NaNoWriMo: Brief Tip Number One: The More You Write, the More You Write

Posted by Joanne Huspek

Today is November 1, and I am once again participating in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month).

I find it helpful to concentrate on the novel during November, so I won’t post much to the blog. However, I plan on the occasional little blurb regarding writing in general and writing during NaNo.

First of all, the no-brainer tip: The more you write, the more you write.

What does this mean? Simply put, if you manage to carve out a little time each day, you will eventually make a habit of writing. It doesn’t matter if the time is ten minutes or ten hours, any effort toward your art is a positive one.

I know, it seems incredibly simple. But there is no magic potion you can take, or book you could read, or class you can attend to increase your words per day. (Barring Dr. Wicked. It’s a program that helps.) The only thing writers can do is write. The more you write, the more you’re willing to write. Also, the more the creative juices flow.

If you as a writer make writing like breathing, i.e. a necessary function, the better your writing will be. You’ll write more because you want to.

(This probably seems like jibberish. Please excuse me.)

For those who have no time, take my word for it. Ten minutes a day.

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Critique and Rejection

Posted by Joanne Huspek

How apropos that this article from Query Tracker landed in my email inbox today. What do they call it? Kismet?

A couple of days ago, I received a critique on the YA story I’ve been working on forever. I had begged my Editor for Life for said constructive critique, as I had never written anything in the genre. (Usually, Mr. ED provides me with written direction as to development and an opinion on whether the story will fly, but not this time. This time, he and his fellow editor oohed and aahed and implored me to hurry up and make the changes and submit the novel to an agent, post haste.) But since I insisted, he passed my draft to a reviewer.

When the review came back, he prefaced the email by telling me a few things. One, he doesn’t agree with the assessment. Two, Nameless Reviewer reamed me a new “b***hole,” or two.

Still, I’m no shrinking violet. I encourage critique, especially if it is constructive. Plus, I asked for it.

And the review? Scathing doesn’t quite describe what I read.

And guess what? I survived it.

Nameless Reviewer brought up several good points. One being that my technology was dated. Yes, yes it is. I started writing this novel in 2008. That’s four long years ago. I rushed to complete it because I wanted to finally finish it. It was the one piece of work that I already had 50K worth of words and was closest to finishing.

There were other technical issues that I totally agreed with. She reviewed my first draft. My first drafts are typically horrible, if not downright obnoxious. Especially true of a first draft that took me four years to finish. And I tried too hard. When I wrote the beginning, I had ‘dumbed’ down my main character. Teenagers these days are rather savvy and more sophisticated than what my character exhibited in the first few pages of my book.

However, I have to disagree with her on the rest of it. She thought it was an unbelievable tale and that my character was unlikeable. I am in contact with 14 to 18 year olds all day long. I see what’s going on. My teenage character is rather spoiled and not very likeable. I wanted to portray her as such in the beginning, because in the end she finds her better self.

Plus I based the character and her antics on my Real Life daughter and her friends. My Real Life daughter can come off as 1. spoiled, 2. bitchy, and 3. not very likeable. But my Real Life daughter can be very compassionate, is fun, smart, and talented.

Why do I blather on about this?

Well, for one thing, I’ve sent out queries and I’ve been rejected. I’ve submitted my work for various contests and have had mixed results. Some people like what I write, and some people don’t. Similarly, I feel the same way about some novels. There are too many books out there, and I can’t expect to like every one, or to have everyone like my work.

I like what Jillian Medoff said about writing as an art. It is an art. Like any artist, writers build their body of work. They grow and learn new concepts; they build a gallery of pieces that (hopefully) show a positive progression of improvement. I’m thinking of a gentleman I know from the Michigan Silversmith Guild, who is holding his 50 year retrospective in Kalamazoo. He was not proficient at metals when he was a college student, but what he creates now is nothing short of stunning and amazing.

