Thursday Writing Quote ~ Robert McKee

Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules. Rebellious, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master the form. ~ Robert McKee

Tuesday Teaser/Opening ~ Milan

Courtney Milan is my one and only historical romance autobuy. Whenever she releases a new book, it goes on the top of my TBR pile. Okay, that's not true. It goes nowhere near the pile because I'm reading it NOW. I wasn't sure if that tradition would continue with Trade Me since this is her first contemporary romance, but I'm far enough in that I already know it doesn't matter what she writes. Milan Rules!

Blurb:
Tina Chen just wants a degree and a job, so her parents never have to worry about making rent again. She has no time for Blake Reynolds, the sexy billionaire who stands to inherit Cyclone Systems. But when he makes an offhand comment about what it means to be poor, she loses her cool and tells him he couldn’t last a month living her life.

To her shock, Blake offers her a trade: She’ll get his income, his house, his car. In exchange, he’ll work her hours and send money home to her family. No expectations; no future obligations.

But before long, they’re trading not just lives, but secrets, kisses, and heated nights together. No expectations might break Tina’s heart...but Blake’s secrets could ruin her life.

Opening:
  Today is going to be a good day.
  There is little outward evidence of this. Ragged, gray clouds skittered in overhead during my morning bus ride. By the time I got to my stop a few blocks from the edge of campus, rain was coming down in earnest. Now passing cars send up a fine spray of droplets. The umbrella in my backpack gave up the ghost as soon as I pulled it out, and I haven't had a chance to duct tape the fabric to the spines yet, because I'm about fourteen minutes away from a class that starts in eleven minutes and twenty-nine seconds.

Teaser:
 "You said that I didn't notice people like you." His voice lowers. His eyes are relentlessly blue, and cut into me. "That's completely false. You've never been invisible to me. I saw you the first day we crossed paths, and I've been seeing you ever since."

Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following: Grab your current readOpen to a random pageShare two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page. BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers! To see what others are sharing on the Teaser Tuesdays, check the comments at:: http://shouldbereading.wordpress.com/ 






Share the first paragraph (or a few) from a book you are reading. Here's the link: Bibliophile By The Sea

Nuggets for January

Got lots to share this month.

Don't know where to start with promotion? Well, this will help. My friend Rachelle has compiled a list of sites that help you promote your book. It's fantastic having all this information in one place, but you still have the problem of where to start.
http://www.rachelleayala.com/p/promo-sites.html

More about promos. Specifically how giveaways can help.
http://www.djgelner.com/2014/12/how-i-gave-away-over-2000-books-on-kindle.html

Don't forget that promotion starts with a few basics like writing your blurb and picking out keywords
http://annerallen.blogspot.com/2014/04/how-to-make-bestseller-lists-why.html
http://annerallen.blogspot.com/2014/03/8-tips-for-writing-that-killer-blurb.html

Want to write a plot twist? Here's a mini-lesson on what you need to know.
http://www.critiquecircle.com/blog.asp?blogID=146

Thinking about how to market audiobooks?
http://www.thecreativepenn.com/2014/05/01/audiobooks-acx-marketing/

Need to update your ebook? Hugh Howey shows you how.
http://www.hughhowey.com/fixing-typos-in-your-uploaded-amazon-e-books/

Action scenes are always challenging.
http://www.superheronation.com/2009/04/03/how-to-pace-a-scene-more-quickly/

The differences between how men and women act always interests me
http://www.superheronation.com/2007/04/08/writing-male-characters-and-perspectives/

The title of this post says it all: Good Dialog is never simply Dialog
http://j.nelsonleith.com/2014/12/24/good-dialogue-is-never-simply-dialogue/ 

Thursday Writing Quote ~ JK Rowling

You have to resign yourself to the fact that you waste a lot of trees before you write anything you really like, and that’s just the way it is. It’s like learning an instrument, you’ve got to be prepared for hitting wrong notes occasionally, or quite a lot, cause I wrote an awful lot before I wrote anything I was really happy with. ~ JK Rowling

Tuesday Teaser/Opening ~ A Spark of Death

This week, I'm reading a cozy historical mystery, A Spark of Death: A Professor Bradshaw Mystery.


