Kate Lowell's Blog, page 26

The Great Mouse Rescue

I have a barn, with two old ponies. One is so old, he lives on horse pellets and sweet feed, because he has no teeth to chew grass or hay with.

But with barns come mice. Now, I don’t mind mice. They’re just trying to get along, raise their families, have their little mouse parties. And I’m a sucker for anything small and furry. So, while I keep my feed in bins because I don’t like the mess they make when they chew through the feed bag, I don’t mind sharing a bit with them.

Except that, when the level in the bind gets too low, they jump in and can’t get out. So, this morning, when I went out to feed the ponies, I found what I think were five mice trapped in the bin.

Don’t mind the squeaking–they haven’t been trapped in a bit, and have sort of forgotten me. You can tell this isn’t the first ride on the merry-go-round for the first three, though. They know exactly what to do when I put the scoop in the bin.

And that one mouse that ran over my head? Does it every time, without fail. Don’t know what his problem is.

Filed under: Random Weirdness Tagged: mice, writing life

Three Dirty Birds Talk about Self-Editing for Fiction Writers and Voice

I’m on time today! We’re over at Ana’s blog. This is our last day for Self-Editing for Fiction Writers. Next week, we take on Chuck Wendig and do a little Ass-Kicking.

Filed under: Three Dirty Birds Talk, writing Tagged: writing advice

The Three Dirty Birds Talk Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, Chapter 11: Sophistication

Oops! I forgot to check Zoe’s blog yesterday for the link! (I was still doing my Snoopy dance over getting the window in and finished.) So, today, we’re talking about eliminating a lot of those little tell-tales of the beginning writer.

Filed under: Tuesday Tickle, writing Tagged: writing advice

Tuesday Tickle: The Walnuts

I’m bogged down in some serious house repairs right now–new windows in the front (my first ever carpentry effort) and a backed up septic system (not touching that one with a 20 ft pole, and still waiting for the septic guy to get here), so I’m really behind on new words.  I do have a tiny bit from the opening of The Walnuts, which happens on Nathan’s birthday.

Nathan lay on Vince’s bed in absolute bliss, while his incredibly good-looking, fantastically wonderful boyfriend massaged his way from Nathan’s shoulders to the small of his back. With firm, loving strokes, Vince chased down every last ounce of tension in Nathan’s body and left him cheeping sleepily against the soft cotton.

Best present ever.

The bed shifted as Vince leaned forward, his breath warm against Nathan’s ear. “How’s the birthday boy doing?” He worked his thumbs up both sides of Nathan’s spine, until he could circle them over the hollow at the base of his skull.

“Mmmph.” Nathan sighed and went completely limp—except for one part of him, contrarily hard as macadamia nut shells. “Feels good.”

That earned him a laugh, low and sexy. “You’re going to need a shower after this. Get that oil off you.”

“You mean you can’t do this forever?”

“Not if we’re going to make it to your party.”

There went his erection. Nathan groaned. “Maybe I can call and cancel?”

“Nathan!” The talented hands disappeared and Vince flopped down beside him, a frown marring his his gorgeous face. “You promised you’d introduce me to your family.”

“It’s not you. It’s...them.”

“I survived the campground. And daycamp with the twins.”

Nathan winced. “Yeah. Sorry about that. What gave them the idea to build a trebuchet, anyway?”

 

 

Filed under: Nutty Romances, Tuesday Tickle Tagged: birthday boy, family gatherings, weresquirrel

The Three Dirty Birds, Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, and Repeating Yourself

Three Dirty Birds are talking about Self-editing for Fiction Writers again. This is our last week for this book. Today, we’re talking about Chapter 10, which focuses on repetition.

Kate: I thought this one really built on some of the concepts that were brought forward in previous chapters, particularly the one on Interior Monologue.

Ana: Yeah, I guess this is another way to prevent interior monologue from getting rambly. Don’t make your characters repeat themselves.

Kate: And it’s one of those things that depends so much on style and voice, which we’ll be talking about in a later post, so this is a skill that takes a bit of time. I didn’t actually agree with all her examples in this chapter.

Zoe: I didn’t either…so it depends on style and voice and reader taste.

Ana: I didn’t think all the edited examples were all that great. K

ate: No, they weren’t. The second one, I thought that the editing actually removed the author’s voice. It read very bland to me in the second version, while–in the first, original–I could hear the narrator as a person.

