What Keeps You Reading???

Here a Book, There a Book

Am wondering ... about the books I started pile. Not the to-read pile, which is growing, but the books I started and put down to read again ... whenever. At last count, there're eight of them in various stages of completion. 

The one I finished last? Neil Gaiman's Stardust, the story of a feckless lad who grows up during a quest to bring his lady love a fallen star. I picked it up last weekend and finished it in three days. Written in the classic fairy tale style, I enjoyed the sly humor of the piece as well as Gaiman's inventiveness in using the standard motifs. Well worth reading. But you probably already know that. It's been around for a while as the various covers tell you.

You can take a look on Amazon and Nook.

So, I finished Stardust midweek. Did I pick up one of my already started books? No. I'm reading Darynda Jones' The Curse of the Tenth Grave. 

Am wondering if you hop, skip, and jump through your reading pile. 

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On my writing front,  the content editor has On the Run. Yeah, I finally got all the critique and beta edits collated into the draft. 

Other progress, finished Pissing at the Green Onion, a short story meant to be a freebie sometime or other. Also, got a couple pages into a post-disaster Andor story set during the times the Kingscourt established its rule over the western lands. Yeah, both There Be Demons and On the Run happen on Andor's west coast. After all, I'm a California valley girl -- Central Valley, that is. For sure.

May seem silly to have a cover so early [My critique group isn't going to be looking at it until January.], but some people seem to think it helps with the writing to have a working cover.

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Writerly Things

Colorado Writers have a wonderful marketing tool in the Ultimate Pitchfest. If you're a writer having problems with your queries, they offer digital lessons on how to create a perfect pitch. Again, having a pitch while you're editing, can help to keep you focused on your story line even if you don't have a manuscript ready to shop.

On the Run won't be ready in time to shop there. [They do Skype pitches to good agents.] But I'm going to be doing the digital learn to pitch workshop soon.

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Oh, Happy Holidays All

Hope you celebrate several during the holiday season.

Archetype or Cliche or ??

The Reading Lesson:

All too often Archetypes turn into Cliches.  This is a major problem for fantasy writers and readers.  Like, who wants to read another vampire novel ... or zombie ... or fairy ... or ???  You name it, and you can probably come up with examples where hundreds of writers followed the cliche and still got published.  You also know why I laughed out loud when I encountered Alison Pang's leg-humping unicorn in A Brush of Darkness.  [Shades of Chihuahuas!]

I've often thunk that Disney & Company should be prosecuted for stifling people's imaginations.  Fortunately, writers' imaginations can still counter the commercial norms.  While we want to make some money from our books, many of us streeetch people's imaginations in the process.

Off the rant.  Pang creates a very credible fey-touched urban fantasy world with a no-nonsense hero --  acting as a gatekeeper between worlds for her boss who has gone mysteriously missing.  The plot centers on finding the boss and other missing people.  The love interest is dangerous [read succubus] and is looking for his sister who has gone missing too.  The peril is developed from the concept soul capturing.  The cast of characters come from faery, heaven, hell, and human, all mixed together in unexpected ways.

Back to the unicorn who remains silent after the hero rescues him from a demon and takes him home.  She even tolerates him sleeping in her underwear drawer.  While she protests, she doesn't kick his ass out the door but fixes him breakfast instead.  About midway, though the book, she learns he's more than a pet ... with knowledge of Faery that helps save her behind.  The beast gives a great example on how to handle a secondary character who makes a major contribution to solving the plot's major puzzle.

A romance?.  Not really.  Urban fantasy is how it's labeled, but it's a dark one.  The love interest disappears in a fit of rejection. Fortunately, I think the book's a trilogy.  At least, there's a second book.  Guess I should read Pang's blog more carefully ... besides checking out the pictures of hunky men. 

Web Promotion and Other Stuff:

Stumbling over query writing?  Jessica Faust at Bookends is running a query critique on Wednesdays.  Granted it only  one agent's opinion, but you might also take a look at Query Shark.  Between the two, you might find a way to improve your query efforts.  I've been printing them off to study, but it's too soon to know the results.  I haven't sent out a new query -- to agent or publisher -- in ages.

[These sharing agents should be at the top of your blog reading list.  I only wish they represented the stuff I write.]

Maybe this should be under "progress" but I finally got around to cleaning up the 1st Turning Point marketing blogs hanging in my email.  Here are a few ideas I thought especially useful.

1)  Hank Quense ran a series at the beginning of the year on making your book stand out in the marketplace.  Can anyone say Amazon or Barnes and Noble here?  This is the third article, but there are links to the first two.

2)  Misty Evans gives some great tips on marketing your series ... and maybe gives you reasons why you should write a series.  There have been a lot of comments in the stuff I read that you'll sell more if you offer more than one book.  Guess once you've made one sale and they like it, the buyer will come back for more without another hard sell.

