Magical Words

Most people who get tattoos choose pictures or symbols, but now and then someone decides to permanently imprint words on his skin, words that meant so much to him that he needed them to be at hand for always.   I’ve thought many times of getting ink, although I usually talk myself out of it long before I get anywhere near a facility to have it done.  And when I am in the tattooing mood, it’s usually one of two symbols, not words.  But if I was of a mind to put someone else’s words on my flesh, I might choose ” Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war” (Julius Caesar) or possibly ” We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he to-day that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother” (Henry V.)  Or maybe “We must take a hard road, a road unforeseen.  Therein lies our hope.” (The Fellowship of the Ring).

Tell me…what word or phrase or paragraph would you consider tattooing on yourself?

Tags: Misty Massey by Misty Massey
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Catie’s been in California for ComicCon, David and Faith are on vacation prior to WorldCon, and then next week I will join them in Denver. Which means posting here may be sporadic for the next two or three weeks.

If you need something to do while we’re gone …

You can click on my dragon hatchling and help him grow!  (and adopt your own baby!)

You can create a brand new monster and maybe win an original Monsters and Treasure D&D volume.

You can send your spam to Weird Tales.

So get busy, and we’ll see you soon.

Tags: Misty Massey by Misty Massey
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In 1992, I travelled with my best friend to Wales. It was a dream trip, because I’d wanted to go ever since discovering the Arthurian myths and legends. We castle-trekked (even snuck into one castle that was closed for the season - naughty Americans!) We ate in tiny pubs and met locals who considered us highly exotic because of our Southern accents. We climbed hills, we chased sheep, we bought trinkets.

One day, we decided to drive into the Brecon Beacons to see Llanthony Priory, a former Augustinian monastery. Legend held that it had been built on the site of a shrine to St Dafydd sometime around 1107. According to history, William de Lacey, a Norman noble, happened upon the site while he was hunting, and felt inspired to leave the world behind and immerse himself in prayer on that very spot. I could understand that feeling. The ruins stand in the remote Vale of Ewyas, far enough from roads and cities that the silence is palpable. One can hear sheep from miles away. Driving there was a challenge in itself, since the road became a lane, which became a path, before opening into a space to park in front of the Priory. We tumbled from the car and approached the ruins, chattering as usual. But once we crossed the threshold, something happened. We stood in what once was the church, and fell silent. I was staring at one of the arches when my friend started singing the Magnificat, very quietly, behind me. I felt weightless in that instant, although I didn’t feel I could move. Something from the very ground had waked up, was aware of us. It wasn’t threatening, but it was definitely there. We continued moving around the grounds, but the silly tourist attitude we’d had on the way up the mountain was gone. We were respectful and calm, because it was as if someone’s mother was looking.

Several years later, I was in the Lowcountry visiting my family. My husband had never seen Old Sheldon Church, so we drove out one afternoon. My church in town always held a spring service at Old Sheldon, which was crowded and noisy and buggy (mosquitoes and sand fleas…ugh) but on the day we went, we were the only people there. Once again, in the calm of the marshes, I could feel that presence. Not the same, of course, but it was clearly attentive. I laid my face against the mossy bricks and just stood, for a while, absorbing the feeling.

People ask why writers write. Some writers say they can’t avoid it, they have to write or they’ll lose their minds. Others say they have too many characters in their heads who want their stories told. There’s a different reason for every individual writer. I write because I’ve felt the magic and I want you to feel it, too.  Magic is all around us, not just in a vale across the ocean, nor in the marshes of South Carolina’s Lowcountry, but in my backyard. If I could, I’d drive every one of you up a Welsh mountain, or invite you all to my house to hang out in the woods.  But I can write it down, and share it with you. The world is full of enchantment, and no one is better qualified to show it than a writer.

Where have you found magic?

Tags: Misty Massey by Misty Massey
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Okay – I know you are saying, *What?!?* But hey – this is the last post before I head out into the wild blue yonder, or maybe, west, young man… Anyway, it’s the best I can do while packing. And it’s an analogy (or is that a metaphor?) that I’ve used in seminars for years.