Blurb:
Can death bring a man back to life? When UW Professor Benjamin Bradshaw discovers a despised colleague dead inside the Faraday Cage of the Electric Machine, his carefully controlled world shatters. The facts don't add up--the police shout murder--and Bradshaw is the lone suspect. To protect his young son and clear his name, he must find the killer.

Seattle in 1901 is a bustling blend of frontier attitude and cosmopolitan swagger. The Snoqualmie Falls Power Plant lights the city, but to most Seattleites, electricity is new-fangled and dangerous. The public wants a culprit--they want Bradshaw behind bars. The killer wants Bradshaw dead.

His life and liberty threatened, Bradshaw discovers the thrill of investigation as he's thrust deeper into the hunt.Questions abound. How had the Electric Machine's Tesla Coil delivered a fatal shock? Was the murder personal--or connected to President McKinley's planned visit? Were students involved, or in danger? And why had Bradshaw's best friend, Henry, fled to Alaska the day of the murder?

When Henry's niece Missouri appears on Bradshaw's porch in need of a home, her unorthodox views and femininity confuse and intrigue him as he struggles to protect his own haunting secret. Danger and death lurk everywhere--disguised as accidents. Has Bradshaw come alive again only to lose all he holds dear? Before it's too late, will he discover the circuit path that led to a spark of death?

Opening:
  A curtain of pale hair hid the young man's downturned face. His skinny fingers trembled as he toyed with the pencil. He'd been staring at his examination paper without making a single mark for ten minutes.
  Test anxiety. Professor Benjamin Bradshaw knew it well. Bradshaw himself had never been good at written examinations. It was the blank page, the abstract theory that vexed him. Put him on a pole with a length of wire to string, give him the components of an electric motor to assemble, and his mind sang. This young man was much the same.

Teaser:
  "I help the students understand the material so they they can pass their exams. It's called teaching, Detective. It's what I'm paid to do."


Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following: Grab your current readOpen to a random pageShare two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page. BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers! To see what others are sharing on the Teaser Tuesdays, check the comments at:: http://shouldbereading.wordpress.com/ 




Share the first paragraph (or a few) from a book you are reading. Here's the link: Bibliophile By The Sea

The Soundtrack - Lynyrd Skynyrd

In Knight of Hearts, Mac is a fan of classic rock, but for him, that also includes Southern Rock band, Lynyrd Skynyrd. They left us too soon, but they left us a legacy of wonderful music.

Thursday Writing Quote ~ Hitchcock

There is a distinct difference between "suspense" and "surprise," and yet many pictures continually confuse the two. I'll explain what I mean.

We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let's suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, "Boom!" There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o'clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: "You shouldn't be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!"

In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story. ~ Alfred Hitchcock

Nuggets

Writing a hooky opening line is always challenging. This might help.
http://www.superheronation.com/2011/01/26/some-observations-about-the-best-opening-lines/

Character voice
http://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/2013/12/common-mistakes-one-symptom-weak-character-voice.html

An excellent post on subplots
http://www.crackingyarns.com.au/2011/01/30/the-one-subplot-you-really-need/

How to write an ending
http://www.plottopunctuation.com/blog/show/does-your-denouement-murder-your-characters

I found this post about emotional arcs of scenes thought provoking
http://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/2015/01/characters-emotional-arc.html 

An excellent guide for writing scenes
http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/articles/writing-the-perfect-scene/

Tuesday Teaser/Opening ~ Mexifornia

I started reading Mexifornia: A State of Becoming by Victor Davis Hanson some time ago. Life got busy and I put it down, so now I've picked it up again to finish it. I'm impressed with the even-handedness of the author. He's not someone spouting soundbites or pushing an agenda. He's examining a complex issue in detail.

