From USAToday.

Get Paid to Write.

Don’t be stupid like me.

So, the novel I wrote for Nano 2006 has been asking to be on the front burner for a while. (This is the book formerly known as The Book With No Title and is now being called The Heart’s Choices.) It’s a good story, but…it needs so much work. Why?

Because it was one of those ideas that came to me a few days before Nano started, and instead of just sticking with the idea I already had, I wrote on the New Idea. I did not research the New Idea and I did not do any sort of preparation. I probably could have gotten away with it except this New Idea was in my usual genre (romance) but outside of my normal time period (I usually write contemporary but chose to do “turn of the century 1900″ instead) AND set in a country other than the U.S. that I am native to (Italy).

Yeah. So, I made up stuff as I wrote. A LOT of stuff. And it turns out that Italy of the early 1900’s is not all that great a place to write about, and that much of what I “assumed” was so completely wrong and that there was no way I could fix it without messing up the plot I’d created quite a bit. And darn it, I like my plot and it’s a good plot, if I had JUST bothered to get a few historical details with some sort of accuracy, I’d probably have a darned fine book on my hands.

Three days ago, I did the unthinkable. I closed the file I’d been trying to fix for the last three months (all 80K of it) and start over from scratch. I have been working for three days on writing, and picking certain scenes that were okay from the closed file, and managed to get back up near 10K by last night. But it’s a very very slow process, and I’m disappointed in myself for not taking a couple of days, while the idea was festering in my mind in those last dark days of October, 2006, to do some research. Just some basic research, historical details like political situations, industry, clothing, and religion, would have done a great deal for the quality of the novel in the first place, and would have eliminated all the work I’m doing now to catch up.

Don’t be stupid like me. Do at least SOME research. Be ready with some details already in place, even if you think you can make it up as you go. I’ve made the editing a whole lot harder on myself just because I didn’t take the time to research a little first!

My book signing was this past Saturday, the 23rd, at the local public library. There were about 12 other authors there, with some amazing books. The only thing missing were the visitors. It is hard to do an event like this on a holiday weekend, and the library staff apologized for picking such a poor date. They had not realized it would be a holiday when they planned it.

I sold five books, all to friends. But that’s five more sold than I sold before, so I am not too upset. It would have been nice to sell out what I had, but there just wasn’t the crowd for it. The coolest thing was how many people, and other authors, came by my table and said “you wrote all these?” Yes, I wrote all those, all four of them. I was the most prolific author there. Kinda made me feel special, even if I didn’t sell that many. I intend to write a letter of thanks to the library for hosting the event, and encourage them to schedule it again for the fall, nearer to Christmas, when people might be in more of a mood to buy. I think it is worth doing, and what else do I have to do on a Saturday, anyway?

I have sold two books so far at the Renaissance Faire, as well. That is more than I expected, but not as many as I ordered, so I’m still keeping my fingers crossed that they will sell. There are two more weekends of the Faire to come.

I also received word this week from Lulu, my publisher, that my books were now going to be listed on Amazon. And lo and behold, they are! I registered as an author and am waiting for Amazon to verify my information, so that I can add the cover art and a description to the listings. If you happen to have read any of my books, and have an account as a purchaser of goods at Amazon, you can leave me a review of my books. I would appreciate it if you would do that. The more reviews I get, the higher my ranking, and the higher my ranking, the more books I will eventually sell. I hope.

In my writing, I am now duking it out with The Heart’s Choices, my period novel set in 1840’s Tuscany. The story is like a donut, plenty on the outside, but not much in the middle. So, I’m filling in some scenes, adding some drama, building the love story, and hoping that I finally get this thing done. I had planned to publish before this year’s NaNoWriMo adventure, but that’s looking like less and less of a possibility right now. Still, I will keep plugging away. I will not be discouraged! I will fight this novel and I will win!

See, the drama is just pouring out of me. Right then. Back to it!

Than a box of your books, just arrived, the ink still drying on their pages?

Sometimes, it’s great to be working on a college campus, even if it is just the community college.

