Wordlovers

Writing Romance

2012-03-01T09:40:00.000-08:00

Romance novels seem to be most people’s guilty pleasure. I used to disdain them until I got hooked on them. Then I started writing them. Granted, a romance novel would probably never be construed as the great American novel, but they definitely have their place. They can be sweeping, stirring, historical, fantasy-fulfilling and fun.

I do not like to write the same story twice. No sequels or series for me. With some authors, you know pretty much exactly what you’re going to get when you pick up their new book. Not true for me (at least, I hope not!). I don’t consciously work to vary my style with each book, but it just seems to work out that each book, each set of characters, demands a slightly different style, and I celebrate that. For that reason, my five romance novels are all very different from each other.

My first romance (and my first book) is The Rare Breed, a historical (western) romance. It was published as Love’s Savage Destiny by Dorchester Publishing in New York in 1984 and underwent several subsequent printings. When they had had their runs with it and allowed the rights to revert back to me, I hunted around for a way to publish it myself just to keep it in print and found iUniverse. These days there are more direct ways of self-publishing, but at the time, this was one of the few options. I did some minor revisions and used my original title, having never been very fond of the “Love’s Savage Whatever” titles.

I like to think of my books as a thinking person’s romances. Although I have varying degrees of titillation in my books, the most important aspect of the story is the growth and evolution of the protagonist. In The Rare Breed, Catherine Lance is a beautiful young half-breed, raised in the white world, who leaves wealthy civilization behind to search the Kansas plains for her Cheyenne father. In this time of Western expansion and Indian wars, being a half-breed is dangerous; she is susceptible to denigration at the least, physical harm or even death at the worst. In order to carry out her quest, Catherine must be secretive and hide her true identity, all the while searching Leavenworth, Kansas, for information about her Cheyenne band. What jeopardizes that search is the amorous attention of two men, one a rough trapper, the other an educated lawyer. While trying to stay single-minded in her quest, Catherine finds herself getting sidetracked by the emotions evoked by the two men, at least until a sudden breakthrough gives her the access to her Cheyenne band that she had been seeking.

It’s here that the book switches gears as Catherine, known as Gray Feather, attempts to sink back into the Cheyenne home and tradition from which she was torn at an early age. Complicating this process is the presence of the man to whom she was once betrothed―now married―yet eager to welcome her into his lodge as his second wife. Catherine struggles not only with her place in the unusual relationship but with her place in the culture as a whole. Her early years as an Indian made her assimilation into the white word impossible; now her years in the white world make it difficult for her to fit into her original home, as well. Like all strong women, it’s only with some deep soul-searching that she finally discovers the path her life must take, and the one man who can share that path with her.

My second western romance, Superstition Gold, is decidedly different. Similar in process to the first, this book was originally published by Dorchester in 1987 under the title Love’s Savage Embrace. As before, once their interest waned, I republished the book with my original title. There the similarities end.

Superstition Gold is written with a lighter hand and, while serious, has more humorous overtones to it. The protagonist, Leigh Banning, is a young widow who travels to the wilds of Arizona to find the deceased father she never knew, a prospector who lived among the Apache Indians. To that end, she is thrown into the disturbing and fascinating company of an Army major and his Indian scout. As the trio penetrates deep into the Superstition Mountains of Arizona, Leigh finds herself out of her depth, both physically and emotionally, in the harsh land and with the two rugged men. Her snobbish overconfidence leaves her completely unprepared for the primitive way of life and it is only after several gaffes and confrontations with her protectors that she finally begins to understand the alien culture and the strong, western men.

Just as she begins to sort out her battered emotions, false murder charges linked to the storied gold of the Lost Dutchman Mine put her on the run. While Major Ryan attempts to clear her name, she and the Indian scout Walking Bear are captured by Apache raiders led by Leigh’s rival for the major’s affections. It is only by working with the Apaches to safeguard the mine and fully understanding her own true nature that Leigh comes to honor her father and the new love she bears.

About this time, I switched gears completely. My next romance was the antithesis of the earlier books, a screaming satire of all romance novels.The Pits of Passion by Amber Flame skewers every cliché every written and takes all the most familiar elements of historical romance to the nth degree. It is bawdy, brazen, x-rated and completely over the top. If you’ve ever been embarrassed down to your toenails by Playboy or Penthouse magazine, do not buy this book! If you’ve ever been shocked by x-rated movies, do not buy this book! If you love Harlequin romance novels and their sacred, unchanging formulas, do not buy this book! But if you’re up for a slapstick, laugh-out-loud romp through the pirate and bodice-ripping world of romance, this might be for you. I actually never thought anyone would publish this, since it lampoons every aspect of a beloved genre, but New Concepts Publishing put it out as an e-book several years ago. Since then I have self-published it as a paperback. It’s a great change of pace, and like nothing else you’ve ever read. I promise you that. You can see a video book trailer for it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NOlYc-scH8.

My next book, Remember Me, is again a completely different animal. This is a contemporary romance, more a deep character study than a sweeping action tale. When Elly Cole wakes up in a hospital with amnesia, she has no memory of how she was injured or of the huge, hateful man to whom she is married. During the painful process of stitching her life back together, she must battle not only terrifying nightmares, her husband’s certainty that she is a lying cheat and conflicting visions of her past, but her own doubts about her unborn child’s paternity and the future of her marriage. This is a subtle, delicate story of very human nature, of conflict and fear, doubt and conviction, strength of spirit and the power of love. It was published in 2004 by Draumr Publishing.

My most recent romance, Lightning Strikes, is different yet again. This is another contemporary story yet almost diametrically opposed to Remember Me. In this slim volume, Jessie Evans is a freelance journalist doing a story on the Hopi Indians of Northern Arizona. When she encounters the half-Hopi architect Lucas Shay, sparks fly immediately, and not the good kind. Taking an instant dislike to each other, they can still not escape the fact that they are intensely attracted to each other, and soon their conflicted emotions start a fire neither can control. While their sexual attraction is too powerful and honest to be denied, their emotional coupling is fraught with doubts, misconceptions and suspicion. Both have to find their way through the labyrinth of their pride and fear to realize and grab hold of their complete and committed love. I self-published this book in 2009.

I suppose the point of all this is that romance, as a genre, is not a set or narrow field. It can be pretty much whatever the reader and writer want it to be. It can be hopeful, painful, inspiring, maddening, funny, heartbreaking, satiric and moving. The overarching commonality is simply the basic human need to connect and create relationships, to give and receive love in its most honest and satisfying form. And how following that thread to real love very often leads us to our own best, true selves.

(Originally published on Desi Moon's blog Feb. 23, 2012:

http://dbmoonauthor.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2012-02-23T00:00:00-07:00&max-results=2&start=4&by-date=false )

Musings on Creativity and Happiness

2012-02-15T07:26:00.000-08:00

In the wake of Whitney Houston’s untimely death, I’ve been thinking a lot about creativity, talent, fame, happiness and demons. How many superstars can you think of who have had huge talent, huge fame, huge fortune and have died young in questionable, avoidable, regrettable and even embarrassing ways? Lots.

Why is that?

As I see it, there are many aspects to this dynamic of creativity, fame and happiness. One is the strange and paradoxical mythology that surrounds creativity. Creativity and talent do not seem to be distributed equally to each and every one of us, much as we might wish that. I believe that creativity is the ability to bring forth something new, something that had never existed before. Certainly creativity takes a multitude of formats, and most people recognize that talent can manifest as easily in an electrical schematic or a mathematical equation as it can in a novel or an aria, and yet it seems that some people are not blessed with any of these abilities. And when I use that term “blessed,” there’s the rub. In our western culture, most agree that having talent, having creativity, is a blessing.

I have had people tell me they wish they could write like I do. I’ve never asked them why. Is it being able to tell a coherent story? Being able to bring characters to life? Or is the fame (ha!) and fortune (ha!) that most people associate with talent? Certainly I love to write; it satisfies some deep internal drive that compels me to make up stories whether those stories are adventures, cautionary tales or flights of fancy. It does give me a huge sense of satisfaction to craft a story, to polish it, to mold it into something that I feel is complete and purposeful and entertaining. Does it make me happy? Yes and no. I love my books; I love the characters, I love the arc of the plots, the twists and turns of the journey, and I love the resolution that brings the characters to their ultimate triumph, understanding, or validation. While I’m writing my stories and later, while I’m reading them, I am happy. Does that spill over into every other aspect of my life?

Not hardly.

I still have problems. I still have disagreements with my husband; I still have misunderstandings with my boss. I still get toothaches and headaches; my car battery dies or my dog gets sick or a friend takes a comment the wrong way. Does the satisfaction I get from writing help me through any of this? No. Am I still unhappy at times? Absolutely.

