Writing: Love It or Hate It?

Writing is:

• A clandestine love affair
• An approach-avoidance relationship
• A black hole
• An elusive butterfly
• Giving birth
• Filling the well
• Creating a rainbow
• Completing the unfinished
• Wisps of smoke
• A pact with the devil (or an angel)
• Building a sandcastle
• Reviving the dead
• Walking in someone else’s moccasins
• Joy
• Despair
• Hate
• Love

What does writing mean to you?

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A native Montanan, Heidi M. Thomas now lives in Northwest Washington. Her first novel, Cowgirl Dreams, is based on her grandmother, and the sequel, Follow the Dream, has recently won the national WILLA Award. Heidi has a degree in journalism, a certificate in fiction writing, and is a member of Northwest Independent Editors Guild. She teaches writing and edits, blogs, and is working on the next books in her “Dare to Dream” series.

Be My Guest: Gemini Wordsmiths on their Love of Games

Please join the Blood-Red Pencil in welcoming guest posters and partners in editing crime, Ruth Littner and Ann Stolinsky, of Gemini Wordsmiths.

During the Jurassic Period, Ann Stolinsky and Ruth Littner knew they wanted to become editors when they grew up. As time progressed, continents drifted, the written word was invented, and their dreams came true. Here is some crucial information about how the company began, who really wears the pants in the family, and what expectations can be exceeded:

Fictional Moderator: How did you start your business?

Ann: Ruth and I met at one of the monthly meetings of the Writers’ Coffeehouse in Willow Grove, PA, during the roundtable introductions.

Ruth: I saw a woman across the table who looked exactly like me. It was a bit unnerving and I felt sorry for her. When she said she was interested in starting an editing company, I knew we were long-lost twins and I had to approach her.

Ann: When we met after to introduce ourselves, it was confirmed that we are identical twins, except for one detail: Ruth is 6 feet tall and I’m barely 5 feet.

Ruth: And to reinforce kismet, it turns out that our daughters have known each other for years.

Moderator: How well do you work together?

Ann: Ruth and I work superbly together. Our work ethic and our desire to deliver the best possible product are very much in sync.

Ruth: The yin and yang of our editing strengths are only surpassed by our ability to laugh together and face work issues from differing approaches.

Ann: As for the question about who wears the pants in the family, that should be answered right here, right now. We both do. It’s a pair of pants.

Moderator: What types of clients do you attract?

Ruth: It’s crazy, but most of them are normal! We have a niche in editing game rules and testing for game playability, so we attract a large gamer market. Additionally, we polish documents produced by folks who have English as a second language so they appear “native” to the reader. We create or improve newsletters for organizations. We attract writers needing developmental or line editing for their manuscripts. We edit websites, write scripts for website videos, and even guest blog!

Ann: The children’s song, "I’m Gonna Eat Some Worms" comes to mind: “We attract short, fat, skinny ones, big, tall, juicy ones. …” LOL. We attract a variety of clients with our twin-ship accident of birth. Our first client was in California and our second was in Canada. We became international superstars with that second job since we went “global.” We’re currently in contract negotiations with a national team of web designers to be their editors. It’s an exciting time.

Moderator: How do you find work?

Ann: We market, market, market. We utilize LinkedIn and other social media. I attend board game and other types of conventions and I market in person.

Ruth: Word-of-mouth is our best marketing tool. Our previous clients are happy to share their “find” of Gemini Wordsmiths. Additionally, sometimes we randomly cruise websites, laugh/cry at their grammatical and typographical errors, and contact the site owners to discuss improvements. We even show them how to play “tag” with SEO for their sites. This works!

Moderator: Do you work independently on each job?

Ann: It depends on the job. The majority of the time, we edit material independently, then get together to review our individual edits. I guess this is really where the wearing of the pants comes in. If we are in conflict, we discuss our positions and come to an agreement. Clients are not just getting one pair of eyes, they are getting two pair — or four pair, if you count our glasses.

Ruth: We work on most jobs independently using our individual strengths. Then we collaborate. If we have a discrepancy, I point out to Ann that I am correct and we continue. Just kidding. She’s right sometimes, too. Kidding again.

Moderator: Last question. How do you exceed expectations?

Ann: With most companies, the client gets one editor, one edit. If the client would like a second edit, they have to pay another company and/or another editor. With Gemini Wordsmiths, the client gets two sets of edits for the price of one, and at the same time. We have no lives outside of our jobs (oh wait, that’s just me!), but we both devote an enormous amount of time to ensuring that the final products are the best they can be. Quality work is our signature.

Ruth: What she said. And, by the way, we’re nice. And who can resist working with two gorgeous redheads?

Disclaimer: Ruth's last comment may imply an oxymoron. We love editors here at BRP, but do writers exist who believe their editors are "nice"?

