I found myself having a teeny problem with my last novel. I got the rough draft finished, started slogging through the re-read to the second draft, and suddenly discovered I was bored.
Yep.
And if I’m bored by my own story, you can believe that readers – who aren’t nearly as invested in these characters as I am – are going to be bored as well, and probably faster.
So what was wrong? Continue reading
Yep…that’s a tease! I’ll be revealing the new cover to WindSinger in it’s entirety SOON, but I wanted to give you a tiny tease since today I’m talking about the importance of a book cover.
You only have to go to my Goodreads page to see that the I had some lousy book covers originally for the first two books of the Seeder Saga. They’re embarrassing to look at now and I’ll freely admit that I did them myself, hoping to save a buck. It turns out they cost me money – a lot of money! – because people don’t like to buy books with craptastic covers, especially in eBooks. And that, unfortunately, is because it’s so freaking easy to write a crap book, slap on a homemade crap cover, and publish it.
To Illustrate:
There’s a difference between romance and erotica. Besides the obvious attention to certain areas of detail in one versus the other (and that line does get fuzzy – I’ve read and written plenty of romance that was straight-up ladyporn), I think one major difference is the use of intimacy to build the relationship. Erotica tends to get right to the point, while a good romance (in any genre of book) has to have a foundation.
It’s a rookie move to write a whole bunch of hot sex, slap a plot around it and suddenly have your characters end up in love. Romance doesn’t really work like that. You need to build that bridge before you happily traipse across it, and this is done by showing moments of intimacy.
For example: Game of Thrones.
So I’m putting the final, finishing touches on “Windsinger” (cover reveal coming soon!) and I have a big, huge, I MEAN ABSOLUTELY HUGE project that I’m working under an alternate pen name, and I have freelance articles to write, and three more parts of the Elemental Destiny Series to plan…and now we’ll just add a screenplay for the hell of it.
What am I smoking?
Nuts. This is absolutely nuts. But I love this book and I filmed it in my mind every second that I wrote it and I mailed it off to an old college chum who happens to be a screenwriter to get her thoughts and now I’m collaborating with a screenwriter who thinks this book has great chops and good potential.
We’ll be working that in the fall, if I haven’t completely lost all touch with reality before then. I’ll keep you posted.
Nuts. I am freaking nuts.
I get great thoughts in the middle of the night.
Or, at least, they seem that way at the time, waking out of a half-remembered dream or musing on the edge of wakefulness. So I learned that I cannot depend upon myself to remember a bit of any of this inspiration, and have taken to keeping a notebook by my bed.
Except I take it out the next day and leave it someplace and then it’s not there when I need it and I wander downstairs and scrawl something on the back of a bill or a paper towel or on the calendar that hangs on the fridge.
Yesterday, I found an note that said “Seven deadly sins? Recertify?”
I’m going to tell you something about me that I don’t think I’ve shared on this blog before. You all know I’m writer. You know I like to write sexy, funny, sometimes heartfelt stories and you know I have a smart mouth that often works independently of my brain.
What you don’t know is that behind this writer facade, is a working single mother. That’s right. I’ve got a full-time day job in addition to the novel writing. I also have a second job blogging and writing freelance articles, under another pen-name. So finding time to write is a serious challenge.
Finding a quiet space where I can just get my head into the story and flesh it all out…well, that’s mostly impossible, because I’m not just a single mom, I’m a special-needs parent, as well. My kids live with me primarily, and my son is autistic. He is frequently (read: always) in my face, talking, demanding attention and interaction. He falls into something called echolalia, where he repeats phrases – usually movie dialogue for him – over and over and over. When he is home with me (which is all but every other weekend), this is constant. I love him with every breath in my body, but it does. not. stop. Continue reading
Last month was the big experiment.
I have been publishing my novels and novellas on both Amazon and Smashwords from the beginning, which of course excluded them from being part of the Amazon Kindle Select program (which demands exclusivity).
In July, Amazon changed its royalty structure (to great public outcry) and I watched the debate on both sides, weighed the pros and cons, and made the decision to take all my full-length novels to the Kindle Select program as an experiment, just to see if it was worth it to me. Smashwords hadn’t been terribly lucrative for me (despite its feedout to iTunes and B&N) and many authors said that the royalties they were getting off KDP were some of the most lucrative parts of their Amazon sales.
So the figures are in for July, and….yeah. Amazon is unfortunately the place to be for me.
Dear Friend,
I was listening to you. Really I was.
You were talking about that thing you did last week at that…place – wherever it was.
See? I was listening. I was listening very intently and then you talked about how somebody wrote something stupid on a rock somewhere on the trail – ah! yes, you were at a local park. See? Listening. Continue reading
Back when I was in college, I had a terrific acting professor.
Every so often in rehearsals, just to shake things up, he’d make us play a scene without the dialogue. It helped us more accurately get a handle on the emotional “beats” in the scene. For instance, a scene with dialogue might read something like this:
John: What are you holding there?
Mary: It’s a letter. From your mother.
John: Why is she writing me after all this time?
Mary: Your father’s dead. He’s being cremated, and the memorial service is Tuesday.
John: I’m working on Tuesday. (Exits)
The actor in me realizes there are a lot of ways to play that scene. And sometimes, breaking it down to just the emotions and leaving out the words gives you a chance to take that character’s story in a different direction than the same-old, same-old. It can let you layer and build and tear down and explore.
You could take out the words, and have a scene like this: Continue reading
It’s a standard piece of writing advice echoed by Stephen King: “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, kill your darlings.” In other words, don’t be so in love with a character or a scene or a line of dialogue or a setting that you can’t axe it when you have to.
Sometimes great characters do nothing to motivate the characters around them. Sometimes great scenes and awesome lines of dialogue slow things down or don’t fit right or don’t make sense to your beta readers (and you should listen to your beta readers). Good writing is also good editing, and you need to learn to do it even if it breaks your damn heart Continue reading
Britt DeLaney 