Here’s the second episode I recorded with the Writing Excuses guys.
In the first podcast we talked about putting and not putting ourselves in our writing and making characters who don’t all sound like the author. In this one, we talked about how to not repeat ourselves in ways that make the reader feel like they’re getting the same old same old.
As usual, the guys had some great insights. Check it out: How to Not Repeat Yourself.
Folks,
Servant is now officially released! And for those who have stuck with me I’ve put it on a super sale this Tuesday and Wednesday: 99 cents for the ebook, $12.99 for the trade paper, which is almost right at cost (this is a nice fat book, clocking in at over 500 pages).
eBook (Amazon)
Trade paperback (Amazon)
I love the ebook, but I must say the trade paperback version is gorgeous. The color and illustration at that size by Victor Minguez is just awesome.
Enjoy!
And Merry Christmas.
P.S. Bad Penny is right around the corner.
The Whitney Awards are open for the public to nominate books they think are great and which are written by LDS authors. Those books that get at least 5 nominations are read and rated by a panel of judges. The judges then send on the finalists in each category to the Academy for voting.
Servant won an award in 2009. Awful Intent is doing well, and if the reviews piling up are any indication, it could win another.
If you liked the story, please take a few moments to nominate Frank, Sheriff Hood, and the Knitters of Death club.
1. Go to: http://whitneyawards.com/
2. Click “Nominate” in the menu at the top
3. Fill in the form
Let’s hope Frank can use some guns legally this time.
I’ve got a deal to make t-shirts for my book available, and I have to make some decisions. The problem is that I am terrible at making these kinds of decisions. So I’m asking for your help. Any input would be appreciated.
So we’ve decided on the design. It will say “Servant of a Dark God” on the font as shown. We might put “Welcome to the Grove” or “Beware, the Mother is Watching” on the back. It will NOT have the Tor logo indicating it’s a book. Who knows what that is anyway? Instead, the question is whether to put my name on the shirt in some fashion.
Option 1
Some suggest that it’s better to just have a shirt that has the crazy label, suggesting the wearer is a servant of a dark god. It’s provocative, and if someone asks, the person wearing it can talk about the book. With this option we would NOT put my name on the t-shirt, just a small open book icon under the title. The idea behind this is that those who would buy the shirt would already be fans and the provocative statement will do more to spread the word than my name because going this route will make the shirt more fun to wear.
Option 2
Others think that you should have your name on the shirt to advertise. So we’d put “by John Brown” underneath the title. Or we’d put it on the back of the shirt. But some say it would make the shirt less fun.
What would you prefer and why?
Because of the way we’re going about this, the color of the letters must be fixed. So the question is do we simply let people choose their own shirt colors that they thing will work with the color of the lettering or fix both the color of the lettering AND the shirt?
Option 1
Fix the shirt colors. Brown for guys and plum for women. Make the lettering a fantasy green or cream.
Option 2
Give people as much choice as possible and choose a font color that will work with the bulk of the shirt colors here: http://gildan.com/distributors/colorpalette/.
But what would color would do that and still say fantasy, or would it matter?
So which option to you think would work best? If you chose option 1, which colors?
Why is John worrying about this? Shouldn’t he be spending his time tracing his ancestry back to old grandpa lemur?
The answer to that is that John’s mind works in mysterious ways, dear Reader. You must bear with him. And you must now face your greatest fashionista test ever: which colors would say fantasy and still be something people would want to wear? I will be making shirts up for the book store employees to wear before I come to signings. So I have to decide. Someone suggested plum is all the rage this year for women. Make the letters a nice new willow green. We could have another color for men. Any ideas of what would appeal broadly?
I await your ideas.
(Ha, look at this. It appears one of my greats did indeed live his life out in the Prague menagerie. Hum.)
Melissa Mead lives in Upstate NY with her husband and cat. Her stories have recently appeared in IGMS and Daily Science Fiction. She’s a member of SFWA, Codex, and the Carpe Libris Writers Group: http://carpelibris.wordpress.com/. She too had a story to tell about using questions to help her develop her published stories. I think it’s worth sharing.
My Double Dragon novel Between Worlds (Double Dragon Publishing) came about because of a reading mistake.
You see, I’d come across the word “cantrip.” Not being a D&D player, I’d never heard it before, so I went to the OED and looked it up. The first definition said “A minor spell or incantation.” The second said “A mischievous trick,” but somehow I misread it as “A mischievous sprite.”
