If you are stuck and having difficulty figuring out what a new character should look like, just go to Google images and type in the character’s name. Describe one of the people that comes up. Not only will that give you an idea for what the character might look like, but it will help you avoid picking the name of a minor celebrity for your characters.
Category: writing
-
First Priest to Contact Intelligent Life
I recently read a book by Michael Z. Williamson called “Contact with Chaos.” It is a story of first contact, one in which we find them. It has a couple of interesting technology wrinkles, and his usual attention to military detail. However, that’s not what I’m going to write about. Instead I want to focus on a minor character named Fr. Dunn. He is one of a large number of people who want to greet the new intelligent life. The others are all opportunists, or with some other selfish agenda. Fr. Dunn, by contrast, is poised, respectful, intelligent, and offers to assist using his medical knowledge when the situation calls for it.
The intelligent species finds his faith puzzling, as does the protagonist (and perhaps the author himself), but everyone respects him. Very often, I find, authors of science fiction and fantasy take pains to mock or insult the Christian (or some other) faith. In doing so, they truncate their sales and shrink their market. In contract, author’s like Frank Herbert succeed, in part, of their positive portrayal of other groups. Dune both exalts and mystifies Arab culture and is beautifully written. When authors take the time to present opposing points of view in a positive light, they create depth. The reader isn’t told what to think, but is more able to draw his/her own conclusions. -
Congregation for the Extirpation of Paranormal Menaces (CEPM)
The best sort of April Fool’s story is one that starts out plausible but weird, then gets progressively stranger until you realize it’s funny and laugh. If the reader passes the story on, believing it to be real, then the joke isn’t fun any more. If the news is too personal or emotionally charged, it’s not fun either. (It’s not funny to fake your death, pretend your pregnant, married, etc.) The personal aspect and emotional impact take the fun out of it. That’s why I really loved this post from Jimmy Akin. He’s a very scholarly Catholic writer who takes great pains to clarify matters of faith, communications from the Vatican, etc. In his April Fool’s piece he creates a masterful narrative that’s as entertaining (I think) as many works of urban fantasy. I started out believing he was serious. About halfway through I realized something was wrong, and maybe a few paragraphs later asked myself, “Wait a minute, what day is this?”
-
On Becoming a vampire without being bitten
A recent psychological study titled “Becoming a vampire without being bitten: A new study shows that reading expands our self-concepts” says that reading about becoming a vampire, or Harry Potter’s school of wizarding, helps us to psychologically feel we are part of a community and satisfies a need for belonging. While I’m not sure I agree with the description of the study’s methods, I find that the thesis resonates with me. Part of the need for belonging (which they don’t state) is belonging in a special group and ties to magic and the supernatural do that quite well. I think when we read we want to see ourselves simultaneously as belonging and set apart. We want to be the chosen people. Christianity is a religion that focuses on literacy, and the telling of Christ’s story. In that story we learn that Christians become “spiritual Jews” by believing in him. We can’t grow fangs, and we can’t learn to cast spells–but we can learn to be better people, to practice love, to be less selfish, to share what we have with others. We can become a part of the chosen people by making ourselves better, and thereby satisfy our spiritual longings in a way that Edward Cullen can’t match.
-
Time Travel and China
The Chinese don’t want stories with time travel that are disrespectful of China’s past. Depending on your definition of disrespectful and of time travel, this could be bad for a book I’m working on. You tell me, is making Lao Tzu an alien disrespectful? Is using cryogenics “time-travel?”
-
The Jambalaya Writer’s Conference
The Jambala Writer’s conference was 3/26/2011. This conference is unique in that it offers agent pitch sessions and it only cost $30. They were supposed to have an editor as well, but unfortunately the editor canceled.
Fiction contest: Yours truly got 3rd place. Agent Pitch Session: Turns out there was a typo. The agent’s name was Cherry Wiener. She told me she might look at Lady and the Necromancer if I trim it down to within 95k and 100k words. She told me to take my time (i.e. about 3 months). Other stuff: They had a critique of first pages of various manuscripts at the end. Mine was not in that group, but it was interesting to notice how almost every manuscript had description and backstory as the opening. Nothing actually happening for a few paragraphs. No questions being raised in the reader’s mind. A surprising number of opening paragraphs mention blood. Workshops: We participated in two workshops. Each broke into small groups and started with an element for the beginning of the story. The first was a woman leaving her house in the middle of the night. The second was someone tripping over a body. It struck me that each of these present the reader with a puzzle (why is the woman leaving? who’s body was lying on the floor and how did it get there?). -
A Green Belt in Paranormal
I’m always interested in the stories of how people go from unpublished to published. Here’s a self-published success story.
The real problem I have with this process, as well as submitting to agents or editors, is that failure does not usually offer any insight into what to do better. If we can design a system where people can learn from their mistakes maybe literature as a whole will improve.
I like to imagine a publisher that offers a continuous writing contest in which anyone can sign up to be an editor or writer, and at the end of each round of competition, the winning books are published and sold.
Writers and editors each get royalties from sales, both authors and editors have a ranking. Authors gain rank by getting good scores from editors. Editors gain rank by identifying stores that are widely liked, and by giving feedback that authors consider useful. That way people can say, “I’m still not published, but I have a green belt in paranormal now.”
-
How Long Should a Query Letter be?
If you’ve finished your novel and are on to figuring out how long your query letter should be, I believe I have a scientific answer!
Using the data from the “Successful Queries” column , I have found that successful queries are 239 words on average with a standard deviation of around 91 words (based on 41 examples).
While there’s more to success than word count, the winners of the query battle seem to be between 240 and 420 words.
-
Cult of the Red Tears is Finished!
“Cult of the Red Tears” is finished! This is the sequel to my book “Battle for the Sphere.” I began writing it on Dec 11 2008. Today, Dec 30, 2009 it is ready for reviews.
-
Cult of the Red Tears
I began working on my rough draft of my novel “Cult of the Red Tears” in December. I have been struggling to get to the end, working every spare moment I could find. Yesterday afternoon I began to realize that I have already written way past what should have been the ending. This morning I hunted through the text for the right spot and wrote, “End Book One of the Viztrel Unity War.”
So when I say “rough draft” I mean that it reads like it was translated from the original ancient Islandic by a non-native speaker (that’s a description I heard at Armadillocon of what a rough draft should read like). Many scenes are out of order, many scenes need to be added, but the general shape of the book is there, lurking in the miasma of words.