Author: Elizabeth Spann Craig

My upcoming Delicious and Suspicious will be released July 6, 2010, under my pen name Riley Adams. Just in time for the backyard grilling season! Here’s the back cover copy:

Welcome to Aunt Pat’s barbeque restaurant–family run and located in the heart of Memphis, Tennessee. Named in honor of Lulu Taylor’s great aunt, the restaurant is known for its ribs and spicy corn bread, but now the Taylor family will be known for murder–unless Lulu can clear their name…

Rebecca Adrian came to Memphis to suss out the best local BBQ for a prominent Cooking Channel show. Trouble is, Rebecca doesn’t live long enough to mention a bad review. A mystery ingredient has killed her–and now all fingers are pointing to Aunt Pat’s restaurant. Horrified that her family is being accused of murder, Lulu fires up her investigative skills to solve the crime before someone else gets skewered…

*************

I was thrilled yesterday when FedX dropped off my cover copies from Penguin. There’s just something about having a cover connected to your book to make it feel more real! I had a lot of fun writing this book and exploring characters that are different from my Myrtle Clover series. I can’t wait to share it with y’all in July! Oh…last bit of BSP. It is available for preordering from Amazon or your favorite independent bookseller. :)

I get a lot of emails for different organizations that I either volunteer for or belong to. Sometimes I want to get out my highlighter and mark the information I need.

Frequently I’ll get a page-long email with only one sentence that was actually important.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed with information overload.
On one hand, it’s wonderful to have so many writing resources and tips online.  When I was starting to seriously write (seven years ago), there wasn’t enough information online.  Now there’s so much that it can be hard to know where to start. 

The basics you should cover if you’re about to submit a finished manuscript:

Going pro?  You need to check out those agents and publishers before you submit.  There are some really wicked people out there that prey on writers (who are sometimes more creative than they are business-headed.) 

If you are submitting (and you’ve checked out your agent and editor and done your homework there), you really do need to make sure your manuscript has been proofed by a separate set of eyes.  You could go several ways with that: the free route (a really objective-minded friend or family member), a critique group (you can find them online if you’d rather say at home or have time constraints), or you can even pass it by a professional editor that you pay yourself.  You want your manuscript to be as clean as it can possibly be.

Review those industry guidelines:  You need to be really sure that you’re following agent and publisher guidelines when you submit. You can easily find guidelines online these days.  You’ll want to make sure you don’t send your thriller to a romance publisher, or make similar mistakes.

Have an email address.   I’m always surprised at who doesn’t have a professional email address. You can get one that’s separate from your family email through a free provider (Google Mail, Hotmail, Yahoo.)  Try a professional-sounding address like Your Name @gmail.com.

Personal website or a blog that functions as your home base.  I could be argued out of the notion that this is a basic…but I really do believe it is. Even one page that  introduces you in a basic, professional way to an editor or agent works fine.   Blogger, through Google, offers free blogging, as do some other providers.  You could also go through WordPress, which can provide you with a blog that’s also a website (with a home page and other tabs.)  I have a separate website from my blog— I bought my domain name from GoDaddy (they have silly commercials, but they do have good deals). I designed my site with their program, “Website Tonite.”

What information should your website or blog contain? How to contact you (email), your genre, and what you’re working on now is probably good enough.  You can put up a friendly looking picture of yourself or an image related to your book and call yourself done.

What basic tips do you have to add that I’ve forgotten or left out?

I belong to a couple of Yahoo groups for cozy authors. One subject that’s been hot on the boards lately is the way some authors argue with their readers on (mostly) Amazon.

It’s almost like the social media phenomenon, which has resulted in a casual relationship with our readers via Facebook and Twitter, has gotten authors in the mood to fight back when a reader gives a negative review.

I think it’s a really bad idea.

Usually, if a reader doesn’t enjoy your book then they’re honestly writing a review of what they personally didn’t like. It’s almost a buyer-beware type post—a note to the reading community: “Hey, if you’re like me and you don’t like this particular thing in a novel, then you might not like this book either.”

Honest dialogue on your book should be happening.  You want people discussing your novel, good or bad. If people are talking about your book, then they’re reading it.

There is absolutely nothing gained, in my opinion, by trying to debate someone who doesn’t like your novel.  There are plenty of books that have been well-reviewed that I didn’t enjoy: maybe they were really graphically violent, or had lots of long, descriptive passages…whatever. People have a right to their opinion. Every book isn’t right for every reader.

And, yes, then you do have the other kind of reader.  They’re sometimes a little flaky. They might say things that don’t reflect an objective, professional-sounding review—they might even be downright mean.  They could say something really odd about how your book promotes a particular political bent (when it doesn’t) or that you had an environmental agenda or were anti-vegan, or whatever.

But these aren’t professional reviewers.  And they’re not expert readers/critics like book bloggers who review books daily.  They’re not writers who express themselves well. They’re regular readers.

And if you start arguing with these people about how your book doesn’t espouse any kind of an agenda, then you’re just going to look bad.  I can’t think of a time when it would be worth the author’s time to counterattack.

Because the reviewers will frequently write back to argue your points. And then you’ve pulled attention away from your book and made yourself look unprofessional to boot.

The worst case scenario is when an author really flips out…like Alice Hoffman did last year. She got so upset with a reviewer (and this was a professional newspaper reviewer) that she posted the critic’s phone number on Twitter and asked her readers to call the critic and complain about the negative review.

