On the road again

by Alexandra Sokoloff

Yes, once again, I’m about to do that thing I do, the long drive.  It’s funny, but I seem to be repeating a childhood pattern (as we all tend to do).  In my case it is the full-out cross-country road trip once a year.

My father is a peripatetic kind of guy. Because of various revolutions and natural disasters and immigration restrictions, his family moved from Leningrad to Tokyo to Mexico City before he was three years old. (We think we live exciting lives – but if you ask me nothing we do holds a candle to what our parents have lived through.) That sense of movement never really left Dad; he got into the U.S. when he was 15 and rode the rails all over the country before he was 18, and I’ve never seen him happier than when he’s behind the wheel of a car (“King of the Road” is one of our family songs).

Though when he married and started a family he put down roots in California, Dad and my mother are both educators, and at the time my siblings and I were growing up, schools still had those three-month long summer vacations. And we spent those long summers on the road, driving all over the country, different routes every year, because Dad and Mom thought that we should see the country. All of it. Intimately. You might even say, would definitely have said if you had seen how grimy we all got after two months on the highway, that we became one with it.

So some of my earliest and most enduring memories and sensations are – movement. Perpetual movement. Constantly changing scenery and huge contrasts: endless brutal deserts turning into palm oases. Towering craggy mountain ranges with pockets of ethereal fields of wildflowers. Geysers and glaciers… and grizzly bears trying to claw their way into the car.

And while there are other life lessons generally associated with the back seats of cars, I really believe that the back seat was where I learned how to write.

I don’t think it’s any surprise that I’m a sucker for big visuals in my reading and my writing, or that I crave stories that have a constantly moving pace and surprises around every bend. I definitely picked up those rhythms and preferences on the road.

But as everyone knows, road trips aren’t necessarily a thrill a minute. Especially in portions of, say, Texas, where the same kind of flat landscape seems to go on for days. Oh, right, that’s because it DOES go on for days. So I did a hell of a lot of reading along some of those stretches, and sometimes would read the same book several times in a trip, which was great training for writing, because with multiple readings you start to see the mechanics of it all. I could recite whole sections of my favorite thrillers and mysteries to my family. I also learned to make up stories to entertain myself. What if that car following us was full of CIA agents? (Oh, right – the car behind us sometimes WAS full of CIA agents. My father is a scientist, and Russian, and that was a suspicious combination when I was a child).

But what if they kidnapped us? What if I was the only one who could get free?

What if those dinosaurs in Dinosaur World suddenly came to life? (Okay, Michael Crichton beat me to that one)

What if there were real ghosts in that ghost town?

You have a lot of time for those “What ifs” on the road.

And God knows all that traveling – the national parks, the different cities, the museums and art galleries and reservations and ghost towns along the way, gave me a whole lifetime of fodder for different stories.

I’m eternally grateful for the traveling because it’s made me completely unafraid about jumping in a car or on a plane and going wherever I have to go to research a story.  Not just unafraid, but eager for it. Especially writing supernatural thrillers as I do – the PLACE of a ghost story is sometimes the most important part of the whole deal. I always want to visit and explore the city or region I’m writing about, because it’s the best way to give a reader a true and complete experience. I need you to believe in the reality of the story – to feel and smell and hear things – so I can sneak in there and scare the pants off you.

All that traveling also prepared me for the author’s life – although I never would have known that going in. I don’t think anyone can possibly realize how much traveling is required of an author: not just the research, but the conventions, the book signings, the workshop gigs. It’s a wonderful gypsy life – you go to different cities every year for Bouchercon, Left Coast Crime, Book Expo America, the Public Library Association conference, Thrillerfest, Malice Domestic, Romantic Times – and all your friends are there, including your agent and editor, so you end up doing business in all these different cities. It’s a huge traveling circus, really.

And it helps me with dreaded book promotion that I have no problem driving all over the state – any state – to stop in at bookstores and sign stock. I’d prefer to be driven, but driving itself is relaxing to me, and a welcome break from writing, so I find it a great balance – exhausting, I won’t lie about that, but also rejuvenating.

I don’t panic if I get lost, I don’t worry when little things go wrong, and I really do end up enjoying the ride. And I never, ever forget how lucky I am: I always wanted the kind of life that would take me to new places all the time, and I’ve got it – in spades.

So, that’s going to be my Christmas vacation. And hopefully, I’ll leave all the not-so-optimal aspects of 2010 in the dust.   I hope the same for all the ‘Rati.

Now it’s your turn. Are you a road tripper?  Was there something else in your childhood that you think prepped you or turned you out as writer?   Or, if you’re not already out there shopping, what are you doing for the holidays?

