A Little Light Blogging by Deborah J. Lightfoot

Goodreads Book Giveaway

2012-02-04T10:35:00.001-06:00

My first book giveaway: At Goodreads, enter to win a free copy of WATERSPELL Book 1: The Warlock (paperback edition). Good luck!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

WATERSPELL Book 1: The Warlock

by Deborah J. Lightfoot

Giveaway ends February 28, 2012.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win

My Favorite Quotes: 5

2012-01-29T14:14:00.000-06:00

“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.”—Martin Buber

“In all crises of human affairs there are two broad courses open to a man. He can stay where he is or he can go elsewhere.” —P.G. Wodehouse

“Mistakes are the usual bridge between inexperience and wisdom.” —Phyllis Theroux

“Take the course opposite to custom and you will almost always do well.” —Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“Drift beautifully on the surface and you will die unbeautifully in the depths.” —Richard Ellmann

“The respect of those you respect is worth more than the applause of the multitude.” —Arnold Glasow

“Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.” —Oscar Wilde

“Patience is a minor form of despair disguised as a virtue.” —Ambrose Bierce

“The soul that has no fixed goal loses itself; for as they say, to be everywhere is to be nowhere.” —Michel de Montaigne

“Anything you’re good at contributes to happiness.” —Bertrand Russell

“Shun idleness. It is a rust that attaches itself to the most brilliant metals.” —Voltaire

“Life is something like a trumpet. If you don’t put anything in, you won’t get anything out.” —W. C. Handy

“The best way to be boring is to leave nothing out.” —Voltaire

“Stupidity lies in wanting to draw conclusions.” —Gustave Flaubert

“The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.” —Oliver Wendell Holmes

“Where men are the most sure and arrogant, they are commonly the most mistaken.” —David Hume

(For more like these: My Favorite Quotes: 4)

Story First; Explanations Later

2012-01-21T11:07:00.000-06:00

“The adventures first,” said the Gryphon in an impatient tone: “explanations take such a dreadful time.” —Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Though I didn’t remember the Gryphon’s plea in time to enter it into the conversation, this was what I was getting at during a recent critique session involving a writer whose work I’d not read before. The writer began her story with a page and a half of exposition, conveying all the background information that she considered essential to a reader’s understanding of what came next.

“No, no,” I said. “Start with action and dialogue. First hook your readers; draw us in with happenings. Then give us the backstory—a bit at a time so as not to slow the pace.”

“But [unnamed editor] told me to set the scene up front,” the writer countered. “The editor wanted all this information at the beginning.”

“Maybe that’s a particular editor’s viewpoint,” I rejoined. “But I’m telling you as a reader: I’m only interested in learning the backstory after I’ve been given a reason to care about it. Put your characters in a situation that stirs my concern for their well-being, whether physical or emotional, or both. When I’ve connected with the characters, then I’ll want to hear how they came to be caught in that situation.”

The writer then confessed that she had originally begun her story with action, but upon the advice of the unnamed editor she had rewritten it to put the explanations first. Too bad she hadn’t gotten a critique from the Gryphon: he would have set her straight.

ALL PUBLISHING PROFESSIONALS ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL

Nearly every writer I know has bought at least one critique from a publishing professional: generally the younger editors and agents who populate the conference circuit. I, too, have purchased critiques, with mixed results. Some have been astute and helpful and worth the money. But others have been worse than useless. They’ve offered bad advice, which I might have felt obliged to follow if I’d been less experienced at this game. Fortunately, though, I know better.

Here’s one example:

“It’s unclear to me whether Carin is meant to be a mortal living in our reality who inadvertently enters a fantasy realm or if they both [protagonist Carin and deuteragonist swordsman] inhabit the same world. Is she trespassing on someone’s property or on another world entirely? There’s no sense in keeping it a secret, so this should be made absolutely clear in the first chapter.” —Young Nameless Agent 1

Actually, YNA1, there is every reason to build this question in the reader’s mind. It is a fundamental aspect of the mystery.

And again:

“Start your manuscript earlier so that we can better get to know Carin … I don’t yet know her enough to be as invested in her welfare as I’d like. Can you let us get to know her more first?” —Young Nameless Agent 2

As the story opens, YNA2, Carin herself does not know who she is. She’s a teenager groping for identity and purpose. She is searching for the place where she belongs.

All told, it takes three 400-page books to finally answer the questions: “Who is Carin? Where does she come from? Where does she belong?” Carving a place for yourself in a world where you don’t really fit: that’s a major theme running through the WATERSPELL trilogy.

FANTASY IS MYSTERIOUS

My encounters with these Young Nameless Agents made me believe they require, in their reading, the same kind of instant gratification they’re accustomed to in every aspect of their lives. Want to connect with a friend? Do it by instant message. Need a fact? Find it immediately online. Have a stray thought? Tweet it at once.

But fantasy, by its nature and at its heart, is filled with mystery. The answers don’t present themselves at the outset. They are buried, oftentimes under layers, deep in the subtexts.

Getting the whole story from an intricate, multilayered fantasy requires a reader’s patience and attention to detail. It took me years to weave together the threads of my tale. Readers need not expect to get the whole story in the first 10 pages.

I’m not into instant gratification—either my own or other people’s. I much prefer the feeling of satisfaction that comes with delayed gratification. Wait for it, work for it, invest yourself in achieving it … then enjoy the fruits of success. There’s nothing better.

Now I’ve committed to memory the Gryphon’s excellent advice: “Adventures first, please! Explanations take such a dreadful time.” I’ll be better prepared to argue for the Gryphon, if ever again I hear of an inexperienced member of the publishing profession contradicting that advice.

Cheap Reads

2012-01-15T15:03:00.000-06:00

The publishing business appears to be evolving at light-speed. But some things NEVER change.

I’ve been grousing on Facebook about readers who willingly shell out $3 for a single cup of coffee but refuse to pay more than a buck for a novel. Case study: Darcie Chan has sold more than 400,000 copies of THE MILL RIVER RECLUSE, her first novel, after self-publishing it as an e-book. But because she has priced it at 99 cents, she has netted “only” about $130,000.

To stimulate sales, “cutting the retail price to 99 cents from an initial $2.99 was critical,” reported THE WEEK magazine of December 23, 2011.

Three dollars was an entirely reasonable price to charge for a 300-page novel. A bargain, in fact. But sales didn’t really take off until Darcie lowered the price to a buck—practically giving it away.

HISTORY REPEATS

Another writer who found market forces arrayed against him was Lewis Carroll. In his Preface to the 1896 Edition of Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, Carroll wrote:

“I take this opportunity of announcing that the Nursery ‘Alice,’ hitherto priced at four shillings, net, is now to be had on the same terms as the ordinary shilling picture-books—although I feel sure that it is, in every quality (except the text itself, in which I am not qualified to pronounce), greatly superior to them. Four shillings was a perfectly reasonable price to charge, considering the very heavy initial outlay I had incurred; still, as the Public have practically said, ‘We will not give more than a shilling for a picture-book, however artistically got-up,’ I am content to reckon my outlay on the book as so much dead loss, and, rather than let the little ones, for whom it was written, go without it, I am selling it at a price which is, to me, much the same thing as giving it away.”
—Lewis Carroll, Christmas 1896

In this regard, at least, NOTHING has changed in the book business. Writers and “the Public” can't seem to agree on the true value of our work.

I’m standing my ground for now, keeping the price of my WATERSPELL e-books at $2.99 each — which is a perfectly reasonable price to charge, considering my heavy investment of time and energy, and the cash I've laid out to get to this point. But as Darcie Chan said in an interview: “I did that [cut the price of her book] to encourage people to give it a chance. I saw it as an investment in my future as a writer.”

Is this what the future holds? Dollar books?

THE MUSIC BUSINESS DID THIS

If publishing is meant to use the music business as a model, then we need to be comparing apples with apples, not with oranges. A single tune can be bought for $1. The fan who wants the whole “album” or CD will thus pay $10 to download 10 songs.

The analogous approach for books, therefore, would be 99 cents per chapter. That would set the price of my 22-chapter, 400-page novels at about $21.75 — a list price that was once considered perfectly reasonable for long, complex, literary novels.

Of course I wouldn’t dream of charging that much for an e-book. But is $2.99 also too much, in the eyes of today’s bargain-hunting reader?

I shouldn’t think so. A novel, after all, lasts a lot longer than a three-minute song … or a $3 cup of coffee.

The Luck Factor: Word-of-Mouth Publicity

2012-01-13T12:54:00.000-06:00

On this Friday the 13th, it seems appropriate to consider the role of “luck” in the publishing game. To succeed as a writer takes practice, diligence, determination, experience, skill, patience, and oftentimes a large dollop of luck.

From a pile of writers magazines I’d saved, I pulled out the June-July 2009 issue of The Bulletin of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. This paragraph particularly resonated with me:

“Like most of publishing, the truth isn’t really out there. It’s all kind of made up. Like a story. Most of us have anecdotal evidence of writers who never earn out, yet continue to receive increasingly enormous advances. Or writers who hit the bestseller lists, and yet their advances stay low. An agent said of a friend of mine, ‘I don’t understand why she doesn’t have a career. Her books are good. She’s got so much talent.’ Then there are books most would agree are badly written that turn their authors into millionaires.” — from “Great Expectations” by Nancy Holder

Luck? Yes, to an extent. A lot of it is being in the right place at the right time with the right book. Success can hinge entirely on word-of-mouth publicity. In this age of social networking, getting one’s book in front of the right blogger or opinion leader can send sales skyrocketing.

STRENGTHS and WEAKNESSES

Of the various hats a writer must wear—creator, storyteller, self-editor, critiquer, file formatter/word-processing whiz, blogger, social networker, e-publisher, advertising copywriter, saleswoman—I am least adept at the last two. I studied journalism, not PR.

I love to write, and I’ve devoted decades to learning how to do it to the best of my ability, producing six award-winning books and crafting a seventh that will also do me proud, I believe, when it comes out this spring. As an editor, I have a reputation in certain circles for magically turning sow’s ears into silk purses.

Social networking, which I initially resisted as an enormous time-waster, now strikes me as kind of fun. I don’t let a month go by without blogging, and I’ve recently joined Facebook and also created an Author page there.

Mere months ago, I was an e-publishing novice. Now I’m something of an expert in formatting files for Kindle Direct Publishing and Smashwords.

But publicity? Marketing? Those, I suck at. I’ve got my WATERSPELL website and my Amazon Author page. I’ve told just about everyone I know that my first two novels have been published, and the third is in the pipeline.

To reach a wider audience, though, I need reviewers and opinion leaders to plug my books on their websites and to their audiences. I need word of mouth.

If I’m going to beat the odds, I need a little luck. Happy Friday the 13th!

Organizing Book Revision Notes

2012-01-08T12:40:00.003-06:00

I spent my Winter Holidays revising WATERSPELL Book 3: The Wisewoman, getting it nearer ready for a Spring 2012 release. While writing and revising Books 1 and 2 (which are available now as e-books and paperbacks—please see waterspell.net), I accumulated a mass of notes: details I needed to work into Book 3, or background that should underpin the third, climactic book.

My habit is to jot down a thought, whenever it comes to me, on whatever scrap of paper is at hand. I end up with sticky-note notes, index-card-size notes, notes scrawled on legal pads, and notes penciled on the backs of envelopes. (See "Notepads, Notepads, Everywhere.") By the time I got to Book 3 of the long and intricate WATERSPELL trilogy, I’d accumulated a rather intimidating mass of notes.

To organize them, I hit upon the idea of separating them into four categories:

PLOT ISSUES / LOOSE ENDS
TOWARD THE CLIMAX
DESCRIPTIVE DETAILS
INSIGHTS

This way, I could sort them by importance.

“Plot Issues / Loose Ends” and “Toward the Climax” (notes related specifically to the final three chapters) took priority. These were essential matters: the solutions to mysteries and the answers to questions. Throughout my editing of all three books, I’d made careful notes to be sure of not overlooking anything vital that must be dealt with in Book 3.

“Descriptive Details” were secondary. In this folder, for example, I filed a quote from snake-handler Bill Haast (1910-2011), describing his pain when he was bitten by a blue krait, one of the world’s most poisonous snakes. “I felt like the skin had been stripped from my body, like every nerve in my teeth was exposed, like my hair was being ripped out of my head,” he said. He had hallucinatory visions of lambs’ heads and purple curtains. Nowhere in Book 3 did I have occasion to use Haast’s pain for inspiration (instead, I drew on my own experience of being stung by a scorpion in the tropics), but I’m keeping the clipping in my files. In a later book, I may want to inflict Haast’s pain on another character.

Under “Insights,” I filed this sticky-note to myself that I do not remember writing: “Carin [WATERSPELL's protagonist] had lost her identity, but perhaps never her sense of place.” That idea, I now see, permeates Book 3. In fact, it’s central to the whole story. Early in Book 1 we find this: “Here in the hard-won north, she might find the place where she belonged.” Carin, like most young people, needs to know where she fits in. She’s on a quest to find her place, wherever it might be.

LETTING the MANUSCRIPT REST

WATERSPELL Book 3: The Wisewoman, a 404-page manuscript, now awaits me on a table near my favorite reading chair. I plan to distract myself with other pursuits (such as promoting Books 1 and 2) for a few weeks. Then I’ll give it a final prepublication read-through. Publication target date: April 2012

http://www.kathrynlay.com/OrganizedWriter.html

THE ORGANIZED WRITER IS A SELLING WRITER

While pulling my Book 3 notes together, I remembered an excellent book of advice written by my friend Kathryn Lay. It's chockablock with great practical tips. The Organized Writer Is a Selling Writer is available directly from Kathy. Or download the Kindle e-book.

SELF-EDITING: A Systematic Approach to Editing Your Own Writing

Another resource I'll mention is my own book, Self-Editing: Two Half Brains Make a Whole Writer. It offers tips for (partially) computer-aided editing and for invoking the critical faculties of your logical left brain at just the right time. First use the Find feature to locate predictable problems: “ly” adverbs, overuse of commas, qualifiers that leech the life from writing. Then move on to meatier matters of self-editing: eliminating wordiness, changing passive voice to active, when to show and how best to tell, subtlety, pacing, etc. This is nuts-and-bolts advice for fixing common errors.

E-book formats available: Nook, Kindle, and others.

The Structure of WATERSPELL

2011-12-17T14:17:00.000-06:00

I’m about to settle down with the manuscript of WATERSPELL Book 3: The Wisewoman to make my final revisions and get it ready for a Spring 2012 release. While sorting my notes, I found a triangle I had sketched as a visual summary of how the trilogy is structured.

THE WISEWOMAN

At the base—that is, at the bottom tip of this downward-pointing triangle—we find The Wisewoman: she who is the instigating character, the one who gets the ball rolling.

The upward-sloping left leg of the triangle represents Book 1: The Warlock. The wisewoman (Megella, pronounced Meg-Ella) sends Carin off on her quest, then remains in the background as that initial part of the story unfolds.

The top line of the structure represents Book 2: The Wysard. In this, the middle segment, Carin and Verek continue the quest, with Megella deep in the background, barely mentioned. As depicted in this little diagram of mine, during Book 2 Megella is visually and literally removed from the main action.

It’s in Book 3: The Wisewoman that Megella comes into her own. The rightmost leg of the triangle takes us back toward the beginning, back toward the woman who started things moving in the first place. In Book 3, Meg steps into the foreground, joining Carin and Verek and taking a prominent role as they conclude the quest.

ALCHEMY

The fascinating thing is: A downward-pointing triangle is the alchemical symbol for water! Get it? WATER-SPELL?

You might think I must have fully understood this structure before I began writing. But no: It only came into focus when I was deep into the writing of Book 3.

Something tells me, however, that the wisewoman has always seen how things connect. From the beginning, she’s been aware of her place at the core of the whole complex framework.

A Glossary of Good Old Words

2011-12-14T17:23:00.000-06:00

“The difference between the almost-right word and the right word is really a large matter—it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning. ... A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.”

—Mark Twain

“Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.”

—Winston Churchill

“In the expression of the emotions originality merits the first consideration.... The words used, however, should be old ones.”

—Fujiwara no Teika (1162-1241)

Finding the right words for WATERSPELL—words with the flavor of medieval speech and the patina of age on them; words possessing the virtue of brevity—became a great treasure hunt, luring me into hundred-year-old dictionaries, enriching me with the troves of golden synonyms that make English such a versatile tongue, and delighting me with the color and variety of the language as it once was used. Here is a glossary of terms from the trilogy that you may find as intriguing, in their unfamiliarity or their long history, as I did.

Key: Where possible, I’ve told what sort of word or phrase it is (dialectal English, old slang, archaic, chiefly Scottish, etc.) or named the date or the century of its origins in English (14c, etc.). Terms from the fictitious Ladrehdinian language (Lad) are boldface and italic, and you’ll just have to take my word that they mean what I say they do.

“You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.”

—Robert Frost

arrah: Irish expression of surprise or excitement

bannock: a flat bread or cake of oatmeal or barley meal (British Celtic, before 1000)

bantling: a very young child (16c)

bedizened: dressed or adorned gaudily (1661)

betony: a plant of the mint family, used in medicine and dyeing (before 1000)

bindweed: a twining plant (vine) that wraps around and strangles whatever it grows upon (16c)

blackguard: scoundrel, villain (16c)

blackheart: warlock, witch, wizard or wysard, sorcerer (Lad)

blencathar: blind cave salamander (Lad)

bloodguilt: guilt resulting from bloodshed (16c)

bowstring: to strangle with the string of an archer's bow (14c)

bray: to crush or grind, as seeds in a mortar (14c)

buskins: laced boots (16c)

byre: barn (before 12c)

cadger: one who gets what he wants by imposing on another's generosity or friendship (Scots, 13c)

calendula: pot marigold; herb with showy, musky-scented flowers, used medicinally (1789)

callet-fish: cuttlefish (Lad)

caltrop: a device with four metal points so arranged that when any three are on the ground the fourth projects upward as a hazard to the hooves of horses (15c)

cant: lively, lusty (dial Eng, 14c)

cantrip: witch's trick, magic spell (Scot—probably an alteration of "caltrop")

carking: burdensome, annoying (16c)

casque-bug: insect of Lad. with a shape suggestive of a helmet (casque)

chalse: magical shackle or fetter (Lad)

chit: a pert young woman (16c)

clewbird: a bird of Lad. with fluffy feathers that give it a rounded shape suggestive of a ball of yarn (a clew) (before 12c)

cockcrow: dawn (13c)

costrel: a water bottle similar to a canteen, flat on one side to nestle nicely against the body for easy carrying (14c)

cyhnaith: a powdered healing herb, bronze in color and hotter than hell (Lad)

darkling: in the dark; vaguely threatening or menacing (15c)

dhera: a tart, sweet liquor made from currants (Lad)

didnae: didn't (Scots Eng)

farsinchia: netherworld of the damned; the infernal regions; hell (Lad)

faugh: interjection used to express disgust or abhorrence (16c)

fay: fairy, elf (14c)

fetch-life: wraith that fetches the soul of a dying person

feverfew: herb used as a remedy for fever and headache (15c)

fey: fated to die, or marked by an otherworldly air or attitude (Scots, before 12c)

fìleen: a term of endearment (Lad, akin to "filly" and the Irish "colleen" combined)

firedrake: a fire-breathing dragon (before 12c)

firestone: pyrite used for striking fire; flint (before 12c)

firkin: a unit of capacity equal to 1/4 barrel (14c)

firstling: the first of a kind; the first result; first offspring (16c)

footle: talk or act foolishly; waste time (1892)

footling: lacking judgment or ability; lacking use or value; trivial (1897)

forfend: ward off; prevent (14c)

gê: earth, ground (Lad, akin to Greek "geo")

gillie: a (young) male attendant or servant (Scottish Gaelic and Irish, 1705)

glenondew: antacid (Lad)

hell-wain: hell wagon (before 12c)

hyweldda: potion for treating concussion (Lad)

jennet: female donkey (15c)

kitling: young creature (Brit. dial., 13c)

knacker: buyer of worn-out domestic animals or their carcasses to use as animal food or for their hides (1812—probably from Eng. dial. "saddlemaker")

Lake Maidens: Welsh fairies of the underworld, whose entrance to the human world is by the lakes

lathy: thin and narrow like a lath (13c)

lay: a narrative poem (13c)

lurcher: one who lurks; spy (archaic)

Macassar-Oil: an oil used as a hairdressing (1800)

minx: a pert, impudent girl

numbles: animal entrails used as food (13c)

quillwort: a fernlike, aquatic plant with quill-like leaves

ravening: rapacious; voracious (16c)

recto: right-hand page of an open book; on the right-hand leaf

reiver: raider (Scots, before 12c)

savitar: mythical monster similar to a dragon (Lad)

scrag: execute by hanging or garroting; wring the neck of; choke, manhandle; kill, murder (1752)

’scried/’scrying: shortened form of “descried/descrying”—finding out; discovering (14c)

scurf: dandruff (before 12c)

skimble-skamble: rambling or confused; senseless (16c)

slipstone: fine-grained sharpening stone for putting an edge on a knife

smallclothes: underclothes

spade: a unit of length (dimension unknown; this use of the word spade comes from “The Banshee of the MacCarthys,” in Irish Fairy & Folk Tales: “My mother ... asked Leary ... how far we were from Mr. Bourke's? ‘’Tis about ten spades from this to the cross [crossroad], and we have then only to turn to the left into the avenue, ma'am.’”)

span: the distance from the end of the thumb to the end of the little finger of a spread hand; equal to 9 inches (before 12c)

sprat: a small or young fish; by extension, a young, small, or insignificant person

starveling: one who is thin from lack of food (16c)

stone: a unit of weight, equal to 14 lbs. (before 12c)

strap oil, dose of: punishment (old slang, from "a flogging with a strap")

tatterdemalion: a person dressed in ragged clothing (1608)

tench: a freshwater food fish (14c)

trull: loose woman, strumpet (16c)

unchancy: dangerous (Scot—16c)

varlet: a base unprincipled person; knave (15c)

verso: left-hand page of an open book

vetiver: long, fragrant roots of a grass yielding an aromatic oil

wencel: child, girl (Old Eng, giving rise to "wench," 13c)

whiffet: a small, young, or unimportant person

wight: a living being; creature (before 12c)

woad: an herb yielding blue dyestuff from its leaves (before 12c)

woundwort: a plant of the mint family, used medicinally (16c)

Lest enthusiasm run away with me, another line of good advice is:

"In composing, as a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigor it will give your style."