I believe the same is true for superstars. Whitney Houston had a phenomenal voice, and I have no doubt it gave her immense satisfaction at certain points in time. Did it solve all her problems? Apparently not. Michael Jackson was, at one time, the most popular and highest selling recording star in the world, as was Elvis Presley. Did it make them happy? Probably, at times. Did it solve all their problems? Apparently not.

Yet we have this unspoken expectation that talent like this brings great happiness. Watching the winner on American Idol or The Voice, we’ll say, “That girl has it made. She’ll get recording contracts and merchandising contracts and have money up the wazoo. She’ll have the world by the tail.” She’ll have fame and fortune; she’ll be rich. How can she help but be happy? As I’ve said, this is generally unspoken, but it permeates our culture. After all, have you ever heard anyone say, watching the winner of America’s Got Talent, “Hoo, boy, that guy is really in trouble. Give him a couple years and he’ll either die of an overdose in a hot tub or he’ll be found in a pool of his own vomit in a ditch by the side of the road. You mark my words.”

So here we have this myth that talent, fame and fortune bring happiness, yet we have glaring examples to prove that’s not true. As a matter of fact, we also have a different mythology that is the exact opposite, and that is the myth of creativity and the tortured soul. Go to Amazon and search under books for “creativity and depression.” You get many, many pages of books with titles like Manic Depression and Creativity, The Van Gogh Blues: The Creative Person’s Path Through Depression, and Writing Through the Dark Night. Think about William Styron, Ernest Hemmingway, Jackson Pollack, Edgar Allan Poe. Some people even believe that creativity and depression are directly linked, that creativity cannot exist without some level of psychological problems, that it either arises from or causes those problems. Is that true? All the very real examples above notwithstanding, I sincerely doubt it. (No one has ever labeled me a genius, but I have written 10 books and I’m pretty darn normal.) I won’t begin to say that I understand it all. It’s way more complex than I know, but some things have occurred to me.

First of all, some percentage of the population is going to have problems with depression, neurosis and even psychosis, therefore some percentage of creative people will have those same problems. The perceptual difference is if Joe Shmo drinks himself to death or suffers from crippling depression, no one knows about it. If a million-selling novelist or a one-name singer has the same fate, everyone knows about it. With our celebrity-hungry culture and the very accommodating media, the famous go down in flames that rival a Super Bowl halftime show. The more extravagant the demise, the more skewed the perception is that they couldn’t handle the talent and all that came with it. So I do believe some of this mythology (creativity = tortured soul) is the result of skewed awareness.

What I see as the really damning part of fame and fortune is license. Most of us chafe against the restrictions in our life: money, work, bills, family. We can’t do whatever we want whenever we want. We have to balance our wants against other things, other people. We have to compromise. Fame and fortune overrides so much of that. Want a bigger house? Buy one. Want to travel around the world? Do it. Want to meet an iconic person? Have your people call their people. If the name doesn’t do the job, the money will. No doors are closed. Access is assured.

But then that all-access pass gets embedded into the famous personality and everyone around them. What I mean by that is that no one tells them no. You’ve seen the entourages that surround famous people. Do you think any of those people are there because they say no? How long would Michael Jackson’s doctor have had that gig if he’d said no to M.J.? How long would any personal assistant have been with Elvis or Whitney if they’d refused to fill a prescription, buy a bottle or score some drugs? They’d be replaced in a heartbeat, and there would be 20 or 50 or 100 yes-men standing in line for the job.

From my viewpoint, I don’t see that it’s the talent, fame or fortune that destroys these people; it’s the lack of grounding. Very often the untreated drunk or drug addict that insists on continuing on their path will get hit hard with the consequences. They will lose their job, their family, their home, their freedom. If you or I had a drinking or drug problem, we would—if we were lucky—be confronted by family and be forced into treatment. Not so the star. When they go to excess, there is no pushback. They collapse on stage and there are a score of people to help them up, dry them out and enable them to continue in the same vein. And as they continue, they move closer and closer to the edge of the abyss.

Now please understand here that I am noting all this with a very broad brush. I am not saying this is true for every celebrity. I am not saying that stars don’t have family members who try to steer them to a safer, healthier lifestyle. But I am saying that we tend to see this downward spiral way too often, and it’s very sad.

So what conclusions can we come to? That both creative and non-creative people have personal problems. That creativity, in and of itself, does not cause insanity. That creativity is entirely separate from fame and fortune (trust me on this one). That fame and fortune is a two-edged sword and can give people a very distorted view of themselves and their world, and the unwary can fall into excess.

Can creativity cause happiness? Undoubtedly, in the short term. Can it cause happily ever after? Probably not. I’ve written 10 books and I am still susceptible to every human challenge from breaking a fingernail to stepping in cat barf to losing a loved one to being diagnosed with cancer and given 6 months to live. Such is life. We have good days and bad; we have joy and sorrow. There’s no escape. (Ain’t none of us getting’ out of here alive.)

Deal with it.

Catching the Tsunami Wave of E-Publishing

2012-02-03T08:38:00.000-08:00

Okay, I admit it; with 10 books available at all online book stores, I’ve been a little slow in joining the e-book revolution. I did have most of my books available for Kindle, but obviously I’ve been just playing around in the tide pools while the tsunami of e-publishing is crashing onshore all around me. So, time to get with the program.

Although I’ve been traditionally published in the past, most of my books are now self-published, which means all the decisions about when and how they are sold are up to me. In order to reach the full audience of e-reader owners (Nook, Sony, etc.), I went to Smashwords (smashwords.com) and started uploading my books one by one. It’s been a painstaking process, but aside from having the books available as e-books, I found it also had an interesting side benefit.

The Smashwords process of getting a book ready for e-publishing is pretty straight forward, but does require some very specific steps. The book must be uploaded with very little of MS Word’s famous formatting (you know, all that stuff that happens when Bill Gates tries to read our minds). There’s an extensive 72-page guide you can download from Smashwords, and it’s strongly recommended that you follow it exactly. After all, you want your e-book to look good, read easily, and not confound the reader by appearing jumbled. Doing any less than the guide tells you risks having your book come across as (at least) unprofessional, or (at worst) as unreadable.

The crux of the Smashwords de-formatting guide is what they call their “nuke” process. To completely nuke the Word formatting, they recommend you copy your entire manuscript, open Notepad and paste it there. This strips out all the Word “gunk.” From there, you copy the entire thing again, then paste it into a NEW blank Word doc. From there, they have very specific recommendations for your style settings so your book will convert to all e-readers with minimal problems. It’s a rather painstaking process the first time around, but well worth the time and effort.

What surprised me was the fact that my newly nuked manuscript, back in Word, was suddenly peppered with spelling alerts. You know, those wavy red lines under suspect words? I was stunned to see many more than I had ever seen in previous proof readings. I can’t imagine that I had commanded Word to ignore all those misspellings (would I really have told it to ignore “moutain” when I meant “mountain?” [which, in all fairness, is possible]), so I assume it was some vagary of Word that decided to ignore those things all on its own. Maddening. One of my biggest bugaboos. (I ranted about typos in my November 2, 2011 blog post.)

But, as irritating as that was, I realized after I’d gone thru and corrected multiple misspellings that this was actually a good thing. No, I’m not happy I have misspelled words in my book, but I’m thrilled that I actually had a new method of double-checking Word instead of just trusting my own, and my proof readers’, eyes. It never would have occurred to me that Word might flag a word in one document but not in another. (Interestingly enough, when I typed “moutain” above, Word automatically corrected it to “mountain,” and it put the red wavy line under it when I changed it to the misspelled word. So how the heck did it get a pass in my MS?)

Once I’d corrected the obvious errors, then it was just a process of going through the book and checking for any undetected formatting errors that occurred in the conversion: inconsistent line spacing, dropped returns, single or double dashes instead of m dashes, straight quotes instead of smart quotes.

Re-reviewing a manuscript is always difficult. Many of my books were written years ago, and re-reading them at a later time always brings up the old issue of second-guessing myself. I blogged about this, too, on November 3, 2011. It’s really difficult to not make changes when I think I could word something a little better, but in the spirit of respecting my decision whatever day I pronounced the book “done,” I do my best to keep my hands off. As I said in that blog, it’s not unusual for me to change a line one day, then change it back the next, so better to trust in my earlier judgment and keep the book consistent with its other forms.

The really good news about self-publishing is the fact that now I can go back and fix the misspellings in my original files and upload a new, clean version for the paperback format. In traditional publishing, I doubt you could ever do this. I had one book published by PublishAmerica (a scam outfit if I ever saw one), and when I discovered some mistakes and asked if they could correct them, they actually sent me a contract to sign saying I would never ask for any more changes, ever. So much for the desire to put out a clean, professional product.

