Please note: this is not a post about e publishing.
So I’ve owned an e-reader (a Kindle) for a year now. To be honest, I haven’t used it much, but I contribute that to the fact that, last August, I got a smartphone (a DroidX) and promptly downloaded the Kindle app. Now I do all my kindling (Kindle-ing?) on my DroidX, who is named HALey.
The Kindle was great because I could read my critique partner’s manuscripts on it, which was a lot more convenient than either reading them on my computer or printing them out. The Kindle phone app does not have this feature. I can only read things I’ve downloaded from the Kindle store on it. HOWEVER, I cannot read on my Kindle or from a paper book in a darkened nursery while holding a baby in my arms at 2 am feedings, and that’s where I’ve been doing most of my reading for the past 9 months, so Kindle app on my phone totally wins.(Yes, I know there are backlit e-readers out there.)
And it’s not like I’ve been doing a ton of reading, either. I’ve read a bunch of baby books (baby care, baby sleep, baby brain development, baby eating, baby scheduling — half on an e-reading device, and half on paper) and a few parenting-adjacent non-fiction books (I loved The Panic Virus, by Seth Mnookin, and Unstrange Minds by Roy Richard Grinker, which I bought after meeting both authors at the Annapolis Book Festival). And I’ve read or started reading maybe half a dozen novels, all on my phone app.
That last part is important. Because of the snippety nature my reading time has taken recently, I’ve been more keen on reading non-fiction rather than fiction. You don’t have to worry about wrecking the mood when you read your non-fiction book in one page snippets. If you come back to the story after a week of not reading or at 2 am when your brain is mush, it’s much easier to follow two pages of non-fiction than it is to remember all the intricacies of a fiction plot.
When I pick up a novel after being away from it, I like to flip back a few pages to refresh my memory — a sort of internal, “Last time, in this novel…” But the kindle app on my phone makes that a major hassle to do, since it oh-so-conveniently saves my last place for me. And though flipping back a few pages to reacquaint myself isn’t a major hassle, any other flipping I might need to do to remind me of something that happened before IS. It’s a major hassle to me because none of the “markers” I may remember from whenever I learned this piece of book information is there to help me find it.
For example, say I’m reading on Tuesday night and I come across a passage that mentions that the main character’s aunt was a famous opera singer. Then, on Friday, I am reading and I read that the main character’s love interest has a colelction of opera music. I want to see if the aunt is in that collection, but I can’t remember the name.
In a paper books, I might have remembered that the information was at the top of the left hand page, or that it was about 1/4 of the way into the book (by thickness of the book in my hands). I can easily flip back to the general area and scan the tops of the left hand pages to try to pick up on that info.
However, in an ebook, all I can know is that it’s at the top or bottom of the screen, and it might not even be in the same spot anymore because of the way e-readers render their text. So instead I have to remember the scene it’s in and scan the pages until I find that particular scene, which is MUCH harder to do than with a paper book because you have to turn pages one at a time. Yes, e-readers have a “go to section x” function, but if you don’t know what section you were reading (and I don’t know about you, but I don’t look up how far I am every page) then that won’t help.
I’m not sure if this is an idiosyncrasy due to the way that I, as an individual, read things or what. When I was in high school, I wold often remember information for quizzes based on where the information appeared in our textbooks. In fact, I once got in trouble in biology class because my answers on a quiz were verbatim what it said in the textbook (the question was something like “describe mitosis”). So it’s possible that this only bothers me because I’m a weirdo who remembers information based on where it appears on the page.
(In passing, this is why it has always worked for me when editing my own work to change the font/spacing on my manuscript because it means I can trick myself into looking at stuff with “new eyes” and ALSO why I’m more likely to (unfortunately) catch errors in proof stage than in copyedits.
But that’s the big annoyance I’ve found regarding reading novels on e-readers. Right now, I have 29 novels loaded on my Kindle. I’ve read 3 of them completely: The Secret Garden, Beautiful Creatures, and Anna and the French Kiss. Two of these, it should be noted, were BQ (Before Queenie). And only two others were downloaded BQ. Which means I buy and download a LOT of novels I haven’t read. Now, granted, a few of them I’m not ever going to read, because I’ve read enough of them to know they’re DNF for me.
