Confessions of a Fantasy Romance Author

That’s the headline for my guest appearance and giveaway at my fellow WisRWA member Mary Hughes’ blog this week. Drop in starting on Tuesday, Feb. 26, for some revelations about where THE PRINCE OF VAL-FEYRIDGE came from (besides my fertile imagination), read an excerpt, and leave a comment by March 1st for a chance to win an e-copy of the book.

Here's the link for when it goes live on Tuesday: http://maryhughesbooks.blogspot.com/2013/02/confessions-of-fantasy-romance-author.html

Hope to see you there!

Some Friendly Advice for Those Who Are Entering Writing Contests

I’ve judged WisRWA’s Fab Five and RWA’s Golden Heart multiple times, and I’ve learned a lot from doing so—sometimes what I SHOULD be doing, but more often what NOT to do in my writing.

The first and obvious piece of advice should be this: Read and follow the rules.

Now I know entrants are at various stages in their writing careers and have varied knowledge of the conventions of writing, but here are some items to pay attention to fixing BEFORE you submit because if you attend to these issues first, you give your judges a better chance to focus on your story rather than on trying to figure out what is on the page. And what you really want them to judge is the story and characters.

Paragraphing

Observe in published novels how dialogue is broken into paragraphs. Put the character’s spoken words in the same paragraph as his/her actions. Readers will be better able to follow who said what if you do this. And following who said what helps the reader see the story without getting lost.

He/She/They used too frequently without identifying who he/she/they might be.

If two male characters are talking, be sure to tag each one clearly with a name or descriptive title because if “he” appears multiple times in a row, you (the author) may be clear as to which “he” is which because you are visualizing the scene in your head, but the reader has most likely lost track. (The same goes for female characters and any time you have more than two characters in a scene.)

The unreferenced “it”

This useful little word can also be a source of major confusion if “it” is not placed close enough to the thing “it” is replacing or standing in for. We, the writer, know exactly what we mean. But readers can’t see inside our heads, so it’s our job to replace all the vague words in our text with clear ones.

When we enter contests, it’s partly because we want to be read, to connect with an audience. We want the judge to assess our story, our characters, our scene setting, our hook, and give us feedback on the story as a whole. The last thing we want to do is interfere with the judge’s ability to see those aspects of our work. My best advice is to pay attention to these few items when you polish that entry.

What about you? What advice would you add?

Price Reduction…and Contests

Good news!  My publisher has lowered the e-book price for books more than a year old. That means that across the board from Amazon to Barnes and Noble to The Wild Rose Press, THE PRINCE OF VAL-FEYRIDGE is now $2.99 in any electronic version. I’m hoping the new lower price will tempt readers to give it a try. Please pass the news on to your friends.

Now to contests. The Fab Five is open for entrants until the end of February. Sponsored by WisRWA, Wisconsin’s chapter of RWA, the contest focuses on the first 2,500 words of a manuscript, those crucial opening pages that will either hook an editor or agent or turn them off. If you want to polish your opening pages before sending them off to the “big time,” this contest offers trained judges, a low entry fee, and editor/agent final judges. To check out the rules, categories, and final judges, visit wisrwa.org and click on the Contest tab.

THE PRINCE OF VAL-FEYRIDGE hit the finals in Fab Five, one of the first contests I entered. I didn’t know what to expect, and I was lucky to place, but I learned a lot from the feedback. And what I learned made the story better—especially since I tried several different openings over the various drafts and other contests I entered.

Even if you don’t win or place, taking that step to put your work out there for readers you don’t know and will never see is necessary to getting up the nerve to submit to editors and agents. You can’t sell if you don’t submit.

Interview Jitters

As an author, sooner or later you have to give an interview. Now I’ve done e-mail interviews for blogs, and I’ve done an interview with the newspaper at a book signing event, and I’ve been part of author panels at events, but I’d never done a televised interview. To say I was nervous was an understatement.

Like most authors I know, I’m a shy, reserved person, preferring to hang around the fringes of a group and watch rather than be the center of attention. Unless, that is, I know everyone around me and/or the topic of discussion is something I know pretty well. Still, I’m not built for public appearances. That’s why I write. Alone. Listening to the voice in my head, not the one coming out of my mouth, which always sounds strange to me when it’s recorded.

When the library’s new volunteer coordinator decided to pursue local authors to give talks, she found me. I agreed to do a presentation at the library, but I was reluctant to do an interview for the local cable access channel. I’d heard one of the “professional” announcers do interviews and knew he wouldn’t be sympathetic to a romance author. So I said no and explained my reasons. She told me she would be doing the interview and she’d provide me the questions ahead of time.

Okay, I said, wondering if I had just doomed myself.

Well, I had a week—in between a gazillion other things—to prepare for 20 minutes of airtime. Being a person who knows she has to be prepared in order to sound articulate, I drafted a 7-page, double-spaced set of answers, including a reading from the book.

Fortunately, they were going to prerecord the show, so any glitches could be edited out. Of course, a few days before the taping my DH gave me his cold. So I went, sniffling and with a scratchy throat, through about an inch of steadily falling snow, to the studio, armed with lozenges and my bottle of water.

