Friday, I'm in Love (with Writing)

Ah, the Cure, you so have a point about Fridays and love. 

Today, I'm gushing about writing: why I love it, what makes it so lovable, and how our love will last forever.

I wrote a poem about the rain in kindergarten that my teacher wanted to keep, so she asked my mom, who agreed and then spent the next twenty-something years wishing she'd kept a copy, too. 

In second grade, my teachers kept my illustrated journal (with permission), and it certainly wasn't, as I thought at the time, because I drew my people with long necks when all the other kids were drawing no-neck people. 

That early attention for my writing is probably what spurred me on in the beginning. But my work hasn't always been picked first for kickball. There are plenty of times when it wasn't picked at all. It's all part of that writer's journey every writer enjoys. If everybody loved our writing, we wouldn't push ourselves to be better than we already are. And that would be sad. 

I love that people care enough about writing to critique and encourage. I love that writing is a record of the collective consciousness of the entire world through history. More than anything else, writing reflects humanity...even when it's just a grocery list from 1964. 

I love the random luck of it--the way words just spill out in some inexplicable order. There are so many synonyms! So many adjectives and adverbs, nouns and verbs that can be combined in countless beautiful ways (countless to my math-challenged mind, at least).

Rain can be described as torrential or timid. A boy can be incorrigible or curious. And when I write it, it is so. The power is highly addictive. 

Yesterday, I was reading the beginning of Moby Dick, the part about man's draw to the sea. It's really beautiful. If you haven't read it, I recommend you read at least the first few pages. As I was reading, I actually sighed. Reading this is like drinking ice cream, I thought. Highly addictive.

My appetite for writing--as for reading--will never go away.

What do you love most about writing? What author's work just makes you sigh with joy?

Thynopthith Thursday: All About Tension and Plot

(Photo courtesy Photos8.com)

Okay, so I'm stretching the days-of-the-week alliteration. :-)

But I was up late last night formulating the SYNOPSIS for my favorite (right this minute) WIP, and I just had to blog about it today. As @KayCassidy taught me (get THE CINDERELLA SOCIETY here), I'm using Michael Hauge's six-point plot structure on all my story ideas.

And it's making all the difference in the world!

I can't stop myself writing the first few pages of a burning new idea, but after that, I do start to wander unless I have a very clear idea where I want the story to go. Therefore, I've become a plotter/pantser combination, which I think most of us probably are. Currently, I lean toward plotter.

My goal with this YA Paranormal Romance is to keep tension throughout. I watched TWELVE ANGRY MEN for the first time a few nights ago and was blown away by the genius of it--so much tension and conflict/high stakes, all shot in that one little room. Masterful! I decided I needed to at least try to infuse my stories with that type of tension.

There are plenty of ideas about how a story should begin. Lots and lots of experts say to start with loads of action. 

Reginald froze. The icy ring of the gun barrel chilled his neck, sending waves of panic through his nervous system. But there was a sense of familiar inevitability in the weapon's cold pressure. Nobody can run forever.


I think this can be a useful way to start a story, as long as you don't find yourself adding in tons of flashback exposition. There's nothing more distracting to me as a reader than when I'm reading an action scene, and the character stops to think about how he got there. Yeah right, I'm thinking. Like anybody thinks this eloquently when there's a gun to his throat. 


Not that there's anything wrong with flashback (especially if you're writing an experimental backwards plot novel), but it kind of defeats the purpose of starting with action, which is to keep a high level of tension throughout.

So what I prefer to begin with is internal conflict. Publishing pros are always talking about how important it is for them to love the voice and the main character, and it needs to happen right away--a sort of literary love at first sight. I believe that revealing the hero's inner struggle from page 1 solves both problems: 1) create tension and 2) establish an emotional connection to the reader.


A smudge of gooey ink from the hotel pen marred the page as Reginald's fingers trembled. It was done. His wife was certain to find the five pages in her mailbox at the conclusion of her writers conference. He half-hoped she wouldn't go home at all. She could do him the courtesy of leaving, at least. In any case, she wouldn't find him in their little tudor house. 


It was time for him to check out. His only regret was leaving the dog behind. 


Okay, not the best writing, but you get where I'm going. Nobody is in fatal peril. Still, plenty of conflict and tension. And since I've started with his internal conflict, I can move on to the external conflict without it seeming forced. The character is established as a nervous man whose wife doesn't love him and he knows it. We know he regrets having to leave everything that's familiar to him, but that he's willing to do it. Now I can have a desperate addict walk into his cheap hotel room and put a gun to his throat. OR I can send him to Tennessee where he'll meet a saucy waitress who brings out his inner rogue. His flirtations thereafter incur the wrath of her wannabe gangster boyfriend who puts a gun to Reginald's throat, and we come full circle.

