Turning Points -- Do Your Characters Face a Life Changing Dilemma?

Coping with the turning points of your life means you are growing as a person. The same is true for characters in books.  I don't know how often I've dropped a series when the main character started spinning their wheels in the same old life-problem-rut for a couple books.  Writing gurus call it "character development." I call it predictable.

Wise authors often end the series when this happens -- even if their readers get angry. Charlaine Harris and Yasmine Galenorn are two of my favorite authors who come to mind as examples. [I've read with enjoyment several of their series -- from Emerald O'Brien of the Chintz 'n China Tea Room to Lucy Bard of Shakespeare].

[Am I fickle? Or, do series characters sometimes bore you?}

A chance book -- Thread of Fear by Laura Griffin,  I picked up at the supermarket, gave me this insight. I was reading a nice police procedural that started after with baby being found adrift on the Gulf [of Mexico]. Suddenly, I was reading Thread of Fear all the way through, without switching reads. None of the other three books I'm in the processing of reading [including Lee Child] had held my interest. Oh, the MCs had a problem to solve -- a mystery in the case of a couple cops or threat to their life or both. But Griffin's character stole the show for me by having to make a decision that will change the course of her life -- more than finding a hunk to love.

Fiona Glass is an art teacher who moonlights as a forensic artist. No paranormal abilities here, she's just great an establishing a rapport with her subjects to create life-like drawings that catch perps. In Thread of Fear, Fiona is recovering from a romance-gone-bad with a cop only to find herself falling for the small town cop who hires her to draw the perpetrator of a cold case that the cop thinks is related to a new murder/rape. When the third victim appears, the plot line is off and running. 

Oh, the personal decision. All the while she's caught in the investigation of the serial murders and falling for the cop, she's trying to finish "serious" paintings for a coming art show. Oh, the dilemma. She's trying to quit the forensic bit for the serious bit.

Yeah, the book has well-developed characters, plot twists, and a great small town vs city comparison in the setting [to make the decision more difficult, I guess]. But those craft skills weren't what kept me glued to the book over the week-end. It was Fiona's problem plus some humorous scenes complicating her decision. I give the book Four Stars**** because the plot didn't stand out from the common mystery paradigms. Still, a good read though.

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 The On-going Saga of an Un-famous Writer:

So, what else was I doing besides having Easter dinner at my house? [Traditional ham with apricot gaze] I was getting Mozilla Firefox unscrewed. My son-in-law worked the wonder. More important, he located a bunch of my short stories and story ideas that got scrambled when the data from my desktop was transferred to my laptop. 

In short, I found my Hagstone stuff. [*happy dance*]. The storyline sort of dribbled away on my first attempt at the novel when too many elements of the story weren't fitting into a coherent socioeconomic system, aka setting. A new character that came to mind -- rather an old character who was way off center in another setting -- may rescue the storyline yet. I'm hoping I can get the novel going again. 

First, though, I have to take care of the stuff on my desktop. My next free short story is getting closer to published-status. [The Ignoble Nobel Prize Winner] 

Then, there's my Half-Elven stuff. The short stories I wrote about Mariah are now accessable, but I haven't found the most-revised version of Dark Solstice yet. 

Then, there's my websites. I'm trying to up-grade the SEO on my author site ... and need to do something for my Half-Elven site. It's losing rank and needs upgrading badly.

Hummmm. Wonder what I can use as a bribe for the free computer guru

to get him to drive up here again.

Hummmm.

Recyling Your Settings: Are You Squeezing the Most Out of the Worlds You Create?

One of my all time favorite settings/worlds is Andre Norton's Witch World series. I've been reading them since forever ... and even have the 25c Ace editions to prove it. Imagine my delight when I discovered a new [to me] Witch World novel in my to-read pile. Andre Norton and A. C. Crispin's Songsmith about Eydrth, the daughter of Elys and Jervon, two of my favorite characters in the series. 

All in all, the Witch World is an excellent example to follow if you want to get the most mileage out of the worlds you create--fantasy or other. How? You recycle the details with new characters.

The story line: Eydrth, a minstrel, seeks a cure for her father whose mind was blasted by magic while seeking her missing mother. On her long journey from Arvon through Escarp, she first crosses the Witches of Escarp and links up with an adept whose quest parallels hers. The quest gets complicated by a mad witch, with a vendetta against men working magic, who seeks to destroy both the adept and Eydrth's family.

Won't mention the authors' effective craft skills here because both writers are Masters. Still there were little glitches here and there which a good copy editor should have caught.

The one I snorted loudest at? Eydrth was singing in the market square when a rampaging half-Keplian stallion threatened her audience. Of course, Eydrth drops her harp and leaves her tip money in the case to calm the stallion. What bothered me? No one stole anthing--neither the harp nor the money.

Such nit-picks aside, I give Songsmith Five ***** Stars. Hey, I read it in one sitting and was bleary eyed the next day. But I enjoyed the trip.

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The Ghost in the Closet is partially back from my beta readers. Got some good input which I'll put into play next week. 

Did get slammed on the word "doodie". I named my charcter "Doodie" because as a kid she hummed to herself -- doo-de-doo-de-dum.

Seems this California gal didn't clue into some eastern parts of the US using "doodie" as the equivalent of "doggie do", aka excrement. My main character's name is getting changed to Dumdie, different but still an insult.

What do you think about getting the cover to 3-D? Is it noticible?

Do Your Settings Turn Off Your Readers, ie. Make Them Stop Reading?

Got to thinking about the settings of my stories again when The Family Fantasy Readers Sharing Association insisted I read Veronica Roth's Divergent. YA. Fantasy. Dystopian. What's not to like? The setting that's what. The buzz in my brain kept telling me such a society couldn't exist.

