Z = The Final Step of Writing a Novel and the End of the A to Z Challenge

Z is for the end, both of writing a novel and this blogging challenge. It's been an interesting ride this month (and this is the only time I've ever completed the challenge). Camp NaNo ended up derailed so I wrote less than 1/10 of what I had planned to. But at least I'm excited about going back to my novel again so the end should be written soon.

I hope all of you have enjoyed reading the various posts linked throughout the month. And the giveaways have been fun (you've got until midnight to enter for Angel Eyes). I'll probably not be quite as active over the next two months due to all the logistics of moving to another country to start my job, but that's life.

Enjoy the last article and please do click through to M J Wright's website to read the rest of the article.

One of my favourite writing tips is so well known it barely needs repeating. When you’ve written your first draft manuscript, stick it in a (metaphorical) drawer for a month and don’t look at it.

The idea is that you come back with fresh eyes.

The other problem is that it’s too easy to re-awaken the old ideas – to lock back into the old thinking. Sometimes the ‘novelty factor’ lasts about a page and a half. Sometimes those old thoughts can creep up on you without you even really noticing.It sort of works, but like all cliches there are two problems with the idea. One is getting that month, especially if there is a deadline and the work has to be juggled between half a dozen other writing projects, along with all the impecunious demands of everyday life.

But there are ways around it. Try this. Print the manuscript off and look at isolated pages, making sure you don’t start with the first one.

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Y = A Map to the Land of YA Publishing

The people over at YA Highway have created an interesting visual map of the publishing process complete with links to articles on various subjects. Click the image below to view the full map on their website.

Click here to enter the Angel Eyes Giveaway! Only one day left!

X = 7 Reasons Agents Might Give Your First Chapter an X

The dreaded first chapter, or even the first paragraph of your novel. That's all the time you have to impress an agent into asking for more. So here are some tips on what not to do, unless you like seeing how fast an agent can lose interest in your novel.

Previously, I attended the Writer Idol Event at Boston Book Fest. It was not for the faint of heart, but for those willing to brave public ridicule, it was a great way to get helpful feedback.

(How to Support an Author’s New Book: 11 Ways For You to Help)

This is how it worked: An actress picked manuscripts at random and read the first 250 words out loud for the panel and the audience. If at any point a panelist felt he would stop reading, he raised his hand. The actress read until two or more panelists raised their hands, at which point the panel discussed the reasons they stopped, or in cases where the actress read to the end, they discussed what worked. Helene Atwan (Director of Beacon Press) and agents Esmond Harmsworth, Eve Bridburg, and Janet Silver (all from Zachary Shuster Harmsworth) served on the panel.

These panelists were tough! I’d say less than 25% made it to the end of the passage. Here are some of the common reasons panelists stopped reading.

1. Generic beginnings: Stories that opened with the date or the weather didn’t really inspire interest. According to Harmsworth, you are only allowed to start with the weather if you’re writing a book about meteorologists. Otherwise, pick something more creative.

2. Slow beginnings: Some manuscripts started with too much pedestrian detail (characters washing dishes, etc) or unnecessary background information. 

Click here to read tips 3-7 at Writer's Digest.

Click here to enter for a chance of winning Angel Eyes until the 30th!

W = 13 Ways to Scare People Away from your Website

Website building is not my forte, nor that of most writers. We try many things to create a website which looks good but keeps people coming back. However, here are 13 ways to make sure no one ever comes back, courtesy of Author Media.

This can be a scary time of the year.

Here at Author Media, there is nothing that scares us more than bad author website design.
Here are 13 proven ways to scare people away from your author website.

1. Music

Many people surf the web while listening to Pandora, Spotify or iTunes in the background. If your website starts music when someone arrives, it will create chaos in their headphones as two songs play at the same time. For bonus points, hide the “pause” button so the only way to stop the music is to leave the website.
To turn your website into a horror show, make the song restart every time users load a new page. This way you can bludgeon your readers over the head with the first few bars of the song.

