The Importance of a Conclusion

Imagine that you've finished reading the second to last book in a series and it ends on a cliffhanger. You inwardly groan when you learn the final book won't come out for twelve months. And then it's delayed further, making it a full 17 month wait time. The book comes out and you manage to get it straight away. Not caring if you'll be up late reading, you open the book. And then...

It falls flat. Quickly. By page 85 you realize it just isn't worth the effort and decide that while you'll read it some day, you are in no hurry and put the book down.

This happened with Karen Marie Moning's final book of the Fever series, Shadowfever. Usually I refrain from mentioning the books I criticize, but this is an example that I cannot in good judgement let slide by, especially as I sung KMM's praises earlier.

Building up events, drama and tension in a series to its breaking point is no easy feat, but if an author doesn't write a satisfactory conclusion to a series, he or she will lose readers; after all, if you wish to remain a successful writer, you must keep reader loyalty and their willingness to refer titles to their friends. (A great example of this is Melanie Rawn's unfinished Exile series. It's been more than ten years and the series still remains unfinished. This destroyed her fan base and reputation.)

For KMM, she did everything you're not supposed to do: a slow beginning, pointless scenes, lack of tension, and even an annoying point of view style (Dani's). In the 85 pages I managed to read, the main character walked a little, had a weird dream and did a lot of talking with a man she thinks killed her sister. Compare this to the previous four pageturner books, and you begin to wonder what happened.

The most noticeable thing is the size; the book was nearly twice the length of the other four books. Now, a bigger book doesn't necessary mean it's boring (Sherrilyn Kenyon's Acheron was twice the size of her other books and I couldn't put it down). The problem with Shadowfever is that it suffered from a lack of editing. There were clearly sections that should've been cut, but weren't.

Another problem was its tension and pace. All of the four previous books had event after event, with lots of tension thrown in, and kept you turning the pages. This was not the case for Shadowfever. It's as if the editors knew everyone would buy the book regardless of editing, and left it as is. Or that the book was written in such a hurry that no time was left to put it aside for a month or so and go back to it and revise. Editing is a pain to complete, but it is one of the most important steps in writing and shouldn't be overlooked.

Thirdly, don't introduce an annoying point of view. In Shadowfever's case, it was for a character called Dani. The writing was written in overly-tough-teeanger-slang that drives you crazy, especially the overuse and abuse of the word "feck." Throw in some words that are supposed to make the character appear to be Irish (I was unconvinced), and it's hard to read more than a page at a time for this POV.

So if you're going to write a series, and create enormous obstacles to overcome, make sure you know how to tie it all up. Nothing can irritate or anger readers more than a poorly written conclusion. If I'm going to spend hours and hours reading through a series, it had better be worth it by the end.

A Different Kind of Writing

February has come and gone, and yet here I am with my first post of the month. It isn't because I have nothing to say; on the contrary, I almost always have an opinion ready, but this month has been different. Any unpublished or unestablished author has no choice but to have a supportive significant other or to work. I lack the former and am forced to do the latter. Yet as the economy is anything but grand at the moment, my career choice of teaching has become a burden. There are no teaching jobs and unlikely to be any in the near future. This leaves me working as a substitute teacher.

Being a substitute is unpredictable and energy draining; even with my fairly good classroom management skills, students seem to think it's fine and dandy to harass a guest teacher more than the regular teacher. It probably doesn't help that I have higher expectations of the students than most regular teachers. At the end of the day, this leaves me drained, with many students wanting me as their regular teacher. I love teaching, but unfortunately surviving comes first. I decided I must find another job and have been at it for months.

Over the last six weeks, I've been focusing not on fiction, but on another type of writing: cover letters. Some people use the same one for everything, but I learned that this approach rarely gets results, so in February I decided I would craft custom letters for each job I was applying to. The result? Me spending my evenings writing how good of an employee I'd make and not focusing on my fiction writing.

I didn't realize how much this affected me until this last week when I finally decided to start writing fiction again. Sitting at the keyboard, thinking about characters and impossible situations, I felt more like myself. I enjoyed doing it and realized that as much as I must focus on finding a job, I must also focus on writing for me.