I’ve also bought several novels in paper since Q, and I haven’t read any of those, because they are never at hand when I have a few spare moments to read, unlike my Kindle books. Though I did break my streak a few days ago with an ARC of Stephanie Perkins’s Lola and the Boy Next Door that Jessica Spotswood was kind enough to lend me. (It was great, and very fitting that the first paper book I read After Queenie was the companion novel to the first novel I read AQ.) Perhaps this signifies a whole new world of paper book reading. I hope so, since i have a bunch that I’m dying to read, including Erica Ridley’s latest, Too Sinful to Deny, an ARC of Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone, and Jo Treggiari’s Ashes, Ashes. Maybe now that Q is pretty regularly sleeping through the night (she gets a pass tonight, poor little teething thing) I can go back to my bedtime reading habit.
But, to be honest, I’m guessing I’ll also go back to paper. I’m not being a Luddite (I don’t think I’ll EVER be able to type that word without giggling again, and, next summer, you’ll all know why) but I do prefer paper, and after almost nine months of being forced to read only on e-format, I think I’ve given it a pretty fair shot.
However, since there are now a whole bunch of books that are ONLY available as ebooks, I’m glad I have a viable option. Before I had my phone (and Kindle), I could only read ebooks as PDFs on my computer, which meant if a book was only E, I never got around to reading it.Now I know I would.
How do you feel about ebooks? Do you have a dedicated e reader or a phone app that you use?
@robin_talley long for twitter. Tell you what — I’ll do a blog post on subject next week.
And so here I am (several weeks late) doing just that.
Writers, like folks of any profession, accumulate a collection of tricks and tools to help them in their work. A plumber will know how to fix a particular kind of clog. A writer will know how to convey a certain piece of story information in a dynamic and interesting way.
Some become so popular that they have names of their own (and entire books devoted to their usage), such as “the MacGuffin” or a “Save the Cat” scene. If I’m having a problem with a scene, I might move it to a more active location, or switch the POV, or perform some other trick that makes it come alive on the page.
A tool I’m particularly fond of is one I like to call “Crying out Loud.”
It works like this. You are trying to write an emotionally-charged scene. Characters are… arguing, or talking, or whatever. (For all values of “whatever.”) And the POV character thinks something rather powerful.
Fine. Okay. Not bad. But how much more powerful would that scene have the potential to become if instead of thinking it, the character actually says those words? The other character then has to respond (or not, which is its own drama and power).
Crying Out Loud accomplishes the following:
1) It deepens the relationship between characters: now they KNOW what the other person is thinking, and how it they would respond to it.
2) It forces change. Whereas before you could stretch the status quo out past the scene, you are now dealing with an entirely different situation. This moves the story forward.
This falls under the same the writerly advice that posits that misunderstandings are false conflict and lazy writing. You know the old adage that stories aren’t interesting if everything could be resolved with a conversation? One way to find out if that’s true is to make the characters have that conversation and see if you’ve still got problems. If so, then you’ve got real conflict. And the reader knows it. So now, instead of the reader sitting there thinking, “Man, why doesn’t she just spit it out already?” She spits it out and has to deal with the consequences and the reader is thinking, “Whoa, now that he knows, what are they going to do now?”
A few years back, I participated at an event with Justine Larbalestier, Cassie Clare, Scott Westerfeld, David Levithan, Alaya Dawn Johnson, and Libba Bray where we all shared some of our most laugh-worthy juvenilia. Today, I have the pleasure (::snerk::) of sharing some more:
(click to embiggen)
Though the piece is not dated, I have good reason to believe I wrote it in fourth grade. I don’t know if I finished it, though I have a vague recollection that it was about the synchronized skating exploits of a group of quadruplets. At the time, I’m pretty sure “Holly” is supposed to be the hero of the piece, though now, looking back at it, I think “Mary” draws a better heart and “Patty” is totally the one I want to go out drinking with. (She thinks outside the box!) Whereas “Holly” seems a bit like a joyless conformist to me.
And no, it has not escaped me that I included a “spelling contest” in a story where I can’t even spell my own name correctly. But hey, clearly I’d just learned how to use the tab function on my mother’s typewriter.
Yes, I said typewriter. I can’t remember the last time I even SAW a typewriter.
Sadly, the rest of the story is long ago lost in the mists of time. However, looking at this now is very curious. I guess I was always drawn to unusual textual elements like drawings and lists. I’ve recently been made aware that some readers don’t like this sort of thing in their book — they want straight ahead, untricky narrative, not to be interrupted with lists, letters, text messages, footnotes, drawings, or other items that remind them they are reading.
To each their own, I suppose. Me, I love that stuff, which is why I’ve put it in 62% of my novels.
But no more drawings, because I cannot draw to save my life, as evinced by Holly’s supposedly “superior” efforts show.