– Alex



GHOSTING

 

By Stephen Jay Schwartz

And here’s yet another example of how music has influenced the way I think about writing.  There’s a musical term, called “ghosting,” that describes a particular style of jazz improvisation. Let’s say there’s a musical phrase, or “lick,” that stretches over a number of bars.  When a musician “ghosts” that phrase, he whips through the notes, punctuating certain notes while passing over others on his way to the end of the phrase.  He might not even express the notes he passes over, he might merely suggest them by fingering the corresponding keys or allowing a very small amount of air into the instrument (if it is a saxophone or trumpet) in order to give the impression that the note was sounded. 

It’s kind of hard to describe this in words, but if you take a listen to Charlie Parker playing Au Privave, you’ll get the gist.  The music starts off with the melody line, which is repeated once.  Then Charlie improvises, and you can hear how he “ghosts” the musical phrases.

Even though we don’t hear all the notes he’s playing, we sense their existence in the context of the musical phrase.  The notes are felt, even though they might not be audible.

I realized how this concept applied to writing when I was working as a development executive and a writer I knew was having trouble cutting back a long scene.  She was reluctant to let go of the back-story she had written into the scene, thinking the reader would be lost if things weren’t spelled out clearly.

“Cut it,” I said.  “All you need is a word here and there to suggest the extensive back-story you’ve written.  Your dialogue already contains subtle references to it.  The ghost of what you’ve written will remain.”

I was discovering the musical connection even as I was saying it.  Teaching works that way, you don’t know what you know until you try explaining it to others.  She liked the concept and went off to do her rewrites.  When she finished, her script was vastly improved.  It said more, with fewer words.  And she didn’t just cut the back-story, she “ghosted” it.

I started thinking about how ghosting plays a role in other aspects of our lives.  For instance, anyone who has had to deliver a hundred-word bio goes through the process of ghosting.  Take mine, for example, with its emphasis on my development work with Wolfgang Petersen.  That was over ten years ago already, yet it influenced my life in ways that the jobs I held thereafter did not.  What about the “day job” I’m currently in?  It doesn’t show up in the bio, except for the line, “Mr. Schwartz traveled the United States extensively…”  That was for the day job.  The traveling influenced the writer I would become, but the job itself…fuggedaboudit.  Ghost it.

And how many of us have written three or four completely different resumes, each in their own way accurate in their description of our work history, accomplishments and goals?  We present different images of ourselves for different purposes.  The full story of my life exists in the combination of all the resumes, but that would be too much information, and probably too confusing.  Ghost it.

And what about our memories?  Don’t we remember the big events, the things that are really significant in our lives, while letting the less significant ones disappear in a haze of gray?  You can’t tell someone the story of your life without ghosting. 

I used to keep a recording device with me so I could capture every “great” idea that came into my head.  Then one day I was having lunch with another writer and he pulled his own tape-recorder from a hidden pocket, hit the record button, and said something to the effect of, “Note to self:  the protagonist should have a bouquet of flowers in his hands when the gunmen approach.”  Click, he slipped the recording device back into his pocket while turning to me with an innocent, “I’m sorry, you were saying?”

I ditched the tape recorder after that.  I realized that the good thoughts stick around.  Recording them or instantly jotting them down seemed redundant.  If the idea was still in my head after a week I knew it was something worth using.  If I forgot it ten minutes later then it probably wasn’t that important.  Kinda like the time I did shrooms and was absolutely fascinated with a glowing filament encased in a glass capsule, I spent hours marveling at it’s unique, sleek design and the God-inspired wisdom that caused it to come into existence.  The next morning I looked at the device again and said, “Oh yeah, a light bulb.”

But I digress.  We were talking about ghosting. 

So, ghosting in writing could be described as an intentional suppression of information that allows for the seeping through of certain elements of that information in order to suggest the existence of a deeper, fuller background than what is written on the page.

Man, I want a spot on the next Webster’s Dictionary writing gig.

What about unintentional ghosting?  I was having a conversation with a friend recently and he told me about his father’s Alzheimer’s.  It’s in the early stages—the man still remembers his family members and most of the important moments in his life.  But if you ask him what he had for lunch he’ll just make shit up.  He’ll give a whole schpeil about the fictitious dining experience he didn’t have.  Brushing over the fact that he doesn’t remember a thing about it.  Unintentional ghosting?

All right, I’ve wasted too much of your precious time already.  Let’s all get back to work.

Does anyone out there in Murderati Land have any cool made-up words that almost make sense?  Or something you’ve taken from a different medium and applied it to writing?

Oh, yeah…one last plug on this…Crossing the Line, my short story prequel to Boulevard and Beat, is finally available as a free Kindle download from Amazon, as well as appearing as a free downloadable pdf from my website…

 

Oops…I did it again.

