Brenda Novak auction

The Brenda Novak auction for 2010 is up and running. See it here. and here.
This is a very good cause and raises thousands of dollars every year for diabetes research -- something near and dear to my heart.

There are critiques being offered by various writers -- Eric Van Lustbauer, Candice Hern, Cathy Clamp, Madeline Hunter, Jim C. Hines, and by agents such as Jessica Faust and Christine Whittjohn and editors like Sauna Summers and Evil Editor.  (Search 'critique')

Lots of ARCs and signed books up for bid.  Diana Gabaldon.  Sue Grafton.
 Go here.
And you can get your name in a book! (How cool is that?) 
(search 'name')

ETA --

I've pulled the photos out of the blog posting, because I'm not sure of my copyright usage here.
I feel ok during the auction, but with works of art I don't want to infringe on the artist's rights.

Forbidden Rose getting closer

One  month till Forbidden Rose hits the shelves.
Just saying.

You can read more about Forbidden Rose on its webpage.  Here.

The cover is actually going to have more rose on it than this one on the left shows. 

I think. 

More like this:

See how the rose kinda went like Topsy and growed?
I don't have any of these books yet.  I think they have not been printed.  Cutting it close, are they not?

 In any case, showing a nonchalant acceptance of theoretical merchandise, you can buy it here. 

Technical Topics: Paying an editor

Here you see me hauling advice back from another spot so I can give it twice.

The question was -- 'Should I pay an editor or Book Doctor to go over my manuscript before I submit it?"

"Hell no," says I.

That is the brief answer.
I do not, perhaps, so much excel at 'brief',  but I can do it.
As you see.
The much looonger advice is below the cut,
where it is fairly happy to remain unless this topic grinds your opticals.

And We Got Yet More Questions

Continuing with the questions that have piled up a bit . . .

15)  ---Are there any elements in the SPYMASTER's LADY that you wished you'd done differently?

There are quite a few aspects of my life I wish I'd done differently.  For instance, I wish I'd sold PHP Healthcare stock a few weeks earlier than I did. 

And I made this dish last night  - Fusilli Donna -- from a recipie my friend Donna gave me.  I forgot to add the 1T vinegar, which would have improved everything.  And there was the matter of forgetting to blanch the fresh spinach before I added it, though I coped with that fairly well.  In any case, it was very good the way it came out.

So it would be strange indeed if I did not look at the galley of a book and say -- Dang!  (using the exclamation point,)  I should have done that dfferently.

There's lots of places in Spymaster's Lady, (and in Lord and Spymaster and in Forbidden Rose,)  where I'd love to go in and jiggle with the writing. Make it clearer. Make it sweeter.

But if I were to come up with one particular place I'd change . . .

There's this scene in TSL where Grey has come up on Annique on the road out of Dover.  Grey, who's being 'Robert Fordham', insists on going with her to London.

Originally, I had four or five paragraphs of Annique's internals. We see her thoughts while she decides it's safer to take Robert with her than to leave him behind, him wondering about who she is and maybe going to the authorities.

In the earlier drafts, I show her adding up the things 'Robert' knows about her -- he knows she's French; she's illegally in England; she's a skilled fighter; she throws knives like a circus performer; and she has these shifty Frenchmen chasing her.
I have her thinking this over.
What am I going to do about this? Anneka ponders in a French accent. (trans. Oh la la, I am le screwed.)

She decides that no lie is going to explain all these various lethal skills.  I mean -- What?  She's escaped from a sideshow and has the lion tamer after her?  Keeping mum on the situation gets more and more suspicious.

So -- remember this was all in the draft -- I have Anneka decide to reveal about one tenth of the truth and say she's a retired spy because there's nothing like spreading a flimsy camo net of truth over the Big Knobbly Important Stuff you're planning to hide.

But this explanatory internal was long and boring and slow moving and . . . well . . . internal and I was up to the gizzard in internals along about then.  So I jerked it all out of the final draft.

