An update on the book I’ve been working on, which has nicely settled into the title THAT MURDER FEELING. The most recent feedback has been that the story remains confusing in the opening pages and so I’ve been re-writing the early chapters, all of which has me thinking about beginnings.
There’s a lot riding on opening sentences. They need to grab attention, establish the setting, hint at what’s to come. It’s the front door, ajar. Come on in, it says.
I tend to write the whole thing, start to finish, then edit away until the ending’s just right, the middle’s not saggy, the unnecessary stuff has been trimmed away — BUT the first couple of chapters, they’re the last to fall into place. Maybe they’re too wordy, written before I settled into the character’s voice. Or there are threads set in motion that turned out to be unneeded by the time I typed THE END.
Mainly, though, it’s something else. When you write speculative fiction, the reader needs a sense as to what kind of unordinary world lies beyond that front door. The setting, the rules, the stakes. Best delivered not in a wordy information dump, but with a drip-drip of detail that moves things along while leaving some (hopefully intriguing) questions unanswered.
It’s a bit of a balancing act.
The Rube Goldberg Machine
A novel is a chain reaction, a Rube Goldberg machine, a marble run, one thing leading to another.
For example, not a story:
Jane followed the hooded figure into the woods. And then she caught up with it. And then the suspect confessed to being the thief and handed over the jewels in his pocket. And then Jane escorted him to jail.
Story:
Jane followed the hooded figure into the dark woods, treading softly. BUT, distracted by the argument she’d just had with her mother, she forgot to mute her cell phone and a loud ring broke the night silence. And SO, as she fumbled at her pocket to get to the phone, the thief fled off into the maze of trees. Yup, it was her mother, calling again. This was the kind of thing they didn’t teach you in private investigator courses; she’d just finished hers not two weeks ago.
Jane looked up and realized that the thief wasn’t the only one who’d heard the ring. “Mom,” she whispered into the phone, the wolf’s growl raising the hairs on the back of her neck, “I’m going to have to call you back.”
Links that add up to story: But. However. So. Therefore.
(Not and then.)
The next link in the chain? Maybe a nice park ranger who’s good with wolves — call him Rick — makes an appearance to chide Jane for disturbing his animals, and we’re off on a romantic subplot.
The Push
If a story/plot is a chain reaction, made up of but and therefore links, what starts that chain reaction? Put simply, a complication in an initial set-up. In the Rube Goldberg machine, it’s the initial push of the button, the tipping of a lever, whatever it is that says GO before gravity and momentum take over. Jane’s out there following a thief in her first official case and things go wrong: The phone goes off, she fails to catch up with her quarry, there’s a wolf, and she meets Rick.
The later stages of the Rube Goldberg machine have an incoming direction, a natural entrance point, a degree less of freedom. A commitment has already been made, momentum is happening, the story is going over there – catch it and keep going.
But that initial stage of the contraption, the first page, the opening scene, the possibilities are all still there.
In a sense, there’s too much choice. I can do this, or that, oh and other, well, that could work too to get the ball rolling.
The solution, I’ve realized, is to think of the opening scene as not the first stage but some n-th stage, with already moving gears. After all, Jane up there has a life before those woods — for one, there’s that ongoing argument with her mother — even if that’s where we join her story, author and reader alike.
The ball, pushed along by the gears, rolls in from somewhere out of sight of the Rube Goldberg, encounters a sudden gap in its conveyor belt — and drops, engaging the machine.
The previous drafts of THAT MURDER FEELING drifted too far across the keep-it-short line. And so I’m adding a new Chapter One, with more backstory.
To show those gears turning.
Thanks for reading,
Neve
p.s. This month’s promotions! The Narratess Indie Sale is today and tomorrow, the other two are ongoing until the end of April.
I write mysteries involving time travel, parallel universes, and other speculative scenarios. Subscribe to my author newsletter by clicking on the button below!I send the newsletter out once a month.
I’ve been playing with ChatGPT as we leave 2023 in the rear-view window and embark on the shiny new highway of 2024.
I like new technology, generally speaking. (Frankly, I wouldn’t say no to a robot assistant who’d decide what we’re having for dinner, remind me of appointments, proofread, and walk the dog on rainy days.) And let’s face it, like everything from the wheel to mobile phones, Artificial Intelligence is here to stay.
So, What Is ChatGPT?
Despite the name AI, models like ChatGPT do not really think for themselves. ChatGPT is a deep learner. It was trained not by being told the rules of the English language — it being impossible to come up with such rules, as a language is a complicated thing — but by being fed pages and pages of example text. That’s what the P in the name stands for, pre-trained. (Its full name is Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer; you’ll also come across the term Large Language Model, LLM for short.) The model digested it all, looked for patterns, incorporated user feedback, and acquired the ability to predict the next string of words in most contexts. ChatGPT can carry on a dialogue and generate text on various topics. It’s a fancier version of those annoying chatbots that pop up on retail sites.
