Monthly Archives: April 2013

Books That Inspire

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Nancy J. Cohen

My daughter, who is a busy career woman, would rather watch TV to relax than read a book. No matter how much I try to convince her that reading novels can be valuable, she is not a Fictionista. I started thinking how books have influenced my life.

In the early days, I read Nancy Drew, Cherry Ames, and Judy Bolton mystery series. This initiated my love for the genre but it did more than that. Reading about Cherry Ames made me want to be a nurse. I wanted to ease people’s fears in the hospital and help them deal with illness. And so I volunteered in the local hospital and took employment, when of age, as a nurse’s aide for a summer job. Nursing school loomed in the future following high school.

A career choice faced me. I was also a student of ballet and could have auditioned for a professional company, but that would have meant daily rehearsals and giving up my ambitions to be a nurse.

Nursing won out, and I graduated with a bachelor’s degree. If you take a look at a site like www.testprepselect.com/medical-nursing/best-mcat-books/, you’ll get an idea of the sort of books that I would have had to read while I was at nursing school. As I am a big fan of reading, I did not find it boring or hard work. In fact, it kept me going. Plus, I was constantly learning something new daily.

Meanwhile, I was still an avid reader and had even tried my hand at some short stories. But it wasn’t until grad school in nursing that I decided to write a novel. Stories by Mary Stewart, Victoria Holt, and Phyllis Whitney inspired me to write romantic suspense. I bought a book called Structuring Your Novel and that’s how I learned to write a full-length book. I wrote six books before one sold. My romantic suspense never got anywhere. When I combined my love of scifi with romance, that’s what sold. Now I had two blossoming careers. What next?

I discovered humorous cozy mysteries with Jill Churchill. Oh, my. These were great. I liked the humor. I liked the structure. And so I wrote one. That sold, and the Bad Hair Day mysteries were born. Now I’m retired from nursing but the writing career is still going strong. Thanks to these books I’d read, not only did I become a writer, but I practiced ten good years as a registered nurse.

What books have inspired you in life? Have any of them led to a career other than writing?

How do you like your critiques cooked?

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Breaking News: We recently learned that TKZ is listed on Writer’s Digest Magazine’s list of “101 Best Websites for Writers“.  We’re totally thrilled to make that list, and we pledge to do our best to live up to that honor going forward!

Today, TKZ’ers, we have a question for you about critiques and how they’re delivered.In years past, we’ve done critiques of reader submissions once a year. We normally accept a limited number of one-page submissions, and then we post our critiques over a span of several weeks. (For an example of how the critiques work, click here.)
This year we’re thinking about changing things up a bit. We’re considering making the critiques a regular feature of the blog. If we adopt this change, we would post a first-page critique every other week,  instead of posting them all at once over a span of several weeks.
Is that a change you’d like to see? And while you’re at it, do you have any other thoughts about critiques? Bouquets, brickbats? Let us know!

Falling in Love with Words: A Tragic Romance

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by Boyd Morrison

We’re readers and writers. We love words. We love their musicality and rhythm, their evocation of achingly beautiful images and thoughts, and their ability to convey us to fantastic worlds and tell exhilarating stories. But what if our love of words transmogrifies into an unhealthy obsession with one word in particular, stalking it like a psychotic spurned by a paramour to the point that it wants to take out a restraining order against us?

I speak from my own sordid experience. I recently received the copyedits back on my latest novel. Overall, the changes were minimal, except for one specific piece of feedback: the copyeditor remarked on my absolute adoration of the word “just.” I thought perhaps she was exaggerating until I did a search for it. In my 93,000-word novel, I had used “just” 232 times.

Some words must be used over and over. There is no substitute for “the,” and any replacement for “said” has to be used judiciously and infrequently unless you’re writing a Hardy Boys mystery. But while “just” has many proper applications, I had employed it primarily to amp up the suspense. Someone had “just a minute” until the bomb went off. Or a person ducked behind a statue “just as bullets slammed into the wall around her.” As I re-read the copyedits, it became comical to see how often “just” appeared, sometimes three or four to a page.

