VALENTINE'S DAY AUTHOR

SIX MAGIC INGREDIENTS FOR WRITING

By Jackie Kramer

 People are always asking me, what’s the secret of becoming a published author?” Actually, there is no secret, but there are six basic things that will go a long way towards success.

 1. Be a reader. Most writers do this already, but it’s amazing how many people don’t read, think they have a book somewhere in them. Also important is to read in the genre you want to write…read and love it. The market tends to change and sometimes authors find the genre they are famous for has dried up. Many of them will attempt to write to the new market with disastrous results. Do you quit? No, find a way to make the new genre work with your chosen love. After all, do you read only ONE type of book? Unlikely! So if you like to write historical romances and romantic suspense is king, why not write a historical romantic suspense?

2. Learn the craft. Start with Basic English (or whatever is the language of your target audience). Spelling, punctuation, and grammar are YOUR responsibility, not the editor’s. Also, learn the how to plot, how to build characters to care for, how to write believable dialogue. Learn scene and sequel, all about hooks, pro and cons of series, all the “have-to’s” of producing a selling novel.

3. Learn the business of publishing. Not just which editor is with what publisher or which agent is accepting unsolicited manuscripts, but so much more. Should you shoot for traditional or indie? Even if you have an agent, what’s a good contract? And once you’ve sold, what about taxes? What is effective promotion and how much time and money should you invest in it?

4. Persistence. Most important, how far are you willing to go? I’ve heard writers state that if they don’t sell within five years, they’re giving up. Study the history of other authors, friends. Rejections are merely compost, to be considered as a way of improving your writing. Most well-known authors have tons of rejections under their belts. Some even have only one well-known book. The key to writer’s success is to never give up.

5. Belief in yourself. If you don’t believe in yourself, why should anyone else? Okay, there will be days when you feel you can’t do this anymore. Have some chocolate and/or wine (or both) and move past the doubt. If YOU believe you can succeed, then you can!

6. Luck. Yeah, you still have to have a certain amount of luck. That one editor who likes your work. The contest win that puts you in the spotlight. The underdog manuscript that finds an instant crowd of admiring readers. But, like the lottery, to win, you have to buy a ticket. You have to do the other five things so you’re ready with Lady Luck is there to smile on you.

  Jackie Kramer

Jackie Kramer recently retired from over 30 years of working her first love, pediatric nursing, to pursue a career in her second love, writing. She is presently working on indie-publishing her backlist while working on a time-travel romance. Watch for the electronic version of her first book CHRISTMAS BONUS, soon to be available on as many electronic formats as she can learn.

Available soon on Amazon.com

 

The Writer as Superhero

by Bill Kirton

A couple of years back, I wrote a blog about being commissioned to write a non-fiction book. As usual, it swayed back and forth between expressing gratitude for getting any sort of commission at all and moaning about deadlines and time scales. In the end, it led me to claim a sort of parity between writers and superheroes. It was written in a plane on the way home from London.

London’s not my favourite city (Paris is way ahead in that race) but, for a provincial like me, it’s still an exciting, fascinating place to be. The impression everywhere is that things are happening, people are on their way somewhere.  Even the Trafalgar Square tourists and the Regent Street shoppers seem purposeful. Actually, come to think of it, maybe that’s why I prefer Paris. Over there, they stop and sit sipping coffee and Pastis to watch others go by. I know it’s a cliché but they do linger over seemingly endless lunches and, rather than try to catch up with time, they’re savouring it as it passes. It  suits my preference for languor over action.

However, one of the reasons for my London trip was business-related. I was there to meet with a publisher to discuss writing the non-fiction book I mentioned, all 145,000 words of it. It was an interesting, challenging project and, unlike with fiction, there was a guarantee of publication. In the end, as a wee bonus, it turned out to be ‘only’ 110,000 words long but it still meant setting aside my preferred state of languor and working full time to meet the deadline.