There are concerns. One is whether the training phase of ChatGPT violated copyright, overstepping the bounds of fair use as the model absorbed Internet articles and books available online. There are lawsuits. Another concern is that since the way it works is a bit of a black box, there’s a risk of accidental plagiarism. The model doesn’t cite sources.
AI as a Ghostwriter
You’ve probably already read news articles written by AI without realizing it. Some fiction writers have jumped on the bandwagon, using ChatGPT or other LLMs to generate a “zero draft”, which they then edit into something usable.
So if a novel is your end goal, how does it work?
My experiment began with me signing up on the OpenAI website. I stuck to the free version, ChatGPT. (There’s also a more sophisticated version, ChatGPT Plus, also known as GPT-4. It’s $20 per month.)
The interface is pretty straightforward. It’s very good at some things, I discovered at once. You can use ChatGPT as an online thesaurus, without the annoying ads. It excels at translating, at least with the two languages I know, English and Serbian. You can ask it for a list of words connected to a setting, a color family, or whatever random thing you need. For example, for the series I’ve been working on, I was looking for an out-of-the ordinary style of fence. Not wood. Not aluminum. ChatGPT gave me a list of ten options, and one of them was a chalkboard fence, which I didn’t even realize was a thing. Perfect. Could I have dug around for unusual fences with a Google search? Sure. But it was nice to have a quick response without having to click through pages of Google results and ads.
But how about that novel writing?
Well, you can enter a prompt. For instance, I went with this one: “Chat, write the opening paragraph of a mystery. A woman breaks into a library after hours and encounters another intruder.”
This was the result:
Emma’s heart raced as she picked the lock on the library’s side entrance. The moon cast a silvery glow over the deserted town, and a slight chill hung in the air. The rusty door creaked open, revealing the dimly lit interior of the library, its shelves holding the secrets of countless stories. Emma had a mission—a clandestine rendezvous with a hidden manuscript that whispered of answers to the questions plaguing her restless mind.
Silent as a shadow, she moved through the labyrinth of bookshelves. The carpet muffled her steps, and the only sound was the soft shuffle of pages in the breeze she created. She reached the secluded corner where the coveted manuscript was rumored to reside, anticipation pulsating through her veins.
As Emma’s fingers brushed the edge of an old, leather-bound book, a noise disrupted the tranquil atmosphere. Startled, she turned to face an unexpected intruder stepping out from the darkness. A man, his eyes reflecting the same surprise that mirrored in her own. In that tense moment, the library’s hallowed silence shattered, replaced by the palpable uncertainty of two strangers caught in the act.
“Who are you?” Emma’s whisper cut through the stillness, her eyes narrowing in suspicion. The man hesitated, his gaze shifting between her and the manuscript in her hand. The library, once a sanctuary of solitude, had transformed into the stage for an enigmatic encounter. The answers Emma sought were within reach, but the mystery had just taken an unforeseen turn.
ChatGPT came up with that in about ten seconds. It’s…not great? Overwritten, flowery, lacking in specifics and grounding details.
I did a few back and forths, requesting that ChatGPT alternate between short and long sentences, add sensory details, and have the intruder be someone from Emma’s past. Here is what it came back with:
Emma deftly worked the lock, slipping into the moonlit library. The scent of aged paper and wood polish filled the air as she stepped into the quiet expanse. The shelves loomed like silent sentinels, their secrets veiled in shadows. Her focus was laser-sharp on a hidden manuscript, its pages rumored to hold the answers to the questions that tugged at her consciousness.
Silent as a whisper, Emma navigated the shelves, the rough texture of the carpet beneath her feet absorbing the sound of her movements. Her fingers trailed over aged spines, feeling the cool embrace of leather and the slight roughness of worn fabric.
A noise shattered the library’s hush, a figure emerging from the darkness. Their eyes met, mutual surprise etched on their faces. The library’s tranquility morphed into a stage for a clandestine encounter.
“Who are you?” Emma’s demand sliced through the silence. The man hesitated, eyes darting between her and the manuscript. The air crackled with uncertainty, the unfolding mystery taking an unexpected turn.
As recognition flashed across Emma’s face, it wasn’t just any intruder—it was someone from her past. The past she thought she’d buried, a door creaking open to memories she had long tried to forget.
The library held not only the promise of answers but also the specters of her own history.
I still want to take a red pen to this, but at least now we’re getting some tension.
I stopped there. But could the generated page have been reworked into a decent story opening? Sure. With time, ChatGPT would train me in the kind of instructions it needs and it would spit out text closer to my own style of writing. And presumably the paid version of ChatGPT yields better, even faster results.
Thing is, it seems to me that I’d be trading away the fun part of writing, for speed. Exchanging the playground of creativity for prompt mastery. Foregoing the hard work that makes the work my own creation and not a machine’s. The earning — the journey — is not only part of the process. It’s the whole game.
