Tag Archives: writing process

6 books published in a year: now we are six!

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It’s a little crazy, right? Our tiny publishing company, Impish Press, has launched six new books in the past year. After the writing, that includes all the traditional and hybrid indie tasks of

  1. Line editing
  2. Proof reading
  3. Continuity
  4. Book design
  5. Conversion to kindle
  6. Design for print
  7. Cover design
  8. Back cover / description writing
  9. Web site design
  10. Marketing

All while I held down a full-time job at Microsoft, and Raven took care of everything with the house plus full-time writing. Admittedly, I have a past life in publishing, web development and design. However, there was guerilla time management in there, along with more than a dash of persistence. My partner is encouraging me to think about making the next book I write on how we managed to write AND publish a book every two months on average. It’s beginning to look more than likely I’ll oblige him. From what I read, short kindle books for the Do It Yourself market are a good niche.

I thought I might start with a quick guide to exactly how I format styles in word (after scrivener export) to avoid tears before bedtime when I convert to kindle. With screen shots and measurements. Think that’d be interesting?

What subjects would you like to see covered, dear readers? Use the comments section and I’ll try to answer questions.

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?

Writing process – the first edits

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There are a few different notions floating around about how to edit a story. Rachel Aaron talks about an arc for each chapter, an arc for a book, and another arc over a series. I agree with her about having a structure, however, I like to be a bit more organic and varied about it so far. I have a rise and fall in each section. When I reach one of what feels like a natural stopping place, I go back and see if I can make the tension a little tighter, and the resolution a bit more satisfying, even if it is just a section.

However, Jim Butcher also gave some great advice in his blog. He talked about scene and setting. One of his examples was the second Star Wars movie, The Empire Strikes back. His argument was that the whole movie was setting, culminating in the one scene “Luke, I am your father.” That was the payoff. Jim follows that structure in the Harry Dresden novels and the Alera ones too. It works for him, and I’ve learned a bunch from playing with the model of scene and setting or vice versa.

Another idea I’ve run across is one that I like a lot. I think it was Janeke who suggested making a pass through a story for each of the characters, to make sure they sound and act like themselves, with consistency. This is something I always do now. Wouldn’t do for one of the characters to be ‘out of character’ as it were. I’ve extended this to the places as well. Another thing that a beta reader suggested was to have a certain atmosphere associated with a character. Edward, a shape shifted dragon, is new to his human body and is just a bit clumsy in it. He is, however, a dangerous and ancient being who is larger than the human form he is currently inhabiting. Adding some grace notes like shadows to the room that give a hint of his gravitas are the equivalent of the music that accompanies Darth Vader (dum dum dum da da dum …) when he is on screen.

The same goes for the sounds, sights and other sensory information. It is those things that ground the experience we are writing about. If you are like me, those things come in to add depth to the world and the experiences. In the first draft the sketch goes down, telling the story and moving the plot along. In the second pass I want to know what color that robe is and how it is decorated. I want some light and shadow in the room and the fragrance in the air or at least a description of the food on the plate. Cooking is magic too, a person needs to eat, and magical beings are embodied in the world. I find that years after I read a book for the first time, it is the small embellishments that I remember. Captain Picard likes Earl Grey tea. Modesty Blaise preferred a one-piece swimsuit and a kongo as a weapon. Willie Garvin was all about the knives, but James Bond preferred a Berretta. I like to ask myself for at least one defining characteristic for each minor character, and more for the mainline characters, including turns of phrase and patterns in their speech.

I make an editing pass for each of the main characters, another for the sensory elements, and a pass for consistency. Then I ask “how could this be more interesting to the reader?” to tease out things I know but may have forgotten to say explicitly in the story. I am always learning more about the writing and trying to make each story better than the last.

I wonder what editing tips and tricks others have to share from their experiences?

New story by Ria Loader

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ChildOfTimeGreen300x400

A story of magic

What a lovely feeling to have a new story published today. Child of Time  is a novella in three parts, inspired by questions from readers who enjoyed my first novel, Library of Time. Fiction is a new departure for me and I’m enjoying the character driven story line.

This sequence started with a foundation story. One reader asked “what happened when Mira threw her brother off a cliff – how did that happen?” I asked my character, who was more than happy to tell me all about it.

“He said he could fly!” Mira said indignantly when her Gran came to find out what had happened.

And who is to say otherwise in a family with such strange and otherworldly magic? Why would she think he was exaggerating? Pushing small girls can be an unpredictable thing when they have strong magic to defend themselves. To find out what happens next, read Child of Time on paperback or kindle today.

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