On Monday’s post, I received a comment from Colleen…she was interested in hearing more about balancing or approaching life as a hybrid writer—someone who is both traditionally published and self-published.

She mentioned (and she’s right) that many self-pubbed/indie authors aren’t at all interested in being traditionally published.  She was curious about how I handle both worlds.

And…it’s interesting sometimes.  But for me, a job is a job. I have traditionally published series with readers who want more books, so I’m providing them more books.  I recently signed a contract with Penguin for more mysteries in the Southern Quilting series.
Continue reading

Guest Post by James Mullen

I’ve started to sketch out the plot for
my second book.  The book is a police
procedural based in Boston, and although I visit the area frequently, I haven’t
lived there in over 20 years. Computer research and phone interviews are
invaluable, you can’t beat putting your eyes on places – even if it’s just a
validation of what’s perfectly remembered. 
To be honest though, I went with the idea of visiting not the actual
places I image as crime scenes, because I know them so well, but want to
re-acquaint myself with the more peripheral areas of those scenes that could
serve as description. 

I plan to have the opening crime scene
take place at a downtown subway stop, or as we like to say in Boston, a “T”
stop.  I’ve found most subway stations
very linear and shaped like, well, the letter “T”;  ascending or descending stairs that pour out
to a waiting horizontal platform in front of the rails.  Pretty straight forward, pretty simple.  Since I was planning a murder, I needed a
place with more complication, more corners. 
I need malevolence.

I remember a stop I used back in the
mid-70s when I commuted from the Back Bay to downtown Boston.  The station always struck me as up to no
good, and on nights I worked late, felt like I was descending into a film noir
movie set.  Mack the Knife or Philip
Marlowe could pop out of the shadows and stick a shiv or a gat in my back
without warning.  The place defined grimy
and dark.  The layout was more like the
letter “Y”, but with intricate and shadowy angles.  Perfect!

So I had my hopes up when I went to
re-visit the street-level environment surrounding the stop two weeks ago. I
almost didn’t enter the stop itself since I knew the details were firmly
embedded in my memory – even 40 years later.

Boston, back then, covered both sides of
the social contract with its ridership. 
The city wanted efficient use of its system, so made the environment
extremely unpleasant; searing heat in any season; zero air exchange; squealing
breaks on subways at all times; crowd movements resembling schools of fish in a
Dixie cup; most overhead light bulbs broken – illumination being supplied by
any natural light able to crawl on its hands and knees down the stairs and make
it to the platform area on the first level. 
Yes, the city made good on its promise that no matter what slings and
arrows were suffered during a given workday by its citizens, they would take
place in an environment much more pleasant than the station.

But look what I walked into?  As you can see from the recent photo; white
tiles on the wall!  A wall, recently
cleaned!  Posters, and get this, a mural
on the back wall behind the escalators. 
Art appreciation!  And the
lights!  More than adequate ceiling
fluorescents throughout. People holding hands! 
I fully expected to see folks alight from arriving subway cars singing
show tunes and then lining up for a dance routine.  How could my memory do this to me?  Or is it the city’s fault?

The second day I took a boat trip to
another crime scene, Spectacle Island, in Boston Harbor.  Although I have never set foot on the island,
it is one of many in Boston Harbor located on a well-used flight path to and
from Logan Airport that I’ve flown numerous times.  If you look out a plane’s window enough, you
get to know the landmarks and the approach well. As a precaution, I also
checked maps on the internet prior to my trip and could see that the island’s
view of the Boston skyline would be blocked by several others in the harbor;
that fact being germane to an intended plot point of my story.  I give you Spectacle Island:

 

Lesser men would suffer boredom from
being right all the time.  Me, I just
take it in stride.

James
Mullen currently lives in North Carolina. 
His first novel, Ketchum and Cobb, can be purchased on Amazon.   

Website:  Grumpy Gets Better (jimamullen.blogspot.com)
– things literary and not so much.

Also on
Facebook and Goodreads. 

By
Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

As I mentioned last week, I recently
turned in a teaser chapter and an outline to one of my Penguin editors.  This particular editor likes to see an
outline before a book is written.

The deadline for the outline was actually
Sept. 1.  The deadline for the book
itself is January 1.  I have a self-pub
project that I stopped working on to write this book, so I decided to go ahead
and start writing the Penguin book while I waited for feedback on the outline.  There’s a bit of risk in doing so, since it
means that I might need to make big changes on a work-in-progress.

And…I did end up needing to make those
changes.  The editor liked the concept
for the book, but thought the set-up in the first chapter was a bit too similar
to the one in Knot What it Seams, which
came out in February. 