And there’s something else.
Rereading what ChatGPT wrote above, it strikes me that what’s missing most of all in its output is seasoning. The text it provided is bland. A lukewarm airplane meal. Wonder Bread, still in the package.
Let’s Talk Bread for a Minute
These days, since my husband is gluten free, we follow a recipe from this cookbook, Gluten-Free Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. The title is misleading. Five minutes is how long it takes to transfer the dough you’ve already prepared and stored in the fridge into a baking pan and shape it into a loaf. Making the dough, well, that involves yeast, 3-4 kinds of flour, and about three hours. The baking adds another 45 minutes. But you know what? The end result tastes way better than store bought gluten free bread.
Another bread I know how to make is traditional Serbian pogacha. That one takes about three hours, too. Yeast, kneading, an egg wash at the end. My mother’s recipe. Baked in a round pan, it’s particularly good when paired with prosciutto and a bit of feta cheese.
Image: Klaus Nielsen from Pexels.
Woven into home-made bread are time and effort, the quirks of the chef and her kitchen, a bit of history and artistry even.
And so it is with books. In my time travel series, Minnesota plays a role because that’s where I live; Pompeii, because I’d always wanted to see it. A novel of mine might lean more towards mystery or closer to sci-fi/speculative…or it might hover right there, on the sharp divide. We make what we make.
Nothing wrong with Wonder Bread. It’s been around since 1921, it’s soft, conveniently pre-sliced, always the same, and comes in a familiar red-blue-yellow package.
What would be wrong is if I tossed it into my grocery cart, drove it home, took it out of its wrapping, and pretended it just came out of the oven.
The Bottom Line
Look, I’m not gonna sit in front of my MacBook Air, with its spell-checker, thesaurus, and Wikipedia at my fingertips, and argue that the One True Method of Novel Writing is chiseling into stone letter by letter. Will there be a time down the road when the models improve, are trained ethically, are as common as word processors and prompt mastery an art of its own, the pointing of a camera into a landscape of words, and only dinosaurs refuse to use the technology? Possibly. I can see the appeal of a chapter draft served up in a blink of the eye.
But for now? For now, I’ll stick to the old way.
My books will be of the artisan kind. I’m not a very fast writer, so the production time will be long. There shall be typos. Odd bits of humor. Peculiarities due to English being my second language. Random facts I happened to be in possession of will make their way into the story, as will my inner-world concerns, dreams, opinions. A novel is an opinion piece. Art. A playground. That’s the fun part, after all.
By the way, I asked ChatGPT to come up with a title for this post and it suggested Navigating the Write Path: A Fiction Writer’s Skepticism on AI and Novel Craftsmanship.
It was one of ten options it provided for the title. They were all long and they all had colons. ChatGPT likes colons. It’s not an intelligence, it’s not doing it on purpose — but what it is doing is offering up its own quirks in the place of mine.
The title says it all. Book 1 of the new speculative mystery series is done and looking for a couple of beta readers!
If you’re unfamiliar with the term, a beta reader is a generous soul who volunteers to read a pre-publication draft of a novel and provide feedback. (Alpha readers see the manuscript at an early, still-in-development stage; beta readers see a close-to-publication draft.)
If Your Problem is Murder is a speculative mystery set in 1985, the first in an intended series. (Yup, this is the book formerly known as Dogwood, the one I was determined to find a one-word title for. As you can see, it…didn’t work. Maybe I’m just fated to have long titles?) The book is 77K words, about 275 pages. Here’s a brief pitch: In this small town mystery series, Redmond Marrs, a life coach with a big secret, tackles the personal problems of residents—all the way up to murder.
Let’s do a quick Q&A:
Does a beta reader need any previous experience?
No, just a love of reading!
What kind of feedback will be expected?
I like to keep it simple. The main question I have for you is this: Is the story working? If not, which parts?
The important thing to remember is that you can’t hurt my feelings. I’m eager to make the book be the best it can be. You would be helping me do that! The manuscript has not been copyedited yet, so at the very least you should expect to encounter typos and the odd goof (timeline or factual) here and there.
What do I get in return?
A signed copy of the book upon publication and my eternal gratitude.
What’s the timeline?
I can email you the manuscript immediately. I would need to receive your feedback by June9.
What’s the next step?
If this sounds like something you might be interested in, great! If you’re reading this in my newsletter, go ahead and respond to the email and let me know your preferred format. The options are .docx, PDF, epub, mobi. I can also do Google docs. I’ll reply with further details and the manuscript.
If you’re seeing this on Goodreads or elsewhere, sign up for my newsletter here to follow along with the latest writing and book news. As I always, I can also be contacted via the form on my website.
Happy New Year! For me, January 1 always brings with it the feel of a crisp new notebook. Pages yet to be written. Moments to be grabbed, new things to be learned, adventures and struggles awaiting just around the corner.
