Meredith Bond's Blog, page 23

Stopping to smell the tropical flowers

Kristen Lamb recently wrote a wonderful blog entry on the importance of taking time off from work. I was reading this while lounging by an infinity pool looking out over the St. Lucie River at the Sandpiper Club Med – how’s that for ironic!

The thing is, she’s absolutely right. It’s so important to take time off. To spend days, even a week or more doing absolutely nothing related to your work. For four wonderful days, my family and I swam, played tennis so badly you wouldn’t have even recognized the game except by the rackets in our hands, learned how to swing a golf club, learned how to sail, ate, drank (frozen margarita’s!!) and read and enjoyed the work of other authors without giving one thought to character development, plot, how much show and tell was used – nothing! We just had fun and enjoyed ourselves.

In a burst of full honesty, I will admit to checking my email once in the morning and once in the evening, but I’m in the middle of helping to organize an anthology and there was some important business to keep an eye on. I also had signed up for an on-line class which began the exact week I was away, so I needed to keep up with that as well. But for the most part, I didn’t even give a thought to all of the work that was sitting at home waiting for me. And I have to admit, I haven’t yet fully embraced the stress that work is trying to put on me – yes, I’ve got to get my story for the anthology finished, but I’d rather sit and finish reading my book. Yes, I’ve got classes to prepare for – already my newest offering has enough students enrolled, but I have yet to write out my lectures. September 12th is just around the corner and I’ve got to do some research for the class because it’s a new one that I’m creating from scratch. But first, I’m going to download all the pretty pictures I took while I was away and sit and look through them with a lovely cup of tea.

Vacation can be hard to get into – leaving all that work behind to focus on having fun. And just as difficult is leaving that vacation and getting back to work. I think it’s easiest to make these sorts of transitions slowly.

Saved

I hate it when they’re right. Thank God I listened and did as I had been told. I’m also just as happy that there was no one there, standing next to me saying “I toldja so!” and nodding vigorously.  Nope. There was just my sister-in-law saying “Yup. Good thing you did that.”

For some completely unknown reason, my brand new computer (which I am loving!) decided that it didn’t want to work. I was working on it Thursday morning in my normal way. I had to go out to take my daughter somewhere, so I shut it down and went out. When I got back, I started it up. It happily came on and then froze within a minute of starting. I turned it off, waited a minute, turned it back on. It did it again. And again. Then I got the “blue screen of death” and it said that to start I would “need to insert a bootable disk” (into a computer that has no disk drive) besides the fact that I don’t have a bootable disk!

Did I freak out? No. I am very happy to say that I kept calm. My brother, a computer whiz who has taken apart, and even more importantly, put together many computers in his life just so happens to be visiting me for the week with his lovely family. He knew just what to do – he ran a disk check. Turns out there were a number of “bad sectors” on my hard drive. How they got there no one knows. But he got the computer to fix itself while we all went out for a nice Ethiopian dinner. And all I could say was “Thank God I backed up! Thank God I backed up!”

If, for some reason, the fix didn’t work, I was ok. All but the most recent, minor changes that I had done the day before were saved elsewhere, most of it was actually saved in two elsewheres – I double back-up. I save all of my most important Word documents (my writing) to a cloud-based drive (Microsoft’s SkyDrive where they give you 25 gigs of space for free) and I have a physical external hard drive where I back up all of my files (music, pictures, everything) once a week. If I know I’m going to be working on a particular story somewhere outside of my home, I’ll email it to myself, so I’ve also got backups in my gmail account as well, they’re just not usually as recent.

The point is, even if my hard disk had crashed, burned and died, I was ok. And these things just happen – for no reason! At any time! This is a brand new computer (ok, it’s a refurbished one, but still…). When was the last time you backed up your most important work? And what about everything else? My brother even suggested buying an enormous external hard drive (the one I have is smaller than the hard drive built into my computer) and “cloning” my hard drive so that if this ever happens again, I will not only have all of my files saved, but my programs too.  I’m looking into doing that today.

 

Retreat!

I am currently in the midst of one of the best weekends. I was lucky enough to not only be invited to join a group of writers on a writing retreat, but to have my husband say “Yeah, sure, go! I’ll stay home with the kids,” when I proposed the idea to him. Ok, our kids are teenagers and don’t need a lot of caring for – more worrying for at this point in their lives (I feel it is my job to worry when they go out – how are they going to get there, who are they with, what will they be doing, how and when are they going to get home).

