Category Archives: Writing

When inspiration fails

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What to do when inspiration fails? I have a deadline for a short story looming, with a character who doesn’t know how to get from here to there. To increase the beats, I need a challenge to throw at my protagonist that isn’t a trope. I suppose I could use a trope (evil family member, random attack by killer cyborg, getting in the way of an assassination/hacker attempt, love/hate interest) but that seems kind of lame in context of the story. What to do? I could go with the tried and true Vorkosigan method – full steam ahead and damn the torpedoes – but it’s an urban fantasy where there are no evil government agencies standing by to act as a backdrop. I have two days to go – ideas from the gallery gratefully accepted.

  • My main character is sixteen, a mage, and a web designer
  • She’s being asked to skin a web site and add some magic to it | someone else is doing the security
  • Some something gets thrown at her as a challenge (not the web site)

Maybe it’s the security person? Maybe there’s a cyber attack? Maybe I torment her with new magic waking up inside her? Security person ends up being a cute guy? Better yet – a cute girl.

Thoughts?

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Fevered days

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Last couple of days have been a blur. It started with my trip to the dentist and ended up with a couple of days of fever and flu. It has felt like sleeping and waking at one and the same time.

coiled in the serpent

dreaming red dreams

of ochre rich with minerals

deep pockets in the earth

and magic traced in bones

I wonder if ley lines might change the junk in land fills, leeching magic into the machines? I wonder if rain might drown the night until it runs down like ink into the dark caves underground? I wonder if children are born with the traces of ancient sea creatures whispering into their shell like ears. There may be a story there, but not while the fever holds me.

I will drink cool water and wait for clarity.

10 Things I’ve learned about writing and publishing

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Some of the most important things I’ve learned over the past year of writing and publishing are

  1. The first (or fifteenth) draft is not ready. It needs an editor.
  2. There are many editorial passes (characters, plot, sensory, place, continuity, tone, tightening up, grammar, spelling, formatting, design)
  3. A beta reader is worth their weight in gold. They answer questions:
    • What was unbelievable, in context of the story
    • What was confusing?
    • What did you want to see more of?
    • What was cool?
  4. Follow the directions of the publishing house – if you don’t, it will not ever get past the mail clerk. Margins, font, spacing, cover letter, synopsis (1000 words max – some prefer 350-500), elevator pitch (Firefly = A western, in space)
  5. The content of a book needs to (mostly) be in the same voice (1st person, 3rd person – it’s rarer than you’d think that it switches at all)
  6. Research is important – tell the reader where/when they are, get the facts right, especially historical facts need to be accurate)
  7. The story needs to be marketable – it needs to fit an exact niche
  8. Sensory information is important (taste, sound, smell, touch, sight)
  9. Characters have motivation, feelings, internal voices. Use them.
  10. Place can also be a character in a story.

Working with Scrivener

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I was new to Scrivener for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) in November last year. I had previously written in Word, however that had a tendency to make it hard to keep all the folders and files together. Scrivener changed all that. Suddenly I could write a novel, a short story and keep character sheets and notes all in the one place. I could add images and place notes in much the same way I’d done in one-note, and then decide what I wanted to export later.

It didn’t come for free or without a learning curve. That’s where the course on using Scrivener came in handy. It’s called “Learn Scrivener Fast” from Joseph Michael . Why learn it all on my own when I could take a tutorial to learn how the experts did it. Now this isn’t intended to be a push to buy the product, though I do think it’s great. If you think you can intuit your way into the best method on your own, knock yourself out. Personally, while I like to make how-to stuff, I rarely follow the directions exactly. So yes, there’s bits in the course you may not want. I encourage you to skip around and only do the bits you want to use. Sooner or later, the other bits will be there for you. All I want to say is that it saved me oodles of time and headaches.

The main thing I do with a Scrivener project is determine what the overarching world is.