The staff and the library coordinator immediately put me at ease. The interview went off without a hitch, and I used most of my material, including some statistics on the romance fiction market from ROMANCE WRITERS REPORT. (I wanted to stress the wide reach of romance.) In the course of doing this interview I learned a few things:

#1 Actors aren’t kidding when they say those studio lights are hot!

#2 My writing “fit my mouth” because the excerpt was remarkably easy to read.

#3 As long as I don’t have to do it live, I think I can do this.

What about you? How have you handled the interview jitters?

The Reader’s Perspective on Self-Published & Professionally Published E-Books

I’ve been reading a lot of e-books lately, both self-published and professionally published, and a number of these were novellas. While the stories were all engrossing and well-constructed, there were some issues in editing.

Now, I’m a stickler for correct usage and spelling, so when I spot a misused word, it bothers me because catching those mistakes is the editor’s job, whether that editor is hired by the author or by the publisher.

Not all authors are good at spelling even though they are darn good at story-telling. Still, there are usage guides available in print and online to help authors catch those common errors and learn to avoid them. Even then, some mistakes will inevitably slip by. That’s where the editor/proofreader should provide the safety net. I expect to find occasional errors in self-published work, especially that for which the author didn’t hire an editor or proofreader, but one would think the professional publishers would hire editors who keep the guides handy on their desks/computer work stations. Not all of them apparently do because in addition to common misspellings like to for too and alter for altar, I’ve seen sentences with words missing and characters’ names that changed spelling from page to page.

I’ve also seen formatting issues, for instance blank lines between paragraphs. Now this does make for faster page turns, but fewer words on the screen makes me feel somewhat cheated, as if the novella somehow has fewer words overall than promised. That’s probably not true, but marketing is as much about perception as reality.

Another odd situation in one professionally published novella was the fact the title story actually comprised only 80% of the book (according to my Kindle’s book progress indicator). The remaining 20% was promo pages for at least five additional works offered by the publisher. Now, I fully expect publishers to put sample pages at the back of books, and I sometimes am intrigued enough to look for the upcoming book, but 20% of the book devoted to promo seemed a bit over the top. Plus, I thought I still had more story left, according to the meter.

None of these little peculiarities caused me to stop reading (other than to comment to my DH about a word misuse) or to enjoy the actual story any less. All of these authors told page-turning stories, but these little “blips” do pull the reader out of the story even if for a fraction of a second.

If you’ve had experiences with this sort of thing, please share. What’s come to your attention lately?

New Refrigerator Adjustments—Don’t Bump Your Head and Hang onto the Rag!

We’ve had our new refrigerator for a month, and I’ve discovered on the drawback side that it has one fewer shelf and only two produce drawers instead of the three the old one had. I’m still trying to figure out the best spacing for the shelves. On the plus side, it has much more door shelf space and the shelves in the body are deeper. I can put much more in the door, but I have a hard time finding space for bags of salad and stalks of celery. But these are the adjustments one expects with a new model. However, there are some unexpected adjustments (lessons) too.

Lesson #1: Don’t bump your head.

The outer door handles stick out farther, and we’ve both bumped our heads and/or shoulders on the freezer door while trying to put in or take out things from the fridge section.

Lesson #2: Hold onto the rag when dusting!

My DH insists on dusting/vacuuming the space between the fridge and the cabinet. This new fridge fits tighter to the cabinet and there’s no more than an inch of space there, but he insisted on cleaning there as usual. I told him, “Use a rag draped over a yardstick, and hang onto the rag.”

My DH heard the first part but not the second, so when I came home, he had the rag stuck way back in the narrow space and was prepared to pull out the fridge to remove it. Now the last thing I wanted to do at 7 p.m. was pull out a fridge that fit perfectly where it was, so I applied my creative problem-solving skills, opened a wire coat hanger, shaped it into a stick with a hook on the end, and pulled out the rag.

While my solution may have looked brilliant, I assured him it was born of experience, having “lost a rag” myself more than once. Which leads me to the final lesson…

Lesson #3: If someone wants to clean, let him.

Hope you’re all having a wonderful new year!

‘Tis the season for...chocolate!

I confess—I love chocolate. But I’m also something of a chocolate snob these days. If I’m going to eat chocolate, I want it to be real chocolate, not the imitation stuff that fills Easter baskets and Christmas stockings. Those chocolate bunnies? Forget it. And don’t even get me started on that thing called “white chocolate.” I don’t mind carob-coated raisins; they’re actually quite good in snack packs. But if a product’s not chocolate, it shouldn’t be labeled as such.

I’m not even sure that artificial stuff has the same benefits. For instance, real chocolate is a mood elevator. Does the fake stuff have enough of the active ingredient that makes us feel better? I doubt it. No wonder we feel so icky after being conned into eating it.

When I was a kid, I happily scarfed down chocolate bunnies and Santas because, hey, it was candy. Now, though, in this era of “healthy” dark chocolate, I’ve discovered the world of Dove and Bliss. They’re mainstream products, so I’m not truly a snob in the sense my chocolate has to be expensive. However, it definitely has to taste like the real thing. If it has some caramel or truffle or coconut in it, so much the better. And if someone really wants to make me happy, stuff my dark chocolate with some marzipan.

What’s your chocolate preference? Are you particular about the kind of chocolate you like?