The Easy and The Hard

Since my last post things have been up and down and all over the map. After the tragedy of losing Trey I spent many weeks not being myself at all. It wasn't until I thought maybe another dog in the house would help that I searched animal shelters and classifieds until I found this little guy.

Winston is a Wire-hair Fox Terrier and he has restored balance to my life.

So that was an up. Then just before Thanksgiving and while my husband was on a plane home from Germany, I got really sick...again. I'll compare it to earlier this year when I'd had to get my gallbladder removed except that I no longer had a gallbladder. So after pretending for a good 12 hours that I only had a bad flu bug, my husband finally gets home and I give him a hug and weepingly ask him to take to to the emergency room. After the nice nurses had given me a bed and some morphine, I sent my jetlagged husband home and waited for the results which I hoped had nothing to do with my missing gallbladder. The findings: my appendix needed to come out now!!

I know, I know. Two unrelated surgeries in one year. Both within a week of a major holiday. I'm a little concerned about what my body is planning for Christmas.

So that was the down. A few days later we hopped in the car as a family and drove to California to have Thanksgiving dinner with my Grandmother. It was a wonderful time to see family I hadn't seen for a long time, even if it was in a partially drug-induced haze. What a great upper.

While all this was happening, I was doing my best to continue with my writing. It's almost 2012, the year that R.A.G.E. will be released and I still feel like it's not even close to being ready. My editor suggested that my book wasn't beginning in the right place and that I should write a chapter about what happens before my current beginning. I thought this was funny at first because I'd deleted the first chapter over a year ago in order to start the novel in the middle of the action. What I learned was that people need a reason to care that the main character is being chased or shot at before you can do any of those things to them.

The trouble was, that chapter I'd deleted hadn't benefited from the massive amounts of writing knowledge I'd collected after it had been sent to be quietly buried in the file graveyard lovingly entitled "trashed writing". It was really no good. I had to start from scratch.

This was actually fun on many levels. I really got to examine my main characters as people would who were meeting them for the first time. I even surprised myself by writing in tiny snippets of backstory that had hitherto not existed, helping to round out characters I already thought were rounded.

And so the massive edits continue although I'm sneaking time when I can to work on the third and final book in my 12th Dimension series. My intention is to have all three books written before the first one comes out.

I'll leave you with this quote I borrowed from a friend. I want everyone to think of it every time you write a sentence, read a book, or even look at a book across the way in some big box store.


Easy reading is damn hard writing. --Nathaniel Hawthorne

And so it is.

What I Do About Loss

It's been a rough month or so. It all started when my little schnauzer, Trey, was following me up the stairs, you know like velcro dogs do. I turned around and gave him a quick scratch under the chin like he likes. That's when I noticed two little lumps on his neck. I felt them for a moment, muttering under my breath, "well that doesn't feel right," and then went about my day. The next day I called the vet and to make a long, painful story short, it was determined that Trey had lymphoma, a very aggressive form of cancer.

It went from oh-that-doesn't-feel-right, to three weeks later taking him for the last time to the Vet for a quiet push across the Rainbow Bridge.

As you can imagine, the grief of losing one of my best friends has taken its toll on everything else in my life. I found myself completely unable to do any writing. Sitting down at my computer would just remind me of the fuzzy foot rest I always had at my feet and the random pictures in my computer containing a face or tail or leg of Trey, always in the background, always part of the family.

So I threw myself into some art projects. My sister-in-law, Brittany, replaced all of the old, wooden windows in her house a few months ago. While visiting her one day, I saw that she'd taken some of the old windows and hung them on her walls. They looked awesome and rustic and I asked if she had any more. Yup.

So I took these...


and turned them into these...








I still have one more window to fill and currently have a watercolor in the works starring my youngest son as a toddler staring out the window with his gray, fuzzy friend, Mr. Trey-Trey.

The thing is, a few days ago I was finally able to open my laptop and continue the mountains of work I'd been neglecting. I guess time does heal wounds, or at least numbs them enough to help us continue on. And cathartic art projects help too.