There really are similarities between a well-made lasagna and the way a skilled author inserts back-story into current narrative. And similarities with the way an unskilled author and unskilled cook write and make anything.

Also, there are back-story rules (rules of thumb, not actual laws on paper, with back-story police to enforce them) for every genre. And every genre is different. Can you get away with breaking the rules? Sure. But if you want to wow an agent and editor (and the discerning reader) learning how to make back-story work like a good lasagna is a very smart idea.

First – terminology:

Great Lasagna – dish made with well-chopped, well cooked, well-seasoned veggies, meat, (yeah, I know, meat is optional) cheese and noodles, layered, combined, blended, and merged into a whole and baked.

A bad lasagna – dish made with un-chopped, uncooked, poorly-seasoned veggies, meat, (yeah, I know, meat is still optional) cheese and noodles, tossed into the pan and baked.

Back-story – all the info the reader *must* have for the book (plot and characters) to make sense to him.

InfoDump – all the info the reader *must* have for the book (plot and characters) to make sense to him dumped onto pages in one huge glob of telling and showing that brings the reader and the forward progression of the book to an abrupt stop.

Bad lasagna means that the onion is in one corner, the meat is in the other corner, the cheese is in a lump. The tomatoes are sitting between the meat and the cheese, and the spices are spilled into a pile. The noodles…well they get to be stacked on the bottom like lumber and the garlic is all icky and smelly off by itself. Nothing is chopped and spread out. Every bite tastes different, is a new experience and nothing is a coherent whole. Really bad food.

Bad info dump is where all the info you need is squished together into one big pile and dumped on the reader, stopping the story. It reads (tastes) different from the rest of the story. It stops everything. And the next time you need to tell the reader something, you do the same thing and it tastes different from either of the other tastes.

Are you beginning to see the picture? Back-story needs to be offered in small doses, chopped into tiny bits and scattered into the book. Let’s say you are writing a mystery series and you have told several things in previous books that you need to remind the reader (and explain to new readers) in order for this book to work:

1. A young woman, mother of three has been murdered.
2. There is a million dollar insurance policy at stake.
3. The husband has an ironclad alibi because he was sleeping with the chief of police at the time.
4. No one knows the chief is gay. (C and D are the most important parts of the back-story, and have to be handled carefully.)
5. The main character is a police investigator.

There are several ways you can tell all this:

1. Prologue scene with the chief and his lover. (Get your minds out of the gutter. Not *that* kind of scene.) This only works if you are using multiple third person POV. If first person, then it gets more difficult.
2. Flashback and its sister the flashback prologue. (Rule of thumb in mystery: flashbacks used only in second third of book, so it would be too late.)
3. Dialogue that reveals the affair and the controversy and the problem with the insurance.
4. And my personal fav – break it up into little segments of dialogue, internal flashback (in the main character’s mind), and scenes scattered throughout the book. The reader who had been with you for several books knows what’s up and catches the clues and hints, and the new reader is intrigued but not overwhelmed.

In fantasy genre you have more leeway. Let’s say that you need the readers to know that:

1. The king was murdered.
2. The queen was accused of the crime and beheaded
3. The masked head-chopper is a psychic

You can open any way you want, as long as it fits the POV and the story line. *But!* Yeah, you knew there was going to be one of those, didn’t you. Most long-time editors are pretty sick of the prologue scene and the flashback prologue. I know a couple of editors who say they’ll stop reading as soon as it become apparent that a new (unpublished) writer has opened a book that way. So what do you do? You give the reader (in this case that editor you so want to impress) the back-story in little bits and pieces in the story-line.

I make a list of things the reader needs to know, and then I make sure the info is inserted in the first 50 pages, checking off the things as I go. No one gets bored, shocked with a new tone (taste) or pulled out of the story.

Okay – know you know about lasagna and back-story info dumps. I hit the road on Monday, so this may be the last you hear from me for a few weeks. Or I might find that I can post on the road. Life is a constant surprise!

Happy cooking! Ahhh… Happy writing!