Blurb:
Massive illegal immigration from Mexico into California, Victor Davis Hanson writes, "coupled with a loss of confidence in the old melting pot model of transforming newcomers into Americans, is changing the very nature of state. Yet we Californians have been inadequate in meeting this challenge, both failing to control our borders with Mexico and to integrate the new alien population into our mainstream."

Part history, part political analysis, and part memoir, "Mexifornia" is an intensely personal work by one of our most important writers. Hanson is perhaps known best for his military histories and especially his social commentary about America and its response to terror after 9/11. But he is also a fifth-generation Californian who runs a family farm in the Central Valley and has written eloquent elegies for the decline of the small farm such as "Fields Without Dreams" and "The Land Was Everything." Like these books, "Mexifornia" is an intensely personal look at what has changed in California over the last quarter century. In this case, however, Hanson's focus is on how not only California, the Southwest, and indeed the entire nation has been affected by America's hemorrhaging borders and how those hurt worst are the Mexican immigrants themselves.

A large part of the problem, Hanson believes, comes from the opportunistic coalition that stymies immigration reform and, even worse, stifles an honest discussion of a growing problem. Conservative corporations, contractors, and agribusiness demand cheap wage labor from Mexico, whatever the social consequences. Meanwhile, "progressive" academics, journalists, government bureaucrats, and La Raza advocates envision illegal aliens as a vast new political constituency for those committed to the notion that victimhood, not citizenship, is the key to advancement. The problems Hanson identifies may have reached critical mass in California, but they affect Americans who inhabit "Mexizona," "Mexichusetts" and other states of becoming.

Hanson writes wistfully about his own growing up in the Central Valley when he was one of a handful of non-Hispanics in his elementary school and when his teachers saw it as their mission to give all students, Hispanic and "white" alike, a passport to the American Dream. He follows the fortunes of Hispanic friends he has known all his life--how they have succeeded in America and how they regard the immigration crisis. But if "Mexifornia" is emotionally generous at the strength and durability of the groups that have made California strong, it is also an indictment of the policies that got California into its present mess. But in the end, Hanson strongly believes that our traditions of assimilation, integration, and intermarriage may yet remedy a problem that the politicians and ideologues have allowed to get out of hand.

Opening:
I met Santiago Lara over twenty years ago. On a late March morning in 1982 he pulled into the orchard, jumped out of a broken-down station wagon filled with seven kids, caught me on the tractor and asked whether he could thin some plums until he found a new job. I had no idea who he was or where he came from. He looked exhausted--red-eyed, unshaven, in dirty clothes. I gave him what work I had, a temporary job for two days. Two decades later I still see him occasionally, and he still doesn't look good. Now over sixty, with white rather than raven-black hair, he continues as an occasional farm laborer and walks permanently stooped. He neither speaks a word of English nor has a single child who graduated from high school, although he has many children and grandchildren, some on various forms of disability, welfare and unemployment, others successful and gainfully employed, and a few who have been jailed.

Teaser:
Simply put, Mexican elites rely on immigration northward as a means of avoiding domestic reform. Market capitalism, constitutional government, the creation of a middle-class ethic or an independent judiciary will never fully come to Mexico as long as its potential critics go north instead of marching for a redress of grievances on the suited bureaucrats in Mexico City.

Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following: Grab your current readOpen to a random pageShare two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page. BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers! To see what others are sharing on the Teaser Tuesdays, check the comments at:: http://shouldbereading.wordpress.com/ 




Share the first paragraph (or a few) from a book you are reading. Here's the link: Bibliophile By The Sea

Creating Romantic Characters - A Review

Creating Romantic Characters: Bringing Life To Your Romance Novel

by Leigh Michaels

PBL Limited - 2002

186 pages of which 65 are about writing. The remaining 121 pages are examples from the author’s stories. Of the 65 pages, maybe half of that relates to romance in particular. Nearly all of what’s said however could be applied to any type of fiction.