I have Trey's collar hanging above my desk and I'm still prone to weeping if I sit and think too long about his soft ears or his waggling tail (there may or may not be tears wetting my keyboard right now), but at least I'm able to get back to work and do things like signing my three book contract *damp grin* and editing, editing editing.



P.S. Since things have been generally sucky, I did finally manage to get the free book MONARCH out to the respective winner but I did it without any fanfare (I haven't been in the mood for fanfare). In fact I simply drew the name out of a hat (a black fedora I borrowed from my long-haired preteen), contacted the winner and sent it to them in the mail. Sorry, folks, the contest is over. There was a lucky winner who is now happily caressing their not so new, well-loved copy. :)

MONARCH by Michelle Argyle--book review

I met Michelle at a baby shower for a mutual friend a few months ago and instantly hit it off. She writes thrillers, I write thrillers. She’s very savvy in regards to the publishing industry and is fantastic at marketing her work. In a word, Michelle is brilliant. And did I mention that she designed her cover? Oh yeah, baby!

So naturally, when I had the opportunity to read and review her debut novel MONARCH, I was super excited.

Synopsis:
Nick’s life as a VIA spy should be fulfilling, but it has only given him unhappiness—a wife who committed suicide and two daughters who resent everything he has become. Now, stuck in the Amazon on the last mission of his career, he must track down Matheus Ferreira, a drug lord and terrorist the U.S. has tried to bring down for years. If he succeeds, he’ll have the chance to start his life over again.

Just when Nick is on the brink of catching Ferreira, he’s framed for a murder that turns his world upside down. His only chance of survival lies in West Virginia where Lillian Love, a woman from his past, owns the secluded Monarch Inn. He’s safe, but not for long . . .

Monarch is a fast, interesting read. The characters are complex, the plotline compelling and the monarch butterfly symbolism created a great thread to tie everything together.

I’ll admit though that I had trouble getting into this novel. As you know, I write thrillers. I love thrillers and everything about them so when I picked up Monarch expecting the super-duper speed and action of a thriller I’m afraid I was disappointed. I couldn’t pin it down for the longest time. Why couldn’t I get into this book like I had so many thrillers before? Well it took a long time to pin it down but I finally figured it out while listening to an episode of Writing Excuses by the phenomenal Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells and friends about making promises to your readers.

Authors make a promise to a reader by the book blurb, the opening chapter, the title, the cover and multiple things in between the covers that the writer must deliver on or risk disappointing their readers. However the very first promise we make is through our book genre.

Monarch is marketed as a thriller and technically has all the earmarks of a thriller. CIA Agent, guns, life threatening situations, dead bodies. However, the real genre of the novel doesn’t technically exist.

This is a book about relationships, thus when it didn't thrill me like a thriller...well there was my problem. Anyone know the genre name for relationship books? I don't. Don’t say romance because it’s not the same, and there’s way too much angst and fighting in this book to be considered Chiclit.

So we have guy meets girl, girl meets guy. Guy likes girl, girl likes guy. Guy betrays girl, girl betrays guy, like, hate, will we, won’t we, etc. etc. This is what the book is about. The balance of thriller vs. relationship leans way too much on the relationship side for this to be considered a thriller. I understand the need to be able to place it somewhere on a shelf, but will someone please create a relationship genre for these books so they don’t get overlooked or lost in the wrong-ish genre category?

I don’t say any of this in anyway to trash on MONARCH. I love Michelle and appreciate all the work she’s put into making this novel the best it can be . . . Michelle Argyle style. As a relationship book it works very well and does have its share of thrilling moments. However if you’re looking for a thriller and are expecting one, you will be disappointed as a whole. Read it for what it is, rather than what it’s marketed as and I think you will find it quite enjoyable.

I have an advanced reading copy available to one lucky commenter. Yes, it’s the same one I read so it might have some telltale signs of wear since I love to cuddle my books to death . . . erm, so with that little disclaimer, comment anyway, yo.

