Robyn Hugo McIntyre's Blog, page 7

Blurb or Babble?

Image via IndieReader Publishing Service

Like most readers, I have a never-ending appetite but not a purse to match, so I must take care to spend my money wisely. Lately, I’ve become more aware of book blurbs. I subscribe to a couple of lists that tell me what e-book bargains are available and every day I get a new batch of recommendations. In grid form, they show the book cover and next to it, the blurb.

A blurb, the way I see it, is an open-ended summary of your story’s characters, conflicts, and goals delivered in a compelling, short form that will inform the potential reader and entice her to buy, or at least look at, your book. When seen in grid form, where comparing blurbs is easily done, lazy blurbs stand out.

Want one? All you have to do is follow this formula:

When Suddenly + Chosen One = Question

When Suddenly

The protagonist is living a happy-go-lucky life as a normal person when suddenly mysterious people start picking on him/her. Alternate: protagonist is a former military person with issues or a woman with an unhappy past.

Chosen One

The protagonist becomes aware that s/he is the person foretold by the prophecy and the salvation of the entire world rests on her/his shoulders. In fantasies, they usually awaken to powers hitherto unknown or in other types of books, they end up being the only one with the right skills to find the truth.

Question

This is the part that’s supposed to get the reader’s blood going and generally includes a list of the obstacles: On the run from the police/evil sorcerers/abusive ex-husband, can the protagonist find the killer/control the power/defeat the ex before the murderer strikes again/destroys the world/deals out more abuse? Not that a question can’t be useful, but if your protagonist is a cop trying to catch a killer, then it’s just silly to ask a question about whether or not he can do so – he wouldn’t be the protagonist if he couldn’t, right?

Bonus points if you use phrases like ‘race against time.’

So what makes a good book blurb?

As I expected when I began to research this topic, everybody’s got an idea and some even have it broken down into steps (there’s a list of the links I read at the bottom of this post). But here’s the gist I got:

Know what kind of blurbs appeal to you as a reader (augh, research? LOL)
Keep it short (maybe 4 paragraphs maximum)
Don’t give away the store (they’re supposed to buy the book to see what happens, remember?)
Remember that it’s about the story and characters, not the setting or the era (Ancient Rome was interesting, but if it’s a romance, I need to feel I’ll like the couple)
Set a mood (give me a taste your writing and how it evokes the atmosphere of the story)
Work as hard at polishing your blurb as you do your novel

Got your own list for what makes a good blurb? Tell me about it in the comments. In matters of writing advice, I’m like the Waco Kid in Blazing Saddles. When Sheriff Bart asked him if he needed any help, he replied, “Ohhhh – all I can get.”

Blurb Writing Blog List

How to Write a Blurb by Marilynn Byerly
Four Easy Steps to an Irresistible Book Blurb
How to Write an Effective Blurb for a Self-Published Book by Sarah Juckes
The Five Core Elements of a Book Blurb by Frances Reid Rowland (my fave of the blog posts)
Blurbs That Bore, Blurbs That Blare by MichaelBrent Collins

Tagged: blurb, fiction, Writing, writing business

Voter Lookup – a Tool For Decision Making

Need help getting the info to help you make voting decisions? Check out:

Drop It

Breaking Plates by Emiliano Ponzi

Sometimes you’re feeling sad

Perhaps a little mad

You’d like to give the world

A great big finger

 

The fact that you have learned

Is others aren’t concerned

You feel like ‘they’ have put you

Through the wringer

 

So deal with it…

 

(chorus)

Smash the plates and knickknacks too

It is really up to you

Include the frames and photos that you hate

 

Drop a cup, and break the dishes

While you do, make several wishes

And get your silly head on finally straight

 

All the junk in hallway closets

Keep it up ‘til you’re exhausted…

And you’ll find that you’ll feel better

When you’re through.

Yes, you’ll find that you’ll feel better when you’re through.

 

You DO feel better, don’t you? Knew you would!

 

Now, clean it up. Ha ha ha ha ha.

Tagged: breakage, dishes, song lyrics

The God Seduction

Theda Bara as Cleopatra

And it came to pass that the Queen decided she should be the mother of a god.

She had her servants bathe her in the most precious of oils and comb her hair so that it lay comely around her shoulders and array her in her finest jewels. Then she lay, naked upon a golden couch in front of the altar and spoke to the god.

“Bless me, o god, with thy presence. Look upon your servant in her nakedness.”

And the god appeared in a crack of thunder and in roiling clouds of red flecked with green.

“O god,” said the Queen. “I tremble before thee. I am not worthy, but I desire thee. Look upon me and may I find favour in thy gaze.”

