Writers in the Storm

Laura Kaye

Most authors struggle with how to balance their writing time against their social media efforts. They feel that the more time they spend promoting their books on Facebook, Twitter, their blog, or other blogs, the less time they have to devote to writing. Some even go as far as wishing they could wash their hands of the whole business end of their writing career and concentrate on what they love best—writing books to put in readers’ hands.

I’ll admit, I’ve had these feelings sometimes, too. After all, there are a finite number of hours in the day. But I’ve come to look at it all a bit differently. I’m often asked how I juggle multiple book contracts and an active blog and an active social media presence and multiple promotional efforts all at once, and I’ve thought and thought about an answer that would be more useful than “I don’t sleep very much.”

I think I just might have found an answer that is more useful: I don’t see social media as a burden, and I don’t approach the business end of my writing career as being different or separate from the writing end of it.

Why do you write books? I write because, well, because I have to write. I can’t not write. But I also write because I hope my words and stories will bring a few hours of joy, happiness and pleasure to my readers’ lives. I do it for my readers. After all, if they weren’t out there reading and enjoying, I couldn’t do what I do. Therefore, when I think of social media, I see an opportunity to talk to and hang out with my readers and friends, not something burdensome or obligatory I have to do.

I adore seeing how readers will react to my excerpts or status updates or posts or weird observations I tweet. Online reader feedback is the best kind of instant gratification, and I find it fuels me. It’s fun and serves as a great break from writing or a way to productively fill ten minutes I couldn’t use for other activities.

• Writing (X%)
  • Plotting, Writing, Revising, Pitching, Submitting, Editing
• Business (X%)
  • Promotion (free), Marketing (paid), Administrative tasks

 Social media only distracts from your writing career if you see it as not being central to your writing career.

Similarly, I’ve learned that the business end of my writing career is just as important as the writing end. In fact, I’ve learned they’re equally part of the whole experience. In fact, for me, I’d fill in the X’s above with the number 50—as in, I estimate that, on average, I spend approximately 50% of my time doing writing-related tasks and 50% of my time doing business-related tasks.

When I’m on deadline, the percentage skews more heavily toward writing. And when I’m in the midst of a new release, it skews more heavily toward business—and I don’t let myself feel guilty or unproductive about that at all. Because, either way, both activities are central to my career. Indeed, these days, most authors can’t be fully successful without doing both. Therefore, social media only distracts from your writing career if you see it as not being central to your writing career.

I’m not talking about basic procrastination here (I excel at that, doncha know?)—yes, of course, procrastinating on the interwebz might thwart your writing goals for the day. Instead, I’m talking about shifting the way you think about how the time spent on social media, blogging and other promotional efforts relates to your career itself.

I think attempting a shift in attitudes about the time spent on social media has the potential to make it more enjoyable, more productive, more consequential, and less overwhelming. Of course, sometimes you just have to say nope, no time for Facebook today! But that’s a different thing from saying Oh, gawwwwd, guess I have to go post on Facebook and twitter now (cue long-suffering sigh). LOL

So, what do you think? Could a shift in perspective make the business end of your career easier to handle, manage, accept, and enjoy?

Thanks for reading!

About Laura Kaye:

Laura is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of over twenty books in contemporary and paranormal romance and romantic suspense. Growing up, Laura’s large extended family believed in the supernatural, and family lore involving angels, ghosts, and evil-eye curses cemented in Laura a life-long fascination with storytelling and all things paranormal. She lives in Maryland with her husband, two daughters, and cute-but-bad dog, and appreciates her view of the Chesapeake Bay every day.

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About Laura’s new release, Hard to Come By (Hard Ink #3, 11/25/14)

 Caught between desire and loyalty…

Derek DiMarzio would do anything for the members of his disgraced Special Forces team—sacrifice his body, help a former teammate with a covert operation to restore their honor, and even go behind enemy lines. He just never expected to want the beautiful woman he found there.

When a sexy stranger asks questions about her brother, Emilie Garza is torn between loyalty to the brother she once idolized and fear of the war-changed man he's become. Derek’s easy smile and quiet strength tempt Emilie to open up, igniting the desire between them and leading Derek to crave a woman he shouldn’t trust.

As the team’s investigation reveals how powerful their enemies are, Derek and Emilie must prove where their loyalties lie before hearts are broken and lives are lost. Because love is too hard to come by to let slip away…

Buy at Amazon | Amazon.ca | Amazon UK | B&N | iTunes | Kobo

Hard to Come By on Goodreads

 And don’t miss the other Hard Ink books, now available:

Hard As It Gets
Hard As You Can
Hard to Hold On To

Tiffany Yates Martin

Before we turn the blog over to Tiffany Yates Martin, we want to announce the winners of Chuck Sambuchino's Worst Storyline Ever! contest.

