By Lisa M Cronkhite

Are you one of those people that can’t stand waiting in lines at the grocery store? Anxious to get a phone call or email? Especially from and agent or editor? [note from Julia - HELL YES! ] Well, I am that type of person too. Learning to be patient is one of my weakest attributes in life.

I first started writing poetry years ago. Then when I finally showed someone, they liked it so much, they thought I should send it somewhere. So I thought, well, why not? No one told me I would wait up to a year to hear back. But when I first got a response, it became addictive. And when I got my first acceptance, I was hooked.

But the process of waiting is a long one in this industry, and it’s very difficult for some, if not many. The ways that I cope to try to relax and wait, is to start on something new. Keep writing. Keep exercising your right to write! And enjoy the freedom of having a pen and paper handy. Because you can escape anywhere in writing. And it helps pass the time too while you’re waiting! Plus you will build not only your writing skills, you will have more to submit.

Also give yourself room to breathe and enjoy life. Open your mind to new things and new hobbies. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket (cliché as it is) but still. It is always good to have something else in the wings.

If you want this to be your life career, then you’ll need all the patience you can get. Keep your options open at all times. And play the field in writing, find your niche. It took me several years to figure out my voice, from poetry to children’s stories to young adult novels. So what are you waiting for? Don’t wait, write now. And then when those emails do come, it will much more worth the wait.

Bio:

Lisa has been writing for the past seven years and has published work in various print and online magazines such as The Storyteller, Poetry Salzburg Review, Triggerfish Critical Review, Ascent Aspirations, and many more. After taking a two-year writer’s course at the Institute of Children’s Literature, based in Connecticut, Lisa has received a certificate and six college credits.

Lisa’s latest release, Dreaming a Reality is out today!

You can find out more here

Seleste deLaney—Promo Rookie

When Julia first asked me to write a post on promotion, my first thought was “Oh, I so don’t think you want me doing that.” After all, I’m not someone who’s been around for years—my first story was just published in August. After I thought about it for a minute though, I realized I had to start somewhere too. You see, promo is something that every author, no matter how big or small, faces. Sure, you can throw your book out there and hope someone picks it up, but with all the stories available, the odds of a random reader finding yours with that method…not so good.

Publishers (big or small) want books to succeed, but some of them quite simply don’t have the kind of financial backing for big promotional pushes of NYC publishing. What that means is a lot of the promo is left up to the author. Now, if you’re lucky, your publisher is doing some work in the background that you don’t know about. I had one put a two-page ad in Romantic Times magazine (my book was one of eight featured). Another makes sure that every release is available on NetGalley (which is a huge site for online reviewers). To put it simply, if you’re lucky, they’re doing something.

But the author needs to work too. For my first two releases, the vast majority of reviews I received were ones I asked for. I stalked the internet and twitter looking for reviewers I thought might be interested and hitting them up. I also asked friends who happen to be reviewers as well. The absolute most important things to remember when asking for reviews are to be polite and accept it if they say no. There are a million reasons for a no, and that includes a no after they say they’ll read it. If your story doesn’t grab them, they have every right to set it down.

To go with the reviews though, you want potential readers to have the opportunity to get to know you as a person. That means working the guest blog and interview angles. Again, for your first time out, you might have to ask for those spots—be polite and accept it if the answer is no (Are you sensing the trend here? Good.). If you land a spot though, do your damnedest to make sure you get things in on time. I will admit, I’ve been a little late to the game more than once, but I don’t think I’ve ever missed turning something I promised in.

These are the most important lessons I’ve learned about promo over the last several months:
1) Be as professional as you can. I’m a laid back person most of the time, but I try to put on my game face every time I promo.
2) Keep a good calendar. Better yet, keep a couple, and make sure they’re updated regularly. (An example of one of my mess-ups, I somehow missed Julia and I setting a date and had to re-schedule. Glad she was understanding.)
3) Be willing to step outside your comfort zone—variety is the spice of life and all that. I hate, hate, hate being on camera, but I spent money to have an author media kit (photos and video) made this year. I went on to do not one, but two video blogs over the holidays (when I was sick no less), and I have another one planned for April.
4) Be willing to spend money for promo, but be wise about it. There are a lot of options for promotion out there, and it’s easy to spend a lot of cash.
5) Learn from your mistakes but don’t regret them. If a certain type of promo doesn’t work for you, don’t do it again, but look at it as a learning experience.
6) Above all, try to have fun with it.