—Sydney Smith, Lady Holland's Memoir (1855)

WATERSPELL E-Books for NOOK

2011-12-10T11:49:00.001-06:00

They’re here! The NOOK Book editions of WATERSPELL Books 1 and 2 are now available for download:

Book 1: The Warlock (Nook book) $2.99

Book 2: The Wysard (Nook book) $2.99

Barnes & Noble was kind of slow on the uptake. Amazon has had the Kindle Editions available for many days now:

Kindle Edition—Book 1: The Warlock $2.99

Kindle Edition—Book 2: The Wysard $2.99

Amazon also has the advantage in showing more of the book details, including a synopsis or Book Description of each title. I hope Barnes & Noble will eventually add a Description of each. Heaven knows, I’ve done my best to make the information available, to wit:

WATERSPELL Book 1: The Warlock

Drawn into the schemes of an angry wizard, Carin glimpses the place she once called home. It lies upon a shore that seems unreachable. To learn where she belongs, and how to get there, the teenage traveler must decipher the words of an alien book, follow the clues in a bewitched poem, conjure a dragon from a pool of magic—and tread carefully around a seductive but volatile, emotionally scarred sorcerer who can’t seem to decide whether to love her or kill her.

WATERSPELL Book 2: The Wysard

After blundering into the last stronghold of magic, Carin discovers that she is right to fear the wizard Verek. He is using her to seal the ruptures in the void, and she may be nothing more to him than an expendable weapon. What will he do with her—or to her—when his world is again secure? Or has he erred in believing that the last bridge has been broken? The quest may not, in fact, be over … and Lord Verek may find himself not quite as willing to dispose of his fiery water-sylph, Carin, as he once believed himself to be.

KATHY LAY–CERELLE WOODS INTERVIEW

Author Kathy Lay has posted an insightful interview with author and bookseller Cerelle Woods. Cerelle says: “There’s just nothing better than seeing a kid come in with that light in their eyes, on FIRE about an author or a series. The truth is that it’s usually a series. … Kids love series … love to keep reading about their favorite characters.”

Ah, yes. I remember my own childhood adoration of Madeleine L’Engle, Andre Norton, and Jim Kjelgaard. I scarfed up everything I could find by them. I also had the complete Trixie Belden series.

I’m still crazy for series. Harry Potter, of course. The Chronicles of Narnia. Anne McCaffrey’s Pern books. The Brother Cadfael books. I could go on for pages. There’s something warmly welcoming about a series, where you know the characters and a lot of their backstory. And as the series progresses, the reader is often treated to fascinating new details about the characters. Only late in the Brother Cadfael books do we learn the whole story of Cadfael’s life as a soldier and his missed opportunities with the son he didn’t know he had.

Reading a series is like living a life. Short stories? Not my favorite—they’re over too quick. Give me a long series of long, intricate books—with a cup of good coffee in hand—and I’ll rate myself among the happiest people on the planet.

Thank you, Kathy and Cerelle, for the interview. Good job, good information.

Do Readers Dislike Suspense?

2011-11-29T17:09:00.000-06:00

Here's a "Health & Science" news brief from the 9/2/11 THE WEEK magazine that I found fascinating:

Mysteries without mystery

Have you ever been tempted to flip to the end of a mystery novel? Go ahead. Suspense, a new study has found, is irrelevant to our enjoyment of a story. In fact, say researchers at the University of California at San Diego, most people like stories more if they know in advance how they end--even with plots that hinge on a mystery or a twist. The researchers set up different versions of 12 short stories written by authors such as Agatha Christie, Raymond Carver, and Anton Chekhov. One came with an introduction that spoiled the ending; one had a spoiler embedded in the middle of the text; and a third appeared just as its author had written it. Surprisingly, readers who learned the endings of their stories up front reported liking them much more on a scale of one to 10 than did readers of the other two versions. Why? The pleasure readers get from a good story, researcher Jonathan Leavitt tells BBCNews.com, has far more to do with the quality of the writing and character development than with a nail-biting plot. Once a reader knows how a story turns out, Leavitt says, he or she "can focus on a deeper understanding of the story."

Interesting! That was my experience with the final Harry Potter book. I enjoyed reading it a second time far more than I liked the first time. On the reread, I knew how it would turn out, so instead of worrying about the fate of Harry, Hermione, Ron, or Hagrid, I could just focus on the writing and the interactions between the characters.

The UC-San Diego study seems to contradict what so many New York editors say they want: a "high-concept" (i.e., gimmicky) plot. What readers really want may be good writing. But many times I have witnessed the NY crowd treating the quality of the writing as irrelevant, while looking for nothing in a story except a tricky or "commercial" plot or gimmick.

Food for thought!

The complete article at BBC News:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-14521627

Facebook: Personal Profile or Author Page?

2011-11-27T14:30:00.001-06:00

Not a week ago, I was saying I didn’t want to join Facebook. But a friend who’s much more of a Luddite than I am said she thought I’d enjoy it. And then I read a good article in Slate.com by Farhad Manjoo: “Everyone else is on Facebook. Why aren’t you?”

Manjoo covers all my objections: that it’s just something else to distract a human from the business of real life; that it keeps people at the computer when we already spend WAY too much time at the computer; that a writer updating her Facebook page is a writer who's not writing; that Facebook “friends” don’t substitute for the real thing; that it’s a gross invasion of privacy; etc. etc.

I won’t repeat all the points Manjoo makes in rebuttal. I’ll just give you the link again so you can read the article for yourself.

I TOOK THE FACEBOOK PLUNGE

Deborah J. Lightfoot

WATERSPELL

Manjoo convinced me: Today I joined Facebook. I did it in a small way, with an “Author Page” instead of a personal profile.

From what I think I know about it all, an Author Page seems like it’ll be less work than a personal profile. Whatever I post to my Author Page will be wholly public—viewable by everyone, the same as my blog.

Which means I won’t have to keep track of various groups. I’ve heard that some Facebook users restrict their high school buddies to one group, their college friends to another, and their friends from work to yet another. Egads! I’m not that organized. I’d rather have one page with book-related content that’s viewable by everyone.

One friend from my childhood commented, a year or so ago, that she’d looked for me on Facebook but didn’t find me there. So then she Googled my name and found my website.

I suppose now I’ll be findable on Facebook. That’s sort of the point—I think.

It’s not like I was actively keeping my light under a bushel, pre-Facebook. I’ve had a website since 2000. Then I got another one through The Authors Guild. Then I set up a WATERSPELL-only site at The Authors Guild. Then I got a page at SCBWI, the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. And of course there are pages devoted to my backlist books from my other life: The LH7 Ranch, Trail Fever, and A Century in the Works.

Now there are pages at Amazon and Barnes & Noble devoted to my new novels: WATERSPELL Book 1: The Warlock and WATERSPELL Book 2: The Wysard. And I’ve got a profile page at Smashwords.

I was pretty easily findable pre-Facebook. But now maybe I’ll be where people expect me to be. If Facebook serves a useful purpose, perhaps it is in the site’s ability to pull together a big chunk of the world’s population, all under one roof.

Passion Between the Pages

2011-11-21T14:19:00.001-06:00

In The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), Charlotte’s friend and biographer, Elizabeth Gaskell, described Charlotte’s reaction to the success of her novel Jane Eyre. Elizabeth had asked Charlotte “whether the popularity to which the novel attained had taken her by surprise.”

This, wrote Gaskell, was Charlotte’s response:

“She hesitated a little, and then said: ‘I believed that what had impressed me so forcibly when I wrote it, must make a strong impression on any one who read it. I was not surprised at those who read ‘Jane Eyre’ being deeply interested in it; but I hardly expected that a book by an unknown author could find readers.’”

I love the honesty of Charlotte’s answer. Many writers would have felt compelled to say they were “shocked, simply shocked” to have produced such a success as Jane Eyre. But Charlotte knew the strength of her words. I suspect she would only have been shocked had people not found her novel to be compulsively readable.

It’s the difference between writing with passion—writing from the heart—versus writing that is little more than an intellectual exercise, or a cynical attempt at producing something the market will deem “commercial.” The books that have stayed with me are the books that reveal something of the author’s heart and soul. They’ve got fire. Between the pages, they seethe with passion. Not (necessarily) passion of the romantic sort, but the kind of passion that has the writer up at 2 a.m., pounding the keys.

I can’t say for sure (since I don’t know him personally), but I suspect that Philip Pullman poured a lot of himself into His Dark Materials, the trilogy that begins with The Golden Compass. And I’d be willing to wager that Ursula K. Le Guin grew a bit obsessed with her Earthsea universe. She started the books in 1968 with A Wizard of Earthsea and was still writing about the world of Earthsea in 2001.

That’s what I want from a writer: Passion. Obsession. Fire in the belly.

When I was writing the first two books of my WATERSPELL trilogy, I took time to record some thoughts about the process and post them on what is now my oldest website. At WATERSPELL: Interview With the Author, I said:

“Writing WATERSPELL became an obsession. I couldn’t let it alone. I’d be up until 2 or 3 in the morning, then spring out of bed after a few hours’ sleep and start pounding the keyboard again. It was an exhilarating experience. There’s something mystical about being awake in the middle of the night, hearing voices in your head as the characters talk to each other—or shout at each other, as is often the case with Carin and Verek—and typing as fast as you can to get the whole confrontation down on paper in ‘real time,’ while the characters are speaking.”

I fervently hope the passion and the immediacy that I felt while the story poured out of me is still there on the page for the reader today. I feel tolerably confident that it is. Everyone who read WATERSPELL in manuscript told me they couldn’t put it down.

Now the books are out there, published, in the real world, and I’m hoping readers will find these two fantasy novels by an unknown writer. Everyone tells me to get on Facebook, but I value my privacy too much to willingly surrender my entire existence to that particularly insinuative social-media platform.

So for now, I’ll just drop a line to virtually everyone in my e-mail address book. You say you only hear from me when I’ve got new books to promote? Well, what would you expect? When I’m writing, I don’t have time to e-mail you.

Such is a writer’s social life. We end up socializing with no one except other writers. Writers understand when a fellow author drops out of sight for months at a time. “Normal people” just think it’s rude. Normal people don’t understand how deeply abnormal a truly passionate writer can be. Bleeding on the keyboard is not the healthiest way to spend one’s life. But it’s likely to produce books that achieve what the writer set out to do.

www.waterspell.net

WATERSPELL E-Books for Kindle and Nook

2011-11-17T12:46:00.001-06:00

WATERSPELL Book 1: The Warlock and Book 2: The Wysard are available as Kindle e-books for $2.99 each.

If you have a Nook instead, you can download the .epub versions at Smashwords (Book 1 here and Book 2 here) and sideload them onto your Nook. Or just wait a week or two, and both books will be available from Barnes & Noble for direct purchase and downloading to your Nook.

Sign up to receive my blog posts in your e-mail (see "Follow by Email," below right) and I’ll tell you as soon as the Nook books are available via Barnes & Noble.

ADVENTURES in E-BOOK FORMATTING

Many people complain about the difficulties of formatting their books for publishing at Smashwords. I, too, balked at the 72-page Smashwords Style Guide that Mark Coker posted. I read only about half of it before I threw up my hands and just dove in.

And quickly enough, I learned what works well and what doesn’t work when you’re formatting a Word .doc file to upload. Most importantly, I learned to use the Heading 1 style for chapter titles and anything else that should show up as a clickable or “tappable” item in the Contents sidebar.

I also learned to set a first-line indent in the paragraph’s Normal style instead of using the Tab key to indent paragraphs. And I figured out pretty quick that, when centering text, I must remove that first-line indent from the Centered style, or the centered text would be pushed slightly over to the right.

I now consider myself something of a Smashwords expert. The Book 1: The Warlock and Book 2: The Wysard .epub files that I produced at Smashwords look perfect on my Nook. The .mobi files also look great on the free Kindle reading app for PC that I installed on my computer.

FORMATTING for the KINDLE

Since Smashwords does not yet distribute to Amazon, I also went to Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) so Amazon customers could more easily download my books to their Kindles.

Good gracious, what a hassle! The same Word .doc that uploaded seamlessly at Smashwords did not work well at KDP.

Problem 1: No paragraph indents. During conversion to the Kindle format, the 0.25" paragraph indent disappeared throughout both books.

Problem 2: Dropped italics. Also during the Kindle conversion, some—not all—italics disappeared. This was as serious a problem as the lack of paragraph indents. I use italics to indicate internal dialogue. Without that visual cue, some passages of WATERSPELL were rendered nearly unintelligible.

I searched around and found out how to “Modify Converted Content.” It turns out that the Kindle format is HTML. To restore my paragraph indents and my italics, I had to download the HTML file off KDP, unzip it, and open and edit the HTML file with Microsoft Word.

Restoring the paragraph indents was merely a matter of editing the underlying style. That took seconds.

It required hours, however, to “Compare Documents”—KDP’s HTML file against my original Word document—to identify all instances of dropped italics. I paged through the comparison file, and every time I found text tagged “Not Italic” I had to locate that passage in the HTML file and reapply the italics. Maddening!

Finally, however, I got both books repaired. Then I had to “re-zip” my edited HTML, which I didn’t know how to do. A quick search online, however, found these instructions:

“Highlight the files you want to zip and right-click, then on the menu tab, hover over ‘send to’ — there’s an option in there for sending to ‘compressed (zipped) folder’ — click that and you're done.”

Bless you, Queber, author of this tip.

I re-zipped both books and uploaded them back to KDP. And as far as I can tell, by perusing a sample of each using my desktop Kindle Reader app, my edits held. The paragraphs are properly indented now, and the internal dialogue is once again italicized.

SMASHWORDS’ “MEAT GRINDER”

All things considered, I’ve found Smashwords far easier to work with than KDP. Though some people speak disparagingly about Smashwords’ “meat grinder,” I have been perfectly satisfied with the quality of the e-book conversions there. My e-books come out error-free—which is more than I can say for KDP.

MY E-BOOK BIBLIOGRAPHY

Here’s a list of everything I’ve published, to date, via Smashwords. All of these items are available as Nook Books. To find them, just search on your Nook for “seven rivers publishing.” (My WATERSPELL e-books aren’t in the official Barnes & Noble Nook catalog as of this writing, but they’ll appear soon.)

FOUR STAR FUNERALS: An Anthology About Death $2.99

SELF-EDITING: Two Half Brains Make a Whole Writer $0.99

SIMPLE GREEN: Confessions of a Former Earthchild Free

WATERSPELL Book 1: The Warlock $0.99 (Limited-time discount price)

WATERSPELL Book 2: The Wysard $2.99

And for those with Kindles, you can sample and purchase my WATERSPELL e-books here:

WATERSPELL Book 1: The Warlock $2.99

WATERSPELL Book 2: The Wysard $2.99

What fun! This is a lot of work, but I’m enjoying the chance to learn new things. I also love being the mistress of my own fate.

"Life is something like a trumpet.
If you don't put anything in,
you won't get anything out."
—Composer W.C. Handy

How to Read E-Books Without an E-Reader Device

2011-11-15T17:03:00.001-06:00

To open and read an e-book, you don’t need to own an e-reader device like a Kindle or a Nook. Just download the free software that lets you use your computer or smartphone to enjoy e-books. The programs are quick to download and install, and they’re easy and fun to use.

KINDLE READING APPS

To open a Kindle (.mobi) file, download a free Kindle Reading App. Choose from the list shown here for the iPhone, Windows PC, Mac, BlackBerry, iPad, or Android phone.

EPUB READER

To open and read a NOOK or Sony Reader (.epub) e-book on your computer, download Adobe Digital Editions.

NOOK APPS

Barnes & Noble also has free NOOK apps for various devices: iPad, iPhone, Android, PC, and Mac.

TRY IT—YOU'LL LIKE IT

Installing and using these free applications is a great way to experience the rapidly expanding world of e-books. Try them all, and decide which suits you best before you go out and buy a NOOK or a Kindle. Or save your money and just use the free e-book apps on your laptop or smartphone.

E-books are so much cheaper than printed books, I'm still amazed by the number of people who are resisting the change-over. If everybody who uses a computer would install an e-reader app, then buy a few 99-cent e-books, they'd see why some of us longtime readers have rapidly come to prefer e-books over print books.

TO BUY WATERSPELL E-BOOKS:

For a limited time, the first two books of the WATERSPELL trilogy are only $2.99 each. To get the introductory pricing (in any format for any e-reader device or app):

WATERSPELL Book 1: The Warlock

WATERSPELL Book 2: The Wysard

WATERSPELL Paperbacks on Sale Everywhere!

2011-11-09T12:34:00.000-06:00

The online bookstores have caught on: WATERSPELL Books 1 and 2 (paperbacks) are now available through both Amazon and Barnes & Noble:

Barnes & Noble:

Book 1: THE WARLOCK $16.95

Book 2: THE WYSARD $17.95

Amazon:

Book 1: THE WARLOCK $16.95

Book 2: THE WYSARD $17.95

The covers have not yet shown up at Amazon, and the Book Descriptions are missing at Barnes & Noble—leaving me to wonder why the booksellers don’t just import the complete bibliographic info from either Bowker—Books in Print or from the Lightning Source catalogs (the daily catalogs LSI provides to its U.S. and international distribution partners). But it’s a start—10 days after the official publication date, the WATERSPELL paperbacks are for sale pretty much everywhere.

PAPERBACKS ARE EXPENSIVE!

It’s easy to see why readers prefer e-books to either paperbacks or hardcovers. The WATERSPELL paperbacks sell for (Book 1) $17 and (Book 2) $18, for a total outlay of $35 for the set.

Compare that to a typical e-book price of $3, $5, or $9 for thick fantasy novels like mine. Any rational person will prefer the e-books.

I chose to release WATERSPELL in both formats, however, because I wanted hard copies to take to events, to send to reviewers, and to satisfy all the folks who continue to tell me they want “real” books, not e-books. I’m confident they’ll come around to e-books eventually. With the paperbacks, I’m just humoring them until they figure out that e-books are a much better deal.

THE NUMBERS:

Here’s why the WATERSPELL paperbacks cost so much—

Book 1:

Cost of printing = $5.89 (384 pages x .013 print cost per page + .90 unit cost per book)

Wholesale price = $8.47 (the price the retailers pay for each book—a 50% discount off the list price)

Book 2:

Cost of printing = $6.67 (444 pages x .013 print cost per page + .90 unit cost per book)

Wholesale price = $8.98 (the price the retailers pay per book—a 50% discount off list)

The list price is twice the wholesale price—that's standard. It means the retail outlets—Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.—are making a profit of $17.45 on each two-book set.

The publisher, however, makes only $4.89 on each two-book set. Add up the wholesale price (8.47 + 8.98 = 17.45) and then subtract the cost of printing (5.89 + 6.67 = 12.56) and that leaves a profit to the publisher of $4.89. That’s less than a third as much as the retailers make.

To show these numbers another way:

A reader buys both books and pays full list price of $34.90

The bookseller receives half that total, for a profit of $17.45

The printer gets most of what’s left: printing cost of $12.56

The publisher and author share the rest of the money: $4.89

From this, it’s apparent that paperbacks and hardcovers are expensive because everyone in the production and sales chain makes a tidy profit. The reader pays dearly, yet the publisher/author gets little of the money: In this example, the publisher/author gets only 14% of what the reader pays. Assuming a 10% royalty to the author—$3.49—the poor publisher makes only $1.40.

Which is why e-books are destined to take over the industry. Why pay for ink on paper when the same book can be published electronically for a fraction of the cost?

ACCURANCE UPDATE

Some of you are following my “adventures with Accurance,” the company I hired to help me produce my books. I have detailed Task 1: The Covers Are Finished and Task 2: The Text Formatting Is Finished.

My next posting about Accurance will be Task 3: Print Setup and Distribution. Obviously the “print setup” has been accomplished. The paperbacks are now available.

But I’m still trying to figure out what Accurance means by “distribution.” When I get my questions answered, I’ll blog about that part of the process.

WATERSPELL Paperbacks Are Now On Sale!

2011-11-02T14:53:00.000-05:00

They’re in print! WATERSPELL Books 1 and 2, The Warlock and The Wysard, are now available through “normal distribution channels.”

Lightning Source, the printer, defines those channels as Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Ingram, and Baker & Taylor.

The official publication date was October 31, 2011.

The Book 1 ($16.95) and Book 2 ($17.95) paperbacks have already shown up at Amazon, but the covers are not displayed there yet.

Conversely, the covers are gloriously shown (Book 1 and Book 2) at Borders in Australia. But Down Under, the books are shown as “Out of Stock.”

I trust that all the booksellers will post the complete and correct ordering info, sooner rather than later. For now, I’m just delighted that the paperbacks are officially in existence and on sale.

For books this thick (approx. 400 pages each), the e-book editions are going to be less expensive, and therefore more appealing to fantasy readers who like long books but don’t want to lug around volumes that weigh a pound or more.

The e-book editions of both titles should be available later in November.

I’m doing a happy little dance as I type. These books have been my grand obsession for quite a long time, and now they’re finally finished, published, and on sale.

Next, I must get back to final revisions on WATERSPELL Book 3: The Wisewoman, to have it ready for paperback and e-book publication in Spring 2012.

Yippee!

Manuscripts: Shred ’Em or Store ’Em?

2011-10-15T16:34:00.001-05:00

A recent Angie’s List “Big Deal” offered mobile shredding at a deep discount. Sierra Shred of Frisco, Texas, will come out to my place and shred 600 pounds of sensitive documents for just $65—half off the normal price.

Since signing up for a visit from Sierra’s shredder truck, I’ve been busy going through closets and file cabinets, gathering up ancient tax return documents, bank statements, canceled checks, credit card statements and the like. What a joy it will be to see that clutter get safely shredded and hauled off for recycling.

DRAFT MANUSCRIPTS TOO?

Other piles of paper are giving me pause, however. I have old drafts of my WATERSPELL trilogy going back for … well, going back a lot of years (more than I care to confess).

I know I don’t need to keep all those drafts. But I’ve never been comfortable tossing complete manuscripts—even draft manuscripts—into the regular recycled-paper bin. It’s not like I’m a famous author whose fans will go dumpster-diving to get a pre-release peak at my latest creation. Even so: I’ve been boxing my old drafts rather than let my husband take them to our neighborhood recycling center along with our junk mail, expired magazines, and exhausted newspapers.

