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Here I am in New York. Made the mistake of walking all around town in wedge heels yesterday, so now my calves are killing me! Good going, Di.
So then, I arrive home to my hotel room very late, after a lovely boozy dinner with a college friend, to discover this: I’ve been Cover Snarked by the Smart Bitches!
Remember those romance novel covers I did a few years back? Well, apparently Candy and Sarah take issue with my magenta-hued skin on the “paranormal” one. Can’t imagine why.
Candy: Every time I look at this cover, the smooth jazz starts playing, and then you find out that the woman is actually this guy’s long-lost sister and they’ve been engaging in accidental incest for the last three seasons of the show, and all of this came to light only because their mother woke up out of a 10-year coma. Man, the things they do for sweeps week.
Sarah: Behold the powers of my divination! This man is not thinking about sex. Or secrets. He’s thinking about basketball, specifically as to whether he can use her head to shoot 3’s.
Candy herself was kind enough to email me and point out the post, a service they probably did not render to the computer generated models in the other covers. And now, of course, I’m never going to be able to look a this cover without thinking the guy is indeed, picturing my head as a basketball. Because Sarah? She may be right. Might be the color.
In other cover news, just received my first ever foreign edition for Secret Society Girl. Stay tuned. I’ll be posting it soon!
 Who has been following the story of PHANTOM PLEASURES, by Julie Leto, on the Plotmonkeys blog?
Every day this week, Leto is posting a chapter of her new novel, PHANTOM PLEASURES, and holding a contest for Amazon gift certificates for everyone who drops by the site to check it out.
I was lucky enough to read this book in ARC form, and it’s a fantastic, adrenaline-fueled ride. There’s this car chase…. wow!
Not to mention extremely sexy, but then, it’s Julie Leto. That’s pretty much definitive for action-packed, sexy, lush, sassy.
Oh, and there are gypsies. And curses.
Go to Plotmonkeys now and check it out. (The prologue was posted on Monday, and Chapter one is today’s post.)
Then, watch this space for more news of this awesome new book.
There are going to be so many giveaways on this blog in the next few weeks… the P.O. and I will become great friends.
The conversation at Fangs, Fur, and Fey this week is all about how we chose the setting for our books. Makes sense. It’s a site about urban fantasy, so the urban part should form a rather large component of the final result.
My book, RAMPANT, is set in Rome, and, as others have said about their own books, Rome is almost another character in my novel.
But in writing this post, I began to realize that, at this point in the creation, I’m having a hard time remembering which part of the story necessitated its setting, and which part grew out of the fact that I’d chosen the setting I did. I do remember considering a different setting for a short time, early in the process. Due to the mythology of the story (maneating unicorns that can only be killed by virgin descendants of Alexander the Great, and the millenia-old culture that grew up around this fact), there were only a few potential places I could pull this off.
Rome had an advantage, both because I was more familiar with its history, culture and landmarks than the other potential location, and because the mythology of the order required a certain culture of accepted, institutionalized chastity. The ancients had the Vestal Virgins, who lent my unicorn hunters both costumes and some really gory punishments, and the Christians have scores upon scores of religious orders, which gave my unicorn hunters a cultural touchstone, architectural style, and organizational structure. I made Rome the seat of the hunter’s order, likening them to the Knights Templar or other similar groups.
Rome is also filled with parks, ruins, catacombs, and other places for giant, maneating unicorns to hide in between their terrorizing rampages. Rome’s bloody history, filled with gladiators, martyrs, artists, and saints, imparted a long sense of both history and painful trials to my fledgling order of hunters.
But the story has grown so much since I committed to setting in Rome that with many elements, I don’t know which came first. For instance, Raphael’s Lady with a Unicorn has long been one of my inspirations. But with a Rome-set story, my characters could actually see this painting, which is on display at the Borghese Gallery.
And there are things I discovered in my January trip to Rome that either dovetailed exactly with concepts I had already written or have been incorporated into the story such that I can’t imagine the novel without them. For instance, the ancient Cloisters in the Basilica di SS. Giovanni in Laterano, with its beautiful, unicorn horn-shaped columns and other architectural elements was dramatic, gorgeous, and thematically perfect. My husband can attest to the hundreds of pictures I’d taken of cloisters during out trip. When I found these, I know my search was over.
 Oh yeah. Eat your heart out, Dan Brown.
Trish Ryan!
Email me your address, Trish. Also, I kinda realized I flaked on sending out those CDs. Oops. Will be remedied. Never fear.
(See, this is my problem: I hate post offices. So sometimes it takes a while for me to get up my nerve and send out all the amil that’s been lying around.)
Anyway, I am blogging about goals over on 70 Days of Sweat today. Are you still sweating?
 ARCS! Pretty! (The cover is actually way brighter than this. For some reason, this picture is coming out looking faded, and the ARC cover is a bit more pale then the real one will be, at any rate.)
You know what this means, folks! Giveaway!