2. Focus on Yourself

People don’t care about you, they care about them. So, focus on yourself. You are the author after all. Fill the website with photos of you and your family. Talk about personal details of your life that have nothing to do with your book. Blog about irrelevant topics. Avoid giving away any helpful information.
Avoid the things in our list of what readers want from your author website.

Click here to read tips 3-13 at Author Media.

Click here to enter the Angel Eyes Giveaway!

V = Victory at Last!

Well, at least for one writer. His story and perseverance are amazing! Most people would have given up long before then.

If your novel has been banging on agents’ doors for years and got nowhere take heart from Berwick Coates, an English author who this week nailed down a $130,000 deal and a two-book contract at age 80.

His historical thriller The Last Conquest was snapped up by one of the world’s largest publishers Simon & Schuster after Coates had failed to impress agents with several previous novels. “They were clearly not being read,” he said.

A retired history teacher, Coates succeeded only when he caught the eye of agent Jim Gill, who was recommended to him by a fellow author. Now Coates is finishing his second novel The Last Viking and can hope to see both in book stores at an age when most authors might have given up or resorted to vanity publishing.

Click here to continue reading his heartening success story at The Writing Village.

Click here to enter for a copy of Angel Eyes!

U = US Tax Treaties for Writers

Taxes. Yes, even writers have to deal with them and they only get more complicated once you throw living out of country into the mix. I've been sniffing around for information related to this due to my going overseas soon and I thought I'd share the information I found with you, my readers.

Thank you Stina for allowing me to take over your blog today. I hope that I may bring some knowledge to those who plan on doing business in the U.S., but may reside elsewhere.

When I was paired with an illustrator on an anthology project, I had no clue where Maldives was located, but I knew I needed to work with Rimi no matter the consequences. Working with others who reside outside of the U.S. requires knowledge of certain tax laws.

Are you thinking of publishing in the U.S., but live in another country? Maybe you are working with someone else in another country on a collaboration, perhaps even a business partnership? Regardless of whether you plan on self-publishing or going the traditional route, if your work will be published in the U.S., you’ll need to understand certain aspects of our tax laws.

The U.S. government requires companies to withhold 30% of royalties made in the U.S. and paid to entities residing in other countries…unless the U.S. has a tax treaty with your country. 

Click here to continue reading at Stina Lindenblatt's blog.

Click here to enter for a chance of winning a copy of Angel Eyes!

T = Twitter: How on Earth do you Become Successful?

Twitter is a powerful social media tool for sharing your writing (you might even have come to this post via my tweet about it) but it can be difficult to figure out how to grow your following. Here is one writer's experience on how to attain a massive following.

I wasn’t planning to write this post. It more came to be as a matter of chance. It all started a few days ago when author, editor and blogger, C.S. Lakin (@cslakin and @livewritethrive on Twitter), contacted me via my website to ask, “How did you get so many followers?” As I’d done in the past with a few others who asked, I emailed C.S. and explained my process. In response she came back, suggesting this should be a blog post and even offered to put my email into blog format, leaving me with only whatever fine tuning I desired. I said, “Cool,” she said, “Here you go,” and voilà, here it is, I’m coming clean about my Twitter success.

When I joined Twitter in August 2009, I went with the simple logic that the more followers I had, the more people would learn about the thrillers I wrote. With that in mind, I got busy with an easy process requiring little account management time which I’ll now share with you. The basic plan was to follow people, some of whom would follow back. Those who didn’t, I would unfollow. All I did was repeat this process over and over again. It obviously works because I now have almost 250,000 followers.

Click here to continue reading at Live, Write, Thrive.

Click here to enter for your chance at winning a copy of Angel Eyes!

S = Scene Writing

As a special treat, here are two articles (instead of one). One on scene transitions and the other on writing dialogue within a scene. Make sure to follow through the link to the whole article and maybe comment saying where you came from on their site? We writers do love comments.