I’ve gotten better at writing in the last 22 years. I have not, however, gotten better at drawing.
A few months ago, I had the great pleasure of meeting Alethea Kontis, an amazing speculative fiction and children’s book writer, and last month, she posted an interview we did on her blog. Due to my crazy schedule, I totally missed linking to it until today. I now rectify my error.
Click here to hear about my favorite food and drinks, my love of Macs, life with baby, and some exclusive news about For Darkness Shows the Stars…
Another killer busy month here. I did another (final) rewrite on my Post-apocalyptic Persuasion book that ate up all of May. I had a slew of houseguests. I hung out with SB, Rio, and Q. I watched my garden wither and ::knockwood:: bounce back.
Writing: Didn’t accomplish any of my May writing goals, since instead I rewrote the ending of my book. But now it’s done. My goal for this month is to finally do short story #3 and get started on a new proposal.
Home: I rearranged my kitchen, and helped SB take out one huge ungainly bush and trim all the others, and finally unpacked and shelved every book in my house. YAY! There wasn’t any *big* change this month, but enough little things to make a difference to me. What happened is once Q started crawling around and I took in the set-up through baby proofing eyes, I realized it was silly to keep all my pretty, fragile china teacups in a cupboard that she could reach with her little baby fingers WHILE displaying on a decorative shelf all of the valves and whatnot of her plastic bottle collection. I don’t know what I was thinking. I blame new-infant sleep deprivation insanity. So, one little switcheroo later:
Pretty, huh? If only it weren’t too hot for tea. My home improvement projects for this month include: finish cleaning out my closet (I skipped pruning last year because it was too depressing while in maternity-wear), babyproof, put in the rocks around the AC units near the patio, clean out the flower garden and replant, and do something about the Ent.
Blog: Sadface. But, I’m already doing better in June!
Quality Time with SB: We took walks every afternoon with Rio and the bebe. It was a whole family time fun thing. We even took the baby swimming for the first time. She loved it!
Rio: See above. She’s still sick. Now the vet thinks it’s some kind of food allergy, which I suspect is related to the fact that Q thinks it’s HILARIOUS to give Rio all her food. Maybe she’s allergic to DHA, which I swear they put in every darn baby food on the market. I found fish oil in Queenie’s YOGURT the other day. Are you kidding me? YOGURT?
Garden: Well, after my pathetic garden post from last week, I redoubled my efforts and I think I may have turned it around. My garden (sans zucchini, which I didn’t plant this year) now looks a lot more like the one from 2010. Yay for tomato food. The plants are higher than my office windowsill now. I also planted a small “garden annex” on the inside of the fence and put three sweet peppers (which are hanging on) and one squash (which I don’t think is) in there. I hope to get some tomatoes next month. Fingers crossed!
I just finished reading ‘Secret Society Girl’ and enjoyed every page and wanted to thank you for writing such a page turner.
I’m writing a book at the moment, as well as working a full time job and I wanted to know if you have any advice in how to find time to write?
Thanks so much for reading. I’m glad you enjoyed the book. How exciting to be writing your first book! I wrote both Secret Society Girl and Under the Rose (as well as four other unpublished manuscripts before that) while working full time. This is how I did it:
Set a goal — either a daily/weekly page goal or a “due date” for your draft. I found that working with a due date meant I would keep my eye on that goal. For me, having the yearly contest of RWA’s Golden Heart was a way to always make sure I had a manuscript to enter for the contest. There are lots of contests. FInd some if that would be a good motivator for you.
Admit that you need to sacrifice in order to reach that goal. Stay home on a Friday night instead of going out with friends, etc.
Get things done in snippets. I would commute by subway, put on headphones, and write to and from my commute to work. I would write during my lunch hour. I would cook in the crockpot so I had time after work to write instead of making dinner.
Fifteen minutes first thing. Set your alarm fifteen minutes early, get up and write for fifteen minutes before doing ANYTHING — eating breakfast, getting dressed, checking your email. I found it would “set” your mind on the book for the day.
Remember, you only need to write ONE page a day to have a finished manuscript at the end of the year. One page a day — you can do that. Get up early, give up a little, try to write in snippets. One page a day.
Recently, I finished the final round of edits on For Darkness Shows the Stars, which took significantly longer to write than every other book I’ve ever written, with the exception of Unpublished Manuscript #4 (otherwise known as The Book I Wrote on a Broken-Screened Alphasmart While Living in a Tent in Oceana). I began FDSTS in January of 2010, which is also the month I found out I was pregnant.