I am exploring the challenges of writing a romance novel that is not cheesy, overdone or too dark and it's not easy. I haven't quite hit the mark yet, but I'm hopeful it will happen soon. In the meantime, I've at least learned my lessson: we must have money to survive, but we shouldn't sacrifice our very self for it.

Writer's Block or....?

Up until now, I've never really experienced writer's block. My imagination runs wild and usually gazing a few minutes out a window or taking a walk will solve my problem. Sometimes waking up in the morning and staying a few minutes in bed is another way to kickstart my creativity. With my latest attempt, however, it's been a different story.

The premise of the book was a woman from 2010 is transported back to 1774 Boston and finds herself in a situation where she has to marry a British soldier. There is all kinds of conflict simmering, from internal to external, and at first it was fun. The first chapter was easy to write. The next two chapters I rewrote two or three times before it was passable. Then, I wondered where was this story going? Will this really work? How can I weave the history and fiction together? How can it be believeable? I let it simmer for a week or so and came to a conclusion: I loved the characters, but the story felt more forced than anything else I'd written in a long time.

For anyone who writes, if something feels forced, warning bells usually go off in your head. I'm not denying that parts will be difficult to write, I've been there before, but there's a difference between difficult and forced. Parts of the second book of my Secondworld series were difficult, but never forced. The only reason I stopped writing that story (for now) is that if I can't sell the first book, writing the second is a little pointless. I have ideas of how to change it into a stand alone book if I have to, but I've put it aside for now, content to come back to it when the time is right.

My Boston story, however, feels forced. I don't mind rewriting scenes (I'm not one of those people who can just write it all out, never looking back until the first draft is complete), but having to rewrite two consecutive chapters two or more times is a warning bell. So I decided to shelf the idea for now, until the idea develops or the feeling of writer's block for that story goes away. I had one idea on a shelf for five years before I wrote something that was worthwhile, so there is hope.

All is not lost, however. I've taken the world of my 1891-1892 Secondworld books and put it in the context of the 21st century. The idea came while reading the two novellas in Deep Kiss of Winter and Stephen King's, On Writing (what if?). It's in the vein of the paranormal romance books I read religiously and if I read so many of them, and enjoy them, then why am I not writing one? I'm reveling in my no-plot mode and just typing away. Let's hope the story never becomes forced.

Liberating First Person

When it comes to writing, one of the most important decisions an author makes is which point of view to use. Most of the fiction I read uses third person, specifcially limited third person (also called single-third). The pronouns are "he" or "she", never "I" or "me".

In the past, I have always used third person. I vaguely recall using first person for a story I wrote in high school, but on the whole, I've used third person singular. This doesn't mean I had only one character, but rather that the character's thoughts are limited to a scene or chapter, switching to another character's third-singular point of view (POV) later.

You can imagine my surprise when I sat down to start my most recent story (set in 1774 Boston) and the words started pouring out in first person. I typed away Kate Johnson's thoughts (my character) and at about 1,000 words, I took a break, read what I had written and wondered if it would be safer to write the same scene in third person. So I opened a new document and started typing. After two paragraphs, I realized it was hopeless. If this story and set of characters was going to work, it had to be told through Kate's thoughts and personality alone.

At 7,000 words in, I find using first person challenging yet refreshing. I have the chance to make the story much more personal and bring the character competely to life. The entire story is told from one person's POV, similar to real life where we have one mind to interpret the world around us. Just like real life, it can be frustrating. We never really know what another person is thinking unless they tell us. A lot of times, as readers, we expect to know how two or more characters think, but this is impossible in first person. The dance between a solder and a woman out of place becomes more complicated and subtle; we must be convinced of their feelings through dialogue and actions alone.

I finished my first book last year, and know I am capable of finishing a 300+ page work. Now I have a new challenge: see if I can finish a 300+ page work told through the eyes of one person.

An Idea Strikes....

On New Year's, my brother-in-law gave me an extra HDMI cable he had and a few days later I hooked up my Blu-Ray player. Knowing this little cord was supposed to improve picture quality, I put in the only Blu-Ray I own: National Treasure. As much as I like the movie, I wasn't in the mood to sit down for two hours to watch it. Instead, I went to the extras and started the section that took a closer look at the Declaration of Independence (a key part of the film). It went line by line, with some additional mini-movies on the history behind it. When it came to talking about the revised Quartering Act of 1774 (where British soldiers could room in empty house, barns and inns if the barracks were overcrowded), an idea struck me: this could be a good beginning to a story.