By Brett Battles

 

It seems like only a year ago I was finishing a book that experienced a few bumps along the way…to recap:

a) I was writing my first standalone

b) Everything was going well, then, when I’d reached around the 200ish page, I stumbled upon another book set in the exact same locale with a very similar plot

b2) it was by an author I knew

b3) …an author I’d already asked to blurb this book once I finish it

c) I then had to start basically from scratch (kept the locale, and the first line, but everything else was new)

RESULT: The whole experience from first page of the discarded story to last page of a semi-polished draft of the new direction all took place from beginning of September to end of December last year because I HAD to get it done.

Oh, so…yeah…it WAS a year ago.

Why do I bring this up? Because it just happened again.

Okay, not EXACTLY the same way, but the results were similar.

This time, instead of a standalone, I had this new series I wanted to start. The idea for the first book had been swimming around my head for months, and, for various reasons I’ll go into sometime in the future, the time to write it had come.

I did even more prep work than usual this time, creating a timeline using butcher paper and colored post its. I had characters named, and detailed back stories figured out before I put one word of the actual novel to paper. Then I dove in.

The action scenes were working out great, the settings were intriguing, and the interplay between the main characters was exactly what I’d hoped for.

In no time, I’d written 288 pages. I was going to have the first draft done before Thanksgiving, well ahead of my end of the year deadline.

The problem was, that 288th page? That was the last one I wrote on that version.

Why? Well, the next morning I woke up no longer able to ignore the nagging little voice in the back of my head. It kept repeating the question, “You DO know what kind of book this is becoming, don’t you?” The problem with your mind asking you a question like that is you usually already know the answer. And I did.

I hadn’t been writing the first book of a new series. I’d been writing a book that, with some name changes and a few additions, could easily be the fifth book of my Quinn series. That’s great for Quinn. I now have a massive start on his next adventure. But it sucked for my new guy, because having him be just another Quinn was absolutely NOT what I wanted. And his was the book I needed to write now.

This realization coincided with an out of town conference I had to go to. So I spent the time away letting my mind stew on a solution. My answer? The basic idea behind the story was still useable, it was just everything else had to change, starting with the point of view.

So the following Monday I was back at my desk, starting at the very beginning.

One big change was that instead of writing the story in third person, this new version is entirely in first. This helped me get into my characters head a hell of a lot better than the previous direction had. As for the rest, I thought at first I might be able to salvage some of the work I’d previously done, and use an adjusted version, but that didn’t end up being the case. Turns out there was only one scene I even slightly borrowed from.

But I’ve got to say, since this restart, things have flowed like crazy, and that nagging voice in the back of my head has not made a reappearance.

If everything sticks to my plan, I should be finishing a first, full draft tomorrow. I still have a lot of work to go. There are many things I know I need to add to the next draft, and a ton of things that need to be cleaned up. But I’m well on my way, and this should be done and ready to go not long after the New Year begins. When that happens, you’ll hear a big sigh from the West Coast.

God, I hope this doesn’t happen to me on the next one! If there’s something a new novelist can learn from my experience, it’s that if you really want to be a published author, it’s all about persistence and constantly pushing yourself to be better. I could have just kept going with that first version. I could have been satisfied with a variation on a theme I’d already established. But I don’t want to just cruise or settle or repeat. I want to get better. Always. And sometimes that means going back to the beginning.

So, anyone have writing horror stories you were able to overcome that you’d like to share? Love to hear them!

Submission. It’s Not As Much Fun As It Sounds Like.

    by J.D. Rhoades

We’ve heard a lot from our fellow ‘Rati recently about Thrilling Deadline Heroics: prodigious word counts, grueling all-nighters, and, as Tess described,  overcoming the inevitable onset of ITotallySuckitis (or, since Tess is a more sensible person, ThisBookTotallySucksItis).

 

I laugh at these things. I laugh them to scorn. I, you see, am finished with MY book. And that puts me in an entirely different level of Hell. Because I’m, as I like to say, “between publishers.” My agent has cast my bread upon the roiled waters of the publishing industry, and we’re waiting to see what comes back. What that means is that I am in that very special VIP Room of Hades that’s known as

 

ON SUBMISSION.

 


    As a trial lawyer, one of the most stressful times of your life is when you have a jury out. That’s when I and my colleague in the other chair have  presented all our evidence, argued all the finer points of law, made our stirring closing arguments to the twelve folks in the box,  and listened, trying not to fidget,  while the judge droned on and on, instructing the poor jurors  in the law according to the Pattern Jury Instructions, which even James Earl Jones and Morgan Freeman couldn’t read in a way that makes them comprehensible to a layperson, much less interesting. Then the jury retires to their little room tp decide your client’s fate. And the waiting begins. And along with the waiting, the second guessing. Should I have left that kindly looking little old lady on the panel or bounced her? Should I really have argued a SODDI defense or gone with diminished capacity? Because, really…just LOOK at that guy.