And the god looked upon the Queen and she was beautiful. “Wow,” he said, “Is this an offer?”

“O god,” the Queen answered, “I offer my body to thee. Know it as a man may know a woman.” And the Queen let her knees fall apart from each other.

“Excellent,” the god replied. “Just gotta find my… where did I put that thing? I know it’s here somewhere, he he he. I can feel it, I’ve just got to untangle this… Oh! Here it…. no, that’s a meatball. Wait. Hold on… be with you in a minute…”

And lo,  the god did finally locate his Noodly Appendage and, with delight, leaned over the Queen.

But the Queen had long since fallen asleep, curled like a babe on the golden couch and the Noodly Appendage slackened as though over-cooked and withdrew.

The god looked upon the Queen with fondness and with regret and sighed a godly sigh.

“Marinara sauce,” he said, and disappeared.

Tagged: god, marinara sauce, queen, sex, spaghetti monster

The Past

The past is inedible. It tastes of dust.

Tagged: dust, eating, past

The Smile

If there was one thing he could say was mysterious about her, it was the way some secret amusement lived at the left corner of her mouth. Not large enough to be called an enigmatic smile, it nevertheless caused her eyes to narrow slightly as though she was preparing to laugh. It set off the intelligence in her hazel eyes and declared her self-sufficient, confident, at peace with herself.

The moment he saw that, he was captivated. He wanted to explore it – and her – thoroughly, leaving as little as possible unknown. He knew it was impossible to ever know another human being fully, completely, because you could not live in two minds at the same time. Yet – with her – he wanted to come as close to that as he could. He wanted to spend months and years prolonging that understanding, to truly perceive who she was in all her independent glory. And when he could see that, he would really begin to enjoy her. He would use everything he had learned, but carefully and in tiny increments until the day would come when he could look at that beautiful face and see that secret amusement had disappeared.

Then he would say, “What happened to that independent woman I used to know?” And he would walk away, with her secret alive now in the corner of his own smile.

Tagged: character, secret, smile

Shining Moment

Picture from Chinese video game Three Kingdom Illation.

“This was not my most shining moment.”

“Have you had one?”

“Had what?”

“A shining moment.”

- – -

“Where did that come from?”

“I was just curious.”

- – -

“Damn it!”

“What?”

“I can’t think of one!”

“One what?”

“Shining moment.”

“Oh.”

- – -

“Have you had one, then?”

“Yeah. I think I have.”

- – -

“Well?”

“Oh! You want to know what it was.”

“Duh.”

“Not sure I want to tell you, now.”

“Don’t pout; you know I can’t stand it.”

- – -

“Well…”

“Please? Please tell me.”

“Well, it was when I pulled that guy’s head off before he could kill you.”

“Awww. That was a pretty good moment.”

“Thanks.”

“So cute. Can I kiss you?”

“Yeah – if you want to.”

- – -

“Oy! You two numb nutz bugbears! We threw you a rope five minutes ago! Get outta that hole and help us out!”

“Yeah! We’re burning and pillaging up here!”

“Yeah, and the burning and pillaging don’t take care of itself, ya know!”

- – -

“Sigh.”

“Heavy sigh. Later?”

“Later.”

“Coming!”

 

Tagged: bugbears, burning and pillaging, fantasy, shining moment

Oh, Damn

“Oh, damn!” The ghost said, contemplating the wheezing, struggling man on the floor. “Sorry! Sorry!” He exerted himself to become more tangible in order to help the portly man back to his feet.

Red in the face, the man glared at the apologetic spectre.

“Just what do you think you were about?” he demanded.

The ghost would have blushed had he been able. “Sorry! It’s just that so few of the living come by anymore and there are quite a few of us spirits in this place and so we’ve become rather competitive, you see, and -“

The man seemed to puff up even more, his red face shading more into purple. “D’you mean to say that you’re contesting one another to scare the daylights out of unsuspecting people?” He shook a finger violently at the ghost, who glided back a step or two in alarm. “Don’t you realise such things could get out of hand? You could give someone a serious turn and then where you would be? Spectres like you are the reason honest house agents like myself have a difficulty in finding owners for these ridiculous relics and more than one ghost has gone wanting for a place to haunt when their castle falls down about their heads for lack of proper maintenance!”

“Sorry! Sorry!” the ghost said again. “Terribly, awfully, sorry. Really. Wasn’t thinking, is all.” He floated closer and brushed at the man’s suit. “All over now, though, right? No harm done, eh?”

“No harm done? No harm done?!” The finger came out again to stab at the air, then suddenly, the man’s eyes rolled back in his head and he fell bonelessly to the floorboards.