  • Start with the project name
  • Change the name of the Chapters to the Sections I want
  • Start a side ‘section’ for related stories (which I inevitably have)
  • Make a bunch of text files inside the sections for scenes I know I’ll want to write
  • Then add text scenes before and after those known scenes
  • Make a set of character files
  • Then start making notes to myself over in the right
  • I use a corkboard to see the scenes all together – and drag and drop them into a different order

Then I start writing just about anywhere, sometimes at the start, though usually it’s the first scene where the action is. Then I just keep adding scenes as I go. Sooner or later, I’ll pop back out and make an outline – that means more scenes get layered in, though those are just a ‘stub’ with the outline of what will happen in them. I leave the stub in place until that scene gets written. I’ve been known to just stub in a scene and then keep going onto the next thing. I can always come back to it later or lose it if it’s not needed.

In November, I found that I was writing short stories that are back story for the main character, at the same time as I was writing book two. It should bother me to be writing at two very different points in time but it was fine. Each day, I’d just decide what I wanted to write and the variety made it less likely I’d get stuck. On days when I didn’t want to write anything in the stories, I spent my writing time outlining or building character sheets instead. When neither of those appealed, I edited something my partner wrote in his stories or wrote blog posts for one of my other blogs. That way I generally got 2000 to 5000 words a day some way or another.

I’d love to hear some of the ways others use Scrivener. Go ahead and use the comments section to add thoughts.

Happy writing – Ria

Remembering character information

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By the end of book 1 – Library of Time – I had about 30 names to remember. It helped that I picked most of them with a botanical theme in mind as that gave me some clues to remember the names. However, what really helped was creating character sheets in scrivener.

There’s a location in scrivener, down at the bottom left part of the screen, that says ‘Characters’. Inside you can add a page for each character, or group of characters, by location, and fill in some information about them. This is super helpful when coming to write the next chapter or even the next book. Some of the things I add for each character are:

  1. Name of the character
  2. Their nickname, if any
  3. What they look like – I try to find a stock photo, illustration or actor who looks a bit like them
  4. Where are they from?
  5. Where are they living?
  6. Character sketch
    What motivates them? Their character (solemn, quirky, tricky, mischievous, lazy etc)
  7. What do they bring to the plot?
  8. How do they act when startled? When angry? When challenged?
  9. Their favorite color (shows up in colors they wear)
  10. Special abilities and role in the story

For what they look like, I don’t intend to cut and paste descriptions; that would be tacky and repetitive. However, I do want to know their hair and eye color, skin tone, general appearance and wardrobe. A friend said that characters need an ‘eye patch’, that is a particular element that identifies them to readers. Remember the ‘cigarette man’ from the X Files? James Bond’s tuxedo or his martini – shaken, not stirred? It can be subtle, but needs to be there. I remember reading a Kay Hooper novel back in the 1980’s – even now, I can tell you about the contents of a character’s purse, including the large-animal leash and tranquilizer gun.

Where a character comes from informs me about how they will act in a situation in the future. I want to jot down what they love, what they hate, what riles them and the kind of music they like to listen to. I may not use all of it in the story now, but in subsequent tales, those elements get sprinkled in to make the character more real.

What do you add to your own character sheets?

Library of Time

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Magic in the library

Magic in the library – Ria Loader

Library of Time is an urban fantasy about a librarian who has walked away from the magical world to make her way in the city of Seattle. She’s hiding a part of a magical library for her long time teacher. What could possibly go wrong? The teacher goes missing under mysterious circumstances, the missing library is being sought by many otherworldly magical beings, and she finds herself on the run. Trying to make sense of what’s going on, she is helped and hindered by allies and friends alike. She will need to put aside her aversion to power and claim her magical inheritance if she is going to survive.

Buy it on Kindle (266 pages) or print edition 330 pages). Hope you enjoy it as much as I did writing it.

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I just got a box of books in the mail; finally I have copies in my hands. What a journey this has been. Galleys seemed to take forever. I kept having to remind myself of Sting’s words about creative projects, something along the lines of “no project is ever finished; at some stage you just need to abandon it”. That’s true in some sense. At least the editor and author can keep on fiddling with commas until doomsday on the ebook but with the print version you just need to commit. No doubt I’ll keep finding tiny comma inconsistencies that will bother me much more than anyone else. Meantime, I’m going to stack up the books and take pictures of my hoard. So satisfying.

 

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