      So you wait. And you fret.


     Being on submission is like that , for days. Sometimes weeks. You look at the phone, checking to make sure it’s on. You resist the urge to send an e-mail to your agent to remind her of the number, just in case she’s lost it. You dread seeing your agent’s e-mail when you open up your computer, because they call if there’s good news, only rejections come by e-mail. And you fret. Should I have shortened that sex scene? Is anybody really going to believe that action sequence? Should I really have killed off that character? He might have been a great sidekick if it ever becomes a series….

 

 

   Then, of course, unless you’re really lucky, the first rejections come in. Some of the most painful ones are the ones that go, “I really love this…but I have to pass.” They love the characters, but think there’s not enough suspense. The suspense is great, but no one’s buying this sort of thing  right now. Love the characters and the suspense, but the market is glutted because everyone already put out  a book like this. And so on. Before long, after getting a few of these, all of them saying something different, and some of them contradictory, you start to wonder if anyone in this business knows what the hell they’re talking about. 

And you tell yourself, this is the last time. It’s just too painful. If this one doesn’t fly, it’s over. It’s time to give up.

 

 

Eventually one of two things will happen. I’ll either get the good phone call…

 

 

Or I won’t. And then, I’ll get to work on something else.

 

 

 

Because, my friends, I am not a well person.

 

Wish me luck.

 

I hate this book

by Tess Gerritsen

I have not been out of my house in days.  If not for my husband delivering nourishment to the refrigerator, I would have starved weeks ago.  My neighbors think I’m the crazy recluse next door, probably destined to turn into one of those weird cat ladies shuffling around in a bathrobe and slippers, muttering to myself.  Except I don’t own a cat.  But I do shuffle around muttering to myself because this is the very worst time of year for me, the time of year when I don’t answer my phone or my mail, when I turn into Greta Garbo and moan, “why can’t I just be left alone?”

It’s deadline time.  

It’s also called the I hate this book stage.  I’ve heard that some authors (I don’t know any of them personally) completely bypass this stage.  They rocket through the process of writing a novel with overwhelming passion and joy and they think their story, at every stage, is grand and a work of genius.  I suspect those people are merely psychotic.  Or maybe I’m the psychotic one, to put myself through this with every single book.

And it does happen with every single book.  It’s utterly predictable.  I will start off with an idea I love.  And then, somewhere between the first and second draft, I will start to hate the whole damn project.  By then, my publisher has a cover design in the works and riveting flap copy written, both of which seem so much better than the story they’re actually supposed to sell.  But no one knows it yet, except me.  And I’m afraid to tell my team how much I hate the story, because then they’ll worry that it really is as horrid as I think it is.

My literary agent, though, takes my misery in stride because she has heard it all before.  At some stage in the writing, she says, almost all her authors have whined, “I hate this story and I hate these characters.”  That, she says,  means the book’s done and it’s time to send it in.  

My husband has heard it all before, too.  “You said this the last time, so just finish the thing already,” he says.  Such an understanding man.  

If you are writing your very first novel, this stage will terrify you.  It will make you question your talent, cause you to surrender, make you wonder if you shouldn’t toss this deformed monster in the closet and start a different novel instead.  My advice?  Don’t.  Stick with it.  Fix it.  Shuffle around scenes, re-write dialogue.  

That’s what I’m doing now.  Fixing things.  Feeling alternately optimistic and hopeless.  Unlike the newbie novelist, I have the advantage of knowing this stage is perfectly predictable.  I also know that I’ve forged through this every time before.  Twenty-two books later, I have to believe I can do it again.  

In the thick of it

by Pari

This holiday season, the only sugar plums dancing in my dreams have price tags on them.

I’m thinking about travel arrangements for our Left Coast Crime 2011 guests of honor; making sure those *hotel rooms at La Fonda are really for our convention guests; programming; my budget; designing and ordering tote bags; the cost of entertainment; whether or not to have convention pins made; how much audio visual equipment we’ll need since we have to pay for it all; my budget; the auction(s?); advertisements in our program books; trying to get sponsors to help defray costs; identifying tasks for volunteers; getting volunteers; public relations and media attention; whether to cap attendance at the convention; name badge pouches; budget, budget, budget; getting discounts for attendees on the local shuttle service; our financial ability to provide extras; budget; how to make people feel welcome; answering all my wonderful committee’s questions and making decisions when there aren’t obvious answers .  . .