Zoe: This was the one with Rita’s habit of gaudy dress? (It’s early here: I’m not up to counting to two yet.)

Ana: I think it’s the one about the garage? I think this goes to show why editors make suggestions rather than rewriting the text themselves.

Kate: I was actually thinking about the one with Rita in it, yes. I thought the garage one was improved by pulling out some of those sentences. Though I’m not sure she should have removed that last sentence. Set off in its own paragraph, it would have been a nice bit of emotional punctuation.

Zoe: I felt the same about the Rita example. It was more vibrant in the original, and it lost its impact in the rewrite. What she took out wasn’t what I usually think of as redundancies that need to be removed.

Kate: Which is just a warning–don’t be afraid to STET something. It’s your voice, you are responsible for guarding it, and I think the Rita passage was an example of someone not being able to see the forest for the trees. Too focused on the technical incorrectness to notice that the voice was carried in those sections. Voice trumps everything–all the editors I stalk on Twitter say so.

Zoe: Well, if it’s on Twitter, it’s true. We all know that. ;)

Kate: The interwebz haz many truths. *nods sagely*

Zoe: I STETed for voice on my upcoming new adult romance recently, and the world didn’t end. Definitely worth sticking to your guns when it really is coming down to voice.

Ana: Are you sure the world hasn’t ended? It’s looking pretty bleak here.

Zoe: I have coffee. The world hasn’t ended if I can still get coffee.

Kate: I ate the last of my chocolate last night. I think that’s the first sign of the Apocalypse, right?

Ana: Does my caffeine intolerance mean I’m secretly already dead?

Zoe: No, you’re still at risk from all the people who may be plunged into caffeine withdrawal if the world ends. (Also, Kate: Ana has chocolate. Make her share.)

Kate: Share, Ana! I’ll share my cabana boys.

Ana: You mean the cabana boy you stole from me three weeks ago? Kate: Possession is nine-tenths of the law. :D

Ana: Don’t try to confuse me with numbers! *walks into a wall*

Zoe: I’m surprised you have any walls left. (Ana hits her head against the wall a lot.) Anyhow, I thought the example given for interior monologue worked much better in editing. It cut away the refuse and… (Ana’s eating chocolate. I’ve lost my train of thought. Anyway: interior monologue example good.)

Kate: This was the camping, right? I liked that one. I also liked that she mentioned that repetition wasn’t always a bad thing, that you could use it to emphasize something, or build up a character with subtle clues, depending on what you repeated.

Ana: I STETed some line edits that wanted me to remove a repetition that I’d intended. I hadn’t put it in consciously, but I knew I wanted it to stay.

Zoe: The authors make a good point on the close repetition of words used with different meanings. It’s something we don’t generally notice when we’re writing (and even through several edits sometimes) because to us they’re two completely different things, but they can jump out at a reader. In the example it was the use of “on the ground” and “ground turkey” just a sentence apart.

Kate: That’s something that catches me quite often when I’m reading. It’s a fairly easy fix, usually, though it occasionally requires some authorial contortions to have everything flow and make sense.

Zoe: Yes! I had that problem in the upcoming book with “lock of hair” and an actual lock being in the same paragraph.

Kate: I remember you talking about that.

Zoe: I forget what I wound up changing “lock of hair” to, but it wasn’t easy, because “strand of hair” isn’t the same thing at all, and “hank” of hair is much bigger.

Ana: I think I’ve never heard that second one…

Kate: It’s not as common as the other ones. Did anyone’s eyes open just a little bit wider when you read the extract from the review on page 183?

Zoe: I think we all agree that review was a bit anal (but I wanted to be the one to type anal. Ha!)

Kate: I’m not sure you need to worry about a repeated three-word phrase with two hundred pages in between them.

Zoe: Mr. Rider told me that I really like the word “congeal,” after he read my horror novel. I did a search on it. Used it twice in 86,000 words. TWICE!

Ana: Lol. I guess some words stand out to readers if they wouldn’t use them themselves? I remember I once read (and gave up on) a book that used ‘proverbial’ every second page or so.

Zoe: I guess that author lost a proverbial reader.

Kate: Groan. Every second page was probably a little too much.

