A Very Vampire Week

I know my fellow bloggers aren't too fond of vampires, but for me it's been a very vampire week.

First of all my latest offering from The Wild Rose Press, a novella called The Vampire and the Vixen is being offered FREE this week on Kindle. In the ratings, so far it's made it to number 65 on the overall Amazon Bestseller List for free titles, and to number 18 under the category Contemporary Romance. I am simply thrilled by these numbers. (I'll find out how they translate to actual 'sale' numbers when I get my sales report from Amazon through TWRP later in the month.) It's also garnered a couple more really nice reviews.

It's FREE through Saturday, so there's still time to pick up a copy if you haven't gotten yours yet. And thanks to those who have shared, posted, or Tweeted about it for me. It is greatly appreciated!

On Sunday the sixth season of True Blood (my guilty pleasure) had its season finale. I'm bummed that it's over for the summer, and even more bummed that my favorite vampire on the show, Eric, was last seen burning to a crisp in the sun. I will be royally upset if they kill him off, let me tell you. The show has gotten so far off book (It's based on the Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris) that I'm in the process of re-reading the sixth book to see if there's ANYthing from the novel in the show. So far I'm about halfway through and there's nothing. Now, I don't want the series to be exactly like the books, since that would leave few surprises, but I'd like there to be SOMEthing familiar.

I also found another vampire series to feed my cravings. It's a series called "Love at Stake" by Kerrelyn Sparks. So far I've read the first two and will take a bite out of the third as soon as I finish the Sookie book. There are about fourteen books in the series so far, so I should be well supplied with reading material (not that there's ever a shortage, right?) for the foreseeable future.

And finally in my vampire world, my in-laws made a fantastic purchase for me at a garage sale last week.

I now have two life-sized Edwards residing in my library. What more could a girl ask for?

So all in all, I am a very happy vampire girl these days!

Until next time,

Happy Reading!

Debra
www.debrastjohnromance.com

Echoes - the repeat offenders

This week I found a blog which talked about echoes i.e. the words you tend to repeat. I thought I knew mine, but then I looked at the blog author's list of the common echoes, and realised how many of those I use (and over-use!)

If you want to know what they are, here's the link: http://writersinthestorm.wordpress.com/2013/07/29/how-to-axe-repeat-offenders/

The blog also gives a link to word count site, where you can copy and paste a chapter and find out what words you've over-used. I put in my first chapter and  O.M.G. - I was shocked! I never realised how much I use 'thing' , as in anything, something, nothing or plain thing or things. A 'find' on the full ms. in Word highlighted so many of these words. One of my most repeated was 'anything more' which I realise could be condensed (in most cases) to anymore.

Try it on a chapter. Exclude 'the' and 'it' words and put 200 in the 'how many words shall I list' option, and see what comes up!
http://www.wordcounter.com/

Debra wrote last week about final edits. At this rate, it will be next year at this time before I finish the final edit of my ms!!! But it's a great exercise in working out alternative ways to say something in order to avoid these 'echoes'.

Breaking the Barrier

What do you do when you’re stuck? You know, when you’re writing and you’re moving along just fine—your characters are doing what they’re supposed to be doing, your plot is advancing, you’re breezing through—when all of a sudden you realize that the past page and a half or so have sort of fizzled.

Despite knowing exactly where I am in my story and where I need to go, this happens to me quite frequently. It’s very frustrating. Suddenly, dialogue that was witty and had a great rhythm to it becomes banal and boring. Character’s thoughts either become too heavy and trap me inside their heads, or they become empty and obvious. The story starts sinking, fast.

When that happens to me, there are a number of things I do. In no particular order:

1.     I reread my notes for the story—where the plot is going, what my characters’ motivation may be, what I wanted to remember to add. Oftentimes, that’s enough to push me over the hump and get me on the right track.

2.     I reread what I wrote yesterday. Hopefully, yesterday was a more successful writing day and if I can find my rhythm from the day before, I can sometimes jumpstart my rhythm for the day.

3.     I read a favorite author. There is one author whose writing I love and whose writing inspires me. While she writes romance, it’s not the same subgenre as mine, but she has a way of putting words together that is amazing. Just reading a chapter or two usually gives me an idea of how to invigorate my own writing.

4.     I help author friends with their own writing. It’s so much easier to find the plot holes in other people’s writing, or to identify what’s not working and how to fix it. By helping others and not thinking about my own writing, I can usually come up with a resolution to a problem I’m having.

5.     I sleep on it. Some of my best inspiration comes as I’m drifting off to sleep. Of course, the trick is remembering it the next morning!

What do you do?

The Genius of Repetition

I lurked on an excellent RWA University class last month. It was about contests and making your first 5,000 words stand out.

I still feel openings are the hardest part of writing, and the presenter offered some super advice that I've heard before, but resonated with me this time:

You must create empathy BEFORE introducing any negative flaws in your character, anything that will distance us from the reader.

There are five ways to create empathy: (Need to use AT LEAST two of these.)

Sympathy

Jeopardy

Likeability

Power

Humor

Is There Such a Thing as a Final Edit?

