July's Newsletter and what lies ahead

 Here's my newsletter for July, which my subscribers got to read last month. If this content appeals to you, please subscribe here. Or here: https://tinyurl.com/yydem5yw

Alas, the harmonicas have gone to a good home. Don't you wish you'd subscribed <g>?

Ah, summer... This spring has been exceptionally hectic for me personally, but that seems to be drawing to a close. I'm settling into a summer of Clearing Things Up and digging into revisions of the next Darkover novel, Arilinn. I'm feeling bemused by my process. I receive editorial notes (this book and the last, The Laran Gambit, were edited by the amazing Judith Tarr), I look them over...and have the literary equivalent of a panic attack. Ack, I can't possibly fix all this! What was I thinking? Aliens must have eaten my brains! It's hopeless... And then, armed with my trusty notebook, I get to work. And, as if by magic, ideas pop into my brain. They not only pop, they explode...they procreate with abandon. I look back and think, I've written how many novels now and this still happens...and I still love the way things come together in revision every single time. You'd think I'd remember that, right?

What's in this newsletter?   Harmonicas free to a good home! A musical gift Writing craft: Who needs dialog? Audiobook links for my books Cute cat pic In cleaning out a drawer (or five), I came across these cute little Hohner mini-harmonicas. They're about an inch long, with a silvery finish and a loop for a carrying cord. I have no recollection of where they came from, but they're too sweet to not enjoy. I've seen them on Etsy for up to $40 but would rather give them away. If you'd like one, email me at deborahjross at gmail dot com. I'll pay domestic postage.   A Musical Gift Speaking of music, my friend and neighbor, musician Karie Hillery, has a new album out, "Meanderings" contains instrumentals with keyboards and guitar. She describes it as "a musical conversation between hearts - songs that flow through every emotion, carrying the listener on a beautiful journey inward." Her musical partner and BFF Chris Pinnick is a world-class musician who has played with the band Chicago, on Herb Alpert’s ‘Rise,” and with The Spencer Davis Group, to name just a few.  Info and samples on her website. And you can listen to a free song here. I encourage you to take a listen. I find her music calming and uplifting, a welcome antidote to stressful days. Who Needs Dialog?     I love to “talk shop” with other writers. I learn so much about my own process and my weaknesses because it’s always easier to see the flaws – and the strengths! – in someone else’s work. Recently, I had the mirrored experience of serving as a beta reader for another writer’s novel and receiving similar feedback on one of my own. The thematic similarities and differences between the two very early versions of the stories are irrelevant. What fascinated me was that we used dialog in diametrically opposed ways in our story construction: my friend’s rough draft read like a screenplay, and mine had comparatively little conversation. We’ll both end up with balanced manuscripts, but we’ve started from opposite places.    Dialog, which is the transcription of what each character says, rather than a summary in narrative, is one of a writer’s most powerful tools. It’s also one that’s easy to abuse, either by using it too much or too little, or asking it to perform functions in the story that it’s not well-suited for. Certainly, it’s possible to tell a story entirely in dialog form, just as it’s possible to write a story entirely in narrative with zero dialog. Most stories fall in the comfortable middle zone, especially if they involve more than one character capable of speech.   When we write prose stories, we can choose to show action in a variety of ways, narrative being one, dialog another. Dialog isn’t very good for showing events at a distance; characters can be discussing those events or relaying them, but both are “off the scene” and hence have less immediacy. On the other hand, if the emphasis is on the reaction of the characters to those events, dialog can be of immense help. One of the strengths of dialog is that if skillfully handled, it can give us a window into a character’s inner state without being in that character’s head. Screenplay writers know this and use dialog to reveal character, to heighten and resolve tension, to create conflict, and to further the plot.   Which brings me to one of the things I saw in my friend’s manuscript. She came to her story with “screenwriter’s mind.” She used dialog not only to convey the content of conversations (relationship building, changing, exchange of information between characters, etc.) but to sketch out the action that she would later fill in with narrative. I’m a bit in awe of this since what little I know of screenplay writing has thoroughly impressed me with what a high-wire act it is to use only dialog and highly abbreviated descriptions of scene and action to tell a story.   I, on the other hand, used bits of narrative as shorthand for the conversations that will be developed in revision. If anything, my rough draft was too focused on the inside on my protagonist’s head, not what she was doing or saying. One of the consequences was that other characters are suggested rather than developed, whereas in my friend’s draft, her extensive use of dialog has done much of this important work.   There isn’t any one right way to weave dialog into a story, any more than there is one single right way to write. The more options we have, the more tools we have in that magic box of tricks, the better we will be at telling a range of stories. So here’s a challenge for your next story project. If you’re like my friend, a writer who uses dialog heavily to set the major blocks of her story, challenge yourself to write that first draft with as little dialog as you can. Can you do it with none? What are the circumstances under which you absolutely have to put it in?   If you’re like me, a writer who puts in just a bit here and there, challenge yourself to use dialog to create the backbone of the plot, to introduce and reveal character, to heighten and resolve tension, without using your normal narrative techniques.   My guess is that either way, the process will be both uncomfortable and revealing. Have you been relying on dialog as a preferred and therefore easy way of transcribing the movie between your ears? Or have you regarded it as a frill, lightweight chit-chat instead of an essential foundation of the story?   The good news is that no matter where we start, whatever our natural propensities and habit, it really doesn’t matter what order we weave in and shift around the elements of narrative and dialog. What matters is that final draft when everything has come into balance and the story shines!   Audiobook Links I love listening to stories read aloud! At bedtime, I fall asleep during all but the most dramatic scenes. In fact, it's a family tradition! But I also enjoy audiobooks while I am cooking or cleaning (or on the exercise bike, or walking alone). I also love sharing my own stories, whether read aloud for your pleasure by me or a professional narrator. All my Darkover collaborations are available through Recorded Books, so they're listed on many venues. Some of my original novels were put out through Audible and here are the links. I have a few coupons for free downloads of my original books. Let me know if you'd like one. They're also free to Audible members. Jaydium Northlight The Price of Silence Azkhantian Tales After a long, cold, wet winter, summer has arrived with a vengeance! Sonja impersonates a Melted Cat, draped fetchingly across two cat baskets.