In any event, I feel like I am now ready to catch that surfboard and ride the tsunami of e-publishing. I still love physical books and will always have my work available that way, but there’s just no denying the migration to e-readers. I have a Kindle myself, and it really is a great way to take books with me when I’m traveling. Vive la difference!

Fantasy Influences - Anne McCaffrey

2012-01-25T14:52:00.000-08:00

The best fantasy series I have ever read must be, hands down, the books of Anne McCaffrey. For anyone not familiar, McCaffrey (1926- 2011) wrote the infamous Dragonriders of Pern, a series of 22 separate novels that take place on a distant earthlike planet. The largest (literally!) difference between Pern and Earth is the fact that huge dragons exist, they have telepathic powers and they bond (or impress) with humans. The guardians of the planet are the mythic dragonmen who ride these immense creatures and ward off any dangers that might arise.

I believe McCaffrey’s books are so successful partly because she has somehow tapped into an archetypal desire of the human race. From the first time dragons were recognized by human consciousness, they have gripped the imagination and inspired emotions across the board: love, hate, awe, fear, power, life, death, immortality, sexuality and liberation. In China, the dragon has been revered for millennia; ancient peoples of varying cultures have presumed comets were celestial dragons flying across the sky and heralding great changes. During the Age of Exploration, it was common to populate maps of the unknown areas with the famous phrase, “Here be dragons,” denoting dangerous and fearful waters. Dragons have by turns been the stuff of either dreams or nightmares, but they have never failed to fascinate, and riding one seems like the ultimate thrill.

So with a backdrop like that, how could McCaffrey lose? Actually, she could. Although the premise that runs through her books is phenomenally attractive, without good stories, good plot development and believable characters, it still would not be enough. Luckily McCaffrey was a master at every aspect of writing. She fully developed the world of Pern and populated it with a varied, regional-specific and vocation-specific race of humans that must learn to balance their sometimes conflicting needs against the needs of the world as a whole. Her main characters, hard-headed Lessa, equally bull-headed F’lar, Robinton in his cups, the quiet F’nor, are all fully human in that they have their flaws, yet all are (ordinary) people who take on extraordinary challenges. McCaffrey loved her villains, as well, and crafted them with as much care as the heroes; during your time on Pern, you will meet dictators, manipulators, bullies, and the fearfully stupid. This, I believe, is McCaffrey’s strength and the core of all good fantasy writing: no matter how alien the locale, we must have realistic characters to whom we can relate.

Luckily for us, McCaffrey had more energy and more imagination than could be contained on a single planet. Her other books―some in series, some stand-alone―explore other aspects of alien worlds and human endeavors. Dinosaur Planet, The Ship Who Sang, Killishandra, The Rowan all expand McCaffrey’s story-telling talent in different directions, delivering memorable characters in uniquely different situations. I honestly cannot think of any book of hers that I have read that disappointed.

I certainly did my best to emulate her in my fantasy novel, The Blue Crystal. Although as a stand-alone book it cannot have the scope of McCaffrey’s entire series, I do believe it makes good use of the strengths she employs: admirable characters in extraordinary circumstances amid alien landscapes and cultures. The Blue Crystal tells the story of a young villager who sets out to free his family from the slave mines of the evil emperor Mal-Zor, but instead finds himself drawn into a mythic and magical battle between good and evil. Aided (and often frustrated) by the whining halfling Igli, Jared encounters strange animals, dangerous terrain and unfamiliar cultures as he pursues his quest. The Blue Crystal is an epic fantasy more similar in story to The Lord of the Rings or the Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe than to McCaffrey’s books, but I would like to think it reflects well on all of those, as they have all influenced my writing.

Sadly, Anne McCaffrey passed away in November of 2011 at the age of 85. As prolific as she was, I can’t help but wonder how many amazing stories died with her that we will never know. The good news is that her work will be available for all future generations; the bad news is that she will be sorely missed. Story-tellers as real and accomplished as she was are rare gems in the literary world.

Guest Blog - Kody Boye, author of Blood

2012-01-19T14:07:00.000-08:00

The Three Series that Inspired Me to Write Fantasy

Kody Boye

Readers are often interested in the inspirations that inspired their novel—most particularly, for fantasy novels. Though since 2009 I have refused to read fantasy fiction for fear of accidentally leeching its elements or story plots and incorporating them into my own writing, I was a very avid fantasy reader back in the day. Here are the top three stories that inspired me to write the first novel in my Brotherhood Saga, Blood.

1. Tamora Pierce’s Tortal Universe. Through a series of nearly twenty books now, Tamora Pierce has introduced readers and lovers of fantasy to the vast and sprawling country of Tortal. The first quartet, Alana, dealt with a young girl who wished to become a knight. The second, Realm of the Gods, followed a young nature mage named Diane as she attempted to thwart against the Gods themselves. Finally, the third quartet (and ultimately my favorite,) Protector of the Small, takes place dozens of years after Alana did in a time where girls can now train as knights. It was this last quartet that inspired me to write a story about a young man who journeys to his capital and then is acquisitioned into the royal army after he is deemed appropriate for training because of his magical talent.

2. The Abhorsen Trilogy by Garth Nix. Back in the day, Garth Nix influenced me to the point where I wrote a semi fan-fiction book that surrounded the idea of a Necromancer being ‘good,’ though my story came nowhere near the perfection that Nix accomplished in his trilogy. It follows a series of characters—first an anti-necromancer called an Abhorsen, then a charter mage and her companion—as they attempt to not only protect the kingdom from the slowly-growing undead, but also a threat that could destroy the country behind ‘the wall’ entirely. It features something I was always interested in—zombies; or, more appropriately, the ‘undead.’ Unlike zombies who just shamble for food, however, these dead things have consciences, and use them to their deadliest advantage.

3. The Harry Potter Saga. Spanning an entire decade, the story of a young man who journeys to a wizarding school entertained my imagination ever since I started reading the Harry Potter series when I was in sixth grade (it ended when I was just fresh out of high school.) The magic, the creativity, the worldbuilding and the plot is enough to drive any fan of fantasy, old and young alike. It isn’t until after the fourth book that my favorite thing comes into play—the darkness, the death, the destruction and the omens. It is in the fourth book, The Goblet of Fire, that we are introduced to one of the most demonic and cruel villains of the early twenty-first century. To say J.K. Rowling inspired me would be to discount all the impact she had on me as a child. Her story and her power of telling it made me venture into fantasy and then write The Brotherhood Trilogy (which is now a saga) when I was only thirteen.

See all Kody's books at http://kodyboye.com/.

Formatting for Self-Publishing

2012-01-04T12:46:00.000-08:00

Self-publishing has come of age. If you have any doubts about that, you might check out this article on the evolution of publishing over the year 2011. Now, not only can anyone write the book they’ve always wanted to, but they can publish it as well without having to pass the muster of the triumvirate agent-editor-publisher. That’s the good news. The bad news is that publishing without the help and know-how of a professional can be daunting. On many of the online forums to which I subscribe, there are frequent calls for help from newbies who are totally intimidated by the idea of self-publishing.

There are many publishing options, everything from the almost-free, do-it-yourself route to the pay-as-you-go services. If you were to Google publishing services, you’d get oodles of pages of people and companies offering their expertise, all for a price. It’s pretty much a straight across trade: the more of the work you do yourself, the more cheaply you can do it. The more services you require, the more you will pay.

The good news is—it’s not that hard.

I’ve been self-publishing now for several years and have done many different types of books: fiction, non-fiction, art, children’s, memoirs. When I was researching the options, I got a line on Create Space, Amazon’s self-publishing subsidiary. What drew me to Create Space was the fact that I had about 99% control of my book, although that meant having 99% responsibility for the formatting as well. Scary stuff. What was also extremely attractive was the fact that I could publish for almost nothing. The only required costs were a proof copy and shipping. You can essentially publish a book for no more than maybe $10 (additional proofs require cost and shipping). I do recommend Create Space’s $39 Pro Plan, however; it widens the distribution channels, lowers the cost of the book and provides for more royalties. Well worth the price.

So where do you start? If you’ve got your manuscript in Word, it’s a fairly simple matter to format it for publication. The screen shots I’ll use are from Word 2010; earlier versions will look slightly different. Any other word processing program will have similar settings.

First choose your page size. Most trade paperbacks these days are 6 inches by 9 inches. If my book is roughly 200 pages or better, I will choose this size. If the book is smaller, maybe 150 pages, I will go with 5.5 inches by 8.5. This way the book is still a good size without being too slim. I like a book with a little heft to it.

