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.

###

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?

Who Wants Some Free Book Promo?

Coming Soon.

Another Thursday, but no new guest blogs. Guess no one's interested in free book promo. Granted this isn't the most powerful writing blog on the web,but my posts have been getting over 100 page views lately. This is much better than last year when the number was closer to 50.

If you'd like to do a short guest blog with links to one of your fiction pieces or author page, send for my guidelines at mkkaytheod-at-yahoo-com. Two caveats: in English, please, and no erotica. 

Curious Fact:

I have more Ukrainian readers than Russian ones, but the French outnumber both. I'm guessing that fact has something to do with my selling more books in foreign currencies. 

Another Marketing Fact:

Want to increase your royalty percentage on your print books? You might check out Lulu. They give back more than CreateSpace and distribute to more venues.

I only do epubs since I've been self-publishing short stories and novelettes to build a "plateform" in case I ever get a print book. 

Setting an Income Target:

Have you ever wondered how much a successful author makes ... and how? Laura Purdie's brave enough to have her income exposed on the SCBWI blog. Care to count the ways she pieces together her income?

# 

Decided to give you another look at my The Ghost in the Closet cover. The more I look at it, the more I like it, even if my story's about old ladies. Think I'll get the piece out to my beta readers tonight.

Anyone care to comment on the cover?

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.

Long Books: Are They Easier to Write than to Read?

Oh, yes, I can read long books, fantasy or otherwise. Case in point, Spirit Walk by Richie Tankersley Cusick. Okay, if you want to nit pick, it's two books in one volume, but I started reading it as I got bored with Great North Road. And--I don't think I finished it because it was 200 pages shorter, either.

Spirit Walk is solid Young Adult fantasy where the protagonist moves to a new town just as she's developing the talent to see and hear ghosts. 

Miranda Barnes gets relocated when a hurricane destroys her old life, and when she's moved to her mother's home town, she learns that her grandfather is the town's lunatic eccentric. Turns out his "strange spells" come when he contacts the spirit world, but he dies before he can teach and guide Miranda to control her developing abilities. Fortunately, she finds a group of friends who are more than willing to help her cope, including the local "bad boy" who provides the love interest.

Sounds like a cliche, but it's a cliche like romance books are a cliche. It's all in the writer's imagination and ability to develop a plot line. In this case, Cusick demonstrates good craft skills plus plausible depictions and explanations for the phenomena she works with. Miranda is a good kid trying to find her feet in a new world and, thanks to Cusick, does it in a logical way with only a few normal freakouts. Her sidekicks are all well differentiated and, while they are familiar types including a southern belle, have kinks that move them away from the norm. 

The ghosts? They're the best of all. They come across as characters with real problems rather than flitting balls of light.

As for being long, there are two major things that can go wrong with a story line. One you go into so much detail that you lose your reader's interest. [Like the Great North Road did for me. Though George R. R. Martin does it for me too.]

Another reason is all the writers, who are still learning their craft as their storyline meanders in and out of plot twists and extraneous scenes, who give up. If the beginning writer's lucky, they keep writing until they learn how to construct a novel. If they are luckier, they'll go back and discover a mouldering draft containing inspiration for a number of different novels.

One example of this is a recent blog by Margo Berendson about a unicorn novel she wrote when she first started writing. ... I was an early critiquer of the unfinished novel, way back, but the plot line always has stuck in the back of my mind. I'm glad she's recycling the material now that she's gained a better mastery of her skills. Check out her experience on rekindling her writing dream.

I'm doing much the same thing with some short stories I wrote way back when. Discovered that some of them could be rewritten to fit into my Andor world [There Be Demons and Noticing Jamilla]. I'm now in the process, while I wait for The Grumpy Dragon to do its thing, of converting the short stories into planks in my platform.

Have you made any other use of your trunk novels, besides making a home for dust bunnies?

Oh, Spirit Walk. I give it a five star rating because it kept me reading past my bedtime.