Midwifing a Story: Beta Readers and Critiquers

A “story midwife” is someone whose insightful feedback helps the writer to make the story more fully what it is intended to be. A while ago, I wrote about Trusted Readers, the unsung heroes of this process. Sometimes they receive thanks in the Acknowledgements page of a novel, but rarely for a short story. Now let’s talk about more visible helpers: beta readers and critiquers.

Most of the time, there is little functional difference between beta readers and critiquers. Both read a story in draft form and respond with comments and analysis. Unlike a Trusted Reader, a beta reader or critiquer is usually either a writer or someone knowledgeable about the internal workings of fiction, like a professional editor. So the feedback may go more along the lines of technical criticism and less a generalized “this didn’t work for me.” A  beta reader acts like a Trusted Reader-with-expertise, whereas a critiquer focuses on pinpointing weaknesses and often suggesting solutions, many times in a workshop or other group setting. For this blog post, however, I’ll use the terms interchangeably.

Critiques often take place in a structured setting, such as a workshop. My first experiences with exchanging critiques were done through the Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop, a by-mail-with-newsletter forum run by Kathleen Dalton-Woodbury (back in the 1970-90s or a little beyond, if I remember correctly). I’ve also attended ongoing face-to-face workshops, as well as weekend groups at conventions. All have involved both giving and receiving critiques. Like many writers, I have cultivated a small group of “go-to” beta readers. Although it’s often not stated explicitly, the understanding is that over the course of time, each of us will critique a story from the other. 

Time, Patience, and the Beginning Writer

Beginning writers enjoy the unappreciated luxury of time. They can work without submission deadlines and crash and burn editorial demands. There’s an undeniable glee in such deadlines; they are the mark of a professional author, aren’t they? They demonstrate our commitment to our writing careers, and that our publishers take us seriously. Deadlines, especially short ones, imply an editor’s trust in our ability to work competently, even brilliantly, at speed. Surely, that’s proof of a high degree of Expertise, not to mention Importance.

If you haven’t picked up the sarcasm in the opening paragraph, please insert it now. Bleary eyes, aching shoulder muscles, unwashed laundry, family eating frozen dinners, and kids running amok from neglect are nobody’s idea of good working conditions. For many published and publishing authors, these things happen from time to time as a part of the publishing industry’s inherent chaos. If we can’t change them and don’t feel we have the option to refuse, then we make them more acceptable via glamorization of suffering. To be sure, when we were beginning writers, we may well have regarded the necessity of dropping everything to proofread a book that should have been done two months ago as a good thing. We wanted to see our work in print, the sooner the better, and too many of us jumped at the chance of being published anywhere.

The time during when we are writing seriously but not (yet) on contract offers its own gifts, and one of them is freedom from publisher- (or editor- or agent-) induced overwork frenzy. We may be overworking in a different way, juggling day jobs, families, and other responsibilities. Our friends and families may regard our writing as a hobby, no matter how seriously we take it, because we have yet made any money at it. (And when we do, the bar escalates: we haven’t sold a novel, we don’t earn enough to support ourselves entirely from our writing, we haven’t won a national award, etc., and with the achievement of each goal, we are subjected to another, even more difficult one.)

A beginning writer has the flexibility to accept external deadlines, like for submission to an anthology or contest, or to ignore them.

Guest Blog: Giving Up on a Novel - Yes or No?

 Today's guest post comes from Janice Hardy's "Fiction University."

How to Tell if You Should You Give Up On Your Novel and Write Something New

By Janice Hardy

Not all novels need to be written. Is yours one of them?

Right after my third novel was published (2011), I hit a bad patch of writing. My muse went on vacation, every sentence I typed was a battle, and writing became a chore I dreaded. Although it felt like giving up, I shifted my writing focus to nonfiction until telling stories became fun again. Eventually it did, but it took years.

