew and with nowhere else to be, Jenny moves into the artist’s house at the edge of a remote English village and starts invading her decade long solitude and personal space - much to the sculptresses consternation. But what starts out as enforced cohabitation, slowly, and through sheer obstinacy, morphs into an unexpected symbiosis, evolving into a caring relationship and opening up an avenue into the future that Jenny may actually be prepared to walk. Of course, old habits die hard, and when Jenny tugs at the wrong end of her happiness the whole thing might just come tumbling down - unless she quickly learns to protect the source of the river and not its mouth.

About the Author

NJ Green loves stories, always has, and is forever looking for them in every nook and cranny. In fiction they’re drawn to zingy character dynamics and the kind of soothing soul food with queer happy endings that give you more than empty fantasies of old. Whenever they can’t chase the dopamine as an avid reader of (fan) fiction, they make do by chasing it on the job as lecturer, editor, and writer in Germany and the UK instead. njgreen.books@gmail.com

About the Artist

Kevin Perry is a designer, educator and organizational leader with two decades of agency experience. He currently oversees talent and operations at Struck, an internationally acclaimed creative agency whose clients include the Utah Office of Tourism, Universal Studios, Snowbird and Nickelodeon.  Kevin speaks around the country and teaches at the University of Utah. His work has been recognized by some of the industry’s most respected organizations and publications including AIGA and Print Magazine. In 2014 he was selected by Graphic Design USA as one of the “People to Watch”. Kevin is the cofounder of Salt Lake Design Week and has held a number of roles with AIGA, the professional association for design, where he most recently served on the national board of directors.

30 Covers, 30 Days 2021: Day 11

Today’s cover takes us back in time into Tarsus, an Other/Experimental novel by Khara House. This cover was designed by the talented Gene Portnoy.

Tarsus

1860. Georgia. A plantation becomes the setting of an antebellum Greek tragedy where secrets and shame culminate in catastrophe in the shadows of revolution.

About the Author

Khara House has been writing for as long as she can remember. She loves creating characters who frequently surprise her with how quickly they change her plans for their lives, and equally enjoys the spellbinding power of poetic lines. A passionate advocate for diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, Khara champions diversity in all its forms, lives for stories, and embraces the beautiful uniqueness of every life with which she has the pleasure of interacting. She began participating in NaNoWriMo in 2009 and supplements her writing time with painting and plenty of hours of karaoke.

About the Artist

Gene Portnoy is a Brooklyn based Independent brand designer. A veteran of Degrippes Gobe, Sterling Group, LPK, & Little Big Brands. Gene has managed & designed major branding programs for such companies as Anheuser-Bush, Colgate, Diagio, Coke, Pepsi, Bayer, Kraft Foods, Absolut, Novatis, Unilever & P&G. A graduate of the Fashion Institute of Technology where he received a degree in Design and holds a Graduate Degree from The Miami Ad School @ Portfolio Center.  Check out Gene’s online portfolio www.workandcompany.com or say hi on INSTA & LINKEDIN.

30 Covers, 30 Days 2021: Day 10

Let’s have some faith for Day 11 because this cover is legendary! We present the Mainstream novel Of Little Faith by Lindsey C. This cover was designed by Tony Pinto.

Of Little Faith

Tammy, Paula, Rosalind, and Joanna team up to save Tammy’s radio station, Rosalind’s bookstore, and Joanna’s church from PURE, a censorship group hellbent on turning their beloved hometown of Ellesmere into a “holier” Waco.

About the Author

Lindsey C is a Texas native that’s been writing nearly all her life and has also been a voracious reader for just as long (no seriously, ask her mom for the baby pictures). Her hobbies also include journaling, listening to music, fountain pens, video games, record-collecting, and being that person at parties that won’t shut up about Silent Hill and Fleetwood Mac. She currently resides in San Antonio with her beloved senior cat Meesie and works for a health insurance company. She is also currently in the process of querying her first novel, which was a past NaNoWriMo project. 

About the Artist

Tony Pinto is a designer, educator, photographer, and fine artist living in Southern California. He teaches graphic design, photography, and painting at several colleges, and is co-owner of Vim & Vigor Strategic Creative, with his wife and business partner, Adrienne Grace.