Ana: You could have made a drinking game out of it.

Zoe: The authors move on to tackle larger-scale repetition: chapters that accomplish the same thing, characters who play the same role. I actually removed a character from the new adult romance and assigned his jobs to the other characters—he wasn’t integral enough to the story to justify being there, and he duplicated some functionality of other characters. (Though it did lead my editor to ask “WHO???” when I forgot to change the name once or twice. But it wouldn’t be a good editing session if I didn’t throw in at least one character who wasn’t in the story.)

Ana: Yes, real life people often have a large circle of acquaintances, but in fiction, it just gets confusing when you have too many characters.

Kate: True. In real life, we interact with people, or can ask who they are if we’ve forgotten. It’s a bit harder in a novel, when you’re reading along and the name is familiar, but you can’t quite remember who this person is, because you’ve met so many. Much better to keep it simpler.

Zoe: Plus you don’t want readers wondering why this character is there. What’s their importance? Oh…there is none. Whoops.

Kate: Or, we’re asking the reader to acquaint themselves with a brand new character, so they can learn something important to the plot, when one of the old characters could have done the job. You never get really familiar with the characters if you’re always meeting new ones, just like in real life.

Zoe: Or Twitter!

Ana: When you’re giving more tasks to fewer characters, you usually end up with more fleshed out characters too. It’s better to have a few well rounded characters than to have a bunch of background puppets.

Zoe: Yes. Well-rounded characters make memorable characters. A well-rounded supporting cast will have your readers begging for you to write spin-offs just for their favorite characters who didn’t get enough attention. (Like one of Kate’s well-loved supporting characters….)

Kate: I thought they made an important point about making sure that your chapters all have their own purpose, that you don’t have two chapters in the novel that essentially do the same thing. That kind of repetition slows down a story and creates a circular plot, where you’re just retreading old ground.

Ana: Yeah, I recently read a story where the three introductory chapters pretty much all just showed the MC’s relationship to her friends and family.

Zoe: Every chapter should have its own purpose (one that moves the story forward, of course).

Ana: Wouldn’t that be nice…

Zoe: And then we get to really large-scale repetition. You know, the one where you loved an author’s book, so you read another. And another. And…hey, they’re all the same book! That’s much less fun.

Kate: I laughed reading that part.

Ana: Yeah, I had some names in mind. We probably all do.

Zoe: Probably. On one hand, they can be comfort food for some readers, but….

Ana: I suppose sometimes it’s nice to know exactly what you’re getting when you’re buying a certain author.

Kate: I don’t know. I stopped reading a fairly well-known scifi author after realizing that if I continued with this series, I was going to be reading the same story over and over again. I could just reread the first couple of books and have the same experience.

Zoe: I feel like it has to get boring to write, by the thirteenth book or so. Ana: Once you reach number thirteen you can mix things up by swapping the males for females!

Kate: Oh, Ana! Dirty Bird!

And the last thing they talked about was overdoing stylistic tricks, or characterizations, because if you use a trick or piece of information too often, people start to notice it. It’s great for a running gag, but most times it’s not meant that way and people start figuratively (or, sometimes, literally) rolling their eyes about it.

Ana: Yes, don’t be a one-trick pony!

Zoe: A Song of Fire and Ice Fans love to parrot the over-repeated lines from those books.

Ana: Brace yourselves, edits are coming.

Zoe: Ha. Words are wind.

Kate: Lol.

Filed under: Three Dirty Birds Talk, writing Tagged: repetition, self-editing, writing advice

Three Dirty Birds and the Wall of Text *cue ominous music*

We’re over at Ana’s nest today, which I’m sure is many degrees warmer than mine–we had hail this morning. Hail.

Welcome to late summer in Canada. Time to build the igloo.

Filed under: Three Dirty Birds Talk, writing Tagged: paragraphing, visual aspect of writing, white space, writing advice

Three Dirty Birds Talk ‘Easy Beats’ *dances*

Chirping it up at Zoe’s blog today! Talking Self-editing for Fiction writers and getting rid of those darn dialogue tags for something that works harder for you.

