Which Character Do You Like Best?

 Fiction Lesson:

As much as I hate admitting not buying the last couple books in the Otherworld series about the adventures of the D'Artigo sisters,   I bought Yasmine Galenorn's Blood Wyne.   I just realized that the other books didn't feature Menolly D'Artigo.  That's the vampire sister.  Now, I'm wondering why that character motivated me to buy a book and the others didn't.  It wasn't because Menolly is the shortest of the sisters.  Being a vampire, she shouldn't engage my interest since I usually don't care for much for vampires.

So, why?  Galenorn's action is in top form as the sisters fight to save Seattle from murderous ghosts ... and a more murderous vampire with an original twist.  She solves a couple of the sisters' problems.  But, she also complicates Menolly's life with two new hassles:  one a dangerous love interest and the other a new terribly dangerous possible nemesis who she owes a debt to.  [Fae are interesting in that way.]  The only reason I can come up with to answer the question "why" is that I perceive Menolly has "trying harder" to pull her weight in the team.  

Guess I think of vampires as being handicapped by any thin stray pieces of wood flying around.  Plus, she's out of commission while the sun shines.  The other two sisters just get sleep deprived.  What makes you latch onto a character in an ongoing series?

Useful Promotion Info and Other Stuff:

This week's gem comes from Justine Musk of the Tribal Writer.  Basically, she takes on the question of should you blog or not and says it depends on what you want out of it.

She also gave a useful link for gathering an email list for my Half-Elven promotions MailChimp.  A link I am suitably grateful for.  You can learn more about my thoughts on the Half-Elven blog.

Am really looking forward to this year's Northern Colorado Writers conference.  I'll be pitching a Color-a-Comic pre-primer a friend and I did years ago.  We sold a few hundred even though we knew zip about marketing.  Maybe that's one of the reasons I feature how-to-promote  info so much?

Progress on My Writing Journey:

Producing words as been as painful as pulling teeth around here.  The silly idea that I could draft a new novel and revise a previous draft got knocked out of my head.  

Why did I think I could?  After all, there're tons of blogs out there of people who write 1,000 to 5,000 words a day.  Why couldn't I plog along at my usual 500 words and revise too?  ...  Tried it.  I can't.  Have given myself permission to only revise ... and jot down weird wisps of ideas as they drift through my brain on the other WIPs.  [Yeah, there's more than one.]

When I look at what needs to be done with Emma Kloken, Reluctant Hero, it's obvious much of the revision will be like drafting a new novel.  I took a class from Trai Cartwright at Craftwrite and learned a lot about scene setting and flow.   Now I done got ta do the work to make it happen in my manuscript.

Do you design your goals too big to chew?  I find I work best with flexible goals, broken down into small bites.  The pesky things are easier to cross off that way.

I should mention my Far Isle Half-Elven blog.   Yeah, I blog twice a week.  One here [on Thursdays] about general writing stuff.  The other concentrates on building building my writer's platform ... which I do kicking and screaming and not very effectively on Mondays.  --  Last Monday, I wrote about submitting my website -- The Far Isle Half-Elven -- to 1st Turning Point for a critique.

Trivia:

I hate it when I make a comment, proof-read it a couple times, publish it ...

then, discover a typo ... or two.     

Pacing and Conflict and Reasons

The Read:  Okay.  I think everyone can learn writing tips from Lee Child's newest novel:  Gone Tomorrow.  I mentioned I started to squirm at his NYC subway doors opening and closing as he traveled uptown, then realized how Child was wrapping the tension tight as Reacher kept comparing the Israeli suicide bomber profile with one on the passengers, an older woman.

