Batman and Robin Photo by Dave Keeshan , via Flickr In an earlier posting, I noted the fact that Heroes and Villains alike are intelligent, resourceful, and charismatic. It naturally follows that individual members of both parties should attract followers. Those attached to a Hero are popularly referred to as Sidekicks ; those attached to a Villain are commonly known as Henchmen (or alternatively “minions” 1 ). Insofar as these subordinate characters perform similar narrative functions, they belong to the same species. When it comes to personal affinities, however, they belong to rival clans. This installment will be devoted to examining the points of comparison. I will be exploring their distinctive differences in Part 2. No man is an island. This saying holds true for the Heroes and Villains that occupy the pages of modern Fantasy. These individuals can exist as one or the other only in a populated environment – which is where this discussion begins. Sidekicks and H...

Photo courtesy of Jason Odell It's October. Halloween comes to mind, which in turn leads to thoughts about scary stuff. Goblins, Zombies, Vampires and things that go bump in the night. We all have our fears. As writers, of course we're afraid we won't be able to finish the book. When we finish it, we're afraid nobody will buy it. Or that it's got mistakes we missed. Or that it'll get bad reviews. Or we'll never be able to write another book. But that's not what I'm talking about today. I'm talking about things our characters are afraid of. Nobody's perfect. And nobody wants to read about a perfect character. We want them to be flawed, because that makes them easier to identify with. And we want to see how, despite their flaws, they can overcome obstacles and can conquer their fears to emerge victorious at the end of the book. I write a lot of action-adventure themes in my books. I put my characters in tight spots. In their action sce...

According to Dud, one of the characters in Slim Randles' Home Country columns, it takes however long it takes. Enjoy.... Dud Campbell could feel it in the mornings … the cool breeze on the skin, the slight chill in the air, the messages nature sent to tell us autumn is almost here. And in autumn, Dud knew, the duchess and the truck driver would return to his computer for yet another season of novel writing. In fact … Dud switched on the computer and sat down to work on “Murder in the Soggy Bottoms” once again. Doc thought that sounded like mayhem in the neonatal ward, so we just called Dud's story The Duchess and the Truck Driver. Anita smiled when she saw her husband back at work on his dream book, and made coffee. It was always hardest for Dud to type the first word, so he wrote “Dear Mom” as he always did, and then proceeded with the story. He’d delete the Dear Mom later. “When the duchess came to the truck driver’s hometown,” he wrote, “she was startled by th...

What exactly is a meme? Merriam-Webster Dictionary says: an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture . The term is often applied to those Facebook posters that get shared so much, and many are political. Recently, this one rolled across my Facebook page, and I thought it was a terrific idea to help authors promote their books. Why not pull a meaningful quotation out of your own writings, and spread it around Facebook? I think this meme would be more useful if the author had added her website URL. My Facebook BBT Cafe group began discussing this and turned it into a little project. We wondered what programs to use and suggestions included Paint and other graphics programs as well as PicMonkey , a free photo-editing service that makes graphics creation astoundingly easy, not to mention fun!  BBT Cafe members started experimenting and here are some of the results: I think adding a website URL is important. Did I say that alread...

About a month ago, I came across the following quote online by screenwriter, comedian, film producer, and comic book writer John Rogers: You don't really understand an antagonist until you understand why he's a protagonist in his own version of the world. I found the quote intriguing. Not to say we discard antagonists, but often in writing, especially in that developmental stage of a story where we're trying to get the bones of it down, we think about our main character, the protagonist. We write an elaborate backstory for this "good guy" or "gal" and flesh the character out into a living, breathing person complete with yearning and laden with obstacles and burdens. Speaking of obstacles, when we get to the stage where we ask what obstacles or conflicts meet our protagonist, this is where we typically start to think of our antagonist(s). We know that our main character (MC) has wants and needs, and we know there must be things and people to preven...