I figgered it'd be fairly obvious to the reader why Anneka has to make some explanation of who and what she is and if the reader can come up with a more plausible story to account for all that then the reader's a better plotter than I am and probably a writer herself and she will be sympathetic.

But it was all not so much obvious to the reader, apparently.
My bad.

Looking back, I should have left in the part where I explained Anneka's reasons for being so 'open' with Robert, because we are not supposed to leave the reader scratching her head about such stuff and saying 'That was stupid of Anneka', when actually it was rather smart, IMO or at least that was the hopeful intention.

16) --You did an outstanding job with both sensory details and sexual tension -- were these elements you worked in naturally or reviewed the ms to find opportunities to ratchet up?

To which I reply -- Oh wow. Thank you so much.

I write in layers. That is, I make many drafts and go back to add detail. Every part of the manuscript is much niggled over.

But if we're looking at adding stuff at the level of scene, the love story -- the sensuality and sex -- is the core of what I was writing. That's what the 'story' is about. Those relationship scenes went in early. The rest of the pacing was moved around to accommodate them.

The 'action plotting' about drove me crazy, but the Annique/Grey interaction was pure pleasure to write. Came very naturally. 

the photo of old paper is cc attrib glass and mirorr

Technical Topic: Before the Seat of the Pants

One of several unprofitable debates in writing circles is whether it's better to 'Outline and Plan' or better to be a 'Pantser' which is somewhat jumping off a cliff, flapping yer wings, and discovering what the story is about as you fly along.

There are successful writers playing both sides of this field.  They probably do other things that involve numerology or sacrifice of radishes or wearing funny hats or drinking coffee on the Rue Satin-Michel or sitting down to write naked,

though it is to be hoped no one tries all of these simultaneously.

Lots of different working styles.  All the methods have practitioners who build story just fine. All of them are 'right'.


But before the Seat of the Pants . . . before The Extensive Outline . . how do we first approach story?

If I were handing out advice wholesale, (because, for instance, I didn't want to buckle down to work this morning,)  I'd say to start writing before you know the story.

Technical Topics: Describing Characters

How do we let the reader know what our folks look like? 

I want to be fairly specific about physical description.  I find the process of giving eye color, hair color, skin type and so on, technically useful, rather than an annoying necessity.

I'm fortunate enough to use two major POVs, (Yeah!) so I can describe each character through the eyes of the other. That also means I give an interpretation of the physical traits, not just the literal list. (Two lips, indifferent red . . .)

Knitting the Revolution

It's a great pity to do lots of research and find stuff out and then realize you will never be able to use most of it. 

Over the last year, I learned more than I ever wanted to know about  who knit what, when and how in France in 1790. 

None of this will fit into a story. 

"Ah," says I to myself.  "I'll put it on the blog."

So if you don't care about knitting in 1794 in France,
(and who could blame you,)
you can wander off again and I will doubtless write something more interesting someday.

I don't know a great deal about knitting as a craft, I'm afraid.
When I decided Maggie needed to do some knitting in The Forbidden Rose I went out and bought some yarn and five, two-ended needles to see how it felt to knit.

I kept losing yarn off the end of the needles.
Apparently the French of 1790 didn't need the endy bits that keep the yarn from escaping.  Or perhaps using endy bits was considered unsporting.

If I'd been knitting wool, I expect it would have itched.
And if I did this all day long, I'd have really strong fingers.

Flash-Bang Openings and Others

There's a particular kind of opening -- I think of this as a 'flash-bang' opening.

Chapter One, (or, more often, the Prologue,) is full of Big Exciting WhizzBang Action Stuff . . .

and then the Big Exciting Action is dropped like something that was left too long in the back of the refrigerator . . .

and then you pick up in the next chapter with somebody leaning over a microscope or teaching class at the University.

This is a flash bang opening, here.

In this sort of opening, the author gives us a gunfight or the charge of Fire Demons or the little spaceship trying to outrun the big one, and then he abruptly pulls us outta there

so we can settle down to meet the Major Character and get introduced to the scenery and the backstory and be told what is really going on, which is generally less interesting than Fire Demons,
alas.

Bits o' News

Good news of various types.