The goal is a steady supply of tension.

Don't forget the comic relief, though. Personally, I can't read or watch something that has no break in the tension. 

*The story samples above are completely made up on the spur of the moment, having nothing whatsoever to do with my WIP, but I'm not ready to share my premise with the world yet. You know when you have the perfect baby name for your future tikes and you just know that if you say it out loud, it will become the most popular baby name of 2010? That's how I feel about my premise. And I'm really not paranoid because it's happened the last two times I started writing something fun, first with mermaids and then with super villains, so forgive my superstition.

Also, a plug for using the six-point plotting technique for your synopsis:

This is the second project for which I've started plotting only to discover that my villain didn't have a believable motive, or didn't have the chops to be that bad. In both cases, a secondary character stepped forward as the true villain. I love it when this happens, and it probably would have taken many rewrites to figure this out had I not done the difficult thinking beforehand. I'm now very excited to get going on this story, which already has twenty-eight pages.

Contest for Substantial Edit 100,000 words or less

C.A. Marshall is offering a fantastic opportunity over at her blog in the form of a contest.

Skip on over to check it out! Here's the gist:

And so, to celebrate the glowing review and for reaching 100 blog followers and 700 twitter followers (that just blows my mind!) I'm giving away a FREE substantial edit! (That's plot, pacing, character development, etc, up to 100k words) to one lucky reader!

+1 for becoming a new follower of the blog

+3 for being a current follower of the blog

+1 for becoming a new follower of my twitter

+3 for being a current follower of my twitter

+2 for tweeting about the contest (once per day, include links to actual tweet in your comment)

+5 for blogging about the contest (once per day, include links to actual blog post in your comment)

+1 for asking a question about writing/editing, or something else I can blog about that I haven't covered already (as many as you can think of!)

All you have to do is leave a comment with your total number of entries!

"Contest is open worldwide (but has to be in English) as everything is done by email, and ends Friday July 2nd at Midnight. I can wait up to a month for you to finish your MS if it isn't finished by July 2nd, SO GET WRITING!"

So far I've got 11 points.


Also, if you've got an adult MS complete, there's another contest over at the Query Tracker blog where agent Suzie Townsend will be judging twitter-length pitches. Could be very promising for those of you who write adult books. (Hee hee. Every time I say adult books, I think of....well, nevermind.)

Mock-Me Monday: My Worst Sci-Fi Short

Facetious flash fiction for Mock-Me Monday. Today we'll try science fiction.

Strung Out

The inter-galactic module under the astro-belt flickers with a faulty warning light, sending me into intermittent panic attacks. These, at least, are peppered with the auto-voice's soothing assurances.

"You are not in fatal peril. There is a 65% chance you will survive." It's amazing how much the sound of an almost-human voice can calm you even when you're on the brink of death.

My oxygen-deprived brain sends me back to orientation where Filriddle-bot and I laughed when the cyb-instructor played the assurances audio file just so we'd know what to expect.

"65% chance of survival?" I'd laughed. "That's supposed to be soothing?"

Filriddle-bot laughed with me, as she was programmed to do.

Now where was Filriddle-bot when I needed her most? Golfing with Jera's stupid leisure-bot, as though the fate of the universe didn't rest in their hands. If only I could reach the control panel! But the ship is too far. I'm going to die out here, tethered to the ship by a stupid miscalculation.

After five minutes of emergency breathing, a technique that supposedly increases my survival chances by 25%, I'm beginning to feel more than light-headed. Space is black already, but the stars around the edges of my vision begin to blacken now.

The last thing I hear as I lose consciousness is Filriddle-bot, shouting her golf score into my helmet-com.

"Fifty-two! I won!"

What I Want from YA: Fun, not Twisted Morals

I'm a lifelong reader--of young adult books in particular. I started with Lord of the Rings as a bedtime story, fell in love with Anne of Green Gables, graduated to Jack Weyland novels some time around fourth grade, and never looked back.

Why do I read YA?

• It's exciting, like my journal entries from that age. Everything means something, and when I wrote those journal pages, I had the time and compulsion to record every detail along with what I thought it meant. Whether my date led me into the dance by the hand or by the small of my back, or he walked five feet in front of me the entire evening--I had just learned the skills to decipher this behavior. I eagerly tried my hand at amateur psychology, detailing my first dates, first boyfriends, and myriad groundings and lectures.  