Critique is not meant to tear down, but to point out various avenues not apparent to the artist. This is my take. Rejection can only be felt by the beholder, not by the artist. If you feel torn down and rejected, it might be time to start working in earnest.

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What to Do When You’re Asked to Review but You Just Can’t

Posted by Joanne Huspek

Life is good. Not only do I write, but I also read. And not only do I read [a lot], but I write reviews, especially if the story is a particularly moving one. Since I’m kinda-sorta known for such things, my email inbox is full of requests to read and review. In addition, I’m on some publicist’s mailing list at Simon and Schuster, and I get free books in the mail.

I know. It’s like Christmas every day.

Unlike bona fide book bloggers, I don’t review everything I read. Biggest reason? I can’t read everything; there’s just not enough time in the day or days in a week. My To Read pile is more like a To Read mountain – Mt. Everest sized. It’s not just the requests I’m sent; every once in a while I’d like to read something that I picked out.

I will not write a bad review, even if the book deserves it. No matter how unsavory the material, I know that someone spent a lot of time and energy in writing. You can learn something from even a bad book.

My time is limited because I also have these things to write… that’s what takes up the lion’s share of what little free time I can scrape up. I feel panic and horror if I can’t write on a regular basis. Sometimes I have too many things on the Real Life agenda, sometimes I’m sick, sometimes it just doesn’t work out, but either way, a churning in the pit of my stomach reminds me that I must continue on.

As it happens, every once in a while I come across a book I just can’t get into. One that sticks out in my mind and that I will mention here only because the author isn’t going to suffer any ill effects by my opinion is 50 Shades of Gray. I downloaded the trilogy months ago, and I still can’t get through it. Sometimes I’ll be sitting in a doctor’s office, open the Kindle app on my iPhone and take a peek. I can absorb about a screen’s worth of words before I have to put it away.

Why, you might ask? Especially since the rest of the world seems enthralled with this epic tome of sex, bondage, and perversion?

I guess my tastes in books run counter to the masses, just as my taste in movies, food, and TV shows. Plainly put, I just can’t get into some books. If I’m not hooked in the first couple of chapters, you lose me.

Currently, I have a couple of requests on Kindle and a couple of physical books I purchased that are similarly problematic. With a purchased book, you can give it away or relegate it to the base of your To Read mountain, and hopefully get to it sometime after retirement and shortly before death. You never have to face the author.

But when someone emails you because you’ve reviewed their friend’s book and they want a return favor, or you have a personal tie to an author, it’s different. It’s especially difficult if you know the person, either well or casually. I know my book, Virtually Yours, isn’t perfect, but I’m not touting it as the next great American novel. It’s a fluffy, fun beach read. I’ve received mixed reviews on it, but I figured bad reviews into my calculations when self-publishing — the format is not ‘usual’ and there are a lot of characters. Some do, but many people just don’t get it.

As for my own rules, I try to be kind when reviewing. A clue or two for writers: when a book is fraught with grammatical errors, when the characters are unlovable, or when there are multiple points of view in one scene, it’s difficult for me to process your work, much less enjoy it, much less review it.

In my case, if you don’t see a review, cherish the fact that silence is golden.

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Something Of an Update

Posted by Joanne Huspek

My followers (and the other people who accidentally happen upon this page), you’d be so proud of me. I actually spent the last two weeks writing every chance that I got.

Yup, I finished the first draft of Virtually Yours Forever, and then moved quickly to my edit of Finding Cadence. I know I shouldn’t say this, because as soon as I do, I’ll be beset by some calamity where I’ve lost my hands/eyesight/will to live/[insert other disaster here] and therefore my momentum and mojo, but this week I actually feel like a writer.

Not a mother, or a business owner, or a homemaker, but an honest to goodness writer.

Sure I’m those other things too, but lately writing has come to the forefront of my daily activities. I’ve limited my play time on Facebook and Twitter. I can’t afford to lounge around, so I’ve been filling my days with words. I’m thinking it’s a good thing. Of course, it could be because I have so many projects on the burner, I’m feeling guilty about most of them being incomplete.