Well, by about a third of the way into the book, the cliche has been turned on its head.  The woman worked for the pentagon and committed suicide with a gun within reach of Reacher.  After the NYC police investigate, Reacher had made contact with the the suicide's brother, a New Jersey cop, and learned her son was missing and may or may not be in danger.  Reacher is contacted by some goons who are working for a "principle" who wants to know if the suicide gave Reacher anything and dropped two names.  Some federal investigative goons, warned Reacher to forget what he saw.  He learns the suicide was delayed on the Interstate traveling from DC to NYC.  Reacher decides to investigate the names to discover one of them (a retired officer running for Congress) has some secret tucked into his military past.  So, Reacher goes to DC where the same federal goons tell him he's too old to mess with them and to go away.  --  I've enjoyed books that have less action in 300 pages than the 150 I just mention.  Best, Child is just starting to roll.

Then, there's the pacing.  I was just getting to noticing Child was using enormous amounts of dialogue with very little setting [which I assumed I was filling in by my own NYC experiences].  This at about 11 PM.  When I next looked at the clock, it was midnight.  Whatever, magic Child was weaving sucked me down the dark hole into his world.

Progress:   On my own stuff, none.  Hopefully, I learned something at the Northern Colorado's Writer's conference that will perculate through my fingers.

Trivia:  Don't ask my why, but the old man and I were discussing Madame Bovary.  I hated the book when I read it in high school.  I had figured out the many (most ?) adults were stupid long ago, but Madame Bovary was the most inane and stupid someone I ever wasted time on.  To read and to write.  By that time, I was a "published" author and had two "novels" under my belt [unpublished].  I knew how long it took to write a book ... by hand and by the typewriter I had somehow managed to pick up.

What no one told me at the time -- the problems caused by frivolous goals where the whole point of the book.  Maybe I can still dislike the book because it takes so long for her world to blow up in her face?

Nuggets of Wisdom

No read today -- though I started reading Lee Child's new mass paperback, Gone Tomorrow.   At first, glance you think the opening description is lo-o-o-o-ng, but before I was ready to skip pages, I could feel the tension building -- all with the subway doors opening and closing with Reacher contemplating the Israeli terrorist screening list.

How fast was slow?  I thought I just barely scraped the beginning.  When I went back and looked, I was almost at page 100.  This even though I still had a headache from the bright lights at the NCW conference last night.

The Northern Colorado Writer's Conference

The following occurred in no particular order, so be warned I'm being my normal incoherent self.

First, I want to praise Kerri Flanagan, the director of the Northern Colorado Writers.  She's been doing the conference for five years, and each year some new useful new tool appears.  This year's gem was a spiral bound notebook with presenter info, session handouts, and lined pages to write on scattered through out -- all in alphabetical order.

Veteran conference goers said repeatedly that this was one of the best they've attended.  Summary opinion.  It's small enough to talk to a good share of the writers, and the presenters were all stellar.  I agree, but it's nice to know others agree with me.

Being me, I might quibble about the food -- but Kerrie didn't cook it.  (The Hilton people did.)   I'm lucky to live where I do -- even if I was ready to move from the place two days in coming here -- back in 1966.

Granted I couldn't go to all the sessions that looked useful,

but here are some nuggets of wisdom

from my notes.

Stephen Cannell (A-Team, The Rockford Files, and the Shane Scully mystery series) just happened to be doing a promotional tour through Colorado, and Kerrie snagged him for our keynote speaker.  I just listened without taking many notes.  Most important thing he said, in my opinion:  Don't take yourself too seriously. .

Mike Befeler, a mystery writer of "geezer-lit" (Paul Jacobson, "It's Murder ..." mysteries) won a medal of bravery for competing with the session:  Agents Read the Slush Pile.  His comment about mysteries -- that the murder has to occur in the first 20 pages -- applies to all books, I think.  Only one might say: something significant that changes your main character's world.

If you're feeling down, you might consider John Calderazzo (a multi-published writer who teaches at Colorado State University) words:  Writers seek the wonders of the world.  I think this is true regardless of genre.

Then, there's Trai Cartwright, a former screenwriter trying to convert to novels, who always blows my mind away.   Some of the things she said:

Focus on the hero (MC) and what s/he wants.

Something must happen in each scene to move the story.  

(characters facing conflict, a partial solution, and a reversal that makes things worse.)