And, Lord, help me, the food.

Let me tell you about the food. I thought I was doing a fabulous thing by including two continental breakfasts, hors d’oeuvres for the welcoming ceremony on Friday night, and a banquet buffet (which is more expensive than a sit-down dinner, btw) on Saturday – all in the convention registration price.

That’s a lot of grub.

And when you stop to consider that EVERYTHING food-related in Santa Fe has an approx. thirty-three percent (yes, you read that right) additional fee slapped on for service charges and city taxes, well, that’s a lot of food to provide.

However, now my committee tells me that people will judge us harshly if we don’t have snacks in the f**king hospitality room. Snacks. La Fonda is a dream to work with, a delight. I negotiated a wonderful room/night fee for our LCC members to stay in an historic hotel, with enough personality to knock every attendee’s socks right off, and it’s mere feet from the heart of the city. The cost for that great rate? I agreed that we wouldn’t bring in food ourselves.  

And now the lack of a bowl of pretzels or popcorn might totally undo all the incredible effort we’re expending to make this convention a success?

Grrrr. All I can say at the moment is that it’s good this blog isn’t in video format. You. Do. Not. Want. To. See. Me. Right. Now.

Okay. It’s time for several cleansing breaths . . . in  . . . out . . .  in . . . out . .  .
Focus, Pari. Think about what you can do . . .

All right. Here’s something; I can remind people about a few dates they might have forgotten and spotlight a few new ones.

Jan. 1 – registration fee goes up
Jan. 1 – award nominations begin
Jan. 15 – main deadline to be considered for a panel (we’ll give the nominees until Jan. 31)
Jan. 21 – nomination period ends
Jan. 24 – nominees announced
Jan. 31 – hotel rates for people not already registered for LCC go to the normal, higher La Fonda rate

Whew! That feels better. More in control. But then there’s this:

* Hotel rates
[Begin rant]  In our contract with La Fonda, we agree to have a certain number of hotel rooms filled each night. People who have reserved rooms but haven’t committed to coming to LCC could really torpedo our budget.  Plus, there are many other attendees who’d love to stay at La Fonda — who have registered — and would be delighted to have the opportunity!

So  . . . my message is this: Stop hedging your bets.
We’d love to have you at LCC. But if you’re not planning to come, please give up those rooms now while we can fill them.
[End of rant]

Okay. I’m done pouting now.
I’ve combed my hair,
gotten dressed,
and had my second cup of coffee . . . 

QUESTIONS For today
1.  What is the most important thing – content, food, entertainment, location – to you at a convention?

2.  Are snacks in the hospitality room a deal-breaker for you?

 

the totally frivolous goofy time-wasting blog of lists

by Toni McGee Causey

I am writing the finale of my book and there are words with the sense that I should make which are gone, spilled, dripped, bludgeoned onto the page of the manuscript and my brain, when called upon for sense for the blog, said, and I quote, “No.” And then there was much cursing and lots of procrastinating (did you know there is actually a girl who knitted an entire Ferrari? or a guy who builds insanely huge buildings out of decks of cards?) and I even fed the brain chocolate ice cream, and still, there was a “No.”

At first, I was kinda proud of the amount of work I did this week, because it was a good output for ol’ slowpoke here, and then I saw JT’s post where she wrote a quibillion words and then Cornelia’s post, where she raised JT another billion and probably did it while taming a lion with her other hand, and I looked around at the fact that I had written (oh, like I am going to tell you after those numbers) and played nonstop with the 3-year-old for two days (much drooling ensued) (me, not her) and I realized, I cannot even whine about not having the words for a blog.

So then I thought… Lists! everyone loves lists! Yay! Problem solved!

Until I realized this required coming up with something to list.

….

….

….

….

(And you wonder why I talk about football.)

….

Okay, I have a list. Things I would never do, no way, no how, not even if you paid me HUGE, as in Bill Gates huge. (Well, possibly Bill Gates huge, if you also gave me valium and a few shots.)

1) jump out of a perfectly good airplane

Now, I know that there are a bunch of people who love to do this, and a whole bunch of people who, for military purposes, are made to do this, whether they love it or not (and really, read the fine print when you sign up for military service, because I have a sneaky suspicion that the “will be forced to jump out of a plane” clause is really well hidden… wedged somewhere between “will get to study to be all you can be” and “may possibly be hazardous work environments”)… and I just want to say to those people who do it voluntarily for kicks: seek help. You are not sane.