Faith

Tags: Faith Hunter by faithhunter
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This post first appeared on my personal blog on Friday, July 18.  Sorry for the repeat, but I’m on vacation for the next couple of weeks and won’t be able to post consistently for a little while.  If you saw this one at my site, sorry for that.  If not, enjoy!

You’ve heard of runners, marathoners in particular, ”hitting the wall” — reaching a point in their run where they lose all their energy and feel like they can’t go on.  Usually experienced runners will get through “the wall” and will actually feel energized for the final part of their run.  Others, I suppose, don’t get through it.  They just stop, unable to go farther.

Well sometimes writers hit their own kind of wall.  I know that I do.  What does this mean exactly?  I have found with just about every book I’ve written, that when I get somewhere between 60% and 70% of the way through a book, I suddenly face some sort of crisis of confidence about the project.  Sometimes (and this was particularly true with my early books) the crisis is pretty severe.  I remember with my first book that I got to that point and suddenly thought, “Oh my God!  There’s no story here!  I can’t finish this!  I have no idea where this book is going!  I’m a hack!  I’m hopeless!  Why didn’t I listen to my parents and go to law school?”  Eventually, of course, I figured out what the problem was.  The plot needed adjustment, and when I made the changes, the rest of the story just came to me.

It happened again with the second book, and again I questioned myself; I feared that I was a “one book wonder”.  The crisis passed a bit quicker the second time through, but it was still traumatic in its own way.  During both of these crises, my wife was very sympathetic.  She talked me through some of the issues and was a compassionate sounding board at all hours of the day and night.  When it happened again with my third book, she started to recognize the pattern and decided that she wouldn’t be my enabler.  

“This book is a disaster!” I whined.  “I have no business claiming to be an author.”

“Ummm, yeah.  Why do you ask….?”

With more recent books, I’ve been able to anticipate the problem.  I don’t panic anymore.  I don’t lose all faith in myself.  But I do still find that I’ll have dry spells around the 60% mark.  Even if a book has been going well to that point, it will often stall a bit.

There’s a reason for this, of course.  The two-thirds mark is about where you have to start pulling things together.  If you’ve been throwing crap at your lead character for three hundred pages or so, you now have to start giving him or her ways to dig out from under.  You have to start leading your reader toward some sort of satisfying climax and resolution.  It’s not easy, and if the path to that resolution isn’t immediately apparent, it can be downright scary, particularly if you haven’t done it too many times before.  This is the place where so many beginning writers get stuck.  

“I have this great story that’s more than halfway finished.  I love the beginning, I love my lead character.  I love where I’ve taken it so far.  And I know just how it ends.  But I can’t seem to get from where I am now to that ending.  So I recently started work on another book….”

Sound familiar?

I bring all of this up, because I happen to be at the two-thirds mark with the third book of my Blood of the Southlands series, and I have yet to figure out how to get from where I am in the book right now (a place I like very much, by the way) to the ending I have in mind (which I also like very much).   And rather than grappling with the book, I’m thinking that I’m just going to punt for a while.  I’m about to go on vacation for a few weeks, and I’m pretty certain that I won’t figure out anything before we leave.  So I’ll put the book away and come back to it fresh in a couple of weeks.  I’ve never tried this approach to getting past the crisis before.  It’ll be interesting to see if it works.

Advice for beginners on scaling the wall (without going on vacation….)?  Hmmmm.  Nothing really profound.  As with so much in writing, it’s simply a matter of putting one’s butt in the chair and writing.  I like to do stream of consciousness when I’m really stuck.  I’ll put myself in front of a blank computer screen (it would work long hand, too, if you prefer that) and I’ll type a question.  “Why am I stuck?”  Or, “What does Character X have to do to reach the end point of the book?”  Something like that.   Then I’ll type out a response — not in prose that I’d use for the book.  I just let myself type without worrying about syntax or typos or anything like that.  The key is getting past all of that to my thoughts and ideas.  I’ll pepper myself with questions, I’ll argue with myself, I’ll play devil’s advocate.  And more often than not, I’ll wind up finding an answer that works.  Those stream of consciousness sessions have gotten me past many a crisis — I recommend the approach.

