Writing workshop -- Making Research Personal

Hello, writers! I'm presenting an online writing workshop-- Fun Facts: Making research personal.  The class will be held 9-20 September 2019. 

Williamsburg, VA

About the workshop

For authors, our writing process can become so absorbing that it steals time away from our families and friends. By inviting them to become our partners in research, we gain some of that time back through multi-tasking.

In this class, we'll discuss more efficient, personal, and fun ways to research our historical or contemporary stories by:

• improving the results returned by search engines;
• creating an inventory of the passions, experiences, and expertise of our family and friends;
• "living" the research with our loved ones as sidekicks;
• the etiquette of involving our family and friends.

This online workshop will take 6 lessons over 2 weeks and costs 20 USD.

Register by Sept 14

Choosing a copyrighted quote?

In Wishing for You, one of the main characters is terminally ill. The reader knows from chapter four that he will not survive. As he's telling the heroine about his illness, he says that he wants "to live hard, right up until the moment my body gives out."

The heroine reacts with empathy, and in the original manuscript, I had her speak a line from a poem by Dylan Thomas:"Do not go gentle into that good night." The hero responds with the poem's closing line.

Since that poem is still under copyright, I had to seek permission from the Dylan Thomas estate. They agreed to let me use it, but the cost surprised me—approximately a halfpenny per word for every book sold (in perpetuity.)

That works out to about 8% of the book's royalties (for 0.02% of the book's wordcount.) As perfect as the quote was, I decided against using it. While I appreciated the Estate's fast response and their willingness to work with me, I knew I had to find something with less cost.

Looking in the public domain

My editors and I brainstormed other poems that could work and avoid copyright restrictions. After a lot of discussion, we hit upon an amazing alternative: the final two lines of "Ulysses" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will.
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.


As much as I would've loved to use the copyrighted quote, I'm glad we kept looking. Tennyson's words were in the public domain, and I was free to use them. They were equally meaningful, perhaps even more so for my hero. And toward the end of Wishing for You, when I needed another related quote, I returned to "Ulysses"--and was able to include a longer passage:

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will.
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

- Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Dame Helen Mirren recently read this poem on The Tonight Show with Stephen Colbert. I leave you with her glorious reading of the final stanza of Ulysses.

Favorite links for writers - self-publishing a book

The production of a book (transforming a manuscript into an actual product that readers can hold in their hands or read on an electronic device) requires time, effort, patience, and perseverance. Traditional publishing houses handle the details of book production for their authors. But if you are self-publishing, then you are the publisher; you own all details.

I have self-published 7 books and learned a lot along the way. In this post, I list some helpful blogs, websites, and publishing professionals that I've discovered. My thanks to anyone who sent their favorite links to me; I've included them here.

Overview of my self-publishing experience

In 2015, a small press reverted my rights on 3 books (the I Wish series). I worked hard to turn those books around fast, 8 weeks or less. Looking back, I don't really know why I thought it was so important, but I did. In putting myself under that pressure, I missed out on the opportunity to connect with the pioneers of self-publishing--who had already figured out the process. Please don't make my mistake!

I wrote a blog post about all of the Fun Times with Self-publishing that I experienced.  Feel free to read and enjoy. Although it was originally written in March 2016, I update it to keep it current. Self-publishing and the book market changes quickly--and book production is definitely improving every day.


Self-publishing blogs and support groups

  There are thousands of these groups to help you navigate the challenges of self-publishing. Here are a few sites that I've found helpful:

• The Creative Penn
• Jane Friedman
• Kboards - A forum for Kindle authors and users
• The Alliance of Independent Authors
• Sarra Cannon's Self-pub guides
• Indie Author Support Network

 Facebook and Goodreads also have many author support groups, so search both sites and see if any feel right to you.



Book cover design

  Your book cover is the best marketing tool that you have. Gorgeous covers will help sales. Bad covers will hurt (or destroy) sales. Ask your writer friends for recommendations or check out cover designs and see what appeals to you. Your genre/subgenre will make a difference too, as they often experience trends.
  Covers can cost from $100 up to $1000s, so research is key. Some suggestions for cover designers to consider include:

• The Killion Group 
• 99 Designs
• Canva book cover templates with support page and tutorials

Ebook formatting and layout

The internal layout and formatting of your book requires technical knowledge of ebook publishing formats, like MOBI/AZW and ePub. If you have a good understanding of these formats (or HTML), you might be able to do the work on your own. I'm a software engineer in my day job, so I do my own formatting and stick to the basics. But I suspect that most indie authors seek help, such as:

• Marie Force's formatting fairies
• Bemis Promotions
• Draft2Digital has some do-it-yourself tools

Professional editing

If you want to sell a quality book, you need a good editor to point out your flaws. Not just spelling and grammar mistakes--but holes in the plot, inconsistencies in characters, and continuity errors.