Of course authors feel very protective about their books. There’s so much of ourselves in every one of them, and we put many hours into books that can be read in a fraction of the time it took us to pen them.
I’ve seen quite a few authors jumping in to defend their novels.

But to me, when we enter into the fray, we’re drawing attention to the negative review, making ourselves look unprofessional, and certainly not convincing the reader to change their mind about the book.  What’s gained?

I have a subplot in my current WIP that wants to take over the world.

In the same WIP, I have a small subplot that stays meekly in its place.

Subplots are a lot of fun for me—I enjoy both reading them and writing them. It’s nice to have a short break from the main plot every once and a while and take a breather.

But problems pop up when subplots get ambitious and want to take over my novel.

They do have their uses, though. While the main plot of my books might be many chapters away from seeing resolution, my subplots usually show a steady progression toward a conclusion.

It’s a fun way to focus on a side character. Or to play around with another genre (introduce a romantic element in a mystery, for example).

A good subplot can also help keep the reader motivated to continue reading.

But…I have to keep them in their place. There’s definitely a limit to the amount of time I can devote to a subplot.

The one in my current WIP that wants to stage a coup with the main plot? I’ve made a deal with it. If I tie it into the main plot so that it’s an integral part of the book’s conclusion, then I’ll give it more screen time.

Do you have subplots that want to take over your books?

Photo by Dana Geary

Kit Dunsmore is a contemporary fantasy writer living in northern Colorado. She’s currently working on a novel about a witch who tries to rescue her best friend from a necromancer without breaking her vow never to use harmful magic. You can find her at Kit’s Home for Orphaned Armadillos.

My first attempt at this post on how I write fiction talked about generating a series of drafts, grafting together the best of the material, and how much concentration each stage takes. It was boring. So I took a walk with my dog and tried to think of a metaphor for my writing process, something vivid and visual that would give depth to my dull description of draft writing.

Of course I couldn’t think of one. I thought of three.

One for each stage of my writing process.

Writing a first draft of a scene or chapter is hiking into new territory. I go down a trail after looking at a map. I think I know where I’m going, and may have some idea of what there is to see along the way, like a lake or stream. But I really don’t know what I’m going to encounter until I start walking. Then I discover all the little twists, muddy dips, tiny flowers, animal tracks, steep climbs, and unknown people the trail has to offer. I may turn off the path at any time to visit a tree or rock barely glimpsed through the leaves. I may go up a hill to see what’s on the other side. Whether I’m hiking or writing, there’s no telling if I’ll find more of the same or something unexpected when I get there.

I’ve honed this exploratory method of draft writing for the last four Novembers by participating in National Novel Writing Month. Giving myself only 30 days to write 50,000 words has proven a great way to keep my feet moving. Desperate to hit my word count (1667 words a day), I will chase whatever shows up, whether it is a new idea for a scene or a character who has appeared out of nowhere. Anything goes. I try to ignore any thoughts I have about how stupid, crazy, or pointless something is and just run with it. After all, I’m dying to see what’s on the other side of that hill, and there’s only one satisfactory way I know to find out.

But hiking is only the beginning. After I’ve made my discoveries, good or bad, the time has come to pick through them and select the pieces that I think are most intriguing, most colorful, and stitch them together. Suddenly, I’m no longer hiking through the woods.

Now I’m quilting.

I take the pieces of draft writing I like best and turn them into a complete scene or chapter by stitching them together with more words. I’ve thought of it as stitching for years now. Sometimes the bits of draft I use are mere scraps – a sentence or two – so maybe that’s where the image comes from. Or maybe it’s the fact that I love what happens when I sew pieces of fabric together into something new and this stage of writing brings me that same joy. What looks like odd bits of fabric become a vibrant whole. Larger patterns begin to emerge, and yet each fabric contributes something unique. Making something greater, something new, from scraps is what the synthesis stage is all about for me.

Once the stitching is done, I have a whole piece, a block or a section of my fictional quilt. I step back to look at it anew, and think about its overall pattern and shape. And yet another shift happens. I am no longer sewing. Now I must weed and prune.

It’s time to garden.

Editing can be brutal. Cutting out words, sentences, scenes can seem like slashing through vines in a jungle. But I prefer a more nurturing metaphor, that of a gardener who weeds and prunes for the good of the garden as a whole. An awkward limb can rub against other parts of a tree and damage it. Weeds can choke out the delicate flowers that are trying to grow next to them. But the good gardener steps in and lops off the limbs that are harming the tree, pulls up the weeds that are smothering the flowers.

And I think good editing is the same. I’m not slashing and destroying when I cut out a sentence or drop a scene. I’m shaping the whole, for the good of the whole, making the writing attractive, making room for better things to grow.

And what do I do when I put down my shears and take off my gardening gloves?

I start all over again.

I go hiking to discover new vistas to fill in the gaps in my story so that I can stitch them onto my existing quilt blocks and then prune away whatever is destructive or ugly. This cycle keeps repeating, and with each cycle, my draft improves, my story grows stronger, and I come closer to having written something that captures my imaginary world and the people who live there.

I really had hoped for a single metaphor to describe my writing process, but now I wonder why I thought that was possible. After all, nothing I know is quite like writing.

Thanks so much for guest posting today, Kit! I especially like your idea of the editing process being a nurturing one instead of a destructive one. That will make me feel better as I slash right and left. :)