First off:
My Lord and Spymaster will be coming out in French.  That's a little surprise for me.  My understanding is that Romances set in England are not so often translated into French.  I am very pleased.

Other good news is
Spymaster's Lady --  you will doubtless remember that the French rights for that were sold some time back --  will be available in May, as Le Maître du Jeu.  (Master of the Game)

This is a popular title. There are half a dozen books with this name, including, interestingly enough, one of John Grisham's books.  I don't live all that far away from Grisham.  And no, I've never run into him that I know of.

Maître is here,   And it's at Amazon.ca here.  It's not at Amazon.fr, so it may not be on sale in France itself.   This is a pity.  I was looking forward to knowledgeable, snarky comments on the historical inaccuracies.

I do not have a cover picture, but doubtless one will appear sometime, somewhere.


Moving along in the good news parade . . . I've finished
the First VERY Rough Draft of JUSTINE. 
It weighs in at 90K words. 

I'm not sure why this particular rough draft is so slight.  The Second Rough Draft should be 100K to 110K which is more typical of my first drafts.

First Rough Draft
90000 / 90000 words. 100% done!

Second Rough Draft
3000 / 110000 words. 3% done!

The Second Rough Draft has got itself shortened a bit because the very first thing I did was throw out one of the first four chapters.  Always a rousing start to a redraft.

And final good news is, I have a copy of the reprint for Spymaster's Lady in my hands.

In person, it is a just lovely.  Beautiful.  The cover is graceful and dignified and impressive.  Just a little sensual.  The print is easy to read.

I got all sniffly, holding it.

Technical Topics -- Paragraphing

I got asked about paragraphing down in the comment trail.  This is one of those topics a bit beyond my skill to talk about, but I will attempt it.

The problem with paragraphing is that it's nine-tenth easy routine. Obvious routine. But then the last tenth of paragraphing is magical handwaving and art.

Easy stuff first.

Add Cleverness

I hate it when the characters are supposed to do something particularly clever.

I put it in brackets. 
[Adrian and Justine figure this out, being clever] 
And then when I come back I sit and look at it and can't come up with anything.

I am not feeling clever at all.
The garbage disposal has stopped working, which may have something to do with a quantity of activated charcoal getting down into its little innards.  The light bulb on the microwave has broken. I have never had the lightbulb in a microwave stop working.  And the bottled water dispenser beeps at me when the water runs out. So stupid of it.
I know there's no more water.  I push the button -- see -- and nothing comes out.

I am disgusted with civilization.  I am going to get me nine bean poles and a hive for the honey bee and just not possess anything with electrons running through it except possibly the computer. 
Hah!!

I will get next winter's firewood delivered and go stack that and maybe put my spirit on a more even keel.

In other news, I have figured out that I own 80 linear feet of books.

I'm rounding the corner on the last section of the ms. Looks like the Very Rough Draft of JUSTINE is going to fall at 100,000 words. That means I'll be adding much layering and description to the Second Rough Draft.


I go back and forth on liking the plot structure. Right now, I feel ok about it.

I just finished reading Laura Kinsale's Midsummer Moon. 

(Pause to say -- Why did they give Kinsale such dreadfully bland and forgettable titles?  Why?  Why?  Why?  That one should have been titled 'What the Hedgehog Saw' and then I would remember the title and everyone else would too.)

I will not be able to read Kinsale again till I am at a stopping point in JUSTINE because she is so good she makes me want to cry and just stop writing prose and go be a greeter at Walmart or go back in the Foreign Service and get sent to Afghanistan.

Yet More Questions

Way down the posting trail . . . going back to January . . . there's a bunch of postings answering questions I got asked here and there. 

I didn't finish with them.  Here's some more:

So. 
You have questions?

12) You had some fresh and unexpected twists -- did these come to you with your first draft or did you work in these twists during your revision process?

I am delighted you think some of this was fresh and exciting.

Let me talk about the blindness plotting because it's fairly typical of how this works.