Making the Most of Your First Draft

Every year, we’re lucky to have great sponsors for our nonprofit events. Dabble, a 2021 NaNoWriMo sponsor, is an easy-to-use writing tool that lets you organize, plot, and create amazing stories. Today, they’ve teamed up with author and editor Chet Sandberg to bring you some advice for getting the most out of your first draft:

Every year, thousands of first time novelists reach the end of November with +/-50k words and savor the victory of finally finishing something. Perhaps you’ll be one of them!

You take a day, or maybe you take a week, to bathe in the adulation of your fellows, many of whom also completed their manuscripts, along with many who didn’t. Then, you freeze. What’s the next step?

This post is dedicated to helping you get a first draft that, no matter how loosey-goosey or clinical your writing approach, serves as a basis for a great final manuscript.

Turning points: give your scenes movement.

This suggestion is one I haven’t seen elsewhere, but it’s something I do in all my drafts now that I’ve stumbled into it. It works especially well for pantsers or discovery writers, but most plotters I know have deviations from their plots, or they don’t plot the polarity of each of their chapters. Polarity is the movement from a positive overall situation (or at least a stable one) to a negative overall situation, or vice versa. This movement may be strictly external—that is, strictly plot—or it may be internal/emotional. It also may involve the movement from negative to even more negative, or (though this is rare in gripping fiction) from positive to more positive. While you see storycraft experts talk about these polarity shifts, I rarely see anyone mention a system for making them easy to locate and manipulate in further drafts.

As you write, mark critical turning points in the plot or emotional tone of your novel. These will be points where the polarity shifts. Where do your scenes turn? Where does a significant misfortune or internal change in the character make even you—the writer who’s writing the book—wonder what will happen next? Many of these turning points have proper names and descriptions—the inciting incident, as an example—in storytelling craft, and you may or may not recognize, from the first time you see it, exactly what that turn is. That doesn’t matter yet. What matters is that it sticks out. 

When you revisit this first draft, it’ll be invaluable to have critical points marked and easy to find. I use composition software, Dabble Writer (dabblewriter.com), that makes this quite simple. Other manuscript software programs such as Scrivener have these features, too, but I haven’t found one yet that fits my process while still being as easy to use as Dabble. In Dabble, I can simply start a new plot in the plot grid and call it “turning points.” When I note a turning point as I’m writing, I highlight it within the scene (something Dabble makes easy), but I also create a card in the grid for that chapter that shows up in the right margin of that scene. I fill out the “turning points” grid card with a brief description of the turning point, along with any thoughts I have when I first see the turning point. 

Noting turnarounds within individual chapters works particularly well in helping you note where to end chapters, too. Often, a new author will create chapters that end three or four hundred words past when they should, essentially deflating the tension before the scene ends. Marking those emotional or plot highlights that make you curious or anxious about the POV character will help you spot these crucial turns and avoid neutralizing the polarity before the chapter ends. While not every scene can have drastic polarity swings (unless you’re intentionally writing melodrama), you still often want some sort of polarity shift to compel the reader on to the next chapter.

I’ve often said, “Verbs are the lifeblood of all prose.” While that’s true for the nuts and bolts syntax of writing, polarity shifts or turnarounds are similarly important for the storytelling aspects of writing. Fiction that lacks internal or external turnarounds—i.e., polarity shifts—is hard to pull off without an incredibly powerful voice. Such feats are usually reserved for experimental prose, not mainstream storytelling.

If verbs are the lifeblood of prose, turnarounds and polarity shifts are the edges of your story. They give shape to your characters’ journeys. Knowing where they are, vetting them, and finally sharpening them, is essential to good storytelling. Marking them within your manuscript as you go will make the task of creating a coherent second draft much easier. Future you will be thankful for such foresight.

Chet Sandberg is a hospice nurse, freelance line editor, and sporadically published author. Find him at world.hey.com/chetcraft/ where he often posts about writing and storytelling craft. His Twitter handle is @Chet_Novels. The software he mentions, Dabble Writer, may be found at dabblewriter.com.

Top photo by Weston MacKinnon on Unsplash.

30 Covers, 30 Days 2021: Day 9

Feeling optimistic about Day 9 yet? We present the literary novel The Optimists by Danny Eisenberg. This awesome cover is designed by Debbie Millman.

Another fun fact? 30 Covers, 30 Days is presented in partnership with designer and author Debbie Millman.