The ghost, startled, crept closer. “Excuse me? Are you alright?” He reached out a transparent hand and pushed at the man’s chest. The man’s eyes flew open, he took a great, gasping breath, and then his eyes snapped shut and the breath blew out of him in a gust. A moment later, a portly spirit emerged from the fleshly chrysalis, finger still raised to berate.

“Oh, damn!” the ghost said.

Tagged: death, fiction, ghost, short

Seen and Heard

She was still asleep. No, she wasn’t.

She stood on one foot and scratched the back of her heel with the other. What was she doing up? Oh. Toilet.

She started to pull open the bedroom door, then stopped, realizing the Victorian decorations on the door frame, on the iron knob, were soft looking, out of focus. Glasses. Easier to find the way to the toilet while wearing glasses. As she took tiny, scooting, sleep-steps back to the bedside, she became aware that there was light leaking into the bedroom through the partially open door. She could hear her mother and stepfather talking, probably as they sat around the dining table. Absent-mindedly, she picked up her glasses and slipped them on, then walked quietly back to the door. An opportunity to eavesdrop on adults should never be bypassed.

“We just got here,” Danny was saying, “and we’re already out of money.”

“First and last on this place took most of it,” Mom replied.

“Ain’t been able to find work. Need to buy a job and I don’t wanna hustle for it.”

Mom laughed. “You don’t have the figure for it anymore, anyway.”

Danny didn’t laugh with her.

“Okay,” Mom said. A chair creaked and thumped as it moved back from the table. A cupboard was opened and closed. Something put down on the table.

“Shit,” Danny said, his voice resigned.

“Where do you want to do this?”

“San Pedro. Drunk sailors by Shanghai Red’s. I know the area good.” His soft Southern accent made the poor grammar sound somehow acceptable.

Her bladder reminded her with a sharp rebuke why she was awake in the first place, and she pulled open the door to stand in the lighted room beyond.

“Hey, kitten,” Danny said.

“What are you doing up, baby?” Mom asked.

“Bathroom,” she replied. “What are those?”

Danny was holding a nylon stocking open at the top and Mom was using a teacup to fill it with metal beads.

“BB pellets,” Danny told her. “They use them in BB guns.”

“We’re making a blackjack,” Mom said.

“What’s a blackjack?”

“If you hit somebody over the head with one,” Mom was still pouring BBs, “you can knock them out.”

She thought about this, decided she didn’t want to know anymore and walked away to the bathroom. When she came back, she didn’t look at the table, but went directly to the bedroom door.

“Want Mama to tuck you in?

“No, thanks.”

“Okay, sleep tight, baby.”

“Sleep good, kitten.”

She shut the bedroom door and took off her glasses. The room was once again out of focus and softer. It was too bad there wasn’t such a thing as glasses for your ears.

 

Jesus Saves

When I was thirteen, my mother appeared on the cover of the National Inquirer. She was extremely proud of it and bought all the copies she had the money for. The covers were all black and white in 1965, and I was thankful: her minister outfit was a purple cassock, cloth of gold chasuble, and purple and gold stole. Still, black and white was bad enough when your classmates were asking “Isn’t that your mom on the cover of the Inquirer?” The headline was: I RUN A CHURCH FOR HOMOSEXUALS.

I don’t know when and where Momma met her first gay friend. I only know that, growing up with Momma, nine out of ten of my babysitters were likely to be drag queens or gay hustlers or gay hairdressers, all of them what she called ‘fem queens’. She didn’t seem to think them unusual, so neither did I.

I found most of them an interesting contrast to my mother. The drag queens often dressed as well or better than she did and more flamboyantly and they were definitely better at putting on makeup and producing a bustline. But out of drag, or if they didn’t wear it, they were usually slight young men whose voices flowed out in a rush and whose hands fluttered about them as they spoke. My mother was considered very tall for a woman in those days – she was five foot nine or ten in heels and very broad-shouldered with a solid, boyish shape and pretty but sturdy legs. In the midst of her friends, she was an Amazon.

When I was very young, Momma would sometimes run away from home for a few days and take me or my sister with her. Never both at once. It usually happened in Spring or Summer when the evenings were soft and warm.

We would spend the early parts of an evening in downtown Los Angeles, in Pershing Square, named after “Black Jack” Pershing, the World War I general. We would arrive there just about twilight, when the office workers were heading home maybe from City Hall – then the tallest building in Los Angeles – or the Richfield building, all black marble with gold filigrees and eagles decorating its deco splendor.