Annique's blindness was part of the original planning of the story. This was also the plot idea I had the most doubts about. I liked writing it, but I didn't think it would sell. Even in the final manuscript I was wondering if I shouldn't rewrite and pull it out.

I still don't know if the book wouldn't be better without it.

The blood relationship between Annique and Galba was also part of the original plotting. I needed this to make Annique's final welcome into the British fold plausible.

So, yes, the action/suspense/spy plot of the story was pretty much in my head when I began writing.

But then you have the surprises.

Annique's special memory was something I came up with the second or third or fifth draft of the story. Originally I had her smuggling around a book with all this information in it. Awkward and unworkable.


So some plot twists were there in the original basket.  Some of the plot ideas I started with got tipped out of the basket along the way.  And then there's some interesting stuff I picked up as I wandered tra la la down the path and I didn't think of it at all till I was in the middle of writing.


12)  Any authors or books you feel you learned from either fiction or non-fiction?

I steal from only the best, so   You know how they have these questions on interveiws about what books most influenced you?

I love this, because I pick up stuff everywhere and I just wish I could acknowledge it all.

When I was in grammar school, Fifth Grade maybe, I read Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead. The book said that the different roles taken by males and females, even the different temperament that is assumed to be proper to each sex, is determined by the society rather than by anything innate.

I never write a female character without asking myself . . . 'this bit that my heroine is doing -- is this something I could see a male doing? Am I assigning this character a 'female' role and making her passive or dependent by doing so? What am I saying about the female spirit when I write this?'

Fiction that influenced me? . . . well, it's all the usual suspects:  Bronte, Heyer, Austen, Sayers, Dunnett, Sergeanne Golon and another writing team, the Curtises, R.A. Heinlein, Bujold, Lackey,and Zelazny, (all great S.F. storytellers), Tolkien, (is there anyone who doesn't put Tolkien on these lists?)

Current Romance greats would include -- and Lord, this is not limited to these wonderful writers -- SEP, JAK, NR, Kinsale, Ivory, Chase, Kleypas, Beverley, Gabaldon, Gellis, Quinn, Putney, Balogh.
I've read every word these writers have in print.  I keep learning from them.

(ETA.  It was pointed out to me that I've used 12 twice.  Well, heck.)

14)  How do you feel winning the RITA impacted your career if it did?

The conventional wisdom is that winning the RITA has zero effect on sales. Readers have never heard of the award. They don't know what it means.  Marketing mavens who will slap on a big cover quote from the 'Yellowknife Morning Chronicle' won't bother to mention the RITA.

But writers know what the RITA means.  Writers award the RITA. This is writers honoring other writers.  So much an honor.  I'm still stunned whenever I see the golden lady sitting on my shelf.

Going back to the practical of whether a RITA win has an effect on sales . . .
There's this -- while readers maybe don't know the RITA, the people who work in agenting, editing, marketing and publishing Romance do. The book buyers for stores know what the award is.
So maybe the RITA will give me just a little blip of recognition with these folks.
It can't hurt, anyway.


I haven't run out of these questions, y'know.  I just figure folks are getting bored, along about now.
Not that that makes me turn off the spigot on a posting, generally.
Anyway, I'll be back with the other Q&A
eventually.

Dreaming . . . Dreams, dreams, dreams . . .

Thinking about using dreams in a story.

First off -- if anybody wants to write dreams, they should go for it. There's the vast panoply of Western literature to back you up. It's full of dream sequences.

The downside of using a dream sequence is . . .

-- With a dream sequence, the reader 'sees' the technique. She gets a glimpse of the stagehands moving the props around, as it were.  It's an inherently intrusive technique -- like chaptering.  But, unlike chaptering, it's unusual enough that the reader notices.  It's heavy handed.  Or heavy footed.  Or something.

Injecting Present Tense

I was pondering verb tenses the other day. Thinking about the tenses we employ when we write in Past Tense, as we generally do.


'Past Tense' should really be called 'past tenses' because you got yer
Simple Past Tense, [Myrtle hunted,]
and yer Past Progressive, [Myrtle was hunting,]
and yer Past Perfect, [Myrtle had hunted,]
and yer Past Progressive, (or Past Perfect Continuous,) [Myrtle had been hunting.]