For someone who is past the neophyte stage, the book doesn’t have much new to offer. Even for newbie writers, I’d recommend tempering what’s said with your own sense. For instance, the author boxes the hero and heroine into certain likeability parameters that strike me as too rigid. Granted, Fifty Shades of Gray was ten years away when this was written, so it’s expecting too much for her to have ever imagined a popular hero who was into BDSM. Though most of the author’s advice is sound, one needs to remember that times change. When someone says “today’s romance” in print, it’s going to be dated by the time it hits the bookstore shelves. (If it ever even sees the inside of a bookstore given how fast things are changing.)

If you’re looking to write a more traditional romance, however, the author deals well with basics about the roles of secondary characters and villains in romance as well as some of your basic fairy tale story structures.

There are, however, points made that seem basic to me that I see far too often in romance, including NY published romance where the story presumably had an editor who knew better (or should have). FREX, This is what the author says about “the other woman” as one of the characters:

If it’s apparent to the reader that this woman is completely rotten, then how could our supposedly intelligent hero ever fall for her? And if she’s clearly a self-centered liar, why does our supposedly intelligent heroine believe her?

All in all, I have to judge this book as being thin on value to aspiring writers.

~***~

I just want to mention that for the next several days, A Dark & Stormy Knight: A McKnight Romance is on sale.

Blurb:
Young and stupid go together like peanut butter and jelly.

Sol McKnight, rancher and rodeo bull rider, married Georgia Carston, the love of his life, at eighteen. So maybe they were too young and maybe he was stupid to believe it would last the rest of their lives because six weeks later, she left him. Now she’s back in Hero Creek for the summer. This is his chance to win her back. Little does he know, this may be his last chance because Georgia has her eye on the divorced father of their daughter’s best friend. If Sol ever wants to feel whole again, he’s going to have to figure out what went wrong so many years ago and fix it. If he doesn’t he’ll lose her forever.

Thursday Writing Quote ~ JK Rowling

Be ruthless about protecting writing days, i.e., do not cave in to endless requests to have “essential” and “long overdue” meetings on those days. The funny thing is that, although writing has been my actual job for several years now, I still seem to have to fight for time in which to do it. Some people do not seem to grasp that I still have to sit down in peace and write the books, apparently believing that they pop up like mushrooms without my connivance. I must therefore guard the time allotted to writing as a Hungarian Horntail guards its firstborn egg. ~ JK Rowling

Tuesday Teaser/Opening ~ I.O.U. Sex

I noticed this book because one of the participants in this meme wrote it, so I thought I'd give it a try.
I.O.U. Sex by Sandra Nachlinger and Sandra Allen is a light, fun romance with older women as the protagonists, which is a nice change from the sexy, young thangs most romances focus on.

Blurb:
Best friends June, Kiki, and Peggy graduated from Dallas’s Rayburn High School—all of them still virgins. After all, they were good girls. Years later, when the three women read June’s high school diary, they joke about the sexual frustration they caused their steady boyfriends back then. That’s when Kiki makes a startling statement. “When you think about it, and I’m only trying to be fair, we owe those guys sex.”

With bawdy jabs and tipsy laughter, they vow to track down their old boyfriends and just DO IT, which is something they definitely did not do back in high school.

Lives intertwined, the three friends share their quest with sexy, poignant, and sometimes hilarious results. Is each woman’s sexual IOU paid in full? Will everyone get what he or she deserves? Or is this just another one of Kiki’s crazy ideas?

Opening:
March 20, 1965--A perfect 18th birthday with my perfect boyfriend. He gave me a single pearl on a gold chain. Drove to Kiest Park and ♥ ♥ ♥. I love him so. I'd do anything for him, except do IT, but it's soooo tempting!!!

  June flipped the diary face down on the coffee table to mark her place and smiled at her two best friends. She was glad she'd kept the book. Kiki and Peggy had lived those high school days with her, and they treasured her diary as a priceless record of the teenaged years, just as much as she did. Their friendship warmed her more than the blazing logs in the fireplace or her glass of wine.

