Sequel days

Ahhh, I am loving writing my sequel. There is one monkey wrench to it, though. How much do I remind people of what happened previously?

I’ve seen books with two or three page synopses of what came before. And I’ve seen books that expect you to either remember well or have reread the previous books. I think I fall somewhere in between, dropping reminders of what happened as we go. After all, characters are going to be thinking of previous events sometimes, to compare what’s currently happening or think about how it all goes together, but if a person who was writing a long series kept doing that, their entire book would become rumination.

How do you like to do it or see it done? Give you as synopsis and let you go? Never mind the synopsis, your memory is fine? Do you reread a first book before you read a sequel? How do you like to drop hints at past events into your writing?

Also, for my birthday, I want this cake:

Courtesy of Cake Wrecks.

I’m sort of here

After all the work I’ve been doing on my sequel, I’m sort of written out, but I’ll try to scrape together a blog post for you. ^_^ It might be difficult, however, as we’re having lovely weather here right now, and it’s soooo hard not to be out in it.

I was reading an internet post the other day (I can’t remember where) and it was talking about cliched beginnings of novels. Specifically, it was talking about sci-fi/fantasy beginnings, but I know that all genres have cliches that we writers are taught to avoid, but that still make it into very successful novels written by brilliant authors. Nevertheless, I was wondering what beginnings you thought were cliches. I’ve thought of two to get you going:

Opening with a dream
A prologue that will be difficult to understand until the end of the book

Now, I really don’t mind either of these. I think agents and such just quote them as something they’re sick of seeing because they read so many openings. I know there are more. Throw ‘em out here!

Whew!

Sorry I haven’t been around, both on my blog or yours. I’m really pushing forward on my sequel because I’m going to be gone from my writing group for a couple of weeks. I’ll be back probably after Monday when I hand over a whopper of a submission to my group. See everyone then!

Waiting in line

We have one big water bowl or all four pets, and I laugh out loud when they form a line for it.

It’s never a very orderly line. JJ, my oldest cat, always cuts to the front, and since the dogs are afraid of him, they don’t make a fuss. He will only yield his place to Roxie, my little female cat, and the dogs won’t try to take her place because of JJ.

Roxie’s a line-cutter, too, but if she wants to get in front of a dog that’s already drinking, she’ll sit next to them and gently tap on their heads. She doesn’t use her claws, just pats them like she’s petting them, and after a second, they get so freaked out that they move out of the way. The dogs themselves don’t cut; one will wait patiently until the other is finished before taking her turn.

Roxie’s pat-pat way of cutting reminded me of a little old lady in Japan who cut through crowds by tapping the person in front of her on the back. (She did this to me and then I watched her go through the crowd ahead.) She tapped me in the small of the back with her knuckle, and she was so short I couldn’t see her over my shoulder, so when I turned around, she slid past me while I was sideways. I watched her move all the way to the front of a very dense crowd like that.

Why am I going on about all this? I’m thinking of culture in all its intricacies. Even my pets seem to have a mini culture with rules and a pecking order, all for various reasons. No one called out the little old lady, even though cutting in line seemed like a big deal in Japan. She was elderly and clever, and I think people were amused by her more than anything. I know I was.

Everything I know about animals tells me that the biggest and strongest should rule, or at least the smartest, but it’s little JJ, my 10 lb elderly cat, who pushes everyone else around in my house. Polly, my largest lab at over 75 lbs, could kill him easily, but I’ve never had to yell at a dog to leave JJ alone. He doesn’t hesitate to use his claws. In my little pack, the meanest is in charge, and he weighs less than everyone else.

When I create a society from scratch, I try to make up social codes and mores that explain why people behave how they do, even though those explanations rarely make it in the actual text. And I think being around micro societies like my pets’ have taught me to think outside the box where societies are concerned. The biggest and most powerful might not always rule. If it’s a medieval or Renaissance sort of society, women can be on equal footing with men (or like in Melanie Rawn’s Exiles series, the dominant sex) as long as there’s plausible history behind it. And we might forgive our elderly or our clever as long as they amuse us. Hmm, now I might have to create a culture that favors humor over everything. The funniest is in charge…

Do you pull your made-up societies from those around you? Does your faraway past or future look just like a specific culture we have now? If you write in the present day and in your area, do you use the cultural rules you grew up with or try to look closer at modern behavior?

Bits and bobs

I don’t have a cohesive thought today. Ha! So I’m going to throw a few things out there.