I wrote a lot of so-so novels during that time. Every single one was based on an idea I loved, but they needed a lot of revising and overhauling to make them work, and I wasn’t sure if revising them yet again was a good idea or not.

Idea #1 frustrated me for two and a half years of revisions. Idea #2 took another two years of my life that went nowhere. Idea #3 was a NaNo project that actually made writing fun again, but then languished when I wasn't sure what to do with it next. It was outside my regular genre and market, and trying to sell that one felt like I was starting over again as a writer.

I wanted to make those novels work. The stubborn side of me needed to make them work—it became a grudge match. But going back to them risked me falling back into that same bad patch of frustration that made me hate writing.

Is it wise to keep struggling with a novel that might never work, or is it better to work on something new?

This is a tough call for any writer. We put so much effort into a manuscript, and it’s hard to let that go. All that work. All that creative energy. Just gone. It’s easy to understand why we hold on tight and refuse to let go, even if deep down, we know we should. The manuscript is drowning, and it’s dragging us under with it.

If you're facing a similar choice, here are some things to consider:

1. How much work does the manuscript really need?

Sometimes the only way to make a novel work is to trash everything but the idea and start fresh. Which means, if it usually takes you two years to write a novel, it'll likely take you that long to to do a full re-write. Don't con yourself about this (it's SO easy to do)...if all the manuscript needed was a few months of tweaks, you probably would have done that already.

Take some time and look at what needs to happen to make the novel work. Really understand what you're getting yourself into by staying with it. Do you really want to put that much more work into this idea? There's no wrong answer here, This is about you.

For example, for my books, Idea #1 needed a different protagonist, a deleted POV character, and a plot revamp. Half the book would have to be rewritten, and the other half revised to make the new parts work. Idea #2 needed a total rewrite from the plot up. The plot direction was what didn't work. Idea #3 just needed the normal amount of revising. 

(Here’s more on 3 Ways to Tell if a Manuscript Is Worth Going Back to) 

2. What are the odds that working on this manuscript will trigger the same frustrations as before?

Be honest. If you're breaking out in a cold sweat just thinking about it, that's a pretty good indication you should move on to something new. But if there's a glimmer of excitement at finally getting this project to work, maybe it's worth giving it another shot.

How do you feel about the novel? What emotions does it trigger in you? Is it keeping you from writing?

For me, Idea #1 carried a very real risk of plunging me back into darkness. There was just so much baggage associated with it, and even though I loved the idea, and I thought I could rework it in six months, I'd thought that before. Idea #2 didn't have that same risk. I could start over there and be okay. It wasn't the book that made me dread writing, so it didn't have the same emotional triggers. Idea #3 was fun to write, and probably fun to revise.

Career Chat: Writing Progress Goals

One of the most common questions I get asked is how I schedule my writing time. Non-writers often think we either write only when the muse strikes (and then, accompanied by quantities of alcohol, swathed in tobacco or other botanical smoke, and living in the most depressing garret imaginable, surrounded by the wreckage of countless relationships) – or we get up at 7, sit down at the computer/typewriter at 9, take a one-hour lunch break at noon, and work steadily  until 5. I am quite sure there are writers who do follow those schedules, but I’m not one of them.

 Some writers need long stretches of time to dig deep into their stories. I’m not one of them, either. I’m a slow-and-steady plodder. There’s nothing right or wrong about either way; each writer discovers what’s right for them. So the following comes from my own experience.

If I’m going to write a novel and a couple of short stories every year (or two novels in 18 months), I need to write consistently, especially when I’m in the early drafting stages. All bets are off when I’m writing proposals, rewriting, or revising to editorial order. Most of the time, I find daily goals helpful, so long as they are achievable. I don’t find it at all supportive to post my progress in terms of words of pages. One writer of my acquaintance used to post not only words written but anti-words; words the writer had deleted. I like that the writer acknowledged that not all progress can be measured by the total number of words.

A better goal for me is to write well.

Auntie Deborah Advises on Writing Craft

Auntie Deborah is back at her advice desk...

I’ve been told that as a new writer I should write what I know. How can I apply this to writing a historical novel?

Auntie Deborah: First of all, that old saw about writing (only) what you know should be consigned to the dustbin of bad literary advice. If we all followed it, all fiction would be trite and unendingly boring. We’d write about writers staring at blank screens, unable to summon the enthusiasm to describe their morning cup of coffee. All our characters would be exactly like us. There would be no science fiction, no fantasy, no romance, no mystery, no historical fiction, no sweeping love stories across two continents…

Better, write what you are passionate about.

But do your research. If your main character is disabled, talk to disabled folks and read what they have to say about ableism. If your story is set in Regency England, head for the library (or better yet, the nearest university) and delve into the history, culture, social mores, language, everything you can learn to bring your story to life.

How can I create an amoral, despicable, sociopathic villain, without making him too cartoonish?