My husband offered to worry for me this weekend and I am more grateful than you can imagine! It has freed me to escape to the hills of West Virginia to a beautiful house nestled in the woods on a hillside. As I type this, I feel as if I’m hanging in mid-air looking down a steep hill at nothing but dappled sunlight filtering through the trees of the forest. A light breeze is ruffling through the leaves and there is no noise but the chirping of the cicadas, the cry of a bird every now and then, and the sound of my fingers tapping out words on my keyboard. Could life get any better than this? Oh, yes, I can’t forget the cup of delicious tea sitting by my side, and the good friends who are sharing this beautiful space with me this weekend.

We are six women. All at one stage or another in our writing careers. All desperately trying to balance family, work and writing – taking advantage of this weekend get-away to get some serious writing work done. We work individually from about 8 or 9 am, gather for lunch where we help anyone who is in need of plotting help or any sort of writing guidance, work until dinner, and then again until we are falling asleep at our keyboards. A little time is taken in the morning for yoga (I will write about that instead of my usual “Fooding” blog on Thursday, including pictures and detailed directions on the two sun salutations we moved through) and chat in the evening. I’m also taking a brief break in the later afternoon to take a walk to enjoy the lovely woods .

If you are ever given the opportunity to escape for something like this, I highly recommend it. We do have one person who is wonderful at keeping us on track in our discussions at meals and who did a good portion of the organizing of the weekend – I am extremely grateful to her for doing so because she did such a beautiful job.  And I’m really happy to say that I fully expect to have my short story – to be published this Fall in an anthology of paranormal and horror stories – finished by the time I leave this retreat.

Have you ever done anything like this? Tell us about it!

 

You need to be a hooker

This is another installment in my occasional series of writing-craft book reviews. If there is a writing-craft book you are curious about email me, and I’ll see if I’ve read it. If so, I’ll be happy to write a review about it. I’m a little ashamed to admit that I’ve got a good collection of writing books.

Hooked, by Les Edgerton, claims to be about how to write a great beginning to your novel – and it is – but it is so much more than that. In order teach us how to write that great beginning, Edgerton must also teach us about story structure, story problems (what he calls story-worthy problems and surface problems, but what I’ve always known as internal and external goals), setting, and so much more. At the half-way point of this small book, I had three pages of notes. My mind (and notes) are filled with notes to myself to add this or that to nearly every topic I cover in my beginning writing classes.

I bought Hooked because of the importance of being able to write a compelling opening – which I’ve also mentioned here just a few weeks ago. As I said in my last post on the topic, beginnings are something I struggle with. Edgerton, too, reminds us that it doesn’t matter how fabulous your book is if you can’t hook your reader within the first few pages because they won’t get to the part where it starts being great. It’s got to be great from the very first sentence.

I do have to say that I found the first half of the book much more useful than the second. The first half is filled with great information on story structure and those all-important problems. He details exactly what the components of a good opening scene are – there are four primary components and six secondary (nope, not going to tell you what they are, you need to go out and buy the book ). I especially appreciated his discussion of story-worthy and surface problems, giving a slightly different take on these concepts than the simple internal and external goals I’ve learned and taught about for years (the most important of which is that the story-worthy problem is slowly revealed to both the reader and the protagonist as the story progresses – cool, huh?).

The second half of Hooked has a great many examples, many of which I skimmed, and I don’t think I missed anything really important. Of course, I did stop to read the chapter “Red Flag Openers to Avoid” (Darn! I can’t tell you how many stories I’ve started with dialogue – something which Edgerton says is a big no-no.) The book ends with a great chapter on what some editors and agents say about openers. Here are a few of my favorite quotes:

From Julie Castiglia (a literary agent): “The story should begin on the first page – too often it doesn’t, so there’s no reason to read on.”

From Jodie Rhodes (literary agent): “Never open with scenery! Novels are about people and the human condition.”

From Bob Silverstein (literary agent): “An immediate connection between author and reader… a sense of something vital at stake.”

I bought Hooked here.