Wait! I can’t begin with that. It’s been used before. It was a dark and stormy night… Rats! That’s been used, too. Call me Ishmael. No one in my story is called Ishmael. Photo by Ed Yourdon , via Flickr Do you have a problem with opening hooks and stilted characters in the beginning of your story? Judging from the manuscripts I’ve edited, the opening sentence, first page, and first chapter are often the most difficult to write. Why? We’ve crafted our character sketches and outlined our plot. We know how the story will play out and how it’s likely to end. Yes, but… Our characters may be clearly defined on paper—or perhaps in our minds—but these formal introductions don’t give us the intimate knowledge we need to flesh them out on page one. We haven’t yet shared morning coffee with them, held their hands during a crisis, felt their pain when things go terribly wrong, laughed at their corny jokes, or wrapped our arms around them after everyone else walks away. In other ...

 A few years back, I asked subscribers of my newsletter what kind of office they wrote in. I got some great answers. Author Doris Lakey offered a lot of info about her office. Her daughter called it clutter. Doris called it "sensory rich." Here's what she said: "I designed my office/studio/craft center the year after I retired, in 1999. One of those longheld dreams come to fruition, long after the need for a "closed door" space to shut out family expired. But it feeds my spirit, keeps clutter out of the rest of the house (I chose the sleeper sofa--the exercise equipment is in the converted garage, with heat, a/c, phone and cable--everything is there but me! You'll find me in the office.) "Some writers need a bare landscape to avoid distraction; I need a sensory-rich environment to trigger memories and feelings and my own history. My room is wall to wall paintings and prints, foreign postcards and maps, sewing machine, a u-shaped compu...

Photo credit: Google Images Naturally, my ghostwriting clients are not writers. If they were, they wouldn’t need me. Because they are not writers, many of them, especially those wanting to author memoirs, know little or nothing about the Book Biz – like publishing options, book design, or marketing.   Although my job as the ghostwriter does not include publishing or marketing services, I’ve been in the game long enough to have some excellent contacts in the Book Biz, which I always share with my clients. I do not like to see them fall into the clutches of an unscrupulous “vanity publisher” company, spending thousands of dollars for little or no return. I also don’t like to see my writing skills wasted on books that no one will read because of the author’s inexperience in the Book Biz. It’s not easy for a newbie to tell the difference between good help and bad. Recently a prospective client told me his horror story of spending $25,000 with a self-publishing company to g...

Recently, Jinx Schwartz and Polly Iyer shared their experiences as authors using free e-books through Amazon's KDP Select program. (Click on their names to read those posts.) About a year ago, the BBT Cafe authors put together a short story collection, The Corner Cafe , as an author sampler and to test Amazon's KDPS free days. As a result of that project, I've watched other authors and publishers implement their assorted approaches to this marketing method. I'm signed up for three e-letters hawking free and inexpensive Kindle books, and review them daily, and also occasionally use NetGalley . Here are some thoughts (based largely from a reader and reviewer perspective) on how I view the free e-book marketing tactic and its evolution: 1. Giveaways and samplers work as well as they have since the idea was first conceived (which historically probably goes way back). If the product is good, the experience pleasant, and the customer has a reason to come back and sp...

“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” ― Mark Twain. Words can have more than one basic meaning and some words sound similar but have a completely different denotation. For example:    (Wrong) Older people often suffer infirmaries . (a place for the sick)    (Right) Older people often suffer infirmities. (disabilities) Some words are homonyms (sound-alikes) but mean very different things. For example, principal/principle or rain/reign/rein.  Then there are words with similar but distinct meanings.    (Wrong) Television commercials continuously (unceasingly) interrupt programming.    (Right) Television commercials continually (regularly) interrupt programming. Which vs That.  "Which" is used to introduce non-restrictive clauses (extra but not essential information) such as in The leftover lettuce, which is in the refrigerator, would make a ...

Authors wanting to write about a major life upheaval in their life must decide the best way to do so—write a memoir, or fictionalize aspects of the story and instead write a novel based on true events. The first offers the chance to unsettle readers with naked fact; the second allows you to maximize the story’s impact along a certain premise. Either way, you endeavor to write an engaging story that ultimately arrives at the truth about life and human nature. After years of waffling on this front I’ve made a decision that delivered me right to the doorstep of my second traditional book deal! As I wrote in a previous countdown post , this summer I’ve been putting together a couple of novel proposals. I’d been working on shaping my second novel since April, writing then boiling down an extended synopsis and polishing the first fifty pages until my agent said, “I love it.” Hoping that love could carry us into a two-book deal, she asked about a third project. I did have a story...

Setting is a character. It can be a friend, foe, or antagonist. It lives and breathes. It can set the tone and atmosphere. It can create obstacles or remove them. The last series I wrote took a year to research (pre-written-history Greece). I took some liberties with it, given there is no documentation. My current novel is set in Victorian England and will involve a vast amount of research. Yes, I am a glutton for punishment. There are a number of ways to approach the setting for your book. Contemporary settings and real locations are probably the easiest, but that does not let you off the hook when it comes to research. 1) You can use a real place. This requires that you research the place in question. You can use Google maps as a start or visit the town if you want to be precise. It gets trickier the further from home you go. If you choose a foreign country, you need to thoroughly research it to get the feel for how the people think, operate, dress, speak, and mo...

Spiders. Snakes. Dark alleys. Thumps in the middle of the night. Scary things, yes, but nothing strikes fear into the heart of a writer more than... Photo by Eamon Curry via Flickr.com THE MIDDLE . The place where plots go to die. The place where characters reveal themselves to be flat, unimaginative and straight-out dull. It's a place from which you're sure you'll never escape. Well friends, I've been to the middle and come out the other side. How, you ask? First, let me say it wasn't easy. Second, let me say it wasn't pretty. There were colourful metaphors flung about. There were clenched fists. There was a finger sneaking toward the delete key. But I escaped. By moving backward. Let me explain. I knew my ending, so I wrote that. I also knew what had to happen right before the ending. Wrote that. I kept working my way backwards, step by step until I found myself back in the middle. I then discovered that I needed only a few scenes to bridge what...

Photo by David Precious via Flickr.com Tools of the trade, gizmos, writing instruments, and connections are the stuff writers can't live with or without. In the past few weeks, I've spent countless hours getting two pieces of equipment updated. A good portion of that time was spent deciding what to get. When I make a major purchase, I take into consideration how long I might use it, and what those future requirements might be. Since my laptop computer was on its last legs, I knew I had to either replace it or suffer without one. As a writer, even on vacation, I find it impossible to resist the urge to spend time on my work in progress, as well as promote what I already have out there. My Kindle Fire HD 8.9 turned out to be a nice toy, but not sufficient to suit my needs. Computer sites and programs have become more and more memory intensive, so I bit the bullet and opted for a Dell laptop with 8GB of memory. That particular model has 500 GB on the hard drive, which I ...

My editor recently returned my manuscript with her markups. She uses both Track Changes and Comments. I dread using the Track Changes option, but I’ve learned a few shortcuts, and I wrote about them a while back. Looking at a 355 page manuscript full of markups and marginal notes is daunting. However, since I wrote the book one word, one scene, one chapter at a time, I tackle my edits the same way, but I prioritize the types of edits and deal with one category at a time. First, I scroll through the manuscript taking care of all the obvious fixes. My editor will make changes in formatting—she might break a paragraph into two, or combine two into one. Sometimes she’ll add italics, or change a word. These are usually straightforward, and I accept almost all of them. As I go down the comments, I’m not re-reading the manuscript, but simply hopping from one change to the next. I’ll look at the suggestion in context, but generally these are grammatical, so I don’t need to read more th...

In January of 2012, after two years represented by an agent, I self-published three mystery/thrillers on Amazon’s KDP Select program. That month, I sold 38 books for a grand total of $82, one in the UK. Wow, I was an international seller. That meant 39 people besides friends and critique partners read my books. Since then, I’ve sold many more. A few free days during the first part of the year garnered enough reviews for the promo sites to feature me, a key in selling. The biggest free promo site then and now is EReader News Today . In July, 2012, they featured Murder Déjà Vu , and that’s when everything changed. The book totaled 37,000 downloads and sold, with borrows, 1800 units. Mind Games got a bump because the first chapter is at the end of MDV. In August, Hooked earned the reviews for an ENT feature. Results: 44,200 downloads, and it sold, are you ready, 3500 books/borrows. Murder Déjà vu continued selling with over 1100 copies sold. It was the best month ever. I ...