Also accomplished: READING. I’ve read the first two Hunger Games books and have started the third, read the book that came with my latest blog tour, and finished another from a fellow writer I met at the San Francisco Writers Conference years ago. Good stuff.

My house is a total disaster and my garden needs to be winterized – fast, since winter is quickly approaching – and the laundry looks like it’s going to take all weekend to finish, yet I still feel very satisfied with my pace. It helps to have people (fellow writers, family, my editor) poking me with a stick. I’m proud to say that these last two weeks I’ve been self-starting.

Perhaps I’ve reached my personal turning point.

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BLOG TOUR: The Book of Paul by Richard Long

Posted by Joanne Huspek

I am happy to be a host in the Novel Publicity whirlwind blog tour this week, for The Book of Paul by Richard Long.

I ordinarily do not read supernatural thrillers, but I can’t put this one down. The Book of Paul is gritty, yes, frightening, definitely, twisted, oh yeah, but also some damned good reading. (I’m only about halfway through, so I can’t comment any further, but I’ll be sure to update this post when I do finish.) Richard Long’s prose grabs you by the throat (in my case, via my iPhone) and drags you into his world. It’s a world that is so out of the mainstream, yet I can’t seem to extricate myself from it.

Please enjoy this excerpt from The Book of Paul, a nail-biting supernatural thriller by Richard Long. Then read on to learn how you can win huge prizes as part of this blog tour, including a Kindle Fire, $300 in Amazon gift cards, 5 autographed copies of the book, and a look into your future through a free tarot reading performed by the author.

Monsters:  An Excerpt from The Book of Paul

by Richard Long

You tell your children not to be afraid. You tell them everything will be all right. You tell them Mommy and Daddy will always be there. You tell them lies.

Paul looked out the filthy window and watched the little girl playing in the filthier street below. Hopscotch. He didn’t think kids played hopscotch anymore. Not in this neighborhood. Hip-hopscotch, maybe.

“Hhmph! What do you think about that?”

Paul watched the little black girl toss her pebble or cigarette butt or whatever it was to square number five, then expertly hop, hop, hop her way safely to the square and back. She was dressed in a clean, fresh, red-gingham dress with matching red bows in her neatly braided pigtails. She looked so fresh and clean and happy that he wondered what she was doing on this shithole street.

The girl was playing all by herself. Hop, hop, hop. Hop, hop, hop. She was completely absorbed in her hopping and scotching and Paul was equally absorbed watching every skip and shuffle. No one walked by and only a single taxi ruffled the otherworldly calm.

Paul leaned closer, his keen ears straining to pick up the faint sound of her shiny leather shoes scraping against the grimy concrete. He focused even more intently and heard the even fainter lilt of her soft voice. Was she singing? He pressed his ear against the glass and listened. Sure enough, she was singing. Paul smiled and closed his eyes and let the sound pour into his ear like a rich, fragrant wine.

“One, two, buckle my shoe. Three, four, shut the door…”

He listened with his eyes closed. Her soft sweet voice rose higher and higher until…the singing suddenly stopped. Paul’s eyes snapped open. The girl was gone. He craned his neck quickly to the left and saw her being pulled roughly down the street. The puller was a large, light-skinned black man, tugging on her hand/arm every two seconds like he was dragging a dog by its leash. At first, he guessed that the man was her father, a commodity as rare in this part of town as a fresh-scrubbed girl playing hopscotch. Then he wondered if he wasn’t her father after all. Maybe he was one of those kinds of men, one of those monsters that would take a sweet, pure thing to a dark, dirty place and…

And do whatever a monster like that wanted to do.

Paul pressed his face against the glass and caught a last fleeting glance of the big brown man and the tiny red-checkered girl. He watched the way he yanked on her arm, how he shook his finger, how he stooped down to slap her face and finally concluded that he was indeed her one and only Daddy dear. Who else would dare to act that way in public?