Now’s my chance to permanently dispose of those old drafts. Once they are shredded, I can rest easy knowing that my intellectual property is safe from dumpster-divers.

FOR POSTERITY?

Yet, I’m reluctant to get rid of ALL my drafts. The incremental ones can go—those with only cleanup edits from printout to printout.

I’ve decided to save the oldest drafts, however, and any that show the deep revisions I made as I progressed in my understanding of the history I was recording. The world of WATERSPELL became a very real place to me during all the years I spent learning about it, its inhabitants, and its history. To throw away my archives would be a vandalic act.

But at least I can reduce the volume of stored manuscripts by a third or more. And maybe when I become famous (!) a well-known research library will ask me for my draft manuscripts so students and scholars can follow the evolution of WATERSPELL from start to finish.

I’d best keep the phone number for Sierra Shred, though, in case nobody ever expresses a burning desire to study my authorial process. (Hmm … Maybe it’s best that no one but my closest writer-friends ever see those earliest drafts.)

SPEAKING of CLEARING OUT the CLUTTER …

All this spring-cleaning activity (never mind that it's fall—I do my spring cleaning as the spirit moves me) inspired me to post a de-cluttering essay at Smashwords.

It's free—please help yourself to "SIMPLE GREEN: Confessions of a Former Earthchild" at smashwords.com/books/view/93173.

Here's the synopsis:

SIMPLE GREEN: CONFESSIONS OF A FORMER EARTHCHILD, by a semi-lapsed environmentalist, is a rumination on keepsakes and mementos and how best to Reduce, Reuse, & Recycle them after somebody dies and leaves all their stuff behind—a life’s residue, inevitably destined for the landfill, unless a sentimental collector intervenes. A personal essay/memoir by Deborah J. Lightfoot, author of the WATERSPELL fantasy trilogy.

TASK 2: The Text Formatting Is Finished

2011-10-04T15:42:00.000-05:00

Oh happy day! It’s been like pulling teeth to get to this point, but FINALLY the Accurance Group has finished the interior formatting for WATERSPELL Book 1: The Warlock, and also for Book 2: The Wysard.

I expected this part of the process to be quick and easy. They took the text straight from my Word .doc files and formatted it as printable PDFs with running heads and justified margins. “What could go wrong?” I asked myself.

Let me count the ways:

ENDLESS REVISION After ENDLESS REVISION

ORIGINAL OUTPUT (8/22/2011): They omitted all of the front matter that I’d supplied: copyright page, dedication, Contents page, epigraph.

FIRST REVISION (9/6/2011): They inserted the front matter OK, but they introduced a typo (theirs, not mine) into the dedication page, a strange, stray hyphen: “an–d its sequels.”

SECOND REVISION (9/14/2011): Whereas I’d been expecting this run of galley proofs to be the final, clean copy, they inexplicably fouled up the established, customer-approved pagination scheme. They dropped the blank book-page (a page that we’d intentionally left blank) after the Prologue, with the result that all of the pages from Chapter 1 to the end of the book were no longer correctly numbered. They replaced the formerly correct page numbers on the Contents page with the now-incorrect page numbers. Instead of centering the epigraph on the page facing the Prologue, they set it flush-left. And they mistakenly slapped running heads on the first page of the Prologue and the first page of Chapter 1. (I described this mess in detail at "Me, My Team, and DIY.")

THIRD REVISION (9/17/2011): Things got quite interesting at this point. Previously, the first line of the book’s title, on the title page, had been set in the font shown at left. I wasn’t crazy about it, but it was readable and I was OK with it. But suddenly, on this particular proof run, that first line showed up in Mistral (calligraphic—second image at left).

“Wow!” I thought. “Somebody is finally taking an interest in this project. They’ve given some thought to how a faux-medieval fantasy novel should be presented.” I’m not sure I would have chosen Mistral, if I’d been doing the choosing, but I was so pleased to see a glimmer of interest on the part of the typesetter, I happily accepted this change of typefaces.

But the danged epigraph was still not right. They’d finally got it centered left-to-right, but it was crowding the top margin. While all of this back-and-forth had been happening with Book 1, Accurance had successfully finished the page formatting for Book 2. And the Book 2 epigraph was attractively centered on its page, both horizontally and vertically (top-to-bottom as well as left-to-right). Of course, I wanted the Book 1 epigraph to be presented the same as the Book 2 epigraph (this is a series, after all); and so that is what I requested.

FOURTH REVISION (9/30/2011): Oh my God! Will you LOOK at what they did to the first line of the title, on the title page? Without authorization—without a word of permission from me—they changed the font from Mistral to some kind of dreadful Edwardian script. Nothing could be less appropriate for these world-hopping science-fictional fantasy novels of mine. I almost puked. (I fully lost my temper.)

On the plus side, the epigraph had finally found its proper spot in the middle of the page facing the Prologue, but the line-breaks within the epigraph were still not correct. No matter how many times I said to “Set it up like the epigraph in job # 8917” (their number for my Book 2), they had failed to do it.

Of course, by this point I would have let the danged epigraph go, in the interest of moving these books along to the next process. (I was hoping for an October release date for the POD paperbacks, but that’s unlikely to happen now.)

Under no circumstances, however, could I accept that horrible Edwardian script on the title page. So I sent the proofs back for yet another run.

FIFTH REVISION (10/4/2011): Oh happy day! Mistral is back on the title page, the Book 1 epigraph finally looks like the Book 2 epigraph, I’ve signed off on the galley proofs, and we can finally go to the next step. It’s taken at least two weeks longer than it should have to get to this point, but at last we can proceed.

LOOKING AHEAD: TASKS 3 and 4

The package of services I bought from Accurance.com includes (1) cover design, (2) interior formatting, (3) print publishing setup and distribution, and (4) e-book conversion and distribution.

Now that we’re finally finished with steps 1 and 2—covers and interiors—I’m hoping that steps 3 and 4—POD publishing (Lightning Source) and e-book distribution—will move along quickly and simultaneously.

If you can stand the suspense, keep checking here on my blog. I’ll continue to post progress reports.

FOUR STAR FUNERALS: An Anthology About Death

2011-10-01T16:52:00.000-05:00

It’s published! The e-book written by the members of the Four Star Critique Group is now available at Smashwords: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/93148

We’re proud of it. This is our first venture, as a group, into e-publishing. Without doubt, we’ll do more.

Cover art copyright © 2011
by David R. Davis

FOUR STAR FUNERALS: AN ANTHOLOGY ABOUT DEATH (in three parts: Memoir, Poetry, & Fiction) packs the emotional wallop of Titanic, darkened with a dash of Tales From the Crypt. This 10-author anthology about death and its aftershocks will sear your soul, make you laugh … and ultimately help you heal, if you’re haunted by a death that has upended your emotions in ways you never expected.

By Ann Barrington, David R. Davis, Melissa Russell Deur, Patricia Holland, Kathryn Lay, Deborah J. Lightfoot, Martha Moore, Cecile Odell, Diane Roberts, and BJ Stone.

Click here to read about the history of this project.

SIMPLE GREEN: CONFESSIONS OF A FORMER EARTHCHILD

After e-publishing our FUNERALS anthology today, I also published a short piece that’s in the same vein, but it didn’t quite fit in the collection. SIMPLE GREEN is available for free at Smashwords.

SIMPLE GREEN: CONFESSIONS OF A FORMER EARTHCHILD, by a semi-lapsed environmentalist, is a rumination on keepsakes and mementos and how best to Reduce, Reuse, & Recycle them after somebody dies and leaves all their stuff behind—a life’s residue, inevitably destined for the landfill, unless a sentimental collector intervenes. A personal essay/memoir by Deborah J. Lightfoot, author of the WATERSPELL fantasy trilogy.

Please take a look. I hope you enjoy both books.

ADOBE DIGITAL E-READER SOFTWARE: IT'S FREE!

For free e-reader software (it lets you read e-books on your computer, if you don't have a Nook, Kindle, etc.) download Adobe Digital Editions.

Self-Editing: Using Your Brain (My First E-Book)

2011-09-21T13:05:00.003-05:00

I have published my first e-book: SELF-EDITING: Bringing Out Your Best (Two Half Brains Make a Whole Writer). It’s at Smashwords for $0.99 (free until the end of September, using coupon code HF63Y).

Summary: "For writers in all genres, tips and tricks for (partially) computer-aided editing and for invoking the critical faculties of your logical left brain at just the right time. We’ll use the Find feature to locate predictable problems: 'ly' adverbs, overuse of commas, qualifiers that leech the life from writing. Then on to meatier matters of self-editing: eliminating wordiness, changing passive voice to active, when to show and how best to tell (with specifics, not generalities), subtlety, pacing, etc. Drawn from the presenter’s years of experience in newspaper, magazine, and book writing and editing, this e-book offers nuts-and-bolts advice on fixing common errors."

AN EDUCATION IN E-PUBLISHING

From this venture into e-publishing, I’ve learned several things:

It’s really difficult to control the look of an e-book. On my NOOK (in .epub format) my Self-Editing book looks great. All the block quotes and examples are properly indented and set off from the body of the text, and they are in the same size type as for the body, and thus they’re easy to read.

But when the book is viewed in a Web browser (in HTML) the block quotes are rendered in tiny type that’s almost impossible to read.

I can’t control the format that people choose to view, but I can recommend an e-book reader that gives digital books (.epub) a more pleasing configuration:

Adobe Digital Editions (http://www.adobe.com/products/digitaleditions/) is free, it’s easy to use, and it faithfully preserves an e-book’s original formatting (including any clickable, embedded hyperlinks).

ONE DOWN, MORE TO GO

I hope I sell some copies of my new e-book, but my primary purpose is to get experience with the Smashwords.com publishing interface so I’ll feel confident about publishing FOUR STAR FUNERALS, an anthology written by the members of my critique group. They are counting on me to get it right, and I’m finding that this e-publishing business can be simple (when you’re publishing your own work) but complicated when you’re acting as the publisher for other writers.

Smashwords offers a wordy document that purports to explain the process of “upgrading” to Publisher status. What it says about “ghost” accounts baffles me.

It also warns me: “DO NOT upgrade your account to Publisher status unless you plan to immediately publish two or more authors on Smashwords.”

Well, darn. That means I don’t get to practice it before I actually do it.

I shall persevere, however. This isn’t rocket science.

For now, I must settle down with the manuscript of FOUR STAR FUNERALS and reread my contributions to the anthology. It’s always best to proofread before publishing.

THANKS TO DAVID R. DAVIS

My thanks to David Davis for both covers: my SELF-EDITING book, and our collective FOUR STAR FUNERALS. I have no idea how to create e-book covers. I’m lucky to be able to call on David’s artistic talents.

Publishing: Me, My Team, and DIY

2011-09-15T15:15:00.001-05:00

Today marks the one-month anniversary of me engaging the services of the Accurance Group to do interior formatting, cover design, POD paperback setup and distribution, and e-book conversion and distribution, for my WATERSPELL fantasy trilogy.

What have we accomplished since August 15?

All three covers are done (see them in the column at right). I’m very pleased with the covers, and I continue to get compliments on them.
I’ve seen and proofread (well, actually, my husband proofread) galley proofs of WATERSPELL Book 1: The Warlock (384 pages), and Book 2: The Wysard (440 pages).

A GLITCH IN THE GET-ALONG

The first run of galley proofs looked good except they were missing all the front matter (copyright page, dedication page, Contents, and epigraph). I took the opportunity, via Accurance’s “Galley Edits & Corrections Sheet,” to point out the oversights.

They did an excellent job then, incorporating the front matter in the second run of galleys. So when I sent them my final tweaks—a few minor refinements to the front matter and the “About the Author” page at the back of the book—I expected “my team” to whip out those changes in no time, and give me a finished set of error-free galleys, in PDF form.

But oops! They apparently entrusted my final tweaks to a newbie on their text-formatting team. The newbie had the temerity (or the poor judgment) to make changes where I had not indicated or authorized any. The most serious transgression was the newbie’s unilateral decision to drop the blank book-page that separated the Prologue (page 1) from the first page of Chapter 1. The dropping of the blank page (page 2) caused all of the pages from there to the end to be mis-numbered—out of sync with the page numbers on the Contents page.

Even sillier, the newbie added a page header to the top of the Prologue and on the first page of Chapter 1. She or he should know enough about book design to know that a chapter's opening page carries no running head.

So instead of having, in my possession, a finished set of error-free galleys for Book 1, I’ve sent back a third “Galley Edits & Corrections Sheet.” I’m hoping the production department will assign my original text-formatting team-member, and not allow the newbie to get anywhere near my books.

WORRIES ABOUT UNAUTHORIZED CHANGES TO THE TEXT

The only reason I’m blogging about this (relatively minor) snafu is that it makes me wonder: If changes like those I just described can be made in my book, without my authorization or permission, is there a possibility of more serious errors being introduced on pages that I have already proofread and approved?

The prospect makes my veins run ice. It is not physically or mentally possible to personally proofread every new output of 400-page galley proofs, looking for errors that creep in while my back is turned.

However, I believe I see a solution. When I finally receive a finished set of galley proofs, I can copy-and-paste the text from those PDFs into a new Microsoft Word document. I can then Compare Documents, comparing my original book file against Accurance’s text-formatting output, to assure myself that no creepy errors slipped in, between rounds of galley-edits.

A GUIDE FOR DIY:
Tricks, Tactics, and Techniques from Published Authors: Thoughts on Traditional vs. E-book Publishing

When I first engaged the services of the Accurance Group, I committed myself to blog about the experience—the good, the great, the frustrating, or whatever I may yet encounter. My purpose in chronicling the entire process is to allow you, my fellow independent authors, to decide for yourself if you want to hire some help with your publishing ventures, or you want to do it all yourself.

If you decide to go solo, an excellent quick-start guide is Tricks, Tactics, and Techniques from Published Authors: Thoughts on Traditional vs. E-book Publishing, a brand-new e-book by my very well-published friends Jan Peck and David Davis.

Tricks includes information on and links to the major digital publishing services: Smashwords, Kindle Direct Publishing, CreateSpace, Lulu, and Barnes & Noble PubIt.

(Lightning Source is not mentioned, but it’s the POD service I plan to use. I’ll report on it when I’ve got firsthand experience with LSI.)

Tricks also includes fascinating facts about the current state of the publishing world, with information about traditional publishing, and when and why you might want to consider going that route.

The book will save you days—possibly weeks—of searching the Web for information on your publishing options. I recommend it highly, as a quick but comprehensive overview of what’s out there for writers who are ready to take matters into their own hands.

For me, I knew that between updating my various websites, taking on various (paying) freelance-writing assignments, finishing WATERSPELL Book 3: The Wisewoman (which I plan to release next spring)—and maybe even taking a few days of vacation this fall, for a rest-break that I believe I’ve earned—I would not have time to properly e-publish WATERSPELL in strict DIY fashion.

And so I hired the Accurance Group. So far, I’m glad I did. Despite the occasional glitch, they are saving me loads of time and effort.

Stay tuned: My e-publishing adventure will continue.

TASK 1: The Covers Are Finished

2011-09-04T09:56:00.000-05:00

Last Friday, I gave Kharl and the Accurance design team my official OK on the covers for the three books of WATERSPELL. I wanted clean, uncluttered designs that would look good as thumbnails, since thumbnail-size is nearly the only way most readers ever see the covers for e-books. Fortunately, these deep-blue covers are also striking when printed full size, 6x9, which is how big the printed books will be.

It’s been fun getting comments from my fellow writers. With one exception (a person who labeled the covers “boring”—she is not, I suspect, a regular reader of fantasy), all the comments have been highly complimentary:

“They’re beautiful!”
“This [cover] really piques my curiosity. I want to buy the book to learn more.”
“The covers are breathtaking. I’d be honored to have a book that looked so beautiful. If this were on a bookshelf, it would be gorgeous to see! But even on screen, it’s eye popping!”
“Looks wonderful, so inviting. The covers are great ... who did them? I just love them.”

TASK 2: Proofing the Galleys Goes On

I have received the first run of galley proofs for WATERSPELL Book 2: The Wysard. They look good, except they’re missing the copyright page, dedication, Contents page, and epigraph that I supplied in a separate file. For Book 3: The Wisewoman (which will be released next spring) I will be sure to put ALL of the pieces into a single file.

I’m still waiting on the second run of galley proofs for Book 1: The Warlock. The changes to the text were very minor. What’s holding up progress, I suspect, are the pages of front matter (copyright, dedication, contents, epigraph) that I asked Accurance to include in the second run of proofs. Inserting those pages will change the pagination throughout the 375-page book.

LOOKING AHEAD TO E-BOOKS

I finally got around to reading Accurance’s lengthy document about their process for converting the book from PDF (which is used for the print-on-demand/POD version) into all of the various formats that work with the various e-readers that are now on the market. And wow! The process takes much longer than I expected. To quote:

[O]ne should expect that in the first phase where the publisher/eBook store accounts are being established, it will average 90 days from the date of completed/approved eBook versions of a title to being on an eBook store website and available for sale. Once the accounts are established, the average from completed/approved to ‘available for purchase’ will be closer to 30 days. Both of these are averages, though: There will be those significantly faster and those significantly slower.

I’m hoping that WATERSPELL will fall into the “significantly faster” category. In any case, I’ve changed the projected release date, for the e-books, to December 2011, while keeping my hoped-for date of October 2011 for the release of the paperback edition.

UPDATING MY ONLINE PRESENCE

My oldest website, the one I created years ago as my first attempt at getting an online presence for myself and my novels, had languished untouched since October 2009. When I got a new, fresh, uncluttered site through the Authors Guild, I thought I might should dismantle my old—and oldish-looking—site.

But no! I cannot do that. When I googled “WATERSPELL,” my old site popped up as No. 3 in the search results. Though I had almost abandoned the site, other people had obviously found enough of value in it to link to it and keep it alive in the search engines.

So I spent the entire day yesterday updating the site’s major pages: Home, Excerpts, Readers’ Comments, Author Interview, Words & Treasures. The other, more minor pages will have to wait.

While rereading the Author Interview, I was struck by something I wrote, so many years ago that I’d forgotten ever writing it:

When I started reading the early Irish legends and Celtic myths, I was looking mainly for “the telling detail”—authentic figures of speech, colorful descriptive terms, gritty background textures. But as I read, I noticed that aspects of the mythology had their counterparts in this fantasy I was writing. Or vice versa. For instance, water often has mystical qualities in the legends—Irish rivers like the Boyne were held sacred. It’s pretty obvious from the series title—WATERSPELL—that water has magical properties in my story, too. The traditions tell of quests, leading into the Otherworld and back. “Other worlds” figure prominently in WATERSPELL—the premise [is] that what’s harmless in one world or reality may prove deadly if it arrives, whether innocently or by skullduggery, where it doesn’t belong. Also central to my work is the heroic quest, undertaken to gain information or wisdom, to bring healing, or to find or restore lost objects.

I was deep into researching-and-writing mode when I wrote that. For quite a while now, I’ve been too focused on the nuts-and-bolts of publication to reflect back on the fun and excitement of discovery—all that I learned while crafting this tale.

I’m glad now that I didn’t permanently abandon my oldest WATERSPELL website. It holds the history of my research, my original intentions for this trilogy, and all the treasures I collected along the way. A lot of it is actually pretty interesting to read—which is why it still ranks high with Google, I suppose, even after my two years of benign neglect.

Steps to Publication #5: Proofing Galleys and Cover Art

2011-08-28T12:19:00.000-05:00

Three things occupy my thoughts this morning. I’ll take them in order.

Tricks, Techniques, and Tactics from Authors Jan Peck and David Davis

Yesterday at the North Texas SCBWI chapter meeting, Jan Peck and David Davis gave a concise, knowledgeable, and highly useful overview of the state of publishing today. Besides describing their own steps to publication, starting in such periodicals as Comic Buyers Guide and the Dallas Morning News, and onward through their current status as star authors at Dial Books (Penguin/Putnam), Simon & Schuster, and Sterling Publishing, Jan and David presented an in-depth look at the industry-changing explosion in indie publishing and e-books. Their handout (worth its weight in gold, which is really saying something, considering that gold now sells for $1,800 an ounce) is posted at The Jan Peck/David Davis Publishing Link Sheet.

A lively discussion ensued, and when I saw my chance to join it, I threw in a few words about avoiding the temptation to throw rough drafts up on the Internet. The speed of publishing, online and electronically, can be intoxicating, especially to those of us who have lots of experience with the sad old routine of “send in your manuscript, then wait a year or six months” for a reply. It can be oh, so tempting, to e-publish and be damned.

But running a rough draft through the Smashwords meat-grinder is a very bad idea. E-publishing one’s unpolished prose can do considerable damage to a writer’s reputation. It is ALWAYS worth the time, to take the time to polish up a manuscript, to make it the best it can be.

I’ve posted several practical how-tos:

Self-Editing: Two Half Brains Make a Whole Writer (an 11-part series on finding and fixing common mistakes in writing, based on a college-level program I presented)
Critiquing Common Writing Errors (from an excellent handout I got at a conference, years ago)
Too Subtle? Too Obvious? (finding and walking the fine line between telling too much and telling too little)

Thank you again, Jan and David, for a great program. I was already excited about my indie publishing adventure, and now I can hardly wait to get WATERSPELL out there.

Book 1: First Galley Proofs

Eager though I am to release WATERSPELL Books 1 and 2, I mustn’t lose my focus on quality. Gene has finished proofreading Book 1: The Warlock and declares it error-free. Today I’m going to skim quickly through the first galley proofs, making sure the poems and other bits that require special treatment (indentation, italics) have been properly handled.

Then, on the Contents page, I’ll assign page numbers alongside the chapter titles. Using the Accurance.com “Galley Edits—Corrections Sheet,” I’ll specify the placement of the copyright page, dedication, Contents, epigraph, and author bio. By Monday evening, this first run of galley proofs should be ready to return to Dwight, the production manager at Accurance.

Book 3: First Cover Proof

I’m also mulling over changes to the first draft of the Book 3 cover, shown here. I believe the dolphin is too large, and I’d like to see more contrast between it and the background.