• Novelty. Even though it was a time of angst, it was also a time of wonder. Everything was new back then. If I went on a date, chances are that something happened I had never experienced before, sometimes things I never expected to happen. This wasn't always good, but it was always an education. 

• Nostalgia. I like to read YA now, in part because it's like reading my journal, without the embarrassment. I get to discover the world with somebody else, reliving his or her mistakes instead of my own. 

• I enjoy the unique voice of each book, meeting new friends and getting to know them one Truth or Dare at a time. 

• And I LOVE fantastic elements that aren't full-blown high fantasy, which sometimes feels too much like a history class for me to enjoy. YA fantasy tends to be shorter, bringing out only as much of the world as is relevant to the main character's journey. It's a moving, enticing way to enter another world. Through the character, the magical world stays with me long after I close the back cover. 

But what I want from YA is the same as it has ever been, and it's fairly simple to deliver.

Listen up, YA writers.

• I want vicarious living, not high morals. (That goes for both ends of the moral spectrum.)
• I want an active main character who thinks and acts like a teenager (which isn't far from what adults think and act like, but with flourish and attitude). 
• I want quirky character flaws, not full-on sex-drugs-and-rock-n-roll delinquency. More on this...

The latter may be okay for one book in twenty, but lately I'm finding book after book filled with somebody else's idea of an acceptable coming of age. It's disturbing. I read on the writerly blogosphere that edgy YA is somehow more realistic--and therefore more desirable. I don't believe either claim. It is no more realistic than the story of a sweet girl who can't play sports to save her life and is suddenly forced to play the most brutal of them all: dodge ball.

These types of YA are worlds apart, and I'm more inclined to think of the edgier sort as an adult book dressed up as a seventeen-year-old. If you must write edgy YA out of a need to record or process your own edgy upbringing, so be it. But I wonder how many authors go to YA with the false conception that they must be edgy to compete. The truth is that not all teenagers are going to parties, getting hangovers, and having sex with everything on two legs. And the ones who don't are being washed with images of the ones who do, not only on television but also now in literature.

I can just imagine myself at fourteen picking up one of these edgy books. With my earnest desire to be cool, would I have experimented with alcohol after meeting some cool, aloof characters who know the difference between rum and schnaaps? Would I have felt antiquated and ridiculous for maintaining virgin status past the age of sixteen?

Hell yeah. Before you write, please ask yourself if you're writing something edgy just to please a twisted market, or if you're writing it because it's really the story in your soul that begs to be told. If you're doing it to fit in, stop. Teens get enough peer pressure at school. They don't need it from the twenty- and thirty-somethings writing YA purely for shock value. In truth, edgy YA is just as preachy as spiritual YA. It's preaching from the other end of the spectrum.

If you write the F-word every other sentence and have your characters in and out of beds, back seats, and basements, I may accidentally buy your book--referred by some misguided friend who doesn't know how much I deplore the charade. But I'm not going to keep it in the house for my sons to stumble upon.

Not any more than I'll leave the butcher knife down low where they can reach it.

*Note: I'm sure many people disagree with my sentiments, and that's fine. But what I'd really like to see in the comments (if you have them) are book recommendations for a mom who is tired of the F-word.

PageToFame: WEbook's Revolutionary Literary Experiment

The future of scouting?

If you're a writer who hasn't heard of PageToFame, I highly suggest you read all about it in WEbook.com's FAQ.

Basically, PageToFame is four rounds of totally objective rater feedback on your work. 

Round 1: 1st page (descriptive blurb and genre categorizations included at the top)

Round 2: 1200 words (w/ optional 4000-word sample which interested readers can continue reading)

Round 3: 50 pages (possibly rated exclusively by industry pros)

Round 4: Full manuscript (likewise)

At the end of each stage, an agent or publishing professional reads and rates anonymously. These ratings don't affect your elevation, but it is interesting to see what a pro thinks of your work.

There is a small fee associated with this service (summer special of $3.95, I believe), but I have found it well worth the price. While reading your piece, raters will have no personal information about you. They won't know your name, your username, your age, your cuteness factor (though I'm sure that would only help my ratings [totally joking]). There is no quid pro quo, mutual back-scratching, or even directing fans to your rating page--it's impossible. This saves WEbook's PageToFame from some of the pitfalls rendering Authonomy a less-than-accurate scouting program.