Then, a whole quote from Trai:  "You know what your strengths are.  If you love writing dialogue but scene description isn't your forte, don't sweat it.  Write the scene to your strengths, knowing that after you get out the initial burst of inspiration, you'll go back and work on the other components in another pass."  This applies to scenes in screenwriting and chapters in novels.

Page Lambert, a mostly literary writer from the examples she read during her session on "Creating a Sense of Place",  gave the all important advise that writer's should use all the senses in creating descriptions.  More important, I thought she gave a neat device to eliminate back story:  Use an artifact to bring memory into the scene you're writing.  I think that'd also apply to something in the surrounding.  [A tip:  This is very similar to including action as your dialog tags.]

Todd Mitchell, a YA author (The Traitor King) and CSU professor, gave lots of many pointers:

Be sure your dialog is feasible.  Read aloud.

Subtext of dialog gives more info about characters than what's said.

You need to know what each character wants to have happen in each scene.

Joe Monti, of the Barry Goldblatt Agency, talked about why there are few books written for boys.  The circular reationship:  publishers don't think boys over 11 read, so they published few books for YA boys other than spy stuff, so boys don't read.  Who says marketing people know everything.

Monti did make one thing clear:  Your book cover is the most critical thing for your book's success.  So, if your cover sucks, make this the turf where you insist on something better, even if it's your first sale.

Those were the sessions I attended.  All were worth while -- even if I had to spend money to attend.   

My most fun moment at the conference:    

  

Got into line for food and discovered Rachelle Gardner, agent extraordinaire, in front of me.  I just had to mention the picture of the pristine desk she put on her blog.  She admitted the picture didn't show the over-stuffed bookcases in her office.

Age Appropriate or Unskillful Use of Language?

The Read:  When the family book trading box arrived, I was pleased to see a book by Diana Wynne Jones -- Witch's Business.  Her Chrestomanci series, Dalemark Quartet, and Howel's Moving Castle sit solidly on my top reads list.  [ I don't really call them favorites because the list is so long. ]  So, I looked forward to the book even though it was obviously a middle grade.

The fantasy is firmly grounded in reality.  In this case, what happens when you try to replace your allowance when it's impounded because you broke a chair.  The brother and sister set up a business but run afoul of the local witch who is in the same business.  The more the kids try to solve their problems, without alerting the adults, the deeper their problem grows.

Witch's Business had charm, humor, and a nice puss-and-boots twist, but I had problems with the simplicity of the plot.  Perhaps this is because it's aimed at 8-10 year olds, depending on their reading level.  The book was written in a simpler time (1973) and, maybe, for Wynne Jones' British audience, granted ... but for me, it just didn't ring true.  I can remember myself and my friends vividly in the 4th and 5th grades.  None of us were so naive as the "good guys".  Not even the densest of us.  ( I don't want to call him stupid, because he wasn't really.  Just dense.)

The "cussing" on the part of the bully bothered me the most.  While he used interesting non-cuss words which created vivid disgusting images like rat slime, slimy puke, and degutted brains-in-gravy, his swearing lacked rhythm.  There's an art to swearing that my friends had mastered even at that young age. 

Is it a good thing I write for young adults -- though I understand you have to be careful of your cussing for them too?

Web Notes:  True or false?  Are some writing truisms myths?  Kevin Hearne wrote a blog exploding three truisms common in publishing circles, especially among writers.  Hearne did a survey of  246 published SF and Fantasy writers and wrote about the results.  --  In his Writer's Grove blog --  http://kevinhearne.blogspot.com/2010/03/three-writing-myths-busted.html 

I took comfort from this result:

116 out of the 246 hadn't sold anything before they sold their first book to major publishers.

Progress:  None, in the usual sense that I wrote something.  I've spent the last two day exhausting my brain at the Northern Colorado Writers conference.  Learned lots of good stuff.  I'll try to post a sample of them tomorrow.

(I'm way behind on my time log for Maren, Lost and Found.  Did get a title to pop out of my brain.)

Trivia:  Had lots of fun at the conference even if my pitch sank. 

PS:  I'm sorry I can't get links to work on this thing, software, whatever.