Ultimately what I try to remember during these difficult stages is that I began the project with a good idea, I’ve written a good book to this point, and I like the ending I foresee for the story.  Eventually I will find that bridge that links where I am to where I’m going.  It might take some time.  I might even need to do some repair work on the bridge when I find it in order to make it sturdy enough to support my characters and narrative.  But it’s out there.  Yes, there’s a leap of faith implied in this thinking.  But I write fantasy for a living.  I demand leaps of faith from my readers all the time.  It’s only fair that I should make some, too.

Tags: David B. Coe by DavidBCoe
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I hear it all the time, sometimes from my own mouth - I wish the characters I read about were real people that I could take shopping, visit on vacation or invite to dinner. I miss them when the book is finished, miss them as much as I miss my real life, flesh & blood friends. Their writer has done his job so thoroughly that the characters feel like real people.

My fictional dinner party will include Helena Justina and Marcus Didius Falco from Lindsey Davis’ Falco mysteries (these two would probably run the conversation at the table!), Will Stanton from Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising Sequence (I love Merriman, too, but Will’s less disquieting), Phil Davies, of Tim Powers’ On Stranger Tides (every dinner party needs a hot pirate!), Brother Cadfael, from Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael mysteries (he’s peaceful, well-read, and can probably keep Davies honest for the duration of the evening), Repairman Jack from F Paul Wilson’s Adversary Cycle (not that he’d come to dinner - he’s a bit wary), Ronny Dillon, from Tom Dietz’ Soulsmith Trilogy (because I want to talk with him about that radio tarot process), Tarod from Louise Cooper’s Time Master Trilogy (if your steak suddenly looks like a pink and green swim noodle, please forgive him - he IS a chaos lord, you know) and Phaid the Gambler from Mick Farren’s Phaid books (such a charmer).

Tell me - who would you like to invite to dinner?  (No fair choosing your own characters!)

Tags: Misty Massey by Misty Massey
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Every now and then, I drop in to Neil Gaiman’s site to see where he’s travelling and what he’s thinking about. A few days ago, Neil quoted from science fiction author Samuel R. Delaney’s letters:

“Writers are people who write. By and large, they are not happy people. They’re not good at relationships. Often they’re drunks. And writing — good writing — does not get easier and easier with practice. It gets harder and harder — so eventually the writer must stall out into silence.The silence that waits for every writer and that, inevitably, if only with death (if we’re lucky the two may happen at the same time: but they are still two, and their coincidence is rare), the writer must fall into, is angst-ridden and terrifying - and often drives us mad. ”

He seems to be of the opinion that good writing only comes from a deep dissatisfaction with one’s life. I have the tendency to become depressed, sure, but on the whole, I’m a pretty cheerful person. I love hanging out with people. I’ve been married, happily, to the same man for nearly 22 years, and that doesn’t appear to be changing any time soon. I have a teenaged son who likes me well enough. I have friends who enjoy my company. I’m an awful flirt. I drink rarely, and never alone. By Delaney’s definition, I’m not much like a writer.

Would my writing reach new levels of brilliance if I started drinking? Would I become legendary if I let myself sink into depression? Would I reach the NYT bestseller lists if only I self-medicated with spray paint in a paper bag? I don’t think so. I know what actual depression, the kind only doctors can fix, feels like, and there was no creativity during that time. I work best when things are going well. The happier I am, the more words spill out all over the paper. But the silence Delaney mentioned…boy, do I feel that silence lurking. It’s the sound of ideas going wrong, the hollow echo of a well of words drying up. It’s the stalking cat on a branch above me, waiting to pounce when I give up on a story because I just can’t think of where it should go next. It’s the shadow in an alley, threatening to swallow me for not taking chances. It keeps me working, which keeps me happy.

Or maybe I’m crazy already, and I just don’t know it.