It was as I was thinking ruefully about having to give up all my time to the project for the foreseeable future that the notion came to me that the business of writing fits into all the superhero stereotypes. People such as Billy Batson and Clark Kent live along their ordinary lives, lost in the crowd. Suddenly, duty calls and, with a quick detour to a phone box (harder and harder in these days of mobiles/cell phones) or a cry of ‘Shazam’, they’re transformed into an extraordinary being.

It’s the same with writers.

There they are tweeting, trying to remember the lead singer of some forgotten 70s group for a Facebook challenge and generally behaving like all the other feckless mortals around them when suddenly they get the tap on the shoulder from their muse, agent or publisher and Blat! they morph into creators of new universes, using their powers to help others escape the mediocre. Only when the job is done do they switch off their power source or put down their pen and disappear back into the humdrum.

The only trouble is that it takes Captain Marvel and Superman just a few minutes to stop Jupiter crashing into the McDonald’s where some 5 year old kids are celebrating a birthday party. The poor writers have to keep it up for months. At this point, I set aside the comparison because I realised that I was exhibiting symptoms you never see in Batman and the rest – self-pity. But then I got home, opened up the emails and was faced with a nice, polite message from the publisher saying it would be good if the book could be finished by the end of the year. (This was in June.) I resisted the temptation to ask which year he had in mind. But it did put the final nail in the coffin of my superhero comparison.

I must learn to resist the temptation to whinge. You never hear Superman begging Lex Luthor to take a time-out, do you?

Writers' Rules and Breaking Them

When I started writing mystery novels, a number of rules for beginning writers were beat into my thick skull. Here are a few:

• Do not insert yourself as an author in your work, e.g., editorial comments or things that would take the reader out of the story
• Show don’t tell
• Maintain a consistent point of view
• Keep a consistent tense
• Choose a person first or third and stick with it and don’t even consider second person
• Wrap up all the story threads and don’t leave them hanging

These are excellent guidelines for a starting writer, but an experienced writer can violate them knowingly. I just finished reading an intriguing book: If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino. I highly recommend it as a commentary on the publishing and writing world and an entertaining romp through rule violations. The whole story is based on author intrusion and interrupting the story to remind you that you’re a reader and to pull you out of the story. It’s full of telling and lecturing. It jumps from a narrator, to a reader to ten other points of view. It mixes both present and past tense. It shifts from first person to third person and even to the dreaded second person. It presents ten stories that are never completed.

This said it’s a wonderful read. It comments on the vagaries of the publishing industry that we can all relate to. It demonstrates that an experienced writer can violate numerous rules and turn a book into a masterpiece.

Mike Befeler

Pet peeves

by Carola Dunn

Trying to get ms finished as there is now a pub. date (December) which, though far in the future, is not far enough for me.

They've already produced the cover art!

 So here is a link to a blog about "pet peeves" in mysteries.  Chester and I both contributed via DorothyL.

http://istoriabooks.blogspot.com/2013/02/mysterious-monday-pet-peeves-in.html

Do leave a comment about your own particular pet peeves--so that we can try to avoid them! 

Missed Opportunity

By Mark W. Danielson

A couple of years ago I missed an opportunity while addressing a group of aspiring writers.  As I discussed details of a factual White House conspiracy and how it became one of my books, an attractive blonde walked in, listened to a few of my words without ever taking a seat, asked if I honestly believed it, and stormed out when I replied, “yes”.  My only regret was failing to ask the members of the audience to describe what they just observed.  After all, good writers are equally good at observing, and had I taken the opportunity, it is likely the audience may have collectively remembered her hair flip and quick spin as she stormed out, nose high, with a look of disgust from insulting her favorite politician.  In my mind, I still hear her fashion boots stomping down the hall as clear as the day it happened, and I remain amused by her polished act – one I suspect she perfected from years of having things her way.  Then again, I realize my assumption is based solely on her few seconds in the room.  Even so, I feel certain her behavior has echoed some characters’ behavior in my subsequent books.

