I use a lot of Thinkology while riding on the back of the bike on rides with The Biker Chef! |
Month: June 2014
Update Day!
Wow. I can’t believe it’s the last Friday of June. As far as my blog hop goes, this is half-way through the year, baby!
Back to the drawing board…
If you’ve been reading some of my more recent posts, you’ll know I’ve been shifting information from later books in my War of Six Crowns series to the second book. Not info dumping, mind you. Just… enough to make things more interesting all round.
Terry W. Ervin on Five Strategies for Self-Editing
Time Between Edits.
Reading Orally.
Changing Font.
Using Text Speak Programs.
Print out the Manuscript.
Terry W. Ervin II is an English teacher who enjoys writing fantasy and science fiction.
To contact Terry or learn more about his writing endeavors, visit his website or his blog, Up Around the Corner.
Soul Forge:
Young Enchantress Thereese lays stricken and silent, her vital essence sapped by the Shard Staff, edging ever closer toward death. Supreme Enchantress Thulease refuses to allow her daughter to fade beyond recovery.
Even if Flank Hawk and Thulease reach the mythical forge in time, can its magic revive the ailing young enchantress, the one whose life is somehow tied to the Kingdom of Keesee’s ultimate fate?
Mark Murata on Using Excel in Writing
Hey all! Welcome to another Monday Feature. Today, Mark Murata is visiting to show us how he uses Excel in writing.
Excel in Writing
Get the pun in this entry’s title? For the first time, I’m using an Excel workbook as part of my writing. In my mashup of The War of the Worlds, I have the cylinders from Mars landing near different cities around the world, not just London, so their invasion has to advance consistently on each day.
Learn from the greatest.
Thoughts on editing The Heir’s Choice
As some of you may know, I’m busy editing The Heir’s Choice at the moment. I haven’t really said much about how I’m doing, but let me just say this:
Editing a sequel is hard.
Especially because the sequel and the first book were two halves (literally) of the same book. See originally, I had this awesome 107k word book that I had to split.
And the approximate split was as follows:
The Vanished Knight: 65k words.
The Heir’s Choice: 65k words.
“Hey wait!” you might exclaim. (It’s all very dramatic in my brain, I promise you.) “That doesn’t add up!”
No. Because in order to make TVK into a book on its own, I’ve had to add about 15k words to the first half of the original book. Which is great.
Except for the bit where every single one of those changes has to be worked into THC. Which is most of what its extra 15k words consists of.
And then I’m not even getting into the real challenge.
As you might know, I’m going to re-publish TVK and publish THC at the same time. There is a very very good reason for this, but I’m not going to go into it. First, I want to see if my plan works.
But if it does work, most of the people reading THC will be doing so immediately after finishing TVK.
So what’s the challenge? (Aside from marketing.)
If I assume that my plan will work, no one will want constant reminders of what happened in TVK. If my plan doesn’t work, everyone will want a TON of reminders. Which leaves me with the unique challenge of striking the right balance between too much information and not enough.
While making sure that all the main strings I left hanging at the end of TVK gets picked up in THC.
Simple.
Except…. TVK has a lot of strings.
How are you doing? What are you doing at the moment?
C.M. Keller on Writing Time Travel Stories
Hey all! We have another guest here today. C.M. Keller is here as part of her newest book release. So before I hand things over to her, I thought I’d share a bit more information on Screwing Up Alexandria:
Time traveling has never brought Mark Montgomery anything but grief. And then, things get worse.
When Mark comes home from Babylon with a coded tablet, he never dreams someone would be willing to kill to get it. But they are. So Mark and Miranda kidnap an ancient cryptographer named Nin and take her to the Library of Alexandria to decipher it.
The search for the truth of the tablet takes all of them to the most dangerous time on earth. And when Nin ends up on an altar surrounded by blood-thirsty crowds, only Mark can save her. But he’s blind.
As a writer of historical and time travel fiction, one of the greatest ironies I’ve discovered is that as radically different as other times and cultures are, people aren’t that different than we are.
The trick to writing time travel is to remember that while the character’s hopes, desires, and problems are similar to ours, they must be shaped by the time they are set in. The culture of the time period must become a character and drives the narrative. In other words, what happens to the characters in Alexandria should be so defined by the time and place that the plot could never unfold like it does anywhere else.
When I pick a time period, I research the culture and history, immersing myself in the significant people, places, foods, etc. I use small details like food, drink, clothing, and superstitions to convey a sense of the exotic and add verisimilitude.
However, the places, people, and culture must propel the plot. For example, in Screwing Up Babylon, I needed a chase scene, and I knew it had to take place in the Hanging Gardens. So I envisioned myself as Mark trapped in the gardens and wondered, How can I escape? The answer was easy—by way of a man-made river that watered the garden. I ended up with a very authentic “waterslide” adventure inside Babylon’s Hanging Gardens.
One of the great things setting the novels in Babylon, British Middle Ages, Alexandria, Mongolia, etc., is that it helps to keep a series fresh. There are always new characters and experiences, so creative options are endless.