Auntie Deborah: Why would you want to do that when complex characters who do bad things for good reasons (or good things for bad reasons) are so much more interesting?

Look, no one worth reading about gets up in the morning and goes “Evil! Evil! Rah! Rah! Rah!” The best villains have heroic, majestic qualities with tragic flaws. They’re a whole lot harder to write well than cardboard characters, but if you put in the work, they’ll steal the show.

 What can you do if your characters won’t do you want them to?

Auntie Deborah: The short (but brutal) answer is that your characters behave the way you created them. Their histories, personalities, goals, and motivations are all part of that creation. So if you — like so many of us! — find your characters resisting the demands of the plot or going off on their own adventures, it’s time to take a step back and delve deeper into what’s on the page and what’s in your creative imagination that isn’t explicit but nonetheless exerts a powerful influence over the character’s behavior.

Print Release: Ink Dance: Essays on the Writing Life

Ink Dance: Essays on the Writing Life

A cup of inspiration, a dash of understanding, a bouquet of wisdom for writers new and old. From the desk of writer and editor Deborah J. Ross comes a collection of warm, insightful essays on “the writing life” – from getting started, negotiating with the Idea Fairy and creating memorable characters, to writing queries, surviving bad reviews, dealing with life’s interruptions and creative jealousy, to nourishing yourself and your creative muse. With space for personal notes.

This collection of my blog posts over a number of years ranges in topic from writing craft to daily rhythms and self-care to staying motivated over the long haul of a career. A number of readers asked for a print version so they could jot down their own notes. It's available now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and your local bookstore through Ingram (ISBN 978-1-61138-757-5)


To whet your appetite, here's an excerpt from the introduction by Mary Rosenblum, and table of contents:

This collection of essays guides you through the craft and career of writing with all the useful information of a shelf full of ‘how to’ books, but offered with the warm personal energy of a conversation across the kitchen table.  

From her advice on how to actually get started,  her craft and career tips, to her really excellent counsel on how to survive writing in real life and still nourish yourself and your spirit, this collection offers an in depth look at what it means to be a writer.  

 Every day. All the time.  

While Deborah’s career has been New York oriented, most of what she has to say works for today’s author going the small press or Indie route as well. She speaks of the things that helped her succeed or got in her way with a refreshing personal honesty that invites us to examine our own behaviors.  There’s a lot here for any aspiring writer who takes his or her craft seriously. No matter what you write or how you publish.  

Read it, learn, and enjoy! You’ll come away nourished. 

Just You and a Blank Page

Getting Started in Writing

Negotiating with the Idea Fairy

Warm Ups

Open Here

More On Story Beginnings

Structure, Shape, and Interest

Do You Outline Your Novel? Should You?

Dream A Little Dream

It’s Only Fiction

Not Just Another Funny Forehead: Creating Alien Characters

Villains, Evil, and Otherness

Revenge and Retaliation

First Person Perils

Guest Blog: Jane Lindskold on Emotional Continuity in Series

Jane Lindskold has been writing full-time since 1994. She is the New York Times bestselling, award-winning author of over twenty-five novels, including the acclaimed Firekeeper Saga, Changer, and the sword and sorcery classic When the Gods Are Silent. Her most recently released novel is Asphodel. She has also had published over seventy short stories.

Welcome, Jane!

Editor Deborah J. Ross interviewed me about writing, my story in the forthcoming issue of Sword and Sorceress and other things. In it, I touch on how negative influences have had a strong impact on my writing.  Here’s an example.

Last week, I took a week off writing to immerse myself in various aspects of the Firekeeper universe before moving into the next part of the story.  One of the complications about writing the seventh novel in a series is how easily it is to gloss over small details.  Add to this that I haven’t written a Firekeeper novel in over a decade and the complexity grows.

By coincidence, my pleasure reading included a series I am enjoying very

much – especially for the evolving relationships of the central suite of characters.  I’m not going to go into details, but something I read made me think about an often neglected element of continuity – emotional continuity.

When something traumatic happens to a character, something that is key to a great deal of the action of that particular book, and then in the next book, something similar (but not identical) happens, I expect the characters to comment, to remember.  When they don’t, my sense that the characters are “real” suffers.

I’m not saying that the author must provide  a full recap of past events, not at all.  However, real people remember what happened to them and those memories influence how they act in the future.  Indeed, one could argue that our core self consists of an accumulated suite of experiences.  Whenever something new happens, we seek to understand it by relating it to what we have experienced before.  When something recurs, the most common reaction is “Here we go again!”   Even new experiences are often understood by how they relate to past ones: “I’ve had milk chocolate with fruit and nuts, but never with chile pepper flakes!”