Word’s default page size is 8.5 inches by 11 inches. In order to change the size of your pages, you must go into the Page Layout tab (see screenshot) and click on the Paper tab. The paper size will show Letter 8.5x11in. Hit the drop down arrow and scroll to the bottom of the options listed until you find “custom.” Select that. Now in the Width box, delete whatever is in there and type in 5.5”. In the Height box, delete whatever is there and type in 8.5”. (Use this same method to create a 6” x 9” format.) Note at the bottom of the dialog box where it says Apply to: and make sure “Whole document” is selected. Click on OK.

Now because we haven’t changed the margins yet, the result of this may look terribly wrong. If you want to be safe, save this document with a different name than your original, but we’ll get this one fixed up.

So the next thing to do is choose your margins. Again opening up your Page Setup dialog box, set your margins to 1” in the Top, Bottom, Inside and Outside boxes. Set your gutter to .25”. This is the extra allowance for the inside closest to the spine of the book. Make sure your Orientation is correct (Portrait here, as the pages are taller than they are wide), and where it says Multiple pages, choose “Mirror margins.” This will ensure that your gutter allowance is always toward the spine of the book instead of the outside margin. (You’ll see that in the small Preview figure.) Again where it says Apply to: make sure it says “Whole document.” Click OK.

The nice thing about the margins is that you can tweak them as necessary to get the pages to look their best. If your book is a behemoth and you want to keep the page count minimal, you can lessen the margins, say from 1” to .75” or even .5”. You’ll have less white space around your text, but it’ll lightweight the book more. Look at other books in your personal library and see what looks good, what appeals to your eye and duplicate that.

Your next decisions involve headers, footers and page numbers. If you look at several different books, you’ll see these things in various ways, and no one way is correct. Some books have the book title as the header on every page; some alternate the book title with the author’s name, i.e. author’s name on the even pages, title on the odd pages. In order to do this, open the Page Setup dialog box again and click on the Layout tab. Under Headers and footers, check the two boxes marked Different odd and even, and Different first page. This way you won’t have a header on your first chapter page, which gives it a much cleaner look.

And speaking of chapter pages, there are more style decisions you can make. Again, there is no one “correct” way to do this; it’s all a matter of style. I generally start my chapters about halfway down the page rather than right at the top. I also generally start my chapters on the right-hand (or odd) page, but this is another point that, if you’re worried about a lengthy page count, you can change. It’s perfectly permissible to start a new chapter on the next page after a chapter end, whether it’s on the left or right, with no blank pages in between. Just depends on what you like.

Now that you’ve got the basics done, you can concentrate on the details. This is the time to consider the font that you use. Again, look at other books and see what fonts have been used, how easy they are to read and how appealing they look. Generally speaking, a serif or footed font (like Times New Roman) is thought to be easier to read as the small flourishes tend to “lead” the eye to the next letter and word. A san-serif or non-footed font (like Arial) has a cleaner look but does not have that flowing style. There are many free font collections online where you can find a font that appeals to you.

Finally you might think about drop caps. Drop caps are generally the large (maybe 3 lines tall) first letter or first word of a chapter, often in a different or more elegant font. If your book is about chicken-farming, this may not appeal to you. If your book is a romance, it adds a bit of a flourish to your chapter starts.

When you think you’ve got the book pretty well formatted the way you want it, convert it to a pdf file. While Word does have a built-in function that will convert to pdf, you might be better off to buy the full version of Adobe Acrobat and convert with that. Adobe gives you options like “press quality” resolution, allows you to imbed your own fonts, and you can create your custom page size settings to make sure your pdf looks exactly like your Word document.

Once you’ve got your pdf file, of course, it’s time for the zillionith review, but you’re in the home stretch. Review, edit, tweak, polish (and repeat as necessary), and you’re ready to upload your book to Create Space!

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-20T08:43:00.001-08:00

Just want to say, Merry Christmas to all and to all a GOOD WRITE!

The Joys of Journaling

2011-12-14T06:43:00.001-08:00

Some people might think that writing is writing is writing. However, while writing fiction (or non-fiction, for that matter) gives voice to the creative spirit inside of us, journaling fulfills an entirely different function. Some might view journaling as simply diary-writing; jotting down the events of the day with a bit of interpretation and/or reaction thrown in for good measure. And for some, that might be useful enough. I use journaling more as a self-help psychotherapy.

I am probably pre-disposed to journaling, since I love to write anyway. What might have pushed me further along that path was the fact that I grew up an introvert in a family of introverts and had an older sister who tended to bully me. Like most situations of this kind of sibling dominance, if I told my parents that my sister had hit me, I got it worse the next time we were alone, so I learned early on that “telling” was not productive. Instead I turned my voice inward, writing on paper the things that I did not feel able to say out loud.

I now journal for several different reasons.

I journal when I do not want to forget about an incident or the way I’m feeling. Ten years ago when my parents died (both within a 2 week period), I journaled extensively about their process and mine. I knew time would fade the memories and I did not want to forget how their world shrank down smaller and smaller, how everything fell away except the here and now, feeling, seeing, hearing and smelling. I did not want to forget how the changes in their bodies and minds affected me and my life as I worked to respond to their changing needs. I did not want to forget the medical concessions we made and why, deciding to wait it out when my mother refused to go to the hospital, agreeing to honor her decision when she began refusing food. On paper I could express the dread that I felt when my father quit painting, since being creative was his reason for living. Depressing as this might sound, it was important to me to remember the entire process, watching them become less and less able, trying to keep them comfortable, coming to terms with the introduction of Hospice, accepting the inevitable. The process was at once heart-breaking, educational, insightful and liberating. I wanted to remember every bit of it, not only because I experienced so much and learned so much, but also as a reference for the day when I reach a similar point.

I journal when I have a conflict I can’t seem to resolve. I have found that often when I’m having a conflict with another person, if I keep it all inside my head, I end up on a hamster wheel just going round and round and getting nowhere. In order to tease out the points of contention, I write about it, detailing the evolution of the process from start to finish, and then I can begin to understand it and resolve it. At one time I was president of a small non-profit organization and one of the board members came to me with a complaint regarding other board members. Her complaint was valid and I agreed that I would support her in whatever way she chose to resolve it. What I didn’t count on was that the method she chose involved deceiving and manipulating the other board members. When she told me her plan, I realized there was no way I could condone it.

She was surprisingly upset. I had trouble understanding her anger, as her plan was so obviously dishonest, but I had promised her my support and now I was going back on my word. We were both locked into our positions and could not find a common ground. Each of us thought the other was out of line; each of us thought our own position trumped the other’s, and we could find no compromise.

I began to journal. I kept going over and over the fact that she was asking me to do something that was blatantly against my better judgment, and as president I needed to act with the utmost integrity. I could not fathom how she could possibly see this disrespectful entrapment as a viable, healthy solution. I seemed stuck on this point, but kept writing, kept looking at it from different angles, kept trying to find the key.

Then it struck me. I put myself in her position and I remembered someone else who had promised me unconditional support and then had not delivered on it. This was a relationship that had colored my life from very early on, but over the years I had finally come to terms with the fact that the other person simply did not have the strength of will to keep his promise. I realized that if I had been like the board member and had insisted on that support at all costs, I would have been asking him to act completely out of character and beyond his limits. I also realized that people who care about each other do not demand that others try to be what they are not.

Now it became clear to me. The problem was not that I could not support the devious method she had devised. The problem was that I had given her my unconditional support in the first place. I had no business giving her such a blanket approval as I had no idea what she would come up with. I had (incorrectly) believed that she would devise a plan that would be honest and honorable. It never occurred to me that she would not. But that was where I made my mistake. I gave her my unconditional support without knowing what she would plan.

We had already arranged to meet again to see if we could resolve the issue, and I went to the meeting with a surprisingly clear conscious and light heart. Although I still could not support her plan as I’m sure she would have liked, I had a clear sense of my own error and readily admitted my mistake. Just making amends for my part in the conflict and being totally honest about it seemed to clear the air. She may have been disappointed, but she did agree to rethink the plan. That was all I could ask for.

Writing about conflict like this can be difficult and cast a harsh light on unflattering behaviors, but can also be intensely liberating. Sometimes journaling reveals the other person’s mistaken ideas; sometimes it reveals my own. There are times when I may discover that the other person’s view and mine are both valid, yet at odds, and there is a form of resolution in agreeing to disagree. If I can tease out my part in the problem, correct my position if I’m wrong, validate my position if I’m right, then I can be at peace with the conflict, even if the other person sees it differently. Journaling does not mean that every conflict is resolved to the satisfaction of both people, but my own journaling can bring me to closure on my part of it, which is all I have any control over anyway.