Reading Your Work Outloud

It's no secret that authors get close to their work. Really close. Dangerously close. So close in fact that criticism can hurt as badly as if someone were criticizing your child or threatening to do them harm.

Don't get me wrong, it's good to love your work. You are your manuscript's best advocate and if you don't love it there is simply no hope that anyone else will either. The problems come when you get so close to your work that your refuse, or are physically unable, to see the faults that are staring you every time you go through it.

Let's face it. You know every word, sentence and paragraph you've written and you know exactly why you wrote it and the importance it is to the manuscript. So why would you even consider taking it out? "Killing your darlings," as they say.

I recently discovered just how close I was to R.A.G.E. and just how hard it was for me to kill anything.

I work on my novel a lot. I consider writing a job in fact and put the necessary amount of time into it. So it came as no surprise the other day when my almost 12 y/o son came to me and wondered when he would be able to read this work I never seem to step away from.

Now R.A.G.E. is an adult book but it does have some cool aspects that a 12 y/o would like such as power over electricity and lots of guns and grenades and such. I'm also in the middle of a heavy edit and I thought, "Hey why not read it out loud to him?" I could bleep out a few choice words while I was reading and it would be fun. This way I could catch all those things your eyes pass right over when you're reading in your head as well as spending some quality time with my son and my manuscript.

I've read my book out loud to myself before so I was unprepared for the way I would view my own manuscript while reading aloud to SOMEONE ELSE who has no idea what the story is about.

And you know what I found? Way too much exposition.

I kept wanting the story to move along. Get to the dialogue. Get to the next relevant item. I began yelling at my main character to stop thinking about stuff so much and just get on with it already!

I couldn't believe the change in my perception of my work. It was though I was viewing it from my son's eyes. And then it hit me. I could actually distance myself from my work. It would take my son's help but I could do it. Today I went back through the chapter I read him last night and edited out a lot of the extraneous exposition.

It's amazing what a new perspective can give your work. How do you distance yourself from your manuscript?

The Importance of Invisible Writing

So you’ve just finished your novel. No, not just any novel, the Great American Novel. No, your magnum opus! This novel has been designed to make people perk up and listen. You had a theme and you stuck to it and now everyone will be talking about it. The word will go out and awareness will be raised for those trees in the Amazon rain forest, those civil rights issues in the south, the sea turtles off the Eastern seaboard facing extinction, the sexism across the country.

Well, I hate to tell you this but if you’ve just finished writing a novel under this mindset, you have a problem. Notice I said novel, not nonfiction. The trouble is people read novels to be entertained. They want to be taken away with a cast of characters. They want to see what they see and feel what they feel. They want to be brought into the emotions of another person and learn their story and savor the conclusion. No one wants to be preached to. That’s what textbooks are for.

We’ve heard it time and time again: The story must be king.

When anything in your novel bounces the reader out of the story and takes them away from the vividness of those characters and settings, I’m afraid to tell you that your writing is showing through. You worked hard on those words but in actuality, no one wants to see them. They just want to be told a story.

Now unfortunately this doesn’t just apply to those larger themes mentioned above. This applies on a much smaller scale. You may have that novel where nothing is more important that the conflict and the characters. And yet your readers are constantly being pulled out of the story for some reason or another and forced to examine the actual words you’ve put on the page.

I’m talking of course about the technicalities of writing. I recently read two books back to back. One, an absolutely fantastic work where the only thing that took me out of the book was the use of OK vs. okay (okay, I admit, I really like “okay” better. OK looks like it’s being yelled). On the other hand, the other book was so full of passive writing, telling vs. showing, adverbs and other bothersome things you may think are not so important, that there were times where I would go for pages only seeing the words and never being drawn into the story at all. I spent more time mentally editing sentences than I did actually reading the stupid thing.