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Kathryn Craft is a developmental editor at Writing-Partner.com, an independent manuscript evaluation and line editing service. Her women's fiction and memoir are represented by Katie Shea at the Donald Maass Literary Agency. The first chapter of her memoir, Standoff at Ronnie's Place, modified as a stand-alone essay, was published online by Mason's Road, the online journal of Fairfield University's MFA program. She blogs about Healing through Writing.

Love Your Characters

Like most writers I really love my characters. I think we really have to love them to stay with them for a whole book, and especially a series. L.J. Sellers has kept her Detective Jackson series going because she still likes visiting every day with that detective and the cast of characters who continue from one book to another. It is the same with other series writers like Sue Grafton, Louise Penny, John Sandford, William Kent Krueger, and more. They/we all love our characters.

In thinking about this to start writing a blog post about it, I wondered why these characters are so loved and so memorable, and I think I figured out at least one reason why. It's because we know so much more about them than the color of their hair or what kind of shoes they wear. We know how our continuing characters think and feel, so we know how they are going to react to a situation or event. We also know their back story - what happened in their lives before they started appearing on the pages of our books. That information is important so we know what shaped our character, and it is best if dropped into the current story in tasty little tidbits.

Isn't that a better way to get to know someone than by being taken for a tour of their home or office before they even step into the scene?

I just went through the galley for Stalking Season, the second book in the Seasons Mystery Series that debuted with Open Season, and when I finished I thought, gosh I love Sarah and Angel. I started to connect with the two detectives as people again and couldn't wait to get started on the third book. I even considered abandoning the book I'm working on to start hanging out with these two ladies again.

When I introduced them in the first book, it was done with very little physical description and more showing of their thoughts and feelings:

"Sarah took a deep breath and faced Quinlin in the stuffy cubbyhole of an office." The first couple of paragraphs set up why she is there and who Quinlin is. In the second paragraph we find out how she feels about being grilled by internal affairs:

"A trickle of perspiration ran down Sarah’s back and dampened her white T-shirt. Shifting in the wooden chair, she contemplated the wisdom of taking off her jacket, then decided against it. He would interpret it as a sign of weakness."

The first time Angel appears in the story, Sarah has just taken a seat in the briefing room across from a new detective:

"The woman turned to give Sarah the briefest of nods, and she recognized the mass of tight curls haloing a creamy mocha complexion as belonging to a former patrol officer. Angel?"

Then the sergeant assigns Sarah and Angel to a new case as partners. This is Sarah's response, which reveals a bit about Angel:

"Sarah turned sharply to look at Angel, and the elusive last name clicked. Something else clicked, too. An attitude that Angel wielded like a sword, heralding the proclamation, 'Don’t think that the only reason I’m here is because I’m a woman and I’m black.'"

This way of showing character is a trick I learned from a good friend and a terrific writer who was able to introduce a character with one brief line:

"Marco knew he wanted to be an artist from the time he was five years old and got in trouble for painting a mural on the living room wall."

What about you? What characters have you fallen in love with, either your own or others? Do you have some examples of great introductions of characters?

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Maryann Miller is an author and freelance editor. Information about her books, her editing services, and her blogs can be found on her Web site at www.maryannwrites.com Follow her on Twitter and Facebook

Be My Guest - Terry Odell

The month of February has many of us thinking about love and romance, and several regulars here at The Blood Red Pencil have shared tips and advice about writing love scenes. Here is another bit of advice. 

Men Are Not Women With Chest Hair

A while back, I had the pleasure of attending a workshop given by best selling romance author, Linda Howard. While the focus of the workshop was the Twelve Steps to Intimacy, I've already done a number of blog posts on that topic, (you can read a summary here)

Most of my books are romantic suspense, which puts them under the romance umbrella, which means the majority of my audience is female. I know there's an XY reader contingent of this blog, so any feedback from them is welcome.

I write books from the points of view of both men and women. Obviously, it's easier to write "female" but I do try very hard to make sure my men are actually "men" and, as the title of this blog suggests, not women with chest hair.

One of the topics Linda Howard covered was writing details. She pointed out that this was one place where men are really different from women. Women write detail in sex scenes, while men write detail in action scenes. And, since we were an audience of women, she told us we had to work especially hard when writing action scenes from a male character's POV.

She said that writing details in scenes of violence takes guts, but that we should suck it up, describing things that make us uncomfortable. And she urged us to remember the emotional detail as well as the physical. Violence, danger and sex have an emotional price, and that needs to come across on the page.

She used Barry Eisler and Vince Flynn as examples of suspense authors who write extremely detailed action scenes. Their fight scenes show every detail. She went on to say that Vince Flynn once said he wished he could write love scenes as easily as Linda Howard.