Tags: Misty Massey by Misty Massey
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I am getting ready for a road trip—really digging in to finish deadlines before I take off for 3 weeks on the road. And the editor keeps dumping page proofs on me. Things not on my schedule. Okay, I should have figured out that I would be getting them, but … well … I didn’t. It has been a while since I had a hard-soft deal—or in this case a trade-soft deal, and I forgot that the book had to be re-typeset for the mass-market issue.

For the newbies here, page proofs (galleys, etc.) are the pages from the printer after it has been typeset. It is the last possible moment for a writer to find typos, missing paragraphs (yeah, sometimes a typesetter will miss stuff) inverted sentences, and other horrors before readers see it. A hard-soft deal is when a publisher buys rights to publish your work in hardback and paperback. A trade-soft deal is for trade paperback rights and mass-market rights. Anyway, a writer only gets a very limited time to see the proofs and has to ship it back or fax changes in, like, a week. The Rogue Mage saga is being reissued, one book a month for three months, to much hoopla (supposedly, we’ll see) so I am getting the proofs bam-bam-bam too.

I had thought I’d have time off for some fun this summer (like 8 weeks!) and so far? Nothing. Three days off here and there, while pulling 7-day work weeks, 80 hours or so. So I am beat and the house looks like a storm roared through. And all this whining is to say that July 23 is the last time I will likely post here (or anywhere) for three weeks. I’ll have email access on the road, but I’m unlikely to bother.  A week of reeeeal vacation, WorldCon, and another week of real vacation. I am screaming inside with delight! And I will really have little to say. So, today, I’ll share about edits and the job of being a writer.

Misty’s agent and I were chatting the other day about prima-donnas and this client she no longer has. The book was pretty good, and the agent had sent it to a friend at TOR. This VIP editor (very high up in the org) read it and said, “I like it but I’d like to see a rewrite. If she can do this, this, and this, I’ll consider it.” The agent, all happy, calls the writer and passes along the changes. The writer says, “I am the talent. I am the writer. I’ll be happy to make any changes he wants *after* he offers me a deal.”

Needless to say—the writer lost both agent and potential VIP editor. She was a word-diva. A prima-donna. I am published, and I have been asked to make changes by agents and editors and I did my job like a good little bobble-head dog (yes, sure, I can do that) and I sometimes I made the sale, and sometimes I didn’t. Having talent and being a writer means producing a product. It isn’t a baby, holy scripture, or a sacred icon. It is a *product* for sale on the open market. Writing for a commercial market means creating a one-size-fits-most manuscript. It means making other people happy.

Edits? There are the edits that you, the writer, do to have a polished manuscript, the edits that a prospective agent requests, then the edits that a prospective editor requests. I’ve had an agent say, “Take out the first 25 pages,” and an editor turn around and say, I want to see some world building, and I added the 25 pages back in. Go figure.

At that point, one is likely to have a sale and the real work begins. There is the text edit and rewrite, where a writer cuts or adds plotlines, characters, chapters, etc. at the direction of the editor. Sometimes this is a 5 page, single-spaced rewrite letter, and is the dreaded letter we have all mentioned here before. It is followed by the copy edit and line edit and then the page proofs. Did I leave anything out? Probably. By the time I finish a book, I am pretty well sick of it. And the deadlines are imposed by an editor who is tired, overworked, underpaid, and likely abused by higher-ups in her company. Not a job I want, BTW.

So, if you are a word-diva or prima-donna, please publish online or self publish. If you are a professional, ie. a self-abusive masochist who can do without sleep, house-cleaning, or a social life, likes being tied up in deadlines and being at the beck and call of others, well then, welcome to my world. And hey—I’d rather do nothing else in life!

That said, I’ll post on the road when I find stuff to say!

Faith

Tags: Faith Hunter by faithhunter
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Letters from the Battlefield, Part VI

Huh. I have to tell you, doing these Letters is enlightening for me, even if it’s not for anybody else. For example, I feel like I haven’t done a lot this week. However, looking at last week’s letter, I was at 39.2K on the book (thanks to going back and revising), with my eye on a goal of getting back up to 55K, which is where I’d stopped and had to go back and fix things.