NanoWriMo is coming. Are you ready? My username is zendra if you wanna friend me. And if it’s a race you want, I guarantee I’ll make you sweat. ^_^

What’s your opinion of -ing verbs? To be cut mercilessly like anything ending in -ly? ^_^ I find I use -ing a lot in action sequences.

Maria Zannini is going on a blog tour. I’ll be updating you on where she is, or you can follow her blog yourself.

And there is a lot of swearing on this blog, but I loved it all the same. I originally got the link from Epbot, which is geek girl heaven.

I’m now hard at work on my sequel. (Heh, makes me sound pregnant.) Thanks for the support, everyone. You guys are boss.

Sequeling

I said I’d never never do it again. Why have an entire trilogy no one wants to represent, I said. Why spin my wheels, I asked. It’s wasting time. It does no one any good. It just makes me sad…. I said all this, I know.

And you know what? It’s complete bollocks.

I like the worlds I’ve created. I’m proud of them. My writing group and my family want to read more stories about these worlds and these characters. I’ve got tons of notes and even a first draft. I’m writing a sequel.

The third book in a trilogy, actually. Many moons ago, I wrote a book called Paladins of the Storm Lord. It’s about a spaceship crew who gets thrown off course, develops super-human abilities and decides to be gods over the colonists they’re transporting. The bulk of it takes place on the colonists’ planet 250 years later when an epic catastrophe of the gods’ doing makes people begin to question their faith.

A couple years after I wrote Paladins and rewrote it….and rewrote it again, I wrote The Third Level, a sequel that I liked even better than the first. By then I knew these characters and what they were capable of. I enjoyed pushing them, mutating them and making them grow. Last year, for my nano, I wrote the rough draft of the third in my trilogy and now I’m fleshing it out, something I swore I wouldn’t do again.

So why now? Well, besides novel love, there’s also the hope that comes with e-books. If no publisher ever expresses an interest in these three books, even if another one of my books gets published, I can release these on my own, just to see them out there. That makes me happy and puts to bed those “spinning-my wheels” feelings.

^_^

Have you written a sequel? Do you ever plan to even if no one seems interested in Book 1? Would you ever write one if your beta readers wanted to know what happens next?

You’re a spec fic fan

Even if you didn’t know it. Speculative fiction is often generalized as “highly-imaginative fiction”. Within its boundaries, you find science fiction, fantasy, horror and every mix and mash-up from paranormal to dystopian.

I love it when I say I write spec fic, and people frown, shake their heads and mutter, “I’m not a fan,” or “I don’t usually like that sort of thing.” What they really mean is they don’t want to be grouped with the kids at the Star Trek cons. They don’t want spaceships or dragons. They equate fandom with not having a life.

But they’re spec fic fans, I guarantee it. You don’t have to be able to debate the best Enterprise captain to be a spec fic fan. You don’t have to know what Color Spray is or be able to list just how many times Jason came back. X-files and Lost were both spec fic shows, as was Alias when they introduced the mystical box thingy.

Twilight is spec fic, and so is Harry Potter. Just because it’s written for kids or teens doesn’t exclude it. If you loved A Wrinkle in Time or James and the Giant Peach, you’re a spec fic fan. And all the new praise for The Hunger Games is praise for spec fic.

Even faced with all this evidence, I’ve had people turn up their noses. “I only read literary fiction,” they say. Well, literary fiction abound with spec fic. Farenheit 451, 1984, and Frankenstein are all spec fic. Shakespeare dabbled in it all the time. (Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, just to name two. Oh, come on, Hamlet’s got a freakin’ ghost as a character!) And lets not get started on Arthurian legends or Beowulf. Anything with that many monsters and supernatural critters is definitely spec fic. Age makes no difference.

The odd, the unexpected, the extraordinary — the highly imaginative. Far out technology, alien races, dystopian/utopian societies, superheroes, magic and mysticism, the delving into the unexplained, speculative fiction explores them all. Don’t look down on that Star Trek kid. As tastes go, you’re probably living right next door.

I know many of you are already fans of speculative fiction, but if you couldn’t admit it before, can you admit it now? ^_^

What form or art or entertainment do you like that someone once turned his/her nose up at? Did the turning of the nose change your tastes?

The dogs don’t mind a mess

My husband and I were at Denny’s the other day, and this group of young men came in and approached the podium to put their name on the waiting list. The three of them looked 18 or so, definitely freshman. The woman behind the counter said, “Three?” They nodded. “Name?” she asked.

Crickets.

They shuffled their feet and scratched the back of their heads and glanced at one another, all signs of embarrassment. The hostess glanced at all three, finally settling on one who mumbled, “Um, Blake or whatever.” When the hostess said, “Pardon?” he had to repeat his name, and I swear he even got a little red.