Promo isn’t easy. It’s a lot of work, and in the end, it takes a certain amount of faith to believe that it’s going to pay off. But as authors, we’ve weathered the storm of rejections, revisions, delayed releases, and all sorts of other things—we kind of live by faith.

Seleste deLaney is not a promo queen. She is however an author. You can find her newest release Badlands at Carina Press and other online retailers. In addition, you can find her personally on her blog, Facebook, and twitter.

By Alex Beecroft

Like most new writers, when I signed the contract on my first book, I had very fixed ideas of what the writing life would involve. These involved a great deal of solitude, long walks in empty parks and sitting at my word processor in a lovely little attic garret with the sun streaming in through the windows.
Occasionally – I dared to think – I might get a fan letter, or be asked to attend a book signing. But for the rest of the time I would be alone with my books and my fictional worlds, free to write all day and be paid for it.

That dream did not long survive the reality. These days it seems that a writer is expected to write 5,000 words in an hour before breakfast, and then spend the rest of the day on the internet, blogging, tweeting, Facebooking, answering emails, attending Yahoo chats, being interviewed by other writers, interviewing other writers, running contests, promoting, advertising, networking, being seen in the right places, saying the right things to the right people about the issues of the day, while being gracious, professional, happy, encouraging and inspirational to others.
If you’re an extrovert and you are energized and enthused by talking to other people, then this may not seem so bad. But you’re a writer, right? And writing is pretty much a career that self-selects for people who love to spend the majority of their time alone with a piece of paper and their inner voices.
So what can you do to prevent yourself from plunging into all of this, swimming frantically for a while and then going down, overwhelmed by the fact that a writer’s life has very little to do with writing? Here are my very hard won tips:
1. Writing time must come first.
If you have one free hour a day and it’s a choice between spending it on social media or spending it on writing, write. You are not a writer unless you write, and a new book will promote your work better than any amount of blogging could.
2. Only follow blogs that inspire you.
Many people love a bit of conflict and controversy, and there are plenty of blogs which will provide it for them. But if you are unsettled by conflict and find it stops you from writing, you are allowed simply not to look. Don’t waste your limited time and energy on things that prevent you from writing.
3. Do not get involved with flamewars/wank on the internet.
Every so often a massive controversy will appear to shake the roots of your genre, and everyone you know will be up in arms about it on one side or the other. Dealing with this will suck up your writing time and your energy. So don’t deal with it. Avoid the controversy and unplug the internet until it’s all over. You don’t have to have an opinion (or at least, you are not obliged to express your opinion) on every contentious topic out there. If you actually want to, and you have the spoons to deal with the subsequent conversation/rant, of course, then have at it.
4. Make the most of your blogging time.
Readers will be looking to find out about your books, so you need at least a basic website. Publishers are looking for you to have some internet presence too, so you probably can’t get completely out of blogging. However, it’s not too difficult to update your blog once a week and have that update fed automatically to other social media outlets such as Twitter/Facebook using nifty software like Ping.press or Wordbooker. A once a week post to prove you’re still alive and working should be enough as long as you’re still writing and publishing new books.