Teaser:
"Damn right," Kiki added. "I remember wrestling with Greg lots of times, but I wouldn't call his begging a conversation."


Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following: Grab your current readOpen to a random pageShare two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page. BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers! To see what others are sharing on the Teaser Tuesdays, check the comments at:: http://shouldbereading.wordpress.com/ 




Share the first paragraph (or a few) from a book you are reading. Here's the link: Bibliophile By The Sea

Ebooks and the rate of growth

I keep seeing what amounts to a meme in the publishing world that laments the "slowing rate of growth"

Mark Coker, CEO of Smashwords, recently said "the rate of transition from print to ebooks is slowing." He's not alone. I see this particular meme everywhere these days. It makes me crazy because I know that many people who read that don't understand what's really being said because there's a sort of "the sky is falling mentality" about this that implies ebooks are a bubble that will implode one day much like the dot-com or real estate bubbles did.

It ain't so because OF COURSE the rate of conversion is slowing. That's to be expected.


For those who don't understand why this isn't a catastrophe, let's explore what rate of growth really means.

First, we need to understand what steady sales is. It's when you sell 100 units of a product in year one. And 100 in year two. And 100 in year three. That's steady sales. It's also a zero growth rate.

If you sold 100 units the first year, then in subesquent years, you sold 200, 300, 400, etc, you would increase your sales by 100 units each year, but your growth rate would be declining: 100% the first year, 50% the second year, 25% the third year, and so on. So even though you're improving your sales by the same amount each year, your growth rate is declining.

What does a growing growth rate look like? I'm going to keep the numbers simple here, so if you debut a product and it sells 100 units the first year and 200 units the second year you have a rate of growth of 100%. To maintain that rate of growth, your subsequent years need to look like this:
year 3:       400 units
year 4:       800 units
year 5:     1600 units
year 6:     3200 units
year 7:     6400 units
year 8:   12800 units
year 9:   25600 units
year 10: 51200 units

All of these numbers indicate a 100% growth rate. Is that sustainable? Not in the long term. Not in any industry. And it should be obvious why. (Clue: it's a lot easier to sell 800 units of something than it is 51k units.)

 So what happens if the growth rate drops to 50% in year 11?

year 11: 76,800 unit sold

In absolute numbers, that's still an increase of 25,600 units. That's roughly the same number of units sold in the first eight years combined. But the rate of growth has slowed to half of what it was in years past.

So what does this mean in terms that relate to ereaders?

To keep this simple, I'm going to work solely with the numbers I could find regarding the kindle, but you might want to keep in mind that the kindle is only a piece of the picture. It's a big piece, but it's still only a piece.

The kindle debuted in November 2007 but Amazon isn't usually forthcoming with it's sales numbers, so I did a little browsing for estimates. In January 2010, Techcrunch reported:
"The total number of all types of Kindles out there in users hands hit 3 million sometime in December, says a source close to Amazon."

In October of 2012, just 5 years later, Newzoo posted this headline:

"17.4 million active Kindle Fire users in US, 30.5 million active iPad users"

That's a helluva sales growth. It averages about 76% over the five year period (in absolute numbers that's 14.4 million more ereaders over 5 years). Because we've seen how the numbers grow exponentially with a steady growth rate, we can assume that the growth rate was higher in 2008 than it was in 2012, but in terms of absolute numbers, the number of ereaders out there is still climbing.

So if you've stayed with me this far, you can see that, even if everyone out there is right (and they likely are) and the growth rate is slowing, the sky is nowhere near close to falling.

I knew that degree in Business Administration would come in handy someday.

Thursday Writing Quote ~ John Long

The fact that one character wants to explore Saturn and another character wants to elope with the janitor's stepdaughter is of little importance. It's the intensity of the wanting that fuels the story. ~ John Long