LTUE presentations

ByJohn Brown

Life, the Universe & Everything is coming up in a little over a month on Feb 12-14, 2015. It will be held at the Provo Marriott Hotel & Conference Center. Some reasons to go.

Number one. Toni Weisskopf, the editor and publisher of Baen Books, is the guest of honor.

Number two. LTUE and LDStorymakers are the best two cons in Utah for learning how to write, but LTUE is lots cheaper.

Number three. Lots of local authors will be there. It’s a great forum for hearing their insights and finding out what they’re doing.

I will be giving three presentations.

  • Plotting Secrets: Action. In this one, Larry Correia and I team up to share a model of plotting that should make developing your action story much easier. Attendees will be able to use the methods on a novel idea Larry, Joe (Larry’s son), and I came up with called Mech Runners. Basically, Larry turned to Joe and said, “What’s awesome?” Joe said, “Giant robots, bandits, and murderers.” We took it from there.
  • Plotting Secrets: Romance. In this one, I team up with romance author LL Muir to share a model of plotting that should make developing your romance plot or subplot much easier. Attendees will be able to use the methods on a story idea Lesli and I came up based on The Hobbit. It’s called My Precious.
  • The Story Setup: A Powerful Tool You’re Probably Overlooking. The story setup is a fabulous tool that’s not only helped me drastically cut down the time it takes me to develop my ideas, but it has also helped me develop better ideas. In this presentation, I will explain what the story setup is and how you can use it to help you nail your novel.

I hope to see you there.

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    ByJohn Brown

    BOOK SIGNING SATURDAY!

    Saturday, November 20, 2010: 5 pm – 7 pm

    It’s fantasy night at Dragons & Fairy Tales bookstore. I’ll be there with NY Times best-selling author Larry Correia, mega-popular comic strip writer Howard Tayler, ”I Am Not A Serial Killer” author Dan Wells, and others.

    3535 E Ranches Parkway Suite A
    Eagle Mountain, UT 84005
    801-789-5014
    Click here for store details

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  • Awful Intent Update: Chapter 26

    ByJohn Brown

    I have now moved from the struggle into the resolution. It’s all down hill from here.  I expect the novel to be 70-80k words. The shortest novel I’ve written yet. But I always seem to add on most of my revisions. I hope to keep it shorter, but we’ll see.

    Now you may ask, hey, how does that compare with other thrillers? Well, here are the lengths of a few of James Patterson’s.

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    Honeymoon 65,572
    4th of July 68,000
    Lifeguard 71,634
    Mary, Mary 72,426
    Judge and Jury 74,288
    Doublecross 70,753

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  • Vote for Servant of a Dark God, American Idol Style

    ByJohn Brown

    The Legend Award

    I was informed today that Servant of a Dark God is on the Longlist for the David Gemmell Legend Award for Fantasy and the Morningstar Award for best fantasy debut. I believe this means the Rapture is close at hand, folks. Or maybe it just means Cthulhu has taken over the North Pole. In either event, Hunger, Sugar, Talen, Hogan, Nettle, Legs, River, the Mother (and the kick butt Hag’s Teeth) can win an award for general awesomeness. They can because voting is open to the public.

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    You may ask: Is this like getting the Nobel peace prize? No. You have to have actually done something like take out a group of speedy Somali pirates or write a fantasy novel. These awards are not given out as scratch away prizes at McDonalds (you can get them at Wendy’s). This is an award given to:

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    The nominees were submitted by editors working within a commercial genre fiction publisher (kind of like Hollywood week at American Idol). All the nominations are then put on the award’s Longlist.  The public then votes for their favorite on the list. The poll opened December 26, 2009. Voting on the Longlist will close March 31, 2010. You’ll notice it is indeed a looong list. But you don’t have to have read all the novels. You just vote.

    The top 5 novels with the most votes will be put on the award “Shortlist.” Then in April the public voting for the winner out of those five will begin, open to all.  See, American Idol, except you can’t vote two gajillion times for the same girl/guy just because of the her/his drool inducing factor. 

    How to Vote

    1. View the list of Legend nominees here: http://gemmellaward.ning.com/page/legend-1
    2. Cast your vote by hovering over the Legend menu item as shown below; you’ll see a red Vote link; click it and select the book you want to vote forGemmellLegendAwardVoting
    3. View the list of Morningstar nominees here: http://gemmellaward.com/page/morningstar-1
    4. Cast your vote by hovering over the Morningstar menu item and clicking the red Vote link.

    Who is David Gemmell?

    David Gemmell was a British writer of heroic fantasy. I’ve pasted two of his covers below. You can read more about him here.

     

    For those of you interested in LDS authors, nominate SERVANT for the Whitney

    Now that you’ve done your part to restore world order in the fantasy genre, if you’re interested in LDS authors/fiction, you can also nominate the Sugar, Talen, Hunger and the gang for The Whitney Award.

    This is an award for novels by LDS authors. It works in the opposite way of the Legend award. In this one, the public nominates novels by LDS authors they like. Then a “panel of industry professionals, including authors, publishers, bookstore owners, distributors, critics, and others” vote on the nominations. Of course, because I’m one of those Carrier Monkeys of Evil Mormons (a future post, folks), Servant of a Dark God is eligible.

    To nominate Servant of a Dark God go here: http://www.whitneyawards.com/nominations.php 

    Whew.  Be happy. I’ll keep you updated to let you know if SERVANT makes the short list for either of these.

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  • Writing Update: Awful Intent

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    Folks, I just finished the first draft of my working outline for AWFUL INTENT. I’m stoked. Lots of research and lots fun and sometimes maddening work to get to this point. Here’s the current version of the summary, which will change.

    Southeastern Utah. 30,000 square miles of red-rock desert and wilderness.  One of the least populated places in the United States. The perfect place to hide just about anything.

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