Winners:

1. Laurie Michele - "Nudist cowboy rides his faithful horse across the Wild West, fighting crime and saddle rash."

2. Therese Calegari - "Defeated by the love of her life in the World Knitting Championships, Mary seeks to rebuild her shattered dreams of being famous by piloting an airplane made entirely of wool, and finds more than she bargained for when a local sheep farmer is waiting on the wing."

3. Rebecca White - "Dabney, a deaf-mute Duclair duck, witnesses a gang homicide in Chinatown, and must race to learn the difficult International Sign Language for Deaf Ducks and communicate the name of the despicable perpetrator to his fianceé and sometime sleazy topless dancer, Hoa duck Daphne, before he is kidnapped and turned into Peking duck by the Gang of Hungry Four."

Honorable Mention:

Hayley I - "When three sisters fall in love with two Martians on prom night, only the sisters’ ex-boyfriends, a trio of tambourine players struggling to make it in Toronto’s unpredictable tambourine scene, can stop the playboy aliens from winning hearts and destroying the world with the helium gas gun secretly stored in the prom king crown by an ancient Martian evil."

Pam Stucky - "A young man, who has never recovered from the pain and anguish of losing his childhood pet rock, forms a rock band in which the band members pass out rocks to the audience at every concert."

David E Markey - "In a world of puppets one marrionette and one tubesock with googly eyes will need to band together to rescue the Princess Macrame from the clutches of the vile Lord Pleather and his horde of yarn-eating mothmen all the while having to overcome their own biases and mutual distrust all before Dark Lord can unknit the world."

Congratulations to the winners, and thanks, everyone, for entering!

Take it away, Tiffany!  

NaNoWriMo: Now What?

Congratulations—if you participated in last month’s National Novel Writing Month challenge (or even if you didn’t), hopefully you’re looking at a finished first draft that’s full of potential.

Now what?

Don't make the mistake of the writer who, after last year’s challenge, had his NaNo manuscript uploaded and available on Kindle one week later. Regardless of how good your story may be, in the inimitable words of Ernest Hemingway, “The first draft of anything is sh**.”

Just as a sculptor wouldn’t have the clay delivered and call it art, the raw material of your first draft is unlikely to be publishable (or sometimes even readable). But that’s not to say that you don’t have the makings of an excellent novel on your hands—if you take the time to do the real work of writing: editing and revising.

Evaluating what you have in your manuscript and knowing what to do to make it the best it can be can sometimes be the hardest part of writing—much harder than the initial sexy, satisfying burst of creativity that is a first draft. If first drafts are the heady honeymoon period, revisions are the marriage—when you can’t rely on the excitement of the new anymore and it’s time to put in the work to make sure you’ve created something that can go the distance.

But what do you do first?

Before anything else, step away. Take a break for at least a few days, ideally longer. You’ve been submerged in the manuscript for a month (or more); you need to surface and catch some fresh air before diving back down.

When you do come back to it, start with an objective read: reading your manuscript as you would any other book, without trying to fix anything, just immersing yourself in the story and reading it start to finish.

Now it’s time to ask yourself some questions about the three main tent poles of story: character, plot, and stakes.

Character:

Readers care about what happens in your story only insofar as it affects characters you have made us care about, so regardless of how “plot-driven” your story may be, or how exciting its events, we don’t care what happens unless we care about whom it’s happening to.

• Begin by asking a few questions about your characters:Who is your protagonist(s)? As remedial as it sounds, this isn’t always cut-and-dried.       Especially in certain genres—women’s fiction, for instance—there may be multiple main characters, or the story may be a pastiche of tales knitted together, with no clear “hero” or engine of the story in the first-draft stage. Or the main character(s) may be fuzzy or not well developed generic “types” rather than three-dimensional characters who pop off the page. Write down your protag(s) and, for each one, a few defining character traits, what makes her/him unique. Do the same with your antagonist(s).
• What do they want? Do all main characters have a strong, clearly defined goal? Is their motive for achieving it strong and evident?
• What keeps them from that goal?
• How are they changed in the process of getting it (or not getting it)?
• Is what happens to the protagonist caused or worsened by the antagonist?
• Is every main character essential? Differentiated?
• Do your protagonists have flaws, and do your antagonists have redeeming qualities? One-dimensional characters make for dull reading.