Monday I attended the distribution party for our campus’ literary magazine, called Currents. One of my department members, who is also a student, had three of his works published in the book. Getting into Currents is not an easy task; only the best of the best make it. I am very proud of him personally, but also pleased that I’m not the only literary member of our department. Everyone in our department knew about the distribution party, but only I showed up. His feelings were visibly hurt by this. I felt bad for him, but he got to read two pieces of his poetry and I have even more respect for him than I did before.

Tuesday I attended a lecture at lunchtime presented by a storyteller. The event was sponsored in conjunction with our current “One Campus, One Book” initiative. The book this school year is Listening is an Act of Love. The Listening project was created to collect stories of our elders, something that hasn’t been being done in a permanent way on a regular basis.

The story teller, Karen Young, mixed a few small stories into her lecture, which lasted just shy of an hour. As a “storyteller” of a sort through my blogs and novels, the presentation hit home on many fronts. Her stories are a mix of legend and fiction, but I know that in my own family, there are plenty of completely factual stories that could be called stranger than fiction. The lecture inspires me to get moving on the project I had discussed here some months ago, getting some of my mother’s stories out and into print, or at least in some sort of written form that I can keep for later. There are a lot of stories. There are stories from my own life, too, like the time my brother fell out of a tree and nearly ripped his arm off on a broken branch. Or the time my kids were “ice skating” in socked feed on a newly-polished school cafeteria floor and my son ended up needing seven stitches to close up his banged-up head. Or the time my mother got up too quickly at night because my brother was ill, and after the excitement was over, she passed out in the kitchen sink while trying to unhook the portable dishwasher. And the story of the first time I ever heard my grandmother curse, and it was the *s* word and I had never imagined that she even knew that word.

Stories, so many stories. Small and large. Stories that shaped me, stories that could still shape me. Stories that could shape others. I don’t know that I’ll read the book, because on first glance there are some wrenching stories that I don’t need in my memories at the moment, but maybe someday. But I am going to go see some of the events planned for the St. Louis Storytelling Festival.

And finally, today I took a half-hour and looked over the books for sale at the International Student Scholarship sale being held on campus. At a dollar a book, these are bargains, but are also going for a good cause! I bought mostly novels, but a couple of more “academic” books too. Not that I needed any more books, but then again, can one have too many books?

I needed to add a new scene to The Book With No Name to press forward the romance. I removed a big chunk of completely out-of-place and overly-dramatic action, and had to put something else in there to take its place, something that made sense.

So, I put the two of them in church. What should have been a half a chapter of action turned into five paragraphs of…nothing. Sheesh. I was raised Catholic, and I know what traditional Catholicism looks like, and I should have been able to write this scene without a second thought. But it sits there, on the page, taunting me with its complete lame-ness.

I really want to get this book in print before NaNo 2009. At this rate, I’ll never make it.

Okay, I started reading a book by Johanna Lindsay that I had not read yet.  She is one of my favorite historical romance writers, although I think she’s not writing any more.  But one of my problems with her is the strange names she comes up with for her characters.

This current book, which I’m not going to be able to finish, I know already, features two main characters named “Megan” and “Tiffany.”  Set in pre-Regency England.

“Megan” I could probably be okay with, but once “Tiffany” was introduced, I lost it.  You’ve got to be kidding, right?  I looked up Tiffany in my 60,000 Baby Names book, and Tiffany is listed, but with a different spelling.  And I might have bought it with a traditional spelling from the appropriate time period.  But to just have a young woman with that name in an unreasonable time period, I just can’t read it without rolling my eyes.

Like I cannot understand how any romance writer would call her main character “Damian,” in any book written after 1980 or so.  Damian has entered the vernacular in America as an evil person.  Hard to have a “Damian” as a good guy in a romance novel.  I kept waiting for him to do something evil.

Names are very very important.  I dig deep for names that are a bit unusual, a bit different, but ones that certainly fit their time period, if nothing else.  I know how I react to poorly-named characters, and I don’t want anyone putting down my books because my inability to pick a decent name.

I am reluctant to tell you who said this, as most of you already know I’d bake him into a cake and eat him if I thought I could…but this comes from Neil Gaiman’s blog today, in answer to a 16 year old’s query about what Neil would tell his younger self about writing if he could:

Enjoy it. Don’t worry. Enjoy it.

And at the start of your career, you don’t have much money, and you don’t have any work, but you have an awful lot of time. Use it. Because if you’re successful, you will have lots of everything except time.

