“And then? And then?” by Nan

Eons ago, in the dark ages of my past, a popular comedy routine had the line, “And then? And then?” It was funny, the way they did it, but now as I edit it’s not so funny when an author uses “then” repeatedly.

So many other possibilities exist for expressing the same time framing, if it needs to be expressed at all. (Sometimes it doesn’t, really, you know.

For instance:

*He jumped into the saddle and then rode off.

Leave out “then” and what difference does it make?

Exactly.

None.

Other fixes for your “then” fixation could be using words like “before,” “after,” or “following,” if you feel the need to line up action in a time-sequence order:

*She patted his hand before leaving the table.

*He went to the door after he gave the book to the boy.

*After he gave the book to the boy, he went to the door.

*Following their picnic, they bathed in the stream.

Experiment with various ways of writing your sentences to avoid using the same sentence patterns and the same word choices over and over again. Thank you!

~Nan

*No examples are from manuscripts I’ve seen.

The Rifle Approach to Story Writing

The Rifle Approach to Story Writing

         

No matter the length of your story, as you create it, the characters and setting, keep the RIFLE approach in mind and you'll never go wrong.

Thinking as a reader, consider all those oldies but goodies residing on your keeper shelf or—in my case—shelves. This is why we return to them time and again, like old friends, or that worn, comfortable pair of slippers or that softest blankie. They bring us joy, keep us on the edge of our seat, or make us laugh right from the toes.

R—realistic. If the reader can't make sense of things—either the plot line or the story arc—they'll give up and toss the book against the nearest wall. It doesn't matter if you yourself have climbed each and every step to the top of the Empire State Building, unless the hero or heroine is in grave danger—or about to propose [or accept], the reader won't get it. 

I—intriguing. Intrigue is what keeps those pages turning. This doesn't necessarily mean danger or suspense or evil spirits. I'm talking about keeping the reader invested in what happens to the protagonists along the way. Let's go back to Suzy Scout who's climbing the ESB because Tommy Trueheart, erstwhile and much younger brother of Tess, is at the top, holding the biggest, fattest, sparkliest diamond in one hand [and bouquet of fire red tulips in the other]. Suzy knows right down to her tidy whities the sparkly will fit her finger like strawberry jam layers over crunchy peanut butter and those posies will smell of the coming spring. Unfortunately she's beginning to wheeze and if she doesn't get to the top by the time the building closes, she'll end up in a dark stairway and never get the ring. Maybe she's turned down Tom Terrific too many times to count and this is it baby—fish or cut bait.

F—fun. If it's not fun to read [or write] why keep doing it?

L—logical? It might be realistic but is the setting or are the character[s]’  actions logical? Do they make sense? If you were Tommy Trueheart, would you give the lovely Sue one more chance or would you have given up long ago and kicked her to the curb? On the other hand, maybe Suzy saw her mother, Magda the Magnificent, change husbands like most women go through silk panties and our Sue fears she'll break Tom's heart when push comes to shove. Of course the reader knows [because we the author has shown not told throughout the story] that old Magda is an ego-centric witch who can't settle for one man because none will ever totally please her. Clearly she never met Rhett Butler or Walt Longmire, but I digress.

E—entertaining. Have it move, keep those pages turning. By the top floor have the reader gasping and turning blue as Suzy takes her last breath, or feel their their hands freeze as Tommy clutches the tulips to his heart as he waits at the exit door for the love of his life to appear.

And that, dear bloggers, is the RIFLE approach to writing.

Best wishes for a safe and lovely holiday coming up.

Kathy Cottrell                        

Kathy Cottrell

Senior Editor, the Wild Rose Press

PSWA, July 2013

A Dream

A dream you dream alone is just a dream. A dream you dream together is reality. ~ John Lennon

I ran across this quote a few days ago and I can’t get it out of my head. Like so much of what John had to say, it manages to be both trite and profound at the same time. He was talking about Double Fantasy, the album he was working on with his wife just before his assassination, but he was also talking about his marriage. As I approach a major anniversary of dreaming with my husband, I can’t help but wish that John and Yoko could have dreamed together for many more years. How much richer the world might be.
 

So what does this have to do with a blog in the Rose Garden? Just this: we humans are dreamers. We dream in the womb, we dream awake and asleep, we dream until we die. We tell ourselves stories about life and death and the realities in between, and we tell each other stories.
 