Of course, I am the woman who fell off the third-from-the-bottom step this summer and fractured her foot in three places. Imagine the damage that I would do jumping out of an airplane. And don’t give me that nonsense about more people die in a car, etc., because the entire way down, I would be obsessing over just who packed my parachute and were they having a bad day, had their girlfriend broken up with them and did they feel like quitting their job and weren’t really paying attention in between the sobbing and the drunk texting and I would have a complete heart attack before I could even pull the chute.

2) Run with the bulls in Pamploma, Spain. Or anywhere, where bulls may run. Because do you see that? —–>

That, my friends, is a bull. NOTE THE POINTY THINGS. Those pointy things are in front of the bull. If the bull is behind you, then the pointy things are between you and the bull, and I am just slightly above average in intelligence, but even I can see that the bull, who knows how to use the horns to move things out of his way… also has four feet. That would be two more feet than I have. Odds are, he’s going to be faster. And if he’s pissed off (and wouldn’t you be if you’d been herded into a narrow street and poked and yelled at and had to chase a bunch of morons?)… he will probably not be thinking, “Oh, dear, look at that dainty little thing there who can’t run very fast; I shall swoop past her, leaving her untouched, for I am a manly bull, full of honor and compassion.” 

Of course, you don’t really have to outrun the bulls. You just have to outrun the other idiots behind you, who are between you and the bulls.

3) Bomb squad, bomb defuser, red wire or blue wire ARE YOU EFFING KIDDING ME?  I can’t commit to a favorite ice cream, or a favorite food, much less a life-changing choice of which wire do I cut to keep from blowing up before the timer runs out.

Now, don’t get me wrong… I am extremely grateful that there are military people and police type people who do this sort of thing every day, and I know that the technologies have advanced and there are (somewhat) better levels of protection, but still. I get distracted too easily by whatever is shiny flapping in my peripheral vision, and it doesn’t take much for me to see something, start thinking what if? and run down the rabbit hole for a few minutes or a few hours, when, meanwhile, dinner is burning and the phone has rung repeatedly for twenty minutes and I didn’t hear or see a thing.

And it makes me wonder… what do they do with the guys who test at the lower end of the class? You know, they still have a passing grade to graduate, but they’re not at the very tip top of the class? those guys? I don’t know about you, but I think it’s really okay if my lawyer was tenth or so in his graduating class, but the bomb squad guy? Insane pressure to be the best at what he or she does. And who wants to work next to the bomb guy who graduated last in his class?

So how about you? What are three things you would totally never, ever, no way, no how, not even with a HUGE reward… ever do?

Contest winners from two weeks ago:

Shannon J

Larry Gasper

kim

Mary (mgarrett)

Donna Kuyper

If you would all email me at toni [at] tonimcgeecausey [dot] com and tell me the online bookstore of your choice and which email you’d like the certficate sent to, I’ll them out right away!

Meanwhile, I am going back to my finale (which, honestly, I’m very happy about, even if I didn’t do eleventy billion words on it this week) (grin)… and I am looking forward to hearing about what you all would not ever ever ever do.

valley of ashes

By Cornelia Read

So, just to glom on to JT’s word counts of yesterday…

Turned in the first draft of my fourth novel yesterday at about 3 p.m.

Deadlines blown: all of them

Pages: 395

Word count: 81,568

Word count last Sunday: I don’t remember. I think 50,000

What I remember of this last week: Um, in one straight twenty-five-hour stretch, I wrote 80 pages. Then I slept for 13 hours, and woke up and started writing at 4 p.m., and had written 60 more pages by 3 p.m. yesterday, at which point I’d reached the 81,568 word count above.

Year it feels like I’ve been awake since: 1952

What my brain feels like:

Favorite line written this week: “I felt like I was being sodomized by my own life. And not the fun kind of sodomy, either.”

What I looked like yesterday at 3 p.m.:

What I imagine my editor’s response will be:

What I felt like, around Thursday at 4 a.m.:

What the overall process of writing this book felt like:

1. I am in labor with a child who has a six-foot-wide head

2. Scratch that, I am undergoing a caesarean section with no anesthesia

3. Oh my fucking GOD, I am being forced to perform a caesarean ON MY SELF with NO ANESTHESIA 

4. With stone knives and bear skins

5. I’m a doctor, Jim, not a magician.

6. I’m not a doctor, Jim

What I would like to be doing right now:

What my brain felt like last night, and also how everything was starting to look around me:

How I wish the writing process actually went:

Song I think we should all be listening to right now:

 

Title of this book:

Valley of Ashes

Projected pub date:

March, 2012

 

The Twelve (No, Eight) (Scratch That, Nine) Days of Christmas

by JT Ellison

On the first day of Christmas, I wrote furiously… 2148 new words.

One the second day of Christmas, I wrote furiously…rewrote 2148 words, and wrote 2741 new words.