I’m grateful that my copyeditor called them out. A reader who encountered all of them might come to wonder if I had any other way to build the tension in a scene. “Just” still had its place in the novel, but I got rid of half the occurrences.

Repeated use of a word can be distracting and take the reader out of the story, especially if the repetition occurs in close proximity. In a single paragraph of the novel during a fight scene, I used “bashed” twice. I replaced one of them with “kicked.” The online thesaurus gets a lot of use during the editing phase.

Unusual words only have to appear two or three times in a novel to seem overused. In another novel I realized I had used the word “pristine” seven times. My theory is that as I was writing the manuscript over the course of months, I would get to a place where I needed a word to mean “spotless” and thought to myself, “You know what word I haven’t used yet? Pristine.” In another month of writing, I’d forget that I’d used “pristine” and have the same thought all over again. After copyediting, I ended up keeping only one “pristine.”

I don’t think I have a way to turn off my need for repetition. It seems to occur no matter how consciously I try to avoid it. That’s why having an independent editorial eye is so important. I suppose I use similar unusual words and turns of phrases from novel to novel, but no editor that I’ve worked with goes through every book in a writer’s oeuvre to make sure that doesn’t happen. I’m happy enough to minimize them in a single novel.

I’d love to hear from other writers what words you’ve fallen in love with in your own manuscripts. Just try me.

Dreams, Reality and Writing

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James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

There he is. Jimmy Bell, age 10, crack third baseman for the Red Sox of the Sunrise Little League in Woodland Hills, California. He’s ready for anything. And his head is full of dreams.
He dreams of playing third base in the Major Leagues. Of playing it like Brooks Robinson, maybe the greatest defensive infielder of all time. He dreams of hitting like Mickey Mantle, but doing it all in Dodger blue. 
The dreams keep him happy in the summer, when the smell of grass from the field and hot dogs from the Snack Shack create the aroma of the possible.
But then somewhere along the way, reality sets in. In its cold, nasty fashion it wakes him up and sets a full length mirror in front of him and says, “Look. Do you see your dream in here anywhere? No? That’s right. Because it ain’t gonna happen, kid.”
No one really likes reality all that much, do they?
Which is why you should give it a kick in the classifieds every now and then.
Which is what Jimmy Bell did after realizing his Major League career was a longer shot than William M. Gaines winning the Pulitzer Prize. (And if you don’t know who Bill Gaines is, read up on him, for he had a greater influence upon America than Henry Luce!)
My dreams switched to basketball. If baseball was my first love, basketball was my true love, the girl I wanted to marry. And working as hard as I could I became one of the best pure shooters in my town, which happened to be a big one called Los Angeles. I dreamed then of wearing Lakers gold.
In college, though, reality came calling again. This time, in the mirror, it showed me the body made of the DNA of my Irish and Scottish ancestors. A body that was not made for quickness or jumping but for klonking slow Englishmen on the head with rocks. Had I been deeded the body of a Jerry West or a Walt Frazier, I daresay I would be in the Basketball Hall of Fame today.
I refused, however, to let reality keep spoiling my parties. I started dreaming of an acting career, of becoming another Brando or Newman. Reality kept its distance this time. It knew I had a few good kicks in me. And it was going good there for awhile—Off-Broadway, commercials. Then I married a beautiful actress and decided that was a dream realized, and I wanted to support a family.
Thus, I went to law school, dreaming of becoming a famous trial lawyer. This was firmly within my grasp. But with two young kids and a long commute to a big law firm, reality whispered something to me: if you really want to be the best, you’re going to have give something up. Like time with your children while they’re young.
I downsized, opened my own office (with my dad, an L.A. lawyer), and was a seven minute drive from my house.
Hovering over all of this was another dream—of becoming a writer. Off and on, through boyhood and school years, I thought it would be wonderful to be able to write books and have people buy them.
But some mob hired reality as a hit man, because it kept shooting me down. It told me I didn’t have what it takes to be a writer. That I couldn’t ever learn how to do it. Its favorite phrase, spoken with a cigarette dangling from its lips, was, Writers are born, not made, kid. And you’re not a writer.
Rather than take more punishment, I put the writing dream away. But it came back, years later, in a movie theater. My wife and I were at a double feature. One film was Wall Street. The other was one I’d hardly heard of, Moonstruck. But that was the movie that knocked me out. It was one of those rare experiences that sweeps you up and holds you tight and makes you happy you’re alive.
And I knew I had to try the writing dream again. Had to. I wanted to write something that would move an audience like Moonstruck had moved me. Reality be hanged! I was going to shove reality out of a moving car on a steep grade.
I set out to do the thing reality said could not be done. I read books on writing. I devoured them. I subscribed to Writer’s Digest and highlighted the articles on fiction craft. A few years later I was a published novelist. Then I was making a living at it. Still am. Not bad for somebody who was “not born” to write.
So what would I say to Jimmy Bell, age 10, if I could go back in time? I’d tell him to keep on dreaming, but be ready to change dreams once in awhile. Work hard, drive toward what you yearn for, but also adjust to the curveballs life throws you. Maybe I’d even give him a few lines from Kipling’s If, just to show him he’s going to grow up and know some poetry:

If you can dream, and not make dreams your master;
If you can think, and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same…

If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And, which is more, you’ll be a Man, my son!

So, if you had the chance, what would you tell your ten-year-old self? 


Finding Your Readers

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By Mark Alpert

I feel reluctant to give advice on this subject, since I’m still figuring out how to do it myself. But I’d like to share what I’ve learned so far.

Last year I read a story in the Times about organizations that sponsor entertaining lectures at various nightspots and performance spaces across New York City. Because several of the lecture series focused on scientific topics, and I write science thrillers, I decided to contact the organizations. I thought this might be a good opportunity to find some new readers.

One of the organizations was called the Secret Science Club. It took some persistence to get in touch with the woman who ran the lecture series. And when I finally did reach her, she said her group preferred lectures by actual scientists rather than science journalists or writers of science thrillers. So that was a dead end.

I had more luck with an organization called Nerd Nite. I’d never heard of this group before, but as it turns out, they sponsor lectures in dozens of cities around the world. Who knew! After exchanging a few e-mails with the man who arranges the New York City lectures, I got on the schedule. I’m going to give a talk about the merger of man and machine — which is the subject of my latest thriller, Extinction— at the group’s event in Brooklyn on the evening of April 19th. (If you want to come, go to nyc.nerdnite.com for information on buying tickets.)

The great thing about participating in this kind of series is that someone else does all the marketing (advertising the event, selling the tickets, etc.) Better still, it gives me the chance to connect with an audience that’s predisposed to enjoying the kind of novels I write. One of the other presenters for the April 19th event is an expert on the costumes worn by the characters on Star Trek. And I thought I was nerdy! I’m ashamed to admit that I know nothing about this topic except that the characters who wear the red shirts are the ones most likely to die while exploring strange new worlds. (Here’s the data from Wikipedia: Of the 59 Enterprise crew members killed in the original Star Trek episodes, 73 percent wore red shirts.) But I do know that anyone who’s that interested in Star Fleet uniforms is also likely to be intrigued by Extinction, a novel that features swarms of cyborg insects and other science-fiction terrors.

So I’m looking forward to the event. And I’m sure there are plenty of other promotional opportunities that I could take advantage of. Hordes of potential readers are out there, like strange new worlds waiting to be discovered. But it takes work to find them.

Writing About Sex (Shh!) – Five Writing Tips

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Jordan Dane
@JordanDane
 

Purchased image from Fotolia

A guy thriller author I know (who shall remain anonymous) said his most mortifying experience about his debut book was that his mother called him after she’d read it and corrected his sex scene.