Oh wow- a mythological being I’d never heard of! I ransacked the library looking for any reference to those mischievous sprites. Didn’t find any, of course. Finally I decided that if I couldn’t find them, I’d make them up. So I started asking myself “What are Cantrips?” From the definition, I figured they must have some minor magical powers, and were most likely small.
So why hadn’t we heard of them before? Perhaps they were hiding.
Why were they hiding? Perhaps something awful had happened between humans and Cantrips long ago, driving the Cantrips underground. Literally.
Then why we were hearing about them now? Something must have happened that made staying hidden more risky than coming above ground. Starvation? Underground isn’t the best place to maintain a steady population. But that’s not very dramatic or personal, for story purposes. Maybe, in addition, there’s an outside threat.
Ok, so someone needs to confront this threat. One person, so we have someone to focus on. Someone more adventurous than your typical Cantrip.
And so Miska, and all the Cantrips, brought a new form of mischievous sprites to the world.
All because of the question “What the heck is a Cantrip?”
First of all, notice she followed her zing. She stumbled upon this new creature and started to research. Her research didn’t provide much, of course. But following that impulse is key.
Next, did you notice she kept asking why? Why don’t we know about Cantrips? Why did they go underground? Why are they returning? That’s a motive or cause question.
There’s no way you’d use those exact questions in your story. But you WILL want to know WHY things are they way they are. You will want to know motives and causes, internal and external. You’ll want to know WHY your hero is facing this problem, WHY the antagonist is working against her, WHY the hero decides to tackle the problem instead of ignore it or run away. When the hero reacts and makes a decision to do X, you will want to know WHY (as well as WHAT’S THE RESULT). Same with the antagonist. When building setting, you might find it useful to ask things like WHY did they build a village here or WHY is my character a tailor? Do you see?
In addition, I’ve found that replacing “why” with “what” seems to be more productive to me. So “what led or caused my character to be a tailor” helps me more than “why.” “What’s motivating the antagonist” helps me personally more than “why is he doing this?” That might be my own weirdness, but I think “what” subtly leads me straight into nouns and situations and values and beliefs. Try it on and see if it doesn’t help you.
Finally, did you notice her use of objective. The story about overpopulation in the underground didn’t interest her much. She wanted something with an active antagonist. Something that could focus on a character. Knowing that objective, she started generating options that might fit the bill. Which lead to the cool idea of a new type of mischevious sprite.
Follow zing. Use the “what” (why) to identify cause and motive. If you can, state your objective; the clarity will give your wonderful mind a focus for its generating powers.
For more in this series, see How to Get and Develop Story Ideas
If you’re conscious, you’re monitoring your environment. You have to. It’s how you survive. This is not something you can turn off. It’s just one of those systems that runs automatically, like your liver. You’re always appraising the situation.
And as soon as you encounter something that’s likely to be of importance to you or yours, your monitor kicks off a physical response to prepare you to deal with or take advantage of it.
The problem is that sometimes a Nazi propagandist worms his way into the monitoring station. And like any good Nazi, he distorts reality.
Sometimes those distortions lead to burning resentment, sometimes to unwarranted shame or anxiety, sometimes to eating disorders, sometimes to grave depression. When I heard of the tragic suicide that occurred in our community a few months ago, my heart went out in sympathy to the girl, her family, and friends. I’m not a doctor. I don’t know the situation. But I’m positive she was dealing with one of these villains.
I wished I’d been able to share something that’s been a literal life saver to me. Now, it might not have changed anything. But hopefully it can change things in the future for you and others you know who may have to deal with a Nazi in the brain.
And you will have to deal with a brain Nazi at some time.
This is not something that affects a miniscule portion of the population. In any given year you can expect more than 15% of a population to experience some form of this [1]. That’s roughly 238 of the estimated 1,592 people 18 years and older in the little county where I live [2]. Rates for teens are similar [3]. Besides, you don’t have to have a full-blown case of a depression for distortions to affect you. How many of us haven’t made faulty comparisons with others? “Oh, she’s so thin and has such great hair; I’m so dumpy.” “Oh, he’s doing so well, and I’m not. I’ll never be a success.”
The question is not whether you or someone important to you will have to deal with it. The question is how prepared you’ll be when you do. Everyone deals with distortions now and again. Which means everyone can find a little more enjoyment in life by showing their brain Nazis the door.
So how does it all work? How do you show the villain out?
I’m going to summarize it below, but I’ll tell you right now that the book that saved my life was Feeling Good by David D. Burns, MD. This isn’t positive mental attitude. It’s not neuro-linguistic programming. It’s not the mumbo jumbo of Freud and Jung. This is practical and proven. It is the most prescribed intervention for dealing with these issues in the current medical community. It’s prescribed because it works.
