An 'Intriguing' Puzzle

Paula wonders how to sort out her story!

I’m on the third draft of my current story. In the first draft, the heroine broke her ankle and had to stay at the hero’s house, which admittedly resulted in some interesting scenes. However, by about Chapter 13 or 14 (approx. 50,000 words), I realised a broken ankle was too restricting for the heroine. She couldn’t recover from it in a couple of weeks (unlike some of the ‘miraculous’ cures we see in the soap operas), so it was time for a rethink.

Second draft – sprained ankle – less serious – but again, by the time I got to the dreaded Chapter 13, I decided the story was going nowhere. It was a ‘how we met and fell in love’ scenario, with internal conflicts for both hero and heroine i.e. why neither of them wanted to be involved in any new relationship, but no real external conflicts.

Even I was yawning at this plot!

After doing the edits for ‘Irish Inheritance’, my editor suggested the possibility of a spin-off story about Charley (the heroine’s best friend).

…Thinks…

Can I move this story to Ireland instead of the English Lake District? Can I change the heroine’s name to Charlotte (Charley)?

More to the point, can I lift this story from the ‘meeting and falling in love’ scenario into something more interesting?

Thinking about a title for this spin-off, I came up with ‘Irish Intrigue’. So that meant I had to work out the ‘intrigue’ part of it. With the help of a friend (a non-writer but a great brain-stormer!), I came up with various ideas - plus some possible red herrings to keep the reader wondering.

It all seemed to be working well – until I hit the dreaded Chapter 13 again! I know (roughly!) how the later chapters are going to pan out, but now I’m stuck with this ‘sagging middle’ syndrome where I’m trying to work out how to get my characters from where they are at the moment to where I want them to be eventually. I’ve tried writing a list of the main turning points – and then moving them around. It’s rather like one of those 'sliding tile puzzles' where you move tiles in a small square in the hope of getting them all in the right places to complete the picture.

At the moment, my story is rather like this picture – and I’m wondering if I can ever get all the ‘tiles' into the correct places!

Another Speech

Jennifer's working on another speech...

Remember a couple of weeks ago I wrote about a “speech” I was planning to make and how nervous I was about four lines? Well, that was nothing compared to what I’m doing now. Now, I’m writing a 20-30 minute speech!

The four-liner was nerve wracking because I was planning to put my complaint on record at a meeting I was attending. I don’t like public speaking and don’t like confrontation, but it was really important to me that I said what I needed to say. So I wrote it, agonized over it, read it, responded and was finished. The reason I wrote about it here was not because it had anything to do with writing, but because it illustrated the difference between finding the right words when speaking and when writing (at least for me).

However, this next speech has everything to do with writing. A friend of mine asked me to speak to her women’s group about my books and of course I said yes. “Of course,” because no matter how much I dislike public speaking or how nervous it makes me, I’m going to say yes. Since I’m not Nora Roberts, I have to market my own books, and speaking opportunities to women’s groups is a great way to do that.

My friend is a wonderful woman and I’m thrilled that she thought of me. I asked her what she wanted me to talk about and she said, “How a nice Jewish girl like you became a romance writer.” Okay then.

The women’s group is part of a Jewish organization, and they’re interested specifically in my book, The Seduction of Esther. Since I just signed a contract for the sequel, the speech is timely. And with the number of people they’re expecting to attend, 50-75, I hope to sell quite a few books.

So, I sat down and tried to figure out what I would say. There are a few ways to take her topic. I could look at it as an apology of sorts, but I don’t like that message. I’m proud of what I write, even if discussing it with certain people does sometimes make me blush. Instead, I took it a bit tongue-in-cheek. My goal when I wrote my speech was to make is enjoyable and hopefully, funny. On my personal blog, I have a particular voice that I’ve been told people like to read, so I tried to keep the tone the same. And having spoken to groups before, I know that even though everyone there knows the topic of my talk, not everyone there is a romance reader. I want everyone to enjoy what I have to say, to find it interesting, and perhaps, to convince them that they might even like to read my book. So I went for light and engaging.

Seventeen pages later—large type, double spaced—I have an approximately 20-minute speech that I think works. I ran it by a few people, all of whom like it (now I’m thinking I need to run it by someone who doesn’t like it, just so I have all my bases covered, but that might be a bit paranoid).

All that’s left is polishing and practicing. I’ll let you know how it goes!

A Script

Ana reads a script. 

I have not read many film scripts, but yesterday I read one that my daughter has been asked to produce. The story is a twist on the coming-of-age genre. A reclusive, about-to-turn-thirty woman is obsessed with staying young, with never dying. She doesn't know her free-spirited, sun-worshiping mother, with whom she lives, has stage 4 cancer.

Script-reading takes some getting used to. The dialogue is centered on the pages in a column. Lots of white space--I suppose for actors to write notes in.