I journal when life throws me for a loop. When something happens in my life that body-slams me, I write about it. I write to understand the event, where it came from and why I didn’t see it coming, why it hit me so hard, what it means to me. When I was called by a doctor’s office and told I had a lump in my breast and needed to have a lumpectomy and a biopsy, that was a major body-slam. Although my family had breast cancer in past generations, I had done all the “right” things to counteract it; I ate a healthy diet, I exercised, I did therapeutic work to value and nurture the feminine, and yet here I was faced with this dreaded thing anyway. I felt betrayed, cheated, and I journaled through a flurry of pages, ranting and raving and crying about the injustice of it all. When I had written myself out, vented out all my whining and crying and arguing, I was left with only one thing—I still had this procedure to go through. Yes, I had taken care of myself—and I still had this procedure to go through. I had done all the right things—and I still had this procedure to go through. I shouldn’t have to do this—and I still had this procedure to go through. I had vented everything I was thinking and feeling through my journaling and when all was said and done, I had come down to this final realization … and acceptance. It was as powerful a therapy session as I could have had with any facilitator.

Journaling is instructive; it’s fun (unless you hate to write); it’s insightful. It captures the moment; it distills the experience. It clarifies and untangles. It can tell us where we’ve been and where we’re going. While writing fiction is story-telling at its best, journaling is telling our story, uniquely personal and supremely satisfying.

Motivation

2011-12-06T07:30:00.001-08:00

I love to write. I think most “normal” people hate to write. I remember back before e-mail when I would exchange letters with friends and relatives, and as soon as I got a letter from one of them I would love sitting down to write a reply. They would often complain that I wrote back too soon, thereby putting the ball back in their court so they were on the hook again for something that was obviously a dreaded chore. I can’t even count the number of people who, after learning that I’ve written several books, say they could never do that. I’ve even heard people say that staring at a blank sheet of paper intimidates the hell out of them. I love starting with a nice, clean blank sheet; the possibilities are endless.

But all that aside, that doesn’t mean that I write constantly. I do have to be motivated. In my earlier blogs about inspiration, I mention how some writers discipline themselves to sit down and write X number of hours (or pages) every day. I used to envy people who did that, because I just couldn’t do it and it seemed very ambitious and very professional. Over the years I have tried it and it just doesn’t work for me. Whatever I write when I am unmotivated (and/or uninspired) is just crap, and that to me is a waste of time. Why should I discipline myself to write if I’m only going to throw it all away at the end of the day? I see no purpose in that whatsoever. So if I’m not motivated, if I’m not inspired, I don’t write.

Most of the time that’s not a problem. If I don’t schedule my writing, there are no deadlines to keep, no quotas to meet. If I do, I do; if I don’t, I don’t. I’ve always had a “day job” and only sold completed manuscripts. I have never sold a book on spec, never had an editor or publisher standing over my shoulder waiting for pages. I’d have a lot of trouble with pressure like that. No, I work on a book until it feels done, then figure out the publishing aspect. Since I’ve turned to self-publishing, it’s all done on my time, at my pace, and on my very undisciplined schedule. The story is the thing that keeps me motivated and moving forward, not someone else’s sense of time.

But that also means I have dry spells. I have gone days, weeks, months, even years without writing a thing. Years ago when I was prioritizing and reorganizing my personal life, I had no energy left for writing. It was all going into my reinvention of myself. Most of the time that was fine as I had plenty of other things to think about, and I had already written 5 books and published 2. But when this particular dry spell stretched into years, I began to wonder if—and fear that—I would never write again. That was scary to contemplate.

Luckily not a problem. Somewhere along the line I had the dream that inspired Goddess Rising, and I was off to the races again. This was one of those stories that grabbed me by the throat and would not let go; I couldn’t not write it. It took two years to write, in between all the other stuff that I was doing, but eventually it got done. And I’ve never had a dry spell like that since.

Now, after having been through that spell and coming out of it, I don’t question my motivation or lack thereof. I know I will write. Maybe not today, but I will write. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not according to anyone else’s schedule, maybe not with any discipline or plan.

But I will write.

Characters

2011-11-29T06:21:00.000-08:00

Writing combines two basic things: good story and good characters. Movies provide a great way to illustrate this point. We’ve all seen movies that had a terrific story, but the characters were flat, two-dimensional or totally unbelievable so the story labored and never quite got off the ground. Or, conversely, we’ve seen so-so stories that had brilliant characters; the movie itself may have been totally forgettable but the characters stayed with you. The same is true in writing (where, of course, all movies get their start). Any story-telling, whether visual or literary, needs a strong story and equally strong characters.

Another similarity between writing a good character and portraying one in film or on stage is being true to the character. If you’ve studied acting or even read lightly about the craft, you may have heard discussions about this. It’s all about finding out who the character is intrinsically, then speaking and acting in accord with that innermost essence. Can you imagine Rhett Butler worrying that his daffodils were wilting? Or Scarlett O’Hara bursting into tears because someone didn’t like her dress? Knowing what we know about those characters, neither of those actions would fit; they would not be “true” to the essence of the characters. In writing, as I’m shaping the character, I have to be constantly aware of that trueness; I have to hold every action and every line of dialog up to the standard for that character and make sure it’s authentic to them.

But then again, sometimes the characters can surprise you!

Here are some common questions I get asked about characters.

Do you model your characters on people you know?

Rarely. I have begun the development of a character with a real person in mind, but very quickly the character evolves and develops far beyond that initial core, so even though some similarities remain, the two are vastly different. More often a character may be a composite, having a few qualities from one person, more from another. The major truth is, however, that characters really do take on a life of their own and stand apart from anyone I actually know.

Do you model your characters on yourself?

Again, rarely. I could probably tease out a few qualities of my own from any of my protagonists, but what I would find would be those qualities that are pretty basic to all human beings.

Do you like your characters?

My emotional reactions to my different characters are as varied as the human population. Some of them I love, some I pretty much hate, some I like and some I barely notice.

Do all characters have flaws?

If you want them to be interesting (and human!), they do. Remember Lancelot in Camelot? At the first he was agonizingly perfect (and humbly proud of it), proclaiming his invincibility to any arrows of love or war. It’s only after he falls in love with Guinevere that he gets really interesting and must grapple with his own flaws and the mess they make of his friendship with Arthur and his life. The flaw is what creates the conflict that must be overcome and also leaves room for growth. The flaw not only shows us that the character is human, but is also the opening for change, for introspection and for resolution. As Marion Woodman says, “God comes through the wound.”

Greer, the protagonist in Goddess Rising, is the prophesied savior of the world, yet she is fraught with flaws. She is by turns giving and selfish, thoughtful and thoughtless, charitable and merciless. She is touched by and guided by the Great Goddess, but never wanted this “gift,” and struggles almost constantly with doubt. You might think a savior, chosen by the Goddess, would be divinely immune to the shortcomings of the human race, but Greer is definitely human and definitely has her failings.

In the ghost story I’m currently writing, my protagonist is a very successful, very accomplished businessman who has the world by the tale. He’s handsome, intelligent, affluent, has a thriving business and a gorgeous girlfriend. But in listening to the Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s unorthodox version of the Christmas song What Child is This, I realized they had him pegged. A section of the song describes a man this way:

Holding on, holding off

Holding out, holding in

That’s my guy.

How do you choose the names for your characters?

Some of my favorite books are Baby Name books. I can sit and go through one of those for hours, highlighting possible names, jotting notes in the margins about potential characters. Same thing with the phone book. I know; most people would find the phone book to be stultifyingly boring, but I can get lost in it. Those are both great resources for names.

As to choosing names, it’s an intangible combination of the commonplace, the unusual, the sound and the number of syllables. I was going to say it is probably similar to the process any prospective parents go through, yet I am not restricted by family names or names of relatives as parents might be. For me, the possibilities are endless. I have, at times, chosen a name for a character and then later changed it or amended it, but that’s rare. Usually if I’m happy enough with a name to attach it to a character, it stays.

Who is your favorite character?

My two most favorite characters are Owen Meany (A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving) and Celeste Chalfonte (Six of One by Rita Mae Brown). Of my own books, my favorite characters are (in no particular order):

Walking Bear (Superstition Gold)

Graydon Cole (Remember Me)

Balat (Goddess Rising)

Lucas Shay (Lightning Strikes)

Igli (The Blue Crystal)

Jory Donnelly (The Rare Breed)

Hannah (Goddess Rising)

Franklin (The Pits of Passion)

Hmm; funny how they’re mostly male. And none of them are the main female protagonist. Some are wise (Walking Bear, Balat, Hannah), some are intense (Graydon, Lucas), some are funny (Igli, Jory, Franklin). The connecting factor is that they are all agents of change and play the foil to the main protagonist and challenge him/her to grow, whether directly and deliberately, subtly (with humor) or even accidentally. More to hmmm about.

No doubt I could write another column all about psychotherapy and what my characters say about me. But we’ll let that one slide.