Amen!

From USAToday:

LONDON — A heavyweight study of the future of soft cheese has won Britain’s annual competition to find the year’s oddest book title.

The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais, by Philip M. Parker won the Diagram Prize, awarded Friday by trade magazine The Bookseller.

The runner-up was primate study Baboon Metaphysics, by Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth.

Horace Bent, who runs the award, said Parker’s volume was a surprise winner given the competition from racier-sounding finalists like Curbside Consultation of the Colon— a medical manual — and hobby handbook Strip and Knit With Style.

Bent said Fromage Frais was a worthy winner that had “turned the supermarket chiller into the petri dish of literary innovation.”

Fromage frais — literally “fresh cheese” — is a dairy product that originated in France and has a similar consistency to sour cream. The book is a 188-page study of the global retail market for the product.

Parker’s book is published by Icon Group and sells for a hefty $795 (euro589.)

The Diagram Prize was founded in 1978, and the winner is decided by public vote.

This year’s other finalists were The Large Sieve and its Applications and Techniques for Corrosion Monitoring.

Previous winners include Bombproof Your Horse,Living With Crazy Buttocks and People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It.

Just suggest that you are going to put their latest crush, best friend, or themselves in your book.

“Mah-uh-uhm!” I hear from the back seat as I’m driving when I say that I should put local news reporter Ryan Dean in my next book.  “He’s MINE!”

I reminded her that there are more than two characters in my books, that not everyone gets to be the lead actor, and that I use a lot of real-life people as inpsiration for characters in my stories, and that her crush, the aforementioned Ryan Dean, is not a lead character.  She was relieved.

If friends and family only knew how much of themselves end up in my books…

Generally, I like Wordpress, which is the blog engine that runs this site.  But every once in a while, actually more than once in a while, I hit “save” instead of “publish” when I’m posting an entry.  Thus it is that “The Book With No Name” post below is just coming out today, instead of on March 23rd when I wrote it.

“Draft” and “Save” would be better choices, in my mind.  Or at least, to my roving mouse clicks.

I continue to work on The Book With No Name.  I was editing the beginning, but felt like I needed to edit the end, so I headed to the end and chopped and remolded and chopped again and remolded.  Having to change the historical footprint for the book has been a big PITA, but I can’t have it be so inaccurate.

So on I go.  I’m making one more hack at the end, and then heading back to where I earlier left off to pick up the editing.  It’s such a great story, with great swings of good and evil, and I am enjoying working on it, however slowly.  I would feel 100 percent better, though, if the darned thing would end up with a name.  Nothing comes to me, and I’ve shopped the story around to everyone I know trying to come up with something, and I got…nuttin’.

I’m behind on my reading, of course, because of being busy with the editing, and being busy with other life-type things that cannot be avoided.  This is why my reading goal for the year was two books a month.  I have read seven books and three months aren’t yet up, so I’m a bit ahead, but not for long if I don’t do something to catch up.  I’ll have to squeeze some more in, which will take me away from editing, but maybe that’s a good thing.

The Writer’s Digest Sourcebook for Building Believable Characters, by Marc McCutcheon.

I borrowed this book from the library after it was suggested reading in my Two Year Noveling class.  I liked it so much that I bought myself a copy, and it arrived a couple days ago.  This book is brand new from the looks of it, although it was published in 1996.

And what a book it is!  There is a nice introduction with contributions from successful, published authors about character-building.  There is also a worksheet with a dozen-plus pages of things to fill in about your character.  It has everything from name and ethnicity to phobias, prejudices, and favorite television shows.  I imagine if I used the questionnaire as is, I’d be too tired to write the novel later, but it is indeed food for thought.

The really cool thing about the book is Part III, a Character Thesaurus.  What an amazing resource!  Descriptions for faces and bodies, personalities and identities, expressions and vocal language, clothing and accessories, dialects and foreign speech (including some key phrases one might need when writing a book with a minor character from a foreign country), and names in more than a dozen nationalities.

I’d have gladly paid full price for this book, but it is currentl out of print and only available used, which means it’s pretty darned cheap.  I’m going to be keeping it on the shelf above my computer along with my Romance Writer’s Phrase Book.  I anticipate it losing its “new” look pretty shortly.

