aurorawatcherak "I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical."
The dawn of hope highlights the damage as Emmaus emerges from the deadliest winter in American history.
The fundamental transformation of the United States of America continues as the beleaguered survivors of the apocalyptic winter gather to form a new government, only to recognize the divides are deep and the bickering nations of the American experiment may not be able to manage a grand compromise.
Meanwhile, darker forces wrangle to take their own version of control and put Shane Delaney and his fellow delegates in the crosshairs of danger.
Many of the scenes of places I’ve traveled to find a home in my books.
The featured town in Transformation Project is a town in Kansas where we stopped for gasoline and lunch many years ago. I changed the name and several details to avoid making that annoying error where you read a book set in your hometown and it takes liberties with your home. But I also include the Fairbanks Airport and locations in Columbus (which I’ve not been to) and Seattle, which I know pretty well.
In my romance that is nearing final draft, I set a lot of the action in Maui, which is my favorite island in Hawaii. Why not use what you know and enjoy. I also use the Denver Airport because I was once stuck there for several hours.
The town of Port Mallory in What If Wasn’t wasn’t a favorite vacation spot, but I did enjoy a lunch there with my husband’s uncle, so again, I used the town as a template but changed the name and details. The description of the downtown and harbor are my memories from about 20 years ago.
I set a short story about Alaska in the valley where our cabin build is located.
In my fantasy series Daermad Cycle, which you wouldn’t think would have a foot in the real world, I have scenes based on places I’ve visited. Janara and Donyl hike the Copper River “Highway” (actually an abandoned railroad bed) and cross the mighty Copper River (renamed the Dragon’s Milk), Padraig rides through a meadow we once found on a multi-day hike, and Ryanna is trapped in burned-over taiga in the Gatelands.
Why Not Just Start from Scratch?
Because there is so much that goes into building a world and sometimes, it is simply easier to base the build on the real world. Does Emmaus Kansas have national gas? What’s the weather like in November or April? How deep would the snow get if the streets weren’t plowed? Why make up a bunch of stuff when you can look it up? This helps readers to believe they’re really in Kansas and it doesn’t limit me to writing Alaskana.
By wrapping my fiction around kernels of truth, I hope I create a sense of authenticity that might not exist otherwise.
I wonder what my fellow blog-hoppers have to say on this subject.
I am a firm believer in the rules of grammar. They help us be clear communicators. A lot of what’s wrong in this world today are the people who think they can just change what you say or write based on their own analysis that changes what you actually tried to communicate.
I don’t buy the argument that it doesn’t matter and if I start to read a book that is filled with grammatical errors, I stop reading it when the errors start to make my head hurt.
But…
Rules are sometimes too constraining. So I do break the rules occasionally. In Daermad Cycle, a Celtic-influenced fantasy, there is a distinct lilt to the Celdryan sections of the books. That requires breaking some American English grammar rules. I think it adds a flavor to the series that sets it apart.
Further, I often have my characters in my American-setting novels use non-standard grammar in dialogue because people do speak that way. They aren’t so formal when they’re just talking with their friends. That doesn’t mean you can’t understand what they said. While I love authors who are great at dialects, but that isn’t really what I’m aiming for. My people speak English, they just don’t worry much about whether their sentences would pass the grammar Nazis’ scrutiny.
Rules are important foundation in writing, but they’re also subject to adjustment as needed for the story.
I don’t follow celebrities very often. Once in a while, I wonder what ever happened to an actor I used to like and I’ll google them, but generally, I don’t have any google alerts for celebrities. I have other things to do. I don’t seek them out on social media.