Aha, you say, she’s finally getting to the point. Writers in particular are dreamers (as are actors, singers, knitters, artists, engineers, politicians, lovers…). We’re very good at dreaming alone; picture all those back-of-the-drawer manuscripts we’ve written since we could first mangle a crayon in our fists. We are drowning in dreams. But remember Lennon’s second point: dreaming together is reality. A manuscript is just a pile of paper until you invite someone else into that particular dream.
 

You all know how scary and even painful it can be to share your story. With a little luck, you’ll find someone who respects it. With more luck, that someone will be capable of elucidating what you’ve written until every word glows. With even more luck, you’ll find other dreamers whose dreams have built a company capable of sharing your story with many more people than you ever dared to dream.
 

Imagine all the elements that become a part of the saga: your story-dream; other writers who critique and support you; the editor who dreams with you; the publishers who bring you together; the cover artists and layout pros; the people who created the machines and technology to produce and sell your book; the readers who enter your world and pass it on to others—even people like me, who weave dreams about the dreams you dream—all coalesce to conjure a new reality: your book.
 

A book that enriches the world long after we stop dreaming and makes a fantasy far more than double.

by editor Kinan Werdski

An Editor's Wish List

by Kathy Cottrell, Senior Editor, Last Rose of Summer

The High Concept

            I spent a very long time trying to figure this one out, attending every editor/agent roundtable available, asking for examples. Nada. Until I heard agent Jessica Faust speak at the New England Romance Writers conference and a light bulb went off inside my brain:  The high concept, in a very few sentences, sums up the crux of the story. Here are some 'ah ha' examples I have found at www.RTBookreviews.com:

            Julia Knight's fantasy romance, Ilfayne's Bane, [Samhain Publishing, Ltd.]: “He destroyed a continent. Dethroned a god. Now she will destroy him.”

            Monica Burns' historical erotic romance, Mirage, [also Samhain].: “An ancient prophecy. A sheikh's passion. One woman ignites the flame that fulfills them both.”

            Irene Hannon's contemporary romantic suspense, Fatal Judgment, [Revell Books]: “Jake Taylor's assignment is straightforward. His relationship with Judge Liz Michaels isn't. They have a past. But if he fails, they may not have a future.”

            As you can see; it doesn't give me any plot details, however it does tell me what I'll be getting myself into. 

 The Hook

            I am not only an editor, I am first a reader. If the first few lines don't grab me; or the last line of a scene or chapter fails to capture my interest and imagination, the story probably won't work for me. For some authors 'hooking' is as natural as breathing; others struggle, however, that's where a good editor comes into the picture. Here are some hooks which made me sit up and take notice:

            Nora Roberts' beginning hook for Montana Sky: “Being dead didn't make Jack Mercy less of a son of a bitch.”

            Rick Riordan's beginning hook for The Lost Hero: “Even before he got electrocuted, Jason was having a rotten day.” 

            Margo Hoornstra's end of scene hook for Glad Tidings: “What kind of woman buries her husband in the afternoon then sleeps with his best friend that night?”

            Debra Webb's ending scene hook for Traceless: Note: hero Clint Austin has just been released from prison after serving time for murder. “There wouldn't be much in the way of financial assets waiting for him back home. But he would have full access to the one thing that he wanted nearly more than his next breath . . . .The people who had stolen his life.”

 Memorable Characters

            I read Leon Uris' Mila 18 when I was fourteen. Every couple years I go back to visit the entire cast of characters. The same goes for Kathleen Woodiweiss' Shanna and A Rose in Winter.  These are the keeper books on my night stand.  The secret to creating great characters is to give them a few warts. Then throw them into the deep end of the pool but make sure you put a few hidden traps beneath the surface of the water.

 Examples: 

            Brenda Leigh Johnson, a Georgia peach transplanted to LAPD in TNT's The Closer. She may be beautiful and built, but her subordinates choke on her thick southern drawl; she dresses out of Volunteers of America; and she's tenacious as Hong Kong flu. 

            Harry Potter, the wizard raised as a muggle with a weird looking scar on his forehead. JK Rowlings tossed him into the deep end of the pool known as Diagon Alley, later Hogwarts and the fun began.