A Thousand Ways to Story: Lace and Blade 4 Authors Talk About Writing Process

 Judith Tarr: 

[How do I write?] Horribly slowly now, but it still works, after a fashion. I get ideas and prompts from all kinds of places. I keep a file of them, multiple files in fact, and when one really needs to have a story, I pull it out and make notes and brainstorm and throw things together and see what comes of it. I do outline, but it's an ongoing, circular, organic process, which grows and changes as the characters wake up and start talking (or often yelling), and the settings make themselves visible, and the gears of story--the friction, the "what does this character want?" and "what are the stakes here?" questions that move it all forward--start to turn. Sometimes in totally unexpected directions.

With this story, I had a visual first, a scene viewed from above. Then I became aware of the viewpoint, and the character started telling me the story. I knew what had to happen in the end, but not how to get there, until I started telling the story. The resolution didn't come clear until I wrote the scene. What I thought was going to happen was not what actually happened at all.

Carol Berg: 

I’m an organic story developer, that is I start with a character in a situation and enough thinking about the world, cultures, and characters to put down the first scene. The act of writing that scene gives me ideas for moving forward in plot, characters, and world development, so that by the time I’m halfway in, I’ve got lots of notes about what needs to happen next. Every day, I read what I wrote the previous day, getting it right enough I can charge forward toward a climax that, so far, has made itself apparent by the time I get there. Revision is my friend and delight!

Marie Brennan:
I am such a night owl. Such a night owl. As I type these words, it's almost 11:30 at night, and this is the warm-up work I'm doing before settling in to put more words on the current story. I'll probably go to bed between 2 and 3 a.m. This has been my habit since college, and I've been lucky that, barring a few summer jobs with very early start times, I've been able to maintain my preferred schedule for basically my entire adult life.

As for the stories themselves, I am much more of a discovery writer than an outliner, though lately I've been working on some collaborative projects where outlining is a necessity. I can do that if I have to, but I prefer when possible to figure out my story as I go along -- that way I stay excited about it, rather than feeling like I'm just filling in the blanks.

Juliette Wade's "Dive Into Worldbuilding" Show Now Has a Patreon

Deborah, thank you for inviting me to post at your blog!

If you come here to read about Deborah's work, I have a suspicion that you enjoy good worldbuilding. Deborah is an expert at it, and it's also one of my favorite things to do. I've been privileged to talk with her about it on many occasions, including when I hosted her on my show, Dive into Worldbuilding. Dive into Worldbuilding is a live weekly discussion of language and culture topics for worldbuilders. Once or twice a month, I have a guest author come and talk about their work. The best example I can show you is Deborah herself, when she came to talk about her fascinating series, The Seven-Petaled Shield.

The transcript is here.

We focused in particular on the cultural models she'd chosen for the different coexisting societies in the series, and on the way she decided to work with many different languages that not all the characters could speak.

On the other weeks of the month, we come together to discuss a wide variety of topics such as colors, economics, language differences, bathrooms, cities, body modification, and many others.

Starting today, I'm expanding what I'm able to do with the show by starting a Patreon and creating the Dive into Worldbuilding workshop. The funds raised by the Patreon will support me in my running of the show and my research on panel topics; they will also allow me to pay my guest authors for their valuable insights and time.

[Deborah adds: This is an excellent thing!}

Where the workshop and the Patreon intersect is in the rewards I'm offering for patrons. At each level, patrons receive things like worldbuilding prompts, research links, a peek into my worldbuilding journal, the ability to ask me worldbuilding questions, an in-depth analysis of your work, or even a personal consultation. Essentially, becoming a patron means you're signing up to participate in the workshop at whatever level you prefer.

If you're looking to dive deeper into your worldbuilding, join us!

Revision -- A Path to Better Writing or an Excuse to Never Finish?

“What's new?” I asked my friend, a young(er) writer.

“I finished my book!” she said radiating both relief and excitement.

“Finished, how? Finished, as in rough draft? Revision? Ready to send to your critique group?”

“This is like the eighth revision,” she said. “My group has seen it, in whole or part, many times.” She rolled her eyes. “I was at the point where the only thing to fix were nits, so it was clear that I needed to send it out.”

Although my friend has yet to sell a novel, she has several quite respectable short fiction sales to her credit. More than that, she has acquired an understanding of when revision is helpful and when it is detrimental. In our subsequent discussion, she pointed out that she is a “pantser” (“writing by the seat of your pants”) rather than a planner. With time, she has become better at planning out a writing project, but she still likes the spontaneity of letting the story unfold in unexpected and delightful directions. Hence the need for multiple revisions.

I was like this when I began writing. I had no idea that people outlined stories. When a fellow writer told me that she outlined each scene on a 3 x 5 card before she actually started writing the story, I didn't know what to think. I would just start writing with no idea where the story was going to take me. As a consequence, my stories were riddled with plot holes, inconsistencies, and dead ends.

I had to learn to revise as a matter of survival. I don’t mean tidying up grammar and punctuation. I mean taking apart large portions of the story, writing new text, rearranging other portions, and so forth, until the final version bore little resemblance to my rough draft. Computers have made this much easier than having to retype the whole thing!