Exception
For a long time, my one exception was the comedian Christopher Titus. He was a funny guy in his performances and equally hysterical in his social media interactions. Unfortunately, Donald Trump destroyed him. He does a periodic podcast that is painful to watch. It starts with the Great Orange is evil, dwells on “the Great Orange” did this (6, 5, 4, 3, 2 years ago), and then slams a Great Orange sighting. The Great Orange has not been president for two years now. Could you find another topic that’s actually funny? Chris, I loved your rants about your family, your ex-wife, and the human condition. You managed to treat sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests in a humorous way. I didn’t mind if you threw in an occasional political insight. When Trump was running in 2016, you were mildly funny on the topic and I expected you to move on after the election, but you just kept focusing on rage rather than jokes. A steady six-year diet of “hate Donald Trump” has gotten stale. Meanwhile, Biden is just the sort of person you used to eviscerate hilariously and you never deal with it. There’s nothing to distinguish you from the majority of comedians not being funny and I’m sorry you’re one of them. I no longer watch you and I wish you were still worth stalking. If you insist on focusing on politics, go back and review some of your hero Johnny Carson’s monologues. He knew how to tell jokes about politicians that made both their opponents and supporters laugh. Frankly, though, you should find some human condition topic and let fly. Do what you excel at and I might stalk you again.
My current exception is probably the fantasy author Kate Elliott, aka Alis Rasmussen. Not only does she write great books, but she actually interacts with her readers via Twitter and I love her insights about her characters and the plots they live through. She even managed to make a romantic cyberpunk hold my attention for three books in part because she threw little bits of trivia out on Twitter that created intrigue for the next book. I admit, her young adult novels don’t interest me, but that’s just a matter of taste. I still like her Twitter interactions and her book set to publish this spring The Keeper’s Six looks like vintage Elliott worth reading.
I guess I wasn’t paying attention because I didn’t really know what an Easter egg is in literature. I was aware the some of my favorite authors link their books in the same universe by leaving hints of them in each book, but I didn’t really know that was a widespread practice.
And it’s not one I use deliberately.
First, my fantasy series Daermad Cycle is not in the same universe as any of my other books. It is literally in an alternative space, so I can make magic work without offending my own rationality. I think the only “Easter egg” in that series is “who killed Prince Maryn?” That question can get a little muddled from time to time, but solving that mystery matters to understanding the series.
I suspect the reason why I don’t deal in literary Easter eggs much is that metaphors are hard to manage and they can become tiresome and strained over the stretch of many books. They’re fun as a one-off, but as a long-term strategy…okay, I figured out who Jon Snow’s mother was in the first book and every time George RR Martin dropped a hint in subsequent books, I wanted to scream …. yeah, if you haven’t guessed it for the books, I’ll not ruin it for you.
However….
Jon Dracines, a reporter for a New York newspaper, gets a mention in both Transformation Project and What If Wasn’t. You never meet him in either series (well, so far). He exists in a long-neglected WIP that may well never be published, but when I needed a reporter for Javier Chavez to reach out to, I used the character name and I am getting to a point where it might make sense for Jon to show up.
He also shows up as a reporter in What If Wasn’t series when Alan Wyngate wants to leak information about his son to the press. Maybe someday, he’ll show up as a fully-fledged character.
Recurring Themes
I use some themes repeatedly in my writings. “Objects in View” is the title to the 2nd book in the Transformation Project series. It’s a phrase that gets used pretty often by the characters. You know a character knew Jacob Delaney if you hear them say or think the phrase. Jacob Delaney’s libertarian philosophy is a throughline in the series.
What If Wasn’t is the title of a series and probably will be the title of one of the books in the series, and it’s also a philosophy I have main character Peter developing as he goes through rough times.
Individual freedom, even in a feudal society, is a consistent theme played out in different ways throughout all of my books. While my people are often surrounded by healthy communities that work together to get through challenges, I try to make the case that they are not forced to participate, but choose to do so.