The actors' movements (narrative) are in wider paragraphs and are explicit.  Eg.:
"Alpha walks through her messy hallway back to her bedroom and opens her closet. All her outfits are white or cream-colored and hung up neatly on a rack. Alpha changes out of her BATHROBE and into a white cropped T-SHIRT, HIGH-WAISTED PANTS, a tan 1970's silk TRENCH COAT and orthopedic-looking SANDALS."

It takes imagination to read a script, with its bare-bones descriptions of setting, tone, internal emotions. The abbreviations imply you are in a secret society. I've figured out that VO means 'voice over,' as in when the main character acts as a narrator. INT, EXT, DAY. NIGHT: setting cues are capitalized.

So different than writing a novel, where we labor over descriptions. Making sure the reader can follow the action and transitions.

Of course, the story is told (as all stories are) in the editing room. My daughter and her friend will edit. I will watch with interest.

My Muse is Calling

Debra's muse (finally) makes an appearance.

It seems like it's been forever, but lately my muse has been nudging me. The timing couldn't be more perfect, as in about two weeks I will be footloose and fancy free on summer vacation. Summer is the time when I get most of my writing done, simply by nature of the fact I have time to do it.

The surprising thing about this appearance of my muse is that it's not nudging me in the direction I thought I'd be taking this summer. I have a mss partially completed and it was my intended goal to finish it and get it submitted by the end of the summer. But apparently my muse has other ideas, because a different story keeps popping into my head. Scenes play out for me as I'm doing menial tasks: making dinner, doing the dishes, even as I was cleaning up after our community garage sale last weekend.

So, as my muse tends to be a bit fickle, as in I often have to coax her into peeking her head out, I'm going to just roll with it. Who knows, maybe I'll be able to finish two books this summer.

I really shouldn't get ahead of myself like that, right? But I'll keep you posted!

Until next time,

Happy Reading!

Debra
www.debrastjohnromance.com

Locations and Ideas

In 9 days’ time, I will be setting off for my month in the USA and Canada (but don’t ask me if I’m packed and ready because the short answer is no!)

When I’ve told people my schedule for the month, which includes New Jersey, Las Vegas, Grand Canyon, Ontario (near Niagara), and Rhode Island, several have said to me, “You should get plenty of ideas for new stories.”

Well, that remains to be seen. I don’t recall ever consciously ‘looking’ for ideas. Usually they sneak up on me when I least expect them, but I have used places I’ve visited as locations in my novels: London, the English Lake District, Scotland, Paris, New York, Los Angeles, the River Nile (including Luxor and Aswan), and Ireland.

One novel was set in a seaside resort on England’s south coast, which was an amalgam of several different seaside resorts (albeit none of them in the part of the south coast where I located ‘my’ resort!)

The only time I’ve used a location I’ve never visited was Iceland (in ‘Changing the Future’). Half of me now wants to visit Iceland to see if I got it right; the other half of me doesn’t in case I got it wildly wrong!

So – will my forthcoming trip trigger any new ideas for me? Who knows? After all, I never expected to get any ideas when I visited a small Irish village in County Mayo on a day when it never stopped raining – but then I spotted Maureen O’Hara’s signature in the visitors' book of ‘The Quiet Man’ cottage museum in the village (bottom line of this page), and a seed was sown…

Will any similar seeds be sown when I visit one of the Vegas casinos, or gaze in awe at the Grand Canyon, or watch the power of the water as it thunders over Niagara, or see the mansions of the Vanderbilts and Astors at Newport, RI? Or will some seemingly trivial event – something I see, or something I hear – provide the seed that will eventually germinate?

I’ll let you know!

It's Official

Jennifer shares good news.

I have news! I just signed a contract with my Rebel publisher for the second book in my Jewish contemporary romance series. I don’t have a release date yet, nor to I have a series title. However, I do have a book title (for the moment)—Miriam’s Surrender.

The book follows Miriam and Josh. This story centers around Passover and is the story of two people who need to discover the freedom of letting go in order to let love into their lives. Josh is an architect hired to redesign the alumni club of a posh, private school in New York. Miriam is the Assistant Director of Outreach, working with the alumni, and is Josh’s day-to-day contact for the redesign. They first met in The Seduction of Esther. Josh had thought he was in love with Miriam’s sister, and Miriam detests him because he hurt her sister. Now they have to work together. As they get to know each other, the animosity disappears, but Josh is hiding something from Miriam and when she discovers what it is, it has the possibility of destroying their relationship. Only when they are both able to let the other in and release some of the control they exert over everything, will they be able to see if their love can survive.

I’m excited to bring this story to publication and I can’t wait to share the process with all of you!

A facebook tip from Rebecca Lynn

Ana reposts a facebook tip from Rebecca Lynn, who gives amazing workshops in social media for authors.