5. Look after your psychological health.
If reading about other people’s successes gets you down, don’t read about it. If you get a bad review, don’t advertise it by talking about it. There is a massive pressure to be out there and available all the time, but you must look after yourself first, or you won’t be any good to anyone. Give yourself permission to unplug and go for a walk, or read, or have a calming bath, or finish your chapter. You cannot be a writer unless you write. So – first and foremost, last and hindmost – you must protect the sometimes fragile thing that gives you your ability to write. Everything else takes second place to that.
~

Alex Beecroft writes full blooded vintage fiction with a slice of lime, and can be found at her website, on livejournal, or on Twitter @Alex_Beecroft

By Sara Townsend

Writing is a lifelong learning process. But, much like driving, the more confident you become in your skills, the easier it is to unconsciously fall into bad habits. And sometimes you are completely unaware of these bad habits until you have an editor gnashing his or her teeth over your manuscript.

Here I present a few things I learned along the way that I try to heed, to prevent my editor feeling the urge to bash me over the head with my own manuscript.

Show, Don’t Tell
Pretty simple, this. Writing “he slammed the book down on the table” says the same thing as “he was angry” but in a much more expressive way.

Avoiding The Word “Said”
I remember my English teacher telling me to always find another word to use than “said.” “Said” was boring. The truth is, though, one can never over-use the word “said”. If you have characters who gush, assert, snap, growl or worse, ejaculate, their words, it takes the reader out of the story pretty quickly. The same can be said for too many adverbs after the word “said”. ‘He said quickly’, ‘she said angrily,’ ‘he said brightly’, and so on. This relates back to the first point – taking more care over what’s actually being said will transmit very clearly the emotions behind the dialogue.

Dialogue Tags
Relating to the last point, something that really bugs my editor is a piece of dialogue that’s full of “he said/she said”. If you have two characters carrying on a conversation, it’s not always necessary to point out who’s speaking, and you can make it clear by clarifying an action. So for instance:

He put the mug down on the table. “Here’s your tea.”
She picked it up. “Thanks.”’

You don’t need dialogue tags at all here, because it’s perfectly clear who’s saying what.

Of course, you can take this too far the other way. Kathy Reichs is one of my favourite authors, but she has a habit of writing four pages of dialogue with no speech tags at all, to the point I have to go back to the beginning of the chapter and start counting to work out who’s saying what.

Head Hopping
An easy trap to fall into when you’re writing in third person is to go blithely hopping from one character’s POV to another. You can’t have, for instance: Mary walked into the room, aware of John’s eyes on her. He didn’t like the dress she was wearing; it made her look dowdy.

The first sentence is Mary’s POV, the second is John’s. But you could say: Mary walked into the room, aware of John’s eyes on her. She knew he didn’t like her wearing that dress. Which keeps us in Mary’s POV.

I see this far more often than I should in published novels, but I was guilty of it myself in my first published novel. Fortunately for me, my editor picked it up. I try very hard not to do it again.

All of these sins I’d been made aware of before I got to editor stage, yet still I was guilty of them all when my editor came to work on my manuscript. I try very hard now to keep these lessons in mind when I re-write. Can I lose some of these dialogue tags? Am I straying from this character’s POV? Do I really need an adverb here? Am I ‘telling’? How can I ‘show’ instead?

It’s best to be aware of these habits early on, and get them out of your system before you even have an editor. The more good habits you hone as a writer, the happier your editor will be. And a happy editor is a Very Good Thing.

Sara-Jayne Townsend is a UK-based writer of crime and horror. She was born in Cheshire in 1969, but spent most of the 1980s living in Canada after her family emigrated there. She now lives in Surrey with two cats and her husband Chris. She co-founded the T Party Writers’ Group in 1994, and remains Chair Person.

She decided she was going to be a published novelist when she was 10 years old and finished her first novel a year later. It took 30 years of submitting, however, to fulfil that dream. Her first novel, SUFFER THE CHILDREN, was published as an e-book by Lyrical Press, Inc. in 2010 (available here).

Her next book, DEATH SCENE, is the first in a series about amateur sleuth and Canadian actress Shara Summers, and will be released as an e-book by Lyrical Press, Inc. later this year.

You can learn more about Sara and her writing at her website at or her blog

So, you want to write. Huzzah! Many people want to write /think they have a novel in them. Many of those won’t get past the first chapter, or if they do, will never finish. If you want to, if you realise that whatever your preconceptions, writing is not easy, then here are a few tips for starters.

