Well it’s been two weeks since Mischievous was released from his kidnappers and he still isn’t willing to talk about it.  So my exclusive interview is still on hold.  He is seeing a psychologist to help him with his post traumatic stress syndrome.  For now we’ll give him some space and as much support as possible.  The Swamp is finally recovered from the annual George Romero Birthday Bash and things are getting back to what passes for normal.  C. Rock Adile is as obnoxious as ever and Swamp Thing is her usual grumpy self.  The muses have been busy lately with Wicked getting her second book Shadows Soul to the publisher.  Snarky the Whipmistress herself sent out Bloodstorm AKA Bite This.  And myself getting 50 pages out to Mallory Durik, one very intelligent and insightful agent for a look-see at The Three Misfiteers.  Did I mention Mallory’s also beautiful and charming.  My point here (besides sucking up) is the muses are staying out trouble.

With so many great works of American literature hitting the mail both E and Snail, the word editing is very much on the groups lips these days.  It seems we all love writing, but editing is the bastard step child we must tolerate.  I heard or read somewhere, “No one likes to write but we love to have written.”  I’ll look that up before we’re finished here for the attribution.  I love writing the first draft of a story.  The characters are coming to life for the first time, ideas crash into each other like hockey players, and plot devices fall from the sky.  I’m not worried about what hand reached for the spoon of what ever.  I’m getting down the broad strokes watching the story evolve.  It’s a rush watching the plot take shape as my characters make decisions I too afraid to make.

Editing and revising on the other hand is when you get to use those grammar rules you learned in school (or in my case didn’t learn).  It’s also the time you get see your character putting on their coat twice without ever having taken it off.  In short you get to make your story into something readable.  Almost every writer I’ve ever met or read praises their editors.  There is good reason for that.  Because with their help the story you loved when your fingers where flying over the keys during that first draft becomes readable.   So thank you  to the editors in the world who help writers to bring their stories to light.  Without you we are stories without readers.

I’m going to leave it there with this quote from the master Stephen King who said, “To write is human, to edit divine.”

Write On,

Eerie

 I LOVED IT!  So much so, now I’m a regular visitor to Mr. Hines’s blog.  I have great respect for Mr. Hines and his posts.  Besides the bravery factor in that post alone, he deserves a medal.  Seriously, I don’t even think with years of yoga I could pull off some of those poses!  He’s shared information you generally have to shed blood for, like how much can a writer realistically expect to make doing what they love, and how Amazon’s pricing impacts the self pubbed writer. 

Since I’m currently considering the art for my second urban fantasy, Shadow’s Soul, Mr. Hines’s observations mirror a lot of mine.  Take the cover for Shadow’s Edge. I submitted it a cover art review blog where peeps are welcome to leave their honest feedback. At the time of this post, I’ve only gotten three comments (so feel free to add your own).  As a writer, I did this not so I could hear the gushiness of “I just love it”  but because I knew I could trust this site to give me serious reactions on the cover.  Now the comments on color for typefacing, I can understand and I’m changing for Shadow’s Soul.  I’m thinking along the lines of reds, oranges and blues as a starting point this time around.  Maybe lighten the overall image.  The third comment discussed Raine’s clothing or lack thereof, and really, I get it.  I’m not so sure I’d want to fight someone with that much bare skin, but like many writers, I’m learning as I go. 

Then there’s the issue of cover models.  For Shadow’s Soul, I’m really hoping to do a male and a female on the cover. Here’s the challenge I’m running into with that concept.  I need a man with a shirt.  I have nothing against six or eight packs, I have a pulse and can appreciate some seriously drool worthy examples of testosterone.  However, since I do have male readers, I’m trying to keep in mind that when they’re out reading in public they may not want to flash all that male flesh.  Granted, if it was female they might be okay, but still…

It’s hard to find that thin line between urban fantasy and romance, especially when your story has romantic elements.  I’m lucky enough to work with a great cover artist, so here’s hoping we can figure out a really, wickedly cool solution!

Wicked

I wonder now if my friend got the irony of it all.

Half way through the drink my head was hot and I couldn’t seem to stop myself from laughing at the tiniest thing. I wasn’t drunk – I knew that from seeing what other people looked like when they were drunk – but I was… loopy, and I’m pretty sure the grande nacho platter I ordered was a result of the alcohol. The fact that I downed ¾ of the plate designed to serve 3-4 people (my friend, by the way, counts as .5, but he ate more than his fill too) is a testament to how ‘silly’ I was.

When I finished my drink, which I took down very slowly, I noticed some guy get served this tall, tall glass of beer, and I asked my friend “how can that guy take all that liquor?”

“It’s because its beer, Kyle. That much beer probably has a fraction of the alcohol in what you just drank.”