This morning I completed my edits on the galley for This Feels Like Home. This time through, we weren't looking for editing choices, but formatting and other errors. Even at this stage of the game, the mss has been through several other rounds of edits, I found a few mistakes. That always amazes me, because it seems like no matter how many sets of 'eyes' look at a mss, it never seems to be enough. I feel fortunate that my books go through many rounds of edits with my editor at TWRP. With Home, not only did it go through the regular round of edits, it also went through several rounds of revisions before being offered a contract. And of course before I even submitted it, I went through it several times with a fine tooth come. But, no matter how fine the teeth, something always seems to get through.

For each round of the official, post-contract edits, we look for different things, so perhaps that's what gets in the way of finding those lingering pesky errors. In the first round, in addition to correcting typos and such we were also making changes to phrasing and story continuity. The second round was a bit more of the same. Both of these rounds are done with the 'track changes' feature in Word, so perhaps that's why some of the misspellings and incorrect punctuation slip through. It's sometimes difficult to see those kinds of mistakes with all of the strike-throughs and comments on the page as well.

After that we got to the pre-galley stage. Here we were focused on mainly spelling and usage errors, but if I really, really wanted to edit/revise something, I could, so long as those types of changes were kept to a minimum. In the galley stage it was strictly for errors. No revising allowed. I found an extra set of quotation marks around some dialogue, the word glace instead of glance, a blank line, and two places where italics should have been used but hadn't been. Now the italics should have been fixed in the pre-galley and weren't, but no biggie. And the blank line was simply a formatting issue. But the misused word and the extra punctuation...how in the world had those been missed when I've looked at the mss a million times, my editor has looked at the mss a million times, and the copy edit department had a read-through?

And of course I found places where I wanted to change something, but knew at this stage that I couldn't. At this point, the story is told and nothing about that is going to change. This happens with every story, right? Eventually you just need to let it go and send it out into the world. If we were allowed to, I think we'd keep editing and revising and editing and revising forever...and then no one would ever get to read our books. And wouldn't that be a sad state of affairs?! :)

My editor thanked me for taking the time to go through the mss so thoroughly again. The next step will be to send it to production for the PDF of the final release format (There may or may not be an approval step in there.) and a release date. Yippie! (The galley showed a copyright of 2014, so I'm guessing early next year.) I know I'll be tempted to look through that ready-to-be-published copy when I get it, and I'm sure I'd find a few errors that were missed. But, at that point it will be too late to do anything about it. If there are mistakes, I guess I have to chalk it up to everyone's human and everyone makes mistakes. And I know for a fact my book won't be the only one out there with errors. I'll just have to grimace and bear it when I do my first read-through of the book when I have the paperback in my eager little hands!

Until next time,

Happy Reading!

Debra
www.debrastjohnromance.com

'Irish Inheritance' - sneak peek

For the past 6 weeks, I've been working my way through my latest novel, 'Irish Inheritance' prior to submission. Editing, adding, deleting, tidying, polishing, etc etc etc! Part of me loves the process, another part of me eventually says 'Enough is enough!' as I plough through each chapter one by one.
Having finally got to the end of 27 chapters, I put the whole thing together, and now I'm in the process of seeking out repeat words and phrases in the full ms. Yes, the ones we all use too much - I still have a list of about 20 words I need to check!

But here, as a sneak peek, is the start of the novel.
“A house in Ireland?” Jenna Sutton stared over the mahogany desk at the lawyer. “Someone I’ve never heard of has left me a house in Ireland?”
The grey-haired lawyer peered at her over his steel-rimmed spectacles. “A half share of the house, Ms. Sutton. Along with a half share of what, at current exchange rates, amounts to approximately fifty thousand pounds.”
Jenna shook her head and swiped several strands of her hair back behind her ear. “I don’t understand. Why would this Helena—what did you say her name was?”
“Miss Helena Keating.”
“Why has she left me a house and twenty-five thousand pounds? How does she even know about me?”
“Ms. Sutton, I can only give you the information passed to me by the law firm of Daniel McGrath in Dublin. We were instructed to find any descendants of James Oliver Sutton—”
“My grandfather.”
“Yes, and as far as we can ascertain, you are his sole descendant."

Here's my (draft) blurb for this story:

Will an old Irish house bring them together or drive them apart?

English actress Jenna Sutton and American artist Guy Sinclair first meet when they jointly inherit a house on the west coast of Ireland. Curious about their unknown benefactress and why they are both considered as 'family', they gradually work out their links to the original owners of the house. At the same time as they are unravelling a nineteenth century love story, they struggle against their mutual attraction to each other. The two lovers in the past were destined not to have a happy ending, and it seems the same thing will happen to their descendants - or will it? 

My question to you - would the blurb and the first page make you want to know more? I'm not fishing for any compliments, but for your honest opinion. :-) 

A Great Resource for Editing Your Writing

A friend directed me to an essay by Chuck Palahniuk, Nuts And Bolts: "Thought" Verbs, about showing versus telling. Actually, I’ve come across it before, but today, I thought it would be useful to mention here in this blog.

The point of Palahniuk’s essay is to train the writer to stop using words like thinks, knows, understands, realizes, believes, wants, remembers, imagines or desires, which are intangible, and instead, use words that show the physical action or details.

It’s a lesson we all need, and he even gives homework! So, check out the essay here and let me know your plans. Do you already do this and if so, how? Are you going to try his homework? And if you want, leave a “before” and “after” example in the comments section.

Good luck!