Blue skies ahead, what’s over the horizon as yet unknown.
The ocean water picture is one I took from my cabin on the Writing Excuses Workshop and Retreat cruise, this past September in the Western Caribbean. It was an extraordinary experience. I’d never been on a cruise before, or the Caribbean, or a writer’s retreat. I can happily report back that I met and got to converse with some wonderful people, attended group dinners in a grand dining room, sat in on lectures by authors Brandon Sanderson and Margaret Dunlap and agents DongWon Song and Seth Fishman, went on three lovely excursions, watched a nighttime lightning storm from the ship’s railing, visited Rose and Jack’s “I’m king of the world” spot on the bow, and never got seasick!
I had planned to do a full edit of Book 1 of the new mystery series on the cruise, somewhat optimistically in retrospect. With all the other activities, I managed to get through about 150 pages, so just about half. I did attend an “unlocking” session, which helped clarify some issues I had been struggling with, mainly having to do with the big arc of the series.
By mid February, there should be a near-final draft of the book. The working title, Dogwood, is not here to stay, alas, but I’ll leave the unveiling of the new and improved title for a post down the road. When I’m happy with the manuscript, I’ll send out a call for beta readers. I’ll give out more details then, but basically the way it would work is I’d provide a Word document (or other format) with the 300-page manuscript and brief guidelines as to the type of reader feedback I need. In return you’d get a deeper look into my writing process than this newsletter, my eternal gratitude, and a copy of the book upon publication in your preferred format, ebook or print. Be on the lookout for the email if you’re interested!
On a social media note, going forward I’ll be taking a break from the merry-go-round that’s Twitter. I’m trying out Mastodon — you can find me in the Wandering Shop, a community of science fiction and fantasy readers and writers. I’m @neve there (@neve@wandering.shop). So far I’m finding it welcoming and less adversarial than the ‘birdsite’. I’ll still be on Twitter, just not as much.
First, a welcome if you’ve recently found your way to this newsletter via my website, or a Voracious Readers Only giveaway, or the ArtWorks parking-lot fair back in September. Very happy to have you here!
This past year has gone by kind of fast, and yet when I think back to January it seems like a long time ago. A side effect of a pandemic year that was weird and strange for everyone? Our goldendoodle (Grif, age 3 1/2) agrees that time is a fluid concept — each spring he seems to completely forget all about snow once it melts away and is freshly surprised (and a little outraged) by its appearance when winter rolls around once again. Above is a picture of him frolicking during our first big snowfall of the year (17 inches!). It took him a couple of days to accept the change in his backyard. He checked the neighborhood streets, too — the white stuff was everywhere on his walks — and then he went back to doing what he does best, enjoying himself. He’s a carpe diem kind of dog.
Moving on, a writing update! I’ve been working on Book 1 of a new speculative mystery series. The current word count is just about 59,000 (out of an estimated 75,000 words) which makes it seem as if I’ll soon be nearing THE END, but really that’s just the messy first draft. Next comes the shaping stage. Shifting, adding, taking scenes out, rewriting chunks, fiddling with the setting and the characters, polishing dialogue, pulling tight the strings of the story. I’ve set myself the challenge of a one-word title for this one. (I picture my cover designers pulling at their hair… She has a looong name AND she wants a long title?? Regarding Ducks and Universes…. All the Whys of Delilah’s Demise… Argh!) I’m sure I’ll change my mind a few more times about the naming of the book, but the working title at this point in time is (ta-da!) Dogwood.
Finally, I have a question for you. What three books that you read in 2021 were your most enjoyable/memorable (or just happen to be on your mind as you read this)? It’s fine if the books didn’t actually come out in 2021, the publication date doesn’t matter, there are no rules here really, other than that I suppose they should be in the one of the categories that have brought us all here: speculative fiction and mystery… Could be a sci-fi mystery. Could be just mystery. Or just sci-fi. It’s all good.
To start us off, here are three books that I read this past year that I quite enjoyed:
The Psychology of Time Travel by Kate Mascarenhas. A thought-provoking, intricate, interlaced story. I found it quite unusual and interesting.
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. In some ways an old-fashioned sci-fi tale. If you liked The Martian, you’ll enjoy this one.
The Nils Shapiro series by Matt Goldman. Mysteries set in Minneapolis. There are four of them so far and I’ve read the first three. Page-turners with snappy dialogue and local color.
There you have it. You can reply to this email with your 3 books (or comment below if you’re reading this on my website) and I’ll include a list of everyone’s recommendations in the next newsletter.
Happy holidays! Wishing everyone a safe and happy 2022!