             Eve Dallas, [JD Robb's futuristic In Death series], the street smart homicide detective with the social skills of a rattlesnake confronts the prime murder suspect, a man with a one word name, more money than God, better looking than some lapsed Irish angel. Eventually he woos her with a rare steak and a sack of coffee beans.

            It takes Parker Evans, [Sandra Brown's Envy], a wheelchair-bound hero twenty years to exact revenge on his college room-mate by deliberately seducing the roomie's unwitting wife. “Did I stutter?” still makes me laugh out loud. This story keeps the reader on the edge from start to finish.

             Cash Boudreaux, [Sandra Brown's Slow Heat in Heaven] revels in the image of local bad boy, occasionally inciting violence, has good reason to want revenge against the richest family in town.       

             Just a smidge about secondary characters: they support the hero and heroine, often provide comic relief, occasionally serve as a red herring. Make each one different from each other as well as the hero or heroine. If they all sound the same why should I bother to read the book?

 The Setting

            Must be as vivid as any of the main characters and, in my opinion, becomes a character of its own. Examples:  Innocence, Mississippi [Nora Roberts' Carnal Innocence] if chock full of murder, depravity and humor; Nohmensville aka No Man's Land [Captain Marvelous] actually should have been named no woman's land due to it's apathy, bigotry and ignorance; Lunacy, Alaska [Nora Roberts' Northern Lights] features its own set of 'lunatics'. And let's not forget Hogwarts. Do you see how the names, while unique, describe the flavor and aura of the settings? 

 Goals, Motivation & Conflict

            Every thing I know about GMC was learned at the knee of one of my heroes Debra Dixon who wrote the book [literally] on this topic. In short, the hero and heroine must have a goal [ie what do they want/need to accomplish?]. It needs to be logical and realistic. Likewise, their motivation for accomplishing these goals must be logical, realistic, and understandable to the reader—as in 'yeah, if that happened to me as a kid, I'd shoot for that goal, too. 

            The really good stories put the hero's goals in direct opposition to what the heroine wants and that's called CONFLICT.

            Now . . . conflict comes in two forms, internal and external. External is usually pretty easy: it's an external force [such as the approaching hurricane in Eileen Dreyer's Sinners and Saints which hampers the heroine's search for her missing sister. In Captain Marvelous the hero is trying to identify the killers of immigrant women and bring them to justice. He is thwarted at every step by complacency, bigotry and apathy from the towns people and a less than sterling police department. External conflict is supposed to be a bitch for the hero and heroine. Thwarting bad guys, disease, pestilence, and the apocalypse is no easy feat. But . . . as Sister John Thomas used to say, 'adversity builds character'.

            Internal conflict is what gets authors every time. This is the demon inside the hero and heroine which prevents them from accomplishing their goals AND should be directly tied to their motivation and goals.  In My Name is Nell, the heroine is a woman working the program of Alcoholics Anonymous while managing a home and raising her children without much help from a toxic mother and sister. She meets, then falls in love with a widower. Neither was looking for romance; it just happened. Now take a guess as to the circumstances which caused the deaths of the hero's wife and child. Go on, take a guess. That's conflict with a capital C. 

             In Debra Webb's Traceless, Clint Austin served time in prison for a murder he didn't commit. Emily Wallace, the star witness against Clint has not been able to move past what happened to her best friend, and vows to make him pay for his crimes all over again.        

Words to the wise:     Conflict cannot be resolved with a five minute conversation between all interested parties. It is something so strong, so powerful, the reader must believe these two people will never ever stay together.

 Common problems that come across my desk:

Failure to follow submission guidelines:  after you pick the publishing house you want to submit to, commit their rules to memory AND FOLLOW THEM TO THE LETTER. This includes submitting a mystery to a publisher who only releases romance [or vice versa].

 Errors in spelling, punctuation, formatting:  Use spell check; take a basic technical English writing course and practice on your computer program to learn how to set margins, line spacing, and indents. Fancy fonts do not impress me, nor do quotations at the beginning of each chapter.

 Point of View: some editors only accept two POVs. I personally don't mind more than the usual two, but I don't want to dislocate a cervical vertebrae while reading a manuscript.

 Telling instead of showing: this takes some practice but it can be mastered. Don't tell me the hero's pissed at the heroine, show me.