Filed under: Three Dirty Birds Talk, writing Tagged: attributions, beats, dialogue tags, writing advice

Tuesday Tickle: Culture Shift

I love characters that are enthusiastic about their jobs, especially when it’s areas that most people wouldn’t find interesting. These guys are a lot of fun, simply because they are absolutely fascinated by what they do for a living. No wonder they got chosen for the primary contact team with a new alien race… Vance (the first speaker) is a xenoanthropolgist, Ken is a botanist.

“We’ve arrived just before a period of religious observation. I don’t quite understand the whole concept, but there will be representatives from all the different canajun here. There’s a competitive aspect to it, too. Some sort of goal, or prize, that they all compete for. I can’t get anyone to slow down long enough to explain it all to me, though.”

“That’s gotta be driving you crazy. Crazier.”

“Funny man.” Vance craned his neck to watch the crowd as they laid out what looked like a series of concentric circles surrounding the low pile of wood. “Come on, let’s go up on the hill where I can get a better vantage.” He picked up his equipment and started the trudge back up the hill.

The heavier gravity took its toll before he got to the top. His recorder felt like it had doubled in weight between the start and the finish, and his feet dragged on the ground. At the top of the amphitheatre, he slumped to the ground with a whooshing sound and lay on his back for a minute to catch his breath.

Ken flopped down beside him and brushed his fingers through the ground cover. His eyebrows twitched and he pulled out a sample bag.

Vance propped himself up on his elbows and laughed. “Don’t you already have samples of all this stuff?”

“I don’t recognize this one.” Ken plucked a couple of long, toothed leaves from one plant, then dug into the soil to pull another one in its entirety. “This will do for genetic sampling. I’ll have to come back later and try for enough to transplant in the isolation greenhouse.”

“Next thing, you’re going to be telling us all we have to sleep in the corridors, so you have room for all your plants.”

“Great idea! I’ll let the captain know in tomorrow’s dispatch.”

“Har har.” Vance pushed himself upright, and reached for the video recorder. “Glad I don’t have to lug the other over to its location too. The gravity is killing me.”

“Think of all the muscles you’ll grow.”

“I wish they’d grown in the gym on the way over here.”

 

Filed under: Culture Shift, Tuesday Tickle Tagged: mm romance, science fantasy

Three Dirty Birds Talk Self-Editing for Fiction Writers–Interior Monologue

Welcome back to Three Dirty Birds Talk, after our short hiatus. Today we’re taking on Chapter 7 of Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, by Rennie Browne and Dave King.

This is the part about interior monologue, right? I should have reread it last night…

Zoe wonders whether she should have gotten another cup of coffee before jumping into this discussion.

Ana: The chapter starts off talking about the differences between movies and books, which I thought was interesting because I have some writer friends who watch more movies than they read, and their writing tends to reflect that. They rarely get into their characters’ heads. It has that whole looking-through-a-camera feel to it.

Zoe: Now you have me wondering how it affects writing when authors mostly play video games versus watching movies or reading books.

Ana: That’s an interesting question. I guess it would depend a little on what kind of games they like too. I mean you have the plot heavy RPGs and visual novels on one hand, and then you have shooter games on the other….

Zoe: I guess we’ll have to wait and see what kind of stuff Kate puts out after all her Candy Crush hours.

Kate: Food!

Zoe: I found the second example of interior monologue they gave interesting. It comes right after they say, “As you might expect, interior monologue is so powerful and easy to write—though, not write well—that many fiction writers tend to overuse it.” What was interesting about the example is that it read like 94% of the Amazon Look Insides I’ve seen over the past month—from trad. and self-published authors alike.

Ana: What I thought was interesting about that example was that, I thought, the interior monologue wasn’t as much the problem as all the telling and generally bad writing.

Zoe: Yes, that was definitely there too. The interior monologue just led right into it.

Kate: I’ll admit, that section made me paranoid for a while, until I really thought about it. And, to be honest, there’s still a little paranoia hanging around.

Ana: What made you paranoid?

Kate: Worrying that I was doing that in my current WIP and not being able to see it. But if it’s showing up in a lot of books, maybe it’s one of those high-level skills and I don’t need to worry about not having quite mastered it yet? Or am I just telling myself fairy stories again?

Zoe: I think it’s one of those things you smooth out in later drafts (which so many books aren’t getting these days!). In early drafts, you put lots of things in because you haven’t decided how best to get them across yet, and by the end—if you’ve given yourself time to get to a mature draft—you’ve honed them.

