IT'S BACK TO SCHOOL

This week is so warp speed, it's plaid, so apologies for the lack of posts. I will resume intelligent (ish) blogging on Thursday, once the little yellow rocket has left the bus stop.

In the mean time three things I found cool:

1) People spend too much time in the office:
French office workers are communicating from building to building using post-it notes as pixels.
A Swiss political party wants to ban Powerpoint, which is a shame because I rock pie charts

2)Torchwood:
Started watching Torchwood: Miracle Day while folding laundry. Am now obsessed. Have been reading episode synopsis into the wee hours.

3)Wordplay - great podcast, terrible name.
Nathan Bransford, James Dashner and J. Scott Savage have launched a weekly podcast. Talk about a powerhouse team. Bransford and Dashner I'm firm fans of and now I want to read Savage, as my three year old says, very much a lot. But Wordplay is a terrible name. Makes me think of Will Shortz.

Have a great week!

Conference Secrets: Welcome to the Jungle

This workshop at the Pennwriter's Conference, with agent Barbara Poelle and novelist CJ Lyons was my favorite. It was also the only one I didn't take any notes on.

CJ started the workshop by turning off the tape recorder and closing the door. "This is just between us. You can ask us anything. If you don't want to raise your hand, write your question on a piece of paper and pass it up. There's nothing we won't answer."

And there really wasn't anything they wouldn't touch on. It was a comfortable, inviting experience. The highest compliment I can give this workshop is that, barring the lack of Bombay Sapphire, it felt more like sitting at the bar with two friends than a workshop.

Man, can you tell Barbara was a comedienne in a past life. She's funny as hell and completely off the cuff. Sharp and smart but amazingly for the industry, not jaded. 

She is passionate about what she does, saying she was born to be a agent. Most of the questions directed towards her were about the state of the industry (is publishing dead?) and ebooks (is print publishing dead?) This is the kind of agent you want in your corner, seriously. Nothing fazed her. She genuinely believes that this is the most exciting time to be working in the industry, on the cusp of all this change. When asked if she was worried that Amazon was setting up what looked like a traditional publishing house (ie. that they would 'corner the market') she said, "They sell spatulas too. Spatula makers aren't worried. I'm not worried."

One point she made that gave me the warm and fuzzies (which echos what Nathan Bransford said in his post this week about rejections.) was that, when she gets in to work in the morning, NOTHING WOULD MAKE HER HAPPIER THAN SAYING 'YES.' We have this image of agents as gatekeepers, trolls under bridges or bouncers at a VIP party, their only joy being to gleefully say NO to you. Couldn't be further from the truth, says Barbara. She makes her living on 'yes', she's dying for there to be 'yes'. She's not sitting there looking for the tiniest flaw in your query letter and sample pages, she's looking for potential. She wants what you want. Barbara knows what will sell, knows what the publishers she deals with are looking for, and she's going through haystacks to find those 'yeses.'

Some key points from CJ Lyons

• Know your audience and brand yourself accordingly. It's as valuable to know who isn't your audience as it is to know who is.
• An Author platform is not, contrary to popular belief, a website, a twitter account or a facebook page. It's Soylent Green. No! Sorry, kidding. But it is people. Your audience is your platform. How you get that audience to follow you, care about you is how you brand yourself and your books.
• And obvious but bears repeating in these 'author, market yourself' times: Your product is your best advert.

Some key points from Barbara Poelle

• She's looking for: 
• Authority
• Authenticity 
• Unique Voice
• And in your query* letter you should have "The hook, the cook (journey) and the book (sample pages)"

So, did I leave the Welcome to the Jungle workshop hearing Axl Rose snarling "You gonna die!" in my head? No. I left feeling that the publishing 'jungle' is an industry like any other and not my own personal purgatory. It's not a validating or invalidating Mount Olympus peopled by unfeeling demi-gods. I would totes buy Barbara and CJ a drink any time. Especially if they spill more secrets.

Check out my conference mate Laura's post on Researching the Police

*In a few weeks, I'll be posting the query letter I sent to her along with her comments/corrections.

