King Parrot Acrylic on canvas by Elle Carter Neal Click to enlarge I enjoy drawing and painting as a hobby – which means I don’t take it seriously, I don’t bother with practicing to improve my skills, I don’t find time for it when I’m just too busy (like the past six years!). Making pictures is a nice way to relax after a long day dealing with words. Artworks by Elle Carter Neal (including Pelican incomplete since 2009) Click to enlarge I know enough about art to know that I’m not good enough at it to illustrate my own covers. So, I’ve now set out twice to commission artwork from professional artists. The first was very easy to find. Sandra Salsbury illustrated What Does It Mean to be Safe by Rana DiOrio and I followed the blog book tour via Dani’s involvement in Little Pickle Press. I fell in love with the artwork on Sandra’s website, and knew she would be my first enquiry when I was ready to design the cover for my first book, Madison Lane and the Wand of Rasputin . ...

Image by Brenda Clarke , via Flickr Building other worlds, and entire planets, is one of the perks of being a SFF writer. I’m often asked, incredulously, how I even start with the worldbuilding process. My response: With a little bit of magic and a little bit of science. First Concepts In Madison Lane and the Wand of Rasputin I began with the idea of a contemporary teenager (armed with an iPhone!) landing in a Renaissance-era-like world. When one of the plot twists turned out to involve quantum physics, I decided what I had here was Earth’s twin planet separated at “birth” but still quantum-entangled with Earth. I named it “Ground”. Time and Relative Location in Space (a.k.a. Cosmology) Even though Madison Lane involves time travel, I decided that the sequences taking place on Ground would be occurring in contemporary time. Except that Ground is not as technologically advanced as Earth. Why? The answers to that question led me on a rabbit trail of worldbuilding. Let’s ...

This morning I held a book launch for my first published book, and, since I am also my own publisher, I was the one who had to organise and run the event. Here are some considerations that worked for me, and some wish-I’d-thought-of-that-earlier ideas that occurred to me during and afterwards: 1. Food and books. It seems like a good idea at the time to treat one’s guests to yummy cake... Luckily I have two small children, so, as par for the course, I grabbed a packet of wet wipes as I dashed out the door – and placed it on the table beside the books for cleaning any sticky fingers. 2. Crack open as many of your sale copies of your book as you have time for, and check that there is nothing obviously amiss. I had a book with two folded pages, with the print broken across the fold line - embarrassing when someone picked it up for a browse and pointed it out. 3. Hire a “publicist”. If you own a teenager (or can borrow one), this is a perfect job for them. I’d had in mind that...

Recent posts by Debby Harris on First and Third Person Limited Narrators and by Diana Hurwitz on Narrator Intrusion reminded me about one of my favourite ways of telling a story – via an unreliable narrator . Photo by Sam Beebe via Flickr I first came across this method in the book The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie. Below, between the brackets, is a major SPOILER for the book; highlight from one bracket to the other with your cursor to view the text . The book is narrated in the first person by Dr James Sheppard, providing a Watson to detective Hercule Poirot’s Holmes. [ The twist, though, is that Sheppard turns out to be the murderer, and ] Sheppard’s entire account of the case is called into question in the final pages. This particular technique is risky because it almost always requires cheating the reader by withholding information that the narrator is aware of. For this reason, I prefer using third person rather than first person for unreliable narrators ...

Turn up your speakers (this is why I write stories instead of telling them ;-) ) Elle Carter Neal is the author of Madison Lane and the Wand of Rasputin , which is now available on Kindle. She is based in Melbourne, Australia. To keep in the loop about “Maddie”, join her mailing list here , or find her at ElleCarterNeal.com or HearWriteNow.com

Available on Kindle from 1 st May 2014 Following the input of my editors , I went back over my book with the fine-tooth comb of their comments. I found that I’d begun with a fairly simple premise, but had complicated it in the main by not allowing my protagonist to know what was going on. I’d made her work far too hard, and I’d let her get it very, very wrong. Thus her convoluted discoveries of even the simplest information took dozens of pages, sent her on multiple wild-goose-chases, and bred walk-on characters. My first step was to let Maddie in on the family secrets that she’d originally spent most of the book uncovering. There were already a lot of puzzles and mysteries to solve relating to her current predicament; stating some of the backstory mysteries upfront would not spoil much of the rest of the story. Secondly I decided to bring some of the final revelations right in to the beginning, by promoting a relatively minor character to co-protagonist and giving her alternati...

As Carola Dunn illustrated in her recent post , in traditional publishing the author is sometimes at the mercy of her editor. One of the benefits of (and problems with) self-publishing is that the author-publisher gets an overruling vote against the editor she hires. Look at all the pretty colours... (a screenshot of the multiple edits of a now-deleted scene) As a history major, I was taught to seek multiple sources of information, and, even with my own fictional brain-matter, I don’t feel comfortable until I’ve had several opinions on it. Since I had the budget, I decided to hire two editors for Madison Lane and the Wand of Rasputin , knowing that I might be tempted to outvote a single editor, but two against one would show me there really was an issue that needed fixing. I also placed a request for teenage beta-readers. And the final member of my team would be proofreader Julia Gibbs . My editors, Sally Odgers and our own Debby Harris , both picked up on an “incomprehensib...

We’ve followed the multi-talented Kathryn Craft through the engaging and triumphant story of her journey from pitch to traditionally published book (which is doing fantastically well – congratulations, Kathryn). Now it’s my turn to count down to publication, with my about-to-be-self-published book, Madison Lane and the Wand of Rasputin . Thirty-four days to publication date: 1st of May (draft cover)  Why Self-Publishing? (I promise this wasn't intended as a follow-up to Stephen Tremp's excellent guest post yesterday.) I started and finished the first draft of Maddie (I nickname all my books for easier reference) while I was pregnant with my second child, more for the sense of achievement than anything else. I wrote it knowing that I would be shelving it for about two years before I would be able to begin the process of finding an agent and a publisher for it – because, with my time and energy focused on two small children, the likelihood of blowing deadlines and...

One of the best things about the Internet is ease and speed of communication between book professionals (authors, agents, editors, publishers) and readers. I love social media connections like Facebook and Twitter. But direct mail is a great way to give and get pertinent information, and direct e-mail is no different. I've signed up for quite a few e-letters to receive news and information from authors I regularly read, as I appreciate having an early heads-up about new book releases and promotions. Do you have a newsletter you regularly email to a mailing list of fans you've gathered? If not, the best way to develop one is by subscribing to a few and analyzing what you do and don't like about them. One of my favorites is the long-running All About Thyme e-letter written by Susan Wittig Albert. It's billed as a "weekly calendar of times and seasonings" and it celebrates "the mysteries, magic, and myths of herbs". Anyone who reads Susan's C...