Because I often have difficulty discerning the proper point at which to begin a story, in my early years I often had to either add one or more chapters or throw them out. Once I had to discard the first 150 pages of text. It was a good thing that I took to heart the advice to kill my darlings, or I would never have been able to do that and the story might have ended up in a trunk instead of a bookstore shelf.

NaNoWriMo Resources!

Here's a great collection of writing books, from "hot-to" for beginners to the finer points of specific elements, all at a fantastic price. Not only that, but you'll get two of my own essays in Book View Cafe's Brewing Fine Fiction -- one on writing when there is no time, and another on surviving being reviewed!

Book View Cave is delighted to be included in StoryBundle’s 2015 NaNoWriMo Writing Tools Bundle. Not only is ourBrewing Fine Fiction anthology part of the bundle, so are two additional guides by BVC members: Writing Horses by Judith Tarr and Writing Fight Scenes by Marie Brennan.

Never heard of StoryBundle? It’s where you can get fantastic ebooks at one low pay-what-you-want price. DRM-free means you can read them on just about all the devices you own, no matter who makes it.

– Pay the minimum $5 and get Brewing Fine Fiction plus five other great titles.
– Beat the bonus price ($13), and get seven more books including Writing Horses and Writing Fight Scenes.
– Opt into the 2nd tier bonus ($25) and get the 2014 NaNoWriMo bundle as well, for a total of twenty-five fantastic writing books!

Plus Bundle buyers have a chance to donate a portion of their proceeds to charity.

National Novel Writing Month happens every November. Thousands of writers all over the world take up the challenge to produce a novel in a month.

This toolkit offers great advice from a multitude of seasoned professionals including Kevin J. Anderson, Lawrence Block, Algis Budrys, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Dean Wesley Smith, and Al Zuckerman. Curator Kevin J. Anderson writes:

Here, to get you ramped up for the marathon, I’ve curated a baker’s dozen of instructional books on all aspects of writing, from craft, to productivity, to business, to career advice, to specific areas of expertise. Presenting, for the second year in a row, the NaNoWriMo Writing Tools StoryBundle: a massive batch of useful books that will help you survive—and thrive—during National Novel Writing Month—the full spectrum of useful information. You name your own price, whatever you feel this batch of books is worth, and part of the money you pay goes to help the supportive non-profit NaNoWriMo organization.

I put together these books from the general to the specific, a treasure chest of books vital to your success—not only in writing your novel but in launching your long-term career as a successful writer. This is a toolkit, a drill sergeant, a mentor, and a cheerleading section, all in one.

For complete details and to pick up your bundle, visit 2015 NaNoWriMo Writing Tools Bundle.

GUEST BLOG: Brenda Clough on Names in Fantasy and Science Fiction (part 2)

Writer and Book View Cafe member Brenda Clough shares insights on how she comes up with names for characters, places, and more!


You write fantasy or science fiction novels. And, unless you write very philosophical Olaf-Stapledon

type fiction about colliding universes and enormous spans of time, you have created science-fictional or fantasy characters — elves, Klingons, Martians, Wookkies. They need names — and this time you cannot resort to Robert, Mildred and Susie!

This is particularly hard for those of us who need to have the names in hand before starting to write. Because names imply enormous things. We do not notice this so much, because modern Western culture pervades all we see and do so thoroughly. But step out for a moment. You don’t need a rocket ship and FTL to travel to another world. All you need do is learn another language and culture. And suddenly names mean something different. Paul Atreides changes his name to Paul Muad’Dib in Dune. The change of name shows the spiritual change. Or open your newspaper. Some Midwestern kid moved to Syria yesterday and joined ISIS. What did he do, just before that? He changed his name from Jason to Ali.

So, somehow, before you’ve invented the world, figured out the plot, or anything, you need a character. And to handle him you need a handle — a name. In fact in inventing this name all the rest will follow: because the world is encapsulated in the name, and the name embodies character which will inevitably lead you to plot. Pantsers have it hard! But even if you are not a pantser — names are so important that you might well start here as well. J.R.R. Tolkien had Middle Earth and its languages mapped out in fanatical detail long before he sat down to write The Hobbit. But to start that work he needed Bilbo Baggins, who is not (as Gandalf notes) in any of the material about the Eldar at all. All those appendices at the back of LOTR, they were not the story. Bilbo was the story.

GUEST BLOG: Brenda Clough on Naming Characters (Part 1)

Writer and Book View Cafe member Brenda Clough shares insights on how she comes up with names for characters, places, and more! This is the first of a series. Welcome, Brenda!

You write a novel. Naturally it has characters. And those characters need names! Let us set aside for some other day the issue of creating fantasy names, and consider today only naming characters with cognomens that already exist.

Depending upon how you roll, this usually comes very early in the writing process. For me it comes before beginning the writing at all; if I don’t know the character’s name I cannot write. I can get away without looking at my hero for many thousands of words. I was more than halfway through the first draft of How Like A God before I thought to actually cast the authorial gaze upon my hero; I knew what all the other characters looked like because I was using his viewpoint, but he had never done the old look-in-a-mirror stunt. (When I did look I was astonished, and marked the place in the text.)