Triberrium

Delirium synonyms: confusion, disorientation, restlessness… these all relate to my feelings about Triberr right now. It seems like it could be a really cool marketing tool. It seems like it could be a fun way to meet and interact with other writers. But I don’t know. I don’t know how to use it, if I’m doing it right, if I’m making a fool of myself and digging myself into a hole of embarrassment which I will never climb out of. I just don’t know and I’m not entirely sure how to find out.

I’ve basically got a whole lot of reading and trial and error to work through. But, I thought I’d share with you what I’ve discovered so far, because, as I said, this could be something fabulous.

Triberr is a way to promote your blog and get followers. So, yes, you first need a blog, and to post to it regularly – but you should probably be doing that anyway if you want to promote your work. You also need a Twitter account because Triberr somehow (haven’t figured this out yet) posts tweets to your Twitter account. I’m not sure exactly what it tweets, something along the lines of blog promotions for the blogs of other people in your tribe.

Now, I’m all for that. I’m very big into promoting other people, people I’m friends with. If you read my tweets, you’ll see that almost all of them are just that, promotion of other people and my own blog. I should probably tweet more content, but I just don’t believe that other people would find what I do in my every day life all that interesting.

The only draw-back, I can see, to Triberr is that it’s going to give me a ton more blogs to read and I don’t have the time. I’m stretched as it is with my writing, marketing, teaching and family. How would I ever have time to read so many blogs as well? It’s a quandary. But it might just be worth trying this out to find out if it really works.

I think it works best if you get an invitation from someone who is already leading a tribe. Somehow when I signed up, I started my own tribe, so if you want to join just email me and I’ll invite you to my tribe and we’ll figure this out together.

Beginning

Two blogs which I have recently begun reading regularly, Kristen Lamb’s fabulous blog and a new one by the always generous-with-her-knowledge Rebecca York called “On Romance Writing”, both recently featured the topic “beginnings”. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that! Beginnings are probably The Most Important part of your book. If you don’t capture a reader with your beginning, you can beg and plead all you like, but they won’t hang around to get to the great part on page 25.

Beginnings have always been hard for me. I write and rewrite the beginnings of my books at least five, sometimes as many as ten times. Yes! I will actually have ten beginnings to my book. I can’t tell you how frustrating that is. Well, I guess you can imagine.

I usually know where I want to begin the story. I know to begin with a bang, as York reminds us in her blog. She suggests beginning in the middle of an exciting scene. An action scene. Get your reader involved and as you do so, drop hints as to who your protagonist is and get that empathy developing quickly in as few words as possible so that your reader is hooked quickly – action and empathy. It works! She gives a terrific example.

On the other hand, Lamb tells us that if we don’t start with a bit of set up, showing our protagonist’s ordinary world, our reader won’t care if our heroine is nearly killed on the first page. Yes, we’ll feel bad because we’re human that way, but we won’t really care. She stresses the need to establish who the character is, what their world is like and get that empathy going right away before we delve into the inciting event, into that action that York loves.

Ok, I can see her point. I can understand where they’re both coming from. And, just to confuse you, I think they’re both right.

Wait. What? How can they both be right? One tells you to start with action, the other with some description (well, not full stop dead description, but showing of the world). They’re completely different, how can they both be right?

Easy – it depends what you’re writing. If you’re writing a book that’s going to be filled with action and adventure – romantic suspense, like York, or YA/middle grade books (like my series which I hope to publish before the end of the year – ha, ha, ha – ahem, er, sorry, working on it), then you want to start with action and quickly build up that empathy. If you’re writing something with a slower pace, you’ll want to start by establishing the world of your novel and letting us get to know the protagonist a bit – building that empathy – first before you get into the conflict. 

The key, I think, you (and I) need to remember is that empathy. You’ll notice that both writers emphasize that right off. Build empathy between your reader and your protagonist as quickly as you can (within the first page). Whether you do that through high tension action or slow descriptive action doesn’t matter. Once we love the protagonist, once we care, we’re a lot less likely to give up on the book.  We’ll not only want to know, but need to know, their story. But it all starts at the beginning.

Happy Indie-pendence Day!

First let me apologize for the lack of a picture in this posting, and for any typos — I live in Washington DC and we got slammed with a storm last weekend. We don’t expect power back for another week. I managed to get this up from my phone — Thank you Verizon!!

This week I am “paying it forward” by joining with a good number of other independent authors to promote the work of the self-published. For a list of all the participating authors see the link at the bottom of this post.