My editor’s memory is flawless and mine
is faulty.  Although that book came out
in February, I’d written it in early 2012 and had written 4.5 books since then
(including the quickly deserted self-pub I dropped to
work on this project). I re-read the start of the story in question and did
notice similarities.

My editor asked for two more suspects, or
at least one more.  She also asked for me to include subplots
involving 3 characters she really enjoys and feels that readers also enjoy.

While these weren’t radical changes, they
were fairly substantial and would definitely require a rewrite of the teaser
chapter I’d just turned in.

I was also already 38 pages into the
book.

I started out by making a list. This
keeps me from being completely overwhelmed by the task ahead.

Brainstorm
new direction:  Who might work as
additional suspects? I came up with as many scenarios as I could, and then
picked the strongest.  How could I
connect the requested subplots in with the mystery?  With the other subplot?  How could I make those characters grow or
change in the process?  What was another
way to start out the book…could I skip the set-up altogether and go right into
the action? I picked the best ideas and dumped the rest.

Revise
teaser chapter:  This had to be
revised first, since it was technically overdue.

Revise
outline:  Incorporate the
additions in the outline (the additional suspects, the additional subplots).

Delete portions of the outline that no
longer fit in with the revisions.

Make notes
on manuscript:  Obviously, I was
going to immediately rewrite chapter one because of the teaser chapter
issue.  Then I needed to replace the
original chapter one with the new one.

Make a note to myself on Word in Track
Changes that page 12ish—38 were unedited.

Keep
moving forward with story: For me, I do major revisions after the first
draft is finished.  So I picked up on
page 38 with the changes from that point forward, following the revised outline
and the point that I was in with the story. 
Others, I know, want to fix those other pages in between, but that’s
what my second draft is for.

So I quickly revised the first chapter
and sent it back to my editor, since she needed it for the end of the December
book.  I finished the other tasks and am
now picking up with the story as if the beginning of the book were already
fixed.

So…yeah, it can be a little unnerving to
get requests from changes from an editor in midstream.  It might not even be an editor—it could be a
first reader or a critique group.  But by
breaking it down into small tasks and prioritizing them, it does make the job a
lot easier.

Have you ever made large revisions in the
early stages of a project?  How did you
organize the process?

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

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By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

I dislike writing setting and
description, but I used to absolutely despise it.  I’ve got plenty of now-published manuscripts
in my Word archives with helpful editorial direction on them: “Elizabeth, could
you share with us what this car looks like? 
I can’t really picture it.”

Each time, of course, I added the
description in for my editor.  There are readers who
really enjoy description, I know.  I’ve
just never been one of them. 

There was also the side of me that mutters, “Who cares?” when asked about the car’s description.  Really, did it matter?  It wasn’t a clue to the mystery.  The character didn’t care much about cars.
Why include it?

But as I went on, I started making my
peace with it.  All right,
so the character doesn’t care about cars. 
Maybe that’s something I should be showing with my description.  Maybe the car shouldn’t be the latest
model.  Maybe the car desperately needs a
trip through an automatic carwash.  Or
maybe the car simply functions as a mobile billboard for the character’s
beliefs and causes—in the form of bumper stickers.  How could I take a humdrum assignment (adding
description) and make it something I could get interested in?

So 
that was one thing that helped—have the
description help show a bit about the character.

Another tip that I picked up along my
blog reading way was that verbs were much more
fun than adjectives when describing something.  A blog post by David Jacobsen on the Book
Talk blog, “Writing
Tip: Describing With Verbs”, does a nice job explaining the process. He
changed Kari was a beautiful toddler. She had
long, black, curly hair and shining, green eyes. to: As Kari toddled across the room, her black hair
curled and bounced around her shoulders, and her green eyes shone. 

Although his examples are dealing with
describing a character, you can use it with settings, too.  Something like this: The mountains rolled off as far as she could see, rising gently to the
sky until they faded into the horizon.  
The closer hills were draped with trees, like moss on stones.

Discover
how the character feels about the setting.  Literary agent and writer resource Donald Maass recommends
that we consider how our character feels about the setting, suggesting that we brainstorm emotions tied to particular events, incorporating those details
in our setting.  Again, this exercise
helps us, and our reader, understand the character a bit better…and helps make
our task a little more interesting.

Make the
setting enjoyable for you to write.  For one of my recently-written books, I chose
a setting with secret passageways, trapdoors, and a spooky attic.  Beats writing about lunch in a restaurant.  If there’s a place you especially enjoy,
think about writing a similar location into your book.

Have you got any tips for writing
description and describing setting?  Is
it something you enjoy as a reader or writer? 

Image: MorgueFile: calebunseth