If you receive these updates via email, as you can see, the newsletter has a new format! It’s now getting to you by way of Mailchimp rather than Feedburner. With any luck, the transition will go smoothly and the email won’t wither away in your spam folder…or, if it did go into spam, you’ve rescued it and are now reading this. As a side note, if the images aren’t displaying correctly, there is a link at the top with an option to view the email on the web. My thanks to everyone who posted a review of The Feline Affair on Amazon, Goodreads, and other sites! Reviews help other readers find the story, and Amazon reviews are particularly important because without a certain number of them the site’s recommendation/also-bought algorithms won’t kick in. (Exactly how many reviews it takes no one outside of Amazon seems to know.) So whether you liked The Feline Affair, or thought it was just OK, or frankly not very good at all… please let other Amazon customers know by writing a line or two about the book.
In other news, I’ve been hard at work on a standalone novel (no title yet). This one is a little different in that it’s decided that it wants to be written not in the traditional past-tense narration (Once upon a time, there lived a King in the small kingdom of Wilderia…) but in the present tense (The king of the far-way planet of Wilderia sits on his throne. An unexpected visitor enters. The king, dispensing with a thousand years of protocol, rises to his feet in terror…) Examples of present-tense novels you may have read are The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger and The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. The immediacy of the present tense works well for those (quite different) books and I’m finding that’s the case for my new novel as well. So it’s a little bit of an experiment, but hopefully a good one. (Also, so there’s no confusion—there are no kings in the new book!)
Finally, I leave you with a couple of photos of beautiful Minnesota autumn, taken at Applewood Orchard, just south of us. Most of the apples had been picked over this late in the season, but our small group–husband, son, and family friends–quite enjoyed the pumpkin-shaped corn maze!
Today on the blog we have one half of the writing duo of Michael Tinker Pearce and Linda Pearce. The couple’s second novel, Rage of Angels, a military science-fiction story, is now available on Kindle. Michael stopped by today to talk about fictional alien invasions of Earth, and how they often seem to involve aliens that aren’t exactly the brightest bulbs in the galaxy. Read on:
Earth is maybe the luckiest planet in the cosmos. Sure, we keep getting invaded but the invaders are always, well, stupid. From the very first alien invasion story, H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds,the prerequisite for attacking Earth seems to be that you must be dumb. Wells’ Martians had overwhelming technical and military superiority and they steamrolled us. It seemed like the perfect plan… except they forgot to filter their air-supply, caught colds and died.
In almost all books and movies on the topic the invaders make stupid, elementary mistakes. In Pandora’s Planet the aliens invaded despite the fact that they were less technically advanced than we were, and even holding the orbital high ground was almost not enough to insure victory. In Independence Day the aliens had never heard of network security. In Battle: LAthe aliens were doubly stupid- they designed their entire offensive around a single point of failure and they invaded for what? Water, made from some of the most common elements in the universe and readily available in space. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed all of these books and movies. I just had to work extra-hard to suspend my disbelief.
The thing is that smart aliens almost certainly wouldn’t attack our planet unless they knew they would win. The energy and effort to cross interstellar space is just too great and expensive to bother otherwise. Kudos to Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle for figuring out why a race that might not win would attack in Footfall, a great book and well worth reading even if it is a little dated now. Of course even his aliens expected to win, and would have but for one of the greatest and most entertaining ‘Hail Marys’ in science fiction.
So what if smart aliens attacked Earth? What if they had a good reason to do so and had a good plan that capitalized on their strengths? That was the foundation of the idea for Rage of Angels. The answer, it turned out, is ‘We’re screwed.’ Two thirds of the way through the book we realized that we couldn’t figure out a believable way for the people of Earth to win. Um… problem there…
We did eventually work out a satisfactory and believable resolution, did a lot of math to insure that it would work and finished the novel, but it was touch-and-go for a while. It turned out that even our aliens weren’t quite as smart as we’d thought, but no spoilers.
We’re lucky in that we live in the best time to be a writer in human history. Especially a science-fiction writer. Not only do we have the ability to self-publish and reach a world-wide audience but we have the greatest research tool in the history of the world at our fingertips: The internet. Whether it is the history of the Viking Era or the maximum effective range of an M16A2 rifle it’s all there for the asking. And then there is Google Earth… Almost every location in Rage of Angels is a real place. As a writer I can look for the perfect location for my action, swoop in and get details of the terrain, elevation etc. Mind you, you don’t have to include that information in the story, but even if you don’t it allows you to visualize the action and describe it more accurately. Yes, you have to be careful and work from multiple sources when using the internet, but it’s still an amazing tool.
There is another reason that this is a great time to be a science-fiction writer. There are actually scientists at NASA and around the world working on Warp Drive and related physics. Seriously. We may well be only decades away from a faster-than-light space drive. Hilariously it works remarkably like the warp drive in Star Trek. What this really means to me of course is that I can use warp physics in my stories and still call them ‘Hard Science.’ Fantastic!