Inspiration, Part II (Great books)

2011-11-21T08:10:00.000-08:00

The one thing that always inspires me and spurs me to write is reading great books. I don’t mean great books as in the classics or the usual headliners of modern literature; I mean books that, to my mind, are very nearly flawless in their story-telling.

My vote for probably the best book on the planet has to go to A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. Unfortunately John Irving can be streaky, so if you’ve read other books by him and have come away unimpressed, you owe it to yourself to give him one last chance with Owen Meany. This is undoubtedly the pinnacle of his work, head and shoulders above any of his other books. I honestly cannot imagine how he could ever top it. In this regard, it’s much like The Stand for Stephen King. Compared to The Stand, all King’s other books are pale shadows.

But back to Owen Meany. It’s a tough book to describe. It’s a coming-of-age story and a great American novel; it’s highly irreverent but intensely spiritual; it’s a tragedy but it’s laugh-out-loud funny. It’s a scathing indictment of America and the Viet Nam era and a heartfelt testament to friendship and family. I’m sure I’ve read it 20-30 times and it still makes me laugh and cry by turns.

What’s interesting to me is the manner in which John Irving writes. He tells the story in a loosely chronological order, yet while he’s doing that, he’s all over the map. His story-telling wanders from pillar to post, yet always impels the reader slowly and irrevocably forward. Whenever I re-read the book in an analytical mood, I try to dissect that amazing disorganized-but-not style, and yet every time I get so caught up in the story itself, I forget all about the technique. I’ve never seen anyone else do this as easily and masterfully as Irving does; matter of fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone else do it at all.

In addition to that, Irving’s characters are vibrant and vital, completely three dimensional and so forceful that they almost come off the page at you. Even the less intense personalities are completely alive as Irving offhandedly drops clues about their strengths, their foibles and fears. He develops characters and backdrop so easily, it’s hard to remember exactly when the story began playing as a movie in your mind. (I should note here that the first 1/3 of the book was made into a movie called Simon Birch. Apparently because the movie was such a truncated version of the story, the name was changed, which I think was a good thing. I’d love to see the whole story told in a mini-series, as it would have to be to do it right. The movie is all right as far as it goes, but the book is significantly better.)

My second favorite book in all the world is Six of One by Rita Mae Brown. Most will remember Brown’s breakout gay novel, Rubyfruit Jungle. As sensational as that was at the time, the story-telling can’t compare to Six of One. Like Owen Meany, it details the exploits of a close-knit group of characters, primarily two sisters growing up in a town divided by the Mason-Dixon Line where the Civil War still rages on obscure metaphorical battlegrounds. The characters are wonderful, each one a masterpiece—even the ones you love to hate. As with Owen Meany, Brown finds the perfect combination of laugh-out-loud humor and heartbreaking pathos, often juxtaposed at surprising times. I’m sure I have laughed and cried my way through this one 20-30 times as well, and will do so again.

Other favorite books just a few rungs below those two are The Mirror by Marlys Millhiser and The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley.

What all these books have in common is that they are beautifully written and I find that reading quality stories makes me want to write quality stories. Nothing revs me up more than reading a description of a character that is so alive and so vibrant I feel like I’ve just shaken hands with them, or reading dialog that is so real it feels like the transcription of a conversation caught by hidden cameras. This sense of appreciation and inspiration washes over me so completely that it often puts me in a quandary: do I put the book aside and start writing, or do I keep reading? It can be a real tug-of-war. When the tide of inspiration floods me like that, it’s very much like a real flood: you never know how much you’re going to get or how long it’s going to last. Because of that mercurial, unpredictable nature of inspiration, it’s best to just jump in and swim while you can before it all dries up.

The “problem” with inspiration is that you can’t manufacture it. I have known writers who sit down and write for X number of hours a day, every day. I’m sure writers that do that have various motivations that I could only guess at, but to me, that’s a waste of time. If I’m not inspired, what’s the point? I’ve tried writing “commercial” novels that fit all the criteria of a publisher (pretty much like pulling teeth), but what results is just dull, flat and basically garbage and I throw it away. If it doesn’t come from my heart, if it isn’t screaming to be set down on paper, if it doesn’t have me in a strangle-hold, I don’t write it. But when it does rise up from that well within, it flows so effortlessly, there’s no stopping it. I wrote my second novel, Superstition Gold (aka Love’s Savage Embrace) in three months while working a full-time job and writing only on lunch hours, evenings and weekends. That one was in a great hurry to be born and just poured out. It is still one of my favorites.

But even if we can’t manufacture inspiration, we can still encourage it. We can open the tap and do the things that just might prime the pump and start the flow going. We can honor it and hold it gently in cupped hands, relate to it on its own terms and revel in it when it appears. We can merge our talents with it and create something new, something wonderful, something bigger than we ever thought we could.

Inspiration, Part I (Dreams)

2011-11-15T10:17:00.000-08:00

Inspiration can come from anywhere. I mean literally—anywhere. There have been times when I’ve been driving down the street and I see a young woman in a beater car with three small kids inside and she’s got her window open, one hand languishing outside with a cigarette in it. A sad, cautionary tale seems to fasten itself like flesh to the bare bones image that flashes across my view and then disappears. Or I see a young man hitchhiking, his face stoic behind a three-day beard as he displays without hope a hand-drawn cardboard sign that says, “Portland, Or.” Filling in the blanks—where they’ve been, where they’re going—seems to come naturally and a story just waits to be plucked from the street and set down on paper. Or not.

On one of the writer’s forums in which I participate, there’s been a new thread asking about books that have been inspired by dreams. When I first saw the forum heading, I immediately perked up as one of my books, Goddess Rising, was such an inspiration. I actually thought that was a fairly rare occurrence (I’ve published 9 novels but this is the only one that I dreamed), but surprisingly, there’s been quite a number of people with similar stories. There’s even been a book written about writers and dreaming, and several books written about mystical artists. Obviously it’s not as rare as I thought it was.

The dream I had that inspired Goddess Rising was a fairly simple one, just the premise of the story. I dreamed about a young girl named Grace who lived in a colony of mostly women in a future time when the world had been decimated by a geologic holocaust. Grace, about 15 years old, was perfectly capable of being a fully contributing member of the colony, but because she was the last and youngest child of the group, the elder women tended to think of her as rather simple and unable to perform more than the most basic tasks. What they didn’t realize was that she would become Greer, the female savior that prophecy promised would lead them back to greatness.

As with all dreams, this one was clothed in feeling, and the sense of it went far beyond the mere description I have put down here. I knew when I got up the next morning that this was a story that needed to be told, and I jotted notes down as fast as I could before it evaporated. Unlike most dreams that fade over time, however, this one did not. Over the next several days, whole chunks of story would drop into my brain, major plot points or sections of dialog, and I was again scribbling notes as fast as I could to get it all down. Within days, I had the major thread, the major characters, unexpected plot twists and developments that seemed to arrive fully formed without any effort from my rational brain at all. I’ve never had a story “given” to me like this one was. Although I was familiar with channeling, I had never experienced it but I thought if I did, it would be something like this. There is a part of me still that feels that this is not my book at all, but was a gift from some other dimension.

I had this dream in 1987 and with it came a sense that I should get the story written and get it out into the world by the year 2000. Don’t ask me why; that part wasn’t revealed to me. I did what I could with it, but during the same time I was going through some major life events which kept claiming my attention and my energy. I found I was putting so much energy into re-inventing my life that I had none left for the story. It languished for quite a while; I think it took me about three years to finish it, but when I did, it felt like a major milestone.

I’m sure other writers get attached to their characters; for me the people in Goddess Rising were like the best and dearest friends with whom I loved spending time. You know that feeling you have sometimes when you’re reading a really good book and you can’t wait until you get to the end but at the same time you’re reluctant to finish it too quickly because it’s just too good? That’s how I felt writing this book. After years of working on it in fits and starts, I wanted very badly to finish it, but at the same time I felt a huge sadness in leaving these friends. As I closed in on the last page, the sense of leaving these people was almost painful. In the foreword I mention the fact that I cried when I finished it, and that’s true. I almost couldn’t stand the thought that I would never interact with these people in quite the same way again. It was saying goodbye forever to people who had become extremely important to me.

The good news was/is that I can go back and visit them any time I wish. True, reading the book is not the same as writing it, but it is a close second. When I miss Greer too much, miss Khassis and Hannah, I go back and read the book again. It still amazes me.

I missed the publication date it wanted, but not by much; it was published in 2001. At this writing, it has already worked through its first incarnation of publication, the publisher allowed the rights to revert back to me and I have self-published it through Create Space. It still holds a very special place in my heart and is different than any other book I have written. I guess it will stand alone until the next time a very special story demands to be set down on paper. And I have no idea if, or when, that might ever happen.

