Author: Elizabeth Spann Craig

I’m taking a couple of days off from blogging to celebrate the Easter weekend with my family. I hope you’ll enjoy this older post, which originally ran last June.

Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella, Snow White, Harry Potter…and it’s not just in children’s literature that there are absent mothers/fathers/wives/husbands.

If you think about it, many novels (except, maybe, ones that are specifically focusing on family life) have protagonists with no significant other.

Why is that? I think it’s because husbands or wives or–in the case of children’s lit, parents–can be domineering, interfering, or overly influential. Worst case scenario, they can weaken the protagonist as a dominant force in the story.

I was editing my current WIP yesterday and noticed that my protagonist is a widow. Not only that, but four supporting characters are spouse-free.

I’m fine with my sleuth being single (her husband might try to curtail her crime-fighting activities: particularly after they put her in danger), but I’m going to take another look at the bevy of single characters in the supporting cast.

I always thought it was funny in Cheers that Norm’s wife became a character, even though we never meet her. Just his remarks about her were enough to bring her to life.

If our supportive characters are married to characters with no role in the plot, their spouses could just have a passing mention. The problem is when we have too many characters in our book for our readers to keep up with. Keeping the head count down is another reason why I have so many single characters or divorced characters.

How do you handle the families of your supporting characters? Do you briefly mention them? Don’t mention them except to describe the character as a parent or married? Or leave any mention of them out all together?

I’m taking a couple of days off from blogging to celebrate the Easter weekend with my family. I hope you’ll enjoy this older post, which originally ran last July. :)

I wasn’t cool in….well, ever. I was on the newspaper and literary magazine staff. I hung out with people in high school that are now architects, IT people, CPAs….but definitely not whatever the cheerleaders and football players became. (Politicians? What did those folks become? Inquiring minds want to know…)

I’m a nerd.

In my Myrtle Clover series for Midnight Ink, my protagonist, in some ways, is an elderly nerd. I completely relate to her. She makes funny literary references, she’s a retired English teacher….I get Myrtle.

But not all of my characters are Myrtles. I have characters that are rednecks, theologians, blue collar workers, wealthy do-gooders, and excellent barbeque chefs.

How do you handle writing different personality types?

I squash my inner-nerd. Sometimes it’s a pleasure to do so. Really.

I explore different personalities by imagining what it would be like to be them. Sort of like playing dress-up when you were a kid.

When I really dislike someone, I write it down. Usually if I don’t like them, it’s because the person is 180 degrees different from me. And a wonderful character, for that very reason.

I model a character on someone I know. And, naturally, completely change the character so they’re not recognizable to the person who inspired it.

I model a character on someone I wish I could be. When we’re looking in the mirror in the morning and wish we could see someone more glamorous or more adventurous in there….well, here’s our chance.

There’s no resume required when writing characters. It’s nice to use our imaginations to fill in the blanks. And…..we’re writers. We get to make things up.

How do you handle writing different personality types?

Today is the first day of spring break for my children.

This week of spring break is also the time to celebrate four close family birthdays, observe Easter, send off my taxes, and email the second Memphis book to my editor.

Yesterday I was frantic. I drove two school carpools in the morning (it was my day), drove to Wal-Mart to shop for my son’s 13th birthday…suddenly realized the dog was in the car (she loves school carpools), drove home, took the corgi into the house, drove back to Wal-Mart, shopped, took my husband’s shirts to the cleaner (where I had a difficult exchange with the cleaner who didn’t understand my Southern accent), drove home and worked on revisions that my agent had sent me.

I had drama class carpool to drive a couple of hours later, and then I was to be Brownie scout leader for a Girl Scout function at a Monkey Joe’s party (where the kids jump on inflatables and generally run wild.)

Then the phone rang.

It was my friend. Could I please bring the cupcakes to the school for the children’s last day before break? Spring cupcakes. She was at work and couldn’t get away.

Of course, I said, making sure the stress didn’t drip into my voice.

I stopped what I was doing, drove to the store, bought cupcakes, and hurried off to the elementary school.

As I strode quickly down the halls, I noticed all the artwork hanging on the walls. I was thinking how familiar I was with this school—my 7th grade son had been in kindergarten here. And it struck me that my daughter had only 2 more years at the school and then my days being an elementary school parent will be over.

My friend wanted to celebrate the beginning of spring— slow down and appreciate the little things with the children.

It made me think that a little slowing down and some daily celebrating might not be a bad thing.

I love writing. But sometimes it can stress me out. The last couple of weeks have been stressful.

I think part of my problem is that I’m always thinking ahead. A friend at the Brownie scout event asked me about my current book and I said, “Oh, I’m turning it in on Monday.”