Here’s what I’ll request:

Move the dolphin to the right so that its dorsal fin is almost centered against the background, and make the dolphin smaller, as necessary, so that its snout/face overlaps the silver frame only about as much as the red-and-gold book overlaps its frame on #8916.
The splashes of water are great—perfect! Can you add another splash or two under the dolphin’s snout, to provide more contrast against the dark-blue background?
Within the silver frame, change the sky-and-sea background to a golden sunset. There’s an excellent example at http://sandeep.pixelring.net/photoblog/images/20080914132754_dsc02610_small.jpg (minus the human silhouette, of course).

FOUR STAR FUNERALS

ISBN 978-0-9728768-2-7 (E-book)

I said I had three things on my mind this morning, but actually I have four. I’m also trying to master the ridiculously long “Smashwords Style Guide” so I can successfully e-publish an anthology written by the Four Star Writers of my critique group. More on this venture, later.

Right now, I gotta get to work!

Steps to Publication #4: Choosing a POD Printer

2011-08-25T11:17:00.000-05:00

With my “Ready-To-Sell Package & eCombo Package” from Accurance, I am to get e-book distribution (which I kind of understand, being an experienced downloader and reader of e-books from Barnes & Noble and Smashwords), but I’m also going to get a books-printed-on-paper account set up for me, with the print-on-demand (POD) publisher that “best suits” me.

To quote from Accurance.com:

"Accurance has worked hard through the years to choose POD publishers and printers that we feel strongly [about] recommending to our authors. These companies must meet strict criteria for low price, high quality, experience, service level, and much more. Though we are always researching, we currently work with three such companies. Our expertise in publishing allows us to be able to match the perfect publisher to each of our authors, and then do all the work to get your book on the market. Currently we are recommending one of the three firms:
• LULU
• CreateSpace
• Lightning Source (LSI)”

Lightning Source (LSI)

Lightning Source, an Ingram subsidiary, is “the leading printer and distributor of print-on-demand books,” according to Wikipedia. Lightning Source works with publishers. According to the LSI website, a small publisher receives the following services:

Print to Order

•           The publisher sets the retail price, wholesale discount, and return policy.
•           We send the data out to our Distribution partners (including leading distributors such as Ingram, Baker & Taylor, Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com, and others).
•           They capture the demand from booksellers, libraries, and consumers and we print to fill the order.
•           We collect the wholesale price, deduct the print cost, and pay the publisher the balance.
•           The price for this service is $12.00 a year per title.
•           To avoid book buyers having to backorder, Lightning Source guarantees that books ordered by Ingram will be printed and returned to their [Ingram's?] shipping dock within 8-12 hours, generally in time to be included in the book buyer’s regular order.

What services does Lightning Source provide for the $12 per year Digital Catalog Fee?

•           Standardized BISAC subject coding with up to 3 subject categories.
•           Detailed title listing in all daily catalogs Lightning Source provides to its U.S. distribution partners (e.g., Ingram, Baker & Taylor, Amazon.com, etc.).
•           Detailed title listing in all daily catalogs Lightning Source provides to its International distribution partners (e.g., Amazon UK, Whitakers/Bookdata, Gardners, etc.).
•           Title summary (annotation) inclusion in our enhanced bibliographic catalog feed.
•           Thumbnail cover image preparation and inclusion in our enhanced bibliographic catalog feed.

That all sounds pretty good. Well worth the $12 a year. Especially if the following printing-cost info from “Self-Publishing with Lightning Source POD” (dated 2007) is still valid:

“Lightning Source as a printing option removes nearly all risk from being [an independent small] publisher. There is an initial setup cost of approximately $100, and apart from a few ancillary costs (e.g. purchasing an ISBN for your book) that is the complete financial risk. Once set up, the cost per book (for paperback) is around $1 flat fee, plus around a cent and a half per page (so a 200-page book costs $3.50 to print, while a 500-page book costs $7.40 to print). Finally, there is an ongoing listing fee of $12 per book each year. Mind you, this fee gets your book registered on both LS in the US and the UK (and as such, Amazon US and UK)—a trivial amount when you consider you can recoup it with two sales.”

What About Lulu and CreateSpace?

I have gotten the feeling, from my communications with the folks at Accurance, that they tend to steer their clients toward Lulu. Of Lulu, Wikipedia says:

“The retail price for the published item is determined based on printing costs, the author’s selected profit margin, and the fee charged by the distributor for distributed items. Printing costs for books are correlated to the page count, paper size, binding type, and color or black-and-white print. The author’s margin is partitioned into 80% for the author and 20% for Lulu.”

That’s pretty general: I need specifics. At Lulu.com, I couldn’t readily find info about costs and pricing, but here are interesting details from Crimson Melodies:

“CreateSpace offers much, much better prices on POD books than Lulu (seriously, half the price pre-retail markup) … printing a 280-page book on Lulu costs just over $10 before retail markup. On CreateSpace, that same book (if you invest $40 in the pro-plan) is only $5 before retail markup …

“For a 280-page, 6x9 dimension book, retailed at $12.99 (assume CreateSpace pro-plan):
Single Copy Cost
CreateSpace: $4.21
Lulu: $10.10 (actual manufacturing cost is $7.10, but $10.10 is your cost to buy)
(Coincidentally, CreateSpace says it costs $7.10 for one book without the pro-plan.)”

What Will My 400-Page Fantasy Novels Cost to Print?

The figures cited by Crimson Melodies alarm me. $10.10 for a 280-page book works out to about $0.036 per page. So for my 400-page novels, the cost of printing (before retail markup) could be around $14.50 at Lulu.

All things considered—and especially considering the thickness of the three books of WATERSPELL—I’m thinking that Lightning Source could be my best bet.

This is definitely something to discuss with my account representative (“Author partner”) at Accurance.

In a later blog posting, I’ll let you know which way we decide to jump.

Steps to Publication #3

2011-08-22T12:56:00.001-05:00

It’s dizzying, how quickly things move in the production arena, compared with the creation arena. After spending years on the writing and editing of WATERSPELL, I’m seeing the books come together with lightning speed.

First above is the final cover for Waterspell Book 1: The Warlock. Under it is the first revision of the Book 2 cover.

Compare the first draft of the Book 2 cover (posted earlier) with this one, and you’ll see that the design folks at the Accurance Group are very good at following instructions. And fast. They took my long list of changes and whipped them into the design in under 12 hours.

(I’m guessing that my designer is in India. I e-mailed my change request on Sunday, August 21, at about 5 p.m. Central time, and the revised cover awaited me in my Inbox when I got to work this Monday morning.)

I’m taking the Book 1 and Book 2 covers to a meeting of my Critique Group tomorrow, for the opinions of my friends and colleagues. Some may say the title ribbon on Book 2 should be red, to match the (deliciously ominous) red in the clouds. But the color green appears in the clothing of a major character in Book 2, and a red touch adorns the clothes of a major character in Book 3. So I believe I’ll keep the green title ribbon for Book 2, and reserve red for the title background of Book 3.

Book 1: First Galley Proofs

Also awaiting me in my e-mail this morning was the 380-page galley proof of the typeset Book 1. At first glance, it looks good. My wonderful husband, Gene, has volunteered to proofread. After so many passes through the manuscript, myself, during the revision stage, I do not believe I could manage another read-through without my eyes crossing. (Did I mention: I’ve spent years on this project.)

One omission pops out at me immediately: They neglected to insert the copyright page, dedication, Contents, and epigraph that I provided in a separate file named “Book 1 front matter.” The lesson is: Put all text in one file, or something’s bound to be overlooked.

They have provided a “Galley Edits Correction Sheet” with which I am to communicate my changes to the text, and I get three full revision cycles, so I do not expect to have much trouble getting the missing “front matter” inserted where it belongs.

Another thing that pops out at me is that this is not “fine” typesetting. There’s no kerning. And long words that fall at the ends of lines are not hy-phen-at-ed. So any strings of longish words result in wide word spacing, with lots of white space between.

That seems to be the norm in the digital age. When reading on my NOOK 1st edition (where I enlarge the type to almost the biggest font they’ve got) I often encounter wide word spacing that could have been eliminated by a little judicious hy-phen-ation. I guess we’ll all get used to it. Or maybe the pro-gram-mers will come up with an easy way for hyphens to magically appear where they’re needed on one person’s display screen or device, but disappear when they’re not needed on another reader’s screen or device.

(In digital publishing, short words yield the best visual results. That’s a good in-cen-tive to Keep It Simple, All Ye Scribes.)

Updating My Various Websites

Over the years, I have created (then sort of abandoned) three websites. My first one resides at http://home.earthlink.net/~djlsbooks/. It looks old-fashioned now. I used site-creation software that, by today’s standards, is obsolete. I need to troll that site for anything worth keeping, and move the material into one of my more current sites.

For my next attempt, after that early DIY site that I haven’t touched since 2009, I rented space at AuthorsGuild.net. I’ve done better with that one, keeping it slightly more up-to-date. I desperately need to redo its Home Page, however.

Newest is my second AuthorsGuild.net site, which I’m devoting exclusively to WATERSPELL. Since it’s shortest and simplest, I’ll work on it next, in hopes of getting something together that won’t shame me when all the hordes of eager readers flock to my site to learn more about the brilliant author of WATERSPELL. [LOL]

A Handy PDF-to-JPG Conversion Tool

The cover files from Accurance.com are coming to me as PDFs. I need the .jpg format for uploading to this blog. So I’m using a fast, free conversion tool: pdf to jpeg online converter.

Once I have the full covers in jpeg format, I use my photo-editing software to crop off the back cover and spine, leaving just the front cover with which to illustrate my Web pages.

All this techno-work is putting different demands on my brain, exercising the parts that don’t necessarily come into play when I’m writing and editing. I’m sure it’s good for me.

Stay tuned: I’ll post all the riveting details as my indie publishing adventure continues.

Steps to Publication #2

2011-08-20T16:27:00.000-05:00

Got the first proof of the cover for WATERSPELL Book 2: The Wysard from the production team at the Accurance Group. It's pretty awful! Some of the problems are my fault—I specified a blue background "in a shade to complement the Book 1" cover, but after seeing them side by side, I think the deep-blue-sea of the Book 1 cover is the way to go for all three volumes. To distinguish one from another, we'll change the background colors of the title "ribbons" on the front cover and the spine.

These are my instructions for cover edits:

Use the same "deep blue sea" background—and dark-blue spine—as for #8916.
On the front cover, give the title "ribbon" a vivid green background to match the green of the water-lily leaf.
No italics for the word WYSARD. (Italics look odd in that particular font.)
Within the frame, put touches of moderately dark (but fiery) sunset-red in the clouds to suggest a storm or the coming of dusk. (And to provide a contrast for the white water lily in the foreground.)
Match the flower's relative size and perspective (its relative position or angle) within its frame to that of the red-and-gold book within its frame (on #8916).
On the spine, change the number 1 to 2.
No italics for the word WYSARD.
Use the same vivid green background for the spine's central title block as for the title ribbon on the front cover.

I'll shoot these instructions back to the Production Team today. It'll be interesting to see how close (or not) they come in the second proof.

I'm sharing the step-by-step process with everybody so you can decide for yourself whether you want to use the services of the Accurance Group. So far, so good, from my point of view. I thought the designer could have shown a little more initiative with my Book 2 cover, and seen for herself/himself that the angle or perspective of the water-lily blossom does not match the angle/perspective of the red-and-gold book on the cover of WATERSPELL Book 1: The Warlock.

But then again, I've worked with art departments, on mainstream projects, that didn't get anywhere near this close on the first try, when working from written instructions. So really, Accurance's team has made a respectable first try on this cover.

Stay tuned—my indie publishing adventure continues!

Steps to Publication

2011-08-17T15:31:00.003-05:00

I have ticked so many things off my To-Do list in the last few weeks, I hardly know which milestone to blog about. I’ll begin by listing them, and then go into greater detail in subsequent postings.

WATERSPELL UPDATE:

Book 2, The Wysard

I finished my “final” read-through of the manuscript, with an eye toward ensuring continuity and consistency through the three-book series. While reading, I kept in mind Stephen King’s excellent advice from On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft: “Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out.”

Since I’m on the verge of sending my trilogy out the door, I was particularly focused on making it as smoothly readable as I could. Those who have read WATERSPELL in ms. tell me that my writing is engagingly smooth. To quote the dictionary definitions, it’s “even and uninterrupted in flow” and “free from lumps.” (Nobody wants a lumpy book.) To enhance the readability of Book 2 as much as possible, I shortened and simplified some words, sentences, and paragraphs. All the 19th-century English lit that I have read has had a noticeable influence on my writing style, and I must make a conscious effort to tighten my work—“crisp it up”—for an impatient modern audience.

E-PUBLISHING and PRINT PUBLISHING

For interior formatting, cover design, print publishing and distribution, and e-book conversion and distribution, I chose Accurance.com and their “Ready-To-Sell Package & eCombo Package.” And my stars!—those folks are fast. On Monday afternoon, I delivered my manuscript for WATERSPELL Book 1: The Warlock to the Accurance Group's Bill Earle via e-mail, and the first proof of the cover art (shown above) awaited me in my Inbox on Wednesday morning!

The cover is very close to being exactly what I wanted. I’m going to run it by my critique group, though, for their expert opinions. We have a professional artist and illustrator among our members, and all of us are published, and so we have all had experiences with cover art—some great experiences, and some disappointing.

BOWKER and ISBNs

Also this week, I accessed the ISBN logbook for Seven Rivers Publishing at BowkerLINK. It’d been “a while” (years) since I’d last used my ISBN account, and I was relieved to discover that my old username and password still worked. I used Bowker’s extremely clunky and clumsy interface to enter bibliographic details for five ISBNs, as follows:

ISBN 978-0-9728768-2-7, Four Star Funerals: An Anthology about Death (E-book)

ISBN 978-0-9728768-3-4, WATERSPELL Book 1: The Warlock (E-book)

ISBN 978-0-9728768-4-1, WATERSPELL Book 1: The Warlock (Trade Paper)

ISBN 978-0-9728768-5-8, WATERSPELL Book 2: The Wysard (E-book)

ISBN 978-0-9728768-6-5, WATERSPELL Book 2: The Wysard (Trade Paper)

I’ll explain the first one, FOUR STAR FUNERALS, in a later posting.

You’ll notice that each edition or format of the WATERSPELL books has its own ISBN: one for the e-book, and one for the paperback. With Bill Earle and his team at Accurance.com, I’m now working on producing the paperback edition of WATERSPELL Book 1, and I’ve checked the ISBN at least 20 times, to be sure we have the correct one on the cover and on the copyright page. The numbers are all so similar, it’s frightfully easy to get them confused.

A NEW WATERSPELL.NET WEBSITE

Also this week (did I mention that I’ve been busy?) I started the process of totally revamping my Waterspell.net (Waterspell.com—it’s the same destination) website. My existing one is dark, cluttered, and sort of dated in appearance. And to my horror, I find that I have not touched the site since October 2009. I’ve spent my time writing and revising, instead of networking and marketing.

Once I have the final covers for the three books of WATERSPELL, I’ll upload them to my fresh, new, clean and uncluttered site at http://members.authorsguild.net/waterspell/.

Then I’ll move all the text (or the stuff that’s worth keeping) out of my old, neglected site at http://home.earthlink.net/~djlsbooks/ and into this blog, where I can save it for posterity.

LOOKING AHEAD to WATERSPELL BOOK 3: THE WISEWOMAN

The rough draft of Book 3: The Wisewoman is now out with my editorial review board—my trusted first-readers. I aim to release the first two books in October 2011, and the third one in May 2012. That should give me time to polish up Book 3 and get it ready for publication.

But I want all of the covers done now, while I have Bill and his design team on the job at Accurance.com. So I need to decide what excerpt to pull from the body of Book 3 to put on its back cover.

Which is what I’m going to go think about right now, after I post this progress report.

Through this report, you-all who haven’t had an e-mail or a phone call from me in ages can now understand, I hope, why I’ve been incommunicado. Life’s been full. And very satisfying. I’m getting things done, lickety-split. And all on my own terms.

E-Publishing Advice and Insights

2011-07-24T11:36:00.002-05:00

At PBS.org, MediaShift: Your Guide to the Digital Media Revolution is running a series of highly useful articles about e-publishing and independent publishing. Here are excerpts from a smattering of their excellent posts.

2010: The Year Self-Publishing Lost Its Stigma

“In today’s tight traditional publishing market, agents, editors, and publishers are now encouraging authors to test market their book by self-publishing. … Self-publishing has finally lost its stigma. [N]ew attitudes are taking hold, especially among younger up-and-coming literary agents.”

“‘Many of our indie e-book authors are outselling, outmarketing and outpublishing the traditional publishers,’ says Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords.”

The Easiest, Cheapest, Fastest Way to Self-Publish Your Book

Says Carla King: “[S]orting through the sheer quantity of offerings, claims, and technologies is overwhelming. I spend a good part of each week researching the topic and, for authors of trade paperback books with no or few illustrations, my answer is to use these two services for creating your e-book and print book: Smashwords and CreateSpace.”

Literary Agents Try New Role as Self-Publishing Consultants

Laurie McLean, an agent with Larsen Pomada, says she is “incorporating self-publishing into every one of my clients’ career plans for backlist titles, experimental fiction, shorter works, and more.”

Laura Rennert, senior agent with Andrea Brown, “has taken it a step further, pioneering an indie-publishing path for the agency’s authors. The first to debut is a young adult novel titled ‘Solstice’ by P.J. Hoover.”

“Rennert shopped ‘Solstice’ to traditional publishers, and it even went to acquisitions at one house. She said that when it was finally rejected (because it was too similar to another book being published by a big name house), ‘we realized this was a concern we were likely going to run into elsewhere, so Hoover made the choice, in consultation with me, to go the independent publishing route and be the first to work with our agency in this capacity … authors are driving this trend in publishing.’” [Emphasis added by moi]

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WATERSPELL UPDATE:

My Role As Continuity Editor

I just finished rereading Waterspell Book 1: The Warlock, getting it into final shape to e-publish. I made a few minor revisions (“Of the making of books, there is no end”) but mostly my focus was on continuity and consistency: I searched for items in Book 1 that contradicted the grand finale through which we travel in Book 3.

In the course of writing Book 3: The Wisewoman, I learned a great deal about the culture and the geography of Ladrehdin (LAD-ruh-din), the world where most of the action takes place. I learned things I simply didn’t know in the beginning of this big project. In Book 1, Myra mentioned “rutted” roads, but in Book 3 we learn that the province of Ruain has good roads. So in Book 1, I changed “rutted” to “busy.”

In Book 1, Myra mentioned the difficulty of getting “hot” meals when on the road. But I now know that Ruain is a prosperous province. Almost every town and village has an inn or a pub—someplace for a traveler to get a hot meal. So in Myra's lamentations, I changed “hot” to “home-cooked.”

Little things. But after working so long and so hard on the WATERSPELL trilogy, I could not bear to publish these books without tending to these sorts of small but important details.

Now it’s time to settle down (again) with Book 2: The Wysard and play my same role as continuity editor. It’ll take me two or three weeks. When I'm done with that one, I’ll issue another progress report.

My goal is to publish the first two books of WATERSPELL by mid-October at latest. The story opens with Carin confronting danger in an autumn woodland, so I aim to match the release date of the books to the same season in which we get to know my vulnerable but gutsy heroine.

Digital Rights Management (DRM)

2011-07-01T12:21:00.000-05:00

Definition of Digital Rights Management (DRM): Technologies used by publishers and copyright holders to limit the use of digital content. Or: An effort to make digital files uncopyable that is as hopeless as "trying to make water not wet."

On my NOOK, I have several e-books from Smashwords.com. At first, I thought Smashwords was being overly generous with writers’ works. Each time I paid for a book, I expected to be able to download only a single copy of it, in the format (ePub) that I need for my NOOK.

But no: Having paid for Craig Lancaster’s pitch-perfect 600 Hours of Edward, and David Davis’s compulsively readable Travels With Grandpaw, I now seem to have the right to download unlimited copies of their books, in any format. I can view them online in HTML; I can download them as PDFs (touted by Smashwords as “good for home printing”); I can even download them as rich-text (RTF) and plain-text documents.

In other words: I haven’t just bought books by these authors. I can now access their manuscripts.

Books vs. Manuscripts

To me—and I daresay, to most writers—there’s a vast difference between our books and our manuscripts. We want our books distributed far and wide. We want our books in every library, public and private. We want our books on every e-reader, tablet computer, and smartphone.

But our MANUSCRIPTS? Those are ours, to be kept safe and shared with only a trusted few. We read our mss. to our critique partners, a few pages at a time. We hand over the whole ms. to a handful of trusted readers. Eventually, when we’re confident that our work is ready for show, we may submit our mss. to agents and publishers.

The idea of putting my WATERSPELL manuscripts online, as editable text files, sent the chill to my heart. But I’m beginning to thaw—even, perhaps, to warm to the concept. My mind is being changed by John Schember and Cory Doctorow.

“DRM—It’s All About Lock-In”

At TeleRead, John Schember clearly and convincingly argues that Digital Rights Management—which supposedly stops people from pirating books—does absolutely nothing to prevent copyright infringement. In John’s view, DRM’s sole purpose is to keep readers “locked-in” to a single e-book vendor: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Apple. This lock-in binds readers to a particular vendor, and can cause them major problems. I quote:

            “There is no way to argue that DRM is a positive thing for readers …
            “The first issue is, it often locks the book to a particular device. If you buy a book from B&N for your Nook, then purchase a Kindle, you cannot read that book on the Kindle. You have to re-purchase the book for the Kindle.
            “The second issue relates to people who have been burned by DRM. Ebooks have been around for decades. There are cases where a store or DRM provider has gone out of business. Suddenly thousands of dollars (this really has happened) worth of ebooks cannot be read because the files cannot be authorized against the DRM server.
            “DRM restricts your ability to move content from one device to another … So if you get a new device (old one broke or it’s just time to upgrade) you cannot read the ebooks you currently own on the new device.
            “DRM gives readers a poor experience … Copyright infringers have a better experience than those who legally and honestly purchase an ebook. Obtaining an illegal copy means a reader doesn’t have to worry about [DRM] issues … Readers shouldn’t be punished by doing the right thing and actually buying an ebook!”

Being not only a writer, but a longstanding member of the Tribe of Readers, I must agree that an unlocked e-book is a much handier thing than a book that is restricted to a single use on a single device. It’s nice to be able to open an e-book in HTML for online reading, if I want to quickly search for something while I’m at the computer and away from my NOOK. And it’s a warm feeling of security, knowing that all my unlocked e-books (those I didn’t buy through BN.com) will move with me if I ever move to a different e-reader.