Professional editors are not cheap, and the costs range widely depending on their education and experience. Seek recommendations from other writers. If you find an editor who you want to hire, see if they will edit a sample chapter. It will give you insight into whether their style aligns with yours.

I've only ever used one editor, Laura Ownbey, so she is the only one I can recommend from personal experience. She is amazing!

If you have any links you would like to suggest, please add them in the blog comments or send them to me through my website.

Who writes better - men or women?

[Originally posted on juliaday.tumblr.com]

I’ve been reading a lot of articles on social media recently about who wins the most book awards: men or women. (If you don’t know the answer, it’s men.) 

In one blog post, the blogger/author (Nicola Griffith) had broken down the data further. She wanted to know not only who won prestigious awards but also if the award-winning books had male or female protagonists. Out of the six awards she studied,

• men won 54% (which is actually kind of decent–but maybe it’s just the six awards the blogger picked)
• men writers had 19% female main characters
• female writers had 71% male main characters

So–if this sample is anything to go by, women writers feature male MCs far more often than men writers feature women.

As an added point of interest, one of the awards in this study was the Newbery, awarded to books of children’s fiction. It’s the only prize where women authors fared better than men. When I remove the Newbery data from the analysis (that is, the analysis is about adult book prizes only), the numbers change predictably. 

• men won 61% of the awards (clearly, the children’s book prizes were skewing our data :) 
• female authors had 77% male MCs 
• male authors had 14% female MCs 

I think we can all conclude that, for a female author to have a prayer of winning, adding a male MC is nearly essential. 

Back to my original question: Who is better? (which is different than who wins more awards?) 

Now, I have a confession to make. I don’t know who’s better because I don’t read enough books by male authors to judge. I checked out my books-read-list from the past 12 months.  I finished about 80 books. Two (yes, 2) were by men. 

I can’t remember specifically excluding male authors because they are male. Maybe they just don’t write the genre of books I want to read. But the results show a distinct bias. 