S is for Social Network

And for Sufjan Stevens

Well, the sprogs are in bed and I'm finally able to squeeze out this (belated) blog post. I'm not even sure I should have done it, but the great-god Nathan Bransford suggested it and I'm nothing if not slavishly devoted to NB. What am I talking about?

Facebook.

I'm on Facebook already as a human of course, I'm not a complete luddite. But as a writer, um, no. Firstly because it never occurred to me until I read Nathan's post from back in February, but also because it seems kinda ridiculous to create a fan page for myself. What is there to be a fan of except my NaNoWriMo win and the fact that I keep plugging away at this writing business like the worst of both worlds Sysiphus and Prometheus combo (And yes, I often think revising feels like eagles are pecking out my liver, you?)

But I keep hearing about brand building and author platforms.  I wish that platform was a wooden 4x4 perched high atop a pool on Coney Island that I'm about to horse dive into instead of the marketing tool it is - horse diving would be much less scary.

There is a small part of me that says "Baaa! Stop being a sheep! Just because people say you have to do this thing doesn't mean you have to do it. You can go at your own pace, do what you think is best, you know, you could grow a spine." But then I remember the 'sustainable writing life' I'm building and I'm determined all over again to do everything I can to give it my best shot. Everything that's seemly, of course. I won't be horse-diving in a bikini. I'll have a one piece on. Maybe a Muumuu too.

For now, I've created an author facebook page here and put some stuff on it. It may become an orphaned page if I can't keep it up. We'll see.

What do you do to build your platform and what won't you do? What helps and what hurts and what is way too much effort?

Definitely an E Ticket

My family went to Disney when I was seven and and all I remember is crying over ice cream*. When I hear e-reader or email or even, in an airport, e-ticket, I think of Julie Brown and her song Homecoming Queen Has Got a Gun. I was eleven when that song came out and I thought it was hilarious, the way most eleven year olds think guns are a hoot. So in trying to get my head around electronic readers I have two hurdles: First, my general oldness and luddite tendencies and second, the fact that the song lyric "Definitely an E Ticket" keeps popping up in my head. E stood for 'exciting' in those days, now it stands for things that move faster than I can comprehend Easily.

I don't need to understand technology to understand the allure of the e-reader. I use email, I have an iphone, ipod, imac, I'm lousy with i's. And though I've blogged about my general feelings about e-readers, I find that I need to find out more, because I'm not only a reader, I'm a writer and electronic readers and their partners in crime, electronic books are about to kill/save publishing, thus have a knock on effect, possibly, on my hoped for livelihood.

So I've been gathering some information on the ebook revolution which won't be televised so much as tweeted and occasionally post a Facebook update:

I *heart* Nathan (Bransford) rounds up the doings of 2010 as transitions in this post about the seismic changes that have taken place and are still to come.

Eric at Pimp My Novel reminds writers, gently, gently, that publishing is a business, and market forces rule.

And a nice, in depth piece from the Independent.

Let's get e-schooled together!

* I do also remember "It's a Small World". I cried over that, too.

Contests

I can't remember wining much of anything. I won Foreigner 'Four' at the school Bazaar ring toss. I definitely won and quickly killed carnival gold fish. I think that's it.

I'm not much of a contest entrant, so the idea of 'You've got to be in it to win it' makes sense to me. I don't enter so I don't win - see how this kind of attitude cleverly intimates that if I were to enter, well, all bets would be off...

So, some contests I've come across - don't be a lurker like me, enter! If you win I will buy you a latte. Venti, not Trenta.

at Query Shark:

Win a free registration fee for the Backspace Writers Conference 

at Nathan Bransford

The 4th Sort-of-Annual Stupendously Ultimate First Paragraph Challenge

Writing Tip Thursday!

I know, you've all been clamoring for advice from me, since I know about as much as you do, if not less. BUT! As my husband has pointed out to me many times, I can have an opinion - a strong, well thought out, convincing opinion - about anything under the sun, without letting facts or experience get in the way.

So, with that disclaimer out of the way, I want to introduce a feature on Thursdays that I call, cunningly enough, Writing Tip Thursday! The secret to a catchy name is, you'll notice, the exclamation point.

