Anya’s Comments (group member since Oct 20, 2017)

Anya’s comments from the Navigating Indieworld Discussing All Things Indie group.

This may be my jet lag speaking, but I feel this latest blurb - although clear - is too long to be on the back cover of a book. :) I might go with something that runs along like this:

The forecast: Record cold.
The crimes: Colder still.

Case #1: Young and friendly. A hardworking veterinary technician. No possible enemies. Gone missing one night two years ago. Broken window and smears of blood.

Case #2: Two mansions burnt down. Arsonist caught and jailed. Out there, another mansion burnt down. Same methods used.

Case #3: A new year. A new murder. Nobody mourns. The only clue left is a bulky address book of accomplices.

In the dead of the most frigid Chesapeake winter in decades, a cold case collides with new cold-blooded crimes. As Detective Lieutenant Rick Peller and his colleagues set off on a hunt for answers, the killer with blood as icy as the bay's waters watches and waits.

In the dead of winter in Chesapeake, Detective Lieutenant Rick Peller's sleepless nights are haunted by the last photo of (name), a young veterinary technician who has gone missing for two cold years. Meanwhile, his colleague Detective Sergeant Corina Montufar is faring better - having chased down and caught the arsonist responsible for burning down three mansions. No one was hurt when the big houses came down.

The good news ends there.

Bloodied by the first murder of the year, Howard County suffocates under a shroud of fear and distrust. Together with his colleagues, Peller must delve into the cold-blooded past that unravels a link between these three cases. All the while, the killer watches them.

Hope this helps!

My editing attempt would be as follows:

In the dead of winter in Chesapeake, Detective Lieutenant Rick Peller's nights are kept up by photos of missing persons. Something's not right. The veterinary technician should've been too young, too clean, to be a target of the cult (just as an example). The wealthy executive's home had burnt down too easily. And (name), that unscrupulous career criminal (I don't exactly understand this job description :P), why was he made silenced suddenly after all these years? And by who? Delving into the cold-blooded past, Peller and his colleagues must find the link to all these forgotten cases, before the killer finds them and makes them part of it. Winter is coming.

Okay, scratch that last sentence. :)

Just a few notes, I feel "...Rick Peller's neighbor asks him to look into a old missing persons case. He doubts anything will come of it, but soon details emerge..." and "With the most likely arsonist sitting in prison and the dead man's address book overflowing with enemies..." are giving away the plot points in the story. For example, now I know they will catch at least an arsonist suspect, and also have an address book as a key clue in the story, before I begin to read about Rick Peller receiving his mission from his neighbor - which I now won't believe a word of him believing how the case would be boring and trivial. That would be a loss of opportunity to establish empathy with the protagonist in the starting scenes, I think. I would have liked to be surprised, together, with him, as we discover there is more to the case that we've initially shrugged off, together.

Also, pardon my confusion, but I wonder if you could find a way to write the blurb in a way that clearly separates the career criminal's murder case with the missing people's cases. The murdered man was murdered; his body found, not missing, but introducing his case suddenly after 2 missing cases (I presume the wealthy executive was missing too, not found and declared burnt?) seems to misidentify them as all being related to missing persons.

Hope this makes sense! :)

Ahh, okay. Sorry, I don't really understand how self-publishing via Amazon works, but might it be possible to remove that one neglected volume, upload the two books separately, then have respective recommendation link to the next/previous book under each to get the whole 140k story? It sounded as though what the readers didn't like was feeling cheated at the cliffhanger (which they might be mistaking as the final ending of your story, not realizing there was another book to move it along), rather than at the blurb or story premise etc?

Regarding the usage of the terms "protagonist" and "character", I wonder if this quoted phrase from https://www.npr.org/2016/04/16/474396... might help me to explain my understanding: "George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, features a sprawling cast of characters jostling for power. There are so many, in fact, that just who is the protagonist is a source of debate among GoT fans."

This is another link to an example of websites that have influenced my conceptual understanding of the two terms: https://www.advancedfictionwriting.co...

That said, these are just term definitions. As long as you have something to tell, you have a story. The Elfland and Paranormal Defence Agency sound really interesting! Hope the reviews and sale of your books go up soon!

Hello Alex, your creativity is overflowing! :) I read that you mentioned your story (or did you mean the drafting process?) seemed to be moving at a slower pace than you'd like, though. That lead me to wonder if this might be partly due to having too many ideas for one story.

I realize that may sound contradictory, but I guess you can imagine it as one person trying to prepare nine hundred dishes for a thanksgiving dinner for, say, a family of four. Very ambitious and lovely, but I'm afraid his guests may not be able to digest all in time. The chef himself may also be feeling stressed out by the workload all the while and cooked slower than his usual abilities could.