Number one thing I’ve learned: If I ever get pregnant again, schedule a big vacation time into my writing schedule.
I finished a first draft in June of that year. It was… not good. There were growing pains, both on my abdomen and in my attempts to adapt a mature Jane Austen novel to a post-apocalyptic society populated by teenagers. The Austen version relies heavily on romantic conflict derived from not one, but two (perceived) romantic triangles. I didn’t want to write about romantic triangles. I particularly did not want to write about romantic triangles in the way that so widely populates the YA paranormal genre these days, even though that would have been the easy way out. The characters I’d created had bigger problems than romantic rivals. Yes, they were there, but even removed, the conflicts existed. The rivals were symbols of the vast gulf which separated my leads.
Commence draft two, in which I threw out pretty much everything except for the first 50 pages of the book. This should also be called draft 2a-2e, because I kept trying things until I reached a solution I was happy with. I felt like I was on the right path, but I had too much on my plate. There was no way I’d be able to do justice to the story in my head while pregnant, sleepless, and preparing for Q’s arrival. My editor wisely suggested delaying the book. I tearfully agreed.
After Q, after maternity leave, and after I got my writing legs back underneath me, I wrote draft three. It was better. I was even surprised how much stuff I had been able to incorporate from draft one. I sent it to my editor.
She sent back a seven page revision letter.
This time, I threw out about 30 of those first 50 pages. Turns out writing two halves of a book a year apart does not make for the most cohesive whole. For draft four I rejiggered most of the plot, clarified and simplified the worldbuilding, streamlined some structural issues, and completely rewrote the ending. The new draft was 10,000 words longer. Sent it in again.
One page revision letter, plus in-manuscript notes.
Draft five needed a whole new ending. But to get to that ending, I had to do a bunch of rewrites in other parts of the book. Another 5,000 words were added, but it was more like 15,000, since I cut out the broken ending.
And now, here we are. The book is done (save copyedits and proofreading). I’ve even (squeeeeeee) seen a cover comp.
It’s become fashionable in places for writers to boast about how little work they did on a book. “I got the idea for this while I was making dinner and I finished it by bedtime.” Don’t get me wrong, it’s wonderful when you have a “gift” story like that. I’ve written a story I love in two days. But sometimes stories take longer to get right.
And getting it right is the point.
So, if you’re a writer and you have been laboring over your draft and feeling frustrated, and wondering if it’s all worth it when there are others you see who toss off a book every week… it’s worth it. Your book is not their book. Its needs are not the needs of their book. Get your book right.
There were many challenges that went into the writing of this book. It was an adaptation and I felt a strong responsibility to Jane and all of her readers to do it justice. I was working in a new world, in a new voice, and with a complicated, non-linear and multi-faceted structure. And then of course, there was the intervention and stresses of “real life.”
And it was worth it. Because I’m so proud of the result.
Number of plotlines rejected during this process: 5-8 (depending on your metric of measurement)
Length: ~85,000 words
Difference in length between first and final draft: +18,000 words
Parts: 3 (one more than Jane’s)
Chapters: 41
Un-chapters: 20
Pages in manuscript version of draft (Note: will be different than typeset book!): 316
Body count: (guys, this is a Jane Austen retelling) 0
Unicorns: (Jane. Austen.) 0
Zombies: (Jane… oh, wait.) Still 0
Number of main characters invented whole cloth with no correlation to Persuasion: 1
Maximum number of Persuasion characters coalesced into any one FDSTS character: 2
Number of Persuasion characters cut completely because I found their plot lines to be entirely too creepy in the adapted version: 1
Number of all-nighters I pulled while working on this book: 6
Number of human beings I gestated while working on this book: 1
Number of times I accidentally referred to said human being by main character’s name during the revision process of this book: >12
Amount of money I should probably keep in reserve to pay for said human being’s therapy bills once she realizes I call her by the names of the imaginary people in my head: >1 million dollars
I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. Maybe I put the tomatoes in too late? We had a really cold spring with many nights on the border of frost, and I was afraid putting them in would kill them. But they haven’t grown much, and several are dying on me, in the ground. I’ve compost-teaed and watered faithfully — at least, as faithfully as I have every other year.
I’m so disappointed. I don’t know what’s to account for the problems. Everything else (hello weeds!) seem to be growing just fine.
If you look at last year’s garden post, you’ll see I had many big plans — plans for cucumbers and blackberries and lettuces. How did I do?