First…Ew.

And secondly, Ew.



I had another writer friend who thought that writing these scenes would be easy, although he’d never written one before. I said, “Go for it, buddy. Show me what you got.” Since the guy wrote in first person (and I was sure that every protag he wrote was HIM), I wondered how he would handle it. The scene turned into a very short QUICK paragraph. I suggested he try thinking of a sex scene as if he were watching porn, where someone ELSE was in the video. It was my way of showing him that 3rd person might be a better fit for him in a “practice” scene like this. The light bulb went on for him and he got it.
 
Even thrillers and crime fiction have men and women playing roles in the book, so tension and gender differences can be a great way to add conflict. Not all books have to have sexy scenes, but you can decide how much or how little to add if you want some spice to your novel.
 
What is the right balance or blend of romance in your plot? My basic rule of thumb is: if you can delete the romance from your book and the plot no longer makes sense, then you’ve got the right blend and it’s integrated well. In other words, the sexual tension between your protags puts them in more danger and ramps up the stakes. You punish them for wanting to be together.
 
 
Five Key Tips to Writing a Sex Scene:
 
1.) Make the scene about something more than sex. If you’ve built up the tension, make the characters have more at stake than just a romp in bed. Have your woman come from an abused past or have the guy put everything at risk to be with her so that one wins and the other almost loses for them to be together. Make the scene meaningful beyond the physical…and make it emotional. Readers who might not read a sex scene might be compelled to read yours and not skim over it, because the character’s emotions are bare (as well as their bodies).
 
2.) Get creative in your word choice of action and body parts. For some reason, I try to minimize the “usual” choices for body parts and I prefer sexy sounding descriptions of motion. People can “get” what you mean without going into too much detail. I’ve included an example below.
 
3.) Foreplay is often the best part (sort of). Don’t short change the set up of flirtation and intimacy. Anticipation is very much a player in building the tension. Sometimes even the foreplay can make the whole scene.
 
4.) You don’t always have to leave that bedroom (or limo) door open. Sometimes you can ease it closed with only a peek. Take your characters to a point where it works for your book, then close the door and let your characters have their privacy if that’s what you’d like to do.
 
5.) Don’t forget that sex changes everything. Before and after, make it ring true. Once your characters cross the line of physical intimacy with each other, things get complicated. Make it real.
 

Discussion:


1.) If you’re a writer, what challenges do you have in writing sexy scenes? Any tips on making them easier?

2.) If you’re a reader, what hot scenes do you remember from books that have stuck with you and please share your thoughts on why the scene(s) were memorable.
 
 
Excerpt THE WRONG SIDE OF DEAD (HarperCollins) by Jordan Dane – Garrett Wheeler and Alexa Marlowe in the backseat of a limo in NYC:

“Yes, I would. Call me if the bounty hunter is receptive to the idea and I’ll make arrangements to meet you.” His somber face warmed to a smile. “But whether she is or not, maybe we could take a few days off to ourselves in Chicago. It’d be nice to get away, just the two of us.”

By the hungry look in his eyes, she knew he meant it. She felt the pull of their mutual addiction. Alexa sipped her champagne and leaned forward to loosen his tie.

“Now you’re talking.” Her throaty voice and suggestive expression sent the message. The business part of their meeting had concluded. “I’d love some downtime with you … alone.”

“We’re alone now.”

“Yes, we are.”

Done with talking, she closed her eyes and kissed him, breathing in the subtle smell of his cologne with her fingers entwined in his dark hair. His lips and tongue tasted like pricey champagne. She hadn’t intended to do much more than kiss him, but when her hand moved under his suit coat, she craved the feel of his bare skin, especially as he nuzzled her neck. The sensation sent a tingling shock wave over her body and things got out of control. Under the silk of her dress, blood rushed down and through her, a surge of pleasure she couldn’t restrain.