Plot:

Before you begin revising the manuscript, I suggest you create what I call an “X-ray” or blueprint for the story—essentially an outline. Basically, make a bulleted or numbered list of the main plot developments—for each one, you will have just a line or two at most. This is just a sketch, an X-ray of sorts of the story so you can see its “bones” more clearly without the “flesh” of the whole narrative covering it. Now it’s time for more questions:

• Are there holes in the plot line? Perhaps you see you need to show how C leads to D, or X leads to Y.
• Does each and every development accomplish something—develop character or further plot—in a way that is tied into the central, overarching plot? (If not, chances are it doesn’t belong in the story.)
• Can you identify the story’s “inciting event”—that thing that sets this entire story in motion? If not, find that event. If you do have it, but it appears well into the outline, consider how to begin the story at that point, rather than before it.
• Can you identify the story’s arc? Is there a clear beginning, middle, and end?
• Examine why each plot event happens. Is it realistic? Believable?
• Is there any easier or better way out of the mess for your characters? (The answer must be no.)
• Are there loose ends? Unanswered questions? Anything unresolved?
• Any unmotivated actions, or deus ex machinas (unsupported resolutions to the plot)?

Stakes:

What separates a compelling book from one readers will put down is keeping the stakes high throughout the story. I used to be an actor, and the best piece of acting advice I ever got was that great actors make the strongest possible choice in every situation, however big or small. If a character leaves the room, is he simply leaving in accordance with the stage directions, or is he furiously retreating? If a man kills his wife’s lover, is it stronger if he does it out of wounded pride alone, or also a desperate, painful unreturned love for her? The latter is stronger, and therefore more dramatic and compelling. The same holds true in fiction. Characters must want something desperately, and there must be consequences—meaningful ones—if they don’t achieve that goal. When looking at your first draft, consider whether you have maximized every motivation, made the strongest possible choice in every moment for every character. That’s what makes for great, memorable fiction.

Now that you have the tools for approaching your edit, it’s time to go back in and start addressing what you’ve discovered in the above “dissection” of your main elements of story—filling in gaps, deepening motivations, raising stakes, building character, etc.

In future articles, we’ll talk about specific ways to execute these elements of craft, and examine other key story concepts, like tension/suspense, show versus tell, point of view, and flabby verbiage.
And though you may feel you’re standing at the foot of what can often seem like Revision Mountain, take time to acknowledge your accomplishment so far—writing a full first draft is no small achievement, and you’re well on your way to a finished novel you can be proud of.

What's the hardest part about approaching an edit for you? What techniques or "tricks" do you use when approaching a revision?
 

 Tiffany Yates Martin has worked in the publishing industry for more than twenty years, currently through her editorial consulting company, FoxPrint Editorial, helping authors hone their work to a tight polished draft. As a developmental editor she works both directly with authors as well as through major publishing houses.

As a freelance copyeditor and proofreader, she has worked with major New York publishers, among them Random House, the Penguin Group, and HarperCollins. She holds a BA in English Literature from GSU and is a member of the Editorial Freelancers Association.

Under the pen name Phoebe Fox, she is the author of the Breakup Doctor series (Henery Press); the second in the series, Bedside Manners, will be released in March of 2015.

James Preston

 We write to entertain, to share our experience, or because we have a story that simply must be told. But it's not easy. Let's be honest. If you studied piano for the same number of hours you put into your writing you could at least pound out "Jingle Bells" at the company party. Writing fiction is different. It's a solo job. I suppose you could stand up at the party and say, "Listen up, here's the first chapter of my new paranormal romance," but I wouldn't recommend it.

My parents wanted me to be athletic, so I played right field in whatever comes before you're old enough for Little League. After a while my dad said, "Maybe the kid needs glasses." He was right, but the glasses didn't help my fielding. Then it was clarinet. I could make a duck noise. Then piano. After a while the teacher told my parents I needed to find something else.

Meanwhile, I wrote a poem that the local paper published, below the fold, but on the front page. It was about a Christmas tree the day after Christmas when it's out in the alley waiting for the trash man, and it's told from the POV of the tree. Hey, I was twelve, getting an early start on teen angst, so cut me some slack.

What is it that attracts us to the writing life?

Have you ever asked yourself why you do it? If you're like me -- and I know we are alike in some respects or you would not be reading Writers in the Storm -- you have on occasion wondered if all the effort and pain that goes into writing fiction is worth it. Usually this comes at 2:00 am when you're awake, looking at your story and wondering what happens next.