Firstly, disabuse yourself of the notion here is the One True Way to write a novel, the Formula that means it will be the next Harry Potter and you’ll be in the jacuzzi with a million pounds. There is not a formula. There is also no one way…which is good. There are as many ways of writing a novel as there are writers – possibly more, because it isn’t the same for each novel.

The two extremes are this:

Outline the heck out of it so you know what happens in each paragraph before you you write it

or

Have no freaking idea what the book is about until it’s there on the paper.

Neither are bad. Neither are good, if they don’t work for you. Most writers fall somewhere in between. I’m waaaay more of a pantser myself (I like to have a pithy line of dialogue in mind for near the end, and work towards that, seat of the pants style) Other than that, I have a character in mind, and just see what happens. Weirdness, quite often.

There is a reason for this – I’m the sort of writer where the act of writing makes the ideas and connections flow. So, I might write an outline and then all these little ideas pop up as I write and…5k words later, the outline bears no resemblance to what I’m writing. And the little ‘ideas as I write’ are almost always the best bit. But that’s me. Your mileage may vary. Find/think/discover what works for you. There is no one right way. There IS the way that gets the book written for you.

Very many writers swear by working out what needs to happen before they write though (I hope to have a ‘how to…outline’ later in the series) so if that sounds like you, go for it. Just be aware that it’s very easy to labour over the outline (plus worldbuilding if you’re writing fantasy) and then never get round to writing the book. Worldbuilding/outlining can be great, but not if you do it at the expense of actually writing the thing. Sounds obvious, but a lot of would-be writers get caught in the trap.

Okay, so we’re getting there. You’ve started writing. You look at it, you think either one of two things (get used to it, writers sway between these two as an occupational hazard) ‘It’s pants’ and ‘It’s like the best novel that has EVER BEEN WRITTEN! I AM A GENIUS’

If you think it’s crap…take heart. Your first draft is not supposed to be perfect. That is what editing/rewrites are for. First get it written, then get it right.

If you think it’s 100% genius..actually when you’re starting out, that’s more of an issue. Really. No book is 100% genius. But you’re so damn pleased you got the book out of you, onto the page, it’s awesome, it’s fab, it’s the best thing since sliced bread. Yes. I have been there.

It almost certainly isn’t. Now, you might be the genius that proves the rule. But let’s face it, you probably aren’t. But there is a solution. It’s called ‘learning to take constructive criticism’. It will be vital. Really. If someone says ‘this is confusing’ or ‘the characters feel flat’ or whatever, you don’t have to listen to them. They might be the exception, or rubbish writers themselves or…. But if you end up ignoring them you should always consider what they said.

Now.

Rules. You will see, if you surf re writing, a lot of things posited as ‘rules’. Don’t start with the weather, or the MC (main character) waking up or dialogue..any number of things.

They are not rules. No, the rules in writing pertain to concrete things like grammar and punctuation and the one, singular rule that you should always adhere to: Always entertain the reader. Which is subjective anyway, and therefore, not really a rule. So, do it, As long as it worksAnd not just for you, for the people you ask to read it. Because you will ask people to read it.

So, you want to write.

Three things you need to do, if you want to be a writer who isn’t just someone who talks about writing.

Read widely, and analyse what you read (how did they make me feel that? How did they go from one scene to the next? Why does this plot work and that one not? Read with writing in mind)

Write often – it’s way, waay too easy to only write when the muse is upon you. But if you write often (every day, even if a little) then the muse will come find you and ask you to party. With tequila. Writing begets writing. Really. Be aware it can also be addictive.

But the biggest, most important thing you can do (other than actually put words in) is this

HAVE FUN!

Resources for beginning writers

Grammar for Dummies (US or UK edition) in any good bookshop or online.
Self Editing for Fiction writers < how to clean up your prose and a general guide to Stuff What Works.
Absolute Write – the number one resource for writers on the web. Ask any damn daft question, and you’ll have experienced writers help you out.