“I thought you’d be wearing it.” Next to her ear, his voice resonated against her, driving her crazy.

Alexa understood what he meant. She had slipped the jewelers case into her vintage Dior envelope purse, saving it for when Garrett could put it on her personally. But she didn’t tell him that. She found another way to say it.

“I wanted it to be the only thing I wore the next time I saw you.”

That made him smile. She heard it in her voice when he said, “Now why didn’t I think of that?”

He kissed the palm of her hand then reached over and punched a button on a control panel. She heard the soft whir and the window to the driver’s compartment closed. And even though every window in the vehicle darkened with a screen for privacy, she still saw the people and traffic outside.

“Can they see in?” she whispered.

“I doubt it.”

Without another word, he trailed his fingertips down her legs, unbuckling the straps to her platform Miu Miu shoes and tossing them aside. The carpet felt good against her bare feet.

“Garrett? We can’t … not here.”

“What if they can see us, Alexa?” He got to his knees between her legs and stripped out of his suit jacket and yanked off his tie, not taking his eyes off her. “Do you really care?”

Her cheeks flushed with heat. She wanted to glance toward the cab that had stopped next to them at a light. She saw the taxi driver turn his head from the corner of her eye. But she couldn’t take her gaze off Garrett. The man’s swarthy good looks mesmerized her, but behind those eyes was an enigmatic man far too complicated to understand in a lifetime.

On the outside, he wore pricey clothing like a mogul on Wall Street, but underneath it all, a wicked scar or two on his dark skin reminded her of the violence in his life. She’d seen him kill with the same passion she saw in his eyes now.

He’d become as adaptable as a chameleon with one foot in the civilized world and the other in places she was too scared to contemplate. Truth told, that had been the part of him she wanted to understand but never would.

“What if they are watching us?” he asked again, his voice lower. Her rapid breathing filled the quiet vacuum of the limo, mingling with his. As he unbuckled his pants, he kept talking to her, “Let’s give them something to see.”

He reached under her dress, his large hands gripping her hips and lingering.

“Tell me you want this, Alexa. Tell me how much you want it.”

Garrett loved pushing her limits when it came to intimacy. Every new experience put his mark on her. And she knew it.

“I want this … I want you.” She reached up to kiss him, but he only shook his head.

“Take it off. Everything.”

Driven to the brink beyond caring, she didn’t take long to make up her mind. Piece by piece, she took off her coat and silk dress as he watched. She didn’t take her gaze off him, not wanting to break their connection. With every garment she removed, the hunger in his eyes intensified.

She turned her head toward the nearest window and found she wanted someone to see her. She even craved it, but before she told Garrett how she felt, he spoke first.

“Where is it? The necklace.”

Alexa retrieved her purse and gave him the necklace. She held back her blond hair to let him slip it on her neck. The gold chain and diamond dazzled on her warm skin as it flushed with arousal. It was all she wore.

“What do you think?” she asked as she posed for him, her inhibitions gone.

“Priceless.” Drawing her closer, he lowered his lips to her body.

“Oh, Garrett. Yes.”

He knew exactly how to touch her and took what he needed. Like an out of body experience, she pictured the scene in her mind’s eye—in broad daylight, in the middle of traffic. She looked up into the urban landscape of New York City as the limousine stopped at another light and pedestrians crossed the street, peering into their tinted window.

And the sensation was … exhilarating.

 

Impart Info with Attitude

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Today I welcome back to TKZ my friend and editor, Jodie Renner, to share tips on imparting factual information without it coming off like the dreaded “info dump”. Enjoy!Jodie_June 26, '14_7371_low res_centred
——————-

by Jodie Renner, editor, author, speaker

Strategies for Turning Impersonal Info Dumps into Compelling Copy

As a freelance fiction editor, I find that military personnel, professionals, academics, police officers, and others who are used to imparting factual information in objective, detached, bias-free ways often need a lot of coaching in loosening up their language and adding attitude and emotions to create a captivating story world.