We went to New Orleans with a bunch of friends from college and I spent two afternoons in the hotel room, working. Yeah, my friends are all, "Whoa, we found a dessert that weighs in at 1,200 calories! Come help us eat this monster." I had a deadline. In Vegas, my friends are feeding the slots and I'm in the coffee shop, typing. Sometimes, "Why am I here" comes when you're out in public, on display as the captive writer.

That was me a couple of weeks ago at Bouchercon in Long Beach. Six hundred writers, maybe twice that many fans. I was asked to do three appearances -- two group events and one stand-up solo presentation. And it was great! For the first time, as soon as I walked in, eight or nine people I had never met came up to me and said they recognized me, either from a previous appearance or from a dust jacket photo. Wow! Walking with my feet off the ground made me taller.

Then it was time to go to work. And that led to "Why am I here?" First there was something called "Author Speed Dating." I'm not making this up. I scrambled around to find out what speed dating was.

(Side Note: I guess I lead a sheltered life. How many of you have heard of speed dating? Has anybody done it? If you have, are you willing to talk about it? I’m curious.)

Speed dating works like this: they fill a room with tables and serve a continental breakfast. Everybody but the writers gets to eat rolls, drink coffee, and chat. The writers pair up and move from table to table. Each writer gets two minutes, for their "why you should date me" pitch.  "Hi, I'm James Preston and I write the Surf City Mysteries. They're really neat you should buy several copies. I'm speaking at noon." Then they ring a bell and you move on to the next table, where people are drinking coffee and chatting. My partner was bestselling author named Allison Brennan, who was a really good sport about the whole thing.

At noon I was scheduled for an Author Spotlight, a one-man offering scheduled for twenty minutes. After hyping it to more than 200 people at breakfast I thought it would be a slam dunk to have a nice-sized group. I should have known when I got to the room a few minutes early. The guy ahead of me had one person in his audience, and it was me. So we chatted a while and he left.

And there I was, with my audience disguised as empty chairs. Okay, in fairness, the room was in another part of the complex and very hard to find. At five after I started talking to the chairs. Hey, I'd rehearsed this thing, and dammit, I was going to do it! The presentation was about social media in general,  “Facebook and Twitter and Blogs, Oh My!”

A minute later six people rushed in, sorry they had been unable to find the room. As it turned out I drew one of the larger audiences for the Spotlight. Fans at the conference recognized me. That was nice, and I was selling books. My last event of Bouchercon was Men of Mystery. There were fifty of us on stage. We each got a minute to talk about our work, and I got to share the stage with luminaries like Barry Eisler. It was a good show and we drew a huge audience.

I had a good time, learned a lot, and sold books. I have appeared at several conferences and thought I'd share some of what I have learned.

Conference Tips

• Eat before you go. Before a presentation stick to something light. Carry energy bars in your bag.
• Get there early and find whatever room(s) you will be presenting in. Also locate bathrooms.
• Travel light! The conference will give you a bag (good) but it may be full of books (heavy).
• Water is heavy! You can usually find drinking fountains outside of restrooms, and most good hotels will have ice water in the meeting rooms. On the other hand, it’s good to have water to sip if you are going to talk for an extended period. Carrying water is a judgment call. I usually do.  Room temperature water is better if you are speaking.
• Carry a small pad of paper to capture names and emails. Pocket-sized has served me best. And of course, your own business cards.
• Finally, remember you are working. You are not there to have a good time. Listening to your favorite authors is great, but meeting new readers and talking about your work is better.

So why do we do it? Well, as far as Bouchercon, I met fans and got to interact with them.

There are the standard reasons for writing: we want to share our experience; we want to provide entertainment, and so on. But, you know what? Under it all, when you peel back the layers -- we write our stories because we want to see how they come out.

What are your conference experiences? Do you know any tips I've missed? And finally...what do you know about Speed Dating?

About James

 James R. Preston is the author of the award-winning Surf City Mysteries. His books have been selected for inclusion in the California Detective Fiction Collection at the Bancroft Library, one of the libraries at UC Berkeley. James' novella, Crashpad, will be published next year by Stark Raving Group. See bookxy.com for more information.

The newest Surf City Mystery, Sailor Home From Sea, will be launched on Saturday, December 13, 2014 at 2:00 pm at Book Carnival—348 S. Tustin Ave, Orange CA 92866.
714 538-3210
Annesbookcarnival.com
Stop in, we’d love to see you!