Kate: I do worry that I’m not seeing things, though. And that I won’t see them. And her explanation wasn’t one that really connected with me.

Ana: I’m sure Zoe would gladly point them out to you.

Kate: Lol. Zoe does love her comment bubbles. :)

Zoe: Some people have Candy Crush, I have comment bubbles. I worry about not seeing things too, but of course that’s what the beta readers are for—being your extra set of eyes (or brain!).

Kate: I need a Substibrain.

Ana: Everyone needs a Substibrain! (Preorder now!)

Kate: Lol. I found that her third example looked like my first drafts. A lot of dialogue and only a few beats to anchor it.

Zoe: That’s me too. The characters are talking, and I have to get it down!

Ana: My first drafts often don’t have the beats.

Zoe: I think with interior monologue, a good thing to remember is that it’s telling, not showing, so when you go back to edit it, ask yourself if there’s a way to show it instead. If you can, and it works, do that. If it turns out it really needs to be interior monologue, then that’s what it needs to be, and as long as it’s important to the story, you can leave it and move on. (Or make it flow better and move on, whatever.)

Kate: I tend to treat the direct thoughts like dialogue, and anything that’s more emotional like narrative/telling, particularly when a scene just shows up and it’s perfect and I have to get it down. So it might come out the first time like a big chunk o’ tell, but then I go back and look for sentences that can be replaced with an action, or eliminated altogether. I’m getting better at not fussing about getting everything right on the first pass, too, which makes it easier to follow these spurts of creativity right to the end, then fix the details after.

Zoe: That’s a good point about direct thoughts being like dialogue. They have voice. They’re more engaging. (But irritating if you have a page full of them, because then you get to the place where you’re listening to someone talk to themselves.)

Kate: You know, talking to yourself is a great way of ensuring you get an intelligent answer…

Ana: As I’m currently editing an older novel I find myself rewriting a lot of instances of ‘he knew’, ‘he thought’ etc. to turn them into something more direct and engaging. So for example “He knew he was screwed.” has more impact when it’s just “He was screwed.”

Zoe: That’s a good point too! It’s brings the reader deeper into the POV when you can get rid of some of those filters between the character and his thoughts.

Ana: Yeah, you’re not placing a pesky narrator between the reader and the character.

Kate: The discussion about narrative distance and interior monologue was interesting. It made sense, though I wonder how many people do it intentionally, and how many do it by instinct alone. I know I notice my narrative distance changes a lot depending on what’s happening in the story, and the emotional tone of the part I’m writing, and it’s not something I do on purpose.

Ana: I can’t think of a lot of times that I have given my narrative more distance on purpose.

Kate: I’ve used it during parts of stories where the subject matter was upsetting. It can show where a character is kind of dissociating too. But I usually use it to give the reader a bit of a break on the emotion.

Zoe: I haven’t actually given narrative distance much thought. (Now I’m going to obsess over it. Thanks!) I wonder if it’s one of those things you do largely by feel, and your sense of “feel” for it tends to be developed by reading a lot. You get the rhythm for it.

Kate: I think the best way to get a sense for it is by reading a lot of books. It’s definitely something where you have to feel your way through it, an almost physical relationship with the story. When the story starts to feel too overwhelming, you automatically want to withdraw. And if you’ve seen other writers do that, you at least have a blueprint for how to do it in your own work. Kind of like kids practicing for hockey–they practice making the shots, but they also watch other kids, and professional players taking shots. It all comes together to help them feel their way into a more instinctive setup for making the goal.

Zoe: (Go Bruins.)

Ana: I once zoomed out on a death scene. One beta complained that it wasn’t as bloody as it could have been, but it just wasn’t that kind of story. So I guess you have to keep in mind who your audience is, what they expect and what kind of story you want to tell.

Zoe: Absolutely! Kind of story matters. The narrative decisions you make for a kinkfest noncon smut story are going to be extremely different from a romance depicting a rape.

Ana: At least you would hope so.

Zoe: Even within a story, of course, it depends on what you’re conveying. In my horror novel, when bad things are happening to the main character, the narrative is close in, but when there’s something horrible happening to someone who had, until that point, been in the periphery, and the characters are forced to stand by, the narrative pulls back—because it’s really hard for the characters to handle having to stand by.

