Second Version of Cover Art

OK, I hate to brag, but since I paid $64K (My daughter is in design school at NCState) for this picture, I just can't help myself. This is her latest version of the cover for my book PRECIPICE OF TERROR.

She's moving my name to the top (and dropping the word 'by'), and removing 'The' from the title and increasing the size of the title font, and making it a little easier to read (hard to place text over red/white background).

So I'm biased, but I love this cover. Note christian and islamic symbols, blood, and hot chick. What more could you want?! :)

Cover For My First E-book

This is the cover my daughter created for my first ebook, titled PRECIPICE OF TERROR. I like the artwork but she's redoing the text to be a white serif font that will overlay the flag and shadows (no white background) and will be larger, but take up only a third of the cover.

Sorry for the large size, 373k.

Query Letters Part Deux

So I've started the outline for the second book of my urban fantasy series featuring Darcy & Aislinn. I'm going to make it stand alone and pitch it to literary agents.

For this book I've decided to do a basic outline and then I'm going to write my query letter. Only after I've written a kick-ass query letter will I actually start writing the novel. That may sound backwards, but honestly the damned query letter is harder to write than the novel. :)

I'll post my query letter here (the main part) once I've written it.

The Dreaded Rewrite

This may ramble a bit so feel free to stop reading ---> here <---

Based on some helpful comments from my critique group (one person said my writing style and my protagonist were superior, condescending, and too snarky) I decided to do a fourth revision of my current novel.

First I decided to change the title. The old title ASH, OAK, AND IRON was topical but evoked iron men and wooden ship, rather than elves and druids. So I finally surrendered and renamed it The THREE-FOLD DEATH. This just sounds scarier and more evocative to me.

My wife, by the way, disagrees strongly with my critique group. She liked my snarky writing style. The book is first person POV, and the main protagonist is snarky, but I sided with my critique group and kept the protag snarky, but the writing style less so.

So... where was I? Oh yea. Somebody stated that my protag was too unflappable. He's seventeen. He gets stabbed, shot, cursed, and people say mean things to him. And when somebody asked me his motivation for helping the cute elf girl (co-protag), my response was, um, he wants to shag her? Yeah, works for me, but other people might find him a bit shallow. :)

So I tried to shoe-horn in some motivation for him (other than wanting to get some sweet elf love). I added a new chapter two, modified chapters three through six and... it just didn't work. I spent days trying to fix things to no avail.

Then I woke up one morning with the solution to my problem. Enter THE SLASHER (AKA me). I was  in love with my early chapters. There was some (IMHO) quality description and exposition, some good dialog and my ego was fully invested into these chapters. But on this morning I woke up knowing that I had to re-outline the novel and throw away significant early portions.

My outline flew together magically in just a few hours. I saved off the old chapters and did heavy edits on them, throwing some away altogether. I got lucky. I ended up rewriting the first nine chapters. Once I hit chapter ten, my old scenes worked and I ended up making minor changes throughout the rest of the work--a matter of a few hours work.

As a fairly new author (this is my second full length novel), I learned a few valuable lessons during this effort. So, lessons:

1. Sometimes for the good of the work, beautiful scenes and awesome dialog have to be tossed.  I found myself trying to save my creations, but I eventually asked myself why I was refusing to let them die.  The answer turned out to be ego.  Once I realized that fact, I was able to cut them loose. Sounds obvious? Sure. Except when it's your scenes and clever words being tossed.
   
2. There comes a point (maybe) when you're working revision 1.752 and there are still MINOR problems with plot and scenes, but you're sick to death of rewrites (damn it!) Take a few days or a week off and then come back and fix the problems. You won't be happy with the final product if you don't. I personally just can't submit a novel with known plot holes or problems.
   
3. Some people may be able to just lay down 70k words in a stream of conscious orgasm, but I have to lay out my scenes, and then lay out the timeline for each scene, and then, and only then, can I write my scenes.

Ah well, that's just me. :)

The Good Guys Lose

So I have an idea for a story, but in it the good guys (humans) lose to the bad guys (aliens).  The loss doesn't involve extinction or having our planet blown up, but we end up being little better than dirt between the cracks of the intergalactic society.

And I'm wondering who would want to read a book, even if it's interesting, that ends up with humanity basically losing the big battle.  We're the plucky guys who always figure out how to beat the 10,000 year old intergalactic society and bend them to our will, not the losers.  At least that's how every Sci-fi book I've ever read does it.

That's so cliche though.  I could do the story from the POV of an alien, but I think people wouldn't like it.  I could do it as a short story or novella and sort of not mention that the people getting their butts kicked are us until the end.  Oh well.

Writing Synops-odes (plural of synopsis)

I've been reading web sites on how to write a synopsis.  I've found some helpful hints.  My first synopsis for my new novel ASH, OAK AND IRON (since renamed to The Threefold Death) was a pure data dump.  It sucked.  I wrote a second version that was a briefer and less sucky version of my 30,000 word synopsis (I kid, but not by much).

Then I found a helpful hint on the intertubes that changed my approach to synopsis writing.  The agent said 'write your synopsis as if you are summarizing your novel to a 12 year old child'.  So I did that. The third version of my synopsis focuses on three characters and only the major events of my novel.  It was actually easier to write than my first two versions because I de-invested (to hell with side-kicks) and just tried to get the main points of my novel across to the oh-so well read and witty twelve year old literary agent.

Now my synopsis is kid friendly. Sure there's sword play, sex, murder, discussion of second base and other subjects that I might not want to discuss with my twelve year old... but you get the point.

I have focused with laser-like precision on my reading audience--twelve year old literary agents with 6th-grade reading levels. Note: consider this an ego-driven snipe at those agents who are currently--or who will soon be--tossing my brilliantly written query letter into their circular filing cabinet!

Vengeance is mine!

Um, so to restate : My initial thought of writing two sentences (approximately) per chapter was a recipe for instant rejection IMHO. My synopsis is now a five page summary of the major events of my novel, enough information but not a data dump.

First Post

So, I'm finally taking this writing thing seriously.  In the last year I've written two books, have two more outlined, and am enjoying myself immensely.

Now it's time to try and find a literary agent.

Yea, writing is the easy part.  The hard part is writing query letters to agents.  I have about three paragraphs to catch some stranger's interest, that and the first 500 words of my novel.  It's akin to showing someone my left eye and asking them to hire me to be a male model.

Oh joy. :)