For my part in the promotion, I am so happy to tell you about Leslie Langtry’s funny romance, ‘Scuse Me While I Kill This Guy.

This is a laugh-out-loud romp with a wonderful romance thrown in, just for kicks. Virginia Bombay is a smart, witty and intelligent assassin (the family business which she had no choice but to go into — kill or be killed). And by intelligent, I mean nervous, worried, jumpy and not afraid to ask for help from her cousin, her brother, or anyone else handy.

When the family is called to gather for an impromptu family reunion, Virginia isn’t worried about making the potato salad as much as she is about who will wind up dead. Then, to make matters worse, Virginia is assigned two jobs to do within a few weeks of the reunion (highly unusual to have two right in a row). She also happens to meet the most wonderful man — an Aussie bodyguard — who appreciates her wit and her lack of concern with what she eats. The romance is just what Virginia needs after years of widowhood (her husband was, oddly enough, not killed by her family, but died of cancer).

With help, she manages to get her work done in time, only to learn at the reunion that the family is in trouble and counting on her to get them out of it. Virginia once again calls in the troops — which now include her new boyfriend.

Despite not being a particularly heroic protagonist — she does need a lot of help and people to lean on — I loved Virginia and her snappy attitude. The whole thing was just so much fun, filled with laughs interspersed with action and a little mystery. The romance was certainly secondary, but enjoyable, and it was great having a heroine who isn’t afraid of not being stick-skinny or the most beautiful woman in the world. Virginia knows what she wants and goes for it, that’s heroic enough for me.

I got this book free from Amazon and look forward to buying the next in the series.

Jolted

I love Orson Scott Card. I love his fiction books, I love his writing books. I’ve read many of each. Currently, I’m reading his wonderful YA fantasy The Lost Gate, but I was rudely jolted from the narrative by Card not following a rule that he, himself, tells me to follow in his book Characters & Viewpoint.

I was happily reading along. For the past few chapters, we’ve been in the hero, Danny’s, point of view. I’m thoroughly enjoying Danny’s story as he takes us from West Virginia to Washington, D.C. and then to Ohio in the course of the story. Loads of fun, right? Yes, until we go from a conversation in Danny’s POV (limited third person, as it has been through all of the chapters about Danny – there is a parallel story set in another world which I’ve yet to discover how it ties into the main story, but I’m sure it’ll all come together in the end) to “That was how Danny’s education in the rudiments of magery began all over again.” Omniscient! What the hell?

There was no break, no extra spaces put in between paragraphs, nothing! In fact, the next few paragraphs are pretty weird. We go from that limited third person to omniscient, skip a whole year in time (it’s told to us) and then there’s one little paragraph in first person (“If spacetime wants me to close gates, it’ll happen, one or another. And if it doesn’t, then I never will learn it no matter how much I study.” – my quotation marks, not Card’s). And then the last paragraph of the chapter, back into Danny’s POV and voice. What?? I’m totally confused. Why would he do this? Did he just have a bad writing day? We all have them, I assume, even great writers like Card. But how didn’t he see that he’d done this when he read through his work?

I’m completely baffled.

Maybe he meant those few paragraphs in omniscient to sound like they were in Danny’s POV, and I’m just reading more into them than he intended. But he loses the voice, Danny’s voice, which is what makes them seem to be omniscient to me. And then there’s that one weird paragraph, those two sentences, in first person.

What do you think? What do you think about changing points of view within a story? Within a chapter? Within a scene?

Hang With Your Friends

I think I’ve touched on this topic once before when I participated in the Beach Book Blast, but writing friends are an incredibly wonderful thing. I’m a member of a couple of different writing groups. I’ve got a critique group, the Washington Romance Writers, WG2E (and it’s off-shoot, the Beach Book Blast group – and we will be doing more things together, so don’t forget to check our web page and Facebook page!), a group of friends who live near me who all write, and my closest friend (who used to live near me, but doesn’t anymore – thank God for email!) who’s also a writer.

Without these groups, I don’t think I could do what I do. Each group provides support in its own way. We talk about writing: one group may talk more about craft, while another will focus more on publishing but it’s all writing related stuff I have to think about and figure out how to do.  The thing is, I wouldn’t be able to figure any of this out without my groups.