Another theme that my son recently pointed out to me is that I pay homage to female empowerment outside the lines of women’s liberation. An ongoing theme in Transformation Project is “My partner is a bad-assed mercenary. Of course, I can take care of myself.” This is not necessarily because the female characters want to take care of themselves, but because their male counterparts are often dealing with other crises at other locations and therefore unavailable to protect the women they love, so their women learn to take care of themselves and to overcome the damage they experience when they physically aren’t strong enough to defend themselves from the bad guys. So, while (for example) Jazz couldn’t prevent Paul Osmowitz from raping her, she had the strength, anger, and gun skills to blow his face off later in the series. In my current WIP, she’s developing into a good backup for her bad-assed mercenary partner Shane Delaney. Meanwhile, Keri Lufgren had to shoot a man who tried to hurt her, but she doesn’t want to do that again, which causes her protective husband Alex to rise to the challenge of defending her. I like to show women as strong and capable, but still feminine. With the possible exception of the elfling Ryanna in Daermad Cycle, my female characters can only best a man if they are possessed of superior firepower, because that’s the reality I see in the world and I don’t think that diminishes my own gender in the least.
I don’t know these are Easter eggs (especially since some of them I didn’t even realize I was putting into the books), but they are themes that undergird my plots. And since I’m not going for metaphors, hopefully they stay fresh through the series. I admire writers who can deal in metaphors with panache (CS Lewis, for example), but I’m not him, so I’ll probably not leave a bunch of Easter eggs in my books, because I don’t want to become a slave to a literary technique.
First, I was 12 when I started writing. That is to say, that’s when I started putting ink on paper. Before that, I was making up stories to entertain myself and friends. So there was a lot I didn’t know about writing. I think I didn’t really know grammar when I started writing.
Let’s fast-forward a bit. I started thinking about writing books for other people to read when I was in my 20s. I was studying and then working as a journalist, but fiction always called to me. And there was still a lot I didn’t know.
There Is More than One Way to Publish
Frankly, in the 1980s, there wasn’t more than one way to publish. The Big 5 were it. Sure, you could do a vanity press, but you’d never sell the cases of books the press would sell you unless you had a publisher to help you with marketing, so there was really only one way to publish where other people were going to read my books.
I didn’t know about KDP for quite some time after it became a reality and it took me a while to get over my snobbery about “vanity presses.” I wish I’d gotten over those hurdles a couple of years sooner. Instead, I wasted time with traditional publishing.
The traditional route to publication involves submitting your manuscript to literary agents and hoping one of them likes it well enough to secure representation. I am a Christian who writes non-Christian literature that doesn’t fit neatly into the categories, which literary agents didn’t like. I kept getting advice about The Willow Branch which always said it was a great book, but I should rewrite it to be one or the other. It couldn’t be both. That left me unable to go forward because I wasn’t willing to turn my high fantasy into a Mitford novel or the Left Behind series. And that made me realize that I really didn’t want to wait forever while my agent submitted my manuscript to editors at publishing houses who would then tell me to rewrite the book.
There is nothing wrong with this approach, but there were new options. There are small publishers and digital-first publishing houses that put out high-quality books and many don’t require authors to have a literary agent to submit manuscripts. Unfortunately, they wanted money, which felt a lot like vanity press and we also didn’t have the cash to spend on that sort of long shot.
Self-publishing is the option I chose because I could work with others in an authors’ cooperative to produce a great product. The cooperative created a boutique press that allows all of us to appear as if we’re part of a publishing house. But the cooperative doesn’t own my copywrites, which I’ve come to absolutely love as I’ve had friends have to fight their way through a rights battle with small presses that fell apart. Self-publication is definitely not a shortcut, but it helps to be able to set my own deadlines and make my own decisions. It’s a lot of hard work but to be a successful author requires a lot of hard work no matter what route you take. I might as well do it for myself rather than for an editor at a publishing house.
I tried to give some deep thought about cooking disasters my characters might have had. In Daermad Cycle, it’s a medieval society, so they cook in open fireplaces. In Transformation Project, they’re living through the apocalypse and are grateful for whatever food they can get. In What If Wasn’t, well there’s a kettle of fish there.
In Daermad Cycle’s third book Fount of Wraiths, a blind Tamys prepares a meal for himself and Padraig and he refers to a near cooking disaster. He’s blind and still unused to his condition, but gifted with special psychic abilities. He still nearly fell into the fire.
