I wish the hashtag was #amwriting, but that's not the way of it. Between editing and critiquing several other authors' work (which I don't regret; it helps me, too), and editing my own Mercenaries; A Love Story, little time for writing activities. And less for the blog, unfortunately.
However, things are preceding apace on Mercenaries. I am the beneficiary of several partners, whose advice and suggestions I appreciate, even though I may not abide by their recommendations. I'm looking for a June 1 availability date on Amazon. The cover is complete; I'll post a blog in the next few days documenting the process so those of you, like me, who fear illustrators and artists can see just how easy it is. With Les Petersen, anyway.
And I'm also putting together a post on formatting for Kindles which may be interesting to some. It sort of starts where Derek Canyon's excellent Format Your Ebook for Kindle in One Hour leaves off. But it's taking longer than I thought.
Thanks, and if you haven't, download and read Twelve Worlds!
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Twelve Worlds Available April 18
I know, it's Tax Day here in the US, due to some obscure holiday affecting DC, but more importantly, it's Release Day for the Twelve Worlds Anthology!
Go to Amazon to purchase your own copy of Twelve World Anthology for the ridiculously low price of US$2.99. As you do, remember that all author proceeds go to Reading Is Fundamental, our give back to a great organization helping others to learn about and enjoy reading.
If you like the Anthology, please put up a review on Amazon. If you find problems with it, let one of us, the authors, know. Visit the Twelve Worlds web site for more information.
Go to Amazon to purchase your own copy of Twelve World Anthology for the ridiculously low price of US$2.99. As you do, remember that all author proceeds go to Reading Is Fundamental, our give back to a great organization helping others to learn about and enjoy reading.
If you like the Anthology, please put up a review on Amazon. If you find problems with it, let one of us, the authors, know. Visit the Twelve Worlds web site for more information.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
When all you have is a hammer
You know the line about not having the right tool: when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
This came to me during a discussion with a writer friend. The discussion started with passive voice and ended with tools. The tools we have as writers. Words, grammar, rules of writing.
This is the place I wanted to arrive. Rules. Rules of writing.
The rules of writing are not "rules" at all, but suggestions. Some of these suggestions are strong, some not so strong, but all are suggestions. We follow them for one reason only: to make it easy for the readers, our readers, to understand what we mean to say to them. A common set of rules is a great leveler.
However, some critics use their idea of rules in an attempt to have us give up some of our tools. Never use passive voice! Adverbs must die! The pluperfect has no place in fiction! You get the idea; if you've written, someone has made similar suggestions to you.
Don't be confused. The only tool we have that cannot be overused is the standard past tense, third person VP, at least in fiction. But overuse of the other tools has, I believe, made some overly sensitive to any examples.
The message is, as it always should be: tell the story you want to tell the way you want to tell it. Don't be put off from using passive voice, or mixed viewpoints, if one of those fills the hole in your story. We have all these tools. Some are common; some are unconventional, perhaps unfamiliar. Use the correct one for the effect you want to achieve. Don't overuse them; with familiarity comes contempt. Don't use them to avoid wrestling with the tool you should be using. But, do use them to make your readers feel your message.
Don't give up any of your tools. Don't allow someone else to take them away from you.
This came to me during a discussion with a writer friend. The discussion started with passive voice and ended with tools. The tools we have as writers. Words, grammar, rules of writing.
This is the place I wanted to arrive. Rules. Rules of writing.
The rules of writing are not "rules" at all, but suggestions. Some of these suggestions are strong, some not so strong, but all are suggestions. We follow them for one reason only: to make it easy for the readers, our readers, to understand what we mean to say to them. A common set of rules is a great leveler.
However, some critics use their idea of rules in an attempt to have us give up some of our tools. Never use passive voice! Adverbs must die! The pluperfect has no place in fiction! You get the idea; if you've written, someone has made similar suggestions to you.
Don't be confused. The only tool we have that cannot be overused is the standard past tense, third person VP, at least in fiction. But overuse of the other tools has, I believe, made some overly sensitive to any examples.
The message is, as it always should be: tell the story you want to tell the way you want to tell it. Don't be put off from using passive voice, or mixed viewpoints, if one of those fills the hole in your story. We have all these tools. Some are common; some are unconventional, perhaps unfamiliar. Use the correct one for the effect you want to achieve. Don't overuse them; with familiarity comes contempt. Don't use them to avoid wrestling with the tool you should be using. But, do use them to make your readers feel your message.
Don't give up any of your tools. Don't allow someone else to take them away from you.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Twelve Worlds Announcment
I take a day off, and everyone has the word out.
Oh, well. Here's my announcement, for those who may not have seen it elsewhere.
This collection includes fourteen stories, over 80,000 words. The stories run the gamut of speculative fiction: romantic fantasy, ghosts, hard SF, vampires. It includes Derek Canyon's Noose in a great story set before Dead Dwarves Don't Dance, and another set in Edward Cote's Violet Skies universe. More information, including story blurbs and author bios, is available at the Twelve Worlds web site. Visit there.