On the third day of Christmas, I wrote furiously… rewrote 2741 words, and wrote 4817 new words.

On the fourth day of Christmas, I wrote furiously… rewrote 4817 words, and wrote 4236 new words, which equaled the end of the first draft. Much celebration ensued.

On the fifth day of Christmas, I wrote furiously… rewrote 4236 words, and wrote 2044 new words.

On the sixth day of Christmas, I wrote furiously… rewrote 2044 words, and wrote 2872 new words.

On the seventh day of Christmas, I didn’t write furiously… rewrote 2872 words, which added 479 new words, before having an ocular migraine which I was convinced was a stroke, dragged my husband out of a meeting to take me to the eye doctor because I was afraid to drive, who told me this was a most common experience, and checked my prescription, which hasn’t changed in over six years, wahoo!, to which I responded with an Ativan and subsequent glasses of wine at a holiday party, where good cheer was in abundance and I got to thank my lucky stars that it was simply an ocular migraine and not a serious issue, then ate chicken tenders and went to sleep.

On the eight day of Christmas, I got back down to work… wrote 2829 new words and declared the second draft finished, so I printed the bitch out.

On the ninth day of Christmas, I looked back on the work of the past eight days and felt slightly faint. Knowing a stroke was out of the cards, at least for now, I put all my research away in the book’s box, thought about what I wanted to write next, got a latte from Starbucks, wrote this post, and dove into the big revision.

Is Christmas over yet?

So you don’t have to do the math, that mess above represented 22176 new words in eight days on my newest book. That averages to 2272 new words a day. It was a two steps back three steps forward process. Each day, I’d read through what I wrote the day before, get caught up, then write new words. So I effectively edited the mess whilst writing it, something I rarely do to this extent. The book is now due December 22, thanks to a tiny extension, but will probably get submitted December 13, which might mean that my editor and I don’t have to work over Christmas vacation. Which would be a Good Thing.

I’ve talked about writer’s block here before, the fact that I believe it’s your story’s way of telling you you’re going in the wrong direction. Well, I had a whopping, massive case of block on this book. I’ve never experienced anything like this. I’m betting it’s similar to what many writers experience on their second novel, that soul sucking fear that the world is going to swallow you whole and you will never, ever produce anything that remotely resembled a finished novel, much less anything that real people would want to read, much less pay actual money to read, and you’re the worst writer in the world, with no discipline, and you can’t remember exactly how you wrote the first book, because looking back, you think you must have entered a fugue state and the gremlins in your brain exited, stage right, onto the page and when you woke each morning they appeared as tiny little black scratches on a white background which most of the world’s people have been exposed to because in Europe learning English is mandatory but to you it looks like Cyrillic, which sends you into new waves of spasm because seriously, the whole world can read this but it makes no sense to you.

Yeah.

I am not a perfect creature. As much as I’d like to be, I’m just not. And this book proved it to me, over and over and over again. It humbled me. It refused to work. As always, I like to challenge myself by writing in new forms, new subgenres, new locales. This book is mostly set in Scotland, and is a gothic suspense. Which, and I know, poor me, necessitated two trips to get the research right, one in July and another just before Thanksgiving. I had such grand plans when we booked the second trip—I’d have the draft complete, and I’d just be filling in the blanks. But the muse is a fickle wench sometimes, and she had other plans for me.

The book wouldn’t work.

No matter what I tried, it just wouldn’t. I talked before about how I was going to write the whole book in Scrivener. After outlining (which I’m convinced didn’t help things at all, but instead made them ten times harder) 30,000 words in I had to switch back to Word. Things started moving along again then, but I got stuck. I was writing words, adding to the page count daily, but it was crap. True, absolutely crap. I don’t normally write like that, but I knew I had to get through it. I went back to the beginning twice and started fresh. Suddenly, it was October, my fifth book came out, and I all stopped to do the promotion (because I suck at creating and promoting at the same time), and then in a blink of an eye, it was November 1. The beginning of NaNoWriMo. And I knew if I had any chance at making the deadline, I needed to figure this out.

 

Urquhart Castle, Loch Ness

So three weeks in, past the midpoint but not much further, we headed for Scotland for a week. Thank God we did, I had all sorts of things wrong. So when we returned, after a day off for Thanksgiving, I dove back in, thinking it was all going to come together.

It didn’t.

It was Sunday night, November 28, at about ten. I had been banging my head against the wall all weekend. Big word counts, the story was progressing, but I could feel, in my soul, that something was wrong. And that’s when I put on my headphones and dove into the soundtrack, trying to figure out why I’d put each song in, what it meant to me, to the story. I got to the end of the soundtrack when I heard it. A late addition. The song that had been so incredibly seminal in helping me figure out the end of the book. (And I can’t tell you what it is because it will ruin the story.) As I listened, I realized the massive, huge, ginormous mistake I’d made. All the way back on page 60. It hit me like a ton of bricks. A revelation. A lightbulb.

