David B Coe Faith Hunter A J Hartley Misty Massey C E Murphy | posted by  Faith Hunter read all posts by Faith Hunter 
On my refrigerator, stuck to the side with magnets, is a piece of paper, about eight by seven inches, with the upper margin torn and ratty from where I ripped it out of a magazine about 20 years ago. It is crinkled, brittle, stained with drops from some past kitchen mishap. (There have been a lot of those over years.) On it are some of my favorite quotes about life, love, sex, marriage, death, and writing. Writing is last, under the part about death, which, in very great hindsight, should have triggered some primal warning in my snake brain. It didn’t. Twenty years ago, I was too excited about writing, publishing, and a career in the field of my dreams, to catch such subtleties. I was also, I suppose, too young to heed the darker warnings beneath such simple nuances as positioning on a piece of paper. Since I just figured them out this morning, that particular wisdom has just caught up with me. Five up from the bottom, is Mario Puzo’s advice for writing a best-selling novel.
Continue reading Puzo and Writing posted by  Misty Massey read all posts by Misty Massey I love the idea of real magic. Surrounded every day by traffic and buildings, by dishes that need washing and trash that needs emptying, I can’t help desiring a world in which something sparkling and strange could be right around the corner. When I was a kid, I used to wander in the marshes near my home getting muddy and wet (to my mother’s great dismay), wishing the fae would come out and play with me. Now that I’m grown, I find that magic in the fantasy worlds I read and write. Magic systems are as individual as the writers who create them. Almost every system has a base on which it’s built. Some are based on natural elements, and function best under the open sky. Others are designed in a more scientific manner, with an alchemical exchange required to achieve results. The religious magic systems depend on a deity who’s paying attention and who’s been properly venerated answering the calls of its powerful faithful. Traditionally magic was considered to be overcome by the intrusion of modern technology. Much of this was due to the legends of the fae, who were weakened by the presence of worked iron. Luckily a number of writers threw that tradition aside, and have come up with gorgeous, intricate systems rooted in the concrete, steel and fumes of the modern cities. So yes, you can use anything to build your magic system, but how do you go about displaying how it works? Of course you can let your character mumble a few words and wiggle his fingers, but wouldn’t it be more fun to introduce something new? A neat way to achieve that is by leaning on the old and familiar magic we all do every day. Some people call them superstitions.
Think about your ordinary day. Most of us have odd little habits or rituals that we do almost without thinking about them. The traffic light changes to yellow just before you enter the intersection, so you kiss your palm and slap the car ceiling to keep the light from turning red before you pass under. Someone at work says, “How much worse could this day be?”, and in response we knock our knuckles against the nearest wooden desktop. Two people say the same phrase at the same time, and one of them quickly calls out, “Jinx!” to avoid…I don’t even know what they’re trying to avoid. Ordinary things no one even gives a thought to in these modern times, but think about it for a second. What if they really worked? Maybe in your fantasy world, calling “Jinx” creates a wall of force around the speaker while the unfortunate slower guy is smacked sideways by a spectral hand. Or if you don’t send a kiss to the traffic light, the traffic deities frown on you, changing the rhythms of the subsequent lights to make sure you stop at every one between where you are and where you’re going, and forcing you to be late for work. How about the old rhyme “Cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye if I lie”? I bet there’d be a lot less lying going on if this was actually the punishment.
There are a million superstitions, from every culture on the planet. It’s our way of doing minor magic of our own. Doesn’t matter if they don’t work they way we wish. Even if you’re not writing a modern fantasy, the words and motions of little superstitions can lend an air of authenticity to the magical world you hope to create. It will resonate with almost any reader, since we all have something we do for luck or safety. If nothing else, the gestures and words of simple superstitions will provide a solid starting place from which you can build something truly fantastic.
Jinx! posted by  DavidBCoe read all posts by David B. Coe When last we saw our intrepid author, she was wading into the Slog, the great morass of storytelling, character development, and worldbuilding that stretched to the imaginative horizon, keeping her from her ambitions. Armed only with a keyboard, a thesaurus, and her wits, she strode forth, prepared to face down the horrors which, according to legend, resided in this creative fen: the Minotaur of Narrative lying in wait at the end of a plotting cul-de-sac; the Hydra of Flat Prose that stalks her, looming over every passage, threatening to poison her tale with its noisome breath; the Charybdis of Datadump into which she might fall at any moment, never to be heard from again; and, of course, the dreaded Chimera of Incoherence, which constantly menaces her work, its fiery breath burning narrative bridges right and left. It is hard, dangerous work, and it’s a wonder that even risks the fen in the first place. Truly, it is a wonder. Continue reading Writing Your Book, part V: Why Bother? posted by  Stuart Jaffe read all posts by Stuart Jaffe I’ve been reading The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, the sequel to his stellar book The Shadow of the Wind, and noticed his eloquent use of description. Passages swoop and soar with metaphor and simile in a way that brings life to the mundane. Likewise, fantasy author China Miéville uses his extensive vocabulary to create a verbal feast for even the most basic of descriptions. Yet sit in any writing class nowadays and you will be told to avoid this type of prose. So what’s a writer to do? We love words and the wonderful images the perfect word can create (if we didn’t, we’d be in some other profession), yet time and again we are told to avoid such things. Continue reading Balancing Words and Description posted by  Lucienne Diver read all posts by Lucienne Diver Hi, everyone! I’m pleased to be joining Magical Words for my monthly mouthing off. First, let me introduce myself. “Hi, I’m Lucienne. I’m a Taurus.” I.e. stubborn, straightforward, creative, persistent…in short, a literary agent. Specifically for The Knight Agency. I represent