The hardest thing about time travel fiction is the language barrier. There is no way to give your characters facility in various languages. My main character Mark, who is seventeen when the series starts, does not/cannot know ancient Greek, Akkadian, Sumerian, etc. So, I’ve had to find ways to allow him to communicate and establish relationships with other characters without knowing the languages.
One way I did this was through the use of other time travelers, people with more language abilities. But I wanted to be very careful with this and not use it as a deus-ex-machina answer to Mark’s problem. So I gave the other time travelers their own agendas, and they are at least as unhelpful as they are helpful, which made them wonderful to write. (I have a soft spot for tough, witty characters.) Another way I dealt with the language problem was by realizing it wasn’t really a problem. The places where Mark travels are not backwaters. These cities are cosmopolitan, cultural crossroads. It wouldn’t be unusual for people without a common language to encounter each other. So I spent a lot of time figuring out how to communicate without words.
A reader once commented that it wasn’t until after she finished the book that she realized that Mark had never once spoken directly to the Babylonians. So I guess it worked.
I’d love to hear your thoughts, comments, questions, or ideas.
Thanks, Misha, for this opportunity to talk about time travel writing!
A Letter from Far Far Away
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I join you today from Misha’s tavern. She has very kindly dedicated her Mondays to writers, authors and compedium compilers such as myself and for that I would like to extend my thanks.
Firstly, please allow me to introduce myself. I’m Far Far Away, and I have been finding out about the comings and goings of my world. I wrote to all the inhabitants asking them to keep me up to date with their daily lives and I was amused by the responses I got. I am now releasing these letters every Monday and Friday at my tavern.
As a thank you to Misha for publishing this letter, I have some exclusive information for her readers about one of the characters that wrote to me: Huntsman.
The first tale of my compendium is entitled The Apple Princess and it is Huntsman’s letter that kicks off the tale. He features heavily throughout the story as we follow his progress as an employee of the Queen.
He comes from one of the oldest families in the kingdoms and is descended from a long line of men that were gifted in using tools. His brother is a lumberjack known as Axeman, and his father worked down in the mines until the dwarven “uprising” (which we more commonly call the “downfalling”, due to the mines being underground). Very little is known about the female members of his family, although it is generally accepted that they were just as skilled as the men when it came to wielding weapons. Frankly, and I say this quietly in case they are reading, they all sound like a bunch of nutters.
Like the rest of his family, Huntsman has a fetish for medieval fashion and is never seen without a blade. Unlike the rest of his family, he does not perform civic duties as a farmer, miner or lumberjack, but instead has self-declared himself as a killer and is often found stalking game in the forests around the kingdom.
At heart though, Huntsman is a sap. He chose work under the Queen as he figured it would please his proud family heritage while allowing himself to get close to the girl he has become enamoured with – Princess Snow. While he has no qualms in slaughtering innocent animals, he has found himself on the wrong side of the Queen on more than one occasion where he refuses to carry out her dirty work in the proper manner. It appears that under his brutish exterior he may have a heart after all.
I hope you enjoyed this brief character background. If you would like to find out more, please drop by my tavern.
Yours,
Far Far Away.
You can read more about Tales from Far Far Away at his tavern.
Interview with Annalisa Crawford
Hey all! Today I have the pleasure of welcoming Annalisa Crawford to my blog. She’s here for an interview as part of her book release.
Welcome to the Five Year Project, Annalisa. Why don’t we kick this off with you introducing yourself to the readers?
Thanks for having me over today, Misha. Well, I’m a pretty normal woman, two kids, dog, cat, Hubby. I live in a beautiful part of the world, sunny-ish Cornwall in the south west of England… and weird things keep popping into my head that I just have to write down. I always know when friends have finished reading my books, because they have a wary look in their eye!
Hahaha yes people do look at us differently when they see stuff that comes from our heads. Speaking of which, tell us a bit more about your new book.
You can find me and mention of Our Beautiful Child in the following places:
Thank you so much for having me here today, Misha. It’s been a lot of fun.
Getting back into the groove.
Sorry for disappearing yesterday. I came down with a bad cold yesterday, which means I slept through most of it.
Luckily I feel lots better, so now I’m back.
Speaking of “back”, I can safely say I’m getting back into my writing and editing groove. Yesterday I officially finished my revisions to The Heir’s Choice and started sending it out for critique. (Note: done while “dying” of a cold.)
I also edited a short story that’s going into an anthology before turning in for the night.
Which means, ladies and gentlemen, that I’ll be able to draft again! The last time I actually wrote something was back in very early February, and even then, it was only two thousand (I think) words.
So I’m way past overdue. The only thing is that I’ll have to reread my old work in order to pick up all the story strings again. Which isn’t always THE best thing to do when I’ve just come off editing.
That said, I’ll just have to suppress the inner editor and get it done. I really do have too much to do and too little time for me to bend to my IE’s whims.
But as I type this, I’m getting a feeling of what I want to do above all, and right now, I want to start rewriting the sequel to The Heir’s Choice. I had it scheduled for the last three months of the year, but hey, I’ve got momentum right now. I can always do rough drafts later…
Or even at the same time.
What are you working on at the moment?