Really need those facts in there? Rewrite with attitude!

Say you want to write a fast-paced novel and your background is in a specialized field, so you decide to set your story in that milieu you know so well. Maybe you want to write a legal thriller or a medical suspense, or a mystery involving scientific research or stolen artifacts. Or maybe you’d like to use your military, police, or forensics experience, but your writing experience to date has mainly been confined to producing terse, objective, factual reports.

As you’re writing your story, you decide at various points that you need to interrupt the story to explain something the readers may not understand. And you want to get it right, both to lend credibility to your story and because you’re concerned about criticism from other professionals in your field. Your first impulse might be to copy and paste sections on that topic from a journal or online search, then tweak them a bit. Or just stop to explain the technical points in your own words, factually, as you would in a report or research paper, then go back to your storyline. Big mistake.

You’ve just interrupted an exciting (we hope!) story to give a mini-lecture. Remember that the main purpose of fiction is to entertain your readers with an engaging tale. To do that, it’s critical to stay in the story and in the viewpoint and voice of your compelling, charismatic (we hope!) characters.

How to keep your credibility but write with passion and tension

Want to keep your readers turning the pages? Try to turn off possible reactions of colleagues in your field and remind yourself that your goal here is to entertain a broad spectrum of the population with a riveting story. So limit your factual, informative details to only what is necessary for the plot, and present them through the character’s point of view, with lots of tension and attitude.

Go through the section several times and keep loosening up the words and sentence structure to take out the stuffiness and achieve a more casual tone, in the voice of the point of view character for that scene – it needs to be their thoughts, not the author stepping in. And introduce emotions and reactions – make the character frustrated, angry, or anxious.

And if it still sounds like a university lecture or a journal entry, make your character less reserved, less nerdy, less buried in his work. Give him more charisma and universal appeal, even a bad-boy rebellious side, and add quirks and more attitude.

Better yet, insert another, contrasting character to the mix to add in some tension, conflict and contrast.

Present the facts in a heated dialogue.

To impart some specific information while keeping your readers turning the pages, try these steps:

1. First, in a separate file, copy or write the bare facts in a paragraph or two – up to a page.

2. Go in and loosen up the language a bit – rewrite it in layman’s language.

3. Choose two interesting characters who each have some kind of stake in this info and are passionate about the topic, but in different ways.

4. Give them both charisma and quirks – and opposite personalities. Maybe make them competitive or distrustful.

5. Give them each their unique voice, based on their personality differences.

6. Give them opposing views on the topic or conflicting goals.

7. Using those facts, create a question-and-answer or argumentative dialogue between the two characters.

8. Add in some character actions, reactions and sensory details.

Now it’s starting to read like fiction!

Remember, most of your readers will be outside your field of specialty, and won’t find those dry factual details as fascinating as you do!

A before-and-after example, disguised from my editing:

Setup: A rebellious, trigger-happy cop has been ordered to be examined by a psychiatrist.
The brief “info dump” part starts with “Dr. Brown flipped…”

Before:
Dr. Brown opened up Jake’s file. “What happened after you were discharged from the Army?”
“I decided to become a cop. After police academy, I was assigned a beat in the Washington Park area in the South Side of Chicago.”
“The Washington Park area?” Dr. Brown asked. “That’s a pretty rough part of town.”
“Yeah, it reminded me of downtown Baghdad,” Jake quipped.
Dr. Brown flipped a few pages in the file where there was some background on Washington Park. The summary stated the area was only 1.48 square miles but was usually considered either the most dangerous or second most dangerous neighborhood in the United States. In fact, in some years it had seen more than three hundred violent crimes committed on its turf. Crimes such as murder, robbery, drug-dealing, assaults, prostitution, and rape were committed regularly in Washington Park.