Today's tip is about writing a series. I love series books. I am a pretty childish reader in the sense that I don't want books I like to end (except for the Road, I wish it had ended before the scene of the people kept in the pantry like sides of beef, a scene i've tried to scrub out of my memory unsuccessfully, but I digress). I read series books because I can more easily inhabit a world and stay a while. Off the top of my head, my favorite series books: Chronicles of Narnia, His Dark Materials, Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy (all six of them), The Abhorsen Chronicles. I could go on and on and that's the point. I never want it to end.

I'm writing a YA fantasy series right now and as I go along I realize I have a shed-load of characters and I need to get organized. How am I going to keep everyone straight? Luckily, I have the answer:  You need to create a Series Bible.

OK! I didn't have the answer, but I found the answer, just where Nathan Bransford left it, on his blog. Nathan, who is absurdly smart and funny and unrelentingly positive has pretty much the answer for everything. I will be mostly cribbing from him, with some additional things I thought of myself.

Series Bible
I like excel documents, I know some people hate them, but they are easy to update, sort and you can highlight cells in pretty colors. There are other writing tools that can do all the below for you, but they are usually spendy software. Almost everyone has excel or a similar program.

1) Create an excel doc with character names, nicknames, birthdate/age, and anything significant about him/her. Some writers include details about their characters, like their favorite color or what they dressed up as last halloween, things that never appear in any book, but I don't. I want to know my character so well that I can answer those questions on the fly, I don't want to have imagined him into a corner. Characters need room to grow, through a series and even in the writer's mind.

2) Location - if it's a real place that you don't know well and need to do research on, keep your research here and categorize it according to what makes sense - your character's homes/workplaces, meaningful/sentimental value locations, locations of conflict. If it's a made up world you need to nail it down COMPLETELY. The cosmology you create needs to feel so real and effortless that your reader immediately believes it and makes a little home in your world. If you're making crap up as you go along and something doesn't jibe, your reader will  stop suspending their disbelief, making them unable to get 'into' the story.

3) How things work - again, especially in fantasy or a made up cosmology, you need to have rules. The rule can be that vampires can only come out at night, or only when it's cold or that vampires sparkle and look like Cedric Diggory, whatever the rule is make it consistent. Not just a rule like 'No more cupcakes for you little girl!" but make it a LAW of PHYSICS. If you break the laws you make, your world will become unreliable and fall apart.

4) Keep track of the gun on the mantle.
Chekov said "The gun that is placed on the mantle in the first act must be shot in the third act." If you've set things up, whether it's a showdown between two characters, an unsolved mystery (big or small) or something that a character needs to overcome - and this gets tricky when you're dealing with lots of characters or some key minor characters - you need to close the deal. I don't mean that there can't be things left unsaid, that everything needs to be resolved in a neat little bow, but if you put something significant to the story in motion, you need to make sure it's addressed. I'll give you an example that probably won't be too much of a spoiler if you haven't read the Hunger Games Trilogy - Haymitch. He starts out as a drunk, goes through some stuff (understatement) and in the end, he's still a drunk. My husband and I talked about whether it's a good thing that his problem didn't get resolved or a bad thing. Ultimately, I think it's a good thing. Not everyone's problems are solved at the end, not even fictional everyone's. Keeping Haymitch an alcoholic was realistic and true to his character. Having him kick the booze would have seemed out of character.

To keep track of my 'guns' I keep  a running list of things that have to be addressed and next to each I put a progress report - where it's addressed, if it's 'dead' as in completed, or if it needs to be addressed again.

5) Sometimes, the build up to the ultimate crisis in a series is so effing huge, it can seem overwhelming and insurmountable. The temptation to employ a little deus ex-machina is irresistible. BUT RESIST!
Deus ex Machina is an old greek-style war horse plot device whereby god/gods swoop down into the quagmire you've created and make everything magically delicious again. If you've ever read a book where the heroine is in dire straits, all options have been exhausted, she's just going to have to become someone's love slave to save her consumptive sister when, POOF! out of nowhere appears a rich, kindly aunt you've never heard of to save the day, you know how completely unsatisfying that is. It's a gyp. Don't do it.

OKAY! That's all I've got. Was it helpful? Do you have any writing tips that help you? Or anything you're struggling with that my paltry tuppence might help with? Let me know!