But there are a number of factors to consider. The most important of course is time and place. A work that takes place on Mars in AD 2502 is going to have a differently-named cast than a work that is set

in 1741 in Wales. Given names especially come and go in fashion in an easily-charted way. You can search on it and kick up sites that will graph for you the popularity of, say, John as a name for boys over the centuries. Certain names are highly redolent of their time. Consider my own. Every Brenda you are ever likely to meet is between 50 and 70, because that was when that given name was in fashion. Nearly all Lindas are the same, whereas a Madison was surely born the year after Splash and is around 30 years old today. You therefore are foolish indeed to name your Elizabethan heroine Brenda or Madison, and if the novel is set in ancient Rome, all I can say is for god’s sake don’t! Rome, like many other non-Western cultures, had its own naming conventions which you should research carefully.

Surnames, if your characters need them, are also a challenge. An old writer trick if you need foreign names is to look up categories of people — sports figures, say, or members of the state legislature, or plumbers. You need a Czech villain? Find the list of the members of the Czechoslovak Olympic soccer team from the 1950s. Plenty of nicely authentic surnames and given names will pop up, and a little slicing and dicing will get you a correctly-named supervillain. The great Georgette Heyer derived all her realistically-English titles for the earls and dukes of her fiction by plundering maps — all the names are obscure villages in the English countryside.

Beyond that, the vagaries of naming a character are mysterious — an art rather than a science. My heroine is staying with an elderly Frenchwoman. When the character was named Solange she was tall. Now she is renamed Cresside, and she is shorter. If I rename her again to Yvette she will be shorter yet. How do I know this? Why is it so? I have no idea. At some point the Muse takes charge of the process, and I have to let her do that. A rose by any other name does not smell quite as sweet.

All names, and in fact all terms and invented places, should be shoved through Google. If someone with your hero’s name was just executed in Beijing for sex crimes, you want to know this. You say nobody will likely notice? It is possible you will sell those Chinese-language rights, you know.

Oh, and one more very important tip: when you change her name from Cresside to Yvette, go through the ms with care. Do a Global Search and Replace, but then reread it. There are sad stories about writers who changed the hero from Richard to Wallace on page 200 but didn’t do a Search and Replace. The readers were confused!

Brenda W. Clough spent much of her childhood overseas, courtesy of the U.S. government. Her first fantasy novel, The Crystal Crown, was published by DAW in 1984. She has also written The Dragon of Mishbil (1985), The Realm Beneath (1986), and The Name of the Sun (1988). Her children’s novel, An Impossumble Summer (1992), is set in her own house in Virginia, where she lives in a cottage at the edge of a forest.

Her novel How Like a God, forthcoming from Book View Cafe, was published by Tor Books in 1997, and a sequel, Doors of Death and Life, was published in May 2000. Her latest novels from Book View Cafe include Revise the World (2009) and Speak to Our Desires.

Revision Round Table 3: Kari Sperring, Marie Brennan

So you've finished your novel -- but have you? That first draft needs work, but where to begin? In

this round table series, I asked professional authors how the approach revision -- not polishing, but truly re-visioning a story.

Kari Sperring:

Ah, revisions.

I’m revising a book right now, and, as a result, my instinctive response to any question about revisions is ‘revisions are the worst. Apart from writing the first draft. That’s the worst, too.’ When it comes to writing, I definitely tend to the Eeyore. Whatever I’m doing right now is the hardest thing, the most uncontrolled, unfocused, worrisome thing.

I’m a very ill-disciplined writer. For preference, I write without an outline – and if I do outline, it tends to consist of a handful of possible scenes plus notes on theme and feel.  My desk is littered with scraps of paper on which I have scrawled ideas for future scenes and plot-turns, many of them only semi-legible and usually out of order. Whether or not I get to them is very random: it depends on what turn the book takes and on what I remember. None of which helps when it comes to revising. 

With both Living With Ghosts  and the book I’m currently working on, I wrote a complete first draft and then rewrote the book from scratch, ending up with a different plot, new characters, and a different outcome. Quenfrida didn’t enter LWG until draft 2. Nor did Joyain. The first draft of the current project seemed to consist mainly of walks and conversations. This new one is full of riots and acts of sabotage, and one of the protagonists is currently disembodied. It’s not the book it was, and I hope it’s better for it, but right now – as always seems to be the case with me and revisions – it feels vast and sprawling and random, a morass of scenes and ideas galloping off in nine different directions, and me in the middle trying desperately to get the whole thing back under control.

Revision Round Table 2: Judith Tarr, Elizabeth Moon

So you've finished your novel -- but have you? That first draft needs work, but where to begin? In

this round table series, I asked professional authors how the approach revision -- not polishing, but truly re-visioning a story.

Judith Tarr:

How do you approach revising a book?

