Mark your calendars. Just got word from the folks at PodCastle. The audio version of “Bright Waters” is set for release on April 7th! You’ll be able to get it then. Remember: Everything on PodCastle is free.
Again, this is my story about a fearsome Dutch trapper, a spunky Irish woman stolen as a girl in an Abenaki raid, and a small Iroquois tattoo…
Just go to the PodCastle site. Enjoy!
Wahooooooo!
I just turned in my final story edits to Stacy and David. The due date was November 1. The 3rd actually. The book clocks in around 177,000 words.
Wow. This last set of story edits led to some great changes. Not huge ones, but nice touches. I had to rewrite part of this battle scene, and man, oh, man I’m totally geeking out about it. We’ll see how it plays with readers.
What’s been interesting is seeing the types of things Stacy and David have commented on in the text. It’s as if they went through asking simple logic questions. Did they have enough time actually to do this? It makes no sense that person y wasn’t there. This thing isn’t fully explained.
And sure enough, the logic gaps were there.
So it wasn’t the interest level of the story they seemed to be editing for as much as the details that lead to clarity and belief. Of course, that those two things must be present for the interest to come. And this is not to say they didn’t focus on parts where interest flagged. There was one comment that forced me to cut my favorite dawg scene, a whole chapter’s worth. But the bulk of the comments were focused on the “logic” of the story.
Anyway, as of next Monday I think I’m officially into production. And back to book 2, which I’m 25,000 words into.
Sometimes, despite our best efforts, mistakes make their ways into the text. Omissions are common. For example, a missing “the” or “of” can be hard to see; your magical mind just fills these tiny words in.
Some omissions are hilarious. I was editing Raveler a few days ago and ran across a howler that made me laugh and laugh.
In one scene Shim is angry about the Bone Faces. When he sees their ships, I meant to have him exclaim with some indignation that they were “Coming to plunder under our noses while we’re tied up here.”
What I wrote was “Coming to plunder our noses while we’re tied up here,” which is a different type of threat altogether.
And then there are the aaarg! omissions. Like leaving the names of awesome folks who provided valuable input out of your acknowledgements. (Head smack!)
Yes, I’m guilty of such an idiocy.
I’m very recently guilty. Like, today guilty.
The good thing about indie publishing is that I can make changes and upload them immediately. I have already fixed the ebooks. The big paperbacks will be fixed on Monday. But these folks deserve better. To make amends, I’m going to spotlight them here, right now, for all posterity.
For excellent feedback on the full manuscript, I want to thank Stephen and Liesl Nelson.
A few years ago, I posted on this website, asking if anyone would be willing to read and report their response to a beginning I wanted to test. These folks stepped up and responded in grand fashion, helping me make the beginning better.
Adam Teachout
Alexis Cooper
Cameron Wilson
David West
Eric Allen
Hyrum Grissom
Justin Fisher
Krista Hoeppner Leahy
Laurel Amberdine
Lindsey Tolis
Mark Holt
Martin Cahill
Melanie Goldmund
Merrill Nielson
Nick Dianatkhah
Ray Solomon
Wes Amodt
All of you rock. And may the Bone Faces never come to plunder your noses.
Here’s a review by Charlene Hirschi of Cache Magazine. I tweeted about it last week, but pointed everyone to the wrong site.
Like another reviewer, I picked up this book with reluctance, but by the third chapter I found myself completely under its spell. Full Review.
Mark your calendars!!
The free, 2009 Life, the Universe, and Everything symposium at BYU will run Thursday – Saturday, February 19 – 21.
The speical guests are Tracy & Laura Hickman (Dragonlance authors) and James C. Christensen (yes, the amazing fantasy artist). But there will be more than a dozen other authors there, including: L.E. Modesitt, Brandon Mull, James Dashner, Brandon Sanderson, David Farland, Mette Ivie Harrison, Eric James Stone, Howard Tayler, and a number of others.
Here’s what I’ll be doing:
If you want to write fiction, you’ll want to attend the workshop. And if you’ve attended the workshop before, know that I’ve made some significant updates to the workshop content for 2009. I’m always learning, and so each time I teach this I’m able to provide more insight.
You’ll also want to carefully review the whole schedule. There are tons of panels with professional authors on them that are going to be both useful and interesting to writers.
My workshop focuses on three incredibly important things. In the beginning, I didn’t know these key things, and that ignorance stymied all my writing efforts for years. Once I learned them, the way was opened. There was still a lot of work involved. But these principles increased my output of quality material 1000% (literally). The principles allowed me to write the story that got me my current three-book contract from Tor.
I’ve taught it now more than a dozen times to all sorts of fiction writers and they’re telling me they’re finding it very useful. You’re going to love this stuff, and I always enjoy sharing what I’ve learned with other writers. The three things are:
It’s a highly interactive workshop. Again, the whole symposium, including the workshop, is free. I don’t know another place where you can learn from so many professionals for such a great price.
Hope to see you there!!
Alan Peterson runs the Meet the Thriller Author podcast. He recently met with me to get my advice for new writers. The interview is now up on his site. After that, you’ll want to listen to some of the others. He’s talked to some great authors.
There are a thousand things to “remember” when writing story. New writers who make lists of these things soon begin to drown in them. But I’ve come to realize that many of these “rules” don’t matter.
They don’t matter because many ignore the function of story. And so you can’t know how and when to apply them, or if they’re even something you should apply in the first place. Furthermore, a good number that do tie back to function often have little impact.
The more I develop and write, the more I begin to see that the key is to focus on a liminted number of fundamentals. To focus on the things that matter most.
So what really matters when you’re writing a story?
I’m going to be speaking for an hour at the Book Academy tomorrow. It’s at Utah Valley University. The week after I’ll be presenting all day at the American Fork Arts Council’s autumn writer’s conference. I will probably write up all my thoughts and post them to my site at some time. But for right now this is where you can hear them.
I truly believe the Pareto Principle applies to writing. But you can’t go searching for those vital few factors until you know the effects they’re supposed to produce. Form follows function. And the function is something that happens in the reader.
Here’s a nibble. This quote from David Howard is an example of what I’m talking about.
“As we’ve seen, what the audience hopes for and what the characters hope for need not be the same thing. The same is true of our fears versus their fears. But how do hope and fear fit into the scheme of storytelling? Hope and fear are about the future. They derive from uncertaintly about future events in the story, future decisions the characters might make, future discoveries or revelations that might be unearthed, future outside forces and how they will influence the journey of the characters. When we discuss hope verusus fear in dramaturgical terms, this uncertainty is a function solely of the audience and its experience [my emphasis]. This is dramatic tension. We hope the man with the cobra in the shoe box won’t open the box; we fear he might and get himself or someone else bitten. We don’t know what will happen, but we know what might happen and therefore feel tension about those possibilities” (How to Build a Great Screenplay, 52).
Readers buy novels because novels provide a service. They provide something to the reader. They DO something to the reader. That’s why readers pay good money for them, and stay up late at night (well past smart bedtimes) with them, and spend hours of their lives reading them.
What do stories do? What are the key factors that have to be present in the stories for them to be able to do these things? How do you help readers hope and fear for what might happen?
I’m no story guru, but I do hope to share some of the vital few factors I see in the presentations I’ll be giving this week and next.