“You must be so excited!” she said. “Are you going to kick back and relax a little?”

And I looked at her with surprise. “No, actually. I’m starting the next book.”

Which I need to do. Because I wrote a book last summer when the kids were home and it was really hard! I’m hoping to get some good progress on the next WIP before mid-June.

But I realize that I also need to take time to celebrate completing each part of the process….whether it’s a final draft, or even something as small as writing a difficult scene.

I want to enjoy the process—whatever part of the process I’m in that day.

And then…continuing on to the next stage after that. Because otherwise our daily successes—the little things—get lost in the shuffle.

Do you recognize or celebrate your small accomplishments to keep motivated?

I’d like to welcome guest blogger Amy Dawson Robertson to Mystery Writing is Murder today. Amy is a native Virginian and graduated from St. John’s College in Annapolis. She lives in the Washington DC area and her writing interests include genre fiction, short stories and graphic novels. She creates strong female characters in action-packed stories drawn on current events. Miles to Go is Amy’s first novel.

In the old days, before the internet was a twinkle in eye of Leonard Kleinrock, writers were condemned to worry and wonder. Say you published a book. And it’s 1888. Or 1942. Or even 1994. Congratulations! You have a contract with your publisher for, maybe, a 15% royalty rate on hardcover sales. Your book is slated for release just before Christmas. Perfect. The book comes out, you get a few reviews – some good, some so-so. Sometimes you go visit your book at the bookstore around the corner and you wonder how it’s selling. You know you won’t have an inkling (unless you’re one of the very lucky few to hit the NYT bestseller list) until you get your first royalty statement.

In. The. Mail.

The mail that will be known in the as yet unknowable future as snail mail.

Writers, tending to be a thoughtful bunch, can’t help but fixate on the notion that this thing that they are driven to do might have value. And not just some esoteric notion of value but quantifiable value. Dollars and cents value. And ultimately, that accumulation of dollars and cents is indicative of individual minds that each made the decision to buy your book.

That’s right. Buy. Your. Book.

Which means there’s a good possibility that same said mind might read your book.

Read. Your. Book.

And that’s really what the writer cares about. We want people to read our books. Everyone single one of us remembers “coming out” as a writer to our friends and their raised eyebrows. It’s hubristic after all. It means you think you have something so worth saying that it not only deserves to be printed on a page and bound between two covers, but also to be cataloged and entered into libraries. Which means of course that it might live for eternity. And it means you believe that it is a reasonable proposition for people, real people, to spend the hard-earned fruits of their labor on your book. If anything’s hubristic that is, right? It’s still hard to know who is buying your book but it is getting easier to know if anyone actually is.

The internet, thankfully, is all about minutia, quantification and immediate satisfaction and nowadays our friendly author is now a member of a coterie of

“twitchy neurotic messes who obsess about their sales, a fact which Amazon should be well aware of because we check our Amazon numbers four hundred times a day, and a one-star Amazon review causes us to crush up six Zoloft and snort them into our nasal cavities, because waiting for the pills to digest would just take too long.”

Maybe this sounds familiar, right? Unless you have endless time to stalk your book in all of the places it sells, you really don’t have a notion if anyone is buying it. So whether you’re in it for the money or that special satisfaction of envisioning your words coursing through another human being’s brain, now there are a few tracking tools that can help you take the edge off until your royalty statement turns up.

Each of these tools captures Amazon sales rank information (admittedly only one piece of the pie). There are other paid tracking sources such as Publisher Alley that pulls their data from Baker & Taylor and the mythic BookScan that grabs data from bookstores everywhere. But if you’re looking for free, here’s a peek at the four that I have found since my book was published.

First there was Titlez . Titlez was my first Amazon sales tracker. I was still naive then.

Titlez, which is still in beta, allows you to track as many books as you’d like. Then it arranges the books you’re tracking into an actively ranked list. If you expand a title, you can see how it has performed over time. Each dot represents the sales rank for a single instance in a day. Sales rank is captured once a day. Note that when the line goes flat that means you are having a sale or more likely multiples sales every day or mostly every day. By hovering over each dot you can see what the sales ranks was for that day and what time it was captured. It’s important to note that Amazon rankings fluctuate wildly (I won’t even get into the mathematical speculation that surrounds it) so it’s best to look at your rank over time. Titlez is especially useful to see how your book is doing in comparison to similar books in its genre.

Next, Metric Junkie swept in on a big noisy motorcycle and stole my attention. Catching my fickle eye with sexy pie charts, bar graphs, and best of all, a thing of their own invention: Cha-chingers™. Yes, Cha. Chingers. (™) And we know what that means.