Looking at this issue as a Reader, not as an Author, I must ask myself: Do I make any distinction between the books I download and read on my NOOK, and the text-file “manuscripts” of those books, which I can also access in their entirety? No, I don’t. Craig’s 600 Hours of Edward, and David’s Travels With Grandpaw, are THEIRS: their works, which I treat with the utmost respect. While it’s kinda cool to be able to thumb through their “manuscripts,” as text files, I don’t actually have much need to do so.

Are Authors at Risk?

Will all readers, however, understand that they are NOT free to cut-and-paste or otherwise monkey around with the copyrighted properties that are published, without DRM restrictions, on sites such as Smashwords?

This question arises from my naturally suspicious nature (I’m a Pisces), but also from a perfectly legitimate desire to protect my property: the writing that I have sweated blood over, that I’ve lost sleep over, that I’ve given my all to bring to fruition.

Soothing my fears (and bringing me back to earth) is this observation from best-selling author Cory Doctorow:

“For me — for pretty much every writer — the big problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity.”

Cory argues that, even if readers download thousands of unauthorized e-books, the author is not greatly harmed:

“[G]iving away books increases your notoriety a whole lot more than clutching them to your breast and damning the pirates.”

Cory states unequivocally that, not only does he hate Digital Rights Management, it’s proven to be useless, as far as helping authors maintain control over their creations:

“DRM doesn’t work. Every file ever released with DRM locks on it is currently available for free download on the Internet. You don’t need any special skills to break DRM these days: you just have to know how to search Google for the name of the work you’re seeking.
“If you get a DRMed ebook, I urge you to break the locks off it and convert it to something sensible like a text file.”

The Choice: Take a Chance, or Remain Obscure

Publishing one’s work has always entailed a certain amount of risk. I remember my student days, when I sat in the library with a stack of index cards, copying the best lines from a dozen or more books. (Steal from one, it’s plagiarism; steal from many, it’s research.)

Then photocopiers were installed at the ends of the stacks, and I was only too happy to drop several dollars, a dime at a time, to painlessly capture the best lines from a dozen books.

Then came the Internet (yes, girls and boys: I’m old enough to remember doing research pre-Internet) and the whole danged world learned to copy-and-paste. Among my responsibilities as an editor is to protect my clients from the wholesale copying off the Internet that is done by some of their freelance writers. One recent project, which was supposedly “written” by an expert with a Ph.D., was largely lifted from other people’s copyrighted websites and pasted verbatim into the Ph.D.’s “manuscript.”

But I digress. My point:

To publish one’s writing is to make it public. And once it’s public, people will use it, in whatever ways they care to use it.

To end this rumination, I’ll again quote Cory Doctorow:

“The thing to remember is that the very *worst* thing you can do to me as an artist is to not read my work — to let it languish in obscurity and disappear from posterity.
“However an author earns her living from her words … she has as her first and hardest task to find her audience. As publisher Tim O’Reilly wrote in his seminal essay, Piracy is Progressive Taxation, ‘being well-enough known to be pirated [is] a crowning achievement.’”

So I plan to take a chance and put my WATERSPELL trilogy out there as unlocked, DRM-less e-books, in hopes of finding my audience—and maybe, just maybe, getting famous enough to be pirated.

For Further Reading:

"The Problem Isn't Piracy. The Problem Is Obscurity." Cory Doctorow on Why Authors Should Give Their Work Away, Stop Sweating Copyright and Focus on Building a Community of Readers

DRM – It’s All About Lock-In, by John Schember

Digital Rights Management, Wikipedia

Too Subtle? Too Obvious?

2011-06-29T11:50:00.000-05:00

At our critique session yesterday, some of us discussed our tendency toward minimalist writing—putting far less on the page than we know about our characters, settings, or story situations.

“I know the backstory,” one writer commented. “I’m completely comfortable with what my characters are doing and saying, because I know everything that’s motivating them. I know the whole situation. It’s perfectly clear—in my mind.”

But will it be clear to the reader who does not have access to the writer’s inside information? Ah, there’s the question.

The discussion reminded me of the diametrically opposed advice I read in Noah Lukeman’s excellent book, The First Five Pages (which covers way more than its title might suggest); and Jack M. Bickham’s practical how-to, The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes (And How to Avoid Them).

The Case for Subtlety

Says Lukeman:

            “[I]f we were to stop and ask what best signals the proficient writer, the answer would be subtlety. … A writer who is subtle … can hint, foreshadow ever so slightly, set things up hundreds of pages in advance. He will often leave things unsaid, may even employ a bit of confusion, and often allow you to come to your own conclusions.
            “The main lesson the unsubtle writer must learn is that less is always more. These writers will often argue to their deathbeds that such and such information absolutely need be included; they will say, Think of the consequences if the reader doesn’t know such and such. But they never stop to consider the other consequence, the consequence of the reader knowing too much …
            “Achieving subtlety is all about gaining confidence, not only in yourself but in the reader. … Picture the reader as brilliant, perceptive, having a photographic memory, taking everything in the first time he reads it, able to grasp ideas before you even begin to say them, able to see where things are leading before you begin to lay them out.
            “Look back over your manuscript and ask yourself if you spell anything out, if you are too blatant. If so, cut and replace with something more low key.
            “It can take time to become proficient in detecting and cutting your own excess, and even the most proficient will not be able to catch it all. You will need an astute outside reader to point out what’s overdone, what’s extraneous.”

Which is why a good critique group is a pearl without price. Critique partners who are watching for overly obvious writing can point out redundancies—passages the writer might view as necessary, but which are, in fact, repetitious or superfluous.

The Case for Being Obvious

Now, listen to Bickham saying: “Don’t worry about being obvious.”

            “Every time you try to be subtle, you run the risk of losing your reader’s understanding.
            “[D]on’t make the mistake of trying to be subtle about what plot happenings mean … Readers confuse easily. If you have any doubt that the reader will understand the meaning of what someone in the story says or does, you must work in at once some method of pointing out what you may think is obvious.
            “Your reader is going to be careless, lazy, in a hurry, distracted and none too patient when she reads your copy. She isn’t going to get anything you don’t put down there pretty clearly.
            “[W]hat seems obvious to the writer may be obscure as hell to the poor reader. And you’re writing for the reader, not for yourself. Aren’t you?”

Who's Your Audience?

That last bit is the crux of the matter: Who are you writing for?

If you’re writing for someone like Noah Lukeman (a literary agent whose clients include Pulitzer Prize nominees, Pushcart Prize recipients, and American Book Award winners), then you’d best be a master of subtlety.

But if you’re writing for fidgety young readers or distracted readers (folks who grab paperbacks off the racks at grocery stores or airport gift shops), you’re likely to confuse—and lose—them if you’re even slightly subtle. Bickham says: “Make the point obvious!”

Once a writer has mostly mastered the fundamentals of her craft, her next big challenge, on her way to becoming a truly proficient writer, is to identify—and walk—the fine line between telling too much and telling too little.

In my WATERSPELL trilogy, I’ve labored mightily to find, and follow, that line. My critique partners have been immensely helpful—invaluable—in pointing out places where I’ve repeated myself, where I’ve told them things they already know, where I’ve beat them about the head and shoulders with obvious information.

They’ve also caught me when I’ve been too subtle, when I’ve failed to give them necessary information: when I’ve expected them to read my mind.

I know every detail about my fantasy world and the people who populate it. The trick is to decide—with the help of my excellent critique partners—which of those details must be committed to paper, and which of them are nuances that are best left to the reader’s imagination.

“Language is not an algebra and … there is no single right answer to any given predicament with words.” —Jacques Barzun

A Crumpling of Revision Notes

2011-06-26T13:50:00.002-05:00

A clowder of cats … a covey of quail … a crumpling of revision notes …

For the past several weeks, I’ve had tremendous fun wadding up my notes for WATERSPELL, my fantasy trilogy, and lobbing them across the room to the wastebasket. Every note I throw away brings me one step closer to finishing a work that has consumed me for more years than I care to admit.

WATERSPELL is long, complex, somewhat unconventional, and possibly controversial. (We’ll see how controversial, when it debuts as a set of e-books later in 2011.) Keeping up with the myriad details of a whole ’nother world and culture has meant keeping extensive notes.

What I've Had to Remember

Some notes have been strictly for continuity. What were the characters wearing at the end of Book 2? Since I never gave them a chance to go home and change, they’re wearing those same tattered clothes when the story picks up in Book 3.

Some of my notes are reminders of the characters’ idiosyncratic speech patterns. They all have their pet phrases: the imperative “Tell me!” and the blaspheming “Drisha’s teeth!” (Verek); the relieved “Sweet mercy!” and the angry “Beggar it all” (Carin); the amiable “Don’t you know” (Welwyn); and the annoyed “Wheesht!” (Meg). I know these people so well by now (after 360,000 words, over three books) I hear them talking in my sleep. Even so, it’s been handy to keep a list of their favorite phrases, particularly so I can vary the swearing with an occasional “By the blood of Abraxas!” from Verek and “Perishing oaths!” from Welwyn.

Some of my notes have been detailed accounts of the history of Ladrehdin (pronounced LAD-ruh-din), the world where most of WATERSPELL is set. That history, only hinted at in Books 1 and 2, is central to Book 3. Though “the sins of the fathers” certainly play their part in the first two books, the roots of Ladrehdin’s present-day distress reach much farther back in time, to the age of the ancients—when a greedy wizard first opened the void between the worlds and set in motion the events that ensnare Carin and Verek. I had to learn all the history. And now that I have it firmly in mind (having completed my Second Round of Deep Revisions to Book 3), I must once again go back through Books 1 and 2 to make sure all are consistent. World-building requires unassailable attention to detail! If I overlook any element, some sharp-eyed reader will be sure to let me know about it.

What I've Filed Away, "Just in Case"

Certain notes have escaped a crumpling. In my WATERSPELL files (which fill dozens of hanging-file folders, suspended in a two-foot-long storage box, and which constitute only the latest set of my notes—other boxes are tucked away now, filled at first-draft stage and currently inactive) … er, what was I saying?

Oh, yes. In my active WATERSPELL files, I have squirreled away the research that could come in handy, later. These include descriptions of such things as:

Types of coughs (barking, wheezing, gasping)
Effects of adrenaline (panting, trembling, rapid heartbeat, dry mouth, dilated pupils)
Evocative sounds from nature (a babbling brook, the roar of a waterfall, the buzz of a cicada … the crunch of boots on autumn leaves, loose gravel, or hard-packed snow)
Parts of a horse harness (collar, breeching, traces, reins)

My To-Dos

What with all the notes I’ve filed away, and those I’ve crumpled and sailed into the trash can, I’m seeing parts of my desk that haven’t come to light in years. The only notes facing me now are a few Post-Its that I’ve stuck to a board near my computer. These are final refinements, minor things such as:

Find-and-replace “Argerich” with Brogar. One reader pointed out that I have a whole bunch of proper nouns starting with the letter A. Most of them are too firmly fixed in the reality of Ladrehdin to undergo a change at this late date. My readers will just have to keep their concentration, and realize that Archamon is a person, Angwid is a place, while Amangêda is … well, we don’t actually know WHAT Amangêda is, do we? At the minor end of this range of names, the Horse Formerly Known As Argerich can easily take a new identity. I’ve renamed Verek’s mount “Brogar,” for the Ring of Brodgar, or Brogar, in Scotland. However, considering the number of major H elements in the Harry Potter books—Harry, Hermione, Hagrid, Horcruxes, and Hallows—I'm leaving my M names alone, and trusting my readers to not confuse Myra with Merriam or Megella (Meg-Ella).
Omit the hairpin from Book 2. This is a continuity issue. That accessory never crops up again. But if Carin is wearing it when she leaves Ladrehdin at the end of Book 2, then it must be accounted for in Book 3. Even little things like hairpins—or scraps of paper—can cause trouble if they are left in places where they don’t belong. Since the Book 2 hairpin has no role to play in Book 3, the easiest fix is simply to remove it from Carin’s beautiful auburn hair before she makes the jump.

The Editing of a Trilogy

Did I mention? World-building requires impeccable attention to detail. Every reader and writer of fantasy knows how essential this is. Fantasy fans know that some seemingly minor item, mentioned in passing as the story unfolds, may come to play a major role later on.

Which is why editors should take care with their strikeouts. A little thing that seems superfluous, at first glance, may prove to be the pivot upon which the plot turns. I firmly believe that anyone who undertakes to edit a thoroughly-thought-out fantasy trilogy, such as WATERSPELL, should sit down and read the entire 360,000 words before daring to make a single mark on Page One of Book One.

How strange it feels, to be so close to THE END after all these years. I’m not sure I’ve completely grasped how few are the items on my Revisions To-Do list.

At this point, my reality as a writer of a complete trilogy is less clear to me than my status as the chronicler of Ladrehdin’s history. I learned it, and I wrote it down. I followed along, notepad in hand, to record the events as Carin, Verek, and their fellow citizens of Ladrehdin wrote new pages in the ancient Book of Archamon.

The Authors League Fund

2011-05-05T15:30:00.000-05:00

Today I dug down to the bottom of my To-Do pile, a big stack of letters, clippings, and stuff that accumulates on a table next to the breakfast bar. The breakfast bar is where I read each day's incoming mail, and the little table beside it is where I place the stuff that I intend to do something about -- eventually.

Near the bottom of the pile, I found this year's appeal from The Authors League Fund. Oops. I'd meant to send my contribution in April. Well, better late than never.

To try to make amends for being slow, I'm reproducing the letter here, in hopes of encouraging my fellow writers to send a contribution that will aid authors who are in financial distress. Who knows? The writer the Fund helps may be you, one of these days.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

March 2011

Dear Colleagues:

We continue to see the impact of the recession upon writers and dramatists, as more and more applicants report having nowhere else to turn. A career novelist, now in her 80s and living alone, was declared blind after suffering from macular degeneration for several years. "I am penniless," she writes, and she has allowed an injury to go untreated for lack of funds. An award-winning children's book author was left with lasting injuries following a car accident and has been living off of credit cards, "getting by day-to-day" in the midst of overwhelming medical bills.

The Authors League Fund is here to help these and other writers, as we have been for 94 years. By providing interest-free loans, most of which are never repaid, the Fund helps professional writers continue their careers, even their lives, with dignity. Many of those we help suffer severe health problems but have inadequate or no insurance; others face eviction or are seniors whose income from writing has ceased because of the changing market. These applicants' words are eloquent testimony to the need and gratitude of the writers we serve:

I cannot tell you how much l appreciate this. I was finally able to get a good night's sleep last night and today was the first day in a very long time I wasn't worried sick. My tears today are of relief.

When I opened the envelope and saw the check and your note, not only was there a sense of relief over finances, but a restoration of some of the faith in what I'm trying to do as a reporter and writer.

What a wonderful thing to greet me after a rocky summer! Now life is not only possible, it may even be sweet.

We encourage you to support your fellow writers by sending $50 or more to the Fund. Every dollar you send -- 100% -- will go to a writer who has fallen on hard times. As always, we are grateful when you share information about the Fund with career writers enduring financial distress. They need not be members of the Authors Guild or the Dramatists Guild to apply.

Sincerely,

Pat Cummings, President
Isabel Howe, Executive Director

The Authors League Fund
Established by the Authors League of America, Inc.
31 East 32nd Street, 7th Floor
New York, NY 10016
http://www.authorsleaguefund.org

Letting the Manuscript Rest

2011-04-25T13:44:00.001-05:00

Hooray! On Saturday, I finished the First Round of Deep Revisions to Book 3 of WATERSPELL. Now I must allow the manuscript to rest for at least three weeks before I begin the Second Round of Revisions. I know there are still some plot issues that I must address: This being the third book of the WATERSPELL trilogy, I must be certain to tie up loose ends. Things were hinted at in the first two books, and all must be resolved by the final page of Book 3, THE WISEWOMAN.

Or, perhaps they won't all be resolved. I'm deliberately leaving a couple of threads to work into a sequel, if I decide to revisit this world and these characters, sometime in the future.

Wow! It's a real feeling of accomplishment, to have an end in sight for all three books. Years ago, I took a run at Book 3 and produced 200 unusable pages. I shelved the whole project then, and went on with my life. But deep in my subconscious, this long, complex story continued to percolate.

And on a Sunday morning more than a year ago, I awoke with Book 3 (Version 2) running through my brain. With fingers flying over the keyboard, I got it down in rough-draft fashion: 111,000 words. Then I let the manuscript sit for months while I went about the business of earning a living and allowed myself to forget what I wrote. That's the only way, I've discovered, to approach the work as an editor -- seeing it "cold," bringing an objective eye to bear.

What I've Learned From Writing a Fantasy Trilogy

Writing the third book has been a radically different experience from writing the first two. When I began this work, I was a long-published (in nonfiction) journalist making the transition to fiction. Alas, I allowed some journalistic expectations and norms to interfere with my creative impulses.

Most damaging, as hindsight now reveals, was my effort to "get it right the first time." When reporting for newspapers and writing feature articles for magazines, I didn't have time to rework multiple drafts. I had to slap the words down, make quick corrections, then hand my writing off for publication.

It never occurred to me, as I took my first tentative steps as a novelist, that I didn't have to get it anywhere NEAR "right" the first time. I could take years to perfect and polish my prose.

I wasted lots of time fussing and fretting over my opening chapters, especially for Book 1, THE WARLOCK. It all came together more fluidly when I finally threw up my hands and gave myself permission to move forward and finish the danged book! You know: "Just write it!"

With Book 2, THE WYSARD, my writing moved along more briskly, because I was beginning to understand that I'd have lots of opportunities to revise and rewrite. Even so, I got bogged down with bits that were destined not to make the cut. I struggled with sections that I should have just bracketed, with a note to myself: "Revise when Book 3 is done and you actually know what relevance this material has to the story as a whole!"

It was only when I finally got Book 3 down on paper -- roughly, but with most of the plot strings threaded through the narrative -- that I was able to reread Books 1 and 2 with a focused eye. Having the whole story complete in my head, I realized why I'd had such a struggle with the problem sections in Book 2: They weren't part of the story. I ended up cutting chunks that I'd labored over.

Such a waste! With Book 3, I finally understood:

Write fiction fast and rough. Don't spend time editing and polishing material that may, later on, hit the cutting-room floor.
And relax! The rough draft can be pretty awful. That doesn't matter. Each succeeding draft, each round of revisions fixes problems and brings the work closer to a "finished" state.

"Finished" in quote marks, because I'm not sure a writer can ever really finish a novel. The time comes, however, when it's as good as the writer can make it (with the help of his or her critique partners) and it must be revealed to the reading public.

That, I believe, is what makes a writer a professional: How many revisions the writer is willing to undertake before finally "killing the monster and flinging it to the public," to paraphrase Winston Churchill.

I long ago lost track of how many times I revised Books 1 and 2. But having learned from my wildly inefficient approach to those manuscripts that a better way exists, I've applied those lessons to Book 3 and I might actually finish this thing by the end of 2011.

And then I'll begin my e-publishing adventure, joining my forward-looking colleagues in exploring our brave new "text meets tech" world.

For now, though, I must force myself to stay away from my Book 3 manuscript. I'm just TINGLING to have at it again. I'm so close -- so close to finishing this story that's been demanding my attention for so many years now.

Hiring a Good Editor

2011-03-31T10:32:00.000-05:00

On March 30 I mentioned all the e-mails I've been getting lately from writer friends who are following the arguments for and against e-books vs. legacy publishers.

Here's a new one: "Author, sell thyself."

What especially struck me was Amanda Hocking's experience:

"Hocking [has] complained more than once about the trouble she's had finding freelance editors capable of catching the typos and grammatical errors that keep turning up in her novels."

My goodness, Amanda! I wish you had dropped me a line. I personally know two excellent editors. One is recently retired from a brand-name publisher and would have done a first-class job on your novels. The other, a member of SCBWI, is also a highly skilled editor.

Then there's the Editorial Freelancers Association, which I belonged to back when I was doing more editing than writing. To quote from the EFA website:

Member specialties include —

    * abstracts
    * copyediting
    * design
    * desktop publishing
    * editing
    * indexing
    * manuscript evaluation
    * picture research
    * project management
    * proofreading
    * research
    * textbook development
    * translation
    * writing

I feel sure you could find a more-than-competent editor among EFA's members.

I'm not trying to be snippy. I am truly puzzled that you have had trouble finding a good editor. Maybe it's because I've earned much more, over the years, as an editor than as a writer. My first job out of college was as a copyeditor on a newspaper. Then I moved into manuscript evaluation, line editing, and developmental editing for an educational publisher. I may move in circles that are more editorial than writerly.

In any event, with all of the experienced editors who have lost their jobs because of the recession and the ongoing shrinkage in the traditional publishing business, there is plenty of talent out there.

Do Writers Need Publishers?

2011-03-30T17:35:00.000-05:00

Writers who know what they're doing are increasingly free to publish their books independently and not fool with the frustrations and delays imposed by legacy publishers. Beginners who need editorial help may continue to seek it from mainstream publishers, but even the newbies are catching on to the fact that they can hire freelance editors who will do the job at least as well as New York can manage it.

Lately I've been receiving lots of e-mails from my writer friends who are seriously thinking of self-publishing and e-publishing. I myself have FINALLY jumped down off the fence, and I've landed solidly on the e-publishing side.

The writers conference I attended last weekend helped me make up my mind. Halfway through it, I asked myself: "Why am I here, putting my butt to sleep on this hard chair?" I was learning nothing new. Only one speaker said anything that resonated with me. An editor admitted: "Publishers are making it up as we go along." Legacy publishers are pretty clueless about the e-publishing revolution that is happening all around them.

Writers, however, are rapidly figuring it out. I quote from "Ebooks and Self-Publishing - A Dialog Between Authors Barry Eisler and Joe Konrath":

"It isn't a good idea for most authors to sign a legacy deal anymore. ... All writers need to be made aware that there is finally an option. Not just an option, but an actual preferable alternative to signing away your rights. ... Publishers look at authors as needing publishers more than publishers need authors. That's changed. This viewpoint is antiquated. Publishers are starting to need authors more than authors need publishers. If you look at the current Top 100 bestsellers on Kindle, twenty-seven of them are self-published. The 'gatekeeper' model, where agents and the Big 6 publishers decided what would be fit for public consumption, is eroding."