“Kids!” Paul huffed. “The kids these days!”

He laughed loud enough to rattle the windows. Then his face hardened by degrees as he pictured the yanking daddy and the formerly happy girl. Hmmm, maybe he was one of those prowling monsters after all. Paul shuddered at the thought of what a man like that would do. He imagined the scene unfolding step by step, grunting as the vision became more and more precise. “Hhmph!” he snorted after a particularly gruesome imagining. “What kind of a bug could get inside your brain and make you do a thing like that?”

“Monsters! Monsters!” he shouted, rambling back into the wasteland of his labyrinthine apartments, twisting and turning through the maze of lightless hallways as if being led by a seeing-eye dog. He walked and turned and walked some more, comforted as always by the darkness. Finally, he came to a halt and pushed hard against a wall.

His hidden sanctuary opened like Ali Baba’s cave, glowing with the treasures it contained. He stepped inside and saw the figure resting (well, not exactly resting) between the flickering candles. At the sound of his footsteps, the body on the altar twitched frantically. Paul moved closer, rubbing a smooth fingertip across the wet, trembling skin and raised it to his lips. It tasted like fear. He gazed down at the man, his eyes moving slowly from his ashen face to the rusty nails holding him so firmly in place. The warm, dark blood shining on the wooden altar made him think about the red-gingham bunny again.

“Monsters,” he said, more softly this time, wishing he weren’t so busy. As much as he would enjoy it, there simply wasn’t enough time to clean up this mess, prepare for his guests and track her down. Well, not her, precisely. Her angry tugging dad. Not that Paul had any trouble killing little girls, you understand. It just wasn’t his thing. Given a choice, he would much rather kill her father. And make her watch.

As part of this special promotional extravaganza sponsored by Novel Publicity, the price of the Book of Paul eBook edition is just 99 cents this week. What’s more, by purchasing this fantastic book at an incredibly low price, you can enter to win many awesome prizes. The prizes include a Kindle Fire, $300 in Amazon gift cards, 5 autographed copies of the book, and a look into your future through a free tarot reading performed by the author.

All the info you need to win one of these amazing prizes is RIGHT HERE. Remember, winning is as easy as clicking a button or leaving a blog comment–easy to enter; easy to win!

To win the prizes:

Purchase your copy of The Book of Paul for just 99 cents.

Enter the Rafflecopter contest on Novel Publicity.

Visit today’s featured social media event.

About The Book of Paul: A cross-genre thriller that combines the brooding horror of Silence of the Lambs with the biting humor of Pulp Fiction.  Get it on Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

About the author:

Richard Long is the author of The Book of Paul and the forthcoming young-adult fantasy series The Dream Palace.  He lives in Manhattan with his wonderful wife, two amazing children and wicked black cat, Merlin. Visit Richard on his website, Twitter (@RichardLongNYC), Facebook, or Goodreads.

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A Warning To My Friends and Relatives…

Posted by Joanne Huspek

The last few weeks have found me mostly editing Virtually Yours Forever, so new story ideas aren’t exactly on the front burner – yet. However, one of the recent exercises in the Savvy Author Donald Maass workshop I’m taking has to do with brainstorming for new ideas.

It may sound easy, but not for me. I’m a pantser. My creative methods include sitting down and writing the first thing off the top of my head. After a few hundred (or thousand) words, I might have story that could take off. Or I might not. This is how I wrote Finding Cadence: I started with a stream of consciousness meme that exploded into something huge.

The Maass exercise comes at a most opportune time. This is the time of year when I gear up for NaNoWriMo. I won’t have a story this year (VY2 was an anomaly, since I had the characters AND the story). I might have a few characters, or I might have a theme. I’d like to say that I jot everything down in a notebook (neatly) but that would be a lie. A lot of times, stories reside in my head only, although now that I’m sliding into old age, taking notes is a good way to stave off the effects of pre-Alzheimer’s.