But, she said, if she had to write an action scene, this would be her first draft:  "He was shot. It hurt. He shot back. The other guy died." (From that example, I'll let my readers extrapolate how a man might write a sex scene—and I've read all too many of them!)

So, while she (and most women) struggle to write an action/fight/violent scene accurately from a male character's head, men must dig deeper to write love scenes

Some observations: Men tend to focus on one thing at a time. She compared them to a rifle: one shot, one direction. Women tend to be more like shotguns, with shells scattering their contents in a wide array. Men are less likely to get sidetracked.

She closed with the point that there is one underlying quality we must understand, and that is how much men love women. Howard mentioned a friend of hers whose wife had passed away. He said he missed waking up in the morning, holding her in his arms, smelling her scent and falling back to sleep.

I know that if I leave the bed before my husband gets up, I will almost always find him on my side of the bed shortly thereafter. Whether he's aware of it or not, odds are, it's the familiar scent that draws him over.

And, in closing, to reiterate the power of the sex drive, Howard, who has been married to her husband for 36 years, said that once they were in the middle of an intense argument. When it appeared that there was no way for her to win, she said, "You may be right, but I'm the guardian of the gate to paradise."

He stopped.
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Terry Odell is the author of numerous romantic suspense novels, as well as contemporary romance short stories. Most of her books are available in both print and digital formats. She’s the author of the Blackthorne, Inc. series, steamy romantic suspense novels featuring a team of covert ops specialists. Look for Terry's newest release. DEADLY SECRETS, A Mapleton Mystery, is her first non-romantic suspense novel. To see all her books, visit her Web site. You can also find her at her blog, Terry's Place, as well as follow her on Twitter, or visit her Facebook page.

Posted by Maryann Miller who tries her best with the action scenes and the love scenes, and appreciates all the good advice that has been shared by other writers and editors.

 

Hearing Voices: I Swear

Swearing isn’t my favorite human trait, in real life or in novels. But a foul mouth can serve a few purposes in writing including these:

• Define a character as bad

• Define a character as different from other characters

• Create a feeling of tension or stress in a character

Overuse of swearing can simply wear on the reader and that’s not a good thing. Most good authors know to keep it light unless they have a really good reason to do otherwise.

Swearing also has to be in character, and it surprises me how carefully authors will create a character down to the color of the top-stitching on their silk shirts, but don’t really think about what kind of expletives would fall out of their mouths, if any at all.

Recently, I read a book in which the author had used a rather creative cursing expression for the protagonist. That character didn’t swear much, just when he was in the occasional tight fix. To keep things anonymous, let’s pretend this character was a literature professor and he swore by saying “bloody balls”.

In the course of the action, the wicked antagonist, who had not one second of direct contact with the professor and no previous life connection at all, was skillfully propelled toward our hero in one of those deftly crafted train wrecks that make for a good thriller. Suddenly, the perp stops and clutches his heart, he pales, falls to his knees, gasps, and whispers, “bloody balls.”

What? Wait a minute. Who is having the heart attack here? I had to go back and re-read a few pages to figure out what was going on. Now what is the likelihood of two such disparate characters in one book using exactly the same expletive? Not bloody likely at all! That’s exactly the kind of mistake that pulls a reader out of the story.

But you know what? I can hear the author using the exact same expression. What I was hearing was not the hero, nor the bad guy. I was hearing the writer’s voice.

So keep that in mind as you craft your characters’ voices. How would they swear, if they did at all? When they swear, what perpetrates them to do so? It’s just one more way to give them each a distinctly honed and unforgettable personality.

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Dani Greer is founding member of the Blood-Red Pencil, writer, editor, artist, and Special Projects Coordinator for Little Pickle Press. You may find her at Facebook and at Twitter.

Be My Guest - Debby Harris

Quis Cetera Nescit? (Ovid:  “Who Does Not Know the Rest?”)

Some years ago, I was invited to speak at the St. Andrews University Science Fiction and Fantasy Society. I had so much fun, I started regularly attending their meetings - and thereby hangs the tale.

During the week of Valentine’s Day, the president of the Society gave a talk on the subject of Sex and Romance in SF/F Literature. The presentation featured a selection of readings from works by Robert Heinlein, Robert Howard, and Anne Rice, among others. Given the fact that many of these passages were uproariously funny when read aloud out of context, I was more than a little taken aback to find myself represented on the agenda by a passage from Spiral of Fire, the third volume of my Garillon trilogy.

In this scene, Margoth, the novel’s leading lady, seduces her beloved and leads him off to bed. The chapter ends thus:

She traced the sharp-cut line of Serdor’s lips, stoking downward to the base of his throat, where she began loosening the laces of his collar. Without releasing her, he said huskily, “If you’re going to keep that up, I won’t be responsible for the consequences.”