I prefer to revise than to write first draft. Revision is my reward for slogging through the draft. Since I do most of my "prewriting" either in notes or in my head, and generally have my plot either outlined or again, clear in my head, my drafts tend to be very spare but pretty much complete. My editor will usually tell me to expand; I've never had to cut, I've always had to add. Sometimes a lot.

Of cuss the editorial letter can make me say bad words, because in my dreams I submit a perfect draft that needs no more than a light waft of proofreading before it bursts out upon the world. In reality, if I'm lucky, I don't have to add or change much. If I'm not...well, there was that time I had to rewrite the whole thing with a different but much more appropriate protagonist. Or the time I had to add 50,000 words. Or...

What makes revision different from polishing or rewriting, or is there a difference?

Revision for me is what I do after I've received outside input. Usually that's the editorial letter. I don't use beta readers in general; have pulled in a reader once in a while for expert advice or clear-eyed input, but mostly it's just me and my ms. until it meets its editor.

Do you work things out in your head, work only from the manuscript (and if so, on the computer or a printed hard copy), some combination of both?

I work on the computer with my editorial letter in hand, with however many passes the ms. needs. Picky stuff first (wording, clarifications, continuity notes, etc.). While I'm going through to get the small stuff cleared up, the back of my mind is mulling over the big stuff: expansion of character roles, plot elements, worldbuilding notes, and so on. Those get done in waves as I can handle them.

I try to find the spot where a change or expansion has the maximum effect. A change in a word or a line at the exact right place can resonate through the whole ms. That's the dream change.

Or, doing the minimum required to make the book work according to my vision and the editor's input. It's the lazy writer's technique, and if I do it right, it makes a huge difference to the quality of the work.

Revision Round Table 1: Patricia Rice, Rosemary Edghill

So you've finished your novel -- but have you? That first draft needs work, but where to begin? In this round table series, I asked professional authors how the approach revision -- not polishing, but truly re-visioning a story.

Rosemary Edghill: "How do you approach revising a book? What makes revision different from polishing or rewriting, or is there a difference? Do you work things out in your head, work only from the manuscript (and if so, on the computer or a printed hard copy), some combination of both? Do you write out takes, read sections aloud? What advice, if any, would you give a beginning writer? What's been the most useful thing another writer has taught you?"

I consider revision to be a collaboration between the writer and the editor, as distinct from polishing and rewriting.  When you're polishing, you're making the best book you can make with only yourself to please.  Revision involves shaping your book to someone else's vision.  The trick is to do it without breaking it.

I work entirely on computer, which has advantages and disadvantages.  There are a number of formatting tricks you can use (in Word 2003, which is what I work in) to make the book fresh to your eyes, including formatting it as if it is already a page of printed book text.  While you're writing the book, you focus on story: for the revision, you're keeping your eye on transparency, reader accessibility, and narrative flow.  Setting a manuscript up in book form gives you a much clearer idea of (frex) how far apart two pieces of information (that you expect the reader to retain and combine) are placed.

Another Word 2003 advantage (probably available in other programs, but Word is what I know) is the "Track Changes" function, where you can see the revision on the page with the new text inserted and the old text X'd out.  I use that a lot when I'm trying to track down doubled or repeated paragraphs (an artifact of being able to cut and paste) or to see how a global replace is going to affect things.

Write It Slow?

Ursula K. Le Guin recently blogged on Book View Café about how the marketing practices of Amazon.com results in disposable, interchangeable world-pablum instead of thoughtful, well-crafted literature. She wrote:

If you want to sell cheap and fast, as Amazon does, you have to sell big. Books written to be best sellers can be written fast, sold cheap, dumped fast: the perfect commodity for growth capitalism.
The readability of many best sellers is much like the edibility of junk food. Agribusiness and the food packagers sell us sweetened fat to live on, so we come to think that’s what food is. Amazon uses the BS Machine to sell us sweetened fat to live on, so we begin to think that’s what literature is.
I believe that reading only packaged microwavable fiction ruins the taste, destabilizes the moral blood pressure, and makes the mind obese. Fortunately, I also know that many human beings have an innate resistance to baloney and a taste for quality rooted deeper than even marketing can reach.

The Guardian responded with an article about her powerful essay, so I expect it’s gotten a lot of exposure now.

Le Guin’s perspective reminds me of an experience I had when I was a fairly new writer. I’d sold a handful of short stories to professional markets and I was perpetually working on one novel or another but I hadn’t sold one yet. Because I was still learning how to write at novel length, I wrote really awful, disorganized first drafts and then revised over and over. It took me a couple of years to get a novel into sufficiently good shape that I felt comfortable in sending it out. That was okay, because each one was better than the one before. They were better written, but also deeper in concept and grander in scope. I was getting personalized rejection letters from editors, which encouraged me greatly. At a convention, I encountered an author who had already sold several novels. In fact, he (nominal pronoun for the sake of the article) was churning out three or four a year. When I asked him how he did that, he told me he never revised. He’d write a draft and that was it.

I was devastated.