I'm teaching my Social Media class over at YARWA right now and we had a conversation today about Edge Rank that I wanted to share with my chapter just as a free tip of the day for how to know if you're winning at EdgeRank or not. Ever since Facebook has changed their algorithms, everyone is worried that Facebook is trying to keep professional pages away from their fans. This is very much not true. Conversely, what they're trying to do is make sure that the people who engage with your page always (ALWAYS) see your posts. This does require that, if you have a professional page, you try to win at EdgeRank. This means you have to engage your fans.

After the algorithm switch, most big professional pages' Edge Ranks were averaging under 10%. This was an organic engagement percentage, based on the number of people who see and engage with the posts from the page. The chances are pretty good that your page is going to be over 10%, just because most of us probably have not paid for likes (which is why Facebook changed their algorithm.. they wanted to make sure that people who were paying for likes weren't able to use those inflated numbers to get marketing pull--basically, what happens when a big company tries to get marketing dollars based on their Facebook page, they used to be able to say, "we have 100,000 likes" and marketers would treat that like the TV numbers, "we have a reach of 1 million, meaning 1 million pairs of eyeballs would see it on their TV"... the problem was that many of these pages were paying for Facebook likes from click farms, which meant that they weren't actually getting 100K
eyeballs, so Facebook decided to change their algorithm so that you can now measure how many people actually see and engage with your page; this means that those people who were trying to get advertising dollars from having 100K Facebook likes now have to admit to those marketers that they're really only getting 2,000 eyeballs; so Facebook has set up their algorithm to measure how many people engage, and if you are consistently over 10%, you're going to keep going up in the "EdgeRank", which means that your organic reach will automatically go up as long as you continue to engage your fans). They want to reward people who are not paying for likes. Anything over 10% gets you automatically in the plus column. Anything over 20% is good. Anything over 50% is excellent. Obviously, we want to shoot for the highest percentage we can.

How do you know what your engagement percentage is?

Go to your Facebook professional page. There should be about a half-page that shows up automatically, as your Page Manager? If there isn't, then try going to the arrow on the right side and clicking directly in to your Pro page instead of going through your personal profile. At the top of the page, there's a bunch of buttons. Click on "See Insights". This will show you what your engagement percentage is. Well, it won't show you exactly, because we don't have access to Edge Rank. But you can calculate it yourself. Take the number under "Engagement" (on the right--this is the average number of engaged people for all your posts over the last week), divide it by your total number of likes. (I know... I promised there would be no math. I lied.) That's your engagement percentage. As long as you are over 10%, you are WINNING at EdgeRank. You are taking advantage of the engagement potential of the new Edge Rank. Make sure you are always over 10% (some people
will say over 5%) and you are going to keep winning at Edge Rank.

My engagement percentage for last week was... 56%. That's up from the week before, which was 52%. It may not always go up every week, but the more you can keep it up and keep it going up, the better. I don't think I've been below 40% since EdgeRank changed. Granted, I've never run "like" ads and I don't try to get likes from anywhere except the back matter of my books, because I only want people on there who really want to be there. But that doesn't have to be your strategy. As long as you don't drop below 10% for consistent weeks and weeks, you are going to keep getting more and more of your fans engaged. Facebook wants this to work for you. They want everyone who wants to see your stuff to see your stuff. But you definitely have to do the work to get them engaged.

Not sure how to do that? Ask a question. I asked a question about a fight scene yesterday. I got almost all of my fans engaged in the conversation in some way (89%). Either they read it (reach), they liked it (clicked), or they talked to me about it (commented). Only the last two count toward your engagement. So make sure that, every once in awhile, you put out a post with something like a question or something (that they can still count on) and then below that, remind your fans that if they want to keep seeing your stuff, it helps if they like, comment, and share. Not often. Maybe once a month. But it's worth saying, just as a general insight for your fans to know about any one of the professional pages they've liked.

A higher general percentage means that when I put out a post that's going to get less commenting (like "my book released today!" with a buy-link), I'm going to get upwards of 50% of my fans seeing it automatically. Plus, and this is the part that's really money, my fans are used to being regularly engaged in my brand. In the day of the Thank-You economy (in which we are fully in the throes today), fans want to talk to their brands. I think I posted about this the other day, but they've actually quantified the value of engaged fans, and we now know that an engaged fan is worth 10% more money over time (think of how much money an individual fan will spend with you over their lifetime, and add 10% to that) because engaged fans are 7 times more likely to recommend your work to their friends than an unengaged fan who likes your product (your books) equally as much.

Again, just things that are running through my mind because of the class. Public service announcement of the day. :)
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Rebecca Lynn, President - Celtic Hearts Romance Writers
    http://rlsyme.com and http://theoutcasthighlander.com