After:

Here, the author has replaced the above factual paragraph with a dialogue.
“Washington Park?” Dr. Brown asked. “That’s a pretty rough area, I hear.”
“Yeah, it reminded me of downtown Baghdad,” Jake quipped.
“How so?”
“The area is tiny, barely one and a half square miles, but it’s infested with crime. Some years you get more than three hundred violent crimes there.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, murder, drug-dealing, robbery, assaults, prostitution, rape—you name it, they’re all run-of-the-mill activities in that area. Stress city, man—I made my bones there.”

How the experts do it – with attitude!

Here’s an excerpt from a scene in a crime lab, as an example of how bestselling thriller author Robert Crais reveals the details of the fingerprinting process without interrupting the story to fill in the reader as an author aside:

[…] The white smear was aluminum powder. The brown stains were a chemical called ninhydrin, which reacts with the amino acids left whenever you touch something.
Starkey bent for a closer inspection, then frowned at Chen as if he was stupid.
“This thing’s been in the sun for days. It’s too old to pick up latents with powder.”
“It’s also the fastest way to get an image into the system. I figured it was worth the shot.”
Starkey grunted. She was okay with whatever might be faster.
“The nin doesn’t look much better.”
“Too much dust, and the sunlight probably broke down the aminos. I was hoping we’d get lucky with that, but I’m gonna have to glue it.”
“Shit. How long?”
I said, “What does that mean, you have to glue it?”
Now Chen looked at me as if I was the one who was stupid. We had a food chain for stupidity going, and I was at the bottom.
“Don’t you know what a fingerprint is?”
Starkey said, “He doesn’t need a lecture. Just glue the damned thing.”

And it goes on like this. Entertaining reading, and we’re learning some interesting stuff at the same time.

~ from The Last Detective, by Robert Crais

Another good example of how to impart info without boring your readers:

Here’s how Lynn Sholes and Joe Moore provide some information on a well-known structure in Las Vegas, without sounding like a travelogue or encyclopedia. This is from The Blade, an excellent thriller I edited in late 2012:

Setting: The Strip, Las Vegas

“So the Reverend Hershel Applewhite is a liar,” I said when Kenny returned from accompanying Carl down to the hotel lobby.
blade-cover4-internetI stood at the window staring at the imposing pyramid-shaped Alexandria Hotel in the distance. I’d read somewhere that the forty-two-billion candlepower spotlight at the top of the hotel could be seen from space. The same guy who designed it—I couldn’t remember his name—built similar pyramid hotels with beacons in South Africa and China. Claimed he wanted his lights to be seen from every corner of the world.

Writers and readers – do you have a short example to share of imparting info with attitude?
————

 Jodie Renner is a freelance fiction editor and the award-winning author of three craft-of-writing guides in her series An Editor’s Guide to Writing Compelling Fiction: Captivate Your Readers, Fire up Your Fiction, and Writing a Killer Thriller. She has also published two clickable time-saving e-resources to date: Quick Clicks: Spelling List and Quick Clicks: Word Usage. You can find Jodie at www.JodieRenner.com, www.JodieRennerEditing.com, http://jodierennerediting.blogspot.com/ and on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

 

The ebook future’s so bright that I gotta wear shades

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By P.J. Parrish

I am constantly losing my sunglasses. This is a big deal when you live in South Florida where people wear them even in winter. Double big deal for me because I need prescription lenses.
Plus I like looking cool, you know? And as any woman of a certain age can tell you, sunglasses are the way to go if you want to jazz up your look and can’t afford an eye job. (Stay with me here, you men out there, I am getting to what this has to do with writing, I promise).
But I lose my glasses. Have left them all over the world.  So when a girlfriend told me about this great online glasses maker Warby Parker I went to check them out. Nice shades! At prices I can afford! And I don’t have to go to LensCrafter at the mall!
Then, as I was reading about this new online company, I had an epiphany about -– wait for it! –- my ebooks.
Warby Parker is one of many new upstart online-only companies that are finding great success by bypassing the traditional retail model. Which is exactly what all of us writers are trying to do with our ebooks these days, right? 