Today I received an e-mail with this headline: "Barnes and Noble claims ebooks will reign supreme in 2 years"

Other articles that have come my way recently include these:

"Authors catch fire with self-published e-books"

"Converting Word Files to ePub Files"

"eCub - a simple .epub creation tool"

"Preparing to Publish on Smashwords: How to Format an Ebook"

My research is just beginning. Whatever I learn, I'll share. If you're way ahead of me -- and thousands are -- I'd be grateful to receive a step-by-step guide to e-publishing for the self-publishing author.

A Writer's Workspace

2011-02-27T17:21:00.000-06:00

Since starting this blog in February 2010, I've managed to post something at least once a month. Not wanting to break my streak, I've cast about for something quick to say today, and I've decided to share my idea of "getting away from it all."

Some writers adjourn to the coffee shop when they need a change of scenery. Some go to the library, or the park. I live and work in the country (where it's normally very peaceful, except when the neighbors across the road fire up their industrial-disco-strength sound system on a Saturday night). Very occasionally, I take a notebook into town and work in the library. Mostly, though, I prefer the fresh air of the countryside.

So when I need a change ("A change is as good as a rest," as the saying goes) I set up in the tool shed that my husband built for himself. Little did he know that it would prove to be the ideal place for me to sit and edit a manuscript while I soak up the sun. Even when it's 45 degrees outside, the south-facing doorway of hubby's tool shed is warm. So warm and sunny, I got a sunburned nose in early February as I sat out there and lost myself in revisions of my fantasy trilogy, WATERSPELL.

Right after the shed was finished, I moved an old bentwood rocker out there, meaning simply to get it out of the house. Now it gets more use, in my tool-shed office, than it ever did when it resided indoors.

On a recent afternoon, as I sat and worked, I was visited by a persistent bee. It seemed curious, not aggressive. I thought at first that it was attracted to the sugar in the cup of coffee I'd taken out there. But after it repeatedly flitted across the page of manuscript I was trying to edit, I decided it was an intelligent insect that could recognize a good read when it buzzed past one.

Progress Report

Harking back to my December 2010 post, where I listed my short-term goals, I'm happy to say that I have completed the first two:

Get a critique of my complete Book 1 from a fellow professional.
Finish my reformat and reread of Book 2.

I'm now in the middle of Goal No. 3, which was to return to work on Book 3. It's written; I'm now polishing it.

My goal for 2011 is to FINISH WATERSPELL and begin seriously looking for an agent. I've made halfhearted attempts before, but this time I'm going to seriously research and find the right one. I have discovered, through hard experience, that having the wrong agent is far worse than having no agent at all.

Triumph Comes Through Perseverance

2011-01-24T12:46:00.000-06:00

Novelist Jodi Thomas was the guest speaker at the January 22 meeting of the North Texas SCWBI. Jodi hails from Amarillo, Texas, and writes western romances. She began by telling all the writers in the audience that "You are not normal." And: "The longer you write, the harder it is to hang around normal people."

That's very true. My circle of friends consists almost entirely of writers. I used to be active in AAUW (American Association of University Women) but I dropped out when my husband and I began living in Mexico for several months every year. Though we sold our house on Lake Chapala in 2005, I have fond memories of the years we spent South of the Border. (I also have nightmares about some of our experiences, especially driving on the dangerous roads down there. And I'm delighted that we found a buyer for our house in 2005, before the current drug violence had really taken hold.)

Anyway, when I came back to Texas full-time, I resolved to devote myself to writing and writers. So now my social life consists of participating in critique sessions, going to SCBWI chapter meetings, and attending writers conferences.

At the meeting Saturday, Jodi said: "Writing must become an obsession if you want to make a living at it." Heck, I've found that my writing has become my obsession even while I'm NOT making a living at it. I'm gainfully employed as an editor and I earn just enough at that to support my writing habit. All day every day, when I'm not busy with a paying assignment, I'm working on my novels.

Jodi advised looking ahead five years and imagining three successes. The three things I'm looking forward to:

Waterspell is published and is doing great.
The movie rights have sold.
I'm collaborating with the screenwriter.

Hey, if you're going to dream, dream big.

Jodi discussed several issues of concern to writers, especially time management, character development, and plotting. I won't pirate her talk by typing up my notes in this space. But I must mention the one piece of advice that I found most helpful: "Give characters fears and secrets." Most writers can readily name their characters' fears, but I hadn't thought so much about their secrets. Knowing those will lead to greater depth-of-character.

Jodi's first book was published in 1988. Her 30th novel just came out. Since I firmly believe that e-publishing is the way of the future for novels, I looked her up at BN.com to be sure her works are available as e-books, and they are.

Good advice can come from unexpected sources. Jodi found this engraved on a headstone in an Amarillo cemetery: "Triumph comes through perseverance."

I'm persevering. Been persevering for a while now. Will keep on persevering. (Maybe if I type the word persevering enough times, I'll learn how to spell it without spellchecker help.)

Jodi also reminded her audience that attending meetings with other writers is not writing. Checking e-mail is not writing. Blogging is not writing. Well, technically blogging IS writing. But time spent blogging (or social networking) is time NOT spent on a manuscript.

So here I go, back to work, back to my obsession. But first: lunch.

The Frugal Writer

2011-01-18T16:07:00.000-06:00

Much is made every spring of the average taxpayer’s frantic efforts to meet the April 15 filing deadline for federal income taxes. However, for those of us who are self-employed and who pay quarterly estimated taxes, January 15 is a much bigger deal. (This year, it’s January 18 since the 15th was a Saturday and yesterday was a holiday.)

Even before some of us have packed away the Christmas decorations, we must spread out our receipts and tally up how much we made as writers, and how much of what we spent during the previous year can be counted as business expenses. In effect, we must prepare our tax return three months earlier than everybody else, because we have to know how much to send the IRS for our fourth and final quarterly tax payment.

How well did we estimate our business income and expenses for the year? Did we send enough in April, June, and September? Will we owe a huge amount in January?

When I’d sorted through all my business records for 2010, I discovered that I’d made only two-thirds as much money last year as I did in 2009. It was nothing to do with the Great Recession—fault lay entirely with my Grand Obsession. I spent as much time as possible in 2010 working on WATERSPELL, my fantasy trilogy. Whatever paying assignments came my way, I accepted, but I spent no time beating the bushes for work. Hence the steep drop in my income.

The good news: I’d used my 2009 income to estimate how much to send Uncle Sam for my first three quarterly tax payments (April, June, and September 2010). It turns out that those payments actually covered my entire tax liability for the year, so I didn’t owe the IRS a dime for the fourth payment that was due today, January 18.

The bad news: I’m pretty well broke.

When all is said and done, however, what does a writer really need in order to write? Just ink, paper, electricity, and a brain. So here are my tips for saving money on these four essentials.

INK

Buy your toner and inkjet cartridges at LaserMonks.com. They have the best prices around. During their recent 60-percent-off sale, I bought a toner cartridge for my HP LaserJet 1022 printer AND a black-ink cartridge for my ancient Epson color inkjet for just $36.63 (shipping included). My discount on the two items was $46.02. I’ve been getting my ink and toner from LaserMonks for years now. The quality is excellent, the prices are bargains, and my purchases support the monks in their good works.

PAPER

Office Depot gives me $2 for each empty ink or toner cartridge that I bring in for recycling. They used to give $3, and for a short time--through Jan. 22--they’re offering $5 each. Gather up those empties and go recycle them while you can get five bucks apiece! Considering that (full) cartridges only cost $6 or $7 at LaserMonks, and you can get from $2 to $5 back at Office Depot for the empties, that’s pretty cheap ink. I then use my “Recycling Rewards” to buy paper at Office Depot. Their house-branded copy paper is nicely bright and good quality, and they often put it on sale. And recently, I used an Office Depot coupon to buy reams of HP paper for just $2 each. Watch the sales and use the coupons they e-mail to regular customers, and you can save a bundle on cases (and on single reams) of paper.

ELECTRICITY

I used to assume that signing a two-year contract with TXU Energy would get me the best price, but then I discovered that their contractless, month-to-month MarketEdge plan was by far the better deal. MarketEdge, they say, “automatically lowers your monthly price when natural gas prices fall and gives you the option to choose another TXU Energy plan for free if natural gas costs rise too high for your comfort level. This plan is indexed to the NYMEX price of natural gas, which changes monthly.” Not much, it doesn’t. I’ve stayed with MarketEdge, month by month, for years now, and my average price per kWh is never more than 11 cents, and it’s usually under 10 cents -- quite a bit less than their locked-in rate for customers who sign contracts with them.

BRAIN

I was skeptical of supplements that claim to sharpen a body’s brain, but I’ve come to believe that lecithin actually does. Plain old soy lecithin, 1200 mg softgels, in the cheapest generic “economy size” bottle, is far less expensive than many supplements. And since beginning to take one a day, I’ve noticed a real improvement in my ability to concentrate. As I revise my WATERSPELL manuscripts, I feel that my wits are sharper and my insights deeper. Walgreen’s has regular buy-one, get-one-free sales, which make it really economical to take a brain pill daily.

So there you go: Cheap ways to get writerly essentials.

Oh, I almost forgot--a writer also needs TIME. Which is something I seem to be wasting right now ...

December Distractions

2010-12-21T15:33:00.000-06:00

It's hard to get any work done this close to Christmas. Last Friday I had lunch with some editor-friends. On Saturday, I attended the Xmas party of my local SCBWI chapter. Sunday I spent addressing Christmas cards. Yesterday I received cards from people I hadn't thought to send one to, so I had those last-minute cards to address.

Here in North Texas it was 75 degrees and beautiful yesterday, so I ended up gardening instead of writing. I demulched a tree, having seen on This Old House that too much mulch can be harmful. I raked some off the Chinese pistachio and put it on the abelias instead.

I also cut about eight limbs off an aging fruitless mulberry. Most of them were dead, but I sawed through three perfectly good, living limbs that unbalanced the tree -- unbalanced it to the point that I feared the whole thing might crash to the ground in a big windstorm. I thought the sap would be down and the poor tree wouldn't feel a thing. But today I see sap oozing from the cuts, so I guess the tree wasn't as dormant as I had hoped.

Last night, I joined 1.3 billion others in watching the winter solstice lunar eclipse, at 2 a.m. local time. Which meant I overslept this morning.

Today it's 82 degrees and sunny, and I've been outside refilling the birdbath and making some Vitamin D. But I'm less tempted to do yard-work this afternoon. It's smoky outside -- a grassfire, I think, burning to the south of us. We need rain! California, send us some?

I have managed a few hours of useful work today, in spite of myself. I've reformatted Book 2 of WATERSPELL to look like unbound galley proofs, the way I did with Book 1. I'm only on page 60 (of about 425) but I can see already that the reformatting will give me a fresh look at a manuscript that's become too familiar in its standard Times Roman style.

At the SCBWI party last Saturday, I made a deal with a fellow writer of fantasy to trade manuscripts. We're both long writers, and both hesitant to ask people to read our 100,000-word epics. But it's not an imposition to critique each other's work, at length. I'm excited at the prospect of having Karen read my whole Book 1 instead of just sharing it piecemeal with my regular critique group. The intensive critique of a few pages at a time is absolutely invaluable. But at this stage of development, I really need a knowledgeable, skillful professional to consider the work as a whole.

My goals for the next few weeks, therefore, are to:

Get Book 1 to Karen for her critique of the whole ball of wax.
Finish my reformat and reread of Book 2.
Return to work on Book 3. It's written; I just have to polish it until it squeaks.

And then I think I'll be ready to finally begin a serious search for an agent. Or perhaps for a small publisher. I'm still considering the options that the new e-publishing technologies have opened up.

But right now it's time to finish my final cup of coffee for the day. Then I need to put aside the distractions (like a warm and sunny Texas winter-solstice afternoon -- and this blog!) and get back to work.

So many distractions, so many pages, so little time -- especially on this, the shortest day of the year. Happy Winter Solstice!

Inspiration Follows Change

2010-11-23T13:56:00.000-06:00

In finishing the first draft of The Wisewoman, the final book in my Waterspell trilogy, I learned things that I hadn’t fully understood before, about the world where my fantasy is set. To ensure consistency across the three books, I’ve had to go back and reread books one and two, The Warlock and The Wizard.

Both of those manuscripts have been in existence awhile now. (I’m a slow writer and a painstaking reviser, and I care too much about this story to rush it.) My challenge, as I curled up with Book One again, was to see it with fresh eyes.

The solution I hit upon is working out remarkably well: I reformatted the manuscript with 1.7-inch margins, which creates a line length of about 5 inches. I changed the line spacing from 2 to 1.5. And perhaps most importantly, I changed the font from Times New Roman to Book Antiqua 12-point.

The result, when printed out (on buff paper to simulate the yellowed pages of an old book), looks a whole lot like unbound galley proofs. I’m not reading a manuscript anymore. I’m now reading a typeset book.

Psychologically, this is having a profound influence on my manner of reading. I’m not looking at the work as an editor who’s line-editing a manuscript. I’m viewing it as a reader would see it.

And surprisingly enough (given how many times I’ve been through the manuscript already), my new perspective as a reader is showing me some unnecessary prepositional phrases and even the odd adjective or adverb that can still stand to come out. I’m reading quickly, the way a reader charges ahead when devouring a fast-paced action story. The quick pace of my reading throws a spotlight on any word or phrase that doesn’t need to be there.

This experience is underscoring, for me, the wisdom of Elmore Leonard’s 10th Rule for Writing Fiction: “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” When I approached my book as a reader instead of a writer or an editor, it became easier for me to see exactly which parts a typical reader might really tend to skip over.

The fresh perspective I’ve gained from changing my manuscript to look like an actual typeset book also proved the value of this advice from hypnotherapist Milton Erickson (quoted in the London Times):

“Change will lead to insight far more often than insight will lead to change.”

I Have a Wi-Fi Hotspot

2010-10-31T11:32:00.000-05:00

Unless you like travelogues (or enjoy snickering at the clueless), you technically advanced readers may skip the following blog entry: You probably already know that a Linksys router turns a home into a Wi-Fi hotspot. I (being somewhat technically slow-witted) just figured that out this morning.

I got a Linksys router more than a year ago so that my husband could use the laptop computer downstairs while I'm on the aging desktop up here under the eaves. Our first stab at the problem of connecting both computers at once was a 100-foot Ethernet cable to connect his laptop to the wireless Internet antenna that's just outside my office window. That, of course, didn't work so well. Lots of plugging and unplugging, not to mention the unsightliness of stringing a long black Ethernet cable along the upstairs hall, over the balcony, and down to the kitchen desk. After seeing the wireless router a friend had installed in her house, I realized that was the solution to our situation.

We quite easily linked the laptop to our new, at-home wireless connection. And when we traveled with the laptop, I had no trouble connecting to hotels' Wi-Fi services. But even with a year's experience with wireless routers, I still didn't grasp that our home router created a Wi-Fi hotspot.

It was only this month, during a week of vacation, that I began, dimly, to see the truth. We went to Palo Duro Canyon and the Alibates Flint Quarries in the Texas Panhandle, then across to Red Rock Canyon and Turner Falls (pictured above) in Oklahoma. While staying in Amarillo, we drove past the Barnes & Noble bookstore repeatedly. Each time, I thought about taking my Nook e-reader into the store so I could download an e-book that kept insisting it required a Wi-Fi connection to download. I don't know why that should be the case -- I've successfully downloaded other books with the Nook's built-in 3G wireless connection.

But we never made it into the Amarillo B&N, and it was only after we got home that I began to wonder whether I could have connected my Nook to our hotel's Wi-Fi hotspot instead. And eventually, that train of thought led me to try out my own Wi-Fi hotspot this morning.

It connected, of course. I downloaded the book that had to have a Wi-Fi connection. And I became just a little less ignorant about Wi-Fi and routers and wireless communications in general.

Honestly, why don't the makers of these gizmos take into consideration the limited technical know-how of a big chunk of their potential audience? I'm a writer, reader, and editor, not a tech guru. I do all right with the technology, most of the time. At least, I figure out what I need to know about it. But experiences like this make me realize just how much is taken for granted by the people who build the hardware and write the software.

Don't just tell us that a Nook 3G + Wi-Fi exists. Tell us that it will download books out of the air the same way a cell phone receives a text message. (That's 3G, right?) AND that it will recognize and use the same wireless router that connects my husband's laptop to the Internet at home, in the same way that the laptop recognizes and uses a hotel's Wi-Fi hotspot.

Well, live and learn. Now I'm going hunting on the 'Net for Alibates flint jewelry. The rock is so beautiful.

My Favorite Quotes: 4

2010-10-17T12:18:00.000-05:00

On Writing:

“The beginning is the most important part of the work.” —Plato

“Inspiration is the act of drawing the chair up to the writing table.” —Orhan Pamuk

“Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm.” —Benjamin Disraeli

“No good story is quite true.” —Leslie Stephen

“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” —Albert Einstein

“Diligence is the mother of good fortune.” —Miguel de Cervantes

“I have a hunch we all get told that we’re a loser, and how healthy you are as an adult depends on how much you believed it when you were growing up.” —Aaron Sorkin

“’Tis of no importance what bats and oxen think.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

“You’ve got to go out on a limb sometimes because that’s where the fruit is.” —Will Rogers

“Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more.” —Mark Twain

“A man’s errors are his portals of discovery.” —James Joyce

“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.” —George Bernard Shaw

“Sometimes we stare so long at a door that is closing that we see too late the one that is open.” —Alexander Graham Bell

On Living Simply:

“Thrift is more about knowing what you cherish, then skipping the rest ... spending less money creates more time.” —Jeff Yeager

“A true sign of wealth is free time—freedom from drudgery and unwanted commitments.” —Daniel Newman

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” —Leonardo da Vinci

“For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

“In the absence of clearly defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it.” —Robert Heinlein

(For more like these: My Favorite Quotes: 3)

Jury Duty

2010-10-13T15:05:00.000-05:00

I’ve had an interesting week. On Monday I answered a jury duty summons that took me to the county seat to sit with about 120 of my fellow citizens. The judge laid out the unusual circumstances (unusual for a smallish, rural county like ours): they were needing to fill three juries at once. One was for a civil case that was predicted to last a week; one was for another civil lawsuit that might go as long as two weeks; and the third was for a criminal trial that should be over in three days, tops.

By the luck of the draw, I was assigned to the pool for the criminal case. We 35 were sent home posthaste on Monday, with instructions to return at 8:30 this morning (Wednesday).

Upon re-reporting for duty today, the potential jurors were told that the case involved a theft, under $1,500. So why wasn’t it being handled as a misdemeanor? The defendant had been convicted of theft twice before. Those prior convictions raised the stakes.

What I found fascinating about the experience was the cross section of small-town Texas represented by the members of the jury pool. We had welders, machinists, nurses, accountants, ranchers, shipping managers, truck drivers, office workers, retired military ... a candle-maker too, as I recall. I was the only writer. Or at least, the only person present who would admit to being a writer.

Sitting next to me was a retired elementary school teacher who’s now a high school reading teacher. A reading teacher! I slipped Kay my card—naturally. And I’ll be mailing her two copies of my chapter book Trail Fever. It’s been used in adult literacy classes in Arkansas (they sent me a nice note saying how well it fit the needs and interests of their adult learners). So I feel sure it’ll be of some use to Kay in her efforts to help high-schoolers improve their reading skills. Though written for the fourth-grade history curriculum, it’s got enough action and drama to appeal to teenagers and adults, too.

Coincidentally (or perhaps it’s all part of some plan?), a very good friend of mine recently shared with me some advice from Rebecca Webber—“Make Your Own Luck,” about the value of seeing possibilities in every experience. Rebecca cites research by psychologist Richard Wiseman:

“He found that those who call themselves lucky score higher on the personality factor of extraversion. That means that they are more likely to have a fortuitous encounter because they meet lots of new people ...”

I consider myself an introvert (aren't most writers?) but I also believe I’m pretty lucky. Certainly I’m flexible and open to new experiences—open “to life’s surprising twists and turns.”

I enjoyed making a lucky new acquaintance this morning. Of all the people I might have sat next to, I ended up elbow to elbow with Kay: a reading teacher! Fabulous fortune.

My only disappointment was that I didn’t get picked to serve on the jury. The chosen 12 came from the first three rows, and Kay and I were sitting in the fourth row. Well, maybe next time. Jury duty is one of life’s experiences that I’ll be glad to have, if and when I get that postcard in the mail again.

(Hmm. I wonder if I should have told the defense attorney, or the prosecutor, that the protagonist of my fantasy trilogy is a thief? Possibly that would have changed my luck ...)

North Texas Art Director-Editor Day

2010-09-29T11:04:00.001-05:00

Some thoughts this morning about the Art Director-Editor Day, presented last Saturday (September 25, 2010) by the North Central/Northeast Texas Chapter of SCBWI:

Elizabeth Parisi, executive art director at Scholastic, gave us an inside view of what goes into designing a book’s cover art and overall look. I was encouraged to learn that the design process is just as fraught with peril as the writing and editing can be. Many, many design ideas will be tried and discarded on the way to finding the right one. The designer’s scrapheap, I decided, is analogous to my writer’s bonepile.

Dan Yaccarino, author/illustrator, offered a fascinating look at his creative processes — processes plural, the man does so many different things. He works in lots of different media, including animation. Though his talk was aimed mostly at illustrators, his advice is applicable to writers, too: “Be self-motivated. Set your own deadlines. Channel your energies. Experiment; make mistakes. Do books about what you really like! Stick to your vision and have an opinion.”

Mallory Kass, assistant editor at Scholastic, gave a wonderfully detailed and helpful talk on “First Impressions: The Art of a Captivating Opening Page.” Mallory gave us lots of useful advice on using that first page to set the tone, create atmosphere, bring the reader into the world where the story takes place ... set up the reader’s expectations, build anticipation, offer glimpses of the qualities that make the work special. The first page is a microcosm of the book. Mallory cited The Golden Compass for its strong opening that gives such a wonderfully rich sense of the setting. That’s one of my favorite books, too.