I watched all this with great interest of course, partly because there was nothing else to do, but also because behavior interests me. These guys were embarrassed! All three of them and for what? The hostess looked to be in her mid-forties, so I don’t think it was pretty-girl-syndrome. There wasn’t a gaggle of teenage girls in the vicinity. I suddenly had the impression that none of them had to do this sort of thing before, put their name on the list at a restaurant. Their parents had probably done it in the past, and now they were embarrassed to be doing it themselves.

Speaking up in public hasn’t embarrassed me in years, so I tried to think of what still does, and that led me to think of when I write an embarrassed character. I’m embarrassed if people drop by and my house is a mess. Since my husband and my dogs don’t really care, I’m a sporadic housekeeper at best. Never had to write that.

But all those little childish things like talking to strangers or to a member of the opposite sex or being seen in public with my parents, those are all gone. I’ve written teenage characters who get embarrassed with pretty-girl/boy-syndrome before, but I’ve forgotten all the rest of that stuff like the potential petrification that comes with simply telling the hostess your name is Blake…or whatever.

I admire all of you who can truly capture the voice of a generation other than yours. I don’t have children and don’t hang around people that much younger than myself, so I’d forgotten how potentially embarrassing life could be to a teen or a child, especially a child, now that I think of it. Since other children will laugh at anything, mercilessly, just falling over on the playground was a incident humiliating enough to make one want to change schools. If I tripped and fell among my peers, I think all I’d get would be a chorus of, “Are you all right?” and hands helping me up, waiting for me to make a joke before they laughed slightly and we all went about our day. I guess I’m lucky the children in my stories are mostly in the background.

What about you? Do you still sweat the small stuff? Do you find that nothing embarrasses you? Are you amused when kids think they’ll absolutely DIE if something embarrassing happens? Do you use any of this in your writing?

Tired of this ride

The publishing ride. I’m sick of it. It’s like a week-long line at an amusement park. In the sun. Where the chains that divide the line into a bullpen are too weak to sit on and too hot to lean on. You can see the people coming off the ride, and they look so happy. They’re so excited. So even though you’re tired and hot, you’re still happy just to be there.

And then you get to where the ride is supposed to be. And instead of going on the happy-fun-published ride, your ride is in pieces, smashed cars, torn up tracks, the works. The conductor waves your forward…and promptly kicks you hard in the crotch.

But before you go, he hands you a card for a free ride, and by the time you get back to where the line started, your crotch has stopped aching, and you can see the happy people for whom the ride has worked, and you think, “I’ll just try again!”

And again. And again. *sigh* I’m sick of this ride. I’ve written three books to what I’d happily call completion, and I really like them. I might tinker with them now and again, but I don’t think it’s making them “better.” My writing group has helped me with my query letters to the point where they’re made of awesome. I don’t see why agents aren’t willing to rep my work. Hell, some agents have even complimented my work. It’s just “not for them.”

Just to get one of them out there, I think I’ll put it up for free on my website. Free to download to computers, and I’ll try and figure out how to get it on e-readers without spending an arm and a leg. And if I do incur some little cost I need to make back, I’ll charge the minimum I have to for a Kindle or Nook edition, a dollar or something. I have to get my technically skilled husband to help me figure this out, but I think it sounds like a good start. I always say that the reason I write is to one day have someone who has no obligation to me pick my book up and like it. Maybe this way they will.

What do you think? Would you take a gander if it were free? And yes, I know, you might feel sort of obligated to do so since you follow my blog, but I’d be glad if even a few of you actually liked it and maybe told a friend. Does anyone know someone who went this route? Have you ever thought about it?

Ker-bleh!

That’s the noise you make when things are kind of crummy. The good news (for me, that is) is that I wrote a new short story. The bad is that I feel like crap. I think I’ve got some kind of stomach thing, which is why I’ve been mostly absent, both from this blog and from yours. Ker-bleh again.

My friend Kena (who has her own writing blog) is giving writing at home a shot right now, as she’s in a new city and looking for a job. In the meantime, she’s giving full time writing a go and found just how easy it is to watch T.V. ^_^ So, I told her how I write those days when I’m just not feeling it. I make myself “earn” my non-writing time. If I want to watch a 30-min program, I have to write for an hour, two hours for a 1hr program, and so on. It works fine when I’m not sick as a dog. I think the only thing I could write now would be ker-bleh and other words like it.

Well, I hope that helps those of you who might be struggling with the same thing. I’m going blog visiting now, and I’ll try to write something in your comments other then blargh.

How do you motivate yourself to write when it’s tough?