3)  John Klawitter writes about your book blurbs:  "Blurb Right or Die".  Hey, you wrote the book -- you have to market it even if you have a traditional publisher -- so write a good blurb.  Again more and more traditional publishers are making the writer to more and more of the marketing.

Progress:

Got a short, short story off to my critique group.  It borders on science fiction ... or at least uses SF parlance to explain the linch-pin situation.  Need to make sure I sure the vocabulary right.  Fortunately, one of critiquers is a scientist.

"Devil in the Details" started out as a flash fiction piece.  It made the first cut in a couple publications but didn't sell.  Thanks to an idea in a blog I read, I came up with an added danger and 500 words.  --  Next week I'll learn if I improved the story.

Bascially, I'm in revision mode.  Back to Emma ... plus I have Kaffy Anne waiting in the wings.  Then, I need to decide what to do with Britt.  I still have some agents I could send queries to.  Unfortunately the book straddles the line between YA and Tween.  Maybe I'll just try submitting it to publishers.  I'm very good at indecisive procrastination.

Trivia:

It weird watching a family squabble over an estate when they were left out of the will...

Reality Hits the Fan

News ... Progress ... or Something ...

WolfSinger Publications sent me a contract to e-publish "Taking Vengeance" in 2011.

I'm working through the details,

BUT

the publisher wants a bio, picture, and back-page blurp.

So, my brain is stuttering, wondering how I'm going to do a decent marketing pitch.

Truth in advertising summary sentence for short story:  Mariah has given up fighting with the ruler of the Marches and wants to live her life in peace ... until her daughter is attacked by privateers who turn out to be more than they seem.  --  Hey, thanks guys ... Writing this blog helps me clarify my muddled thoughts.

In case you were wondering:  Taking Vengeance is part of what I think of as my "Mariah mess".  The piece is the first three chapters I excised from "Dark Solstice" last year.  The story chronicles the beginning of the feud between Mariah and Linden, the ruler of the Marches and her former lover.

Big Problem, though ...

I'm no longer a pretend writer
[basking in my own brilliance].

I have to work.

[All that said, I must tell you we're talking 12,000 words here, but the poor lil' thing
will have to stand
on its own two feet.]

The Read ... I sort of had a read, a mystery/thriller with a romance.  Felt it was overwritten  ... couldn't get into it even though I skimmed over a third.  Just didn't like the character (written in first person) -- even though she shared some of my favorite habits, and she was smart, persistent, and didn't take no sh*t from nobody.  I cheated.  Read the ending, but didn't read enough to guess the villain, before I put it back on the trade pile.

Used books serve a purpose by making it cheaper to buy a book you might not like.  Glad it was a used one.

Busy Day

Trivia:  Didn't get much done today.  A good friend's funeral cast a damper over it.  I hate funerals but felt I had to go.

Critical Reading:  Got the last book of the Charlaine Harris' Harper Connelly books read:  An Ice Cold Grave.  Fortunately, the grave wasn't for Harper, but she did have to run for her life in the snow from a villein who didn't appear for sure until at least the last third of the book.  (Hints were dropped along the way.)  

My guess about the changing relationship was right on -- Harper and Tolliver decided they weren't siblings and took 'significant other' to the carnal level.  I was wrong about the triology though.  Harris kept making hints about finding Cameron, Harper's missing sister.  The question is dead or alive?

Dropping such textual hints are a great marketing tool, it seems to me.  Nothing like implanted teasers to make people look for your next book.  The only problem is you have to have a regularly published series to take advantage of it.  Harris has four series going.  In the Harper Connelly one, Harris has dropped so many hints in Ice  you can't possibly miss them.  I'd say Cameron is definitely looming on the horizon.  Which to me is a good deal since I like a series ...  though Lily Bard is my favorite of her MCs.


Another form of hooking readers before the book is out is including a first chapter of the next book in the current one.  Teaser chapters have always got me when I like a series, but there's always that wait until the book comes out in mass paperback.  At the moment, I'm champing at the bit for Karen Moning's newest MacKayla fae book.  At the moment, it's still in hardback.  (Incidentally, Moning drops her own hints.  I'm looking forward to her bringing MacKayla into the Highlander world.)

Writing:  Tangled is still being revised at the rate of a couple chapters a week -- and being critiqued at one chapter a week.  It's going to take forever to get it sliced into shape.  I'm supposed to worry when it sat in my computer for three-four years and gathered mold?

I thought I had a good thing going when I was writing about the Marches the first time around.  Now I'm looking at the manuscript, and I can't believe how much I've learned in the past couple of years.  Who knows if I'm any closer to getting published, but my fiction is approaching the quality of my former non-fiction shorts. 

Progress:  Next to none.  

Maybe even less if I spend more time with the new character bobbing around in my head.  So far, I haven't figured out what kind of book ... other than it's YA.  Maybe a mystery with some sort of supernatural in a small town.  So far I'm thinking of north of Hardscrabble in my never-never-California world.