The Optimists

A small picaresque about a teenager thrust into a world of clueless people with lots of money and wise people who have nothing, of wasted opportunities and tiny obsessions. Parents who sell the furniture in order to buy themselves wine; an artist gluing millions of dollar bills into a mountain; a diarist who becomes a cult leader as she dies of cancer; college classes; sex work; forgery; and death, and life, and blind optimism.

About the Author

Danny Eisenberg has been writing movie reviews for his hometown newspaper for over a decade, since approximately the same time that the idea for The Optimists first came into his head. When he’s not working on this novel he can be found working on five or six other ones, or writing short stories and poems, or trying his hand at designing a board game. He lives in Denver.

About the Artist

Debbie Millman is host of the award-winning podcast Design Matters, one of the world’s first and longest running podcasts; Chair of the first ever Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts, Editorial Director of PrintMag.com, and the author of seven books on design and branding. She has worked on the design and strategy of over 200 of the world’s largest brands. Her most recent book, Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World’s Most Creative People, will be published by Harper Collins in 2022.

Pro Tips from a NaNo Coach: How to Keep Writing

NaNoWriMo can seem like a daunting task sometimes, for NaNo newbies and veterans alike. Fortunately, our NaNo Coaches are here to help guide you through November! Today, author Rebecca Kim Wells is here to share some tips for meeting your goal this month:

Hello, dear writers! By this time in your NaNo journey I hope you’ve made some progress on your novel. (As far as I’m concerned, any progress is winning progress!) But I also know that the second week is often where doubt sets in. While the first few days are full of jitters and adrenaline, by week two things aren’t as new and exciting. You might be tempted to turn off that early alarm. You might have hit a plot quagmire and have no idea where to go. You might be facing the fact that all novelists face—that in order to write a book, you actually have to, you know, write it. And writing a novel is a long-haul project.

So how do you keep making progress when things get hard? Here are a few pitfalls I’ve experienced (and things I do to keep myself going):

1. I don’t know what happens next. 

Have you reached a point in your story where you don’t know how to get from point E to point G? Are you wracking your brain trying to come up with point F with no success? 

Good news, you’ve got several options! Do you really need point F? You can always just skip directly to point G. If you’re certain something happens between E and G, you can just write in “Somehow, the intrepid adventurers made it to the Pit of Despair!” and move on to the next scene. (Seriously, you’re allowed to do this!) 

If you’re well and truly stuck with no idea what happens next at all, take a moment to come up with a few “I wonder” statements: “I wonder what my hero is doing right now.” “I wonder what would happen if a three-headed monster interrupted dinner.” “I wonder which character is plotting a betrayal.” “I wonder who is secretly in love with who!” Then step away from your novel. Go for a walk! Read a book! Watch a TV show! Take a shower! Make dinner! But keep a notebook close, because the answer to at least one of your “I wonder” statements will come to you…

2. This feels like work and I’m bored! 

This does not mean you’re doing it wrong—writing is hard work, and sometimes it’s very boring! So as much as possible, take the opportunity to indulge yourself. Are you bored with your story? Throw in a cuddly penguin or a banter-y fencing duel or a secret tragic backstory—delight yourself with your favorite tropes and story elements! 

If you’re groaning over the plodding monotony of writing, indulge your writing self: write with the fancy notebook or the pen with cool colored ink. (I recently bought my first fountain pen and I am in love.) Light a candle. Make a special snack, use your special mug. Write with a silly cap or luxurious sweater a la Jo March. NaNoWriMo is a ridiculous, wonderful endeavor and it’s time for you to embrace that ridiculous wonderfulness wholeheartedly.

3. Is this any good? 

Great news! It is not your job right now to make anything good. Your only job is to keep writing your draft. Whether or not your first draft is good is irrelevant, so stop worrying about it! The only way a first draft can fail is if it doesn’t exist. I think Shannon Hale was the genius who said once, “When writing a first draft, I have to remind myself constantly that I’m only shoveling sand into a box so later I can build castles.” Let’s all have fun building our sandcastles.

Rebecca Kim Wells writes books filled with magic and fury (and often dragons). Her debut novel Shatter the Sky was a New England Book Award Finalist, an ALA Rainbow Book List selection, an Indies Introduce selection, and a Kids’ Indie Next Pick. She is also the author of Storm the Earth and Briar Girls. If she were a hobbit, she would undoubtedly be a Took.