But first, the long-overdue description of this book:
RITES OF SPRING (BREAK)
An Ivy League Novel
From “witty and endearing” to “impossible to put down,” the critics have given elite marks to Diana Peterfreund’s Secret Society Girl and Under the Rose. Now, in a wildly captivating new novel, Amy “Bugaboo” Haskel and her fellow Rose & Grave knights are trading cold, gray, hyperintellectual New Haven for an annual rite of spring (well, early March) in Florida.
For Amy, a week of R&R on her secret society’s private island should be all fun in the sun—and an escape from an on-campus feud with a rival society that’s turned disturbingly personal. But along with her SPF 30 and a bikini, Amy is bringing a suitcase full of issues to remote Cavador Key. Graduation from Eli University looms, not to mention buckets of unfinished business with a former flame and—most pressing of all—the sudden, startling transformation of a mysterious Rose & Grave patriarch from sheerly evil to utterly…appealing?
Just when Amy thinks Spring Break can’t get any less relaxing, a wacky “accident” puts everyone on edge. And that’s only the beginning, as Amy starts to suspect that someone has infiltrated the island. With some major Rose & Grave secrets to be exposed, and the potential fallout enough to take down one of America’s most loathsome figureheads, what she can’t know is that the party crasher is deadly serious about making sure “Bugaboo” doesn’t get back to Eli alive….
And, just so you guys can see the complete awesomeness that is the cover, here’s front and back!
Fun, huh? Leave your name here, and I shall draw a winner tomorrow.
Carrie found this and sent it to me. I have no idea what gives with the marmoset fascination, but I am not at all surprised by my results.
What Kind of Unicorn are YOU? (no, really..its cool- with graphics!)
In case you missed it, the incomparable Kathy Carmichael did a wonderful guest blog on writing great endings at Plotmonkeys this weekend. I love Kathy’s advice so much: she’s the woman who taught me to write (and adore) synopses. Don’t miss it!
One of the things I love so much about Kathy’s essays and workshops is that they are arranged in the same way as my thought patterns. Everything she says just makes sense to me, on a gut-deep level. I think that may be why sometimes, you need to hear the same advice a few different times before it “clicks” for you. Maybe it’s the wording, or the organization, or the examples given.
I was talking to a writing friend recently about the beginnings of books, and I realized that I have amassed a lot of different advice about how to start a book:
“Start at the moment of change.”
“Start on the day that is different.”
“Get in late; get out early.” (Okay, this last one isn’t specific to beginnings, but still applies.)
But sometimes writers are curious about how to reconcile these things with the oft-heard advice to give us a glimpse into the character’s “ordinary world.” I saw a debate recently that talks about how it’s wrong that so many people hold up Star Wars as the perfect example of starting with the “ordinary world” of Luke on a farm, etc., b/c that it’s all a lie, since it actually starts with Leia feeding the plans to the robot as Darth Vader invades her ship. Yes, it’s true that this is the first scene of the movie. But when you first meet our protagonist, Luke, it’s not him being all warrior-like. It’s him being a farmer, doing farm-boy things. Ditto for when you first meet Han Solom roguish smuggler, doing smugglery things (like, ahem, shooting first). Leia is also in her ordinary world– Imperial Senator, secret rebel. It’s all in a day’s work for the Princess.
(Leia, of the three main characters, probably has the smallest growth arc throughout the series, except for the fact that as Luke got stronger, they wimped her up a bit. The girl who withstands torture while imprisoned on the Death Star and watches the destruction of her home planet with little more than a flinch spends much of the last movie playing Snow White to a bunch of dwarfs Ewoks.)
But I digress. the point is, the Star Wars example is talking about introducing the protagonist, which is, in almost all cases, where you start your story. That bit on the ship is really prologue, which is what happens when you have an inciting incident (here, kidnapping the Princess, secret plans, etc.) that occurs “off screen” for the protag. A similar example would be the murder in the Louvre in The Da Vinci Code. If you’re anti-prologue (I’m not, but I know folks who very vehemently are), then you’re always talking about introducing your protagonist.
In evaluating manuscripts in contests, etc., probably the single most common problem I’ve seen is books that don’t start in the right place. I know a lot of writers who advise folks to write three chapters, then cut out the first two. I never understood that advice until I judged a bunch of contests where the first chapter was nothing except exploring the character.
That’s another thing about writing advice. Sometimes it’s easier to understand when you see examples that do it wrong. I advise new writers to judge contests. Bad books can teach you a lot about how to write well.
I think people get confused about how one can both show the ordinary world and start at the moment of change. That’s why I like the description, “start on the day that is different” a little better, because then you can see those last idyllic (or not so idyllic, depending) moments of ordinary world before things start to fall apart.
One example of this that I really love is Jana DeLeon’s debut, Rumble on the Bayou. Now, don’t tell Jana, but I judged this first chapter in a contest back in the day, and it blew me away. One of the strongest openings of any book I’ve ever read. Seriously, go read it. I’ll wait.
Now, the brilliant thing about Jana’s first chapter is that the character doesn’t even know that things have changed for her. Even the outlandishness of a gator in the town drunk’s pool is still just business as usual for the sheriff-cum-game warden Dorie Berenger of Gator bait, Louisiana. But when she pulls out that backpack of heroin, her neat little world splits wide open.