But I can dream, can’t I?

Editors and Editing

2011-11-10T10:08:00.001-08:00

I’m guessing we’ve all seen movies about writers where they are best buddies with their editors and often sit down with a cup of coffee to go over the latest pages and discuss the progress of the book. I can’t imagine any process being as homey and nurturing and encouraging, and I think it’s complete hogwash. I can’t speak for mega-writers like Stephen King or Danielle Steel, but for the other 99.9% of us, that scenario is nothing but a fairy tale.

My first book was published in 1984 by a New York house. Their communications with me were probably as diametrically opposed to the above as they could be. Granted, the book was already complete when they optioned it, but they never suggested so much as a punctuation mark to me. The fact that they accepted the manuscript verbatim and had no editorial suggestions seemed like a silent nod of approval. I was rather quickly disabused of that notion, however, when I got a letter from them saying I needed to add 70 pages to get to the proper page count. The content of those pages―story line, plot points or character development―seemed to be of no concern whatsoever.

Being a newbie at this and wanting to do everything I could to make the book a success, I set about to add the 70 pages. Interestingly when I had originally written the book—a historical romance—I had gotten so sick of it by the time I neared the end that I had deliberately skipped over quite a bit of detail about living with the Cheyenne Indians. I still had the reference books and so proceeded to write the Indian section that I had originally planned, and since this was a couple years after the fact, it was fresh to me and not a laborious process. When it was all said and done, I was grateful for the chance to round out the story in the way that I had originally envisioned.

The next communiqué was the “big reveal” of the name of the book. They had dubbed it Love’s Savage Destiny. Obviously my title, The Rare Breed, was much too tame, and obviously they did not care to have my input in the renaming as I was not even aware that process was going on. (After publication, my husband and I went to the nearest Waldenbooks to search for it. After much perusing of the romance section, he said, “There’s a lot of ‘savages’ here.” I think at that time, it was a prerequisite that all western romances have “savage” in the title.)

The final non-nurturing bit of communication came when I received a box of books … from my agent. I had no idea the book was done. I had received no notice of its publication or availability. They just shipped my free books to my agent and left it to him to send them to me. It seemed more like an afterthought: “Oh, and we need to send books to, um, what’s-her-name.” What’s-her-name, you mean the author? Yeah, that’s the one.

Meanwhile, my agent was shopping my next book around, but he was having no luck. He had thoughtfully sent me the rejection letters he had received, but when I realized he had not offered the book to the publisher of the first book, I went ahead and sent it to them. I’m not quite sure why this never occurred to him, but they jumped at it.

As before, they never uttered a word of editorial wisdom, just accepted the book as written. Oh, except for the fact that on this one I needed to cut 50 pages. The dreaded page count reared its ugly head again. No other suggestions of what areas might be cut, just get the page count down.

And as before, this had a silver lining to it. I discovered that the book was actually pretty tight, but I did go through and cut out whatever fluff I could find. I started cutting paragraphs; on the second go-round, I was cutting sentences. On the third go-round, I was cutting single words. I just barely made the page count, but I was happy with the result. And all this, of course, without any help from the editors at all.

When I received the letter announcing the book’s new name (with no input from me), I was not terribly surprised they had chosen Love’s Savage Embrace. My title, Superstition Gold, they said denoted “the occult,” and was obviously not appropriate. In the letter they actually said, “We hope you’ll be as thrilled with the name as we are.” I swore right then that at some point I would write a book and name it Love’s Savage Armpit.

By the time my third book was optioned in 2000, the entire publishing landscape had changed. The big New York houses were concentrating all their efforts on sure blockbusters and small presses were springing up everywhere to take up the slack. It was a novel and heartening experience to work with an editor of a small press. No, we didn’t sit down and have coffee as we pored over my book, but we did e-mail just about daily about everything from chapter headers to fonts to white space. Although, again, he did not offer a single suggestion about editing, the collaborative experience was about 1000% better than what I’d experienced before.

My next two books were also picked up by small presses. One was published with no changes to the text, no editing whatsoever. With the second one, to my great surprise, my editor actually made some suggestions—three if I recall. She suggested alternate text in two locations, both of which I declined to change, and then flagged some confusion over a name that I had not realized I had used twice in different circumstances. I quickly amended that and the book was good to go. It was nice (1) knowing she actually read the book and was thinking of ways to polish it and (2) having that give-and-take relationship where we could discuss the problem areas and agree on resolutions. Still no coffee, though.

Now I have moved into the realm of self-publishing, which means I supply my own coffee and my own editing advice. I do, of course, rely heavily on friends and family to read and give feedback, but on the whole this is not much different than what I’ve done all along. I suspect this is just the way it will be until I make my way up there to the top, right next to Stephen King.

Oh, and I choose my own titles, now, too.

Writing Family Stories

2011-11-08T10:14:00.000-08:00

How many of us tell family stories around the Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner table, at birthdays, reunions or out camping? Stories about great-great-grandfather coming to America from the “old country,” or of grandmother being born in a sod hut on the plains, or uncles and aunts that persevered through the dustbowl/depression era. I would guess most, if not all, families have such stories. What’s sad is that a high percentage of them get lost through time because they never get written down.

I had a vague interest in genealogy until 2002. That’s when both my parents died within a 2-week period. Suddenly I was trying to reach cousins I had never met and was sorting through documents and photos that I had never seen. Aside from the simple task of notifying everyone who deserved to know about the passing, I became intrigued by the faces I was seeing for the first time. And―like many others I’m sure―I realized that the very people who could answer my questions were gone.

Luckily some of the photos had writing on the back, at least a name, maybe a year. Some had nothing at all. Again, luckily, my aunt (the last of her generation) was still alive and was able to fill in some of the blanks. Unluckily, she was in the middle stages of Alzheimer’s, so some of her information was suspect. When I asked her the names of three different forebears and she responded with “John” to each one, I knew I could not rely on her answers. But I had gleaned enough information to launch me on my search for more.

What proved to be the greatest treasure I could have imagined was my father’s autobiography. He had written his own story in several installments over the last 20 years of his life. He wrote it primarily for us kids, prefacing it with remarks about not knowing much about his own family origins and hoping to rectify that for us. While that concern was the genesis of the idea, I believe my father found that he enjoyed writing more than he had known (runs in the family), so even after he had told his story, he continued to write articles and essays about things that interested him. Some years ago I realized that this detailed account of life during the 20^th century was something that needed to be accessible and should not simply lie forgotten in a drawer. I dragged it out, scanned it in (my father had had it typed up), added photos and published it through Create Space. While I never expected to sell very many copies, I just wanted it out there. I didn’t want those stories to be lost.

I have actually sold more copies than I expected, primarily of course to extended family, but the real gratification is the feedback I get. So many cousins had never seen the manuscript or had never heard the stories about their own parents or grandparents. And it’s an absolutely invaluable resource for family genealogy. Using the names, dates and places that my father wove into his story as a springboard, I have been able to follow several branches of the family back to the 1600’s, 1500’s and even 1400’s. An interesting aside is that my father’s family was poor and he often remarked about not having any connections to the Mayflower; in my research, I found out that we actually do have a connection!

Spurred by the familial success of this, I began to think about my aunt. My mother’s twin was an Army nurse during World War II and was captured on Corregidor in the Philippines and spent three years in a prisoner-of-war camp there. I knew that the Wisconsin Historical Society had two scrapbooks that were started by my grandmother when my aunt went into the service, but I had never studied them. Going to their website, I found I could download a pdf file of the scrapbooks, and that they were full of letters, newspaper clippings and photos. The scrapbooks told the story, not only of the war effort and the concern for the prisoners, but also of my grandmother’s efforts to find out information and get relief to her daughter. It included a letter from President Roosevelt himself congratulating the returning nurses on their bravery and service as well as the full transcript of a radio interview wherein my aunt described her time in the Japanese camp. As before with my father, this was a story that needed to be told.

Using the scrapbooks as my foundation, I told the two-sided story of my aunt in her retreat from—and eventual capture by—the Japanese, and of my grandmother’s unflagging efforts to understand what was going on so far away. The story spoke of the day-by-day courage and perseverance of both women battling on in their respective challenges and of course was a microcosm of the war that engulfed the entire planet. I knew this same story had unfolded for thousands of servicemen and women and thousands of family members still at home.

Although I understood that many people were interested in the war and such stories, I have been surprised at the interest my book has generated. I am basically a fiction writer and I was intimidated by the idea of writing non-fiction, even more so about detailing the private lives of many family members. I didn’t publish the book until I was certain I could hand it over to siblings and cousins without flinching, but at that point I went again to Create Space and the book has been doing quite well. As a matter of fact, I recently received an e-mail from a small museum in Wisconsin that now wants to sell the book in their gift shop; nice validation for a story that might never have been told.