I’m at 70K now, which includes a bunch of material I could more or less fit right back in, and a bunch of new material I’ve written over the past week. So, in fact, despite not feeling like I’ve accomplished much, I’ve actually done a pretty good job.

Now, however, we face a bit of a parting of the ways. I’m going to San Diego Comic Con next week, and I have a bunch of stuff I need to do before then. Realistically, the next week is not going to involve any more work on this book. *Obviously* SDCC week isn’t going to be productive in a word-count sense. So my goal of finishing this by July 18 isn’t gonna happen. I’ve got about two weeks of work left on this thing, probably, so it looks like I’ll be turning it in around mid-August instead of mid-July. All things told, I think that’s not bad.

Anyway, so there might be a Letter next week, but it’ll be “what I’m doing when I’ve got a zillion small writing tasks to take care of”, and since I fly back from San Diego on the 28th/29th, I can’t guarantee anything for a Battlefield post on the 29th except maybe a snapshot of Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki (look, *somebody* here’s gotta appreciate that, right…?)

All right, enough of that. This week’s actual Letter starts out with a humiliating discovery of an early-stage URBAN SHAMAN draft….

[Read more →]

Tags: C E Murphy by cemurphy
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Mid-July.  Middle of the summer.  It’s hot and humid and I can think of twenty places I’d rather be than home working.  I’m in the middle of a book, which will, at some point, wind up on the middle of a bookstore shelf and have middling sales numbers which will keep me right where I am career-wise:  in the Midlist.

Declaration of the obvious:  I would love to write bestsellers.  I’d love for my books to garner lots of awards and sell hundreds of thousands of copies and make me rich.  I wish that I were a big enough name in the field that my publisher would give me gorgeous raised-print covers and send me on national book tours and arrange for me to put in appearances on Oprah and Good Morning America and the Colbert Report and whatever other TV talkshows authors frequent.

Another declaration of the obvious:  All that stuff in the preceding paragraph ain’t gonna happen anytime soon.

I’m a midlist author, which means that while I’m established, with a small but devoted fan base, and I manage to sell new books to publishers with some regularity, I’m not a bestseller and I don’t get great big advances.  My books get nice jacket art (very nice, really — I love my cover artist), but no raised type or foil on my name or the book title.  When one of my novels is released, I get an ad in Locus and a few other places, but not much beyond that.  My print runs are big enough to give me a chance to earn out my advance, but they’re not so big that I’m going to get rich off of any book.  I’ll be reviewed in Publisher’s Weekly and Booklist and maybe Kirkus, but not in the New York Times or the New York Review of Books.  If I set up a signing at a local bookstore, my wonderful publicist at Tor will send out materials to the bookstore and do whatever she can to help me promote the event.  But no one is setting up signings for me.

Obligatory but sincere disclaimer:  There are probably hundreds if not thousands of unpublished writers, or authors writing for small publishers who would like to be midlist writers at a big publisher.  I don’t question that for a moment.  I may sound like I’m whining about all the things I don’t get (Phil Gramm take note….), but I know how fortunate I am to have this career.  I get to write stories, and then people pay me for them.  That’s pretty cool.

That said, I also know that I can’t allow myself to be satisfied.  This isn’t some sweeping declaration on the importance of being driven and wanting to excel.  I simply know that I want more, and that if I allow myself to think that this is as much of a career as I’m going to have, I’ll lose whatever drive I have.

I’m not really going anywhere with this post.  I have a book to finish and page proofs to read through.  I woke up this morning knowing that it was my day to post on the blog, and this is what I was thinking about.  I’m in the middle.  Of everything, it seems like.  And right now it’s all feeling like bit of a slog.  I’d love to finish with something uplifting and hopeful, filled with determination and a promise that I will eventually have that huge success.  But this is a tough business, and I understand that we can’t all be bestsellers and household names.  Someone has to fill the midlist, and I’m not willing to give up my position here if it means moving anywhere but up.  It’s not a bad place to be; not by any means.  Let’s be honest, though:  No writer begins his or her career striving for the middle.

Tags: David B. Coe by DavidBCoe
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