I write YA, so I read a lot of YA last year for research as well as pleasure. But, yep, just one (of those 2 aforementioned books) was by a male YA author. I should branch out. Probably. 

~~~~~~~

My first YA contemporary romance, The Possibility of Somewhere, will release in September.  I'll use a new pen name for my YA contemporaries--Julia Day. As I move closer to September, I'll begin to use my Julia Day social media accounts more and phase out this blog.  Please consider following me on Julia Day's:

tumblr

twitter

goodreads

Facebook page

Writing question - what I know about teens

What do you know about teens? What qualifies you to write Young Adult (YA)?

I have two kids in college, so I’ve lived through the process of parenting teens. I do recognize, however, that my daughters and their friends might not be typical of American teens in every region of the US, so I’m grateful to have an editorial staff that brings different perspectives to both my books as well as the dozens of other YA books they edit. 

My junior editor is in her twenties (recent college graduate and former teen). My senior editor at Spencer Hill Press teaches social studies to eighth-graders, so he’s surrounded by teens throughout the school year. Even my younger daughter reads all of my books multiple times to ensure that I’m keeping things realistic. I also have a set of teens (mostly male, since I don't have sons) who are willing to answer my questions about dialogue and plausibility.

I’m lucky to have such a solid team of people to find and point out my mistakes.

 
[I often get questions about writing.  I'll answer each of the most commonly asked questions in a separate blog post and include them in the FAQ on my website too.]

Reposting What the Hale!

My friend Lisa and I are guest-blogging at Adventures in YA Publishing today (Friday, 29 Aug).

We're chatting about the fun and challenges that we are having while co-writing our YA historical / paranormal / romance. One of the protagonists is Nathan Hale, an American hero who sacrificed his life during the American War for Independence.

So, yeah, that part is sad. He was captured and executed for being a spy. We'll follow his story as faithfully as possible based on historical records.

Look for us at What the Hale!

Reader reaction

The thing I'm going to love most about being published is the response from readers.

I've been warned that I can't please everyone.  So, yeah, I understand that.  Not every book I read appeals to me either.

But there will be some people who do like them. They're going to love my characters. Readers will gasp over, worry over, cry over the things that my characters go through. And then readers will talk to me about it, and we'll compare notes, and imagine what happens after The End.

I can't wait.

I got a taste of it this weekend. I submitted Whispers From the Past to my editors. Editor-J finished the book this weekend, and we've been sending a flurry of email talking about what happened to whom and how it made us feel and...

I loved it.

All of you readers out there, send me email or come to my book-signings or stop me at conferences where I'm speaking. And talk to me about books, characters, consequences, emotion, love.

That's why I write stories. That's why you read them!



P.S. I took the above photo on vacation in Belgium this summer. The B&B where we stayed had a beautiful backyard garden.

Gotta love the details

Two weeks ago, I announced that I would be signing my third contract with Spencer Hill Press. (First one was for Whisper Falls, second contract was for two sequels to WF, and the third, drum roll, is for I Wish.)

I promised details, and frankly, they're not all that interesting. But I promised and there is simply no point in breaking a promise so easy to fulfill.

I Wish will be released in November 2014, one month after the final Whisper Falls book.  IW might have sequels. Not sure about that yet. It's still open-ended. Perhaps we'll let the readers decide.

IW will be edited by the Lovely And Talented Jessica. LATJ works with me often, in conjunction with the Manly And Talented Richard. MATR is LATJ's husband. It is quite cool working with a matched set.

LATJ and I have already discussed IW at a high level. We use impressive literary terms like series arc, character development, world-building, and pertinent backstory.The book will be better for it. I'm excited. I want to start now.

Sadly, there is that pesky problem of the two WF sequels that were contracted first.

We often call I Wish 'the genie book.' I assure you that the genie, aka Grant, would object. He is not a genie. It is true that he joined the Guild of Benevolent Supernatural Beings to grant wishes. If it helps you understand his role in the universe to call him a genie, well then, he tolerates that. But he will pity your poor simple mind. Grant has skills. He has protections (via the Guild.) He has a boss. He also has a problem, and her name is Lacey.

When you meet her in November 2014, you'll find out why.

Juggling all these stories

I have an author-friend who has contracts with five different publishers (three are Big Six and two are mid-size).  She has to produce books for all of these publishers sometime in the next twelve months.

That would be a nice problem to have, although I'm not sure how good I would be at juggling that many. But I guess I'm finding out in April. I've been working on five books this month.

Three of them are in the Whisper Falls trilogy, which hasn't been too bad since they're all so strongly related. I'm making progress on the first draft of Book 3.  My editor is sending me some edits for Book 2.  And I may have to read, for the final time, Book 1 before it gets printed.  (Yes, indeed, the kind of printing that happens with ink and paper and binding.)

I have a YA contemporary manuscript that I wrote a while back.  I love the characters in that book, sort of Romeo&Juliet-ish (without the suicides.) It was the first novel-length manuscript that I ever wrote. Unfortunately, my story-telling skills were immature, so I put R&J-ish aside and studied writing craft.  It took a few years, but I think I'm ready to pick that book back up and unleash the main characters.

Finally, there is my "genie" book. It is the book that intrigued my agent enough to offer representation. Neither one of us have ever given up on I WISH. So I've been tweaking it too, making sure that I'm not standing in the way of Grant and Lacey to get their stories out.  And there might be a sequel or two lurking in there somewhere.