And there may be some others, for all I know.  All these verb tenses carefully define relationships between the particular bits of the past when stuff is happening. They are the 'home tense'.

The JUSTINE Manuscript

Justine comes along slowly.
Slowly . . . slowly . . . slowly.

I've finished up a big section and I'm moving on to new territory.
Trying to limit the number of characters in the manuscript. 
Trying to simplify this maze of a plot.



I'm about 50K words into the Very Rough Draft.

More Maunderings About Saidisms

Responding in the comment trail, I got all talkative about saidisms and rules and thought I'd stretch out and natter about that in a post instead of trying to fit everything into the little comment box.

 I saw the Guardian article with many Writers' Ten Rules of Writing.  It's here,  I enjoyed it up down and sideways, of course, and found it interesting and educative.

One problem with rules is that they tend to tell you what not to do.
But people don't read books because of the tremendous number of adverbs the writer didn't employ.  They read books because of what the author is doing right.

Fight Scenes

I was thinking about fight scenes. 

I'm not about to write one just in the next week, but I will need one near the end of JUSTINE.
So I am pondering the physical aspects of violence in the back of my mind.

You got yer 'one guy attacks another guy' kinda scenes. 
These do not tend to be fair fights because if you want to 'attack' somebody, you bring a gun and shoot them or you pick up a baseball bat and jump out and hit them over the head.

When to use saidisms.

A 'saidism' is one of those nifty replacements for 'said'.
He whispered, he noted, he declared, he suggested, he promised and so on and on and on.  

You run into the rule sometimes --
No Saidisms.

And it just seems so wrong.

What it is . . .

there's this unfortunate tendency of novice writers to pluck creative dialog tags, apparently at random, from a list they have in the back of their three-ring binder from sixth grade.

This leads the friendly folks who put together writing books to grow thin and haggard and tear their hair out and make a rule
No Saidisms
which probably relieves their minds considerably,

but it's, like, y'know, more of a guideline.

When do we use saidisms?

Lots of places.

Pretty obviously, the first thing we ask ourselves when we come up with a nifty saidism is whether this word
-- and all the information packed into this word --
has been put into a dialog tag because we need that information.

Are we writing he complained because the complaining is important
or have we just decided to tag dialog in a novel way because we're sick of using 'said' and Mrs. Grundy told us in sixth grade not to repeat words?

A dismaying proportion of the saidisms used by novice writers are information that
-- does not need to be conveyed,
-- or can be revealed another, better, way,
-- or is exaggerated or inappropriate.



When you use a saidism, what you get, a lot of times, is:

"I'll tell them to leave the mayo off your sandwich," Maurice stated . . . (or declared, cajoled, promised, expostulated, argued, complained, opined, or maintained.)

Really.  No.
Don't use that saidism.  Use 'he said.'
Maurice didn't promise or declare.
He just said it, for Pete's sake.


Before we use a saidism, we assure ourselves the saidism is logical and necessary and not exaggerated and we're dealing with information the reader must be told.


Even if this is necessary information -- is a dialog tag is the best way to get it across to the reader??

The brute force way to determine this is to try out a couple different techniques that convey this necessary and exciting information.

One way to convince ourselves we don't really need to tell the reader that Maurice is asserting and maintaining and cajoling about mayonnaise is to drag those saidisms out of the dialog tag and put them into action or internals.  That's when we suddenly realize that Maurice ain't doing any such thing as cajoling, nohow.

Anyhow . . . let's say we got this character is whispering.

First we satisfied ourselves that the character is really whispering
and not just 'saying'.  

We also decided we need to tell the reader the character is whispering
and we have decided that the nature of the dialog itself and the surrounding action does not at this time make it clear this is all in whispers.


Ok.  So, having got those questions out of the way, we look at our saidism as a dialog tag --

She whispered, with a child’s simplicity, “I do not need to see your face, Citoyenne Finch.”

We change it around a bit. Take it out of the dialog tag and put it into action or description or internals.