Did I mention it's for charity? The authors selected Reading Is Fundamental; RIF will receive all the authors' royalties from the sale of the book. The price has been set at $2.99 (US$). The release date is early April. Check back here for details on where you can purchase Twelve Worlds. A great bargain and a way to help great work by RIF!
Oh, well. Here's my announcement, for those who may not have seen it elsewhere.
This collection includes fourteen stories, over 80,000 words. The stories run the gamut of speculative fiction: romantic fantasy, ghosts, hard SF, vampires. It includes Derek Canyon's Noose in a great story set before Dead Dwarves Don't Dance, and another set in Edward Cote's Violet Skies universe. More information, including story blurbs and author bios, is available at the Twelve Worlds web site. Visit there.
Did I mention it's for charity? The authors selected Reading Is Fundamental; RIF will receive all the authors' royalties from the sale of the book. The price has been set at $2.99 (US$). The release date is early April. Check back here for details on where you can purchase Twelve Worlds. A great bargain and a way to help great work by RIF!
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Editing. Or as it's also known, Critiquing
I joined Critters.org last year to improve my writing, help others improve theirs, and learn. I hope so far I've been successful at all of them; I know I've done two out of three.
What I consider editing:
I've learned that what I consider editing (or critiquing) is a combination of copy-editing and reviewing.
Philosophy
I keep in mind first and foremost: It's not my story. Really. I make suggestions about spelling, punctuation, word order, plot tension, all those things I believe will help an author improve their work. But at the same time, it's up to the author to consider those suggestions, and choose which if any of them to act on. Because it's their story, and I could well have read something in a completely different way than the author expected. That's good for the author to understand, so I may have done my job. But specific suggestions may have no validity at all.
There are authors who take exception to my suggestions as a matter of fact. Or whose style I don't care for. Or ignore misspellings or [its/it's] confusions that make my teeth ache. Move on. I'm a volunteer, not paid by anyone, have no special expertise beyond tens of thousands of pages read and years of trying to be sure I was understood as easily as possible.
Mechanics
If you're interested, there are a lot of web resources, at least on copy-editing and proofreading. Start with Wikipedia; these articles don't seem to be fraught with personal agendas. There are similar resources at Critters on the topic of critiquing, which is a different animal than editing.
I start by reading the piece, as much of it as I have, through. During this read, I annotate with bothersome things, almost all in the category of copy-edits (misspellings, punctuation and the like) that take me out of the story by drawing attention to themselves. I don't catch nearly all of them - and never claim to find 100% - just the ones that interfere with that first read. Obviously, the more I like the story, the fewer of these errors I notice. So, I put it down for a day or so, then read it again, again making line-by-line edits and on this pass, comments on wording (choice, order) as seem appropriate. If the story is particularly engaging to me, I may have to do this a third time.
Following this read, I review the story elements using a short check list excerpted from Victory Crayne's helpful article How to Critique Fiction.
Opening
Conflict
Plot
Setting
Characterization
Dialogue
Point of View
Show versus tell (many, very, really, great, nice)
In addressing as many of these points as I think useful, I try to focus on my reaction to the piece, which I hope might be typical of other readers, and so useful to the author, giving them an insight to the way the I perceive the writing, how I react to it, do the characters elicit my sympathy, is there a hook in the opening that would draw me to read further even if I wasn't doing a critique, does the ending satisfy me - or in the case of a non-final chapter, does it provide a hook to lead me on?
My goal in making comments and suggestions is to inform the author how this one reader understood and reacted to their work. As a writer, this is information useful to me. I want to know if I've gotten my message through the veil of words to a reader. I want hints about the things I should change to make the reader's job, not easy, necessarily, but easier. I want the reader to invest something of their own imagination and thought processes as they read, but I acknowledge that too much of that will send some readers to a different leisure time choice. Because these things seem important to me, I expect that other authors will similarly find them useful.
Application to my own writing
This is an interesting problem. I find it much easier to copy edit another person's work than mine. (I suppose that's a good reason for copy-editors to charge good money for their efforts.) And it's even more true of the critiquing process.
The wisdom of the web is that this is largely because as the author, I know everything about the story. I am inflicted with the God viewpoint, after all. I know with absolute surety not only what the words and characters are, I know what each of those characters are doing, have done and will do in any conceivable circumstance. I even know why. With all that backstory in my head, it's difficult to read what's actually been written; I read what I already know is there.
Of course, this comes as no surprise to anyone who's been doing this a while. It is far easier to find errors, either of omission or comission, in something you didn't write. The main self-help documents provide tips for improving the success rate; I am trying to put them into practice. Still it is unnerving to read a manuscript that has been read by myself probably fifty times, and by others another handful, and just last week, I found another capitalization error!
One technique I have recently stumbled on: for me, editing is more successful when I change the format of the ms. I write in either Open Office Writer or Word (I tried Pages, but wasn't happy with it in the early version). Most review is done in one of those as well. But when I convert to Kindle (not as easy for me as it seems to be for others, but that's another post), and read in that format, things pop out at me that don't in Word or OO. The same is true of a paper review copy, but to cut page count down, I print in 6 pt type, making the reading more difficult (for this really old guy), so the Kindle format works better for me, at least so far.
How is your experience? Any tips you'd like to pass along? Comment below, please.