As writers we spend a lot of time talking about plot, character, setting and description. We learn how to put all of those together into scenes and how to show character motivation with sequel. But then when it comes time to stitch it all together we often stutter… uh… okay… and then after that some other stuff happened and now I’m going to tell you about it.

Okay, hopefully, your transitions aren’t that bad, but frequently writers do spend way too much time on the stitches when they should be kept clean and simple.

How to do that?

Click here to read the rest at The How to Write Shop.

A writer friend had feedback which said that her novel suffered from "ping-pong dialogue". Had any of us heard of this particular ailment, she asked here. None of us had, but the example she posted did suffer a bit from something I've seen a lot over the years, and no doubt I've been guilty of too; in fact, I'm rather grateful to have a name for it. It's not that the dialogue in itself is badly written; rather, it's a combination of things. Have a look at this:

"How long can you stay?" he asked.
"My bus doesn't go till six," she said. She slung her jacket over the back of a chair.
"Would you like some coffee?"
"Only if you've got decaff, thanks."
"Yes, I've got some." He put the kettle on to boil.
"You've cut back the hedge," she said.
"It got shredded in that storm. Had to do something," he replied.
"Ah, yes."
Roly began to scratch at the back door and whine.
"I'll just let him out."
"Does he still come upstairs and bark if you stay in the bath too long?"
"No. He only did that to you." The kettle clicked off.
"No milk, please."
"Right you are."
He put the mug on the table.
"Did you get my letter?"

Now, there are various things going on here, all of which could be contributing to the ping-pong effect. First, it's not actually that briskly alternating lines of dialogue are a Bad Thing, but more that there isn't enough else going on. The dialogue has got detached from the other kinds of action in the scene: we've got speech-action, but not much physical action, or mental action and so on. 

Click here to continue reading at This Itch of Writing.

Remember that I'm giving away a copy of Angel Eyes! Click here to enter until the 30th!

R = Random House Contract Missteps

We all know about Random House, one of the huge publishing companies which puts out a huge number of books each year through all it's various imprints. But it looks like Random House is trying out a new tactic: mimicking vanity presses. And this is not good news.

This week, Random House generated controversy among writers over the terms of their contracts for two of their new digital-only imprints: Hydra, which focuses on science-fiction/fantasy genre and Alibi, which focuses on the mystery and thriller genres. These imprints were launched last November, along with Flirt, which publishes college-age stories. Loveswept, an ebook-only romance imprint, was already in existence.

The controversy became more widely discussed when leading professional organization Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) declared that works published by Hydra (which is not to be confused with Hydra Publications) would not be considered eligible as credentials for membership.

Click here to continue reading at Huffington Post.

Click here to enter the Angel Eyes giveaway!

Q = Rejecting Agents You've Queried

Is it even possible to think of such a thing happening as having to reject an agent? It seems like it's usually the other way around with the rejection letters streaming in. But, once you have an offer of representation you do have to let the other agents know. Here's how you can do it politely.

Congratulations! You’ve received an offer of representation!!!

But there are more agents considering. Possibly agents you submitted to at midnight on a Friday after a glass of wine or two and noticed your rejection pile was growing and your submission list thinning and good GOD you need to GET IT OUT THERE MORE AND INCREASE YOUR CHANCES OF AN OFFER JUST TO KEEP UP THE HOPE….!

I.E: definitely not dream agent material, but worthy of settling for.

Yeah, yeah; maybe I should have rose-colored glasses on here and say that EVERY agent an author submits to is TOTALLY his/her dream agent but…I know better. And it’s ok; this business is so subjective, just as not every author is right for every agent, not every agent is right for every author. Doesn’t make either party less awesome – just not the best professional fit.

So what do you do when you receive an offer and (as you should) want to be fair and notify any other considering agents to give them a chance…but don’t necessarily WANT to give some of them that chance, or KNOW that even if one of those agents you were being fair to offered, you wouldn’t go with them?