On your side, you won't see any info about your raters other than the total percentage who want it elevated (and rated your work a 4 or 5 out of a possible 5). You will also see which percentage rated it 1 or 2 or 3. You won't know who these people are. They are in no danger of retribution from an author scorned, so they're free to be completely honest in their appraisal of the excerpt.

This is incredibly freeing for the author, too. It's not just your mom saying, "This is fabulous!" It's not even your critique partner saying, "Very good (I hope you're nice when you critique me back)." It's a completely anonymous person rating a piece of work, separate from his or her opinion of the author. 

Double-blind. 

The only way to conduct real research. And this is definitely research. It's the best kind, as far as publishing pros are concerned, because it's market research. Agents and publishers should love this because the author pays for it, volunteers do the rating, and they then have the option of picking successful work--not from a slush pile, but from a list of market-proven literature. PageToFame takes some degree of risk out of the publishing industry. 

I've submitted five of my own 1st pages, two from the same project where I simply retitled and reworked the first page. Ratings went up in the second 1st-page sample, but still not high enough. This kind of feedback is helping me to see which projects resonate with my public, and which ones aren't worth pursuing.

PageToFame is fairly new and still evolving. For instance, initially, there were only ratings, with a box to check if you didn't like the subject or genre (though you can easily avoid this as a rater by selecting your favorite genre from a drop-down menu). Now raters can also check whether they think the concept is unoriginal or the writing needs work. Both are very useful statistics to the author. 

Each of my five submissions is in a different stage of the rating process. 

My very first attempt leveled out at only 28% of raters wanting it elevated to the next round. It didn't make it past 85 votes in Round 1 (first page only). I changed it completely and resubmitted. The second time around, it has garnered 141 votes and 40% approval. Still not high enough for Round 2 (which is a longer sample of 1200 words). Of those who didn't like it, 13 said it was not original enough and 2 said the writing needs work. Based on these results, I'm setting this project aside for the time being. It obviously needs a totally fresh makeover and I have other projects that are already more promising. 

Two of my girly YA 1st-page submissions have achieved 50% or higher approval, so I'm waiting to see what happens with these. If they continue to do well, I'll devote more time to writing them. Of course, I don't completely depend on these ratings to choose projects to work on. Sometimes the muse bites and I just have to write a certain story. But PageToFame has acted as a reliable guide, telling me which projects have commercial viability, a buzz-term agents everywhere can appreciate. 

My most successful project so far is the humorous MG (8-12 target age range) book, which is currently in submission to literary agents as well. It's in Round 2 with 24 ratings and a 75% approval rating. In Round 1, it garnered 210 votes with 61% sending it on to the next round. Pretty impressive sample size, considering the difficulty unpublished authors usually face in finding willing readers. At this point, you can see the consensus hovering around the same number, not getting higher or lower with the addition of one vote, let alone ten. WEbook has developed an algorithm which tracks the trend in ratings, and determines when a piece probably won't garner enough positive votes to pass the round. 

Though this experiment is still pretty new, it has already proven very useful to me, personally. I predict that it will be helpful to authors, agents, and publishers in the future. Imagine being able to gauge accurately the marketability of a concept, or general reader reception of an author's writing style--all from page 1. 

I know what you're thinking. You can't tell a best-seller from a dud in just one page, but agents and editors have long been facing the same challenge. And a back-cover-blurb paragraph does accompany the 1st page of PageToFame, so it's the same as a bookstore patron perusing the back cover and first page to determine buyability. Okay, so I made that last word up. What do you want? I'm a kidlit writer.   

If you're intrigued, just head on over to WEbook.com and check it out yourself. If you're a voracious/insatiable/avid reader (did I miss any cliches?) then jump straight into 1st-page reading and rating. You'll be surprised how addictive it can be. Plus, you may be getting a first look at the best-sellers of tomorrow.
     

BREAKING NEWS: I am on TV at the Eclipse screening

Video Proof that I was there. (you can also watch it on HULU)

Click on the proof link above, people. That's the episode over at abc.com called Total Eclipse of the Heart with Jimmy Kimmel. As stated before, I'm the blonde in the tie-dye and dark glasses on the right side of the theatre (your right). You can see that my physical reaction matched my blog reaction. We were very excited and very surprised.

I hope you enjoy the interviews with the cast and the excitement that you can clearly see even through the lens. Eclipse was seriously epic. You will be blown away.

Also, a fantastic fan site for all things Eclipse is Eclipsemovie.org.