I wonder if you might consider splitting this story into a trilogy - or even a saga. For example, have one book that focuses on the Elfland and its two elvish Queens' battle for the throne. Then, in a next book, switch the point of view to Geoff, Chris, or Ben and their life adventures up until a turning point to the next book. In the final book, weave the two worlds together and have all these characters meeting up with one another. By then, you can just write about what each character is doing at the moment without having to stray away from the main plot to explain backstories, characters' ambitions/goals, world history etc.

Also, I believe it's difficult for a story to be clear to readers if it has multiple "protagonists". I believe that a good story could, instead, have multiple "characters" that each reader may decide for himself/herself which one is the protagonist. I understand that a writer may feel all characters to be important and honour all as protagonists, but right now, that love for your characters seems to be confusing even you, the writer, and causing an unbiased decision on where/what you'd place emphasis on in your story.

Thus, my suggestion is to either pare down on the secondary plots, or flesh them out selectively into main plots for a book series. Hope this helps! :)

*P.S. I went back to re-read your line. Just to clarify, is your book already published, and that you were meaning to say its sale was going slow? Or are you still editing the manuscript, along with its blurb? If it's the former case, then feel free to ignore my idea of a trilogy etc! :)*

"When The Law's Away" (..The Gang Will Play!)

"The Grass Is Always Redder/Blacker" (depending on if you have more blood spills or explosions/fires in your story)

"Silence Before The Fire" (or whatever happens at the story climax)

Again, another comedy crime title, "Killing A Stone With Two Birds"! :)

"A Gang By Any Other Name" :)

Thanks for taking in my suggestions. :) Just to inquire, what may be the name of that gang in the book? Perhaps it can help to inspire some potential titles from us.

For now, I have another, "Breaking Fire", ha! But I guess it's out from your adage pattern. :/

Can't say I totally recommend it, but I can only think to suggest "To Kill Is Only Human" - coming from the adage "To err is human....;to persist devilish". However, I believe without the mention of that adage, the title might just sound like bad English. :P Hope this helps!

Also, "The Stone, the deaths and the Gang"...but I guess it's more suitable for comedy crime genre though! :)

Dale - our well wishes for your family!

Matt, please, keep it down. I'm an animagus. I'm just letting people assume that's a pic of my pet or something.

Regarding LitRPGs, I went to read up some about it after you raised it up, and only then realized more completely what LitRPGs refer to. I didn't know those Korean/Japanese movies -where a group of schoolchildren gets transported into a virtual game arena and has to fight it out to leave a winner to escape the game etc.- fall under the LitRPG genre. I'd thought it was simply sci-fi/horror, and that LitRPGs had to be fanfictions of clearly acknowledged existing games. Thus, my concerns on copyright issues.

With the expansion of possibilities, LitRPGs sound fun to write! Why the "six months" though - are you planning to work on a LitRPG idea for a book? That's exciting! :)

Matt - You seem a really nice, interesting and easy-going fellow! I appreciate sharing a similar level of writing interests with you, as well as constantly getting inspired by ideas you'd freely toss around your discussion.

Regarding the RPG-like magic system, you'd guessed it again - I'm not planning for magic to have an elaborate backstory or system or laws etc. in this story series, but it is indeed influenced by some RPG I'd played before. I'd teased with the idea of writing LitRPG-genre stories, but I dismissed it in fear of breaching copyrights issues of those games. I once saw a novel-type book in a bookstore that advertised itself to be a Minecraft novel or something, but I didn't check its author or publisher. Might you, Matthias the magical James Bond-style cowboy, have any tips on how to go about writing and publishing those LitRPG books?

Well, and if you wouldn't call synaesthesia as a condition, what would you call it? Mental illness? :) Also, if you want blackness in your name, get a "W". Or, find another synaesthete who would see/hear/smell black in your current existing name alphabets!

Reading the latest conversation here is like being transported back to a high school corridor again. :) I like it!

Don't worry, guys, I'm not here to disrupt this lovely discussion on zombies and hard sci-fi and, probably soon, catching pokemon. Just popping in to answer Matt's direct question for me. #fireballdiscussion

Ahh, fireballs really won't be a major element in my story, although regarding spellcasting, I'm intending it to be a skill level thing, as well as the wizard being able to decide which of his learnt levels he's going to cast each spell in. Why, would you like there to be a character called Matt who would jump out during the climax and throw a meteor of a fireball and save the day? :)

Also, just saying, besides touching on the topic of fireballs, your snippet has relevance to my story in that it suggests synaesthesia. My protagonist is a mild synaesthete...to reflect one of my minor traits. For example, I could 'cheat' in spelling tests last time because I'd remember the colours present in the new vocabulary word, and thus guess/know the letters, without having to spend more time to memorize for the tests. :D I have more trouble with Stroop tests though - they look so rainbow to me at first glance. But since my condition is mild, I could largely 'mute' it off and not scare the teachers/doctors checking us.