I recommend this book for busy fiction writers.  Even if you don’t use any of the words or descriptions, they are often a great jumping-off point to building your own descriptions.

I got this back from Amazon this morning.  At least someone real seems to be reading these letters.

Thanks for contacting Amazon.com, and we appreciate you taking the time to send us your comments about this issue.

Thank you again for contacting Amazon.com.

Word comes today that Amazon caved to pressure from Roy Blount, Jr., president of the Author’s Guild.  They are removing text-to-speech functionality from the Kindle 2.  If an author asks to let text-to-speech be used with his/her book, then it will be turned on for that book.  Otherwise, the default will be no text-to-speech.

I find this appalling and irresponsible on the part of Amazon.  They are NOT breaking the law, and they are not doing anything even remotely wrong by allowing text-to-speech technology to be embedded into the Kindle 2 device.

How sad for all of us, that one loud mouth can ruin it for everyone.  I have voiced my displeasure to Amazon.  I hope you will do the same.  You can send a comment to Amazon through their Kindle page’s “contact me” function.  Below is the text of my letter to them.

I was so close to buying a Kindle 2.  So very very close.  I had my credit card out and was ready.

Until you fight for the rights of USERS and BUYERS, my money will have to be spent elsewhere.  It’s time for Amazon to take a stand for what is right for the people that are purchasing the books.

Neil won’t let this one go…the continued argument from the Author’s Guild over the text-to-audio functionality of the new Kindle 2 keeps raising Neil’s dander.  And he keeps pushing his point of view.

As an author, this is encouraging.  As a provider of disability services, this is dance-inducing for me.  I am ecstatic to see such a high-profile author bucking his own guild.

As an author, I encourage you to keep up with Neil’s blog.  Even if you aren’t into his type of writing.  He’s an amazing person, period.

Today is week nine of the Two Year Novel Class.  It has been a slow proccess, and some of the exercises are on the lame side, but I understand that that is the way it is supposed to work.  Week 8 we finally got to write something more than a list of things, or a short description.  I did my assignment last night, and am very happy with what I came up with.  I miss just sitting and WRITING.  When I do sit and write, this is what comes out.  Not bad, eh?

Roy tried to relax in the leather armchair.  The open doors of the wood stove showed the crackling fire clearly, the heat starting to seep through his wet jeans and onto his cold skin.  The bag of ice he held in one hand on his head was doing nothing for the intense throbbing above his right eye, and the cold of it seemed to drill right through him.

What on earth was wrong with him?  He pressed the bag of ice to his head and closed his eyes, willing the unwelcome thoughts away.

When I wrote my 2006 NaNo Novel, it was on a whim.  I had a sort of a story laid out in my head, but a few days before Nano started, another idea practically lashed me to my computer, and I couldn’t help but write it.  Unlike my other work, it was a period piece, and I’d never attempted (seriously, anyway) to write a period piece.  But I jumped in with all ten fingers and flailed away and ended up with a 60K novel that wasn’t too darned awful.

Except for the singular lack of research I’d done.

I set the book around 1900 in the Tuscany area of Italy.  I thought I knew enough about Italian food to write about my characters would be eating.  I made up fashions for my characters, and drew a little town and a huge winery.

Boy, I was so close…to nothing.  My first mistake was the date.  The type of story I was writing and the types of conflicts the characters were having could not have happened at that particular date in time.  The food choices I’d made were atrocious.  While there is a fair amount of pasta being served in Tuscany, it is not a diet staple, so all I k now about Italian cooking is obviously Sicilian, very nearly a completely different country than Tuscany.  The clothing?  I didn’t even get close on that. And I made one of my main characters from Rome, a place not anywhere near Tuscany in terms of my novel.

It’s a good thing the story itself is still good.  It’s just the details I’m going to have to work on.  I need a challenge, I suppose, to keep my mind occupied.  But still.  I had no idea I was that far off.  Serves me right for jumping into an idea only a few days old without doing some minimum research.  I’m very thankful for my easy access to really good reference librarians.  I didn’t even know I needed to specify that I needed Tuscano history, culture, and society, not “Italian” as I am getting into my research.  Until the late 1800’s, Italy wasn’t even a single country, just a collection of regions that operated under their own governments.