Priscilla Burris, author/illustrator, gave a mini-workshop to round out the day. Since I can barely draw stick figures, I used the time to wind down after a long and busy day. After the artists among the attendees had finished their sketches, Priscilla offered some advice that resonated with all of the creative types in the audience: We do what we do because we can’t do anything else. We all have our strengths, and we all have the areas we need to grow in. Be teachable; be open to learning. We’re in competition only with ourselves.

And on that note, I need to end this blogging stuff and get back to work. Only yesterday, meeting with my critique group, I was reminded again of my strengths and, alas, of my weaknesses. It’s time to settle back down with Book 1 of Waterspell and try to improve those areas that remain in need of improvement. (Will I EVER succeed in “Omitting Needless Words”? Not unless I find a way to recognize which words actually are needless.)

Awakening Your Stylistic Instinct

2010-09-19T11:00:00.000-05:00

From my friend Ruth Cauble, I inherited a book called COMMON SENSE ABOUT WRITING, by Thomas H. Cain. Its copyright date is 1967, making it a brand-new book when Ruth won it as a prize in a writing competition. She inscribed the flyleaf: "Rec'd for first place award in the Grace Gaylord Creative Writing Contest — June 9, 1967 — R. Sammons Cauble."

I'm endlessly interested in matters of style, so I turned first to chapter 7, titled "Expression: Style and Sentences." Dr. Cain, who wrote the book when he was an associate professor of English at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, defined style as "the total effect of writing."

"It is the effect achieved," he wrote, "by the ideas, the order, the paragraphs, the sentences, and the words all working together harmoniously."

Cain recognized that a writer's style is a very personal thing. No two people will write exactly alike, or even agree completely on what constitutes good style:

"The reason may be that when you try to express your ideas in the best words, sentences, and sequences of sentences, a whole army of subjective human variables comes into action: personal factors, individual gifts, range of experience, reading background, discretion, sense of decorum, feeling for rhythm, and plain taste … style springs from just such individual sources."

Style, then, is partly subconscious: it arises from a writer's way of thinking. But by reading widely and intensively, we can sharpen our stylistic instincts.

We've all heard the advice to read widely in the genre in which we wish to write: picture books, chapter books, memoir, novels, etc. According to Alan Cheuse, author of novels, short fiction, and memoir:

"You can't write seriously without reading the greats in that peculiar way that writers read, attentive to the particularities of the language, to the technical turns and twists of scene-making and plot, soaking up numerous narrative strategies and studying various approaches to that cave in the deep woods where the human heart hibernates."

To help you read in the writer's "peculiar" focused way, Dr. Cain suggested this exercise:

From a book you especially admire, choose a passage of about 12 or 15 sentences. Read the passage silently.
Note the structure of each paragraph.
Read the passage aloud, listening to the stages in the paragraph structure and especially to the rhythm of the sentences and how they vary in length and emphasis.
Now copy the passage slowly by hand (don't type), sentence by sentence, first reading each sentence aloud and noting its pattern of emphasis and rhythm.
Copy the entire passage again (typing it if you wish), listening for the way the sentences work together in groups of two or three.

"By the time you reach Step 5," Cain predicted, "you will find that you have almost memorized the rhythm and scheme of emphasis in some sentences, even though you can't quite repeat the words. This is enough. The whole point of the exercise lies in sensing when sentences sound right. It marks the awakening of the stylistic instinct that guides most professional writers as they write."

I did this exercise with one of my favorite books, THE GOLDEN COMPASS by Philip Pullman. In analyzing a page chosen at random from near the middle of the story, I noted unusual similes, questions presented in groups of three (employing "the power of three"), specific and colorful word choices, strongly rhythmic phrasing, and the use of the conjunction "and" to create both a driving rhythm and a smooth flow. On just that one page, I identified and studied a wide range of the techniques that contribute to Pullman's powerful and pleasing style.

Dr. Cain suggested doing the exercise one hour a day for a week or two. This kind of intensive reading isn't a replacement for an extensive reading background, but it can be a useful crash course in developing your stylistic instinct. (Thank you, Ruth Ann. I love the book.)

Reprinted from the May/June 2010 issue of The SCBWIs of Texas, the newsletter of the North Central/Northeast Texas Chapter of SCBWI.

Deborah J. Lightfoot has written three books of nonfiction (published) and three novels (not yet published) and earns her living as an editor. At her blog, she's posted the transcript of "Self-Editing: Two Half Brains Make a Whole Writer," a program she gave at a Tarrant County College writers' workshop: djlightfoot.blogspot.com.

The Comma-Happy Writer

2010-09-11T12:22:00.000-05:00

My post today is in response to a question I received about the proper use of commas:

I am "comma-happy." I love commas. I use them everywhere, as often as I can! I've been reading a lot, lately ... and often I see commas not being used in places where I would normally put them.

For instance, I thought I was supposed to put a comma before the word "too," or the word "also," at the end of a sentence. (e.g., You write, too?)

I also use commas to separate complete thoughts that are found in one sentence. (I could talk about commas all day, but I have to go to bed.) Or, I use one after a transitional word (or phrase) following a semicolon; but, it must precede the next complete thought. (sigh ...)

Overusing commas is, ahem, common among writers. As I noted in Self-Editing: Part 5, contemporary writing tends toward a more open style, with commas omitted that might be expected in a formal or literary style.

From The Chicago Manual of Style, here’s an example of close punctuation:

Babs had gone to Naples with Guido, and, when Baxter found out about it, he flew into a rage.

Open punctuation (modern style) calls for fewer commas:

Babs had gone to Naples with Guido, and when Baxter found out about it he flew into a rage.

The open, modern style just looks and reads better to most of us these days. A comma introduces a slight pause … and when you’re tearing along in a fast-paced action story, pausing is the last thing you want to do.

One cure for the comma-happy writer may be to write the first draft with almost no commas in it. Use the ones you must, such as the commas that separate dialogue from the dialogue tags:

It was Thoreau who wrote, “One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels.”

“I hope you are not referring to me,” Garrett replied.

(In the example above, note that the comma goes inside the closing quotation mark. Periods and commas always precede closing quotation marks.)

Writers, while writing, often pause to think. It’s easy to type a comma each time you pause. It may even feel correct to do so.

Begin breaking the habit by forcing yourself to write without inserting commas even when you strongly feel the urge to do so. Then during the revision process, when you go back through and read what you wrote, you can plug in commas as required to avoid misreading.

For a good review of when and where to use commas, try "seven easy steps to becoming a comma superhero" from The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

For a thorough discussion of when to use a comma with “too,” see Grammar Girl, Episode 157.

For a discussion of eliminating every comma that isn’t absolutely necessary for clarity or grammatical correctness, there’s my Self-Editing post from March.

I hope this helps you tame your comma-mania! :-)

The Mutating Mars Hoax

2010-08-27T15:33:00.000-05:00

http://science.nasa.gov/

Normally on this blog, I share my writing-related thoughts and experiences. But this being August 27 -- anniversary of a persistent astronomical "misunderstanding" -- I'm passing along some information from NASA that, I hope, will be circulated widely. Every year I get the same dumb e-mails about "Mars Will Look as Big as the Full Moon!"

Come now, my friends! Have you ever gone outside after sunset and actually tried to find Mars in the night sky? The Red Planet is, at best, a dot. Even at its closest to Earth, it remains a dot. (The photo above is faked.) Read on:

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August 25, 2010: It spreads, it mutates, it refuses to die.

For the seventh year in a row, the Mars Hoax is infecting email boxes around the world. Passed from one reader to another, the message states that on August 27th Mars will approach Earth and swell to the size of a full Moon. "NO ONE ALIVE TODAY WILL EVER SEE THIS AGAIN," the email declares--always in caps.

News flash: It's not true.

Here are the facts. On August 27, 2010, Mars will be 314 million km from Earth, about as far away as it can get. Mars will shine in the western sky after sunset like a tiny red star of ordinary brightness. If you didn't know it was there, you probably wouldn't notice.

The origins of the Hoax can be traced back to 2003 when Mars really did swell to unusual proportions. On August 27th of that year, Mars came within 56 million km of Earth—the nearest it has been in 60,000 years. People marveled at the orange brilliance of Mars in the night sky and crowded around telescopes for clear views of the planet's towering volcanoes, ruddy plains, and glistening polar ice caps. At the height of the display, Mars was about 75 times smaller than the full Moon.

That's when "the virus" was born.

Someone, somewhere, reasoned as follows: If Mars is 75 times smaller than the Moon, then magnifying it 75 times should make it equal to the Moon. Early versions of the Hoax encouraged readers to get out their telescopes and insert a 75x eyepiece: "At a modest 75 times magnification," the message stated, "Mars will look as big as the full Moon to the naked eye."

Soon, the Hoax was vectoring around the internet, making copies of itself and mutating. Advanced versions of the virus, sleeker and less wordy than its ancestors, omitted the magnification and simply stated, "Mars will look as big as the full Moon to the naked eye!" Before long, the year was omitted, too. August 27, 2003, became August 27, and the Hoax became immortal. Indeed, years of stories contradicting the Hoax have failed to stamp it out. This is the fourth vaccination by Science@NASA alone.

Tolerant readers point out that the Mars Hoax is not really a hoax, because it is not an intentional trick. The original composer probably believed everything he or she wrote in the message. If so, even the name of the Mars Hoax is wrong!

Here's what you should do on August 27th. Go outside at sunset and face west. The bright light you see shining through the twilight is lovely Venus. Grab a pair of binoculars and scan the sky around Venus. A few degrees to the right, you'll come across a little orange star-like object. That is Mars.

Now go back inside and delete that email.

Author: Dr. Tony Phillips | Credit: Science@NASA

Just Write It!

2010-08-22T12:57:00.000-05:00

Here’s an item I clipped and saved from the Spring 2000 Authors Guild Bulletin:

“I don’t like gorgeous writing,” novelist Kent Haruf told Dinitia Smith of The New York Times. Haruf, who lives in Murphysboro, Ill., is the author of Plainsong, winner of the National Book Award for fiction.

Haruf said he wrote the first draft of the novel with a wool stocking cap pulled down over his eyes. According to Smith, “He would sit typing blindly in the unheated basement of his unpretentious white frame house in this sleepy town trying to visualize the high, dry Colorado plains of his childhood.”

Haruf said he pulled the cap over his eyes because “I was trying not to be analytical, to get in touch with the intuitive, the visual, the spontaneous, without any attention to detail and syntax.

“It takes away the terror when you’re blind and you can’t go back and rewrite a sentence,” he said. “It calls for storytelling, not polishing.”

I wouldn’t be able to write with a cap pulled down over my eyes. More than likely, my fingers would get off of home-row and I’d end up with Mpe od yjr yo,r gpt s;; hppf ,rm yp …

Experience has taught me, however, that Haruf’s approach -- just write it; save the rewriting and polishing for later -- is the only way to write a novel. As I made the transition from writing nonfiction to trying my hand at a novel, I wasted beaucoup time agonizing over my first chapter. I can’t tell you how many rewrites I did of that one chapter. And none of them, of course, was satisfactory.

Finally I threw up my hands, figuratively speaking, and just went on writing the rest of the book. And by the time I reached the end of Book 1 of my WATERSPELL trilogy, I was a different writer. The process of writing fiction had changed me in countless ways. I was far more in touch with “the intuitive, the visual, the spontaneous” than I had been as a working journalist and a writer of nonfiction.

Book 2 came a little easier as I applied the lessons I had learned. I still tended to overwrite, but my style in Book 2 is looser, freer, more confident -- more spontaneous.

But it’s in Book 3 that I seem to have hit my stride. From late 2009 into early 2010, my fingers just flew over the keyboard as I wrote the first draft of that final installment of my epic. I remember waking up one Sunday morning with the whole story clear in my mind, sitting down at the keyboard, and tapping away at a blistering pace for day after day, then week after week, barely pausing until I had transferred the story from my head to the computer.

Write It, Then Let It Sit

The draft had to sit for months while I made a living -- such a pesky necessity it is, having to make a living. But this month I have finally been able to get back to it, and reading what I wrote all those months ago is like reading someone else’s writing.

I do not remember writing the scenes I am now reading. Cross my heart and hope to die, it’s the truth.

As I read what I wrote, I have no idea what’s going to happen next -- I’m surprised by each twist and turn. The whole story seems to have flowed out my mind, through my fingertips, onto the page, and left hardly a trace of itself in my memory. I remember the long, intense hours I spent bringing the draft into being. But the contents of the draft, I had forgotten.

Happily, I am not displeased with what I’m reading now. My mind must have been hitting on all cylinders during that two- or three-month period of feverish writing. I rather neatly tied up loose ends from Books 1 and 2, I crafted satisfactory explanations, I untangled the knots that remained after the first two installments.

What a relief to pick up the draft of Book 3 and realize I have nearly pulled it off! This trilogy is almost finished.

Oh, I still have many pages to write, including a third narrative lay (poem) that will be a sort of prequel to the poems in Books 1 and 2 that contain hidden clues. Those two poems came to me quite easily and naturally (I wrote about the experience here).

So far, the third poem hasn’t presented itself to my conscious mind. But I trust that my subconscious will spit it out at some point. I just have to be ready to write it down when it comes (hence all the notepads everywhere).

What I have learned from the years-long task of writing my trilogy is that the writing must come first. Rewriting and polishing have no place in the early creative stages of telling a story. Just write it!

Then, later, when you can look at the draft objectively, when you can see it as though somebody else wrote it -- that’s the time for analyzing, rewriting, and refining.

A Writer's Bonepile

2010-08-14T11:45:00.001-05:00

I keep a bonepile (and I'm not talking about skeletons in the closet). On my computer, I have these files:

Book 1 bonepile.doc
Book 2 bonepile.doc
Book 3 bonepile.doc

In them, I keep the major passages that I have cut from the books of my WATERSPELL fantasy trilogy. Not every superfluous adjective or adverb, of course, not every unnecessary prepositional phrase, but the meaty bits that, for one reason or another, I've edited out.

It's handy to be able to dip back into those bonepiles when I discover that I've cut something I shouldn't have. Recently, a critique partner told me my main character's motives during one important scene were murky. I was "being subtle," I replied. I was following this advice from Noah Lukeman's book, The First Five Pages:

"Picture the reader as brilliant, perceptive, having a photographic memory, taking everything in the first time he reads it, able to grasp ideas before you even begin to say them, able to see where things are leading before you begin to lay them out."

Well, as it turns out, I was demanding too much of the reader, expecting them to see where that particular section was leading without me laying it out. I needed to provide more information so the reader would fully understand why Carin had made her decision in the way that she had, when other factors seemed to strongly tempt her to choose differently.

Seeking something half remembered, I scanned my Book 1 bonepile, and sure enough I found that in an early draft I had revealed her thinking, I had shown the considerations that made Carin's ultimate decision seem inevitable. But, following Lukeman's advice about "how to be subtle," I'd taken it out.

The passage in the bonepile wasn't something I could just copy and paste into my working draft, but it provided a skeleton upon which I could build. The passage I ended up with is better than the original bits that landed in the bonepile, and I believe it solves the problem that my critique partner identified. (I'll find out, anyway, next time we meet.)

Bonepiles as Organization Aids

Kathryn Lay (the award-winning author of Crown Me! and other books and nearly 2,000 articles, essays, and short stories) has an excellent article in a recent issue of The Writer magazine, "Plot vs. character." In it, Kathy quotes A.M. Jenkins, the award-winning author of Damage, Beating Heart, and the Printz Honor Book Repossessed:

"I'm a very disorganized writer who gets through a manuscript mostly on feel. This means a ton of rewriting, moving things, gutting scenes, cannibalizing them if needed."

That makes me feel much better about my own slow progress through my WATERSPELL trilogy, as I grope my way to the final pages of all three books.

It also underscores the value of keeping a bonepile. Things that get moved (moved out), scenes that are gutted, can go into the bonepile, where they'll be available later for cannibalizing.

I know some writers keep every draft of a novel, just renaming them Draft 1, Draft 2, etc., as they revise their work. I don't do that. I don't care to be reminded of just how many drafts I've been through. I make my latest round of edits in the master file, and if I cut something substantial, I paste it into my bonepile file.

That way, I have only the "good bits" to sort through, the material that might actually prove useful, whether I eventually restore it intact to its original location, or I use it as a skeleton to hang better words on, or I cannibalize it and incorporate the meat of it into the story somewhere else.

Bonepiles give me the confidence to cut some "good bits" that might not be working as well as they should where they are. I can remove them, but toss them clattering into the pile with all the other potentially workable bits, and that way I haven't lost them permanently. My bonepiles can bleach in the sun for however long it takes until I'm sure I don't need them anymore.

Join the Fight for Net Neutrality

2010-08-09T10:58:00.000-05:00

The clearest explanation of Net Neutrality -- what it is, and why we cannot afford to lose it -- that I've seen anywhere is in the July 2010 issue of The Hightower Lowdown, a newsletter edited by my fellow Texan, Jim Hightower, and native Australian Phillip Frazer. I quote from the preview that is available at their website:

"Unbeknownst to most people, the [telecom] conglomerates are making an outrageous power play in Washington to make themselves the arbiters of internet content. Using their role as 'service' connectors, they are effectively trying to squeeze non-corporate, non-wealthy voices off of the worldwide web.

"The whole idea of the internet is that it's a wide-open, wildly-democratic place where anyone and everyone can 'meet' to exchange viewpoints, ideas, facts, ideologies, theories, videos, opinions, stories, visions--and, yes, propaganda, nonsense, ugliness, and outright lies. The internet's beauty is in its free-flowing, uncensored, uncontrolled nature. No one should be allowed to control the flow of legal content that makes up this rich public discourse--not governments, not media barons, not special interests, nor any other intermediary. Instead, ordinary people get a full range of information from the internet and decide for themselves what is 'true' and valuable. That's democracy in action.

"However, to participate, you must first plug into this worldwide digital network. Hooking us up is a rather mundane mechanical task--but it has become the point at which the spark of internet democracy is confronting the stifling power of corporate autocracy. In the US, the plugging-in process has been entrusted to private, for-profit 'internet service providers' (ISP's), an industry now in the firm grasp of just four telephone and cable giants: AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner, and Verizon. This cabal of special interests controls 94 percent of the national ISP market, and the monopolistic group is now asserting its market dominance and political muscle in an autocratic effort to impose corporate censorship over what information the public will be allowed to get via the internet."

The rest of that article can be read online only by paid Hightower Lowdown subscribers (like me). But I don't think Jim and Phillip will mind if I quote a few more points that I found to be particularly enlightening:

"On the net, you get access to any and every website on an equal basis. A behemoth like Time Warner puts its content there for you to view, but so does a myriad of voices with names like Tiny Warbler. At present, anyone who puts up a web page (including us here at the Lowdown, www.hightowerlowdown.org) is treated equally in the system, allowing millions of people around the globe to have their say. This freedom exists because the internet is a neutral mechanism, making no judgment about whose content is superior or deserving of special treatment."

If the big telecom companies have their way, however, they will destroy the neutrality of the Internet. They want to establish themselves as gatekeepers who will give privileged treatment to users who will pay a premium to have their content go out on the net.

What does this mean for those of us who don't have money?

"The smaller, poorer, non-establishment communities on the web are to be shunted off to the slow lane, or not even allowed on the system at all."

Folks, this is serious. If we want to protect the Internet, if we want it to remain available to everyone on an equal footing, we must join the fight to protect Net Neutrality.

Here are some ways you can get involved:

Sign the Emergency Petition to Google: Don't be evil -- stand up for the free and open Internet. The New York Times has reported that Google is days away from announcing a deal with Verizon that would end Net Neutrality (and the free and open Internet) as we know it. We can't let big corporations take control of the Internet -- sign the letter to Google pressuring them to back out of this deal.

Join "Save the Internet" (www.savetheinternet.com)

Join Freepress.net (www.freepress.net)

These sites will give you more information and show you how to take action on this issue. This is a vital matter to everyone who has a blog or a web page and doesn't want a phone or cable company deciding whether other people get to access it.

Why I Don't Deal With Amazon

2010-07-28T09:32:00.000-05:00

Ah, just when I was thinking I ought to post something new, along came this e-mail from The Authors Guild. It addresses several issues that I'm following: developments in e-publishing, the unwillingness or inability of traditional publishers to change with changing times, and the stranglehold that Amazon has on the book business (see item 3, below). As I often tell people, I don't do business with Amazon. I don't shop with them, and I prefer that people buy my books from BN.com. Barnes & Noble is a legitimate part of the book business, whereas Amazon, in my opinion, is parasitical.

Anyway, here is the e-mail from The Authors Guild, dated 7/26/2010:

Wylie-Amazon: Publishers Have Largely Brought This on Themselves.

Thursday's announcement that the Wylie Agency, through its new publishing arm, Odyssey Editions, has a deal with Amazon to exclusively distribute at least 20 books in electronic form has shaken the industry. The 20 books include many important 20th century American works, including Invisible Man, Lolita, Portnoy's Complaint, Updike's Rabbit novels, The Adventures of Augie March, The Stories of John Cheever, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. These works are all in print and all, apparently, governed by old publishing contracts in which the authors didn't expressly grant electronic rights to the print publishers.

Random House, which holds the print rights to many of these titles, reacted Thursday afternoon by disputing that authors retained electronic rights to these books and saying that it would not do business with Wylie for English-language works "until this situation is resolved."

This is the most important development in electronic publishing since Apple entered the market offering publishers an "agency model" for selling e-books. Several aspects of the Wylie/Amazon/Random House entanglement merit comment:

1. Authors retain e-rights in standard publishing contracts unless they expressly grant those rights to the publisher, as we've consistently said and as a federal court held in Random House v. Rosetta Books. It's fine and proper for these authors and their heirs to exercise those rights, and we applaud the Wylie Agency for finding a way to make it happen.

2. That said, when an agency acts as publisher, serious potential conflicts of interest immediately come to mind. The most obvious of these is the possibility of self-dealing to the detriment of the agency's client, the author. If, by acting as publisher, the agency receives a higher percentage of the author's income than it would normally be entitled to, or if it receives other benefits that the author doesn't share in appropriately, then a conflict seems unavoidable.

Our understanding is that Wylie, as agent and publisher, is taking no more than it would as an agent. That is, Wylie/Odyssey is limiting its total compensation to its rate for commissions. If our understanding is correct, then our concerns about conflicts of interest are considerably eased. Other literary agencies contemplating similar deals should be aware that even non-monetary provisions in e-book distribution contracts could create conflicts of interest. A clause binding the agency to not sign exclusive deals for any of the books the agency represents with other e-book distributors, for example, would present a clear conflict of interest. (We have no reason to think Odyssey's contract with Amazon contains such a clause. From what we know, it appears that Wylie has avoided any conflict of interest.)

