Which one is he?

I have given and received the critique that characters are confusing.

Sometimes their names are too similar. Sometimes they don't have their own feel. In one of my stories, I thought the character names were quite distinct. They looked very different on the page, but said aloud they sounded similar. After much internal struggle, I changed them.

In another story of mine two characters only shared the first letter, but people confused them. One was a very minor character and one was an important character who showed up every few chapters. How could they confuse them? Sheesh. One was a cop and one was a doctor. Isn't that enough?

Obviously not. There wasn't enough to hold an image or a feel or a lingering impression. I put in a description the first time the character arrived and left it at that. But describing his suit and the color of his eyes isn't enough to give the reader a feel for him. I need to think about characters that stay with me.

Jim Butcher's characters work for me. In the Dresden books his protagonist's sidekick is a petite blonde woman, with blue eyes and a button nose, who has multiple black belts and is a sharpshooter. I have a very clear picture of her. Dresden's reactions to her very often involve her looks. He thinks she's cute and knows she'll trounce him six ways to Sunday if he ever said so. But he thinks about it. And that reinforces the reader's image.

J.K. Rowling repeatedly mentions Snape's greasy hair. Robert Jordan has a character that pulls on her long braid when she's angry. Physical reminders of who is acting or speaking. I can see how it is done well. I just need to figure out how to do it myself.

My new favorite author - Alex Bledsoe

This time, grabbing blindly off the shelf worked well. I read Dark Jenny, the third novel in the Eddie LaCrosse series. When I picked it up, I didn't realize it was the third, and luckily it reads very well as a stand alone.

People have said he is a cross between the hard-boiled detective and classic fantasy, but I'd like to add a dollop of Terry Pratchett in there. Yes, he solves a complicated mystery. Yes, there are sword fights, magic and lots of mugs of ale. But there is also the guy who gets stoned on 'giggle weed' and strums a little ditty on his lute that just happens to fit a certain tune by the Grateful Dead...

There was plenty of anachronistic language (Hey, man). But it really didn't bother me. I liked the character. He's in the Han Solo mold, pirate with a heart of gold, or in this case, mercenary. It's a quick read, nicely written. I am going to go back and read the first two of the series.

Yay! Another wonderful author to add to my list!

The End . . no? . . Drat!

Dang my writing group!

They told me I wasn't done. And then they gave me excellent advice on what was missing, curse them. And I thought I had tied up all those loose ends.  They all agreed the resolution came much too fast.

Hmm. I have read that there needs to be a try/fail cycle repeated at least 3 times for the reader to feel satisfied. Guess that's true, because my protagonist got it on the first try and no one was satisfied.

Another point was the culmination of the internal struggle. I dealt with the overt struggle - addiction. But I forgot about the underlying struggle of him getting himself back. A reintegration of self seems to be needed. Now that's a great insight. (thanks Pat!)

So it looks like the tome may need to wait a bit while I rewrite the end of the mystery. It's important to me that it is complete and well done. Now if I could just clone myself and work on them simultaneously.

Bounty from the compost

Every year I get a present from the compost pile. One year it was potatoes, another marigolds and nasturtiums. This year it's squash. And a lovely big vine it is. I tried to corral it so I could still get to the pile. My composting area is between two large rhododendrons. But it climbed up the wire fencing and into the rhody!

 And it is charting new territory!

Wonderful!

Comments on The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N K Jemisin

This book was nominated for the 2010 Nebula Award and is a debut novel. Two things that made me want to read it.

I liked it. The characters are interesting. The setting is small and fairly simple for such a large book. But I didn't get bored with being in the same environs the whole time. It flowed well and I read it quickly.

The first chapter promise is totally fulfilled.

However, the characters' names threw me off. The protagonist is Yeine. Which in my head was yeen, not a strong name (like Harry!). Another character was Sieh, which I pronounced sigh, but I felt that wasn't right and dithered over it a couple of times. The other one that threw me was Scimina. In my head it was sky-mean-a. Again, I felt like that didn't seem right. There is a glossary at the back. I wish it came with pronunciation of the names.

I've gotten that critique myself, about names--too similar, too hard to pronounce. It's a fine line when you take someone into another world. Names can be bizarre, but I think you have to give them simpler handles for the reader to hang on to. At the very least a pronunciation guide. I am going to pay close attention to the names in my stories and make sure they aren't distracting.

All in all it's a good read and I look forward to the 2nd book in the trilogy.

Ready to start the rounds again

When I started writing for real I followed the old school recommendations of publishing a few short stories before trying to publish a novel. I submitted to Writers for The Future every quarter and made the rounds of Asimov's, Science Fiction and Fantasy and a few online magazines. It was hard work. I don't like short stories, they're too short. I made a few Honorable Mentions and a Quarter Finalist at Writer's for the Future, which felt pretty good. Every Day Fiction took 2 of my flash stories. (see links)

Then I had to admit that I really should be spending more time on the tome. That was. . .yikes. . .years sgo. I have rewritten the tome twice and turned 2 screenplays into novels and rewritten them several times.

Novel writing is so time consuming!

Don't get me wrong, I love it. But with short stories you can finish them, polish them and send them out pretty quickly. This last rewrite on my mystery novel took me a year to finish, polish and get through my critique group.

Not sure why, but the submitting bug has hit me again. I went back into Duotrope (best database ever!) and printed out some magazines to research. It's been awhile since I looked at some of those rejected stories. Maybe my new skills will help with additional polishing.

Wish me luck!

Diving in

With the whole "First chapter is a promise to the reader" concept in mind I started writing a new first chapter. I took an incident that had happened before the first version started (and is mentioned later in the story) and fleshed it out..

I know, I know, I've also read that you should start the story as close to the end as possible. But this really worked. That incident had the potential to have a few foreshadowings built in and when I did that it also fell right in with the themes in the story. I love it when things dovetail like that. Now it feels like a really good promise to my reader. One that is true to the book.

Now what to do with my previous first chapter? It still has some important information in it, but it doesn't have the same tone as the new piece. It makes an OK chapter 2. I'm ignoring it for right now. It needs to be re-written, but I'm not sure, yet, what it needs. I'll let it sit for a few days, then read it aloud.

I remembered a few scenes from the first version that I jettisoned in the 2nd version and wanted to go back and find them. Then I nearly had a heart attack because I thought the only copy I had was on an old set of floppy disks. Luckily, I had transferred them over to CDs at some point. Whew! This story has been around a long time.

And I have learned the hard way to save my revisions as new docs instead of constantly writing over the same one. Sometimes it's good to go back and see how a scene was originally written. The last tweak I did dropped out a lot of subplots that I now may want to use.

Now - off to write!