And look! I learned something new. Could I make this into a story? Sure I could! Just add a few twists, a few turns, a few perils, a villain or three, and bam, you’ve got a story. The point is, when I write, if I need to, I can draw from this very experience and add all sorts of flavor, detail, and realism to my story.

So now that Shadow’s Soul is off my desk and on my editor’s, I thought I was good to go for book 3.  Until I realized I’m not finished with Shadow’s Soul just yet.  Nope, now I need a tag line, a synopsis, and a cover.  Great.  I’m so thrilled (and yes, that is sarcasm in my voice!).

Although the opening scene of book 3 is floating around in my head along with Eerie’s voice screeching “Just write it, damn it!” while Snarky’s whip is whispering along my prickling skin, I can’t do it.  Not yet.  Not until the tag line and synopsis is done.

I enjoy writing, because let’s face it, if I didn’t, I’d have to be a masochist to put my self through all this crap for some words on paper. Yet I have to say that trying to pare down 387 pages into two catchy paragraphs is like trying to get my hellhound into the backseat of my car for a vet’s visit.  It’s not pleasant and suddenly there seems to be a long list of things I just HAVE TO DO RIGHT NOW.  It stinks but it’s something that has to be done.

Plus I’ve found that my working line of logic to tie up the project known as Shadow’s Soul is somewhere along the lines of:  DO SYNOPSIS, CREATE TAG LINE, and then, go forth and try to piece together your cover so it matches what the book’s really about.  I have started but I just keep stalling out.

As soon as this post is done, I think I’ve run out of THINGS I MUST DO RIGHT NOW and will be forced to finish my dreaded synopsis and tag, then submit it to the other Evil 7 for dissemination.

Procrastination is now heading for the door and wiggling bony fingers in a very snerky way leaving me chained to my desk with a keyboard super glued to my fingers and a mental countdown clock is slowly driving me mad.

I will get this done, really…

Oh look, a text message from my BFF… movie at 5 tonight?  I think I can work that in…

            “What’s the occasion?” I asked.

            “Don’t you know what today is?” She practically buzzed with enthusiasm.

            It took me a moment. “Oh yeah, it’s Valentine’s day.”

            “No silly,” she shook her head, “it’s single’s awareness day!”

            F#@&*@&$

            “Oh, so it is…”

            “And you know what the acronym for single’s awareness day is? S.A.D.”

            And that was my day for the rest of the day.

            Sorry dedicated readers, no lesson on writing today, just jolly old throat strangling, heart crushing, stomach pitting… joy! Joy all day. Joy all flippin day long.

Have a great week!

May the Force be with you,

Jedi

Hang over sleep

I’m speaking softly because some of us are still suffering from the aftermath of the party.  Thanks to everyone who sent messages of support for Mischievous.  He in particular is still not flying straight. He claims his bird-napping traumatized him.  I might have to send him for psychotherapy.  We’ll interview Mischievous next week, at that time we’ll get an exclusive on the details of his abduction and imprisonment.  Now onto to this weeks topic.

I’ve only just completed polishing the first fifty pages of my novel.  Thanks to the vertically challenged Evil Ones, I had much to consider.  Editing is like spring cleaning, no one wants to do it, but everyone feels better after they’ve put it behind them.  Elmore Leonard has ten rules for writing which can easily be applied to editing.  So I’m going to post them here because some things bear repeating.

WRITERS ON WRITING; Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle
By ELMORE LEONARD

Published: July 16, 2001 in the NEW YORK TIMES

These are rules I’ve picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I’m writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what’s taking place in the story. If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules. Still, you might look them over.

1. Never open a book with weather.

If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a character’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

2. Avoid prologues.

They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in nonfiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want.

There is a prologue in John Steinbeck’s ”Sweet Thursday,” but it’s O.K. because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: ”I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. . . . figure out what the guy’s thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that. . . . Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.”

3. Never use a verb other than ”said” to carry dialogue.

The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with ”she asseverated,” and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb ”said” . . .

. . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances ”full of rape and adverbs.”

5. Keep your exclamation points under control.

You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

6. Never use the words ”suddenly” or ”all hell broke loose.”

This rule doesn’t require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use ”suddenly” tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.

Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won’t be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavor of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories ”Close Range.”

8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.

Which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway’s ”Hills Like White Elephants” what do the ”American and the girl with him” look like? ”She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.” That’s the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight.

9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.

Unless you’re Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison. But even if you’re good at it, you don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

And finally:

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. It’s my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing. (Joseph Conrad said something about words getting in the way of what you want to say.)

If I write in scenes and always from the point of view of a particular character — the one whose view best brings the scene to life — I’m able to concentrate on the voices of the characters telling you who they are and how they feel about what they see and what’s going on, and I’m nowhere in sight.