Maybe this is just a problem in MY eyes; I certainly can’t fault an author for wanting ANYONE to read his/her manuscript and fawn all over it, even if s/he doesn’t really intend to go with that agent. But truly, it’s a waste of time; and it really sucks to let an agent possibly fall in love with your manuscript if s/he doesn’t stand a chance.

So what’s the best approach?

Click here to continue reading at Adventures in Agentland.

Click here to enter the giveaway for Angel Eyes!

P = How Not to Kill Your Story in the Opening Paragraphs

The beginning of a story or novel is one of the hardest parts to get right. I know I've agonized over many a beginning. Did it have the right punch? Was the hook sufficient or even present? But here are a few tips to help you along the way (make sure to click through to whole article to read the rest of the tips).

Ever driven a car round a bend and seen another one heading straight at you? At 60mph? It happened to me last week. I swerved into a ditch and it clipped my wing mirror as it bulleted past. Not a good way to start a day but a great place to begin a story…

Why do so many writers get their opening paragraphs wrong?

Here are five big mistakes new authors make - and how to avoid them - based on my experience of judging 3500+ entries to date in the Writers’ Village story contest.

Mistake #1: A start that has too many characters

Good opening passages typically involve just one or two main players. Don’t bring in a cast of thousands or tell the whole history of Renaissance Florence before the action begins.

The UK crime writer Ruth Rendell typically has more than 30 named characters in every novel. Too many? Yet her novels are successful. Why? She limits her characters to just three per scene and makes each character highly memorable the moment she introduces them.

Slip in your minor characters and details of back story naturally, a fragment here and there, as the story proceeds. Limit the cast list at the start!

Click here to continue reading at Writer's Village. 

Click here to enter the giveaway for Angel Eyes until the 30th!

O = Over-utilization of Character Names

We all use them constantly, have to, but character names can be sorely over used. I've discovered this problem plagues my 1st person POV writing. Here's a literary agent's perspective on the problem.

A common, first-manuscript-page mistake: referring to what your protagonist is doing so much that your first page soon reads like (if you have a female protagonist named Jane):

• Jane didn't like Mondays.
• She rolled off her bed.
• She had already eaten all of the cereal.
• Because it always had mold, she disliked her shower.
• She toweled off and put on her shoes.
• She thought shoes were the most important part of an outfit. 
• Today, Jane wore gladiator pumps. 
• She was looking forward to meeting her boyfriend. 
• After turning off the light, she picked up her bag, and left her house.
• She got into her Prius, gunned the engine, and promptly flattened a squirrel.
• She disliked squirrels.   
• That said, the homeowners' association, of which Jane was a member, would not be pleased about scraping squirrel off the asphalt. 
• She frowned. 
• Reapplying her lipstick, Jane screeched over the center dividing island--after all, what else was four-wheel drive for?--and pulled into her favorite parking space. 

It's not even that so many sentences begin the same way--or that many are of similar length and rhythm, which is another thing to avoid--it's that your fictional world will automatically be fuller if you describe things without always attaching them to the protagonist. (That is, without doing the fiction equivalent of writing "I think" before every statement in an essay.) No bueno.

Continue reading at AgencyGatekeeper.

Don't forget to click here to check out and enter the new giveaway for Angel Eyes by Shannon Dittemore!

M = Military Mistakes and a New Giveaway!

Hello and welcome back to the third week of the A to Z challenge! I suppose you'd like to know who won the book giveaway? The lucky gal's name is Lia and she won by becoming my 50th blog follower! Congrats, Lia!

But, onto the next giveaway. The next one you say? Yes, because I planned two back to back. This time you could win the fabulous "Angel Eyes" by Shannon Dittemore! Again, I reviewed it this past January. Click here for my review. Scroll down to the bottom to enter the giveaway and to read the blurb. You've got until the 30th to enter (and there are daily entries too!).

And on with the post of the day: the letter M!

This article is by Joseph Zieja.

I’m an officer in the United States Air Force, and I’ve been wearing the uniform for ten years.  I also write.