 Frothy, repetitious prose. As I have occasionally informed the authors involved with the Class of '85 series for TWRP, “Hauling out the hedge clippers makes me cranky.” Tell me what you want to say in simple declarative sentences. Learn the purpose, and proper use of, commas and semi-colons.

 Too much sexual attraction too early: there is a reason why we call it sexual tension. Giving it all up by page 10 is not tension; it's risky and dangerous behavior, not to mention unhealthy. There is a reason why we keep our zippers in a locked, upright position. It makes readers keep turning pages. Note - there are certain types of romances where this rule would be broken such as in erotic romance. But for most of the romance subgenres sexual tension is what keeps the reader reading.

 Editor bio: July 2004, in the middle of a bar at RWA Dallas, nurse/victim advocate/and insurance investigator Kathy Cottrell was handed her first published novel. The experience, similar to holding her first-born child in her arms, remains with her to this day. She uses the years spent maneuvering the twists and turns of Rejection Road, as well as her time as Senior Editor with The Wild Rose Press, to teach new, and not so new, authors as  examples of what to do and not do, who to listen, and not listen to, in order to hold that new baby in their arms.

 Kathy's current editor duties involve wrapping up the Class of '85, a reunion series for the Wild Rose Press. Ever wonder what happened to the prom queen? Or the guy voted most likely to spend time in a maximum security cage? Come to the twenty-fifth reunion of the Class of '85 and find out!

Did I do that?!

Hi! Callie Lynn here. First I'd like to wish everyone a Happy Halloween and a Blessed Samhain!

I'd like to talk about something I've come across quite a lot recently in Black Rose submissions. I believe that for the most part this is done unintentionally and not in anyway meant to copy another author's work, but it may be construed as plagiarism or at the very least a copyright issue. So with that said, let me move on to the point.

I have noticed several story submissions on my own desk recently that have mirrored other works dangerously.

With a lot of emphasis and I might add a good amount of very good books, movies, and shows out there in the last several years on the subject of vamps and shifters, I notice more and more submissions are coming in with all too familiar themes, storylines, and even down to character and setting. While watching everything you, as an author, can in the genre you enjoy writing in the name of research, which by the way I do myself, we must keep in mind that NEVER and I do mean NEVER are we able to adopt any piece of that original work for our own. Nor may we borrow characters from those works. Characters are part of copyrighted creative works and may not be used unless express permission is given by said creator.

For instance, I have recently delved into several older vamp series which many have perhaps forgotten about and noticed similarities on some of the mythology of the creatures who we adore. "Moonlight" depicts Nick St. John as a PI gumshoe-type vamp who sleeps in a freezer and is able to move around in daylight as long as it is overcast much like those in "Twilight." "Blood Ties" goes the opposite direction with the human, Vickie Nelson, a police detective turned PI due a progressive eye disease and who partners with 450 year old vamp, Henry, a descendant of royalty who sniff out nothing but otherworldly evil-doings. These are great stories and unique in their own way. But though some of the finer points may mirror other stories you can not borrow the obvious.

Things such a daywalking, no heartbeat or pulse, changing to counterpart animal on the full moon or whenever the mood urges you is fine. No reflection or having a reflection, all fine. Needing to feed every day or once in awhile due to age, again fine. The thing is to beware of having a group of teens or adults who live in Forks that are vamps. That is Twilight to millions of people and especially Stephanie Myers who owns rights to her story and her characters.

More recently the infamous "True Blood" has give us even more unique twist to vampirism, as well, wolf/shape shifters, demons and so much more. We eat all these shows up as well the many authors such as Laurell K. Hamilton, J. R. Ward, Anne Rice, Christine Feehan, and so many others who have created such lustfully attractive monsters with hearts and hot bods. But as writers, we need to figure out a way to create unique storylines and different themes with a risk that no one has thought up yet. How do we do that while our minds are wrapped around the awesome books, TV series, or movies we have rolling around in our heads? Well, my friends, there in lies the question. Only you can answer through your own means of filtering out what's already been done.

The moral of this post is to be aware of what you write. Be careful not to weave a wonderful tale that comes too close to something that has already been done and by all means, NEVER borrow characters from other's work. You do not want to find somewhere down the line that you have stepped on someone toes or copyright.

Callie Lynn Wolfe

Senior Managing Editor

Black Rose Imprint

The Wild Rose Press
callielynnwrp@aol.com