These days, I've been paying more conscious attention to noticing if accents may affect the colour of a phoneme that flash by in my brains. Right now, I think it does, although it may also be due to the speaker not pronouncing the phoneme 'properly' and instead roll it off to sound like another phoneme.

Anyway, this is all more fun than serious researching. I feel lucky to have this condition, and even more lucky to have it not bother my daily life. Some extent of synaesthesia can send its bearers into crazed states. For me, I just have a navy blue-bright red-dark brown-dark brown "Matt", and a bright red-pale milky orange-moor green-cinnamon brown "Alex"! :)

Okay, back to you guys.

Matt - I was surprised to see someone picking this thread up again, but oh, thank you for your very helpful suggestions! Gosh, seems like I'm going to re-work my opening lines again. I adore your effortless tendency to notice puns and figure of speech, and I appreciate your idea to use the nursery rhyme as part of setting up the world. I didn't give much thought to that detail like that before! So, really, thank you so much for presenting me a plausible scene (I enjoyed reading it!) between the doctor and her little patient, and letting me see my story with a fresh pair of eyes. It's quite amusing how relevant your snippet is to my story! :)

Faith - Hello, and thank you for the valuable writing advice! Trust me, I didn't start out doing that. I picked up that way of writing from various writing blogs, courses and published books, believing that should be the way to do it. I'd chuckled madly to myself after typing "But" at the start of a sentence for the first time in my writing life. But (:D), you're challenging that opinion now! Urgh, this is complicated. I shall take more careful note of it as I write, thank you for kindly pointing it out for me! :)

Congratulations, Judy! It's motivating to see your perseverance and brilliant success.

Urgh, shorter sentences, longer sentences, clearer sentences, dizzy sentences...@.@ Heehee, but thanks for provoking me to think about my own writing style!

Helen - Thank you so much for dropping by! Gosh, I just realized I'm actually receiving advice and encouragements from actual, published authors! This is quite grand (sorry for my newbie moment)! :D Thank you, too, for your affirmation - I'm going through my first lines faster than a fisherman changes his hook! I hope my writing will get better in time!

Dale - Thank you for your generosity. I'll be sure to bombard you, flood you, catapult you with questions on editing, get ready. >:) And just to say, my dad is 60! He has 4 children and 3 grandsons, and will sometimes hint for more of the latter, but will earn criticisms from my yet unmarried siblings, heh. Anyway, I've taken your suggestions to give the doctor a name, and also how it would not be her first time to ask the nurses to restrict the toy usage policy in the clinic. Thanks again!

Dale - Thank you for your affirmation! Since seeing some of your review posts and your Book Blurb Clinic, I've been hoping for a chance to speak with you and to get your advice on editing. Thank you so much for dropping by this thread! Your suggestions and edited snippet are much appreciated. I shall put them, along with the suggestions by Alex and Amy, to good use in my revision. It seems like "tightening" the sentences is a key element pointed out to me by all three of you. I shall take note of that. And well, last but not least...I didn't know you're this old! :D Hello, grandpa Dale.

Alex - Thank you so much for coming by from the "Hello" thread! :) Thank you for the advice to tighten my syntax, and for the nice encouragement. I shall get to work on it now! Have fun with your own editing process too!

Amy - Thank you so much for the writing advice. I'd come across that "write succinct"-advice some times, but would so often slip and start blabbering, forgetting that readers would be trying to follow my story for their first time. Thank you for pointing that out to me again. :) And of course, thanks for saying you loved it! Shall keep that positive energy in mind now as I work on the seemingly never-ending editing!

Judy - Lovely, you're a multilinguist! By the way, as I understand, "konnichiwa" is usually written without spacing between as it is a greeting word "Hello" in its whole form. ;) For me, my French will be put to the test this December when my family and I visit France - I think we'll just fall back to using English and a lot of gesturing and google images showing, though. :) Any quick tips on French (language/people/culture/food)?

Helen - Hello and thank you for the welcome! :) Yes, this community has proven to be very friendly and helpful. I hope I can contribute some efforts back soon! Delighted to meet you, and I look forward to seeing you around!

Just found this thread. This is amazing! Good luck to all sending in your books! By the way, might it make a better spoof to say "Who are you reading?" rather than "What are you reading?".

I know it'll sound quite odd, but it's considering the similarly odd question to be spoofed is "Who are you wearing?" - as though that poor celebrity is draping a human being around his/her body. Thus, since it's not "Which designer clothes/What are you wearing?", likewise the spoof seems too grammatically correct when it becomes "Which story world/What are you reading?" - unless getting corrected is part of the joke itself?

Or maybe I'm just blabbering here. Anyhow, thank you so much for organizing this excellent event! :)

Congratulations, Dale! I'm envious! :)