In the Square, Momma would talk to her friends until the people with the songbooks and portable organ arrived. Then we would sing hymns of the type my mother learned when she was being raised by my great-grandmother. My mother told me that great-grandmother had been a Seventh Day Adventist and had once given away all of her belongings because the leader of her particular congregation had said that Christ was coming back to earth on such-and-such a day. It might have been just a story. My mother told me a lot of stories and probably believed every one of them. During her lifetime, she tried on a lot of religions, but always liked singing those songs, so maybe that story had a little more truth in it than the others.

Pershing Square was lush with palms, ferns, and elephant ears and thick with stands of Birds-of-Paradise, the official flower of the city of Los Angeles. Lighting was a mix of Edwardian era standards with frosted, knob-like glass, and newer metal lamps, spare and utilitarian. A long time ago, purple glass blocks had been placed in the concrete sidewalks downtown and some places the light in underground garages or workplaces would still shine up through them, as it did in Pershing Square, where there was a vast amount of underground parking. I put my little feet on the purple glass from time to time, wondering what was underneath.

There were also lights in the bases of the planter boxes and lights at the bottom of the trees, but no matter how many lights were put in the park, it remained shadowy and full of dark and secluded grottoes; the perfect place for some of Momma’s friends to conduct their business.

In the early to mid-fifties, if you could stay in the closet, you did. But, if you couldn’t, you still had to earn a living. Then, as now, a lot of young runaways and boys who had been turned out of family homes, came downtown to hustle, providing sex to the guys still in the closet. Baby-faced kids with barely there beards who serviced the “chicken hawks,” and “drugstore cowboys” who went for a ride with those who liked their companionship a little more exotic or “rough.” Pershing Square, with its secluded spots and underground restrooms was perfect for such anonymous meetings.

The Los Angeles police were often there, and sometimes they would talk with Momma, and smile at me. Momma would wait until they were out of earshot before calling them “bastards” and “gestapo.” There must have been other types of people there, too: business people on their way to dinner or a night at the Biltmore, couples headed to the big art-deco movie theatres a couple of blocks away, drug dealers, other kinds of opportunists. But I didn’t know any of those. When I was with Momma in Pershing Square, my world was a night world of shadow and lamplight, my nearsighted vision blurred all lights to snowflakes, and I would sit on top of one of the large concrete planters and listen to the sounds of traffic, footsteps, the thrum of the pigeons as they went to roost in the trees, the mix of voices raised in song.

Maybe it was the Salvation Army, those people with the songbooks and portable organ. Or maybe another group, people from the building with the big red neon light reading, “JESUS SAVES.” Someone was always there, though. They would hand out the song books and start the singing. My mother knew every song. Her voice was not beautiful, but it was melodic and distinctive. In later days, I came to think of it as representative of her Missouri roots. It was strong and clear and conveyed a sort of certainty. She would stand near a planter, with me sitting on top of it next to her, my legs dangling from underneath my car coat, and I would listen as she lifted her voice about gathering at the river or clinging to an old rugged cross or becoming a Christian soldier. Sometimes I would try to sing along, but mostly, I listened.

I always fell asleep. Once that happened, I would experience the rest of the night as a series of blurry vignettes: opening my eyes to find myself being carried somewhere; hearing a man’s voice with a woman’s lilt singing to me; seeing the parade of Yellow Cabs in front of the Biltmore, men in tuxedos and ladies in evening gowns getting out of big cars to stroll across the sidewalk; Momma asking me if I needed to use the toilet and realizing I was already in a stall.

I alternated sleeping and waking to a continuous buzz of talking and laughter, the smell of cigarettes, coffee from a vending machine, and sometimes a cup of hot, watery cocoa or salty chicken-soup.

When the evening was done at last, we often walked to Cooper’s Donuts for a plain cake donut and a cup of coffee full of milk, each of them only a nickel. The pressmen from the Times or Examiner might be there, or men from the flower market. Almost always, one of them would buy me a special donut – eight cents – with chocolate frosting and nuts.

Walking downtown afterward, looking for a place to spend the night, we sometimes ran into more friends of Momma’s. They yelled, “Hey, Mary!” across the street at her, called her “Miss Thing,” and introduced her to others as their “sister Bobbie.” Momma and her friends would laugh about the evening’s work or entertainment and often, we would all go to a Clifton’s Cafeteria. My mother and I both favored the one that was decorated like an island paradise.

In those times, I thought the best part of being with Momma then was Cooper’s Donuts or going to Clifton’s. But now, I think I might pick Pershing Square in the springtime and the sound of young male voices singing about being Christian soldiers while the big red neon sign across the street flashed, “JESUS SAVES” and the world rushed by in shadow.

 

NOTE: this piece is part of a collection of autobiographical works under the title, My Life in Pictures

Tagged: memoir, pictures, Writing