Magic.

Monday morning the 29th I went back to the beginning. The very first page. I rewrote 175 pages that day, rewrote the next 70 the 30th. I added nearly 11,000 words. And suddenly, there it was, in all its glory. The story finally, after 4 months of head banging, worked.

Hence the massive word dump that led to the finishing line, which isn’t rare for me, I usually write a substantial chunk of the book in the last few weeks.

Writing Secret #859 – Sometimes, when a book isn’t working, you must open yourself to the universe, drop your preconceived notions of what you’re trying to do, and let something magical happen.

Some of you saw this on Facebook. I put it up at the end of the day Tuesday. I feel like I was given a gift, that all the praying and moaning and teeth gnashing finally paid off, and the Muse, who is a fickle wench, but can be a really lovely woman if treated properly, given gifts and sacrifices and not cursed but nurtured and loved, tiptoed down from her mount on high and touched me on the shoulder.

The Muse Collection

There are just housekeeping details to take care of now – I’m reading through for my first major revision, will send to my betas today, will take a day off to buy Christmas presents and send cards, then buckle back down with their suggestions before sending it to New York Monday or Tuesday. Ahead of the revised schedule.

By the way, the new book? It’s called WHERE ALL THE DEAD LIE.

So my question for you today: Have you ever prayed for something that was subsequently delivered? What blessings have you experienced this week?

Wine of the Week: Bivio Tuscan Red, a DOCG Chianti, because we drank a lot of it Tuesday night at the Dutch Lunch Literati Christmas Party, and I think the grapes might have naturally occurring Ecstasy in them, because it made me love everyone, so, so much.

Weaving the Tangled Web

Zoë Sharp

These days, every writer needs a website.

True or false? 

 

True – but why?

And, more importantly, what?

It’s been mentioned quite a bit by my fellow ‘Rati that writing is no longer simply about writing the books, and hasn’t been for some years. In fact, there’s been a lot of talk lately about whether writers should also be their own publishers and cover designers, but I won’t go into that one again. It’s been covered far better than I could in Allison’s recent post.

But even if you don’t go down the eBook route, there’s a whole load of other stuff that goes along with being a writer and occasionally swamps the creative process altogether. Websites, although creative in their own right – and certainly a creative outlet – can be one of them. Websites are a vital but time-consuming (and possibly hideously expensive) part of the job, but if all you’re providing is information on yourself and your work, how do you know it’s the right info, presented in the best possible way?

The reason for this post is because my website is due for revamp. In fact, it’s probably overdue for revamp, but there never seems to be the time to devote to pulling the whole thing down and rebuilding it from scratch. I’ve been trawling the web quite a bit recently looking for good and bad examples of web design, purely from a visitor’s point of view. I won’t name the guilty parties, because this website has already done it for me.

Just as you can learn a lot about writing from reading bad books as well as brilliant ones, you can learn a fair bit about web design from looking at appalling websites. Good design looks effortless but is incredibly difficult to do well.

 But design is one thing.

Content is another.

A writer’s website, after all, should be more about the content than anything else.

Shouldn’t it?

What makes you seek out a writer’s site?

Personally, I don’t put ‘crime fiction authors’ into Google and see what comes up. I usually search on a title or a specific author’s name. Why? Because I’ve heard them mentioned somewhere like here, or recommended, or there’s been a lot of hoo-hah for some reason. I always click on what looks like their official site – I’d rather go straight to the horse’s mouth than a publisher’s author page or similar. Don’t know why – just personal preference, I guess.

But, what do I look for when I get there?

If they’ve written a number of books, I want the right order for the series. I want publication dates for the next book. An opening chapter and/or an excerpt is always good. The publisher and ISBN can be useful for ordering. Tour dates are a plus.

But that’s just me.

What I’d like your help with, is what do YOU want from an author’s website? What are examples of good sites you’ve visited, and why? What DON’T you like about either writer’s sites, or other websites you’ve been on, for whatever reason?

I remember visiting a Thai restaurant site in a town where I was going to do an evening speaking engagement. I went to the site both to get the address, so I could be sure we could find the right place, and make sure we had time to be in and out before I had to be at the gig.

The only thing not on the website was the restaurant’s opening hours. Doh!

Anyway, let me know your thoughts, ‘Rati!

This week’s Word of the Week is toxicophobia, a morbid fear of poisoning. And, along with this – but perhaps more worrying – we get toxicomania, which means a morbid craving for poisons. Doesn’t say why, though…