Now I think it’s just about time to start writing down the stories in my husband’s family ….

So what about you? What family stories could you tell?

For more information:

The View from the Summit by Howard L. Munns, edited by Melissa Bowersock

Marcia Gates: Angel of Bataan by Melissa Bowersock

The Dynamism of Writing

2011-11-03T10:08:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of things that writing is not. It’s not mechanical (or shouldn’t be—knowing the mechanics is just not enough). It’s not often governable because inspiration is not governable. (More on inspiration in a future blog.) It’s not a simple modular process. (Subject + verb + object = quality sentence.) It’s fluid, dynamic, protean, mutable, nebulous, and highly subjective.

I am guessing that some non-writers think it’s a simple process of jotting down all the right words in the right order, checking spelling and – voila! Instant book. Not so. It’s not like there’s an absolute amount of the “right” words, or an absolute “right” order. It’s more like herding cats.

I often equate writing to building a brick wall. I write linearly, from start to finish, and as I’m writing the first few paragraphs, the first few pages, I feel as if I am laying down a foundation for my wall. Each word is a brick, carefully chosen and carefully laid in. If I don’t have the exact brick/word that I want, I stop building the wall. It’s not unheard of for me to stop writing for minutes, hours, days, waiting for the perfect word that I want to manifest in my brain. I know some writers will go ahead and put in a close substitute in order to continue writing, then go back and edit later. I don’t do that. Just imagine building that wall and say I’ve got three or five or ten courses of bricks built up. Then I go back and find there’s a brick on the bottom row that doesn’t fit right or is the wrong color. Pulling that brick out and trying to fit another one in is going to weaken the entire wall. I would much rather build the wall as best as I possibly can from the start, and edit as I go. I hate to rewrite, so I do as little of that as possible.

I remember one time I was working with an editor on a book he was publishing for me and we got into a discussion of this very thing. When I told him how I worked, he said, “My God, I thought that was a myth! I have always heard of writers who work like that, but I didn’t really think they existed!” Yup, they do. At least I do. And it works for me.

So now I’m happily writing away, steering the story where I want it to go and suddenly … what the heck? That fluid dynamism raises its head again and I realize my story has been co-opted. This is often difficult for non-writers to understand, but it’s not uncommon for a story to take on a life of its own and suddenly veer off in a different direction. Going back to our wall, it’s as if I’ve laid one course of bricks just ever so slightly off center from the last course. This new layer is now 1/8” off to one side. Without noticing the difference, I keep building, and before I know it, the whole wall is leaning. When I realize that the wall is not going where I want it to go, I then have to demolish however many layers until I get back down to the solid and straight foundation, then start building again.

But how does that happen? I’ve been asked, “You’re writing the book. How can it go a different way than the way you want it to go?” I honestly don’t know. I just know that it does. Obviously I don’t have the entire book scripted in my head; it does not exist in some fully-formed way. It evolves as I write. New ideas present themselves; new aspects to characters reveal themselves. I’ve got options for new directions, little side trips. And sometimes I’ll pick a direction and it just evolves in a way I hadn’t intended or foreseen. The good news is that this taking on a life of its own is when I know the book is truly alive, that it’s not just me mechanically putting words on a piece of paper. It’s viable, it’s growing; it’s real. The bad news is it can transform into something that I’m not expecting.

I began writing a ghost story about a ghost that came over from England with the London Bridge when it was transported to Lake Havasu, Arizona. When I first conceived of the idea for the story, I had in mind that it would be a comedy, the ghost experiencing a light and fluffy culture shock between 17^th century England and modern Arizona. Several chapters in, I realized that not only was it not going to be a comedy, it had a distinctly dark side to it. Surprised the heck out of me. And even though it’s not the story I had planned to write, I do like it and I’m letting it have its way. We’ll see how it turns out.

Okay, so I’ve built my wall, I’ve told my story and it’s done, ready to publish. Hold on, not so fast. How do you know when it’s done? In proof-reading my stories, whether it’s my own early copy or a final galley proof, I’ve found that “doneness” still evades definition. I might read a paragraph that was perfectly satisfying to me when I wrote it, but now suddenly it lacks something or it feels clunky and contrived. I rewrite it, sharpen it up, cut it down. Two days later I re-read the same paragraph and decide that the way I had it to begin with worked better, so I change it back. What I’ve realized is that any story, any book, is what it is only on any given day. Any other day, depending on my mood or frame of mind, it might need to be something completely different. I could look at a book every day for a year and probably have 365 different opinions about it. Even when I re-read my already published books, I can still see places that—at that moment in time—I would change slightly. So pronouncing a book “finished” is a very elusive process; it can change day by day and it’s never an absolute. Only by chipping away the less than perfect parts, grinding it down by finer and finer edits until I’m finally down to moving commas do I get to the point of completion. Today.

Tomorrow all bets are off.

Typos

2011-11-02T10:35:00.000-07:00

With apologies to the pure-minded, want to know what really burns my ass (besides a flame about 3 feet tall)? -- Typos. Typos, whether in my book or someone else's, drive me up the wall. Nothing will pop me out of a story faster than my brain getting hung up on a misspelled word or the wrong word, because then I have to stop and figure out what I or the other author was trying to say. And what's really bothersome is the fact that my body conspires against me in this.

Let me explain. My body is really very helpful. It tries very hard to guess what I'm doing, and it goes out of its way to do that for me. (Kinda like Microsoft and their constant "improvements" to guess what we want the auto functions in their software to do.) I've been touch typing since I was about 12, so that's a few years. My fingers know exactly where the keys are. Only problem is, the paths of muscle memory are strongest for the most common words: the, and, for, etc. Very often when I'm typing, my brain knows exactly what word I want but my fingers, in their oh so willing helpfulness, type something else. I will get heat instead of head; going instead of doing, one instead of on. Because I think I have correctly sent the proper word down the path of my nervous system to the muscles in the fingers, I think I've typed the right word. Only later do I realize that my fingers have made their own decision on that, and they've guessed wrong.

Next the brain steps in. This is the same brain with which I thought up the frickin' word in the first place. It does not guess incorrectly, it knows what word I want. Only problem is, when I'm reading over my work, it very badly wants to do the right thing, so if my fingers have inadvertantly typed the wrong word, my brain convinces me that I'm seeing the correct word! I might read the same passage over and over, and it'll still look just ducky to me. Obviously this is a huge argument against proofing your own work.

And spell-checker doesn't help. Oh, sure, if I misspell a word, it does, and that's fine. But my problem 90% of the time is that I don't misspell the word, I type a different (very good) word than the one I want. I think I'm typing, "the top of his head," but my fingers guessed I really wanted to say, "the top of his heat." Spell-checker says, "Yup, that's a good word. Thumbs up." Wrong. You can see I'm going against the tide here.

So over the weekend, I re-read my book Queen's Gold for probably the 30th or 40th time. If you count all the times I read it over while working on it, all the times I read it over while editing it, all the times I read it over after all that was done and all the times I've read it since it was published (did I mention I like this book?), that's a lot. Is it enough to catch all the typos? Noooooooo. I found another one. Hard to believe, but it just popped right out at me. Why couldn't it have done that back when I was proofing the galleys? Grrr.

Luckily, since I self-published this book through Create Space, it's a small matter to correct it. That's one of the huge benefits of self-publishing over traditional publishing. I can simply correct my Word doc, create a new pdf and upload it. It takes a couple days for the process to complete, but then the book is fixed and available for order. I'm happy, the readers are happy and the book is one step closer to being perfect.

Until next time.

Wordlovers

2011-11-01T13:22:00.000-07:00

I love words. I love the infinite nuances that can describe an action by varying paper-thin degrees. I love the fact that a person can walk across a room, but that same person can also amble, meander, stride, toddle, creep, trot, charge, weave, mosey, gallop, sneak, stalk, lunge, scramble, tip-toe, leap and stroll.

I love the sound of words. I love complex sounds, complex rhythms. I love the staccato sound of serendipity. I love alliteration and patterns and feminine rhyme. One of my favorite poems is The Bells by Edgar Allan Poe:

Hear the sledges with the bells -
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells -
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

I love the fact that words can paint a picture in our minds, can evoke emotion from our hearts, can take us to any place we can imagine. They can inspire, instruct, hide or reveal, tempt or satiate. There are truly no limits to what words can do. And all we have to do is string them together.

I am constantly writing. I can't not write. If I am not working on a new book, I'm writing letters or writing in my journal. If I'm not doing any of those things, I'm writing in my mind--revising dialog, reworking descriptions, narrating. I narrate throughout the day, imagining how I might describe an event, something I see, a feeling I have. I don't know if all writers do this, but it's a constant activity for me. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

I really do love words.