I’ve had pieces appear in Daily Science Fiction and some other anthologies across the web and in print.  So I have a tiny bit of writing clout to back up my military experience, and you can lean on that when I tell you that there are a lot of mistakes in the way that writers portray the military in their fiction.

I therefore present to you the Top 5 Biggest Military Mistakes in Fiction, According to Joe Zieja.  I’ll try my best to keep it­ to speculative fiction, since I know that’s who my audience is, but these mistakes extend to all genres.

One last warning:  I’m from New Jersey.  Hold on to your self-esteem.

1. Yes, You Should Have Thought of That Before:  Misuse of Technology

No one is as desperately misled as Hollywood when it comes to military technology.  Movies take a lot of poetic license, but they’re expected to sacrifice accuracy for the sake of explosions and entertainment.  But seriously, if you can’t make a cell phone call while driving in the Lincoln Tunnel, you probably can’t fly a satellite-controlled airplane through it.  That’s all I’m saying.

Click here to continue reading at MythicScribes.com.


"Once you've seen, you can't unsee. 

"Brielle went to the city to chase her dreams and found tragedy instead. She's come home to shabby little Stratus, Oregon, to live with her grief and her guilt . . . and the incredible, numbing cold she can't seem to shake.

Jake's the new guy at school. The boy next door with burning hands and an unbelievable gift that targets him for corruption.

Something more than fate has brought them together. An evil bigger than both of them lurks in the shadows nearby, hiding in plain sight. Two angels stand guard, unsure what's going to happen. And a beauty brighter than either Brielle or Jake has ever seen is calling them to join the battle in a realm where all human choices start.

A realm that only angels and demons-and Brielle-can perceive."

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L = Local is the New Buzzword!

When it comes to marketing your book, have you covered your bases in your most important area? You have the greatest impact in the area that can claim you as a local writer.

In It’s a Wonderful Life, everyone loved George Bailey, the ultimate hometown hero–but George didn’t realize it. He felt intimidated by his friends who had gone out of Bedford Falls and made names for themselves. George wasn’t inferior to them. He just thought he was.

Authors can fall into the same trap. It’s easy to get discouraged when your book doesn’t make the best-seller list or the Amazon top 100, (or even top 100,000).

In the day of the internet, it’s easy to forget the power of local.

It’s time to think like George Bailey.

Read on at Author Media.

Enter The Eye of the Sword Giveaway! You have until midnight tonight to put in your final entries.

J = Job News

To continue the break from writing tip posts, I wanted to post a bit of news about my new job (which might lead to some interesting blog posts in the future).

I've just recently accepted a position at a school for teaching kindergarten and elementary students English. The catch? It's in South Korea! Yes, I will be leaving sometime this summer for that country which has been all over the news recently what with all the commotion their northern relative has been making.

Look forward to blog posts about Korean stuff later this year! I may even try my hand at writing articles featuring various places around the city I'll be living in (which isn't Seoul though it is located just south of it). But the best part ought to be the pictures.

Don't forget to click here to check out the giveaway for The Eye of the Sword. And make sure to check back on Monday for a new giveaway. I wonder which book it will be! Heehee. 

I = An Interview in the Works?

Why yes, one is. It's more of a guest post with a predetermined prompt/topic though. But I'm not telling you who's interviewing me though! You get one clue and the date. No more than that.

The clue: I've interviewed or featured this person before on my blog.

The date: April 15th

While you're waiting around to read my guest post (and to find out who I'm talking about) why not check out some of the interviews on my blog? 

Try the NaNoWriMo Spotlight for the interviews from this year. 

Or, try the NaNoWriMo NW Feature for the interviews from last year.

Remember, the giveaway for The Eye of the Sword lasts until the 14th so make sure to enter!

H = How to Spot Contest Scams

Writing contests are a way for writers to get their stories and their names out there. And most contests with a decent payout have an entry fee. But, how do you know that the contest you just submitted your story and your money to is legit? It's hard to tell, but there are a few red flag you should know about.

Have you ever been scammed by a writing contest?