While the biggest limitation to Titlez is that it only captures data once a day, Metric Junkie solves that problem by capturing data hourly. The image below shows an eight hour time span when five books were purchased.

Metric Junkie only allows you to track ten titles (per account) but you can see the sales of those titles across any time period you choose. The pie chart also shows how the ten titles rate against each other by percentage. The bar chart allows you to see how you’re doing week to week, month to month, etc., graphically.

After my experiences with Titlez and Metric Junkie, I’d been through a lot and I was more mature. So when a subtle, handsome application called NovelRank came along I was ready to jump on board. Most appealingly, it could capture multiple sales in a hour. Did you hear me? Multiple sales in an hour. Yeah, seriously, I was blown away.

Though NovelRank doesn’t have as many graphical ways to display your data, it has an RSS feed feature that will show you those multiple sales in an hour. For instance, from the time period of 11AM-7PM where Metric Junkie shows five sales, NovelRank shows seven including three in one hour. This is what showed up in my RSS reader:

NovelRank is cosmopolitan too. It captures international Amazon sales data — this is how it displays:

NovelRank can also download your hourly sales rank into an Excel file making it easier to pinpoint fluctuations in your sales. (You may find you need pocket protection if you go this far.)

Another application that only recently caught my eye is Rankforest. Rankforest allows you one title to track for free — I don’t see much value to this service except that it is the only sales tracking application I’ve found that also tracks Barnes and Noble. It is mostly useful as an application on the side.

How accurate are any of these tools? It’s hard to say. I haven’t seen my first royalty statement yet and I don’t know how analyzed it will be. I have found that these tools take the edge off the wait a bit. But I also believe that such applications can offer a snapshot of how your book is doing which can influence how you strategize your own marketing. Mondays tend to be very good sales days for book buying so maybe you’ll want to post to your blog or otherwise remind people of your existence sometime Monday morning. Businesses are investing more and more in data mining and accessing valuable results. Likewise, the more data a writer has, the more she can understand her audience and the market. Unfortunately, none of these tools will write your next book for you, so quit fooling around on the internet and get to work!

Amy Dawson Robertson

Author of Miles To Go: A Rennie Vogel Intrigue

http://amydawsonrobertson.com/

I’m doing my best to eliminate paper from my writing process.

At this point, the only paper that’s still around are the notebooks (and Post It notes) for my car and purse. I need those for writing on the go (because I grab every second I can.)

But at the end of the day, the paper I wrote on is transcribed onto the computer and thrown away.

Why am I doing this? Well, I’ve discovered that as much as I love paper, it’s slowing me down. And I don’t have much time to spare.

I used to do a lot of writing on paper. But then I discovered that A. I frequently lost the paper and B. I had to transcribe everything onto the computer—I was effectively writing the material twice.

My revising? It was all done on paper. I’d print it out (and this would be 270 pages, single sided) and then go through and mark it up like crazy.

Then I’d have to go back and page-by-page make all the corrections…looking back and forth from the printed, marked up text to the computer, finding the right place…

It was just too slow.

Now, if you’re not in any hurry or under any deadlines, then do what works best for you! But if you do want to go paper free, then here are my tips–

How I weaned myself off paper:

Never let myself get too far ahead on paper…maybe 2 pages…before I made myself transcribe it. This kept me from having 20 or 30 pages that needed to be put into Word. And, after a while, I thought how much quicker the process would be if I just wrote on the computer.

Remembered my deadlines—self-imposed and publisher-imposed. That tends to spur me into action.

Learned how to do revisions on the computer with Track Changes (all editors want to work with Track Changes now). Since the editors were using Track Changes, I got more practice doing revisions on my computer.

Practiced brainstorming on the computer (trying to generate new ideas while looking at a blank screen. It wasn’t easy….)

I remembered how much it cost me to print out all those pages I used for revisions…in paper and printer ink.

But, what’s the biggest thing to remember if you do all your writing on the computer?

BACK IT UP!!!!!! Use a thumb drive, USB, external hard drive, or email it to yourself. Just make sure it’s somewhere. Because it won’t be on paper anymore for you to piece together. Now I’m more careful than I used to be (although I still screw up and end up accidentally losing text.)

I’m thinking there’s an age gap with the writing on paper thing. It’s VERY easy for my kids to be creative on the computer, but I had to really work at it. I’m thinking that the younger you are, the easier it might be to make the change (if you haven’t already.)

Which is easier for you—paper or word processing?

In other news–I’ve murdered my comment widget. :) It comes easily to a mystery writer. Too many problems for many of my Blogger friends and when I discovered that several people had tried to comment and couldn’t, it had to go. I’m still looking for the perfect universal commenting system that’s compatible with Blogger…when I find it, I’ll let you know!