Unlike some major talents, I write what I know. I’m totally blown away by people who pen fantasy or sci-fi. I just finished The Hunger Games, and it was great! The whole time, though, I kept wondering how the author did it. I mean to come up with the futuristic world, the Games in question, the brutality? In the same way, I’m in awe of those who write historical novels. Not only do these take a lot of painstaking research, the story has to be told in such a way to make it interesting to the modern reader.

I couldn’t write fantasy or historicals. Which is why I concentrate on modern women and relationships. I guess it’s what I know best.

I know what most authors say. “Sure I write what I know, but this is fiction and not based on my life.” The disclaimer is a necessity to prevent getting sued. And yes, my work is fiction, although many times I use real settings. There is no REAL Janna Abraham or Cadence Reed or Amberly Cooper. But I’m not going to lie or sugar coat the truth; I’ve used my own life experiences and my own acquaintances to populate my books.

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day.  The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any. ~Orson Scott Card

Orson Scott Card is right. Real life is heady; the story lines are endless. Good themes weather the test of time. Potential characters number in the millions, the plot situations may be out of the ordinary. Even the most mundane person or story line can be peeled back to reveal a treasure of the human condition.

Since I’m now actively mining my life for characters and story lines, this is a warning to those who I know both intimately or mildly. Don’t be surprised if you become a star in my fiction.

Anonymously, of course.

🙂

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The Importance of Continual Learning

Posted by Joanne Huspek

Writing is a singular activity. It’s a solitary obsession. Sitting down to write a story or an article or a novel is not a team sport. The writer, like any artist, takes what I call are the little poofs of inspiration out of his mind, tempers and tests and does the fandango with it, before finally placing the art in a spot where others can see and experience.

We writers feel an inexplicable urgency to get the words out, sometimes with success, others not at all. Sometimes the work is solid, but needs a gentle, guiding hand. Other times, it needs a cattle prod and a machete.

Just because writing is singular doesn’t mean you have to do it alone. In fact, writing is such an encompassing task, I would recommend not flying solo. Since writing can be such a lonely business, it’s important to reach out for help in honing your craft. Even if you have an advanced degree in literature (I don’t), there is an importance in constantly learning.

I am not so full of myself that I believe my stories spring from my subconscious ready for an agent and a three-book deal.

It’s helpful to network with other writers. Some might even offer help by way of beta reading or critique. (Writers are busy and I wouldn’t ask; but if someone offers, I’ll probably take them up.) Even if they don’t offer personal critique, the writers I know have offered me a wealth of information on the skill of writing.

The fledgling writer should seek out classroom situations, whether traditional or not. There are always places where you can take classes, like colleges and even some community ed programs. But even if you have no time (like me) for a regular class room schedule, join a local writers group or an association where members will offer critique.

If you can’t make it to a class room, there’s a wealth of information online. Online classes offer the freedom of working at your own pace, while keeping you on a schedule that’s easy to manage. Thanks to the local president of the RWA who turned me on to the site, I joined Savvy Authors. Savvy Authors is one useful web site, featuring articles, contest leads, and classes and workshops. I’ve been in the Donald Maass’s The Breakout Novelist Workbook Workshop since the beginning of the year. I’ve had the book and the workbook for ages; it took the online class to provide the impetus to actually do the exercises. There’s plenty of critique and ideas, coming from writers from all over the globe.

In the past, I’ve also taken Jeremy Shipp’s classes online (Twitter @JeremyCShipp), and I would highly recommend taking it. So, I don’t write in his genre (mystery/fantasy/horror), but I’ve successfully applied his exercises to what I was writing, so successfully that I’ve used my exercises to spawn bits of other stories. I also enjoyed the class so much, I took it twice.

The amount of information out there is staggering. No matter where you turn for guidance, no matter which classes or workshops you take, there is always a value in education. As writers, we alone shoulder the responsibility for our growth and advancement.

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