I’m sure someone is yelling at me at this point that not all readers see or even know about these silly writing rules. I agree. Most readers don’t know about them. They simply read the book with a vague sense of annoyance. They’re never drawn fully into the story and they probably don’t even know why.

Writing rules are in place for a reason. They allow us to smooth down those sharp edges into a silky piece of work. People will read it and walk away talking about your characters as though they are real people. They’ll make fan pages for the fantasy world you’ve created and sport t-shirts with your brilliant magic system brought to life.

The only people who appreciate purple prose are the ones who write it. You will never be able to sell the importance of your theme to a group of people if they can’t get into your novel. People will never get to know your characters unless you can make them seem like something other than words on a page.

So here’s the kicker. You know your characters better than anyone. You can go to any page of your Work in Progress and see their faces and feel their emotions and see their thoughts. To you they are real because you created them. You saw them before they were those words on the page. So how do you know if you’ve actually made your writing invisible?

1. Alpha readers. Beta readers. Writing groups. Editors. I can’t stress enough how you need an outside opinion on your work. Someone honest who won’t tell you what you want to hear. Allow them to tell you when they can’t stay connected to parts of the story. Or when that word keeps jumping out at them. Or when they’ve had to read the same sentence five times to discern the meaning.

2. Learn those all-important rules. Active vs. passive writing. Limited adverbs. Varying word choice, point of view, etc, etc, etc. Don’t just learn them, embrace them. Make them become as natural as typing. The rules are in place for a reason. They are formulaic devices honed over the years by people much more brilliant than ourselves to pull the story forward and make the words sink quietly into the background.

3. You know if you’ve themed your writing. It’s good to have a theme. It’s better to have a story where readers feel for the characters plight and worry about said characters surviving in that doomed rain forest in the Amazon.

Make the story the King.

So let’s be honest here. Is your writing invisible?

Payoffs

I was talking to a fellow writer the other day who is struggling a bit with her first draft. She’s an amazing writer but sometimes has a hard time putting down that crappy first draft because she’s a self-proclaimed perfectionist. No matter how many people say, “Just write it. It’s a first draft, it’s supposed to suck!” she just hates leaving behind any ugly sentence structures, even the slightest bland-ish character, or stilted dialogue and therefore doesn’t always feel excited about getting back to the work.

We came to the conclusion that what she needed was a payoff. And not just any payoff—a daily, paragraph to paragraph, sentence to sentence payoff.

So what’s a payoff? Something that excites us about the sometimes not-so-beautiful work-in-progress that brings us back to it day after day, month after month until it can be completed and therefore edited to perfection.

I hadn’t actually thought about it until this conversation and I realized that I have a payoff in place for myself. Sometimes I’ll find myself writing some beautiful prose that I wouldn’t mind reading again and marveling at my brilliance, but most often it’s simply the dialogue.

I love dialogue with all my heart. I like writing conversations and arguments. I love the act of communication and how it can drive a scene either by characters learning more about each other or miscommunication that leads to blows (I like the blows a lot. Ask anyone.). I like speaking dialogue I’m considering for a scene to myself in the mirror while I get ready in the morning (don’t judge, you do it too...erm, maybe) and therefore even in my first drafts, my dialogue tends to shine. Everything else is an atrocious lump but, hey, I have fancy dialogue.

That’s my payoff. I don’t move onto another scene if I feel that the dialogue is even a little off. So the next day, after letting my mind be filled with other (more important) things, I’m still excited to come back and see what my characters said to each other, and what they might say next.

What’s your payoff to keep you writing?

I'm guest posting at another blog today!!

As the title states, I'm doing my very first ever guest post on another blog today. This is super cool on many levels, the first of which is I adore the author of this blog (Michelle Argyle). I have even been privileged to obtain an advanced reading copy of her novel MONARCH and will be reviewing it right here in October.

My guest post is pretty much the same post as this one I did last week but I added one more tip concerning the "Starting Syndrome".

Go check it out when you get the chance and spend some time browsing Michelle's blog as well. You won't be sorry.

The Innocent Flower