They could only speak in whispers. She said, with a child’s simplicity, “I do not need to see your face, Citoyenne Finch.”

We convey it in Internal Monolog.

I must not be overheard. She said, with a child’s simplicity, “I do not need to see your face, Citoyenne Finch.”

We drop the information into description.

“I do not need to see your face, Citoyenne Finch.” The words snaked out from under the rain; words made of cool wavery sounds.


When we look at these couple alternatives, the simplicity of simply laying out the whisper as a dialog tag is obvious.
We place the saidism in this sentence and we know it's right.
We can break that 'no saidisms rule' and still sleep easily at night which is nice.

Speaking generally, it has been my experience that verbs in the class of saidisms that relate to the actual mouth-moving action of speaking,
like whispered, murmured, muttered, yelled, spat out, grated under his breath, and so on
 are the most apt to become elegant and thrifty dialog tags.

They are simple, straightforward actions that lend themselves to expression as simple action verbs.

Having determined that we should tell the reader about the mouth movements, we may often do this with a saidism.


Moving along -- there is a much larger class of saidisms that show intent and emotion. Avowed, complained, averred, promised, guessed, questioned, concluded, wished, harassed, rejoiced, mourned, remembered, and so on.

These are the saidisms that end up getting latched onto sentences that do not deserve them.
What we tend to forget is that these are powerful words. You can't just drop them down anywhere.

This is where we get the infamous:

"I'll tell them to leave the mayo off your sandwich," he promised. Or avowed, stated, maintained, declared, cajoled, expostulated or stone-walled.

All those words are too important and exciting to get attached to a sentence about mayo.  They are BIG.  In this case, he didn't promise or declare.
He just said it, for Pete's sake.


Speaking very generally again,
these saidisms that carry intent and emotion are full of complex information and abstract concepts.

The concepts are so big and floppy they want to spread out comfortably in Internal Monolog, in other internals, or in the dialog itself, or in really sneaky and significant accompanying action.
 The information -- and we are assuming it is vitally necessary information and relevant and all that -- doesn't like to be crammed into a dialog tag.

Let's say we have something to say about Hawker's state of mind.

“You don’t eat your own donkey. And you don’t use your own woman as bait,” Hawker complained. "That’s one of those delicate distinctions gentlemen make.”


or

“You don’t eat your own donkey. And you don’t use your own woman as bait,” Hawker said sarcastically. "That’s one of those delicate distinctions gentlemen make.”

But let's put it into action instead.

“You don’t eat your own donkey. And you don’t use your own woman as . . .” Hawker kicked a loose chunk of cobble in the gutter. It rolled end-over-end and rapped up against a wall. “bait. That’s one of those delicate distinctions gentlemen make.”

The action carries the big, complex emotion in a way the dialog tag can't.

 If we have an emotion to convey, we take it out of the dialog tag where it is all cramped up and simplified. We stop trying to compress big important emotion into the tone of a voice. In IM, in action, in description, we can use more words, basically.
And it lets us pull in some images we got lying around in our brains doing nothing in particular.

The final class of saidism is the fairly innocuous
replied, answered, repeated, interrupted, cut off, and so on.

These talk about the mechanics of the dialog train. Useful friends of the writer, this lot, but only if the answering or repeated or interrupting is significant.

We don't use them when it is obvious that one line of dialog is in answer to the other. (Well . . . duh.) We don't use them when the act of answering or repeating is not in itself important.

The whole -- 'when do we use saidisms' question -- is like talking about anything else in writing.  You read the advice in the writing books.  Take some.  Leave some.  Some gets rained out.

And we got book covers pretty much galore

In the interests of bringing exciting covers to my blog ...  Here is Cathy Clamp's Serpent Moon and the May trade reprint of Spymaster's Lady.
Annique certainly gets around, doesn't she?

(I moved all these covers below the cut, so browers won't have a hard time loading the blog, which I think they may do, sometimes.)

Happy Chinese New Year

This is especially fun for me since I have Chinese relatives.

photocredit Susan Watkins Schwartz