As interesting as the science may be it’s the characters that drive the story. Male or female, human or alien. Memorable, sympathetic and likable or coldly sociopathic and calculatedly evil. Without the characters it just isn’t going to happen because in the end it comes down to people. What ever else may change I think that’s likely to remain true for as long as people tell each other stories.
******
Michael ‘Tinker’ Pearce lives in Seattle with his wife and co-author Linda. He got the nickname ‘Tinker’ in the 1980’s when he was at various times a soldier, college student, a bodyguard, a private investigator, a meat-carver at a restaurant, a police officer, an illustrator, heavy equipment operator, competition shooter, cover-copy writer, outlaw road-racer, Drill Instructor Candidate, receptionist, executive assistant to the heads of corporate banking at Citycorps, Tobacconist, courier for a currency exchange etc.
He finally settled down to become a knife and sword maker, specializing in the blades of medieval Europe and the Viking Era. He is the author of ‘The Medieval Sword in the Modern World,’ and the designer of the CAS Iberia Tinker Line of medieval swords and trainers. He is a trained theatrical fighter and choreographer, and a student of Historic European Martial Arts. He co-authored the Foreworld novella ‘The Shield Maiden’ and the couple released their first novel ‘Diaries of a Dwarven Rifleman’ in early 2013. They released a sequel novella, ‘Diaries of a Dwarven Rifleman: Rear Guard’ in September 2013. Their second Foreworld Novella ‘Tyr’s Hammer’ was published in October 2013.
The couple has just released their second novel, ‘Rage of Angels,’ a hard-science military science-fiction story based on the events in ‘The Killing Machine’ and ‘What Happens in Dubai.’ Future projects include the full-length sequel to ‘Diaries of a Dwarven Rifleman,’ ‘Lord of the North’ and the Contemporary Fantasy “The Gray Man’s Journal.’
I’ve had a couple of readers email asking me when the final book in the Incident series will release, so here’s a quick update:
There’s a working title (ta-na!): THE BELLBOTTOM INCIDENT
The book is in the developmental (content) editing stage at the moment.
Depending on how long the editing takes (and obtaining permissions for any quotes I include in the text, cover design, etc) the expected publication date is sometime this winter, that is to say, late 2014 or early 2015.
Also, this final book in the Incident series may just be my favorite of the three. Just sayin’. Hard to comment further without giving away key plot points, but let’s just say Julia and the others get to go to near-time, meet a famous author… and, oh, all sorts of stuff happens. Stay tuned.
Today I welcome fellow 47North author Melissa F. Olson to the blog! Melissa writes urban fantasy — her short story Sell-By Date, an introduction to her Scarlett Bernard series, releases today. Read on:
Neve: Tell me about your books, Melissa – what drew you to writing an urban fantasy series?
Melissa: I’ve been an urban fantasy reader since I was twenty-three and my baby sister first passed me a copy of Rob Thurman’s Nightlife. As I was beginning to write, however, I told myself that I would never write in this, the genre I love the most, unless I could think of an idea that I hadn’t seen before. I went on my merry way, writing mysteries, and then it happened: I had the idea. I came up with the concept of a null, a person who can negate magic within a given space around her. I hadn’t seen it before, and I started to get very excited, and things took off from there. N: How did signing with 47North come about?
M: I did try to get published the “traditional” way first – I had an agent who shopped DeadSpots around to everyone, and everyone gave me one of two answers: either they loved the book but the UF market was too saturated, or they loved the book but it would require some development editing, and they just didn’t have time to put that much work in a new author just then. I was considering publishing DeadSpots myself when my agent had one last meeting– with 47North.
N: Do you outline your books in advance or are you the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of writer? M: The first three books I wrote were all fly-by novels: I started out knowing the first chapter, the basic arc, and usually the last scene. It turns out, however, that stupid editors like having these things called outlines in advance so they know what to expect from your book. The nerve! Now that I’m published I’ve been trying really hard to do the outline work in advance – but small things always end up changing along the way.
N: How about this winter we’ve just had, conducive to writing or what? Speaking of which, where do you get your best writing done — home, coffeehouse, other?
M: I write best in a quiet building away from my children, which usually means a coffee shop. Sometimes my babysitter takes the girls on adventures and I get to write in the privacy of my own home, but mostly it’s coffee shops, libraries, etc. This winter was a tough one for having to get in the car and go somewhere, but I’d rather it was me than my little kids. N: Favorite quote from one of your own books? M: Ordinarily I would agonize over the question, but there’s one line that I’ve had to fight three different copyeditors to keep, so I’ll pick that one. From Hunter’s Trail (Sept 2):
The second time there was no mistaking it: a long, deadly-sweet howl that was snatched up by the wind and braided through the tree line.
N: I saw that you lived in California for a while, same here. Everyone talks about the lovely California climate but really, it’s the food, isn’t it? M: OMG YES. I’ve taken two trips back to LA since I moved back to the Midwest, and both times it was pretty much Melissa’s Culinary Tour of the City. Although after this winter, it’s definitely also the climate. Every time I looked out my window and saw two feet of snow, I wracked my brain trying to remember why I ever moved back to the tundra. N: Just because I’m curious about how other authors function — do you read your Amazon and Goodreads reviews?