First, all first time novelists take heart. Divergent, set in a far future Chicago, is Roth's debut novel and the first in a trilogy that's been sticking to the New York Time's YA Best Seller List for weeks. Don't know how many trunk novels she had, but she sure hit the bull's eye with her tale of Beatrice Prior learning what her place is in a fragmenting world is. 

I know I took heart. I have my own "trunk novel", a trilogy about "Austel's Idiot" who was introduced in Dark Solstice, set in my Far Isles Half-Elven world. Maybe there is hope that it'll get revised and published one day, but at the moment, I'm wallowing around in short stories to build my platform for There Be Demons.

In a world that sought political peace by dividing into five factions adhering to one particular virtue -- Candor (the honest), Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (the brave), Amity (the peaceful), and Erudite (the intelligent), all sixteen-year-olds must chose which faction they'll join after being tested for their aptitudes. Most choose the faction of their families. Beatrice Prior and her brother chose other factions.

Beatrice becomes the hardened, calculating Tris when she joins the Dauntless, the opposite of calm, collected selflessness of her original group. The title, Divergent, comes from the fact that those who don't fit into any of the groupings are anathema and are destroyed. Guess which group Tris tests out as? Fortunately, she's finds allies, who were hurt by the system who give her clues she needs to survive the transition.

Yeah, it's a story about someone who finds themselves even though they don't fit into the structure of their society.

Divergent has a lot going for it as Roth sets up her world. An interesting protagonist who doesn't wallow in the difficult decisions she must make. Well-drawn secondary characters who must also cope with a changes required to become Dauntless. Fortunately, Tris finds a guide, who becomes the love interest, to help her make the transition from selflessness to a fighter. All the drama of surviving a corrupted playing field leads to lots of action with enough to plot twists and turns to keep the reader guessing as Tris learns the surface secrets of her world.

The setting got into the way of the intense story before I'd read a third of the book. One of the big first images is of Chicago, the city of trains. Granted they run on schedules, seemingly frequently, but they exist in a vacuum as does most of the sophisticated technology used in the book. Granted teens can be clueless about the details of farming, factories, and utilities. Granted Roth provides a couple of scenes of food coming into the city, but nothing about the kind of people who grow it. 

Short supplies of food, including bananas (?), is one of the structural plot points. Where all the pieces of a technological society come from is presented as a given, sui generis.

Oh. There's another group -- the factionless who are condemned to live in poverty, almost on the edge of starvation -- who provide the grunt work of the city. They might provide the labor for the items above, but where do the materials come from? No political entities are mentioned outside of those centered in Chicago. Also, where do they get the technical skills to make them?

The demographics of providing school aged kids work against a realistic setting. When I realized that Chicago had a graduating class of sixteen-year-olds of implied double-digits, I got kicked out of the story. Granted some failed and became factionless from the git-go but the math still didn't make sense to me.

I couldn't shake the impression that Roth had a population of about a 100 trying to pass the initiation into their faction. I grew up in a town of about 8,000 and had a high school graduating class of 200+/-. As I said the math just didn't work close enough for me to accept the world as a self-sustaining social system, which as Roth described it, it is.

So, I ended up skimming Divergent to its contrived ending. I give it three stars. ***. The story had so much going for it at the beginning, but for me, the pieces just didn't fit together.

###

I'm making some progress!

I did get my ending on Crossings, a side story for There Be Demons, and it's off to my critique group. Then, fermentation, before I do paper revisions, looms.

Am sort of anxious to get back to posting my revisions to The Ghost in the Closet. With any luck, it'll be published before the end of April. Maybe before if I keep making progress like I did today. In the meantime, here's a preview of the cover.

Hope your writing -- or other pursuits -- are progressing as well or better.

Avoiding Cliches: Some Writing Crutches to Build Your Story Line

Cliches are the bane of a writer's existence. They things pop up in the words we use. They undermine the characters we build.  The darn things even undermine our story lines, because you structure your stories like so many other writers have done. So the question: how to avoid cliches. Here are a couple links that struck me as helpful.

What can be more cliche than a private eye? We can't all come up with a Harry Dresden, but we can give our private eye ... something different to investigate.  Reed Farrel Coleman blogged on Ten Reasons to Hire a Private Eye at the Writing PIs.  Once your main or secondary character is chin deep in the investigation, you can throw odd ball complications at her/him. It's the "odd ball" that gives your story its freshness.

Another way to avoid cliches is choosing a setting that is uniquely yours. We all have places we know better than most people.  We know the possibilities for danger that are unique to that place and its hidden beauties. When we weave them into our stories, we create a sense of freshness.  MaryLu Tyndall did a guest blog on Rachelle Gardner's blog that gives you some hints on different ways to weave a settings into your stories ... until the setting becomes a character in its own right. 

I would have had another set of good hints, but the blog had all sorts of dire warnings about lifting info from it that I decided not to link to it. Which maybe reminds us, we should think twice about what we put in our blogs. Basic question you should ask yourself: Do you mind complete strangers knowing about what you write?

And then, there are my snarly elves. I've gotten the revisions done for two-thirds of "For the Price of a Pig". At least, I think I tied up the loose ends. I even have the last third of the story outlined in my rough fashion.  -- Mainly writing down some suggestions actions that might take place. Of course, everything is subject to change. 

At least, I've worked the black tailed pig into the ending of the story. My daughter still won't like it because she thinks the pig should be magical. I think she spent too much time in Wales.

Now, I get to resolve the story line ... and introduce the love interest ... only I can't decide which guy it'll be.  --  That doesn't mean I'm done. It still has to be critiqued and rewritten, yet again.