Brief background: The four geeky guys behind Warby Parker (the name is from two characters in a Jack Kerouac journal) were trying to figure out why designer glasses cost beaucoup bucks and discovered it’s because everyone in the process was taking a cut — designers, manufacturers, brands, wholesalers and retailers. So they eliminated the middlemen, lowered the prices and built their reputation and customer base via the internet.

Sound familiar? In the traditional publishing model, think of all the folks who get a cut before you the author does — agents, editors, designers, copy editors, bean-counters, printers, binders, warehouses, distributors. And that’s before we even get to the bookstores. This is why royalty rates for hardcovers usually range from 10 to 12.5 percent, with 15 percent for big authors. Paperback is even less. Everyone along the book line has their hand out.

Back to Warby Parker for a sec. They seem to be pretty inventive. On their site, you can upload a photo and do a virtual try-on. And they’ll send you five frames to try on at home free. Isn’t such agility also one of the hallmarks of good ebook authors today? Every author I know who is succeeding at ebooks is thinking outside the old marketing boxes.  We are packaging our books in boxed sets. We’re offering short stories and novellas. We’re being flexible with pricing and even — gasp! — giving our products away. (It’s called sampling in business and it’s been a successful practice since the 19th century.) How many of you have tried to get your traditional publishers to do some of this? Maybe drop the price of your backlist ebooks to help catapult your new book? Show of hands for those who succeeded? That’s what I thought…

So what about that epiphany? Well, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it’s not an epiphany so much as an affirmation of something I already knew in the back of my brain. I am new to the ebook self-pubbing business. I’ve only put one backlist title out there, Dead of Winter, and one novella, Claw Back. I know I have a ton to learn and some catching up to to do. (I mean, I can’t even figure out GoodReads, for corn’s sake).

What I have figured out is that I need to be a better business person. Yeah, I am a writer first and the creation of the story will always be paramount. And I want to keep a foot in traditional publishing because I still believe there is a place for actual books you can hold and actual bookstores you can visit. (even the Warby Parker guys figured this out — they opened a couple boutiques because they realized people still want to touch things before they buy them.).

But my real epiphany is this — that if I don’t pay attention to Parrish Inc. no one will. I have to get rid of any illusions I still might have about some nice big paternalistic publisher being there to always watch over me.

I may need glasses, but I’m not blind.

  

What is History?

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By Clare Langley-Hawthorne

So I have an idea for a new book and it takes place partly in the early 1980s and it suddenly strikes me that, though I lived through this decade as a young teen, for my own children this era is as much ‘history’ as the Edwardian age is…and then I started to worry, am I really contemplating writing a ‘historical novel’ set in the 1980s?!

I was at a writer’s conference a few years ago and on a ‘historical mystery’ panel I remember an editor saying that ‘the 1980’s are not history’ – at the time, I dismissed the idea out of hand because it seemed such a no-brainer. I mean, the 1980’s – that’s hardly ‘historical’ – but then I started thinking about what happened during this time and my ideas fermented…until, I started to write and then I wondered, so what is the recent past like the 1980’s. Is it history or not?

For the most part, classification hardly matters, but when contemplating writing a novel set in the early/mid 1980s, I have to confess I started to wonder…I mean, how does one deal with the recent past in novels? How to you write about an era that hasn’t quite passed into ‘history’ and which, with all its quirks, is very much open to scrutiny. 

Just watching an episode of the show The Americans makes me appreciate just how ‘foreign’ some of the 1980s can seem…but it also makes me worry about dealing with the ‘recent past’. I have to wonder, what is the best approach to writing about an era that seems ‘so near and yet so far’?  One thing is for sure, you have to be absolutely sure about all your references as too many people are ready to catch your errors. But what about the other pitfalls? Are the 1980s ready to be used as a backdrop for a novel, or is the era caught between the past and present and best avoided? 

So what do you think?
Is a novel set in the 1980s ‘historical’?