At first my story leaned toward a merchant's daughter having to take care of, per the provisions of the law, the soldiers by feeding them and being thrown into a situation with a solider she'd end up marrying. I was excited and immediately started some research. Now, as a history teacher, I know the basics of the American Revolution but it had been some years since I studied anything about it (not since I took my subject knowledge test in 2008). I'm a stickler for details, and read articles, primary sources, watched PBS's famous Liberty! documentary, etc. The more I researched, the more I realized how difficult it would be to put this man and woman together. But what if the woman was from the present, knew what was going to happen, and was stuck in an unescapable situation with a British solider stationed in Boston? And what if it was 1774, right when the Intolerable Acts were fanning the flames, the year before the first shot was fired?

This idea was appealing, but how to get her there? I needed something semi-believable, with rules of time travel. Then I remembered my niece talking about a lunar eclipse right before Christmas, and I had it! The lunar eclipse fell on the Winter Solstice in 2010, for the first time since the 17th century. Here was something rare I could work with. After all, throughout history, and even today, there are a number of superstitions surrounding lunar eclipses.

Since I had constructed time travel via eclipses, I needed to find one in the beginning of 1774. According to NASA's predictions, the earliest lunar eclipse in 1774 was May, which was too late--General Gage (of the British Army) and his extra troops were already in Boston by this point. I looked up solar eclipses, and voila, there was one for March 12, 1774. Perfect!

So now I have a working time travel universe and I've just about completed my research. I have yet to decide if this will be historical romance or more historical with a twist, a la Gabaldon style. Whatever happens, it just shows that ideas for stories come from just about anywhere.

2010 in Review

The year is over in a few days and I decided to look back on 2010, in terms of reading and writing:

1--The number of novels I finished

83,000--The word count of my finished novel

75+--An estimate of how many books I read this year

11--The number of query letters I've sent out so far

2--The number of new novels I started writing

2,500--The length of my only short story this year

19--The number of blog posts, including this one, for 2010

99--Percentage of how happy I am when I write (characters do make it difficult that other 1%)

125,000--The number of words I've written this year


This is rather silly, but it'll be interesting to compare the numbers at the end of 2011. Here's to a great year in 2011! (I may even start saying twenty-eleven instead of two thousand eleven.)

Let's Revisit Short Stories

A little over a year ago, not long after I started my first novel, I toyed around with a few short stories. One of them I tried submitting, but it was ultimately rejected. It didn't bother much then or now since I like longer stories; short stories are too restrictive.

One of them, about the legend of Melusine, I ended up incorporating into my now second Secondworld novel. Melusine and her family will play a large role in the second book.

The other story, Burden of Discovery, I think still has an interesting premise (set in the future, where barren women are the outcasts of society and worth is determined by how many children you have), but is more suitable to a novel than a 5,000 word story. I've put in on the back burner for now, but maybe someday I'll be able to rework it.

Since I finished Melusine's story back in 2009, I have focused solely on my novels. I enjoy a larger cast of characters and the freedom to play around with the plot. I never thought I would try writing a short story again unless it tied to my Secondworld novels, hopefully after they'd been published. Then this week I started thinking, what if I gave short stories another chance? It'd be nice to write something that wasn't part of an 80,000+ word story and I could even write it in first person (something I want to do, but my current novels require narrow third person viewpoints).

I sat down and five minutes later, I had an idea. What if one of the characters from my second book, a huldra who can shift to the form of a fox, wrote a letter to his children about his first days as a shape-changer, offering fatherly advice along the way? I sat down and started writing. I finished half of it, took a day off for Christmas, and finished the second half this morning. It's cute, to say the least, and after letting it sit for a few days, I plan to edit it and submit it to a few online magazines.

After a year of near-constant writing and editing, writing a short story was easier for me. The key was to keep the topic narrower and focused, and not try to write a story spanning a number of years, as I had tried to do before. If my fun little exercise pays off, I may have to repeat it again in the future.