To understand this, you have to understand how emotions work. As I said before, you’re always monitoring your situation. You hear a buzz and see a rattlesnake on the path two feet away. Your monitor immediately responds. Alarm, adrenaline, increased blood flow–all of that to get you ready to deal with the situation. Your monitor writes “alarm” on your face to communicate it to those around you–to warn and ask for help. This happens in less than a blink of an eye.
But this doesn’t just happen with danger. It happens when we encounter unfamiliar things. When we encounter positive things. You see a great friend who makes you laugh all the time. Boom, your monitor responds. You smile. Feel. Focus. You do so because you not only want to avoid dangers, you also want to seek out the things that make you happy.
Our emotions prepare us to fight, flee, seek, and pitch woo. Our little monitoring and physical response system is brilliant.
But there’s more. We don’t rely on just the automatic subconscious monitoring. We also have a cognitive (conscious thinking) part. Let’s go back to the rattlesnake. You walk out into the garden, step on a slither, and immediately go into alarm mode. Then you look, consciously see the slithery thing is not a snake, but the garden hose. You relax. Laugh.
The quick subconscious appraisals keep us alive, because with snakes and other things, if you’re slow, you’re dead. We don’t have time for thought. If you touch a hot stove, you want an immediate reflex. You don’t want to ponder it for a second or two. On the other hand, the cognitive appraisals help us further appraise a situation. They bring more of our resources to bear on the situation.
So there are three parts of the appraisal-emotion system: the subconscious appraisal of the situation, the physical response, and the cognitive appraisal. Each of the three parts affects the other two. And when things are running smoothly, we don’t have problems. But sometimes we get a distortion mucking up the works. We make a faulty appraisal of the situation. And therefore have a faulty physical response.
For example, you’re a mother. You’ve had a hard day. The kids make a huge mess with flour in the kitchen. You yell, freak out. When they’re cowering in their rooms and you’re cleaning up the flour, you think, “There I go again. I’m a total failure. I can’t stand it! I never do anything right! I’m a terrible mother.” These thoughts make you even sadder.
And that’s the propaganda. That’s your brain Nazi with his all-or-nothing thinking, telling you that you either perform perfectly or you’re a failure.
But is that true? No, it’s not. You might be a B+ mother, filling the lives of your kids with all sorts of goodness. You might have just had a great time reading with the kids not thirty minutes before. But the brain Nazi tells you to forget that. “Vatch dis film,” he says, “und see de horrors of vut you are!” 
And the all-or-nothing thinking gambit is just one of ten common weapons he uses. Furthermore, this happens so quick that we often don’t notice it. In fact, we’ve often repeated some of these distortions so often than they’ve become almost automatic.
The good news is that you can pull the lid off the lies. You can open the door, spot the brain Nazi that slipped in, and take him out. You can do this because one of the three parts of the system is our cognitive appraisal. This means you can consciously stop the movie, pin the distortion on the wall, and uncover the truth. Once you do that, it’s like the rattlesnake scenario above—oh, it’s a hose, we realize, not a snake, and the appropriate emotions immediately follow.
But you need to know how to stop the movie. You need to know how to spot the lies. David D. Burns, MD tells you exactly how to do this in his book Feeling Good. (By the way, DON’T get this book confused with his Feeling Good Handbook–you DON’T want the handbook; you want Feeling Good, the book.) In the book, Burns talks about the theory, the results, and then gets right down to the practical techniques used to blow the brain Nazi to kingdom come.
A few years ago I hit a bad patch with a brain Nazi that had taken up residence. A very bad patch. He’d been there for quite some time. This book and a good counselor saved me. I thank the Lord for that. By the time I went to see a medical doctor to assess whether chemical issues might be playing a role, I was stable. I wasn’t out of the woods yet, but I had opened the lid and found the villain at the controls. I used the techniques Burns gave me, and I’m happy to say that while the brain Nazi still comes round every once in a while, I can spot him. And I can take that sucker out.
Go to the library and check out the book and take the assessment test. If you, or someone you know, scores in the mild range, maybe you’ve just experienced a very sad event. But maybe you’ve also got a villain in residence. Get the book. Read it. Be happy. Nobody needs to live with a Nazi at the controls.
By the way, fiction authors should pay special attention to this stuff. Not because we’re more susceptible to brain Nazis than others, although we do have to deal with our fair share as we develop and share our stories. No, we should because the emotion process is exactly what we’re trying to tap into. Knowing the principles can be very useful indeed. Let me recommend you read the books on emotion listed on the Learning With Pros page.
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!