Being a member of the Washington Romance Writers, I have attended a good number of their monthly meetings. They cover a wide range of topics because they try to appeal to every member of the group, so I’ve listened to talks on character development, setting and POV. There have been seminars from agents on how to write a good query letter and from knowledgeable members on how to market my work. I don’t think there’s a topic that hasn’t been covered at some point, and then there are always the fabulous talks by Kathleen Gilles Seidel on Jane Austen which makes you stop and realize how brilliant a woman and writer she truly was – not to mention how brilliant a woman and writer Kathy is, but that’s a different story.

Being a member of the WG2E Street team has been a study in disparate people getting together and working toward a common goal – selling all of our books. We live all over the country (and I think we’ve even got members in Canada and England as well); we write in every genre and are at every different stage in our careers. Yet, we put all that aside to support each other and help market each other’s books. Why? Because we can’t do it alone. The market today is too huge. We need each other in order to be seen in the murky publishing waters.

To encourage this sort of support, I just started a Facebook page for all my former students at FCC. It’s so wonderful to see students from different classes, or even the same class over time, get together and talk to each other, support each other, even offer to read each other’s work. It makes me so happy to see this. Way to go, guys!!

It’s always been my dream for my students to get together after a critique class and keep it the group going. That never happened (as far as I know), so I created this group to give them a nudge. I’m crossing my fingers that this will work. And in the meantime, I’m using Facebook to keep in touch my students and continue to teach them by posting links to writing blogs I think they might enjoy.

So, I encourage you, no matter what you write, find a group – or two or three – to join. Get active, support someone else’s work – I guarantee you, just because someone buys another person’s book that you’ve promoted doesn’t mean that they won’t buy yours as well.  We all benefit when we support each other.

Oh, and I almost forgot – I’m blogging today (Sunday) at RG2E as well! Come on over and say ‘hi!’. D.D. is giving away copies of Magic In The Storm to anyone who wants one – is she fabulous or what?!

When Characters Take Over

I am the most left brained writer you can imagine. I have worksheets for everything – characters, scenes, story structure, show & tell – you name it, I’ve got a worksheet for it (well, maybe not dialogue – for that and editing I use highlighting, but that’s another post). The point is that I plan out my scenes thoroughly before I ever sit down at my computer and begin to write. I fill out a scene chart, I have my story structure all detailed and I pre-write to get myself into the scene and figure out exactly what’s going to happen when I do actually open up my computer and begin to write.

And then – sometimes – a really strange thing happens. You’d think with so much planning and thinking things through, when I write what happens is what I planned to happen, but no. Sometime my characters just take over. Sometimes my scene gets hijacked by things that just happen as I writing. It really throws me when this happens because I plan my scenes so thoroughly.

It happened to me last week. I was writing a scene that I could see perfectly clearly in my mind. My heroine is called in to her mother’s formal drawing room (this is a Georgian romance, set in about 1780). She walks in completely disheveled in an old worn-out dress with straw hanging off it and her hair is a mess – she’s just been rolling around in the barn, playing with a new litter of puppies. She even brings one of the puppies in with her. She is called in to meet the hero (although she wasn’t aware of this) who is there, and impeccably dressed. He takes one look at her and says, “No! Absolutely not.” She’s is so startled by this that she squeezes the poor, little puppy in her arms and it pees all over the front of her dress further humiliating her. Now, I never planned for the puppy to pee on her. It never occurred to me when I was planning the scene that it should do that. It just happened. The hero said no, and the heroine reacted, scaring the poor, already terrified, puppy.

I was shocked. Amazed, even. How could this have happened? Of course, I thought it was terrific. I mean, I wanted my heroine to be in a terrible situation, and this addition only made everything so much worse for the poor girl. I love this scene! And it annoys me to no end that I had to completely change the plot of the story so that the scene no longer fits and I can’t use it. Argh!

Oh, I’ll find some time, some story where I can use it, just because it is so wonderful – but not in this story. Now, I’ve completely reinvented the character (she is no longer the type to play with puppies, let alone carry them into the drawing room), and therefore the plot of the story. It’ll be good (I hope, I have yet to write it), but it will be completely different and I can’t wait to see what this new character does despite my meticulous plans for her.

Have you ever had this happen to you? How has it worked out – for the better, or worse?