Now, keeping that in mind, let’s look at that third bit of beginnings advice: get in late, get out early. Like that? I stole it from our friends the screenwriters. Basically, it means start the scene at the last possible moment before it doesn’t make sense, and end it at the last second that it’s interesting. You’ll notice that Dorie’s “day that is different” doesn’t start with her waking up in the morning, making coffee, brushing her teeth, checking her email… heck, it doesn’t even start with her showing up at the station and getting a call to go over to the town drunk’s place. Nope, it starts whens he gets her first look at the gator in the pool.
Because that’s the moment of change.
What are some of your favorite story openers? First lines, or just summations of first scenes. Books, movies, we’re all friends here!
Tomba del Leone, Necropolis Etruscana, Cerveteri, Lazio, Italy.
So last night, Microsoft Word decided to screw with me. It wouldn’t let me save, close, or recover my file.
My book file. The book that’s due next week.
This has never happened to me before. Not in seven books, not in countless partials, critiqued chapters, synopses, edit letters, cut files, brainstorming notes, newspaper articles, school papers, or two senior theses (the second one filled with monstrous graphs and pictures), or even journal articles I used to copyedit at my old job. It didn’t happen on a Windows-based PC, and it didn’t happen on any of the three Macs I’ve written books on.
Other writers I know hate Microsoft Word with a passion, and have been encouraging me to switch to different software. I’ve downloaded Scrivener twice to try the trial software, but the learning curve seems a little steep to me. I don’t have time! I have books to write! The second time, I even did the tutorial, and it sounded grand! But then I got all confused because they asked me what kind of project I was doing (I think I clicked “novel”, and then proceeded to force me into this funky formatting that I didn’t like at all.
And it won’t show me page breaks. Justine says I need to get over my fascination with page breaks, but I can’t help it. I know it doesn’t correlate to the finished book at all, but it’s a quick and dirty way for me to keep my eye on the rhythm and pacing of any given chapter.
(Edited to add: Someone just informed me that they start each chapter on a new page in their document by making hard carriage returns (i.e., pressing “Enter/Return” key) until they hit the new page, and they find it annoying to go back and fix every chapter head every time they make an edit. Don’t do this. You’re right, it’s extremely annoying! Instead, when you reach the end of a chapter, click on “Insert” menu at the top of the screen, then “Break” then “Page Break” and it will automatically make a your cursor move to the top of the next page, wherever it may fall on the current one.
Next, someone will be telling me they type in their headers by hand.)
Also, like others, I love the comments feature. And track changes. Can you do that with Scrivener? Even if I switched, I’d still need to use Word when exchanging work with my CP.
I like the idea of Scrivener, though, and I’ll be trying it again with my next project, when I have a little more time to learn the software.
Anyway, back to my file situation. I Ctrl-A and copied the whole thing into my NeoOffice (OpenOffice for Mac), then tried to quit Word, eventually had to Force quit, and then one hard restart later, here I am with an Auto-Recovered file of my book from a few hours (and pages) before, and then the Neo Office version, which is ugly as sin, but at least intact.
Now the real question is, do I finish writing this book in Neo Office, which looks SO BIZARRE to me, or do I risk trying to use Word again?
Why are you doing this to me, Word?
As I mentioned the other day, I’ve misplaced the USB cable that connects my camera to my computer, so I have a lot of lovely pictures of unicorn paraphernalia trapped on my digital.
For instance, the picture of my lovely Avenging Unicorn Playset, which my same friend who made me the Astrid!Unicorn Hunter action figure gave me as well.
However, I have photographed parts of it before on the blog, so:
That’s part of it. The Unicorn comes with several interchangeable horns, and a variety of people to gore, including: a hippie-chick, a lawyer (pictured), and a mime. You can see the whole thing by following the link, above. Since announcing my new book, I regularly get emails from friends, colleagues, and strangers, asking me if I’ve seen this playset, (or the other varieties that the company makes: Patriotic Unicorn, Good Vs. Evil Unicorn, etc.).
I’ve got one! I love it! I love it especially because it’s one of the few bits of unicorn stuff in my house to adequately convey the evil nature of the killer unicorns in my book. Most unicorn toys are all fluffy (like the stuffed animal, below). This is an AVENGING unicorn. A few steps away from my man-eating ones.
In fact, I loved my avenging unicorn so much, I took it with me to Europe:
Here, the Avenging Unicorn poses in front of the famous mosaic of Alexander the Great (a replica, actually, the real one is in the museum in Naples), in the ruined city of Pompei.
And below, Sailor Boy the Avenging Unicorn returns the favor for the author:
 That’s Alexander and Bucephalus, right next to the author’s left ear. A look at the close-up, however, reveals that Bucephalus in this mosaic is being depicted as an everyday war horse, which we know that he was not.
After all, you don’t name cities after a horse.
I chalk it up to artistic license. Artists! We they are always letting their imaginations run wild! This hard working Pompeiian mosaicist probably just wasn’t sure what a karkadann looked like. They’re very rare, after all. Had he (or she, could have been a she) traveled up north to Rome, however, she may have met a few women who knew all too well!
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