2010
Berries: None ever fruited, not the strawberries, and certainly not any of the bush berries.(Poor Logan Echollsberries.)
Cucumbers: They grew nicely, but they were really sour. Even the neighbor kid (aged 4) who loves cucumbers, wouldn’t touch them. Maybe they weren’t ripe yet?
Hot peppers: grew fine in the pots. We used these lots.
Sweet peppers: Did not grow fine in the pots. I’m trying them in the ground this year.
Mystery plants that came up in the garden: They were tomatoes. And they were awesome.
In fact, all my tomatoes last year were amazing. I was the envy of all my neighbors, not to mention my inlaws. I had sungold grapes out the wazoo and tons of stoplight cherries and a bunch of slicing tomatoes.
Lettuce: Not doing this again. If you don’t pick them when the leaves are babies, they get big and bitter and unwieldy. And I am not quick enough on the draw for that.
Basil: All grew great. We had so much basil last summer.
Oregano: The one in the pot died, but that’s okay, because the one in my garden came back in a major way (it’s about 1/6 of my current garden).
Cilantro: NOT a pot plant. Now I know.
Mint: Don’t even ask. I’m the only person on the planet who can kill mint.
Zucchinis: Wow. I got about a dozen zucchinis the size of my arm last summer. We got sick of eating them, and then they (conveniently) died.
Yellow squash: Died before we got any.
Rosemary: Died. Not a pot plant, I think.
Sage: Shaded out by the zucchinis.
So, what am I planning on this year?
Tomatoes, and plenty of them! I think, buoyed by the enormous success we had last year, I got a little cocky on my tomato planting. I planted seven (more sungolds, natch, and 3 different kinds of slicing tomato, plus a “chocolate cherry” that sounded fun). In addition, TEN tomato plants came up. So even if htey don’t grow to the heights they did last year, I should have plenty of tomatoes.
The oregano came up from last year, and I planted a bunch more basil. I also planted a bunch more strawberries, but they haven’t been doing anything yet. I put some regular mint and some chocolate mint in the ground, and so far, they haven’t died — the regular mint even looks like it’s growing. The Chocolate mint has definitely sent out shooters, but there isn’t enough to do anything with.
I planted a jalapeno and I have some sweet peppers i plan to put in the ground elsewhere to prevent cross pollination.
I planted one squash plant. My neighbor is going to have enough zucchini for us all.
But I don’t know what to think about my skimpy tomatoes this year. The ground might be underfertilized. I forget the eggshell/tums trick Dragonfly told me about. Bummer. But I didn’t need it last year. I don’t know. Keep your fingers crossed some of these tomatoes come up!
One of the things about Netflix Watch it Now is that I keep coming across old movies from my childhood and watching them while making dinner/folding laundry/cleaning bottles and pump parts. The other day, I came across the Don Bluth cartoon, The Secret of NIMH.
I don’t know anyone from my generation who, confronted with a long list of government health agencies, couldn’t pull NIMH out of the line up due to this movie, or the Newberry award-winning children’s book it was based on (Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH). I’ve never read the book, but those Newberry folks usually know what they’re talking about, so I’m sure it’s great.
(In passing, though I knew the book title had the main characters’ name in it and specifically referenced the rats, rather than the “secret”, I didn’t know until just now that the movie had changed the character’s name from Mrs. Frisby to Mrs. Brisby. I’m guessing because of Frisbees.)
It’s very weird to view beloved old children’s movies from the other side. I actually shouted “no way!” at the screen when I saw in the credits that two of the Brisby children are voiced by Shannen Doherty and Wil Wheaton. I was also a little confused on how “intelligence-boosting” injections made Nicodemus capable of crafting magic crystal balls that can show Mrs. Brisby dramatic re-enactments of what happened to them and Jonathan capable of crafting magic amulets that convey upon the wearer all the powers of Yoda.
(Seriously, the climactic scene with the cinder block is pretty much Yoda and the X-wing in the swamps of Dagoba. The story went from Flowers for Algernon to Star Wars.)
Which is not to say I didn’t love it. Despite how little I remembered about the plot, I was surprised how many imagines I recalled, how many lines I knew by heart. What should that space in my brain be doing instead of remembering all the lines in The Secret of NIMH? I shudder to think.
Also, I might as well let y’all know right now. There’s a character in For Darkness Shows the Stars named Nicodemus. I named him that because of this film.
A few weeks ago, I got involved in a truncated Twitter conversation with writer Robin Talley that went like this:
