A thriller I think Kyrennei Series readers will love - Cold River Rising

College students from an Oregon Indian reservation are kidnapped by a Shining Path splinter group in Peru. The Peruvian army is worse than unhelpful and the Indian tribe, as a sovereign nation within the United States, declares war on Peru. Other tribes join the non-traditional war along with a white police chief.

Here's a story of courage, today's wounds, history's tears, a deep friendship and the kind of heroism that the modern world thinks is gone or never was. There's a young woman with both strength and a lot of doubts. There's a lonely police chief who has to choose between laws and justice. There are real warriors and women who challenge propriety and dance rage and joy against anything that stifles. 

I love it when I find a really fabulous book by an independent author. I know there are piles of books that aren't that great, full of mistakes and floppy plot. But I've hit a nugget once again in my rather random perusal of books. All through Cold River Rising, I kept saying out loud "Home run!" because there were scenes, emotions and issues that resonated and the author handled tough stuff well. 

I have never said this before, so it isn't just that this is a book I personally like.  I love all kinds of books (historical fiction, epic fantasy, futuristic dystopia and memoirs) and many of the things I love to read are very different from what I write. But this time I can safely say that I think readers who love The Kyrennei Series would get a kick out of this book. That isn't just because I like it. It's because of these things:

• Cold River Rising deals with emotion in a real and visceral way, much like The Kyrennei Series
• It deals with violence in much the same way, brutally and without any hint of weapons porn or glorification.
• It pulls at issues of social justice without ever dipping toward preaching or dogmatism at any point.
• It is primarily about a whopping good story while also including brain fodder that keeps you thinking and caring when you aren't reading.
• There is an element of people making justice when the authorities refuse to or are actually the perpetrators of injustice. We write in the hallowed tradition of Robin Hood.
• Oh, and it's partly set in Oregon--the Cold River Indian Reservation to be exact--and it gives an Oregonian the same rush of reality, knowing the landscape that The Soul and the Seed does.

This book has a truckload of great reviews (4.5 stars out of 5 on Amazon). It also has a few negative reviews and I almost didn't read it because I always read negative reviews first. That usually pays off but this time it was a bit misleading. Some of the reviews say there are a lot of errors in this book. Maybe there were back in 2011 when it was first published and maybe it has been edited since, but I didn't notice any mistakes as I read briskly through it. I could have missed a few minor things, but the point is that there aren't distracting mistakes for anyone who is more interested in story than ego. 

There were a few negative reviews about graphic violence. And in some ways that's fair enough. There is graphic violence, but it is real and honest, not glorified and meant to titillate. It is there because it's the truth about the world and it's true to the story.  That makes the violence worth reading. However, there are people who for reasons of youth or past-trauma might find it too much. 

Then there is the fact that the book is about Indians. Mostly Native American reviewers seem to love this, even though the book was written by a white guy. He did reasonably well, according to the reviews, and I expect it took a mountain of research. But a few of the negative reviews mentioned an Indian leader giving an endangered eagle feather to the friendly white police chief, which is apparently wildly unrealistic culturally and highly illegal. The book I read didn't include anything like that. I suspect that this is a symptom of modern publishing in which a mistake can be caught and rectified after publication. So, it may be that the author did put in such a scene initially and then changed it based on legitimate complaints. I personally don't see anything dishonorable in this approach. It is very difficult to write about a culture other than your own (even difficult to please everyone when writing about your own culture). It requires massive research and making a change based on good feedback seems like a wise choice.

All in all, I have to say, author Enes Smith, that's a home run. It was a very fun read, not too heavy for me but then I can't stand things that are too light. I have to feel the thrum of passion, the echoes of social justice issues and some intense emotion for a book to hold my interest at all these days. Too much life going on otherwise. 

Lightning strikes and the dubious use of inspirational self-help for creative workers

The game has changed for writers. Or so they say.

It used to be that the gatekeepers (publishers and agents) kept out the masses and only a select few (primarily those with the right connections and prior celebrity) could publish--let alone make a living as a writer.

Today everyone can publish.

The technological revolution for creative workers is intense. Writers, musicians, visual artists and even artisans making traditional crafts have suddenly found the world wide open. There is, in theory, a giant market out there, just a few clicks away. If only we could find our niche. 

Lightning strike - Creative Commons image by John Fowler (cropped)

And as with all opportunities, the pitfalls have multiplied too. When the virtual doors were flung open and those hoping for a chance at creative work swarmed out into the sunlight, others fixing to make a profit off of their hope started popping up like mushrooms after long rain. Today there are hundreds of self-help books, courses, programs and websites devoted to "helping" writers who want to earn enough to make a living from their work. And it's similar for musicians and all other creative people. Are these helpers and "allies" really on our side, or are they primarily hoping to make a profit?

The vast majority of this self-help material centers on the idea that all creative workers really need is "motivation" and "discipline."

"If you keep track of your word count every day, you'll get that novel written in a few weeks," they say. "If you are generous and prolific on social media or a blog, you will no longer be lost in obscurity. If you aren't successful, it is simply because you need to become a better writer. Study and work hard. You too will climb the mountain, if you put one foot in front of the other long enough." 

On the one hand I appreciate that many of these inspirational books and blog posts are helpful to people who are struggling to find time for their creative work or to those who have the requisite wealth or media industry connections to make a career of writing, if only they could get motivated and organized.

But those aren't the circles I move in. Mostly I know writers who do find time for their work no matter how hard it is, who stay up half the night and give up their family time to do the work and improve their writing. Many of them are excellent writers but still have little chance to get paid for their work, even in today's supposedly more open world.

The problem is finding the people who want what you have--readers, listeners, viewers, your tribe. And that is as big of a problem today as it ever was.

While anyone can theoretically publish today, traditional publishing wasn't traditionally about only printing and distributing books. It was about getting the information out to readers. There was a time when publishers ran ads, hosted events and worked out deals with bookstores for special book displays. And not exclusively for celebrity authors. Back in the day, it might have been difficult to get a publishing deal, but those who did had at least some help from publishers in reaching readers. A completely unknown writer could, if he or she was very very good at spinning a tale, go from nothing to a successful author. J. K. Rowling did it after being rejected 20 times after all.

(People are still telling me that is why I should drink the Kool-Aid, even though that was a different era. Rowling is fantastic and deserves all she got, by the way. But she isn't my favorite British author. My favorite British author is Ann Pettitt. Never heard of her? There's a reason for that. Being fantastic doesn't mean you get in the door.)

In 2015 whether you go with a big publisher or not, unless your name is already fairly well-known, your work might as well be sitting on your coffee table in terms of the chance that readers will see it. 

The rough news

The message I have for fellow writers and other creative workers is not as sunny as the inspirational self-help books and websites out there urging us to bootstrap our way to success. I might be more popular if that was my message, but that kind of message would also be quickly forgotten. I have been a writer for more than twenty years. For most of that time I have made my living from writing in one form or another. I have seen other eras come and go, even in such a relatively short time.

My conclusion is that there is both gold and dust at the heart of our favorite inspirational phrases. Gold because those who are drawn to creative work must find ways to maintain focus. Dust because the hard truth is that this era is not that much different from any other. Most of us will never be able to make a living doing creative work in the current economy and the system for choosing who has that great privilege is still not based primarily on merit and market viability.

A story of another era

When was eighteen I had a dream to become an international newspaper correspondent. At the time, in the 1990s this was a similar dream to being an author who actually makes the bulk of their living from book sales today. It was a reasonably popular ambition but statistics said that one in ten thousand young people who wanted that job would ever get it and the professionals knew that 95 percent of those successful ones were promoted through relatives or friends in the business.

It was ridiculous odds for a broke kid with no connections to speak of. But there was that whisper, "It's extremely unlikely but it's possible." I pursued it. I got scholarships, so I could get the right education and work for free for years without having to pay off loans. I beat the pavement and the mud of reporting locations for years. I did the work and wrote the word count and perfected my craft and learned the business side of writing and journalism.

Then one day while I was washing the dishes in a tiny apartment in a squalid neighborhood in Eastern Europe, the phone rang and a successful reporter was on the other end. He had a job he couldn't do and he needed to give it to someone. He picked me, and that was my big break.

I got into the elite club. That job was quickly followed by more. I built on my success and hopped from success to success for a couple of years. It only lasted a short time because the whole profession of stringer journalism collapsed a few years later, but I'd made it.

And I have never forgotten the lesson. My experiences before and after that break showed me that all of my motivation and hard work counted for a very small portion of the success. What really mattered was that phone call. And it might well never have come. I knew others just as motivated, just as good or better, who it never came for and I knew those who had it made easily through lucky birth who were not nearly so good.

I know. This is the opposite of what inspirational people are supposed to tell you. I'm supposed to say that my luck was just a bit of it. That really it was mostly sweat and sleepless nights. But it doesn't correlate. Those who got a break were not primarily those who worked hard. They were those with connections and luck. Some had lots of connections and thus didn't need to work very hard. Some had to work extremely hard and also had a bit of luck or a minor connection. Many who deserved it, both in terms of hard work and talent, never got in.

The self-publishing window

And now I find myself in the slush pile again and I have researched the business enough to know that the game is the same. The authors of inspirational self-help for writers would like us to buy their books and believe that an unknown author without capital for major advertising can bootstrap their way into making an income with genre fiction. But when you look at the details, how the systems of publicity and book selling actually work, it doesn't add up. And worse yet, if you know excellent writers who take all the right steps and still remain lost, the picture is all too clear. 

There will be one or two exceptions, but those will be lucky breaks helped along by an enthusiastic Amazon or BookBub editor whose hobby happens to correspond to the book's themes (or a similar fluke). There will be those who were celebrities in another field or simply had the money for a lot of ads to start with or had a cousin who works at one of the major distribution channels. And these will all be held up as proof that anyone can do it, if we only buy this inspirational book and try harder. 

And many of the writers who were fortunate and smart enough to get into the self-publishing business between 2009 and 2012 continue to misunderstand this. They bootstrapped their way into publishing! Why can't others do the same?

The problem is that the window between 2009 and 2012 WAS a lucky break, like the time I got that phone call. It was a fluke created by the jockeying and competition between Amazon and the big publishers.

Part of the fallout was that a few authors who were positioned just right at the time, took a risky leap and landed well in self-publishing. But what they did is no more replicable by writers in 2015 than my "strategy" of washing dishes to await a phone call from a colleague that would send me to the elite club of international journalism was something I could advise rookie reporters to do. 

In 2009 to 2012 I was drowning in huge medical problems and very needy babies. I wasn't one of those well positioned this time. Even though I heard about the opportunity I couldn't take advantage of it. .And by the time I got my head above water that window was closed. 

Gold and dust

Back in 2001, when I got my big break in journalism, I might have been sick or had commitments in a day job. Plenty of things could have held me back. I was lucky that, when that break came, I could drop everything and seize it. And in that respect the inspirational slogans of the self-help books are dust.

But the gold in there is that luck or no luck I would have lost that opportunity if I had not been driven to do the creative work even without being paid for it. If I hadn't been already motivated, if I hadn't been doing the work for free for several years, if I hadn't practiced the craft of writing high-powered newspaper and magazine articles, if I didn't know how to do hard reporting, I would have missed that opportunity no matter how lucky I was. 

So, here is my not-so-inspirational message for fellow travelers in creative work, particularly those not born to an easy leg up: I hear you. I know the struggle.

Whenever I have had a job that required writing all day, I was in bliss. Yes, it can be hard. But even the pain of creative work is somehow sweet. Some of us have a burning fire at the core that will not die. I have never been very good at anything else. This writing thing is the one place where I excel and yet I am intelligent enough to calculate the odds. Most writers will never be able to write full time, no matter how good our craft is and no matter how much readers love to read our stories. 

The inspirational books say you should log a word count. They spend a long time talking about how to start and the discipline needed to keep writing. I'm mystified by these lengthy discussions. Certainly it's hard to find time with kids and day jobs and everything else tugging at you. But I have no trouble keeping up a word count. I've been doing it since about age seven. 

The inspirational blogs urge us to strive to improve our craft and promise that those who can work magic with the written word will someday reap the rewards--somewhat like preachers promising eternal life in heaven to those who refuse all sin. I love to read craft books. It's fun. I love to tinker and improve my writing. If I didn't have kids and the necessity of making a living, I could crank out a novel about every two months in good condition. Why do we need to be urged to do this?

Some of the more practical inspirational books tell us to spread the word and be proactive in our attempts to reach an audience. I don't exactly love the marketing and business end of the job as much, but I know how to do the research and develop strategy. And most of the work is still writing in some form. Thus, I'm doing that too in those few hours I have free.

Real hope, no fluff

Writers write because we can't help ourselves and generally we don't need any motivational encouragement to do so. It's possible that some fluke or chance or lucky break will come and I might just be ready for it because of all this work. But it's much more likely that it will never come, that most of us who do all the necessary steps and have what it takes to make a living writing will never get that chance. When I went into journalism as a young kid, I knew that. I knew the that the chances I would make it were ridiculously small and I did it anyway.

I didn't go into journalism with some motivational book or speaker telling me, "Just keep at it. Practice makes perfect. You can achieve it, if you climb the mountain."

Nope. My mentor told me, "You have chosen a damn hard business, but I see that isn't going to stop you, so here are a couple of tips that might slightly help your chances."

And that was both a comfort and a help. It was a comfort because someone actually cared and was giving me real encouragement rather than a fluffy dream. And it was helpful because I went into it with my eyes open. I went because my inner drive wouldn't take "no" for an answer and I gathered every skill I could to slightly increase my odds.

And that is what writers need today, I believe. We don't need a pep talk on good habits and reaching goals. We need to know the real odds and the true mechanisms by which most paid writers become paid (even if those mechanisms are depressingly rigged). Writers need to know the mechanics and how to do the business right, and also that even if you do everything right and your books are excellent, you will most likely never be able to make a living at it. We need to know that lightning does sometimes strike and if you are ready when it does, you might just be able to ride it.

Now, I'm just hoping lightning might strike twice in the same lifetime.

I love your comments on these posts. I can be mouthy on this blog. Chime in. Tell a story. I love to hear from you.

When you become your greatest fear: A Kyrennei Series character interview

Readers of The Kyrennei Series love to ask questions about the premise, especially about how the Addin really works on the inside. There will be more on that coming in Book 5 of the series this fall, but for now here is a character interview that will answer some of the questions you have wondered about and add a little more spice to the summer.

If you haven't yet started on the series, this interview doesn't contain any major spoilers, although you'll have to roll with a few unfamiliar terms. Reading this first may also have unexpected consequences in your experience of the story when you do read it.  That could be a good thing, although I'm not sure what the results would be. 

With no further ado and by popular demand, the character who has been drafted by readers to be interviewed on these pages is...

Atreyu O’Keefe

Q: We'll leave aside how and why you're here talking to me for the moment because that is confidential. We'll start with the basics. Where are you from? Where were you born? And all that.

Illustrative photo - Creative Commons image by Palmira Van

I’m from La Grande, Oregon. I was born there. My mom was too. My dad was from Portland. They built our house out on Hunter Road.

Q: You were friends with Aranka Miko as a kid, weren’t you? What was that like?

We were friends for a few years, since we were seven or eight until we were twelve. It was great at the time. There weren’t any other girls my age who lived close enough to visit. We were active, outside most of the time. We played dress-up like a lot of girls, but we’d dress up in wild outfits and then we’d go ride our bikes down the gravel roads and get the gauze of our princess dresses tangled in our chains. 

Q: Was there anything out of the ordinary about her then? Would you have believed that she would play such a crucial role in the world?

No, no, of course not.

I mean she wasn't average or anything. She was kind of wild adventurous for a kid. She talked me into hiking to the top of Mount Emily to camp out by ourselves. My parents freaked out. She was never going to fit in with the mainstream, but neither would I, except for... well, all that. But still I never would have thought anyone from our little backwoods corner was going to do something like that.  

Q: Did your parents approve of your friendship with Aranka?

My parents were always a bit nervous. But when my mom mentioned that I wasn’t best friends with any Meikan kids, I remember my dad said, “Lin, let her be. She’ll have to accept hard reality soon enough. Let her be a child for a while.” 

My dad liked Aranka’s dad too. That was probably part of it. So, they didn’t have anything against us playing, but they believed she was uninvolved and that I would have to grow out of that friendship someday.

Q: What was it like growing up Meikan in La Grande? 

It was okay mostly. I have to say. Even though some things were hard. We had our community. People stuck up for each other. A bunch of guys helped my dad build our house. If someone was sick, you always had people to help out. It was like having a big family. 

We were under pressure from the Addin but only as much as we could bear. It was more that you knew what your limits were. Uninvolveds talk about how “any kid can be president” and all that. We knew that wasn’t true. We knew we couldn’t even be mayor. 

But we also knew that we could live a reasonably good life if we just kept our heads down. At least that’s what I thought as a kid.

Q: But then you were taken.

Yeah.

Q: Why? If you obeyed the treaty, why were you taken? 

Accidents happen. I was always told it was because they didn’t know I was Meikan. That might have been true.

Q: And afterward they couldn’t undo it?

No! No, there is no way they can undo that. And they wouldn't even if they could.

Q: Can you tell us what happened exactly? How you were taken?

A family moved in nearby who had two girls a bit older than me. I guess they were fourteen and fifteen. My mom always made one little effort to welcome new neighbors, even though she was nervous about uninvolveds. She brought them cookies and some spring greens from our garden.

Aranka wasn’t home that day. I think they went on a canoe trip. So, I went with Mom to see who the newcomers were. The girls weren’t very nice at first. Their names were Britney and Chelsea. I tried to act like I was their age to try to get them to accept me a little, but I don’t think they believed me. I didn’t think about the fact that someone like that might be Addin. I was twelve. It just didn’t occur to me. 

When I ran into them later, I kept trying to say hi to them, even though they didn’t say hi back. Once the younger one, Britney, commented on my clothes, laughing and saying she had the same skirt a few years ago, so I must have gotten it at the second-hand store. We weren’t dirt poor or anything and I’m pretty sure that we bought that skirt new, but we did sometimes buy clothes second-hand. My mom thought buying second-hand was socially and environmentally responsible. Or something like that.

Anyway, I figured those girls weren’t going to have anything to do with me. Then one day a week or two before summer break they came up to me in the public library while I was checking out books and waiting for my dad to give me a ride home. All of the sudden, they were acting really nice. There were two other girls with them. One of them was Rose Sinclare who was an eighth grader and already a social queen. She smiled at me and said I was cute. I couldn’t help feeling good when someone so popular said something nice to me. 

They said they wanted to show me something and we went back to the teen section. That’s a room at the back of the library that’s all glassed in and has lots of posters up. There are some couches for kids to hang out on. Those girls had smart phones and this was before it was standard for everyone to have smart phones. They started showing me pictures... 

Q: That's it? That's all that happened? They just accepted you and you went willingly because you didn't know they were Addin? 

No... It wasn't just that. When it happened I felt kind of dizzy. Like if you spun around in circles dancing really fast. I held onto the couch really hard and I must have looked a little weird. Then the girls were all laughing and patting me on the back. 

“See. No big deal,” Rose told them and then asked me, “How do you feel, Atreyu?” 

I didn’t know why I should feel anything, but I did feel a little different. I really wanted to be Rose’s friend and I wanted her to like me and like what I did and what I wore. I think that was the first thing. The rest of it sank in more gradually over the next few weeks. At first, they didn’t tell me anything about special Addin stuff. 

Q: But that still doesn't sound like a big deal. Was there ever a moment when you were shocked to realize you'd been taken?

I started to wonder and the idea didn't bother me. Then I wondered why I'd been afraid of the Addin.

It wasn't a single moment. It took a little while to really understand it. That's probably because I was so young. I wasn't shocked. I thought it was funny. I was a bit nervous about how my parents would react. Very briefly, but I knew they couldn't do anything to me. That made me kind of giddy, knowing that my parents were weak and brainwashed and I didn't have to do what they said every again. 

Q: How did your parents react?

My dad showed up at the library to pick me up and Rose and the others said goodbye just like they were my friends. Rose said something like, “Have fun and don’t get into too much trouble at home.” 

My dad got on my case when I got in the truck, saying I was being sullen and turning into a teenager. Then he started giving me a lecture about how you always have to use the sign, even if you’re pissed off or whatever.

I’d just picked up the sign a few weeks earlier and I still wasn't entirely sure what had happened. But I couldn’t remember it. I couldn’t even remember what it was. I still don’t. I know it was something I could do for those few weeks, but it was just gone.

I did get sullen then and I wouldn’t answer my dad. It took a few days before I told my parents straight out that I didn’t remember it. First I told them maybe I wasn’t really old enough. They talked to some of the Meikan elders. At first they hoped maybe it was a fluke, like I’d regressed or something.

They took me to see Annie Reese. I only knew where we were going when we pulled into her driveway and my dad got out of the pickup and ran in to talk to her. When they came back out Annie was really upset. And by that time Rose and the others had made the situation clear to me, so in the end I told them.

I got out of the truck and said, "Yeah, you idiots. I finally woke up and realized how stupid you are. Now you have to leave me alone. It's the law." 

My mom started sobbing and some guy across the street was staring at us. I felt embarrassed to be around them at all, so I walked away and went to one of my new friends' houses in town. I had to go home eventually, but it was different then. They couldn't boss me around.

Q: Do you really think the Addin didn’t know you were Meikan?

Britney and Chelsea acted all shocked that I had been Meikan. I’m not sure. I think maybe some of them knew. It’s hard to say. Why else would they have been interested in such a young kid? It’s possible Rose knew and the others didn’t. The way she acted was different. She could have been told by adults to practice on me.

Q: So then the Meikans shunned you?

Annie Reese let everyone know about it and immediately no Meikans would even look at me. At first, I didn’t really care that I was shunned. I had new friends. And it was good that the uncool people who I knew around town didn’t try to bug me or say hello to me. If they had, it would have been really awkward with my knew friends.

I saw that most of the Meikans shunned my family too. At home my family acted stiff around me. I could see that my dad was really angry when he looked at me, but he didn't raise a hand against me. My mom cried a lot. I thought she was just silly and hysterical. I had no idea how much it hurt her that I was taken. Then my dad and my brother moved away. My mom was pretty much alone because a lot of Meikans were too afraid to have anything to do with her, even though she still had the sign. They were afraid of me. I could see it in their faces and their hatred too.

Q It’s odd. It doesn’t sound that terrible to be taken. It almost sounds like your family and other Meikans overreacted.

It wasn’t a terrible thing for me. I've said that plenty of times. And I did think they overreacted. That’s how it was for me. I’m sure they saw it differently. They saw me change. I went from being a kid who was interested in the community, a kid who had dreams and goals for my own life and a kid who was really into saving forests and protesting clear-cutting to a kid who was  passionate about the popular crowd and having all name-brand clothes and perfect make-up.

There's a cost. You lose yourself, but you don't grasp that, so it doesn't actually hurt while it's happening to you.

 I didn’t care about our community anymore. I really thought they were delusional and I thought the Addin was much more practical and reasonable. The Addin knew how to run things. They had a hierarchy that made sense, based on how talented you were as well as good looks. 

When you’re in the Addin you want the Addin to be in control. It’s the most obvious thing in the world. You know that people are better off with the Addin in charge, even the people who don’t know about it. And all you want for yourself is to be accepted in the Addin. 

I could sit down and have dinner with my parents and not have any real problem unless they brought it up. I knew they had weird ideas that would screw things up, if they ever got their way.  But once I was brought into the Addin I had older mentors who explained to me why I had to let my parents be the way they were. They weren’t important and as long as they didn’t stir up any trouble it was best just to leave them alone.

Q: But you didn’t just let Meikans be. You gave the Addin names of Meikans in La Grande.

A few months after I was taken I was asked to come and talk to some people, including the mayor. That was a pretty big deal for me. One of the Addin teachers let me out of class to go, so my parents didn’t have any idea about it. 

The mayor's people told me again how I had to accept that my family and other people I knew wouldn’t understand. They seemed disappointed that I had been shunned by Meikans so soon. That is another reason I suspect that my being taken wasn’t entirely an accident. But it could have been. It doesn’t really matter. The Addin never really took the treaty seriously. What they took seriously was the need to keep Meikans docile and quiet.

Anyway they started asking me who was Meikan. They already knew about some people, but not about most of them. I didn’t know everyone’s last name at that age, but I could name off which kids were Meikan from all over town and they could then figure out who the families were. At the time I didn’t think about why. They wanted to know and I was so happy to be important enough to help them that I was all glowing and elated inside. Maybe I was just an immature kid or maybe its a specific Addin thing. I don’t know, but it never occurred to me at the time that I was betraying anyone or what the consequences might be. 

Q: But Aranka wasn’t Meikan. Why did you stop being friends with her as well?

She wasn’t cool. She was nowhere near the popular crowd. After I was taken, all I cared about was being accepted by the popular Addin kids and doing what they wanted. Mostly I just couldn’t be bothered with Aranka. She was insignificant. 

When she kept following me around and talking to me, Britney told me that I had to get rid of her for good. She let me know that having a nobody like that act like your friend was really bad juju. It would hurt my chances in the social scene. So, I told her to get lost. I told Aranka I was just pretending to be her friend. 

Q Why was Aranka not cool?

I don’t know… No specific reason really. She dressed very practically and she didn’t seem to care about what was in style. But it wasn’t even mostly about appearance. The social crowd can always find something about you to pick on, but they mainly do it because of who you are inside anyway. 

She wasn’t as quiet as a low-status person should be. She’d go ahead and talk, even when you were supposed to listen to the cooler people and work your way up to being worthy enough to talk. When the top girls decided someone needed to be punished, she didn’t seem to notice. She’d still laugh at that person’s jokes and talk to them. 

I guess most of all, she just didn’t play the game. She knew it was there, but maybe she didn’t know it was mandatory to play it. Or maybe she couldn’t play it the same way. Kyrennei are still Kyrennei even before they’re changed. Maybe there is something about them that is never going to fit in.

Q: Do you feel hope for the world, given how powerful the Addin is?

I do now. I can't really say more about it, because like you said it's confidential. But there is hope. For me, it's about compassion. That and I still believe people have good souls.

The dystopia of today's popularity cult: The Kyrennei premise part 1

There's the high school cafeteria with its ironclad rules about who sits where--tables for the gamers, the emos, the jocks or the geeks among the boys and for the girls the clusters around this or that social magnet. Just about everyone has been there. If you're lucky you might fit in with one group or another or at least squeeze through relatively unnoticed. A few actually thrive in this acrid environment. And some are torn to bits.

Creative Commons image by Autoskabar of Flickr

On one particular gray Tuesday, there's a girl sitting on the steps leading to an upper level. She's alone - as always. She has a pad of paper and colored pencils and she's practicing drawing lines of perspective, capturing the crazy, obtuse angles of the modern cafeteria.

Does she bother the groups at the tables?

She sits there every day in the same spot. She is weird. At first she tried to talk to people, but she looks a bit different and she won't play along. She won't dress the way you are supposed to. She won't wear makeup or not in the right ways. She never pays attention to what was in style. She doesn't make small talk. She talks about why things are the way they are in the Arctic and what happened in a book more than about the other girls.

Yes, she bothers people. 

A couple of the guys catch a nerdy kid with glasses at the top of the stairs. He should have been paying attention. Never should have walked by them. He knew he should take the other stairs to avoid them, but he was in a hurry. He bothers them too. He doesn't give them their due.

So, they grab him and hurl him down the stairs. He crashes into the girl's back, scattering her colored pencils, shattering them into pieces, pulverizing the delicate cores within. They'll be useless now.

She saved for those pencils. There's no way she can afford a new set. But that isn't even the important part. They were her lifeline, the way she survived the hell of this place, the disdain and the shame. Now her lifeline is broken.

She believes the boy jumped on her from the stairs to taunt her, and in a split second brain chemistry flips and years of isolation coalesce into rage. 

She grabs the boy's hair at the tender nape of his neck in her left fist and pounds him with her right fist. Again and again. She sees white, not red. She hears only her own ragged breath. She doesn't scream but her face holds such intensity that they leave her alone for a while after that.

She knows that she has failed again. She played right into their hands. The crying, beaten boy wasn't the attacker. They should have been allies.

We left such things behind in high school. Didn't we? 

I hoped so. Once. But then I discovered Mommy cliques. When you're a mother with small children, you need other mothers. You need companionship with those who understand and the occasional conversation of multi-syllabic words. And you need playdates so your toddlers don't drive you crazy. But if you thought high school had cliques... watch out! 

Mommy cliques are a tad more sophisticated, but the rules are still pretty much the same. The ammunition is still fashion, makeup and small talk, but you have to add in home decor, flashy birthday parties, magazine-quality Pinterest photos of crafts and cooking, kids fashions, kids behavior, parenting styles, how early you potty-trained and how well you can talk about it all without seeming to brag too blatantly. 

The stakes are the same - inclusion or exclusion, street cred or isolation.

Does this mean that men get it easier? Maybe. But both men and women have to run the race for "success" in academia and then in career. Men have to dress the part too. If you don't, it's your loss. You can't blame anyone but yourself. Sure, the fashions are arbitrary, but only geeks can differ and they can only differ in certain ways. 

Creative Commons image by Martinak15 of Flickr

A random perusal of my Facebook feed shows that it isn't just mommies who didn't leave the social rat race behind in high school. Everything is measured in "likes" these days. I've been studying a lot about effective online business, but I still can't figure out how "likes" help exactly - except that they give that street cred. It's essentially the same thing as having the popular kids give you a considering look and an oh-so-minuscule nod to show that you are allowed to sit in their vicinity.

Except "likes" have the illusion of democracy. They make it appear that the more you have the more people must really support you.

I inadvertently ran a small experiment on "likes" recently. I was trying to choose between two possibilities for the new logo of my dystopian fantasy series and I posted it to various groups asking for gut reactions. In every group there would be one enthusiast who would pipe up quickly and give their answer, either  "right" or "left." The first time this happened I was thrilled. The first person chose "right" and that was the option I secretly favored. There followed a stream of agreement, "right," "right," "yes, right's the best," a dozen or more responses. I was vindicated! 

But then I looked at another group. There the first person to answer had said "left" and the whole string of replies had agreed that the left-hand choice was the better one. Out of six different groups, the responses were about even, but they always followed the leader, like little ducks... or lemmings. 

What I learned from this is that "likes" are far from democratic. What is popular is popular because of how people follow the leaders, not because of popular appeal or true support. I call it "the cult of popularity," but I might as well call it a "cult of power."

Political organization, social structures and economic entities all use it and the underlying psychology isn't that different from high school cliques.

I just read an article about a blind citizen detained by US border patrol between Montreal and New York because the way his pupils were dilated looked suspicious. He and his friends laughed and the border patrol was incensed. "You think US Customs and Immigration is a joke?" they bellowed. Then he was subjected to hours of intimidation and interrogation. The guy's eyes "bothered" those with power. His failure to "play the game" of mild intimidation bothered them even more. 

Does nothing ever change? Are humans just wired to ostracize - to pick sides, pick out and pick on? When will those who are bullied stand up together instead of fighting one another? Will bystanders ever wake up and say enough is enough? 

For as long as there have been poets and bards and storytellers by the fire, some of us have tackled these questions with stories. That's why I wrote The Kyrennei Series. It started there in the lunchroom in high school. I watched the florescent lights and escaped from purgatory by making up characters, names, places and fantasies.  

The story is dark because it comes from that darkness. But it's also essentially the anatomy of hope. First, how can you survive? How do you struggle and hang on to those who stand by you? Then how do you choose your own path no matter how hard you're pushed down? How do you use the power you have - great or small - to make something meaningful? 

I'm going to write a few posts about the premise of the Kyrennei series. This is the first. The Soul and the Seed is a story that faces the human desires to to build cults of popularity and reject difference head on. 

I love your comments on these posts! Do you thrive in the social rat race? What do you think would happen if the cult of popularity literally ruled the world? 

Must all modern female heroines be unbelievably strong, fearless and invincible?

Maya Gardener is a college student with practical dreams. She's a dutiful daughter, attending church even when she goes away to Michigan Tech. But she doesn't feel like she belongs--not at church, not with the sororities on campus, not with her parents nor anywhere else. She assumes that's because she is both adopted and biracial in a country where the rift between black and white is widening.

And yet that's the least of her troubles. Shadowy authorities are trying to track her down, authorizing "lethal force" to capture her. A guy she thought she liked turned into a maniac, shot up the university and kidnapped her. Maya has good reason to be frightened. Most of us would be.  

"But she isn't like Katniss of the Hunger Games!" a friend who is also a prolific author protested.

"That's true,"  I answered. "She isn't Katniss... or Tris of Divergent for that matter. Her name doesn't even end in 'iss' as seems required of best-selling modern heroines.  But more importantly, she is more like a real woman." 

"But who wants to read about regular old people who aren't superhuman?" my colleague argued. "I want to escape into a fantasy world when I read, not experience a life that is even more miserable as my own." 

"It's easier to fully enter the world of the story, if the characters are like real people." I tried to explain but I wasn't entirely invested in the argument. "Katniss and Tris will always win. You know that from the outset. They don't give me a sense of hope, because I always knew they were in a class apart, superheroes, who I can never measure up to." 

My correspondent wasn't convinced and neither was I. We simply disagree. And readers are bound to disagree as much as writers on this issue. 

Aranka Miko, the heroine of the initial trilogy of The Kyrennei Series, has been compared to Katniss and Tris on occasion. She is feisty. She gets hit with bad stuff and she bounces back. The minute she has a spare breath, she is ready to help rescue others in a similar predicament, regardless of the danger to herself. She stands up to torture and refuses to surrender valuable information to the bitter end.

And there is a kind of hope in that. We need strong heroes and heroines.

As readers, we recognize the strength and courage it takes for the character to survive and even fight back in the face of enormous evil. But how difficult is the path of such a heroine really when she begins with tenacity and ferocity as her strengths? And what can she really do for the world, when you get right down to it? She brought a flicker of hope, but unless the author (ahem) engineers a series of extremely unrealistic events (as some authors have... no naming names here), Aranka won't be able to bring down the powers of tyranny alone. 

To do that, it will take something more than tenacity and ferocity. It will take the kind of strength our own world is in such dire need of.

That kind of strength comes from a real battle within. Deep and authentic hope comes from the understanding that even those of us who do not start out as superheroes, who are small, terrified, wounded and broken can choose our own path in the face of the most horrendous odds. The battle is within us as much as on the outside. 

And that is why Maya Gardner is the heroine of Code of the Outcast (Book 4) of The Kyrennei Series. She is like most of us. She isn't particularly strong or fast or good with a bow. She avoids fighting and conflicts. She freezes up in a crisis. But within her she carries a hidden potential, a spark of something waiting to bloom. If only she can reach out and choose her own path when most of her choices have been taken away. 

Then we would have hope in the darkness of our own world as well. When the choices are hard and uncertain, choosing your own path is an act of great courage.

I love your comments on these posts! What is your favorite type of hero or heroine? Share this article using the icon below and find out what your friends think.

Code of the Outcast (Book 4 of the Kyrennei Series) is out!

Code of the Outcast, the long-awaited next installment in the series, is now live on Amazon. This book departs a bit from the first three, focusing on new characters, but it is more of the desperate adventure in the world ruled by the Addin. The series is best if read in order. If you're new to it and looking for a gripping read, try The Soul and the Seed.

Please don't be shy and drop a review of Code of the Outcast on Amazon. Reviews matter. They don't need to be long or convoluted, but they're a big part of what keeps your favorite authors writing. 

Here's the story

When a masked gunman barges into a university acoustic-dynamics class and abducts Maya Gardener, she knows she has to fight for her life. But her supposed rescuers may want her dead, and the kidnapper insists that the world as Maya knows it is a lie.

It’s present-day America and society is as dysfunctional as always. Democracy and even the “freedom to shop” is a sham. A powerful elite wields clandestine control over human will to maintain hegemony in every aspect of modern life. 

It’s been that way for a thousand years, but today there are finally a handful of people who might possess the power to resist and to shield others… if they only knew how. Maya isn’t a fighter by nature, but the random chance of genetics chose her and now she’ll have to learn to help herself and others. 

She was always an outsider—trapped in the borderlands between races, cultures and families. Now she’s hunted through the biting cold of a Wisconsin winter, and the only thing that holds her body and soul together is her love for Kai Linden, the fierce-eyed musician and comp-sci major who claims there is one place she truly belongs.  Read more.

What's in a word? "Outcast"

"You must think the whole world is against you. Why else would you write about an outcast?" 

That was one interesting reaction to the upcoming publication of the fourth book in The Kyrennei Series, entitled Code of the Outcast.  (I'm beginning to like criticism. It provides good blog fodder.)

Obviously the word "outcast" stirs up some intense emotions. I'm well aware of it. For some, that word has more gut-punch power than the worst curse words. It isn't a word we say or hear very often, but it's between the lines a lot. 

I wrote about the issue of a community shunning a person, making him an outcast, because I believe that it's the duty of writers and artists to open up the dark corners of society and the mind.

Whatever is too painful to touch directly, we must touch and try to heal with stories. For centuries that has been our role. Where the healing of doctors cannot go, where the words of public figures dare not go, artists and writers should go. 

And no, the world isn't "against me." The world is very troubled and mostly doesn't know I exist. And that is quite difficult enough for anyone to cope with. 

Code of the Outcast is the fourth book in a series. Even though this book starts with new characters, you will probably still enjoy it more if you start from The Soul and the Seed (Book 1). For those who know the series, this book is a bit of an answer to a lot of reader questions, wondering about what happens to those who don't have the protection of the legendary fighters of J. Company.

The answer isn't always pretty. And yet there is something of great value here. 

Code of the Outcast begins with a person facing the realization that he and only he can make a difference, save a life... change the world. Yet in order to do it he must commit violence and take the consequences. 

We float through so much of our life in numbness because most of the time there is very little we can do to change the terrible things that happen in the world. We hear about them at a distance and we can only write letters to politicians and protest. We can't really change it. 

But there are moments when you can.

Such a moment will usually not come when you expect it or come at a convenient time. But there are moments when one person can make a great difference. Code of the Outcast is essentially the story of one of those moments and the two people it uprooted and turned into outcasts.

You don't get to change the world without sacrifice and in this case the sacrifice is just that - to be shunned and lose home and family forever. Could you make such a choice, if it would save the life of a person you cared about? 

Is this a worthy topic for a novel? Comment using the icon on the lower left. And please share this post with your friends using the icon on the lower right. :)

Time to order Book 4 of The Kyrennei Series

Code of the Outcast is now available for preorder as a Kindle ebook. Until July 1 it will be on sale for 99 cents. Then the price will gradually go up until it's $3.99 like the other books on publication day (JUly 7). It's both cheaper and a boost to the series if you preorder now and have the book delivered to your Kindle on July 7. 

If you haven't read The Soul and the Seed (Book 1 of The Kyrennei Series), it's recommended that you start there.

The paperback book and other ebook formats will be up soon. 

If you need a read-for-review or pre-release copy either in the Kindle format or another ebook format,  send me an email. 

Free books!

If you think you might like my books or have read one of them but not the rest, here's your chance to get a free book. Join my hearth-side email circle, where readers get an occasional email with links to my blog posts plus a sort of virtual cup of tea. And you get a free ebook. Here's how:

1. Subscribe to my hearth-side email circle here. 
2. Then look at The Soul and the Seed (or check the Books by the Fire tab to find the next book in the series if you've already read that one.) 
3.  Next go to my contact page and send me a message. Include your email address, your preferred ebook format (Mobi, Epub or PDF) and which book you would like. Presto! You'll have it in your inbox soon.

Violence in fiction and the concept of deep hope

Violence in real life is brutal, traumatizing and usually over before you have a chance to think or react. 

I've been mercifully fortunate to undergo only a few incidents of real violence or narrowly averted violence in my life.  I was once grabbed by a man in a dark, deserted street, but I managed to trick him into believing that I had friends in the doorway of a nearby building, so that he let go of me for a second. And I had fast feet.

As a journalist during the conflicts in the Balkans, I often saw the aftermath of violence, but only rarely was I in the middle of it. One terrifying night in the summer of 2001, I ran for my life through dark deserted streets to escape from a mob firing automatic weapons. When I was finally able to get indoors, a man who was out of his head with terror leaped on me and tried to sexually assault me. I fought him off and then had to lay on the floor of a room while bullets whizzed by the open windows and pinged off of the gutters just a few feet away.

Those experiences have given me an idea of what real violence is like, and the discrepancy between that reality and the way violence is usually portrayed in books and movies is often disturbing. Before I had those experiences I found gratuitous violence in fiction to be merely boring. Violence that is divorced from emotion and real human reactions of shock and trauma felt meaningless. After my experiences in conflict areas, it feels both meaningless and disrespectful, dismissive of the experiences of those who have undergone far worse than I have.

Arie's rules of fictional violence

I am reasonably tough and I wasn't traumatized by my experiences. I'm not all that disturbed by reading violence. But I usually avoid books that seem to be primarily about violence.

And yet my books have fictional violence in them. My contemporary fantasy The Kyrennei Series has even been called a thriller by reviewers, due to the violent content. 

Let me lay it out clearly then. I don't write violence the way 80 to 90 percent of action and thriller books are written. Here are my rules of violence in fiction:

• The violence in a good thriller isn’t where the greatest suspense is. The suspense is in our emotions about the characters.
• And yet the violence must be integral to the plot. It should not be an aside just stuck in there to titillate. 
• Violent scenes should be brutal, even traumatic, and avoided when possible by both the characters and writers alike.
• Violent scenes should not be entirely pleasant even for the reader. Making it purely entertaining is a betrayal. 

That said, there are times when you can’t avoid violence in fiction. And it is better to have it out there than in real life. The story must be told. And The Kyrennei Series is a hard and desperate story. It’s fiction—even fantasy—on the literal plane. And yet there is a deeper level of reality where this story is true. And that truth has to be told. Even when it’s hard.

The road to deep hope leads through darkness

A reader recently told me that my books are like The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It’s a great book, and at first I was simply pleased to be favorably compared to an awesome author. But then I realized that The Road is categorized as literary fiction, not popular dystopia. I've been categorizing my books with things like The Hunger Games, not with literary dystopia. 

So, how in the world is The Soul and the Seed like The Road?  

They are in wildly different settings after all. The Road is in a grim, future in a destroyed world where people resort to cannibalism to survive. The Soul and the Seed is set solidly in the present. The dystopia is inherent in today’s socially harsh and physically unsustainable society… with one fatal twist that isn’t even apparent on the surface. 

The similarity is more in the way that violence, despair and emotion are dealt with. Much of the violence in popular urban fantasy and dystopia is “justified” and almost enjoyable to read.

And the violence in my books isn’t fun. It’s all too real. 

Why read it then?

To the readers of books like The Road or The Soul and the Seed, it’s partly the authentic spirit of the people that keeps you glued to the page. It's also the burning questions we carry inside whether we read this sort of thing or not. 

How do we live with despair? How do you go on through anything, no matter how terrible and gut-wrenching? Is hope just wishful thinking?

Authentic answers to these questions have always come hard. But they can be answered in bits and pieces--in the gentleness of a person forced to fight, in the need that binds the strong and the weak together, in the fact that you still seek life and comfort amid horrific circumstances, in the play of children in wartime, in the courage those who know they cannot win..

If you don’t have the darkness--real darkness--true and desperate, how can you have an story about hope?

I wanted to write about these things, but I also wanted to do it in a gripping story without the tiniest whiff of moralistic preaching. I am as much a seeker as the reader. The story is there to sweep you away to another reality while simultaneously making you question your own world, to terrify you and help you feel deeply.

And it may just help you find hope. Or not. Depending. But it will grip you and make you fall in love with the characters, regardless.

An example from The Soul and the Seed

Let me put it technically. The Soul and the Seed has three or four incidents of violence in it, depending on if you count hearing violence at a distance or not. That’s not a peaceful book. But it isn’t that much violence when compared to a book like The Hunger Games, which is (after the first third) essentially a sequence of violent incidents.

And yet readers who have read both The Hunger Games and The Soul and the Seed will often say the latter is scarier and more intense. People who can read about teenagers slaughtering each other in The Hunger Games, sometimes find The Kyrennei Series to be “too much.”

And that's how it goes. a writer can't please everyone. If I want the reader to feel hope deeply, I have to make the reader feel pain deeply as well.

The only problem is with telling readers that. I want to give fair warning about the violence in the series. And yet violence isn’t at the core of the story. There are other readers who find modern fiction too violent who will actually like The Soul and the Seed better than The Hunger Games. Which is more "intense" or "violent" Is to some degree subjective and bases on what kind of violence the reader is prepared to handle.

Sometimes a thing is described best by saying what it is not. I liked the idea of The Hunger Games up until the middle of the first book. But then the violence became mechanical. The emotion slid into melodrama, even though it didn't need to. By the third book the violence read like the description of a video game. It wasn’t painful to read. It was a game.

Not everything must be painful, but if you want real hope, it is likely that getting to it will hurt.

And that is what The Kyrennei Series does. It goes for real hope. Hope that doesn’t pull any punches. And it is wrenching to get there.

Books for 99 cents

Code of the Outcast (Book 4 of The Kyrennei Series) will be published on July 7. As of today, it is available for preorder. For just a few days you can get it for 99 cents. Next week the price goes up to $2.99 and then to $3.99 when it's published on July 7.

Book 3 of the series, The Taken and the Free, is on sale this week at 99 cents too, for the last time. Time to get your summer reading. 

Free books!

If you think you might like my books or have read one of them but not the rest, I have a special offer going. Join my hearth-side email circle, where readers get an occasional email with links to my blog posts plus a sort of virtual cup of tea. And you get a free ebook. Here's how:

1. Subscribe to my hearth-side email circle here. 
2. Then look at the books under the Arie's Books tab at the top of the page and pick the book you want. (It's highly recommended that you read the books in order and the first book is The Soul and the Seed. But if you've already read the first book, here's your chance to get the second for free. ) 
3. Next go to my contact page and send me a message. Include your email address, your preferred ebook format (Mobi, Epub or PDF) and which book you would like. Presto! You'll have it in your inbox soon.

Note: If you are already subscribed to the Hearth-side Email Circle, you can also get a free book. Reply to the latest By the Hearth email and let me know which one you want.

On violence in fiction and the path to deep hope

Violence in real life is brutal, traumatizing and usually over before you have a chance to think or react. 

I've been mercifully fortunate to undergo only a few incidents of real violence or narrowly averted violence in my life.  I was once grabbed by a man in a dark, deserted street, but I managed to trick him into believing that I had friends in the doorway of a nearby building, so that he let go of me for a second. And I had fast feet.

As a journalist during the conflicts in the Balkans, I often saw the aftermath of violence, but only rarely was I in the middle of it. One terrifying night in the summer of 2001, I ran for my life through dark deserted streets to escape from a mob firing automatic weapons. When I was finally able to get indoors, a man who was out of his head with terror leaped on me and tried to sexually assault me. I fought him off and then had to lay on the floor of a room while bullets whizzed by the open windows and pinged off of the gutters just a few feet away.

Those experiences have given me an idea of what real violence is like, and the discrepancy between that reality and the way violence is usually portrayed in books and movies is often disturbing. Before I had those experiences I found gratuitous violence in fiction to be merely boring. Violence that is divorced from emotion and real human reactions of shock and trauma felt meaningless. After my experiences in conflict areas, it feels both meaningless and disrespectful, dismissive of the experiences of those who have undergone far worse than I have.

Arie's rules of fictional violence

I am reasonably tough and I wasn't traumatized by my experiences. I'm not all that disturbed by reading violence. But I usually avoid books that seem to be primarily about violence.

And yet my books have fictional violence in them. My contemporary fantasy The Kyrennei Series has even been called a thriller by reviewers, due to the violent content. 

Let me lay it out clearly then. I don't write violence the way 80 to 90 percent of action and thriller books are written. Here are my rules of violence in fiction:

• The violence in a good thriller isn’t where the greatest suspense is. The suspense is in our emotions about the characters.
• And yet the violence must be integral to the plot. It should not be an aside just stuck in there to titillate. 
• Violent scenes should be brutal, even traumatic, and avoided when possible by both the characters and writers alike.
• Violent scenes should not be entirely pleasant even for the reader. Making it purely entertaining is a betrayal. 

That said, there are times when you can’t avoid violence in fiction. And it is better to have it out there than in real life. The story must be told. And The Kyrennei Series is a hard and desperate story. It’s fiction—even fantasy—on the literal plane. And yet there is a deeper level of reality where this story is true. And that truth has to be told. Even when it’s hard.

The road to deep hope leads through darkness

A reader recently told me that my books are like The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It’s a great book, and at first I was simply pleased to be favorably compared to an awesome author. But then I realized that The Road is categorized as literary fiction, not popular dystopia. I've been categorizing my books with things like The Hunger Games, not with literary dystopia. 

So, how in the world is The Soul and the Seed like The Road?  

They are in wildly different settings after all. The Road is in a grim, future in a destroyed world where people resort to cannibalism to survive. The Soul and the Seed is set solidly in the present. The dystopia is inherent in today’s socially harsh and physically unsustainable society… with one fatal twist that isn’t even apparent on the surface. 

The similarity is more in the way that violence, despair and emotion are dealt with. Much of the violence in popular urban fantasy and dystopia is “justified” and almost enjoyable to read.

And the violence in my books isn’t fun. It’s all too real. 

Why read it then?

To the readers of books like The Road or The Soul and the Seed, it’s partly the authentic spirit of the people that keeps you glued to the page. It's also the burning questions we carry inside whether we read this sort of thing or not. 

How do we live with despair? How do you go on through anything, no matter how terrible and gut-wrenching? Is hope just wishful thinking?

Authentic answers to these questions have always come hard. But they can be answered in bits and pieces--in the gentleness of a person forced to fight, in the need that binds the strong and the weak together, in the fact that you still seek life and comfort amid horrific circumstances, in the play of children in wartime, in the courage those who know they cannot win..

If you don’t have the darkness--real darkness--true and desperate, how can you have an story about hope?

I wanted to write about these things, but I also wanted to do it in a gripping story without the tiniest whiff of moralistic preaching. I am as much a seeker as the reader. The story is there to sweep you away to another reality while simultaneously making you question your own world, to terrify you and help you feel deeply.

And it may just help you find hope. Or not. Depending. But it will grip you and make you fall in love with the characters, regardless.

An example from The Soul and the Seed

Let me put it technically. The Soul and the Seed has three or four incidents of violence in it, depending on if you count hearing violence at a distance or not. That’s not a peaceful book. But it isn’t that much violence when compared to a book like The Hunger Games, which is (after the first third) essentially a sequence of violent incidents.

And yet readers who have read both The Hunger Games and The Soul and the Seed will often say the latter is scarier and more intense. People who can read about teenagers slaughtering each other in The Hunger Games, sometimes find The Kyrennei Series to be “too much.”

And that's how it goes. a writer can't please everyone. If I want the reader to feel hope deeply, I have to make the reader feel pain deeply as well.

The only problem is with telling readers that. I want to give fair warning about the violence in the series. And yet violence isn’t at the core of the story. There are other readers who find modern fiction too violent who will actually like The Soul and the Seed better than The Hunger Games. Which is more "intense" or "violent" Is to some degree subjective and bases on what kind of violence the reader is prepared to handle.

Sometimes a thing is described best by saying what it is not. I liked the idea of The Hunger Games up until the middle of the first book. But then the violence became mechanical. The emotion slid into melodrama, even though it didn't need to. By the third book the violence read like the description of a video game. It wasn’t painful to read. It was a game.

Not everything must be painful, but if you want real hope, it is likely that getting to it will hurt.

And that is what The Kyrennei Series does. It goes for real hope. Hope that doesn’t pull any punches. And it is wrenching to get there.

Preorder for just 99 cents

Code of the Outcast (Book 4 of The Kyrennei Series) will be published on July 7. As of today, it is available for preorder. For just a few days you can get it for 99 cents. Next week the price goes up to $2.99 and then to $3.99 when it's published on July 7.

The paperback edition and other digital formats will follow short.y. If you need another digital format now, write to me here and I will make sure you get one. If you would like an advanced review copy, drop me a note.

Free books!

If you think you might like my books or have read one of them but not the rest, I have a special offer going. Join my hearth-side email circle, where readers get an occasional email with links to my blog posts plus a sort of virtual cup of tea. And you get a free ebook. Here's how:

1. Subscribe to my hearth-side email circle here. 
2. Then look at the books under the Arie's Books tab at the top of the page and pick the book you want. (It's highly recommended that you read the books in order and the first book is The Soul and the Seed. But if you've already read the first book, here's your chance to get the second for free. ) 
3. Next go to my contact page and send me a message. Include your email address, your preferred ebook format (Mobi, Epub or PDF) and which book you would like. Presto! You'll have it in your inbox soon.

Note: If you are already subscribed to the Hearth-side Email Circle, you can also get a free book. Reply to the latest By the Hearth email and let me know which one you want.

New characters and epic struggle in Book 4 of The Kyrennei Series - Code of the Outcast

I know many of you have been waiting for a long time for the fourth book in The Kyrennei Series. When The Taken and the Free (Book 3) was published in November, I wasn't ready to make any promises. But now it's imminent. 

Just a detail the cover of Code of the OUtcast - Not for copying (Shutterstock license)

First, I'm ready to announce the title of Book 4. That is Code of the Outcast.

The cover is ready, but I'm working out the details in a new version of the series logo, so I'm not going to post that quite yet. It will be one of the most atmospheric covers yet.

As to what's in the book... 

I received a lot of questions from readers about the world of The Kyrennei Series and what other people beyond J. Company are experiencing, particularly given the societal upsets caused by events in The Taken and the Free. So one of my goals in writing the next few books in the series was to let the reader take a wider journey into this alternate version of our world, to experience what life is like for those who are not directly under the protection of J. Company, which is widely known as the only outfit with the wherewithal to provide protection from the wrath of the Addin.  

In order to explore these questions, Code of the Outcast focuses on new characters - college students Maya Gardner and Kai Linden at Michigan Tech on Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Michigan gets the dubious honor of being the setting of the latest Addin machinations because it's one of those places where pharmaceutical companies like to set up small, high-tech labs that no one really seems to know much about. In addition, my mother grew up there and Wisconsin, where I attended university, is right next door. As you know, I love to pick on my own stomping grounds. In fact, most of Code of the Outcast takes place in Wisconsin after Maya and Kai are forced to flee from Addin agents, including Kai's own family.

But there I'm getting ahead of myself... 

What really happens is that Maya, a biracial woman  studying sound design, is sitting in class one day when a masked gunman barges in and forces her to leave with him.

But is it really a kidnapping? He claims he is trying to rescue her from something far worse. Forced to survive on the run and on foot in through a Midwest winter and to face her long-held fears of being a misfit in the cultures where she should belong, Maya struggles with her tendency to freeze up in a crisis and avoid confrontation at all cost. In this world, there is no avoiding fear.

These are very different characters from those in the first trilogy of the series, but no less real. I fell in love with them early and I'm sure you will too. I love Aranka and J. Company, but we are not always that strong and we also need fictional characters who are sometimes as lost as we are. Only then can they reflect back the hope in our own struggles.

This story tackles the issue of what it is to be an outcast - not only outcast from mainstream society, but even among those who should be friends and allies. Without the protection of an established outlaw group like J. Company, the search for a safe haven is paramount. And once a measure of safety is found, it can hardly be permanent in a world where the Addin controls the powerful social and economic elites. 

Because Code of the Outcast begins a new part of the story with different characters, it may be tempting for readers who haven't read the previous books to jump right in with this one. While the basic premise of the world of The Kyrennei Series does come out in the telling, test readers have shown that you get more out of the story if you read at least The Soul and the Seed first. I don't want to repeatedly belabor things that would slow the story down for those who have read all the books, and there are psychological issues with how the world of the series works that can't be summarized quickly or easily. 

For those who have read the previous books, you will find Code of the Outcast deepens and world and calls to the vulnerable parts of our souls. The road to authentic hope is long and rugged.

You can read the full book description of Code of the Outcast here on its dedicated page. 

And if you are just getting started with The Kyrennei Series and need to get the previous books, now is your chance. The 99 cent sale of The Soul and the Seed (Book 1) on Amazon ends today. And starting today for one week The Fear and the Solace (Book 2) will be on sale for 99 cents. If you or your friends need some summer reading, now is the one time to get it for a reasonable price. The ebooks are normally $3.99.  There are also paperbacks of all the books available on Amazon and at Looking Glass Books in La Grande. 

How can a reader find the ideal book when all the descriptions sound the same?

Am I the only reader who finds that book descriptions have started to sound way too similar? 

On the back of every novel you see it. Action! Drama! Intensity! Guy in pursuit! Girl in despair! Snappy prose! One- or two-word descriptions by celebrities. "Fantastic!" "A masterpiece!" 

How do you tell which book you will really like? 

I don't know about you, but I don't have nearly as much time to read as I would like. I get frustrated when I pick up book after book and read a third of the way in and find that it really isn't my thing. Half the time it's not even poorly written. It just doesn't have the atmosphere I like or I don't care about the stoic characters.  

That's because readers are diverse. Some readers like physical action. Others prefer wrenching emotions. Some can’t stand the internal tension but are fine with violence. Some insist on sex scenes. Others can do without the details. Some books are harshly literary and others are more cozy. And those are issues that mostly cross genres and are true regardless of specific themes. 

So, why is it that it is so hard to tell what the heart and soul of a book will be like from the description?

Here are a few reasons:

1. The description can only be 100 to 150 words or about a dozen sentences. There are only so many combinations of grammatical sentences possible. 
2. There are rules. The writer must present who the main character is and what their problem or goal is immediately. It's not just the industry standard. That part makes good sense for readers too.
3. The blurb has to give an indication of genre and the major themes and that takes up most of the space.
4. And then few blurbs ever say what the book is not. No one is going to advertise a book by saying it isn't intelligent, even if it's definitely NOT literary fiction. And no mystery writer will say their book isn't suspenseful, even if the truth is that it's pretty cozy and the suspense is at a minimum.
5. If there is violence in the book, this will often be made clear but no one will ever tell you that it is gratuitous, video-game-style violence. Every violent thriller or dystopian novel will insist that it is gritty and realistic--employing characters with heart, even when its main character is a stock tough guy who leaps, shoots and dashes through the pages. 

So, there are some legitimate reasons for the look-alike cover blurbs. But what is a reader to do? I love good fantasy and I like contemporary thrillers, but I don't like gratuitous violence and those genres are often filled with it. I enjoy historical fiction but I prefer a story with a casual tone and characters from everyday life rather than momentous language and well-known figures of history. I can read virtually any genre as long as it is neither too dry and literary nor too brainless. I barely know how to describe the humor I like. How can I find books that will actually suit my taste?  

And worse yet, how do I as an author give readers a feel for the heart and soul of my books in the space of a blurb?

My first book (The Soul and the Seed) starts with a teenage girl imprisoned in a laboratory by doctors with nefarious motives. Given that, it's hard to convey that this is not a story about teenage angst. There is violence in the story. I wouldn't leave that out of the description, because some people really don't want to read any violence of any kind and this is pretty heavy-duty intense stuff. Yet the story isn't primarily about violence. Most important of all, it's hard to convey the close, confiding tone of the story--like a friend telling you about their harrowing experiences--let alone the sense of magical realism, the deep connections to characters or how a book that is so dark can be primarily about hope. 

I follow all the blurb-writing rules and I'm not a terrible writer (at least I'm told I can string sentences together with some semblance of art) and what comes out?

Action! Drama! Intensity! Girl in despair! Guy to the rescue! 

Ah, I see the problem that all those other authors have while trying to describe their books when I'm the reader. My book is NOT like all most of those books. They are all vastly different. But in a blurb on the back cover it is very hard to get that across.

I love to hear from you. Feel free to comment using the bubble on the lower left. What are your frustrations as a reader? Do you agree that book blurbs are all the same?  Do you have any tips for how to decode which ones will suit you? Do you ever pick up a book, thinking it is going to be your thing and it isn't? Or do you ever randomly discover a fantastic book behind a description that didn't do it justice? 

Free books!

The publication of my fourth book is coming up. To celebrate, I'm going to give every new subscriber to my hearth-side email circle a free ebook. If you've looked at The Soul and the Seed and been curious or if you've read part of the series and haven't gotten around to reading the rest, now is your chance to do so for free. 

1. Subscribe to my hearth-side email circle here. That's where you get links to my latest blog posts as well as the occasional virtual cup of tea. There's no spam, thanks to the excellent security of Mailchimp. 
2. Then look at the books under the Arie's Books tab at the top of the page and pick the book you want. (It's highly recommended that you read the books in order and the first book is The Soul and the Seed. But if you've already read the first book, here's your chance to get the second for free. ) 
3. Next go to my contact page and send me a message. Include your email address, your preferred ebook format (Kindle, Epub or PDF) and which book you would like. Presto! You'll have it in your inbox soon.

Note: If you are already subscribed to the Hearth-side Email Circle, you can also get a free book. Reply to the latest By the Hearth email and let me know which one you want.

The big lie about writing and getting rich

There's a modern obsession about a mythical connection between writing and making tons of money on the internet. At every turn, I encounter some version of this question recently asked on Quora, "Through what ways can I become wealthy if I am an extremely talented writer?"

Leonid Pasternak - The Passion of creation (public domain image)

It brings me back to a wonderful moment when I got to meet one of my personal heroines as a teenager. I read a book called The Cloud while I was an exchange student in Germany. It still hasn't been translated into English, so this was a challenge, but it was so well-written and the story was so gripping that I was hooked. The author, Gudrung Pausewang, was a very well-known author in Germany at the time and I read several of her other books and loved them all.  English speakers may not know her but Germans certainly did in the 1990s.

A few months after I read that first book, a foreign friend of mine had to visit a sweet German lady who was a friend of his father's to deliver something. He asked if I would like to go along because he'd heard that the old woman was a writer. Ironically, he was from Czechoslovakia (Pausewang's birthplace) and he didn't know her name. 

I went with him that day. And yes, the woman was my newly discovered favorite German author. I was blown away to meet such a staggering figure. 

But I was also a little disappointed. I assumed that being a famous, best selling author during her lifetime meant that she would be wealthy. Instead she lived in a humble cottage amid flowering shrubs with little more than the essentials and her bookcases. She was far from wealthy, although otherwise she lived up to my expectations in wit, wisdom and sheer presence. 

Gudrun Pausewang, author portrait

This was one of the hard lessons of my youth. Fabulously talented writers don't become wealthy by writing. Period.

If they become wealthy, which is rare, they do it by having a relative in the publishing business, by being a celebrity in some other capacity (actor, well-known psychologist, president, etc.), by developing excellent marketing skills, by investing inherited or previously acquired financial assets (in marketing), by utilizing interpersonal manipulation and similar pursuits. 

Writing is an adjunct skill. It is helpful to many other careers or conditions, but it isn't the primary vehicle.

When I was an up-and-coming journalism intern in 1999, one of my mentors gave me some good perspective:  "Writers who are good enough to write for a top newspaper are a dime a dozen. But not many make it. The real deciding factors are connections and bull-headed persistence." 

It's as true today as it was in the 1990s--probably more so.

The vast majority of people who make a living writing actually make a living through using (rather than wasting) some degree of prior celebrity, through skillfully working social or family connections and through intelligently investing money in marketing. Despite the fact that these sorts of careers are out of reach for most people, they still require motivation and hard work even for those born into privilege.

Here's the cold hard facts about publishing today.

• There are many poorly written, moderately successful books. These books are successful based purely on other skills or preconditions. There are a few wildly successful, well-written books. These combine other skills/conditions with excellent writing.
• There are thousands upon thousands of fantastic, rock-your-world books that are languishing in obscurity. They had the benefit of good writing but the writer lacked other conditions or skills necessary to make them successful.
• Obviously, there are also millions upon millions of crappy, boring books also languishing in obscurity (camouflaging the relatively few good ones) written by authors who lacked both the conditions and skills to make money and the ability too write well. That's true but it, unfortunately, doesn't mean that just because your book is great, you will find success.

So, when I'm asked about what a talented writer should do, I have my own set of advice based on today's conditions:

• First, determine if you really can write well. Get some independent, very critical opinions from professionals who don't know you. Insist that you want a real assessment.
• If it turns out that you can write "extremely well" AND you have one of the prized pre-conditions (some celebrity in a field, a lot of inherited money and/or social and family connections in media, publishing and/or entertainment industries), I would suggest you spend the next ten years perfecting your writing skills, writing a minimum of 2,000 focused words per day. And if you stick with it, you have a reasonable chance of at least making some money from "writing," even though you will actually be making money from capitalizing on your pre-existing conditions and there may be a lot of other ways you could do that that would be more lucrative.
• If you don't have the preconditions but you are assured that your writing is spectacular, decide if you love writing beyond anything else. If so, spend the next ten years developing your writing further as described, while working a marketing or media job as hard as you possibly can. With a large dose of luck, you might be moderately successful. though you will have to accept that those born into better preconditions will always outpace you.
• However, if you are assured that your writing is excellent and you have a job or a life you can tolerate, just write. Forget about becoming wealthy and write. Pity the poor fools who think wealth is important when they already have the joy of writing.

I have made a living writing in one way or another most of my adult life. However, most of that time was spent writing what an editor told me to write in the style that a boss wanted. For me "getting rich writing" would mean having the financial independence to write the stories I have always wanted to read without having to worry about the next paycheck.

What does getting rich mean to you? Do you have a passion that you'd love to make your living at? How much marketing and networking can you do before that becomes your primary occupation? What are you willing to do to follow your passion? I love to hear from you. Comment using the comment's button on the lower left and share this post with your friends using the button on the lower right. 

Book Review: I found one of the hidden jewels! Circle of Ceridwen

I am a reasonably easy reader to please... and a very hard reader to enthrall. I like  a lot of books, but I passionately love only a few. My favorite authors can be counted on one hand. And if Octavia Randolph keeps it up I may need another finger.

The world of digital books is like a great mountain of ash. You step into it and you're instantly up to your waist in dust. You know there are jewels of incredible power hidden in the grime and fluff, but finding them is a mammoth task. After more than a year of searching, I have finally found one of the jewels in The Circle of Ceridwen, the first book in Randolf's historical series.

Oddly enough, I never would have bought this book in a million years based on the cover and the description. I like a good historical novel and I'm not adverse to violent stories but I have never found a book with big swords on the front to be very emotionally powerful and a description that immediately touts the presence of "vikings with tatoos" is unlikely to have the emotional caliber I'm looking for. But I downloaded the book because of one of those free deals and I was very pleasantly surprised. I'd be willing to pay plenty for books like this.

Here's the real deal on this book:

• Its style is accessible and conversational, yet historically evocative. All the semi-literate reviewers confused about the grammar are simply wrong. There are few if any errors in this book. There is a refreshing absence of flamboyance and pompous writing. The prose is easy, flowing and without distraction, a rare treat and the very first necessity for me to love a book.
• The book has the emotional impact that so few have these days. That's hard to prove without reading it. It's a mix of good characters and realism. 
• The story is told in first person. Always a plus in my opinion. You experience ninth century England through the eyes of a young woman named Ceridwin.
• The characters are likable, believable and relatable, including the supposed "bad guys." I am one of those readers who demands a likable main characters. I simply won't suffer through a book, no matter how good the story is, if the heroine or hero bores me or ticks me off. Here is a young heroine who is so different from the modern vision of a "strong female heroine." She is strong and courageous without being divorced from real women. She is emotionally real and does not try to be "everywoman" so that all readers can see themselves in her. She is a distinct character but one you can love with her flaws. The other characters are also well developed and fascinating.
• The plot is riveting from the first few pages. It takes some very unexpected turns and yet it is never confusing. The tension is held throughout with a fierce desire to see Ceridwen survive and thrive.
• There is warfare, suspense, incredible tension and yet there is no classic villain. It is the real world. The invaders and those who threaten the heroine are people, in fact at least moderately understandable people. You may not agree with all of their decisions or motivations but they are understandable and even honorable in many instances. It is the sheer believability of the characters and world that make the story so emotionally gripping. 
• The details of the historical world are breathtaking. I've read enough historical fiction and nonfiction to know extensive research when I see it. While it's hard to say exactly what life was like in the ninth century, this feels both true and consistent. The level of detail is wonderful with none of the vagueness that results from historical uncertainty and no facts clearly manipulated to suit the needs of fiction. It fulfills that thirst for something beautifully historical and effortless to read at the same time. 
• The pace is just right. This is a subjective matter as far as I can tell. Some people may call this pace "slow." I call many books that have little emotion and character-develop to them "chaotic and rushed."  It isn't constant action. It is instead ever-present story, plot and emotional tension. At no point does the story slow down in order to show off the author's excellent grasp of the history. There are no wasted words or long descriptive scenes for the sake of showing off.
• The book's only flaws may be its cover and description, which hint at a rollicking ride of battle, "weapons porn" and macho atmosphere. The reader only gets to see one "fight" in real time in this first book of the series and that one doesn't even result in anyone dying and is a minor incident in the overall plot. There is plenty of battle going on around but the main character is a girl, who isn't unrealistically placed in the middle of battles. Some readers I know who are into constant battle might be taken in by the cover and description and may be very disappointed. While other readers, who are interested in more character-based stories with flavor and conversational tone, may miss out on this one due to the cover and description. 
• It is fashionable today to comment on the ending in a review. This is the first book in a series and while the ending appears to wrap up the major plot lines, it is clear that peace is unlikely to last long. There is plenty of room for more story and yet the ending doesn't feel contrived or episodic. I appreciate this. The fact that much of the plot is sort of wrapped up makes it easier to resist spending my kids' lunch money on the next book right away but I am eager to get my hands on the next book. 

Unique, detailed settings galore: Real super secret trick of the trade # 3

This tip is obvious on first inspection but using it to its full potential is an art form

How long do you spend drawing maps and sketching out buildings? Most writers either spend a lot of time on this or their settings are sorely lacking in detail. I've drawn my share of maps and sketched quite a few buildings, but there is a shortcut that will get you there a lot faster. It will do a few other things besides. And you already know what it is and have probably used it many times for other purposes. 

GoogleMaps and GoogleEarth

Here's a short list of the things I use either GoogleMaps or GoogleEarth for while writing and the reasons why one or both is almost always open on my desktop:

Imabe by Simon Ledingham of the Geographic Project Collection

1. Real settings: If you are writing about a setting in the real world, it's pretty obvious that you're going to want to have a map and pictures of it handy while you write out your first draft and when you edit. You've got to get distances right and check for street names, but you also want to include details of the landscape and buildings. If you're writing about a real location, even if you have been there, open up GoogleMaps and refresh your memory. You'd be surprised how many more details reemerge when you see the landscape around your location. You know the key to getting your reader engrossed in the story is often in the use of sensory details. Take a look at the pictures and if you've been in a place with similar plants and climate, remember how it smelled. What would that city street feel and sound like? I write a lot of scenes in real places because even though my books are fantasy, they're set in the contemporary world and the realism of the settings adds to the plausibility and suspense of the story.

2. Fantasy settings: But I've written fantasy locations as well and GoogleMaps is just as good for that. There is no need to draw a map from scratch and fill in every detail even if your world is complete fantasy. Use GoogleMaps like a template. Is your world desert? Fine. Find a large desert and use the distances, types of rock formations, water sources and habitations to make a realistic map of your world. Change a few things and voila, you've got a fantasy desert with a lot more detail than you could generate on your own. As you describe your character's movements, use the close views on GoogleEarth to grab details of the landscape. Need a cityscape? The same can be done. Look at the street view and imagine how the city of your fantasy world would be different. But choose a part of a city that is at least close and that way you'll have the basic layout already.

3. Planning action scenes: At one point I knew I needed a bridge. It had to be a two-lane freeway with not much in terms of railings, so that one of my characters could leap off in desperation. And it had to be high enough for that to be dangerous but not high enough to make survival impossible. And it had to have at least a low wall in the center for my other characters to take cover behind in a gun battle. I assumed I was going to have to choose a river and invent my  own bridge, but I actually found the perfect real-world bridge in Portland, Oregon on GoogleMaps and once I had a real bridge coordinating the scene realistically and plotting the aftermath was relatively easy. Even if the building, street, mountain, bay or bridge that you choose for your scene isn't in the location you say it is or is really pure fantasy, choose a look-alike location on GoogleEarth, get into the detail mode and imagine your scene on location. The details and the physical movement of action scenes will go much more smoothly.

4. Coordinating distance, time and plot:  If your plot requires characters moving from one location to another and arriving at a particular time, let alone if more than one group must move and arrive at the same time, you need to plot the movements and time on a map. (I know you may think your scene is simple enough to avoid this step, but please take it from someone who tried that a lot of times and had to backtrack every time due to a need for details. If you plot the movements on a map, you will have a much easier time keeping details accurate and evocative.) You can do this by hand but is is grueling. Better, grab an area with enough similarity to your fictional setting on GoogleMaps and plot the movements there. Are your fantasy heroes on foot through the Great Kierlap Mountains and the villains racing on horses across the plains of Umthrak both heading for the city of Fallem? There are plenty of mountains and plains that intersect with a city in the real world. And you can get distance and time estimates for travel on foot as well as by bicycle and car. (Google, would you please add horses!) Note that distances and time on foot will still be calculated based on roads. But this actually helps a great deal. Even in a world of wilderness, your characters won't be going in a straight line. They'll be following winding trails or at least the bottoms of canyons. Use the time and distance calculations as a guide and adjust appropriately. This helps to keep estimates of time and distance realistic and to keep directions consistent over long plot sequences.

5. Easy variety and detail in dwellings and other buildings: When you're using GoogleEarth and GoogleMaps, don't forget that most buildings can be transferred to another location in your imagination. If you need a medieval castle in your landscape, go find one. A real one. If it is partly in ruins or you simple don't like part of it, change it, and sketch a new one. But having a real one to look at from the air before hand will be immensely helpful in making your castle realistic. You may also not need anything out of the ordinary. Maybe you just need a suburban house but you want to describe it well. You could use your house, if you live in the right neighborhood, but what about the next book? You could also make up all those details, but you're going to start repeating yourself eventually. GoogleMaps provides you with endless possibilities of buildings to describe. And when you're writing about imaginary locations, you can use any building and keep a 3D picture of it handy on your desktop for evoking detail and planning scenes.

Note 1: You'll notice that I use GoogleMaps and GoogleEarth almost interchangeably. They aren't exactly the same. GoogleMaps.com is  a website and you can use from any kind of internet connect. GoogleEarth is a program that you can download onto your computer. The basic version is free. I find it easier to find locations and get directions and estimate distance and time on GoogleMaps. I find GoogleEarth has better access to street view and more photographs of specific places. Obviously they are really the same thing but I use both. You could probably get by with on or the other depending on how complex your setting isl

Note 2:  Just in case anyone misunderstands this, I am not suggesting that you should copy Google's maps to make your own map. Don't plagiarize. This is not about making a map to put in your book. This is about using a working and interactive map to plan out the details of your scenes and plot. If you need to draw a map to put in your book, that's another process entirely. You can draw a map, hire someone or buy software that will help you draw realistic maps.

This on-line thesaurus is a writer's best friend: Real Super Secret Trick of the Trade # 2

I'm sharing the real tricks of writing that I use every day. 

Today, here's the one site I always have open on my desktop if I'm writing on my computer. Granted, you have to keep discipline in order to have your browser open without going to social media and breaking up your writing time. But if you can do that, open a window in the background and you'll have the basic tools at your fingertips.

My favorite on-line thesaurus is www.wordhippo.com.

Here's why:

1. You know that point when you're writing along at a good pace and your character smiles in an unfriendly way. Not at you necessarily. At another character. You don't want to use the word "smile" or "smirk" or "grin," because you've already used those in the past few chapters. And you definitely don't want to resort to "humorlessly" or (shudder) "grimly?"  Now, maybe you're a born genius and this never happens to you. Maybe you always have strong, specific words at your fingertips and finding the perfect one never sets you back a moment.

But if you're like most of us, this kind of problem can lead to writer's block or to using vague placeholder words or just to time-consuming frustration. Back in the day, we had to keep a heavy thesaurus around and even that was limited by printing costs in the number of words it could list. The days of the internet are truly wonderful!

Wordhippo suggests "sneer," "leer" and "beam" for a potentially unfriendly smile. 

Painting by Hieronymus Bosch (circa 1450–1516) through Wikipedia

2.  Áside from synonyms, Wordhippo also lets you look up words that mean the opposite. An interesting opposite for "sneer" might be "commend," "admire," or "applaud."

3. Wordhippo also offers quick grammar advice such as the correct tenses and plurals as well as a dictionary definition and example sentences.

4. One of my favorite features is the rhyme dictionary. I occasionally include riddles or songs in my stories and there is no shame in using a rhyming dictionary to get the ideas flowing. It's just like using a thesaurus in narrative writing.

5. Then there are the lists of related words. For "admire," Wordhippo gives "admiration," "admirer" and "Admiral" among a dozen or so others. You don't have to spend time and brain power trying to remember. And when you're dealing with an awkward sentence a look at this list might be all it takes to change the focus, make it more active and cut through the fluff. 

6. There's a sweet little section on names toward the bottom. In my example, there are names beginning with "A," Names meaning "admire" and names beginning with "admire." Character naming has a whole new dimension. 

7. There are lists of matching words that start with the first letter of a given word, the first two letters, the first three letters and so on  (for your alliterative delight). 

8. And if that isn't enough, there are translations of each word into 50 plus languages. It may be risky to use this part in hopes of choosing the correct word to be mentioned in a foreign language in your story, but it can at least get you started, so that you have something to check when you find a native speaker to confirm it. (See my previous post on Quora for a great place to find native speakers of obscure languages who are glad to help you do their language right. I've had several Burmese speakers help me on my latest book just for the fun of knowing that there will be some modern fiction out there in English that won't mangle a reference to their mother tongue.)

WARNING:  I know it's been said before, but it bears repeating. Don't use words you don't really know. You use a thesaurus to jog your memory and move faster, so you can get on with your plot. The goal is NOT to sprinkle your prose with a spectacular vocabulary. The whole point of looking up the word "smile" In my initial example is that you want to find a strong and highly specific verb so that you can avoid the use of weak adverbs. The key point here is "specific." Think of it in terms of finding the exact right tool for the job or tuning a musical instrument to the precise sweet spot. You have to know your tools or have good pitch in order to do either. And in writing, you have to know the vocabulary. Use the most specific word that you are already familiar with from the list. (If you aren't familiar with enough words, hit the library and read piles of books. Look up words as you go. That is really the only way to increase usable vocabulary.) Don't use a word you don't have experience with for one simple reason. You don't know its other connotations and the chances are good that it actually won't be the specific word you need but something that means something slightly different. 

Otherwise, pop open Wordhippo the next time you write and see if things roll just a bit more smoothly. 

I love hearing from you, drop a comment below and let me know know about your favorite thesaurus or your favorite super specific word for describing a character's facial expressions. 

Happy writing!

Teaching writing to resistant teens

I am an ESL teacher in a town where we struggle with very demotivating schools. Most of my students are reasonably well off socio-economically, but when they first come to me, they have no interest in school, reading or writing. After years of struggling as a teacher, I have found something that works. I've seen it engage many different kinds of students now, often making a huge difference in a few short months.

It's blogging. It sounds simple. Too simple in fact. But it works.

If you're a teacher or a parent or anyone concerned about teaching teens, read on and I'll tell you how I make it work. 

I spend some time in discussions beforehand to figure out an interest that each student can really pursue. You have to reserve all judgement at this point. Your goal here isn't to help students develop interests that adults believe are worthwhile, but rather to teach them writing skills and spark their passion. My students initially claim absolute boredom and disinterest with everything. It takes a while to identify interests. 

One of my students played 49 hours of video games at home last week alone. He has no interest in anything else. Okay. But he is interested in video games at least. It might be the party scene that your student is interested in or Facebook or some sort of music you don't even consider to be music. But there is something if you dig enough. 

Image by MCPearson of Wikipedia

Once you have identified topics for your students' blogs, you go on to a free site like WordPress.com. and have each student set up a blogger account. Have them title their blog something to do with their identified interest or interests. (Putting in writing what the general topic is can be crucial for the success of beginners.) And then spend class time drafting blog entries on topics within the interest. This shouldn't be left to homework or it is unlikely to happen. This is the core of what needs to happen and your students will often need help thinking of how to continue. You can have them write on paper if few computers are available and then have them type in the final draft later.

I have one student who is only interested in tennis and primarily the tennis played on TV. She writes about her practices, what tennis matches she watched on TV and what she thinks of celebrity tennis players. I am really not interested in tennis and I find writing about what was on TV to be excruciating but this student is suddenly motivated. I don't care that she is reformulating what she saw on TV. She is writing.

My students are writing at a very basic level because this is ESL, but the same can be applied to English-speaking high school students. Whether your students can write one paragraph per week or a full essay, each constitutes a "blog post." This can be adapted to any level beyond about third grade reading level.

To help students generate more complex and interesting entries, have them show you their progress and then ask specific questions. In the beginning I have to ask leading questions to get students to write the next sentence and the next and the next. If you have to ask a question for every sentence they write, you know they're struggling but if they write a sentence to answer your question and these sentences string together to make a post on a topic, then they'll make progress.

Students will have to read and write in their area of interest in order to post on their blogs. As they become more advanced and tackle topics beyond their direct experience, they will need to read other articles and cite them in their blog. These are indispensable skills in today's world. 

There will be resistance at first. You will still have to "force" students to do it as assignments in the beginning, but in my experience they quickly stopped complaining about coming to class and came in with smiles, which they had never had before. 

Most started to do assignments voluntarily and they now come up with ideas on their own. The most important thing is that their writing and language skills improved by leaps and bounds. Studies have shown that people learn not just somewhat more but many times more if the subject matter is of personal interest. This method capitalizes on that. As time goes on quality control will actually come from within the student because the blog will be public and they will be motivated to try to make it interesting. You can encourage them to post about their blog on social media and discuss it with people who share similar interests.

In a large class this could take time to set up, but it is worth every confusing organizational and discussion hour in the beginning. Once you have identified each student's interests and set up blogger accounts, you will have ready made lessons. You help students choose a topic, advise them on where to get information (this is probably the homework part to some extent) and then do the writing (primarily in class under guidance at first). 

Many students will balk even when faced with their area of interest and claim they can't think of ideas for posting. Give them a short list of things within their topic that they can choose from. Here are post ideas for some of the more common teen interests that often elude adult comprehension. 

Video games/programming: 
Review a video game (can be used many times and could be the entire blog)
Review a new computer or game console on the market
Review an operating system.
Compare and contrast any of the above

Sports: 
Write what happened at the game last weekend
Write about sports events in the media, give opinions
Compare and contrast celebrity players
Compare and contrast sport styles

Facebook or other social media:
Defend social media from one specific criticism (can be used several times for a whole list of criticisms)
Compare and contrast SM platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Quora...)
Review or discuss specific Facebook groups or Twitter hashtags
Discuss the groups or hashtags useful for various topics
Discuss an issue such as what to think about when accepting a friend request
Discuss an experience from SM such as what happened when I posted about a private moment, something controversial, something boring, something cute
What kinds of posts get the most interest from my friends

Music or pop culture:
Review specific musicians, bands, albums, songs or actors
Compare and contrast
Describe specific styles
Defend a specific style against criticisms
Write about what was recently in the media, give opinions

Introducing the Real Super Secret Tricks of the Writing Trade

that I use every day but didn’t find in the writing and publishing books

Okay, I’ve had enough!

I am sick and tired of the virtual sharks and even the virtual parasites out there in the land of indie publishing. If you have come anywhere close to the world of authors and publishing on Amazon in the last few years, you’ve seen them. Chances are you’ve even been at least nipped by one, if you’re a writer.

Image by Brocken Inaglory of Wikipedia 

These days there seem to be as many scams out there to part writers from their money as there are writers.

There are sharks who will take your rights for a song and a promise of marketing that they never intend to fulfill. There are parasites who will eat away at your meager savings (or get you into debt) with some very convincing words about “lifting you out of obscurity.”

Peddling hollow dreams to people who have slaved at soulless day jobs all their lives to earn meager moments to write is big business. And lucrative!

There are even authors who were once not that different from the rest of us, who realized the market for dreams is bigger than the market for fiction (or else realized that their writing craft isn’t all that developed and they didn’t want to put in the effort to improve it), so they’ve taken to preying on their fellows.

I’m a little irritated… in case you hadn’t noticed.

But there is an antidote to this problem (beyond ranting). And that is to share the real nitty gritty of writing secrets with one another.

I’m not a newbie at this. I was a journalist for ten years. I have put in my proverbial ten thousand hours in fiction and then some. I have three books published and three more on the way. In the past twenty years, I’ve read a lot of craft books and a lot of publishing books and a lot of marketing books. So, I know what any writer trying to learn the trade is going through.

You are told that you can’t live without a bunch of how-to books, whether they are about writing craft, publishing or marketing. There is usually a little real info in each of these how-to books - usually about enough for a blog post, very rarely enough for a book. There is almost never anything revolutionary in them and yet they are advertised as life savers for writers.

And the books will tell you that there are no secrets and you have to just “go write” and if you are talented (and wealthy and connected to the advertising/publishing industry like the author of whatever book you’re reading) you’ll do just fine. You’ll finish the latest new must-read book for indie authors feeling mildly upbeat but having learned very little of real value.

And you know what is worse? They’re lying.

First, there are secrets to the trade. These are rarely in the books at all and if they are they are buried among a lot of fluff.

The secrets of the trade aren’t special passwords or names to drop or formulas to put into your next plot. They are resources, things that experienced writers use every day. These usually either aren’t included in the indie publishing guides or they are lost in such long lists of parasitic options that you have no way of knowing which are the real goods, until you either spend some time in the trenches or run across a good-hearted and experienced friend.

I’m not even saying that I know all the secrets of the trade. I am sure there are some I don’t know yet. But I do know quite a few that make my writing life immeasurably easier than it would be otherwise. I remember the days when I didn’t know these things and I feel motherly and tender toward my former self. I want to take her by the hand and give her these tools.

Because that’s what they are. They’re like hammers, nails, screw drivers and power saws, and I was trying to build a house with my bare hands. I know a lot of writers who are still trying to do that.

I’m told I should save all these tips and tricks and write my own “how to write and publish and make a million dollars” book and capitalize on the market.

But I won’t. I won’t because I love my readers and I know that this is basic, simple stuff. It is mostly free and it should be free. I got most of it from friends and I don’t own it. (And by the way, the “make a million dollars” part is the scammiest part of that sort of advertising.)

These tips won’t turn you from a hack into a brilliant writer and they won’t make you into a bestseller overnight. (When you find a tip that will, would you please drop it in the comments section for me. :D ) But they will spice up your prose, polish your best work and make it easier to turn out professional writing fast.

That is why I have decided to start a series of posts on the super secrete tips and resources for writers, the real ones that I actually use to do the writing job. They are free because we’re in this together. I’m not selling to you and I'm not your competitor. I’m your colleague and I’ll tell you when I find something that works.

Well, and because you were really sweet to read this far into my rant.

The first super secret trick of the trade

Today I’m going to start right off telling you about one of the power saws in my tool chest because you shouldn’t miss this one for a moment longer.

This is one tip that I didn’t get from a friend or a book at all. I discovered it entirely on my own and I haven’t seen any other serious writers using it, so it may actually be a real super secret that only I know about and I can’t wait to tell someone.

The secret is Quora - to be known hereafter as writing research on steroids.

I think Quora is technically called a social network, but it would be more accurately called a content generation system that may eventually rival Wikipedia. Quora is basically crowdsourced information gathering and research at its best.

Here is the thing that is revolutionary for writers. Quora can give you the tricky obscure facts that are hard to find on Google or in a library, but that is nothing yet. Quora will also give you what you can’t get on Wikipedia and what you could find only after exhaustive research in books and interviews - the personal experiences of people who have lived exactly what your specific character is going through. And if that isn’t enough, Quora tells you what the world - particularly the typical picky reader - thinks about ANY topic imaginable.

Here’s how it works.

Quora users sign up for an account and list their areas of expertise. I listed mostly writing, journalism, linguistics, Eastern Europe and blindness, because I happen to be legally blind. I started getting requests from other users to answer questions such as “Why does English have so many verb tenses?” and “How can a blind person live alone?” I answered a couple of them for fun and lo and behold I earned points. You earn points by answering questions, especially those that someone specifically asked you to answer. I discovered that Quora also gave me 500 free points to start out.

Now comes the fun part. You use the points you earn to ask people with the expertise you need to answer your own questions. Just asking a question is free. It doesn’t take any of your points and it can even earn you points if other people want to know the answer to your question too.

What takes points is sending a message that will put an email in the inbox of an expert in the field you want or a person with a specific experience that you need information about.

This is why I call it writing research on steroids. Recently, I discovered that one of my major characters is gay. I’ve had gay friends but I don’t have any close gay friends at the moment. I have a few lesbian friends but I specifically wanted to know what it would be like for my teenage male character to realize that he is gay, get rid of his own denial on the issue and deal with his parents about it. This is deep stuff and a few words of an embarrassed answer from a friend might not give me nearly enough to make the character’s experience ring true.

So, I asked on Quora and I specifically requested answers from men who listed LGBT as one of their areas of expertise. I got five essays back within a few days full of thoughtful, emotional, real-life experience from five different men with different takes on exactly the issue my character was dealing with.

Wow! I’m floored. My beta readers are ecstatic over this character because his experience is so vivid and his emotion is so right on.

Since discovering Quora I have written way more involved, accurate and suspenseful action and weapons scenes. I write contemporary fantasy thrillers, so I need to know a lot about police and military operations of the modern world. I was a war correspondent briefly way back in 2001. A lot has changed since then and I never was actually the kind of old hand who could tell what kind of mortar that distant boom was just by the sound.

So, I need a lot of help with the details and there are a lot of police and military people on Quora who are bursting with the information and the first-hand experience that I need. This is way better than googling weaponry or military tactics. You get the smell of things, the details, the emotions as well as various facts.

And yes, given that this is crowdsourced sometimes you need to do a little fact checking, but by and large I have found the answers to be accurate for the particular place and time the person answering is talking about. They don’t know everything but they do know what Wikipedia will never tell you, what X or Y feels and smells like. That is what a writer really needs, the sensory details and Quora is extraordinary for this.

The other thing Quora will tell you is what your most critical readers are likely to say. The type of people who use Quora today are intellectual, argumentative and love to write lengthy rants. They are the kind of people who would give you a terrible book review if you wrote something about their field that doesn’t make sense in their practical experience.

In many fields, it doesn’t entirely matter if the facts are guaranteed. What matters is that if you ask about a technical detail of how a police scene would play out for a thriller and half a dozen police officers and former police officers and other specialists get back to you and generally agree on the answer, you’re not going to get nasty reviews about that particular thing if you follow their advice. Common wisdom can be wrong, but it is what people think and if you want your book’s facts to check out with readers in a particular field, it is a good idea to check with them as well as with the encyclopedia. Quora is the fastest way to check with people with practical experience in just about every issue, line of work and life situation imaginable.

Some questions do fair better than others on Quora. I asked for experiences of attending an elite boarding school at the age of eight. I didn’t get a lot on that because as it turns out, it’s very rare for elite schools to accept boarders that young. But still I did find out that I need to make it clear that the situation I’m describing in my story is uncommon.

I don’t make a big deal out of the fact that I am asking questions on Quora for a book. Sometimes I mention it if the question is particularly convoluted and involves a whole scenario. But often there is no need to mention it. People ask the weirdest things on Quora all the time, just for fun and people almost always answer them. This wasn’t even a network that it took any appreciable time to get into and I am a notorious introvert. I would almost say Quora particularly appeals to geeks, nerds and introverts.

Still I don’t see many other writers on Quora. The only other writer I actually did run across there recently was someone posting their full short story and asking for opinions on it in a somewhat demanding way. I desperately hope that will not become common practice among writers as it would make us very unpopular on Quora. “Is this a good story?” is not really a legitimate Quora question. The writer in question did actually get some gentle and insightful responses, which I felt was extraordinarily generous of the Quora crowd, but this isn’t really the place I’d go to find beta readers in that particular way.

That said, I did find a beta reader on Quora. In fact, I found the kind of beta reader it never even occurred to me to dream of having. The fourth book in my contemporary fantasy series has a main character who is the son of a Burmese immigrant in the US and as the story progressed I realized that his relationship with his father is actually pretty significant to the story. And I don’t know much at all about Myanmar. I only said the guy was Burmese on a whim because I saw a picture on-line of a Burmese guy and thought, “There’s my character’s personality in his eyes!”

So, I was a bit stuck on a couple of Burmese cultural things and I started asking questions about it on Quora. I got into a short and friendly exchange with one Burmese guy who answered and he said, “Now I want to read what you’re writing.” So, I wrote him a PM and offered him the chance to be a beta reader, a chance he happily jumped at and he quickly ironed out all of the cultural issues.

Oh, and another neat feature of Quora is that you can both ask and answer anonymously while still both earning and using your points. You will have a screen name and it is in your interests as an author to use your author name, but if for some reason you need to ask a question or answer and you don’t want your author name to be associated with it, there is a handy little “anonymous” button and you switch to anonymous use. I wouldn’t post anything illegal by doing this as I would bet the authorities could bypass it if they really wanted to, but it works in terms of other users or someone searching the internet to see what you area associated with or finding spoilers about your next book.

So if you are stuck for details, whether factual or experiential or simply want to run a scenario by a group of people with specific knowledge, Quora is the trick. I have even found plot twists when temporarily stumped by asking “What do you think should happen if…” types of questions. You can ask just about anything on Quora and I’m shocked at how many active and engaged answers you get in a matter of hours or days.

As an end note, I'll also mention one other way that Quora might be useful. I hesitate to do so because if Quora becomes commercialized and a forum for spam like Twitter and Facebook it will lose its effectiveness. But if you have read this far in my post, I'm assuming you're a serious person. So, think on this. Remember that the people who are asking you to answer questions are actually seeking your expertise. If you happen to write non-fiction books there is an obvious side benefit. You can answer their specific question and include a link to your book at the end of the post. You've just provided something wanted to an ideal reader. Think you might make a few sales? 

I have even used this for fiction books. I was recently asked to answer a question about how to improve high school English classes. I gave my answer actually based on my experience as an ESL teacher, but after giving a very exciting new method, I also mentioned that I write YA literature and included a link to my fantasy thriller series. A few high school English teachers might just have a new book to recommend to their students from someone they feel like they like and trust because I gave them an awesome teaching tactic. The same goes for topics within my books like herbs or Pagan spirituality. If I answer a question on those, I can legitimately put in a link at the end and if I do a good job on the answer, I have got an audience that has true interest in the work I'm talking about.

So use Quora well and wisely. Good luck and happy writing!

The Ten Commandments of Writers

The reader lost in a story is thy god.

Thou shalt not disrupt the zen of the reader.

Thou shalt not make technical errors that boot thy reader out of the story.

Thou shalt hold no other goal higher than the reader’s full immersion in the story.

Remember thy writing time and keep it holy.

Honour thy voice and the rules of thy fictional world.

Thou shalt not kill off characters just for fun.

Thou shalt not write love triangles that are exactly the same as hundreds of other fictional love triangles.

Thou shalt not steal more than a few ideas from one fellow author.

Thou shalt not make characters do things they would not do.

Thou shalt not covet false sympathy by making thy character an orphan. 

Character development the easy way

There are all kinds of books on writing that will tell you how to develop deep, multi-dimensional characters. And yet most leave out a few easy and essential early steps that make all the difference.

I’m not saying that character development is easy. Good, deep character development is very hard. It’s arguably one of the hardest things about writing fiction and also the most important thing.

But there are harder ways to do it and there are easier ways to do it. This the easier way to do something that is hard enough even if you don’t make it any harder than necessary.

Step 1: Choose models

Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat. Using real-life people as models for you characters is not plagiarism and it is not slander. The whole point of using a real person as a model for your character is that you want to come up with a new person. The model is only a starting point and usually only covers one facet of the character.

The key point is that you actually don’t want one model for your character. You probably want at least three. You want one person who looks more or less like what you want your character to look like. You want another person who has a personality and speaking style like you want your character to have. And you want one person who has a job or situation like you want your character to have. It is much simpler to take these three things from three different people. That way you have the flexibility to work within your plot. And no one can say that you slandered them by putting them in your story.

Why is it important to have models? Well, models make it easy. You don’t have to do it this way. You can make your ten or twenty essential characters up out of whole cloth and try to keep their faces and mannerisms in your head through your book or series of books.

But… well, good luck with that.

If you’re name is George Martin or Diana Gabaldon you can ignore this and all of my advice. Those authors are either doing this already or they are geniuses with astronomical IQs.

Here’s a practical example of what I’m talking about. Let’s say you need a police officer in your story.

There. You already have a job for your character. But figure out what kind of police officer, in what position, in what size of town you need. Then if possible find someone who is a police officer in that sort of situation. The job part is actually one situation where people like to be models for fiction. If possible, find a friendly cop in the kind of position you need and tell them that you want to write about someone in a similar position who isn’t them, who looks completely different and has a different personality but the same job. Professionals will often be thrilled to tell you all the crucial details about that job.

I’ve got a landscaper in my current work-in-progress and my younger brother is a landscaper. It’s very handy to pick his brain to find out exactly what my landscaper should be doing at various times of the year. But my landscaper couldn’t be more different physically or emotionally from my brother.

Okay, I went a bit backwards on this one. The characters at the bottom of this cover (Rick and Kenyen, as readers of the Kyrennei series will know) are recognizable but I actually didn't find these pictures on ShutterStock until I was finished writing the first three books.  That made finding the right pictures hard. But I'd had these characters in my head for twenty years, and had a very clear picture of each of them, although Rick does sort of look suspiciously like an Iraqi friend of mine who likes to cook.

As for the physical picture of your character, think about what physical characteristics will suit the character in your story. Don’t forget that besides hair color, eye color and height you have many other factors to play with. Don’t make all your characters be of average weight and build. Don’t make all your characters the same race as you. Give your characters some small differentiating feature. Once you figure out what general kind of physical appearance you need, try to find someone who looks like that.

Think about your circle of friends and acquaintances or look up photos on Google. You can seriously google “Picture of tall brown-haired man” and get a ton of great pictures of tall, brown-haired men. Look at them and pick one. Then copy the link to your research file. Do NOT use this photo in any publication as you probably don’t have the copyright privileges to do so. But do refer back to it. Keep it in front of you enough that you can visualize the character.

With a main character or other key character you might still want to change some important detail of the character’s appearance but make it something you can visualize in that photo. Pick a person without a scar and give them a scar in your mind. Or glasses. Or sideburns.

The most difficult and most important part is your character’s personality. But again the same technique will serve you well. Choose a person to be your emotional model. This time it is really better to choose someone you know personally. Otherwise, you won’t know their reactions in enough depth. Then think about that person in various situations. How would he or she react if their spouse broke up with them or if they won a writing contest or if they had to tell a loved one terrible news? Get used to that person’s reactions and way of relating. Play amateur psychologist and make up reasons for why a person might have those particular reactions. Or if you know why your real-world model has those reactions, change the reasons up a bit.

You can in fact use more than one emotional model for one character. Combine different traits from two different people. Again think how your character with the personality he or she has would react in various situations.

I have a character in my current work-in-progress who is trans-racially adopted. I use what I know of people in that situation to inform me about her emotional make up. But she is also the kind of person who avoids conflict at all cost and tends to freeze up when there is tension.

A relative of mine, who is also one of my trusted beta readers, talks about struggling with freezing up in the face of conflict. So, I use my relative’s reactions to inform how this character might react. The character isn't “supposed to be” my relative. The girl in the story is very different in other ways, but it is handy to have an emotional model.

It is particularly handy to have one who likes being an emotional model and is happy to read through the story and pick out how I’ve slipped up on the personality type. That is a rare treat. You won’t usually be able to tell your emotional models that they have a personality double in your story and you might have to go on the run if you do tell, but it’s fun while it lasts.

Step 2: Fill out a character sheet

The next thing you do with your budding characters is print out a copy of this free character sheet I developed, combining the best qualities of the many character sheets out there. You’ll need a copy for each major character.

Stop!

Wait. You don’t have to fill out the whole thing immediately. In fact, you probably shouldn’t. Fill out as much as comes easily to you given your choice of models for this character. If you don’t know your character’s family history yet and it isn’t key to the plot in the beginning, leave it blank for now. You may find that the story will provide you with the answers you need as you deepen your plot.

So, in the beginning, just fill out those parts you can and then come back later and fill in other parts as you go.

Why am I asking you to do this exercise that looks like a worksheet from school and doesn’t seem to have much in common with writing? Because it will save you endless blood, sweat and tears later.

You may think you know your characters well now but after 70,000 words and many months of work are you really sure you’re going to remember the make of this character’s car or the color of that character’s eyes? Even when it was mentioned only once somewhere in your narrative?

Remembering those references will be much harder than you think. And finding them again is tedious and time consuming, assuming you even remember to look. What if you decide to put this manuscript aside for a couple of months and get back to it later? It will be much less work to get back into if you can quickly review the crucial information about your characters.

There is nothing worse than having a reader catch you being inconsistent. “I’m confused. In chapter 1 she had blue eyes. In chapter 10 she has brown eyes.”

Oops!

Keep character sheets. I’ve made one for you and it’s free.

Step 3: Think about what your characters want

I know the character’s desires are on the character sheet but it is likely that with many characters you won’t be able to come up with all of their desires in the very beginning.

This is a step that starts in the beginning and keeps going throughout the writing process. Remember that good fiction requires conflict or at least a problem to be solved. Conflicts and problems create suffering of some kind in a character. And if you ask a Buddhist guru (or a writer) what the root of human suffering is, you will be told that it is desire.

Without desire, there is no suffering and without suffering, there is no conflict. Make your characters yearn for something and you have story.

Deny your characters what they want and you create suffering. There is a law in fiction that says that the more you make a characters suffer, the more your reader will love them. This is almost always true. You can make a character too pitiful and lose the reader’s sympathy and respect but generally if your character suffers, your reader will keep reading.

Desire doesn’t have to be a fantastic dream or an overt goal and suffering need not involve physical pain. Sometimes a character simply wants to be able to live in peace or to find the answer to nagging internal questions. But this desire must be made clear and vivid to the reader. The more abstract the desire, the harder the writer’s job is.

Suffering is the same way. While commercial fiction usually involves a character suffering in some dramatic way involving physical injury, grief, betrayal or denial of love, it is very possible to make a compelling story in which the suffering is deep and less easily understood. It is only that doing more abstract and less overtly tangible things with a character is harder to do well.

Step 4: Visualize scenes like a movie or act them out

Either before you write or in the early stages of writing your first draft, visualize new scenes in your head. Let them play like a movie a few times. Get a picture of the characters and watch how they move. Get a feeling for them and watch what they do and say.

Try out the scene in a few different ways. What works best? What actions and words seem natural to your characters?

I have been known to act out scenes from my stories, standing in the middle of the room and stepping back and forth to take on the roles of different characters in a heated debate or moving around the room to block out a combat scene, making sure the physical actions will add up in three-dimensional space. I don’t really recommend doing this when other people are watching or listening. It requires too much stopping and backing up and redoing to be very entertaining and your goal is not to be silly but to iron out specific details that will then come across very real in the story.

Do I look slightly crazy while I talk to myself and have fights with the air? I might but this is another reason to do it in private. If the NSA is spying on me through my computer’s webcam, at least they’ll know what all my Google searches involving borders, bridges and weapons are about.

Step 5: Start writing or plotting, whichever is relevant.

There are two kinds of writers, it is said. The plotters and the pantsers.

Plotters carefully plan out their story with note cards, time-lines and outlines before they ever sit down to write.

Pantsers fly by the seat of their pants. They get the basic groundwork in place, particularly the settings, premise of the story, key conflict and the characters, including their initial desires. Then they sit down at the keyboard and let the characters do their thing.

I’m a pantser, in case you hadn’t noticed.

Pantsers don’t necessarily do less work in preparation for writing. Flying free in writing is best done if you have all the necessary back-up - well-developed characters, settings, premise and initial conflict. I usually know where the story is going within the next 20,000 words. And I have a vague idea of the ending but I don’t usually know how I’m going to get there.

I have often pulled up Google Earth, plunked my characters down in one place and told them they have to get to another place, given whatever the conditions of the story are (chase, pursuit or search for something), and then I let Google Earth surprise me and the characters. It almost always works beautifully, providing me with plot twists I never would have come up with on my own.

Oh, there’s a river there. That’s a problem. How are my heroes going to get across while being chased by helicopters. Ah, there’s a bridge… But only one bridge. And it will be guarded by the antagonists, obviously.

You can see where that’s going.

But this isn’t a general guide to plotting. This is about characters. And which ever way you choose to write, whether plotting or pantsing, you have now come to the point where you have to just do it. You hold onto the sense of your characters as individuals that you have developed in the previous steps and you feel their desire while you work out the specifics of your story. This will result in what is called a “character-driven story.” But that is just a fancy name for good fiction. All good fiction is character-driven, even the fiction that is action packed.

Step 6: Now change your characters

I know. I know. I said keep your characters consistent. But there is a difference between “consistent” and “stagnant.”

Real people faced with challenges and conflict change. Characters with a realistic personality should too.

Aranka Miko, the main character in The Soul and the Seed, is initially a frightened teenager imprisoned in a dark cage. How she rises in a troubled world to kindle the first flicker of hope in a thousand years is the core of the story..

Maybe this is the hard part for some, but I contend that if you’ve done the previous steps well this will be the easy part. I have rarely decided beforehand how my characters are going to change. I have simple set up characters and given them unfulfilled desires and a conflict. Then I followed where they led and the characters changed by the time the story was done.

Several reviewers of my first book gushed, “You can see the characters growing and changing before your eyes.”

I hadn’t realized when I started the story that the growth of the characters would be so obvious so soon. I also thought the only character to really change would be the main character. But that wasn’t the case. Because my major characters were strong and unique and had real personalities and they were faced with huge challenges, they had to change and I didn’t have to force it or consciously manipulate it that much.

In case this doesn’t come as easy in every story, remember to go back to the character’s desires. Do they get what they want? Are they thwarted? Does what they wanted turn out to be as good as they thought it would be? How does this impact the character?

Step 7: Rewrite and edit with an eye to character consistency

When you are done with your first draft, it’s time to rewrite and edit, then edit some more, then put the story aside and pick it up again and edit some more, and then edit again… and again.

That’s just the reality of writing. I edit certain parts roughly as I go and my first drafts are relatively clean. I rarely have to change major plot twists after the first draft is done, despite my seat-of-the-pants writing style. But I do have to edit and edit and edit. Everyone does who wants to turn out good writing.

When you edit, pay particular attention to what your characters look like and what they say and do. Make sure you have kept their appearances consistent and that the actions and words of each character fit their personality and situation. If you have a feisty, firebrand for a heroine, you can’t suddenly have her meekly take insults just because the plot requires that she is calm and collected for once. You can get away with having her learn to be calm and collected but that is going to take some work.

Read your text out loud and particularly your dialogue scenes. Go through dialogue several times, trying to hear the voices of your characters. What kind of voices do they have? Do they have an accent compared to you? What is the emotion behind the words?

I hope these tips come in handy. What are your favorite tips for developing characters? I would love to hear from you. Put a comment in below and keep in touch.

The Self Publisher's Ultimate Resource Guide is less than ultimate

I received a review copy of The Self-Publisher’s Ultimate Resource Guide in an exchange for an honest review.

This is essentially a master list of some of the top service providers and resources for authors. Some of them are relevant for new traditionally published authors as well. The lists are good and helpful as a very basic starting place for research. The sections are reasonably chosen and organized.

There are two reasons that this book doesn’t get an enthusiastic review from me. First, the descriptions of the services are vague and uninformative. Often the listing simply states the claims of the provider without giving any independent confirmation of quality and bang-for-buck.  As a self-publisher who has already published several books, I can see how the early sections of the book sum up information that I already know. I had to learn all this on my own through simple research but what I know from my research is far more than is contained in this book. But when I picture a newbie coming to these lists, I don’t see how the lists would save more than a little time.  

Because the listings are vague, the newbie will still have to do exhaustive hours of research to determine which of the providers is makes sense for their circumstances. I found the information on these lists within an hour or two as a newbie. I spent months researching which providers to use. If the experienced authors of this book had provided some more detailed information about the various providers, including things that many of us know simply because we have enough experience to have learned the difference between Smashwords and Draft2Digital, the guide would be much more useful to the newbie.

 That alone would have knocked this book down a bit in my rating. It gets knocked down further because of the price. I’m sorry but with the going prices of ebooks these days, charging $7.99 for a “book” of lists that is only 180 pages borders on exploitation of the new and inexperienced. I gave the book three stars on Amazon. give three stars to books I buy that I don’t find entirely useless but wish I hadn’t spent that amount of money on. Had I paid $7.99 for this book I would have been disappointed and disgruntled.  

That said, if you have the money this book would save a little time if you are still in the very early stages of research. It is a handy summary for those who are more experienced and simply want easy links to everything all in one place.