M: Nope, not really. I don’t do anything with the Goodreads reviews, but I keep an eye on the number of Amazon reviews, and when a new one comes in I look at the rating. I might read it if it’s four or five stars, but I general stay away. When I get a great review, I feel pleased for three minutes and then forget about it. When I get a terrible review (and thankfully, there haven’t been many) it haunts me for days like my own personal rain cloud. I’m a classic middle child that way.
N. Best thing about the writing life? Worst?
M: The best thing is getting to build my lifestyle however I want. Wait, no, the best part is not having a regular boss. Tie for first.
The worst thing is that my job is always with me – there’s no going to an office to work, then leaving the office and leaving work behind. Instead I wind up stuffing writing time in the nooks and crannies of my life, or stuffing my life in the nooks and crannies that I’m not writing. It’s exhausting. Everyone tells me it’ll get better when both my kids are in school, so right now I’m just trying to hang on that long.
N: E-books or paper ones?
M: I’m about 70-30 in favor of print books right now. I read a lot of library books or get my books used, both of which favor print. I also usually try to own at least one print book by all the authors I really love, so if I ever meet them I can get it signed. That said, I buy books for my Kindle fairly often.
N: Finally, what are you working on now?
M: You know, I just wrote a blog about current projects so I’m going to be lazy and link you.
**** Melissa Olson was born and raised in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, and studied film and literature at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. After graduation, and a brief stint bouncing around the Hollywood studio system, Melissa proved too broke for LA and moved to Madison, WI, where she eventually acquired a master’s degree from UW-Milwaukee, a husband, a mortgage, a teaching gig, two kids, and two comically oversized dogs, not at all in that order. To learn more about Melissa and her work, visit www.MelissaFOlson.com, www.Facebook.com/MelissaFOlson, and www.Twitter.com/MelissaFOlson.
I’m very pleased to welcome Kate Danley to the blog today. She’s a USA Today bestselling author, an actor, and a playwright. She shares sage advice about the business of publishing, including why being a writer can be easier than being an actor. Read on:
Kate, tell me about Queen Mab.
Queen Mab is the story of Romeo & Juliet told from the viewpoint of Queen Mab.There have been a lot of fantasy authors recently who have been getting Mab (the fairy queen of dreams) confused with Maeve (the queen of the dark fairy court), so I decided to bring Mab back to her roots.She was created by Shakespeare (much like Coke defined Santa Claus) and appears in only one speech in the entire play.I posed the question: What if she was real and her love for Mercutio was, in fact, responsible for everything that happened to Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers?What came out was a dark, romantic fairy tale that I still can’t believe I actually wrote.
How did signing with 47North come about?
I had submitted my book The Woodcutter to publishers for about five years and no one would touch it.It KILLED me.I knew I had this beautiful story, but it was dying a slow death on my hard drive.Then one day, I got this email saying, “If you want to be a published author and have a manuscript, just click this button and you’ll be published.”So I did.And it was the single most important decision I ever made in my life.The Woodcutter went on to win awards, including the Garcia Award for Best Fiction Book of the Year.It caught the attention of the team at 47North, and one day I opened my email and there was a message asking me if I might be interested in talking with them.I said, “Yes.”
You’re both an actor and a writer – which is the crazier business to be in? Do you find there is much overlap in the survival skills needed for one vs. the other?
It’s funny that up until recently, being an actor was a much sounder business decision than becoming an author.Bless this glorious digital age!I never thought I’d ever be published, much less be supporting myself full-time or sitting on the USA TODAY Bestseller list.It seemed much more doable to get a national commercial than have a national bestseller.How wonderful to be wrong!
The odds are not good for either career.As an actor, the reality of the business is that you have to wait for someone to write the perfect part for you, then have someone come up with some money, then get a director who likes your type, then have an audition notice posted where you’ll find it, all for an audition against twenty other people who look just like you, and then maaaaybe you’ll get the part.But if you can write and produce for yourself… well…It makes things just a wee bit easier.Being a self-publisher mirrors that experience.I can either wait for an agent and publisher to have room on their docket for someone like me and hope that I get past the slush pile… or just do it myself.
But what acting taught me was work ethic.It doesn’t matter what’s going on in your life, the curtain will go up and you will go on, and an audience doesn’t care if you’re having a bad day or sick or just not “feeling” it.If you’re not committed 100%, you look like the jerk.Showing up at the computer each day is a piece of cake compared to a cattle call.Promoting your book beats the pants off of mailing headshots and resumes.Getting a cover designer is very much like getting headshots done.The business of writing and acting are the same beast.You’re marketing your brain, but one is wrapped up in the package of your face, and the other is wrapped up in the package of your words.