Yeah, contracts to write more books would be a great problem to have.

The moratorium is over

I promised my family that I would take the month of March off, and I did.  It was not fun.

For one thing, it was arbitrary. Why a month?  I did need a break after spending eight months working on Book 2. My husband and daughters deserved my attention. But, as it turned out, they didn't want as much attention as I had available.

The first week was the worst. I had all of these ideas for Book 3 that I wanted to get recorded, but I couldn't. 'Cause I promised.

I created a clean-the-cabinets project.  That died after five cabinets.

I started hunting through book review sites, looking for new things to read.  And I discovered the New Adult genre. Yes, I forgot about Book 3 and all my ideas and the cleaning projects to submerge myself in NA books.  I can never write them myself, but I am sold!

It is April 2nd. I started Book 3 yesterday.  And I'm never taking a month off again. I need to write. 

How many rounds does it take to edit a manuscript?

It takes as many rounds as it takes.

I am on the third and final round of revisions with Whisper Falls, and the manuscript is getting ever closer to perfection. 

Round one focused on big picture changes. Normally, that would involve rewriting shaky parts of the plot.  Mine didn't change much, although I did simplify a subplot for a minor character.

Round two took a deeper look at the characters, their choices, and their reasons for those choices. I didn't change the personalities or voice of any characters—not the hero, heroine, or secondary characters. However, I did add lots of backstory (at least, that is what I call the stuff I added. My editors call the new details essential to understand choices and motivation.)

Round three revolves around refinements. Does the story flow organically from start to finish? Are there any continuity errors? Will readers from all around the globe be able to visualize the North Carolina setting from my narrative?

This last question has been the hardest to resolve. I've lived in North Carolina for so long that I've forgotten how unique this location might be.  Consequently, I've had to sprinkle in several details to enhance the ability of readers to visualize my beautiful home state. My editors, who live in New England, have proven invaluable for these revisions. Weather, flora/fauna, topology, lifestyle—even school calendars—can differ dramatically.  For instance, my hero likes to bike through a park near his home.  The park in question, Umstead State Park, is 5000 acres.  That is NYC's Central Park times seven.  Apparently, parks aren't that big in New England, hence the need for a deeper description.

I should have my final revisions completed later this week.  And then, Whisper Falls will be really and truly done. A few copy-edits later, we go to print!

It takes a village

I have become an unapologetic user of people. Everyone I meet becomes a potential source of information for my next book. No one is exempt.

• Tom-the-personal-trainer offers me insights into the mindset of male athletes. 
• My physical therapist helps me figure out how to hurt people (and, not surprisingly, he is very good at that). 
• My nurse practitioner advises me on how long it takes for untreated wounds to become infected (when she's not taking care of me). 
• My cousin (who is studying to be an English professor) can now serve as my finger-on-the-pulse of academia.
• All female acquaintances with teenage sons are now my new best friends. 

Yesterday, I had brunch with a friend and two of her amazing kids.  One will soon be a secondary English teacher (yay! another finger-on-the-pulse). The other is a male high school senior.  Poor guy. I had a list of questions waiting for him. If he could have any classic car, which one? What types of sport teams are available in college?  How much do teen soccer players know about knee injuries?

WARNING to all males 14-18: Avoid me if you don't like talking to earnest old ladies. I have an endless supply of things I want to understand about your world.

So, friends, I may be unapologetic about picking your brain, but I am also deeply grateful.  It may be my mind assembling the puzzle pieces of the plot and my voice choosing the words, but it is your knowledge, experiences, and generosity that provide the building blocks.

I thank you all!

The write kind of holiday

Merry Christmas / meri Kirihimete / Froeliche Weihnachten
 

I'm loving this time of year.  Regardless of your faith tradition, I hope you are too.

However, 2012 brings a major change in how I structure my holiday.

I've spent so much time around work-a-holics that  I vowed I would never be one. When I was off-duty, I wouldn't work. Holidays were a time to relax and celebrate.

Then I became an author, and my attitude had to change. I am writing under a deadline. I can no longer measure a project by its percentage of completeness. The book is done--or it's not done.

So, yes, it is Christmas morning. We've opened gifts. We've eaten our 'special breakfast.' We've planned what we'll take to Christmas dinner at the home of dear friends.

And in-between all of that, I'll be writing.

Happy Holidays!

A Dog's Tale

My co-worker Ed is visually impaired. He has a seeing-eye dog who has his own blog.

Willie-the-seeing-eye-dog Blog has been in existence for about six months and has had two postings.  Willie and his ghost-writer Ed have been too busy to give it the attention it needs.

Ed has asked me to take over the responsibility of ghost-writing for Willie.  After all, I'm a writer. How hard could it be to switch from writing fictional characters to channeling a live dog?

I've said yes to writing the blog.  But the request reminded me of a simple truth about artists that might not be intuitive. Our abilities tend to be limited to specific genres and forms.  Consider dance. A dancer who has trained in hip-hop for years will not be able to pick up a role in classical ballet overnight.  While hip-hop and ballet are both forms of dance, the style, mood, and required skills can be very different. This holds true for writing. Just because I'm good at novel-length fiction, it isn't a certainty that I will be good at short stories, poetry, or ghost-writing for a non-verbal creature.

But I'm going to give it a shot.  If you check Willie's blog periodically, you may see the ghost of Elizabeth there.