I haven’t actually written a cooking disaster into Transformation Project. It’s more like adventures in the culinary arts as Jill Delaney attempts to feed a houseful of people with dwindling resources. Shane mentally remarks on it once that the meals are getting “creative” and involves potato slices swimming in a yellow broth. Since Shane doesn’t know, I don’t actually identify what they’re eating, but yes, it’s a thing if one lacked corn starch to thicken the sauce.
It’s not been published yet, but a great deal of it has been written — an episode in What If Wasn’t when Peter is first out of prison and trying to remember how to make himself breakfast. Suffering from culture shock and genereally finding it hard to think, Peter struggles to remember how to adjust the toaster to end up with palatable toast. This is based directly on a friend’s experience of his first morning after being released from prison. Thank you, Bern, for being willing to share that even simple things are a struggle when your whole life changes abruptly.
How about me?
Like everyone, I’ve overcooked a few meals and I once meant to shake a sprinkle of cinnamon in waldorf salad, but the screen wasn’t tight and I ended up putting half a bottle of cinnamon in the salad. Not particularly good eats even after I spooned most of it out.
But the most memorable kitchen disaster I’ve ever had didn’t occur in a kitchen. We go annually to get our winter fish supply to Chitina, Alaska, on the banks of the wild Copper River, where the wind rarely stops blowing. Usually Brad and I subsist off MRE’s or pilot crackers and tuna when we do these trips, but one year we went with our friend Ray, Brad asked me to make breakfast a priority and I knew Ray’s favorite breakfast was pancakes and bacon.
First I built a firepit from the slab rocks that break off the surrounding cliffs and tried to shelter it with the more rounded river rocks on the beach. And then I built a fire. All went pretty well with that and my cast iron skillets are great for campfire cooking. I put the bacon in the high-sided 9″ skillet and started the pancakes on the griddle. The wind gusted violently, sweeping down off the mountains to our west and then a second wind rushing hard along the river to the north, turning the campfire into a blast furnace with flames shooting several feet out the leewind side of the pit. I managed not to set myelf on fire, but it was a near thing a few times and even above the fire and on far side, the fire was HOT! The bacon cooked really fast and was black in some places and raw in others. Fortunately, that’s how Ray likes it. (I swear the man was raised among cavemen).
This cooking technique didn’t work for pancakes however. They were also black in some parts and raw in others — earning them the nickname of glue-cakes. I’ve never attempted to make pancakes over a campfire since, not even in the windless Interior where I’m sure I wouldn’t have to same problem. We now usually stick to cereal or bananas. Way more predictable results and you don’t risk burn injuries.
This is what I mean by adventures in culinary arts.
Cover reveals can be a great marketing tool. At least they were when I first started publishing eight years ago. Admittedly, I had a really pretty cover and that drew a lot of attention. Some of my later covers are just as pretty, but I have to admit the cover reveal — like so many other marketing ideas — is a hit-and-miss thing. Timing is everything and sometimes you just can’t time the timing right.
Wrapped in Plain Vanilla
I like the strip tease. Wrap my cover in a plain vanilla wrapper, publish the blurb, and ask people to tune in for the slow-motion reveal. I start about a month before I publish the book by announcing the cover is ready and then a week later I offer the hidden cover. Then a week later, over a period of about one week, I reveal it bit by bit. Then I start publicizing the publication date for the book, using the cover as the avatar.
Results?
I do notice a bump in activity on my blog and occasionally a few sales of earlier books in the series or a bump in reads. So I know it has an effect, but it’s hard to quantify. Like so many things, cover reveals seemed to have changed during covid — it’s now harder to get attention. Maybe it’s because my series has an ongoing pandemic and people are done with pandemics. On the other hand, a reader sent me a note recently that complimented me on a pandemic with real consequences rather than what real life has provided. So it’s hard to know what effect cover reveals have on early sales in this era. I’m still going to do one if I ever get the next book finished.
Why? Because it worked in the past and I’m hoping things will return more to normal in 2023. We’ll see.