You’ve also given self-publishing a try and done well. Comparing the two experiences, do you have any advice for those of us who might want to try the hybrid approach and dip our toes in self-publishing waters in the future?
Do it!Listen, this is just my experience, and if you’re given a hammer everything looks like a nail, but man… self-publishing changed my life.It was the single best decision I ever made.Your manuscript is doing you no good sitting in a drawer gathering dust.The self-publishing lists are the new slush piles.In a best case scenario, if your manuscript was picked up by the first agent who read it, shopped around and picked up by the first publisher they pitched it to and goes through the entire publishing process, you’re looking at least a year and a half before your book gets on a shelf.Or you can be earning money (70% royalties) that entire time.
So, what I recommend is lurking around kboards.com in the Writers Café.It is where all the cool indie authors are hanging out.We share marketing information, advice, encouragement, etc. all for free.You’ll find information on cover designers, editors, aggregators, you name it, again, all for free.And when you’re ready, I thoroughly recommend Draft2Digital.com (for publishing your ebooks) and CreateSpace (for publishing your paperbacks.They print a book when someone buys it, so you don’t have to buy 1000 copies and try to sell them out of the trunk of your car).Both are free to use.You just upload your manuscript and they take care of the rest. They list it on all the sites, they send out your stuff to anyone who buys it, they collect the money, and deposit it in your bank account.They take a small percentage (I think 6% of each ebook sale and around $5 for each book), but no other money is exchanged.
Do you outline your books in advance or are you the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of writer? I’m both.I feel that my books are better when I “pants” it, but I’ve had the privilege of getting some contracts this past year.In those situations, there are people who want to know where you’re going with your story and they want your book churned out in a certain amount of time.So for those, I outline.
Where do you get your best writing done? Home, coffeehouse, other? I love writing at home, but I’m a coffeehouse junkie.The gently hum of humanity and the white noise of garage rock in the background gets my Muse boogie-ing.
Do you have a daily word count that you aim for?
I write for fifteen minutes every day no matter what (and I set a timer).I find my biggest hurdle each day is just getting started.So, if I tell myself “just fifteen minutes”, I can usually write for hours.There are times I do need to set daily word counts, though, and that is usually determined by deadlines divisible by how many days I have left.
Just because I’m curious about how other authors function — do you read your Amazon and Goodreads reviews? I used to read everything, but I have a tender little soul and now only read my good reviews.Haters gonna hate.*insert mental picture of me strolling down the street with a big dumb grin on my face*
Favorite social media site and why?
I love Tumblr.I started off blogging during the golden age, and when that era died, all of my online friends migrated to Tumblr.I have online friendships there that have lasted over a decade.
E-books or paper ones? Can I pick “C- All of the Above”?For me, heaven smells like the pages of a leather-bound book and I will always love paper.But I adore my Kindle.I travel internationally and there is nothing like being able to tuck an entire library into my bag as I catch a train.
Finally, what are you working on now?
I have a fun little urban fantasy series called Maggie MacKay: Magical Tracker.The first book is in a boxed set called Magic After Dark which has been on the USA TODAYbestseller list for the past four weeks.It has also been optioned for a television series.So, I’m working on Book IV: M&K Tracking and hope to have that out in the next few months.I’m also working on Book III in the O’Hare House Mystery series.A detractor described it as a demonic Clue.I was like, “And the problem is…?” Between those two series, I should be kept busy for the next year.
But as far as what’s coming out next, I have a short in an exciting anthology coming out in January that I am very proud of (can’t say much about it, but it is really, really cool).And I also worked with Lee Goldberg (co-writer of Janet Evanovich’s latest book), William Rabkin (Psych), Lisa Klink (Star Trek), and Phoef Sutton (Cheers) on the new Dead Man: Reborn serial, also coming out in January.
*******
USA Today bestselling author Kate Danley began her career with the novel The Woodcutter(published by 47North). It was honored with the Garcia Award for the Best Fiction Book of the Year, the 1st Place Fantasy Book in the Reader Views Literary Awards, and was the 1st place winner of the Sci-Fi/Fantasy category in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards. Her other titles include Queen Mab, the Maggie MacKay: Magical Tracker series, and the O’Hare House Mysteries.
Her plays have been produced in New York, Los Angeles, and DC Metro area. Her screenplay Fairy Blood won 1st Place in the Breckenridge Festival of Film Screenwriting Competition in the Action/Adventure Category. Her projects The Playhouse, Dog Days, Sock Zombie, SuperPout, and Sports Scents can be seen in festivals and on the internet. She has over 300+ film, television, and theatre credits to her name, and specializes in sketch, improv, stand-up, and Shakespeare. She trained in on-camera puppetry with Mr. Snuffleupagus and played the head of a 20-foot dinosaur on an NBC pilot.
Neve Maslakovic 