So, I’m a few weeks away from having everything that I want researched, but I’m getting there.  I had no idea PBS had so many great DVD’s about Italy out there.  While the information is mostly about current Tuscany, there’s still much to be gleaned.  Housing and foods have not changed much in a thousand years in Tuscany.  I can’t say the same for the clothing or politics.

Great article by Wally Lamb on Oprah.com. Check it out and then come back and read my comments.  I’ll wait.

Back?  Good.

I like the idea of writing an autobiography to get rid of your own personal demons.  As I prepare to sit with my mom to ask questions about my family in an effort to put together a book for my family about some of the stranger things in our past, this does hit kinda close to home.  But in addition, I wonder how many other writers, like myself, write fiction with parts of their past as catalysts to action.

My first book, Second Chances, took my experiences as a woman abused by a lover as the main climax of the story.  Through the use of this real-life experience, I was able to heal in a somewhat cathartic way, by having my heroine deal with the problem head-on, finally resolving it in her own mind.  I have used other similar experiences in Colorado Dreaming and Fairest of the Faire.  Not every experience I draw on, or write about, is negative, either.  There is at least much positive as there is negative in my own life experiences.

I find doing this is cathartic.  It gives me a chance to deal with the incident in a way that is non-threatening yet resolves some or most of my feelings surrounding the incident itself.  And in a way, I think this can be as valuable as writing an autobiography.  For me, writing the entire autobiography would probably be too painful to look at.  No one’s life is perfect, and certainly mine isn’t.  Not that it is overwhelmingly negative, either, but there are painful incidents that have shaped my existence, my reactions, and how I live my life.  To delve into all of it at once can’t really be a good thing, overall.

But if I share these experiences, bit by bit, in novel after novel, won’t I have accomplished the same thing?

I’ve written about this on both my tech and disability services blog this past week, but thought I’d mention it here.  I know not everyone reads those two blogs who may stop by here.  As a writer, copyright issues always catch my attention.  But being a well-versed self-published woman, I also have very definite opinions about where copyright goes too far.

This is one of those times.  Amazon is about to release the Kindle II, a serious upgrade to their foray into the electronic book reader market.  The Kindle I was and is an amazing piece of technology, allowing you to carry up to 1500 books in the palm of your hand and read them anywhere.  I don’t own one but I’ve looked at one, and some day, maybe in the future, I will really really want one.  But what piqued my interest about the Kindle II is that it offers something wonderful and new:  it has a built in text-to-speech reader that can read the book to you electronically.

This may sound like a fabulous thing, but not for the reasons you think.  Text-to-speech technology is primarily used by persons with print disabilities or visual disabilities, so that they can have access to the same printed material as those with no disability.  Text-to-speech technology has gotten very good in the last few years, but it still features a non-human voice that reads in a monotone.  For the disabled person who needs it, the electronic conversion is a Godsend.  But for someone who doesn’t need it, the voice is annoying and monotone.  It’s not something anyone who didn’t need it would pay for, that’s for sure.

But the fact that is is available has gotten the disabled services community pretty excited.

As with all things like this, someone had to cry “copyright infringement.”  In this case it was the Author’s Guild, whose president unequivocally denounced the Kindle II’s text-to-speech technology as creating a derivative work.  He couldn’t be further from the truth, of course, but in general, publishers and authors’ representatives have not been known to be that up on technology and what it can provide.

Some authors are, though, including Neil Gaiman.  When his literary agent expressed her concern about him releasing his books on Amazon for the Kindle, since a derivative work could be produced using the text-to-speech technology on board the device.  While Neil appreciated his agent’s defense of his copyright, Neil himself sees no need to lock down everything he produces.  Aka, the text-to-speech technology available on the Kindle is no threat to his copyright or to his livelihood.  In fact, it is even more likely that his books would be purchased for the Kindle by disabled people who at this time are getting them free through their subscriptions to the Reading For the Blind and Dyslexic.  That can only be a good thing.

I’ve always been a fan of Neil Gaiman, for plenty of reasons.  One is his views on copyright and when it’s okay to just let things happen.  The other is how supportive he is of writers, especially beginning writers.  I’ve just put his blog on my daily read list, even though I probably already have plenty of stuff on that list already.  He’s worth giving up a few extra minutes.