I have a loose goal to publish a book every year. That said, I am my own publisher so I am not held to any dates. I don’t advertise release dates until the book is finished and I’m just doing last-minute cleanup, so I don’t have to sweat that goal.
So far, I’ve been really good at keeping it, and I usually publish two books a year. During covid, I published three books in a year. But it’s a loose standard, subject to revision as conditions allow.
When I published Worm Moon last summer, I turned my attention to the next book in What If…Wasn’t and immediately hit a writer’s block. I don’t get those very often because if I can’t write one story, I’ll turn to another which usually gets me going on both.
And it was understandable for this book because it’s the first full-length romance I want to write and, well, yeah, me and romance aren’t really close. I’m feeling my way through it. And it was also summer in Alaska, so wanting to be outside would have slowed me down a bit anyway.
In September, I realized I needed a break. To give myself some time to marinate the story I was struggling with, I decided to start work on the book that comes after Worm Moon (title tentatively “Inalienable Liberties”). Turns out, it wasn’t just romance that had me down. Writing the most-complicated book in the Transformation Project series turned out to be a struggle. Or maybe it’s writer’s block in general because I haven’t written much nonfiction either. Anyway, throughout October and November, it was like writing through molasses. I wrote a bunch of scenes in no particular order and felt like I was scattered and never going to finish. But then on Thanksgiving, I had a lovely conversation with some of my alpha readers and they gave me a bunch of ideas that provided the climax to the novel. Because everything is out of order, it still feels scattered, but I’m getting to a point where I can actually organize the story and then work on what is missing and what can be trimmed.
Whew! I still need about 40,000 words to make it a novel, but I know that’ll come once everything is organized.
So the point is, I will probably still keep my loose schedule of one book published per year, but it probably won’t be two books in 2023.
Beauty in Flexibility
I am still working my full-time job and trying to live life. I refuse to be a hermit-writer. So naturally, I can’t be too ambitious about writing goals. I strive to write somewhere between 350 and a thousand words a day about anything, but it’s not always my novels that get the attention. I try to finish a book every six months and publish yearly, but I’m not going to kill myself doing it. And sometimes, I go through dry periods when writing doesn’t flow like normal.
There’s beauty in flexibility because I don’t need to freak myself out if I’m not producing like normal. I did this once before a few years ago, where I watched TV instead of writing for about three months and then wrote the rough draft for the next book in six weeks. I don’t know that I’ve ever had a more productive period of writing. Sometimes we need to take breaks to recharge our battery/muse.
I still do have a couple of dates marked on a calender that tell me when to start pushing myself hard to complete my loose goals.
Bright Spots
The good news is that Cai Delaney may be talking to me again. The character had stopped talking to me a while ago and I put him in a position where he could die at the end of Worm Moon, but now I’m getting slivers of a future story, so I might need to resurrect him. I try never to kill off a good character unless they stop telling me their story. And I really love Cai. He’s such a nice guy and I put him through hell. I think this resurrection isn’t going to be a walk in the park. I’m not a capricious god-creator, but bad things definitely happen to good people in my books.
And then there’s what I’m working on over in What If…Wasn’t. I put Peter in prison, where I don’t really want to write his story. Even with my friend Bern giving me insight into the experience, I don’t want to write Peter in there. But the story of what happens later in his life is almost entirely written. I thought I’d concentrate on what happens to the people he affected, but that’s where I started struggling. I know Lily and Ben fall in love while Peter is away, but writing it as a traditional romance is s struggle. I know the other stories too and they will be easier, but I have to get past that hurdle first. Maybe finding a dead body is the answer. Or, er….
And then there’s Daermad Cycle. The fourth book is largely drafted and I just have to find time to write it. Fantasy takes time and a lot of immersion compared to writing real-world fiction. It also requires a reset in my own thinking because I’m entering a different world with people who think very differently from ordinary people.
The point is, I have lots to work on, so I shouldn’t have any difficulty with keeping up with my goal for a few years.
aurorawatcherak 