3. That the Wylie/Odyssey agreement is reportedly exclusive raises many questions and concerns. Authors should have access to all responsible vendors of e-books. Moreover, Amazon's power in the book publishing industry grows daily. Few publishers have the clout to stand up to the online giant, which dominates every significant growth sector of the book industry: e-books, online new books, online used books, downloadable audio, and on-demand books. (That Random House, by far the largest trade book publisher, has retaliated against the powerful Wylie Agency but not against Amazon, which must be equally culpable in Random House's view, tells you all you need to know about where power truly lies in today's publishing industry.) Adding to Amazon's strength may yield short-run benefits, but it's not in the interests of a healthy, competitive book publishing market.

There must be consideration for this exclusivity, of course, and we can only speculate as to what it is. Though we'll keep our guess to ourselves, we think the consideration wasn't monetary: we doubt that there was an advance paid for the rights or that Amazon has agreed to pay Odyssey more than 70% of the retail price of the e-books, since that might trigger most favored nation provisions in Amazon's contracts with other publishers.

Regardless of the exclusivity issues, any direct agreement between a literary agency and Amazon is troubling. Amazon has, time and again, wielded its clout in the industry ruthlessly, with little apparent regard for its relationships with authors or publishers or, for that matter, antitrust rules. Any agency working directly with Amazon may find its behavior constrained in unpleasant and unpredictable ways. Agencies should proceed with extreme care.

4. To a large extent, publishers have brought this on themselves. This storm has long been gathering. Literary agencies have refused to sign e-rights deals for countless backlist books with traditional publishers, even though they and their clients, no doubt, see real benefits in having a single publisher handle the print and electronic rights to a book. Knowledgeable authors and agents, however, are well aware that e-book royalty rates of 25% of net proceeds are exceedingly low and contrary to the long-standing practice of authors and publishers to, effectively, split evenly the net proceeds of book sales.

Bargain-basement e-book royalty rates will not last. Low e-book royalty rates will, as e-book sales become increasingly important, emerge as a dealbreaker for authors with negotiating leverage. Publishers will, inevitably, agree to reasonable royalties rather than lose their bestselling authors to more generous rivals and startups. We suspect publishers are well aware of this and are postponing the unavoidable because it seems to make sense in the short run. We believe this is short-sighted.

A major agency starting a publishing company is weird, no matter how you look at it. This sort of weirdness will only multiply, however, as long as authors don't share fairly in the rewards of electronic publishing. Publishers seeking to manage this transition well should cut authors in appropriately. The sooner they do so, the better. For everyone.

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Feel free to forward, post, or tweet. Here is a short URL for linking: http://tiny.cc/f9et5

The Authors Guild | 31 E 32nd St | Fl 7 | New York, NY 10016 | US

Grammar, Naturally

2010-07-13T15:31:00.000-05:00

This being summertime, with all its distractions, and me being tied up with my freelance editing and personal writing projects, I'm dipping into my files for something to post on my blog. Here's an article that appeared in 2003 in the Bulletin of SCBWI.

Grammar, Naturally

Deborah Lightfoot Sizemore

"The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions." --Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

The television sportscaster was speaking of ski jumpers at the Winter Olympics when he quoted the elder Holmes (the physician, not the Supreme Court justice). I was glued to the TV, rooting for the teenaged Harry Potter look-alike from Switzerland to win his second gold medal. But the Holmes quote sent my thoughts skidding off the slopes and slamming up against the imaginary stone wall of the "rules" of grammar.

Awaiting me at the wall were those writers who feel so tyrannized by the rules that they are scarcely able to press ahead with a sentence or a paragraph for fear of making a mistake. The stern voice of their eighth-grade English teacher rings forever in their ears: "That's a preposition! You may NOT end a sentence with a preposition!"

Begging your pardon, Mrs. G (my eighth-grade English tyrant was Aunt Bea without the dimples): When I write dialogue, I may and MUST often end with a preposition. "What did you do that for?" "Who are you going to the game with?" That last question, if recast to please the grammarian--"With whom are you going to the game?"--could only be spoken by a Chauncey Uppercrust kind of character. His formality would distance him from his peers. Most people don't talk that way.

To write dialogue that sounds natural, to narrate in a natural voice, to tell a story ringing with authenticity: these are the writer's concerns. Whenever "good grammar" gets in the way, the grammar must yield.

Creative writing admits the exceptions and recognizes that there are no real rules governing the English language. There are only guidelines, and the aim of the guidelines is communication: clear, evocative, successful. Janet Aiken, in Commonsense Grammar, makes the case beautifully: "Good grammar is not merely grammar which is free from unconventionalities, or even from the immoralities. It is the triumph of the communication process, the use of words which create in the reader's mind the thing as the writer conceived it ..."

While we're debunking grammar myths, here's another old favorite from a standard English education: the prohibition against splitting an infinitive. Some Mrs. Grundys do not dine with people who split infinitives, but I hold with George Bernard Shaw. He once complained to The Times of London about a tin-eared editor:

"There is a pedant on your staff who spends far too much of his time searching for split infinitives. Every good literary craftsman uses a split infinitive if he thinks the sense demands it. I call for this man's instant dismissal; it matters not whether he decides to quickly go or to go quickly or quickly to go. Go he must, and at once."

Some years ago, the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary sent the old "rule" packing, too. If a split infinitive sounds right and reads right, then it is right. (This may explain Gene Roddenberry's refusal "to go boldly ... ")

And what about the ban on starting a sentence with and or but? An unforced, natural style may put those two words to good use as transitions. In Ursula Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea (winner of the Horn Book Award) is a prime example: "But all this is hearsay; wizards will not speak of it." Le Guin started not only the sentence but also the paragraph with but, and it's a one-sentence paragraph. (Remember what you were told about one-sentence paragraphs being "wrong"? You don't still believe it, do you?)

Where, oh where, does the comma go? A grammar book's section on comma usage can run to 15 pages. Space does not permit such treatment here. But the "serial comma" deserves a mention, if only to help ease tensions between the journalism camp and the larger world of publishing. Newspaper style omits the final comma in a series: "red, white and blue." The Chicago Manual of Style favors use of the serial comma: "red, white, and blue." Neither is more correct than the other, but many book publishers follow Chicago style. Though I'm a journalist by training, I prefer the serial comma because it gives equal weight to each member of the series and avoids lumping the final two items in together.

The key to sensible comma usage generally is to know why you are using the punctuation. Be able to account for each comma you use. A comma makes your reader pause, if only briefly. Do you want that pause? "She looked up, and there he was." That comma adds an element of suspense. "She looked up and there he was" is more a statement of fact. If a comma has ever stopped you cold, you'll find it worthwhile to check a grammar guide. But know that comma usage varies with different writers. Some use them heavily; others use them hardly at all. "The use of the comma," says The Chicago Manual, "is mainly a matter of good judgment, with ease of reading the end in view."

I hope this brief look at grammar mythology will help convince the paralyzed writer that the conventions of English usage are merely that: conventions, customs--habits. Grammar is a tool, not a tyrant. Learn it. Use it. Make it serve you. Never fear it.

And listen to Robert Burton (The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621), who told us: "No rule is so general, which admits not some exception."

A journalist turned historian and fantasist, Deborah Lightfoot Sizemore is the author of three books of Western history and biography, including the middle-grade biography Trail Fever: The Life of a Texas Cowboy, published under the byline D.J. Lightfoot. Her books-in-progress are fantasy novels.

Update: My "Nook" e-Reader (and My Geocaching Adventure)

2010-07-05T16:49:00.000-05:00

Back in February, I blogged about my new Barnes & Noble "Nook" e-reader and how I loved everything about it except its balky touchscreen.

Time for an update: the touchscreen is balky no more. Either my screen-tapping technique has improved, or the recent software updates have solved the problem. We're up to Version 1.4.0. This version has some new features (games, for instance) that I don't use, but with the updates my Nook works faster and seems more responsive. I now have no trouble tapping the screen to bookmark a page or search for a term. It's silky smooth.

This beautiful July afternoon, I took the Nook outdoors and sat under a shade tree in the yard as I read Mark Twain's Roughing It, an e-book I got for $1. For reading outside in a breeze, an e-reader is far superior to a traditional paper book -- no pages for the wind to riffle. The e-ink screen was exactly right for reading in the dappled shade under the tree. When bright rays of sun shot through the leaves, the screen stayed comfortably readable instead of brightening to a blinding whiteness the way a paper page will do.

My next-door neighbor came over to sit in the shade with me, and of course I had to show her my Nook. We live out in the countryside a good long way from the nearest bookstore, so the part I bragged about the most was the ability to shop for and download new books from the comfort of one's lawn chair. My neighbor seemed surprised that the 3G connection was free.

Another friend had the same reaction. She questioned me closely to be sure she understood: A free cell-phone-like connection to the B&N bookstore comes with a Nook? You don't have to pay an extra fee to shop from home? Really?

Really. Anytime I want a new book, I just tap the Shop icon, pick something, download it right then, and the book arrives instantly in my e-library. For a country girl, that is just the best part!

I Don't Merely Read and Write, I Also Geocache

What a lovely holiday I've had. My husband and I went geocaching this morning for the first time. It was research. I'm editing a manuscript about the sport of geocaching for the national youth organization I freelance for. We used our brand-new Garmin Nuvi 1300 GPS receiver to drive to the spot, then our brand-new Garmin eTrex handheld GPS receiver to walk out until we located the actual cache.

I'm so new at geocaching, I forgot to bring any little trinkets to trade. But that's OK, since there wasn't anything in the cache I wanted anyway! The fun part was finding the cleverly camouflaged little box in its clever, green hiding spot.

The search took us along a country lane barely two miles from our home, a lane I'd never been down before. It's a cul-de-sac, and I'd never had a reason to drive down it before this morning. We found an old house-place at the end of the lane, with two stately trees that had obviously flanked an entryway once upon a time. There were no foundations apparent, nothing to indicate that a house had ever stood there. But those trees -- obviously planted with care, to mark the front entrance of some long-gone house.

When the need to make a living draws me away from my novel-writing, I chafe sometimes. But not today. Today, I am acutely aware of how lucky I am. I get fun and interesting freelance assignments by which I can earn enough to fund my labor-of-love writing. And some of those assignments introduce me to new interests. I aim to go on geocaching, long after this current freelance job is over. It's a great way to explore the world, or at least the neighborhood.

The Function of an Editor

2010-06-26T12:43:00.000-05:00

"The function of an editor is to prevent a writer from making a fool of himself." --Kathryn Harrison, quoting Bob Shacochis

That's my all-time favorite description of the job. It gets the point across when I'm trying to explain to the uninitiated just what it is that I'm doing when I'm gripping my editor's red pencil. Defining the job of "editor" can be difficult, since editors do so many different things.

There's the managing editor -- the boss, oftentimes. There's the acquisitions editor, who is principally concerned with finding and signing up authors. There's the production editor, who traffics materials between the editorial office and the production department.

But, said Adolph Ochs of the New York Times: "The most useful man on the newspaper is one who can edit."

He said that in 1925. To paraphrase him these days, I would say that the most useful person in any publishing venture is the one who can edit -- who can recognize and correct errors of all sorts, from mechanical and grammatical to factual and logical.

From The Art of Editing, by Baskette and Sissors, comes this passage that I've long admired:

One may describe the duties of the editor, but no one can analyze how an editor works, anymore than one can describe how a poet composes a poem. Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine, came close to defining one obligation of the editor -- "to improve an essentially well-written piece or to turn a clumsily written one into, at the very least, a readable and literate article, and, at the very most, a beautifully shaped and effective essay which remains true to the author's intention, which realizes that intention more fully than he himself was able to do. He cares about the English language; he cares about clarity of thought and grace of expression; he cares about the traditions of discourse and of argument."

That quote touches on so many aspects of the editor's job:

The work is creative.
The work is individual. Each editor's approach to the task is different.
Editors have obligations to both the writer and the reader.
An editor must respect the author's intention.
An editor's job is to help the author.
Editors sweat the details.

On those days when I make the mental switchover and I'm writing instead of editing, I'm comforted by this observation from L. R. Blanchard, an old newspaper exec:

"No man is qualified to be his own editor. No matter what his reputation, his writing will benefit from another's look."

And that's why I've become such a regular participant in my critique group. I've come to realize that I don't have to write it right the first time. I get it as close as I can on my own, and then I take it to critique for another look. My critique partners are my editors who are helping me to improve and shape my writing.

Here are a couple of other quotes that reflect my personal editorial philosophy, whether I'm editing another writer's work or getting editorial advice about my own stuff:

"The essence of editing lies in helping the author say what he wants to say in the way he wants to say it." --Betty Ballantine

"The editor must not in any way at any time attempt to edit the book so that it will be written the way the editor would write it if the editor wanted to, or could, write. The editor must learn to edit in the writer's voice, think the writer's thoughts, achieve the writer's perspective." --Gerald Gross

A World Without Editors?

2010-06-20T16:48:00.000-05:00

The Spring 2010 Authors Guild Bulletin quotes Thomas Mallon:

"The idea of e-books as the most popular format bothers me less than the possibility of a publishing world in which the editorial apparatus has collapsed. As the world of self-publishing proliferates, I just worry about so much stuff being out there that people don't know how to find what's good. That, I think, is the big challenge, more than the shifting technology itself. I suppose that immediately provokes charges of elitism from people. Well, so be it. I don't want to live in a world where everything receives the same imprimatur as everything else. I don't want to live in a world without editors."

What would life be without editors? In such a world, I would have to find a new line of work, since I earn far more of my living as an editor than as a writer.

The Function of an Editor

I'm not too worried about losing my editing job, however. The national nonprofit organization that keeps me busy editing bunches of its publications is unlikely to do away with its editors altogether. As somebody once said: "The function of an editor is to prevent a writer from making a fool of himself." (My Favorite Quotes: 2) Editors protect not only writers, but also the organizations that publish what the writers write.

No organization wants to look foolish in print. A good editor, for instance, would have caught the blunder about "walruses" in Big Oil's emergency preparedness plans. If the oil companies had bothered to run their plans past an editor, any editor worthy of the title would also have alerted them to the fact that their go-to expert had been dead for the past several years.

No organization, be it for-profit or nonprofit, can afford to be without qualified, conscientious editors examining and correcting the organization's publications before they go public. I can't imagine that world being devoid of editors.

Freelance Editors for Self-Publishing Authors

But what about the world of book publishing? IS the editorial apparatus of the traditional "legacy" publishers on the verge of collapsing?

If it is, then all those book editors will be out searching for work or carving new careers for themselves, just as the newspaper and magazine editors have been doing for years. Many book editors will find work editing online publications. Others will set up shop as freelance editors, the way I did long ago.

Which will leave authors with a decision to make:

Do I, Annie Author, self-publish my work without first running it by a good editor?
Or do I pay a professional to edit my work before I self-publish it?

Some writers will choose to put their raw copy out there for the world to see -- or, more likely, for the world to ignore.

Serious writers, however, will get it edited before they release it as an e-book or a POD (print-on-demand) book. Writers who care about quality, and who care about their reputations, will not risk making fools of themselves by offering their unedited work to the reading public.

Reader Ratings

Which brings me to the mechanism that may supplant a publisher's mark of approval. When a publisher buys a manuscript, the publisher spends money to get that book edited, designed, printed, and distributed. The publisher's willingness to spend money on the book gives the work a certain validity or legitimacy.

That's the standard view, anyhow. Just because a publisher agrees to publish a manuscript is no guarantee that the manuscript will get good editing.

In a brown-paper sack, I carry around a mass-market paperback that I use as a horrible example of what can happen when neither the writer nor his publisher cares enough about the book to edit it. The unreadable thing came out from a major mass-market imprint of a major New York publisher, and it's just riddled with errors. (For details, see Self-Editing: Part 1.)

But I digress. My point is this: If the traditional publishers go out of business and all authors are self-publishing, then we will need a new way of separating the wheat from the chaff. Ratings by readers may provide that mechanism.

Right now at BarnesandNoble.com, readers are rating books for all sorts of qualities: writing, characters, story, cover art and illustrations; whether it's absorbing, funny, challenging, or thrilling; whether it's a book just for fun or it's good for classrooms or improving one's reading skills, etc.

Why not simply add a rating for the quality of the editing? Is the book (check one): Well edited? Minimally edited? Unedited? Unreadable?

An "Angie's List" for Books

I recently joined Angie's List, a site where people grade the businesses and service providers they use. When shopping for a dentist or an auto mechanic, it's reassuring to read about the experiences other people have had with those professionals or businesses.

Why not an "Angie's List"-style review site for books? Readers who review books could be encouraged to comment on the quality of the editing.

Good editing, of course, is invisible. But an absence of editing is obvious to even the most uncritical reader. Volunteer or amateur book reviewers who say the writing is rough or choppy or awkward or hard to follow, or the logic of the story breaks down, or the spelling is atrocious, or the lack of punctuation makes the whole thing unreadable, or the story sags, or it's wordy, or it jumps all over the place, or the quality of the writing is inconsistent -- criticisms such as these indicate that the book didn't get careful editing.

Editors or Gatekeepers?

Even if the editorial apparatus of the traditional publishing industry does collapse and all books become essentially self-published, the world of books, writers, and readers will still require editors. An editor who works for a self-publishing author may, however, fulfill a more basic editorial function:

The editor will be the keeper or caretaker of a book's style, content, and logic, lavishing care and attention upon the work to make it the best it can be. To quote Betty Ballantine, a legendary editor known by everyone who ever wrote or read in the science fiction field:

"To me, the essence of editing lies in helping the author say what he wants to say in the way he wants to say it."

That is the proper role of an editor. I don't believe it is an editor's job to be a gatekeeper who prevents books (even bad books) from reaching the reading public.

Like Thomas Mallon, I'm not much bothered by the idea of e-books becoming the most popular format. (I love reading e-books on my Barnes & Noble "Nook.")

But unlike Mr. Mallon, I'm not too worried about the world losing all of its editors. Nor am I fearful that readers, in a world of self-publishing authors, will be unable to find the good books amongst all the garbage.

I believe in the power of word-of-mouth wisdom. The good books -- those that are well-written and well-edited -- will get noticed.

My Favorite Quotes: 3

2010-06-13T10:39:00.000-05:00

"We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done." --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly." --Philosopher Henri Bergson

"What isn't yet can still become." --German proverb

"I couldn't get anyone to even read it to reject it. ...You've got to stay at the table. If you walk away, nothing will ever happen." --Karl Marlantes, author of Matterhorn

"Perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races one after another." --Walter Elliott

"The most important quality of a writer is not talent but persistence." --Philip Freund

"Easy reading is damn hard writing." --Nathaniel Hawthorne

Why write? "... the afterglow can last for years if the work is published and other people profit from it. The lasting pleasure is not in their praise but in your knowledge that you have contributed something of value to the culture from which you derive your being."
--Ellen Gilchrist, The Writing Life

"The greatest thing I ever learned to do was read." --Michael Caine

"What to do with too much information is the great riddle of our time." --Theodore Zeldin

(For more like these: My Favorite Quotes 1 and Quotes 2)

Heralds in Fantasy Literature

2010-06-05T16:50:00.000-05:00

Heralds, in their original and simplest form, were messengers. In fantasy literature, a herald often brings the message or in some other way triggers the events, sets the events in motion.

In The Hobbit, for example, Gandalf is the herald, or the trigger, that sends Bilbo Baggins off on his grand adventure.

In my WATERSPELL trilogy, Carin is the herald. Her showing up on the property of the wizard named Verek sets the story action into motion. In effect, she will send Verek off on a quest—and she will participate fully with him on the quest, similar to how Gandalf sets Bilbo into motion and also plays his great role in the events of that story.

But behind Carin, there’s yet another herald—another character who is the one that set Carin into motion. So the events actually begin with the original herald, who is described in my Books One and Two as “the wisewoman.” We won’t know the wisewoman’s whole story until Book Three, which I'm about two-thirds of the way through writing.

But back to the beginning. When we first meet Carin in Book One Chapter 1, she’s not acting entirely of her own free will. The wisewoman has sent her to the wizard Verek.

One thing that has made Chapter 1 a bit hard for me to get right is that I need to at least hint that Carin isn’t really sure what her goal is, why she’s come north, or what she’s supposed to do when gets there. She only knows—or she feels, deep in her gut—that she has to be there.

In effect, she’s under a spell—a spell of compulsion. She thinks she’s acting of her own free will, but if she were pressed to explain her motives, she would be hard put to do it. This becomes clearer in Chapter 3, when Verek presses her about her reasons for trespassing on his property. Her explanations don’t satisfy him, and they will—I hope—deepen the sense of mystery that surrounds Carin.

But my problem with Chapter 1, as I’m discovering, is that many “mainstream” readers will expect the main character’s goals and motivations to be clearly laid out right at the start. That’s what they’ve been taught to expect.

Experienced readers of fantasy will understand that motives and circumstances are often quite murky as the story opens. In Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass, for instance, the main character, Lyra, has no problem whatsoever as the story opens. She’s having fun. She’s exploring a forbidden part of the college where she lives, and she’s enjoying herself. The big problem that she will face does not become clear for a very long time, as the trilogy unfolds.

So what I’m trying to accomplish with Chapter 1 of my fantasy is to present Carin as a strong, active, decisive character, but I also have to hint that she’s been set on this course, this particular path, by forces beyond her control, by circumstances that she didn’t create. She’s being used, quite frankly, but she’s not a pawn.

In a sense, she’s like King Arthur’s sword, Excalibur. He used the sword—only Arthur as the rightful king could wield it—but Excalibur had magical powers of its own. It allowed itself to be used only by the rightful king.

My girl, Carin, very definitely has a say in how she’s being used by the original herald, the wisewoman in the south, and by the wizard Verek once she follows the wisewoman’s instructions and finds him, up in the north.

I've been working on a Prologue to Book One that may help to clarify what's driving Carin, what her goal is, what problem she must overcome. I'm hoping that the agent I met in April will give me some feedback on it. In the meantime, I'm studying successful prologues, such as the lovely one that opens Ursula K. Le Guin's novel, The Tombs of Atuan.