Although detailed observing is an acquired skill, it becomes habitual if you practice writing what you see.  Viewing the world this way leads to believable scenes and characters.  Next time you find yourself in a public place, note how people speak, smell, gesture, and dress.  Dialects, accents, clothing, and hair styles can help identify where people are from.  Note their shoe heels to get a better picture of the person’s actual height.  If you witness a crime, your power of observation can help identify the culprit.  If you see a suspicious person, note their build, size, voice, gestures, tattoos, and other significant features.  Test your abilities by observing someone for a second or two.  In tense situations, that may be all the time you have.  (Having encountered an armed robber up close, I assure you such memories never fade.)  Now write a scene based upon what you observed.  Doing so will give you an understanding of your personal power of observation and what you can do to improve.

The benefits of enhancing your observation skills are endless.  Once they become a habit, your writing will become spontaneous and require fewer re-writes.        

Cord Literature

by Leighton Gage

If you come to visit us in Brazil, you’ll occasionally see a stand where the offerings look like this:

Literatura de Cordel (lit. “cord literature”) derives its name from the way the wares are often displayed, i.e. hung by a cord, usually with the aid of clothespins.

Such stands are less common in the southern part of the country, but are a feature in many of the fairs and markets of the northeast, principally in the States of Pernambuco, Paraiba and Ceará.

These little booklets are the last survivors of a form of popular literature with which an inhabitant of eighteenth-century Madrid, or nineteenth-century England, would have been quite familiar, but that you’d be hard-put to find elsewhere in the modern world. They contain stories and ballads and are generally produced in black-and-white, illustrated with woodcuts.

Down through the years, the content has taken-on a distinctly Brazilian flavor.

Many of the books deal with the folklore, legends and history of the northeast, subjects like Lampião and his band.

I've previously written about him under the title The Bandit King. And, if you like, you can read that post by going here:

http://murderiseverywhere.blogspot.com/2010/01/bandit-king.html

One of the classics of cord literature, The Arrival of Lampião in Hell, by José Pacheco, is much-prized by collectors.

And a satire on the Brazil’s former president, The Arrival of Lula in Hell has enjoyed a good deal of success.

As to the art, two of the more talented woodcutters are Adir Botelho and José Francisco Borges.

This is Botelho:

And this is a work from Borges, who has had expositions at both the Louvre and the Smithsonian:

Determining Time of Death

by Jean Henry Mead

The rule of thumb in determining when a person dies is that the body begins to stiffen and rigor mortis sets in about two hours following death, according to Lee Lofland in his book, Police Procedurals & Investigations. The facial muscles move downward first, then the lower muscles of the body.

As rigor mortis sets in the body becomes stiffer until it’s completely rigid, which happens within eight to twelve hours. As soon as the heart stops pumping, gravity takes over and pulls the blood supply to the lowest parts of the body where the tissue takes on a purplish tint with the appearance of bruising. Laymen who find bodies often think the victim has been badly beaten, particularly if it’s found face down. The face will have also taken on the purplish hue.

Blood pooling reaches its peak within eight to twelve hours and deteriorating blood vessels cause blood to leak into surrounding tissue. Lividity, or discoloration of the skin, is set within six to eight hours and can shift from one area of the body to another if the body is moved, which indicates to investigators that the victim died in another location.

Body temperature is also an indication of time of death. The normal body temperature is about 98.6. When a person dies the body temperature drops 1.5 degrees per hour until it is the same as its surroundings. Therefore, if the victim is found in a room with a temperature of 75 degrees and the body registers 86.6, death occurred approximately eight hours earlier.

Variables occur if the victim is found in the snow or on ice. The body cools much quicker under those circumstances just as it would cool slower in a hot tub or on the desert. Investigators take careful note of the surroundings so that pathologists can factor in the circumstances when determining the time of death.