Ana: Isn’t that like the narrative pulling back because the characters are trying to pull back too? Since it’s too much to handle?

Zoe: Yes!

Kate: I did something the opposite in Knight, where I push farther inside Ross’s head during the worst parts, closing the narrative distance until all you can see and hear and feel is what Ross can. Using that closeness to up the terror factor in those scenes, even the ones where no violence actually occurs, just the horror of having to deal with a certain character.

Ana: I love to get up close when my characters are close to emotional break-down. Sometimes reality as they perceive it doesn’t make sense anymore, but I don’t care, I describe that too. Of course, I don’t do that for pages and pages, but I do like to take the reader down with the character.

Kate: Ana, the Evil Despot. :) I really like to use it with unreliable narrators. Those are fun. That section on page 131, where she quotes the part about the drug-addled researcher going into the boardroom? And you start to wonder where reality really starts and ends, and whether he’s just now beginning to tell himself the truth about these people? That was a hoot. I like how her sentences got longer and longer as you read, not just dragging you along in his hallucination, but showing you how he was reeling out of control, faster and faster. You just know something crazy’s going to happen. And you feel it yourself, too.

Ana: The example was nicely done, but it does make you happy the writer doesn’t stay in that character’s head for a long time!

Kate: No. I think the crazy probably broke right after that passage. But it was a good example of how you don’t have to show, not tell everything to keep your reader’s interest up.

The last thing she says in this chapter is not to take their advice to ‘show, don’t tell’ too seriously. She says that they’ve been seeing a lot of stripped-down manuscripts, where everything is shown, and there’s very little interior narrative, and the stories are losing a lot of their depth and magic. (Like having a Porsche, without all the leather seats and expensive stereo system.)

(Ana: Noooo, not the leather seats!)

Kate: Haven’t we just been complaining about that in a couple of DNF’s? There was plot, and action, but it all felt shallow, like we were eating cardboard instead of piping-hot, fresh pizza.

Don’t serve cardboard pizza in your stories. Give us the emotion, the thoughts, and the depths. Fill our hungry minds with action and feelings.

Like a really good deep-dish pizza.  :)

Filed under: Three Dirty Birds Talk, writing Tagged: interior monologue, writing advice

Three Dirty Birds Presents: The Substibook!

There’s nothing more satisfying than a good book. (Except maybe a weekend on a remote island with hot and cold running cabana boys and all the chocolate you can eat.)

But it’s an unfortunate fact of life that not every book is the wonderfully fulfilling, sensual experience we would like. And, with the advent of ereaders, there isn’t even the entirely visceral pleasure of throwing the offending object at the wall in a fit of frustration. No surge of adrenaline, so satisfying clunk, no inspecting it for damage with an ecstatic “Serves you right!”

Until now…

Three Dirty Birds presents…The SUBSTIBOOK™!

Available in high-tech silvery gray, The Substibook™ is the size of your average mass market paperback, but slightly heavier, to add to the force of impact (and the satisfying Clunk!) when it hits your wall.

To use it, you simply print out an appropriately-sized cover off the book, tape it to the front of The Substibook™, and Heave Ho! (Note: No books were harmed in the making of these videos. Exemplars are not necessarily specific to characteristics discussed.)

Feel the delirious joy of watching plot holes you could drive a truck through as they splat against a random vertical surface.

Watch as Characters Who Are Too Stupid To Live develop a deep and intense connection with a horizontal surface.

Or just use The Substibook™ as a target for your disappointment with four pages of introductory info-dump and the twenty characters it introduces–all of whom have names beginning with the letter J.

The Substibook™ can also be used for more than leaving dents in your drywall. It can also be used for exercise, as a wedge under the tire of your car (still in beta mode), and for getting those pesky zombies™ out of your garden.

For the special introductory price of only $4.99 (plus shipping and handling), you too may experience the transcendent joy of taking your frustrations out on offending books, while your ereader breathes a sigh of relief.

(Just kidding about the price–we’re not actually trying to sell anything. We thought it would be fun to do up an ad for our little running gag. Stay tuned for the Substibrain, and other random oddities as they pop up. :) )

Filed under: Random Weirdness, Three Dirty Birds Talk Tagged: bad writing, The Substibook