What Steinbeck did in ”Sweet Thursday” was title his chapters as an indication, though obscure, of what they cover. ”Whom the Gods Love They Drive Nuts” is one, ”Lousy Wednesday” another. The third chapter is titled ”Hooptedoodle 1” and the 38th chapter ”Hooptedoodle 2” as warnings to the reader, as if Steinbeck is saying: ”Here’s where you’ll see me taking flights of fancy with my writing, and it won’t get in the way of the story. Skip them if you want.”

”Sweet Thursday” came out in 1954, when I was just beginning to be published, and I’ve never forgotten that prologue.

Did I read the hooptedoodle chapters? Every word.

My personal favorite, # 10, “If proper usage gets in the way it may have to go.”  Mr. Leonard’s new book Back On The Case is in a store near you.  Be sure to check it out.

So now, I don’t feel worthy.  I may have to go through my novel again looking for those pesky adverbs, they’re like rabbits I tell you they multiply when you’re not looking.  Also searching for any all modifiers.  A writers work is never done.

I’ll see you all next week.  Until then I’ll leave you with this.

“Psychopaths… people who know the differences between right and wrong, but don’t give a shit. That’s what most of my characters are like.”
― Elmore Leonard

Write On,

Eerie

Unfortunately, this week my post is short and sweet.  Thanks to having to travel for the job that pays the bills, I was marrooned in an aluminum container many, many hundreds of feet above ground for a couple of hours where viruses of all sorts and sizes were allowed topercolate.  Now I am the proud owner of a sinus infection.  So other than trying to get the Prankster Duo, the hellhound and the knight in slightly muddy armor back on track for the upcoming week, I’m wracking my brain for a good tag line and trying to gouge out the synop for Shadow’s Soul. Once I manage some sort of progress, I’ll submit it over the Evil 7 and pretend I’ve accomplished something this week!

I promise a better blog next week.  Until then…have fun, but not so much that you can’t afford the bail!

Wicked

Now that I mention it, though, I might just be able to…

Erm. Well, anyway. Welcome back Mischievous. I hope your captivity wasn’t too harsh… for the poor people who had you. I mean, come on. Kids couldn’t stand up to that crow’s mouth.

Anyway, I’ve finished the first book in my soon-coming Vampire series. It’s out to the wonderful Dwarves (and edits are already coming back).

The good news is, the book isn’t bad, LOL. I’ll be digging back into edits soon.

But I’m currently trying to write book 2.

I’m a plotter, I fully admit it. When I sat down and sketched outlines for the first three books, I was raring to go. Now that I’m actually writing book two, I realize I just can’t write with a sketch. I need an actual outline.

So, I hit the brick wall. (Don’t worry, I did more damage to it than it did to me.)

I fixed the first few chapters (for now) and am stuck again.

I was planning on trying to smash the wall, but since I have a sick kiddo home today, my well-laid plans have gone awry. The brick wall is safe.

Instead, I’m going to sit down and actually plot out the book. I use skimpy outlines, with a sentence or two telling me what should happen in each scene/chapter. I know we have flying pants writers in this group. And you know what? Awesome. It works for them.

Me? If I don’t have the bare bones of my plot written down, that brick wall just jumps right in front of me.

So, happy writing to ya’ll. Today, I’m gonna plot.

~ Snarky

What editing feels like: fighting back against near-impossible odds.

Yes, I’m finally set to edit The Novel, readers, which means combing through at least seven other sets of comments (thank you, dwarves!), cutting, slicing, dicing, perfecting, and doing all sorts of other moves best left to lightsabers and the even more deadly red-Sith pens of doom.

And I can tell you I’m not exactly psyched.

This is round number four of editing, although the story–a young adult fantasy where two teen elemental mages face a witch of an English teacher–has been in my head for about ten years.  Thanks to Nano, I was able to get this story out of my Hello Kitty notebook and into a quasi-novel form a few years ago.  Now I can feel the end coming, but it seems there’s so much work to do.

My motivation is low, I keep getting distracted by new story ideas (which conveniently, were all missing the last time I wasn’t ready to edit) and other fictional worlds.

That is why I’m considering NaNoEdMo.

I haven’t decided yet, as I get the feeling this little goal/project (at least 50 hours of editing  in the month of March) might be a little too contest-like.  However, like its larger parent project, it might be a good way to start, or at least another good kick in the tunic besides the dwarves’ continual patience and help.

I’ll be scouring around for good editing tips and (hopefully) passing along some of my own as I face this challenge.

Does anyone have experience with NaNoEdMo? How do you cope with editing?  Any tips, tricks, or stinkers?

May the Force be with you,

Jedi