What I consider editing:
I've learned that what I consider editing (or critiquing) is a combination of copy-editing and reviewing.
Philosophy
I keep in mind first and foremost: It's not my story. Really. I make suggestions about spelling, punctuation, word order, plot tension, all those things I believe will help an author improve their work. But at the same time, it's up to the author to consider those suggestions, and choose which if any of them to act on. Because it's their story, and I could well have read something in a completely different way than the author expected. That's good for the author to understand, so I may have done my job. But specific suggestions may have no validity at all.
There are authors who take exception to my suggestions as a matter of fact. Or whose style I don't care for. Or ignore misspellings or [its/it's] confusions that make my teeth ache. Move on. I'm a volunteer, not paid by anyone, have no special expertise beyond tens of thousands of pages read and years of trying to be sure I was understood as easily as possible.
Mechanics
If you're interested, there are a lot of web resources, at least on copy-editing and proofreading. Start with Wikipedia; these articles don't seem to be fraught with personal agendas. There are similar resources at Critters on the topic of critiquing, which is a different animal than editing.
I start by reading the piece, as much of it as I have, through. During this read, I annotate with bothersome things, almost all in the category of copy-edits (misspellings, punctuation and the like) that take me out of the story by drawing attention to themselves. I don't catch nearly all of them - and never claim to find 100% - just the ones that interfere with that first read. Obviously, the more I like the story, the fewer of these errors I notice. So, I put it down for a day or so, then read it again, again making line-by-line edits and on this pass, comments on wording (choice, order) as seem appropriate. If the story is particularly engaging to me, I may have to do this a third time.
Following this read, I review the story elements using a short check list excerpted from Victory Crayne's helpful article How to Critique Fiction.
Opening
Conflict
Plot
Setting
Characterization
Dialogue
Point of View
Show versus tell (many, very, really, great, nice)
In addressing as many of these points as I think useful, I try to focus on my reaction to the piece, which I hope might be typical of other readers, and so useful to the author, giving them an insight to the way the I perceive the writing, how I react to it, do the characters elicit my sympathy, is there a hook in the opening that would draw me to read further even if I wasn't doing a critique, does the ending satisfy me - or in the case of a non-final chapter, does it provide a hook to lead me on?
My goal in making comments and suggestions is to inform the author how this one reader understood and reacted to their work. As a writer, this is information useful to me. I want to know if I've gotten my message through the veil of words to a reader. I want hints about the things I should change to make the reader's job, not easy, necessarily, but easier. I want the reader to invest something of their own imagination and thought processes as they read, but I acknowledge that too much of that will send some readers to a different leisure time choice. Because these things seem important to me, I expect that other authors will similarly find them useful.
Application to my own writing
This is an interesting problem. I find it much easier to copy edit another person's work than mine. (I suppose that's a good reason for copy-editors to charge good money for their efforts.) And it's even more true of the critiquing process.
The wisdom of the web is that this is largely because as the author, I know everything about the story. I am inflicted with the God viewpoint, after all. I know with absolute surety not only what the words and characters are, I know what each of those characters are doing, have done and will do in any conceivable circumstance. I even know why. With all that backstory in my head, it's difficult to read what's actually been written; I read what I already know is there.
Of course, this comes as no surprise to anyone who's been doing this a while. It is far easier to find errors, either of omission or comission, in something you didn't write. The main self-help documents provide tips for improving the success rate; I am trying to put them into practice. Still it is unnerving to read a manuscript that has been read by myself probably fifty times, and by others another handful, and just last week, I found another capitalization error!
One technique I have recently stumbled on: for me, editing is more successful when I change the format of the ms. I write in either Open Office Writer or Word (I tried Pages, but wasn't happy with it in the early version). Most review is done in one of those as well. But when I convert to Kindle (not as easy for me as it seems to be for others, but that's another post), and read in that format, things pop out at me that don't in Word or OO. The same is true of a paper review copy, but to cut page count down, I print in 6 pt type, making the reading more difficult (for this really old guy), so the Kindle format works better for me, at least so far.
How is your experience? Any tips you'd like to pass along? Comment below, please.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
The 12Worlds Cover is Here!
Artist Les Petersen created a great cover for us. It evokes the feeling of multiple genres and is just an awesome piece of art. Thanks a lot, Les! If you are an author looking for an artist, I definitely advise you to contact Les at his website. He’s a breeze to work with.
The anthology will have a wide variety of stories in it, including paranormal, epic fantasy, romantic fantasy, urban fantasy, cyberpunk, space travel, mystery, and more.
My contribution to the anthology is a romantic fantasy named Weird and Wonderful, starring Mailira, her sister Marelsa and Jackson, a musician. As the blurb says:
Twelve Worlds is the only place you’ll be able to read this short story.
Mailira and Marelsa together bring an old Scottish folk tale to life for a young musician.
Twelve Worlds will be available in early April for $2.99.
Author profits from the sale of this book will go to a charity that we’ll announce before publishing.
Keep checking back here for more information about the anthology.
Much of this post is shamelessly taken from Derek Canyon's blog. If you have interest in ePublishing, you should definitely visit.
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