“Nothing could please me more than to hear you say so,” Margoth assured him. “Now why don’t I help you off with that shirt…” (dramatically read out as “Dot! Dot! Dot!”)

Much friendly ribaldry greeted my coy use of the ellipsis here and elsewhere–to the extent that I’ve been gun-shy of using the device ever since. But from a writer’s perspective, the central question still remains: when a particular couple are poised to consummate their relationship sexually, at what point do you metaphorically switch off the camera and leave the rest to your reader’s imagination?

There are, of course, no hard and fast rules to go by. (If only there were!) But in my experience, the following questions may have some bearing on the situation:

1) How much emotional groundwork have you previously layered in?
2) What’s the nature of the sexual magnetism between the partners? (I.e., are you dealing with raw hormonal urges or a conjugation of soul-mates?)
3) What factors in the story have prevented the partners from bonding before now? (And what makes NOW the right time?)
4) What other aspects of the story (plot, pacing, character development, theme, etc.) are being served by this event?

Medieval writers used to discriminate between eros (animal passion) and agape (spiritualised love). Although we no longer formally differentiate between these two extremes, there is perhaps an artistic distinction to be made between depicting sex as an end in itself, as compared to depicting sex as the crowning affirmation of a relationship.

In my own work - though I’m not aware of having made a conscious decision in this matter - my standard of practice seems to have been “the baser the passion, the more graphic and detailed the treatment.” In other words, I have fewer inhibitions writing about lust than I have when it comes to depicting romance. Why this is so, I can only speculate, but I suspect that it has something to do with a fuzzy notion that love in its fullest expression is something of a mystery. Thus, drawing a veil over a love scene may sometimes be the best way to preserve the romance.

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Debby Harris is an independent editor living in Scotland. Please visit her website for more information about her editing services and fees. She is also an author with multiple titles to her name. Not one to brag about her accomplishments, we offer you the link to her no-longer-secret webpage.

Be My Guest - Jodie Renner

In keeping with our February theme of Love, guest blogger, Jodie Renner, shares her love of reading and some of her favorite books. Enjoy.

I Love Reading Fiction

Reading fiction has always given me pleasure, from way back in my early school days in a small mining town, where the teachers usually provided novels for us to read in our spare time. The world of exciting stories was a magical discovery for me—coming from a large, working-class family, we had very few books at home. Some of my earliest favorites were Heidi and The Bobbsey Twins series. Then the Nancy Drew mysteries, horse and dog books like Black Beauty and Old Yeller, and historical fiction like Little Women, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn—and lots more that I can’t remember. (Yes, I know I’m seriously dating myself here!)

In high school and university, I discovered classics like Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath, Catch 22, and others. I’m sure you can all add some old favorites.

As an adult, I’ve gone through phases with my reading for pleasure – historical fiction from James Clavell, James Michener and Leon Uris to find out about other places and times; women’s fiction from Susan Isaacs, Barbara Delinsky, Jodi Picoult, Maeve Binchy and Joanna Trollope for reaffirmation and a sense of community with other women; mysteries by various authors to challenge my mind, and bestsellers by writers like John Grisham and John LeCarre for intrigue.

And as a middle-grade English teacher, even though my school had a library, I always had a huge collection of fiction for my students to choose from, and I read aloud to them daily. (And along the road, I got a master’s degree in French Literature, but that’s another story.)

In the last few years, I’ve mostly chosen, for escapism and entertainment, thrillers and other suspense or crime fiction. After a long day of editing (mostly thrillers and other crime fiction), I still want to read for relaxation, believe it or not, but I don’t choose books that tax my tired brain. So these days I’m going for an adrenalin rush or to see the hero catch the bad guy just in the nick of time—entertaining and satisfying.

My favorite authors of the past several years have been Sandra Brown, Lee Child, Robert Crais, Nora Roberts, (her romantic suspense), Harlan Coben, and Michael Connelly. I especially enjoy the stories where the white knight defeats evil, with brave, determined, strong heroes like Jack Reacher, Joe Pike and Elvis Cole. Other contemporary writers I enjoy for thrillers and suspenseful mysteries are Lisa Scottoline, LJ Sellers, Andrew E. Kaufman (The Lion, The Lamb, The Hunted), Lisa Gardner, Janet Evanovich, Allison Brennan, and Ian Walkley ( No Remorse).

Do you have any thriller, suspense or crime fiction authors to recommend to me? I’d love to hear about more good ones to explore and enjoy!

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Jodie Renner is a freelance fiction editor, specializing in thrillers, romantic suspense, mysteries, and other crime fiction, as well as YA and historical fiction. Check out Jodie’s website at www.JodieRennerEditing.com.   

Posted by Maryann Miller who would humbly suggest her suspense novel, One Small Victory, and her mystery, Open Season.