I run a short story competition at Writers’ Village, so I have an interest in asking. We attract around 1200 entries each year, and with total prize values of £1500 ($2400), we’re edging into the big league. So I get angry when I hear about contests that don’t play by the rules and give all story awards a bad name.

Here’s a recent example.

One of my contestants told me he was about to submit an entry to a contest that we’ll call GeeWhiz Stories (not its real name). The contest announced total prize values of £4000 ($6400). That’s top money! At a £10 ($17) entry fee, it would need to attract 400 entries just to cover its prizes. Yet with low page rank, its website couldn’t be getting much traffic. Nor did its name appear in the web’s top contest directories, like Ask About Writing, Places For Writers, or Compete Around The World. So how did it attract over 400 entries annually and fund its prizes?

It didn’t. GeeWhiz was a scam.

Read John Yeoman's five tips for spotting rotten contests.

Enter The Eye of the Sword Giveaway until the 14th!

G = What in the World is Google Authorship?

You know those words you’ve been writing? The ones on your blog that you’ve spent countless hours carefully crafting?

Yeah, you don’t own those.

Not really. Not according to Google. This may be the biggest thing you haven’t heard of…yet.

Before you get upset, let me tell you a quick story.

Last year, David Cohen, a brilliant marketer, SEO, and mentor invited me to a small Google+ Hangout with other writers interested in SEO and Authorship. He also asked if he could use my personal website as an example during the meeting.

I said sure. Who doesn’t like free feedback from an expert?

But while we were on air, he said something that wrecked my day.

“Caitlin,” he said. “According to Google, you didn’t write any of these posts.”

Snap. I was mortified. Embarrassed. And more than a little bit angry at Google. Over 300 blog posts and none of them mine? That just wasn’t right.

I’ll never forget the day I first learned about Google Authorship.

Read more at Author Media.

Enter The Eye of the Sword Giveaway until the 14th!

F = The Financial Reality of Being an Author

The reality of writing is that authors don't make a lot of money. Oh sure there are the successful, rich authors but they make up only the tiniest fraction of actual published authors.

If you have dreams of selling your science fiction, fantasy or horror novel and getting filthy rich, you need to adjust your expectations. We’ve collected three testimonials from genre writers below to help aspiring writers to maintain realistic expectations.
Horror novelist Brian Keene gave a speech at Towson University’s Borderlands Boot Camp recently, laying out some frank statistics for aspiring genre novelists. Here is an excerpt:

The average advance these days, for a genre fiction novel, ranges between $2,500 and $10,000. That’s right. The novel you spent a year working on only earns you between $2,500 to $10,000 at first. When the book is published a year later, that advance will have long been spent. And you probably won’t see a royalty check until another year AFTER your book has been published (provided enough copies have sold to earn out your advance). So it will actually be two years from that advance check before you get paid again.

Read more testimonials at Media Bistro..

Enter The Eye of the Sword giveaway until the 14th!

E = Excel is Your New Best Friend, Self-Publishers

After the writing, editing, layout and publishing in general is done, the sales begin. Hopefully, that is. But let's assume that you're selling a few here and there at least. But you're a self-published author without a sales or marketing department to keep track of your sales. What do you do so that you have a track record to show to literary agents, convincing them you're a best seller in the making? Why, you make best friends with that helpful tool known as Excel!

I’ve discovered that in general, authors are not numbers people. They tend to have vague idea of sales and revenue earned. In fact, most authors probably don’t scrutinize their royalty statements like they should (with a few exceptions of course). And I get it. Authors are creative folks. Math uses the other side of the brain. But if you are digitally self-publishing, then you are your own publisher. And given that, you should be generating your own royalty statements in an excel spreadsheet. Here’s what you should track and why.

TO TRACK:

1) All Price Points – sales especially

2) All editions — including audio/shorter works

3) Copies given away for free

4) All distribution venues where editions are available

5) Percentage splits/royalty

6) Cumulative totals

Continue reading to find out why at Nelson Agency.

Enter The Eye of the Sword Giveaway until the 14!