over forty authors of fantasy, mystery, romance and young adult fiction, including two of Magical Words’ founders, David B. Coe and Faith Hunter, and past guest bloggers Diana Pharaoh Francis and Rachel Caine (hey, guys!). The question of appropriate word count for various genres has come up time and again in my recent talks and on my blog, so I thought I’d use it to start off my very first post here at Magical Words. First of all, if you’re J.K. Rowling or George R.R. Martin, you can get away with the kind of books that keep chiropractors in business, the big fat fantasies. If not, here are some things to think about: 1) Simple economics: it costs more to print big, thick books than it does for thinner volumes. Shocker, right? This means more economic outlay for the publisher without a guarantee of returns on their investment. (And yes, I’m primarily talking about print publishing here, because while the audience for e-books is growing, their sales still only account for between 2% and 4% of the market and don’t yet pay a living wage.) Before acquiring anything, publishers run a PNL (profit and loss statement). The numbers they run are based on an author’s previous sales history, if any (or if not, an approximation of expected sales based on similar books on the market), the cost of printing the books (not just the advance to the author, but payments to editors, copy editors, cover artists, etc.), average returns, etc. Based on this, the publisher decides whether it will be financially advantageous to acquire a book or series. If the publisher doesn’t expect to earn enough money above their costs to make acquisition worthwhile, no offer will be forthcoming. 2) Publishers can’t charge the same price for a new writer as they can for an established author with a following, one whose audience is already hooked and will automatically pick up the next title from favored authors, sometimes even waiting in lines the day before a coveted release. Publishers want to charge a more attractive (read lower) price to entice readers to take a chance on someone new, someone whose market appeal is not a guarantee. A free market society is built on the laws of supply and demand. Houses must first build up demand for a product before they can increase the price on their supply. (Note: there are always, of course, exceptions, but they are really exceptional, for example Susanna Clarke’s debut Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.) 3) Bookstores have limited shelf space. This means that if you’ve got a big fat tome, booksellers can’t shelve as many in the allotted space and consequently might order fewer copies. 4) So far we’ve been talking about maximum word counts, but there are minimums as well. Agents and editors don’t bring these up because we want to impose artificial boundaries on your artistic creations. We do it because we know that readers feel shortchanged by a book that’s too short. Bigger fonts and wider margins don’t fool fans when they finish a book in a matter of hours. It only makes them wonder why the book that entertained them for a week cost the same (or nearly so) as a book they finished in an afternoon. Readers want to spend some quality time living in your world with your characters. Publishing is more than just a creative endeavor, it is, like any artistic achievement meant for public consumption, a contract between the artist and observer. If you provide satisfaction, your readers will come back for more. Otherwise, they tend to complain rather loudly in on-line reviews. In fact, a lot of authors who’ve been told to trim by their publishers for economic reasons 1-3 have had to explain to readers why their books are getting shorter. (Note to readers: authors often have as much input into the font and trim size, etc. of their books as they have to whether or not their brunette heroine is a blond on their cover. Sometimes we get to haggle. Sometimes we see artwork, etc. too late for changes.) More economics? I’m sure you’ve been hearing a lot lately about loss leaders and price wars. Let’s start with print books, because that’s what we’ve been discussing thus far. There was a huge kerfluffle last fall because Walmart and Amazon got into a price war, taking losses on hot hardcovers and other books in order to drive traffic to their venues. (See Wall Street Journal article of October 2009.) They were willing to sell these books at such a price that they not only didn’t turn a profit, but lost money in order to lure consumers. The same kind of loss leading has gone on with e-books, particularly with Amazon.com’s insistence on a $9.99 price tag for all books. When Macmillan negotiated with them recently to change things so that some e-books would be more expensive and some less (in both cases closer to the prices of their print counterparts), Amazon tried to convince consumers that Macmillan was being unreasonable, harping on the higher prices being discussed and giving no play to the lower. What most readers weren’t aware of was that Amazon had been losing money on a lot of their e-books to build a loyal consumer base for their readers and e-book offerings. While it is true that publishers don’t have to pay warehousing and shipping costs for e-books (the latter of which are not generally paid by the publisher in any case), they do have other associated costs, like formatting. Also, publishers still have to pay authors, editors, copyeditors, designers, artists, etc. and the salaries of all those other people who make the publishing world go around, like contracts administrators, sales and marketing, publicity, subrights managers…. The economics of e-books really aren’t so vastly different from their print counterparts. Well, there you have it. My two cents on the economics of publishing. No calculator required. For more on the subject: Romantic Reads on the Economics of Word Count Getting Published (for academics) on Book Length and Word Count Wall Street Journal article mentioned above on the Walmart/Amazon price war Shelf Awareness with a take on the Amazon vs. Macmillan issue posted by DavidBCoe read all posts by Special Guest Stars I first met Blake Charlton in San Jose last fall, at the World Fantasy Convention. Blake is a sibling of a sort: His editor is also my editor. And so I looked upon him initially as a younger brother. An incredibly bright, talented, capable, charming, funny, good-looking younger brother. In other words I hated his guts. Not really. Okay, a little. But he’s a really, really good guy and, from all accounts, a wonderful writer. His debut novel, Spellwright, will be released by Tor Books on March 2. His website can be found at http://www.blakecharlton.com. So let’s make him welcome. Ladies and gentlemen, I present Blake Charlton. [Cue crickets; smattering of applause.] Continue reading Today’s Special Guest: Blake Charlton | |
Latest Comments