Blog Tour Giveaway: Free Ebooks!

Hey guys and gals,

As part of my blog tour, I'm doing an interview and giveaway today only on Dale Ibitz's blog!

All you have to do to win a free e-book of The Superiors is go to her blog, read my interview, and come back here. Please follow me and her if you haven't already--it's not necessary but we'll send happy reading vibes your way if you do!

Please leave a comment here so I know you've read her blog post. Answer this question in your comment: Name one of the three books/series I read in middle school. Also leave your email address or message me with it so I can send you your free copy of The Superiors.

That's it for today! Thanks!

Guest Author: Meghan Ciana Doidge

Hey everyone! Please welcome to my blog Meghan, author of After the Virus. She's got some great tips on writing for us. After you read the post, go check out her blog and see what else she has going on!

The role of structure in a 1st draft novel

by Meghan Ciana Doidge

Transitioning from writing screenplays into writing novels has been an exciting and daunting task. Exciting, because, after writing screenplays for over 10 years, I fell into writing my first novel, After The Virus, and the writing just flowed. Daunting because now I have to follow up and recapture the magic I found while writing After The Virus.

When I write a screenplay I rely heavily on structure to craft the 1st draft, and I mostly adhere to the Syd Field school. I don’t even write a single word, other than jotting down scene ideas or bits of dialogue when they come to me, until I have the entire screenplay plotted out. But, I didn’t craft my novel, After The Virus, in this same fashion, though it is quite structured (as that is just in my nature), however its structure ended up, by necessity I now believe, being flexible.

So as I jump into another novel (or 4) I’ve been thinking about screenplay structure and how it applies, for me, to novel writing. Here are the elements that I think are most helpful when crafting a 1st draft.

1. Three Acts – Beginning, Middle & End – this might be a no brainer for most writers, but it is odd how many stories don’t actually have a clearly defined beginning, middle and end. It is amazing how many novels and/or movies I have read/seen that don’t end well (God, that can ruin a story!!).

So pull out a piece of paper, divide it lengthwise into three sections, and jot down a sentence to describe the beginning of your story (aka your set-up), the middle (aka the confrontation) and the end (aka the resolution). By the way, each sentence should be about the plot not about the characters feelings or thoughts; what happens?

2. The beginning – start with the The Inciting Incident – what is the one action or plot point without which your entire story could not actually take place? Start writing there, and don’t worry about an introductory chapter or setting up the story. What propels the plot? What pushes your protagonist through the story?

After you’ve compelled your 1st draft and you still think you need an introductory chapter, write it in your 2nd draft pass. But start in action, and you’ll suck your reader right into the story. The character background, environmental elements, and other introductory items can be worked in to the action of the plot as you move forward.

If your story is a chess game, you lead with your queen not one of your pawns. Pawns are follow-up, development. Start strong. Play your queen.

[spoiler alert] In my novel, After The Virus, the inciting incident is when my main protagonist, Rhiannon chooses and succeeds in escaping her capture/captors. Without this action (aka plot point) none of the remaining story is possible. Note my emphasis on the protagonist choosing action, as there are not too many stories that can function well with a passive protagonist (there are, of course, always great exceptions to this and any other rule).

3. The middle – also known as the place where writers go to die a slow, painful death – solidify your The Midpoint - this is your hook from which your entire story hangs. If your story was actually hanger this would be the hook that hangs off the closet rod.

The entire first half of your book builds to this point and then something happens that propels us into the second half of the book. This something is directly tied to the main plot and completely changes the game. Someone dies, someone loses, or, in less action driven narratives, someone has a massive epiphany. This is the point of no return. The characters will never, ever be the same and, to repeat myself because I think it is important to stress this point, there is no going back.

To take this a little bit further, the midpoint is usually tied directly to the inciting incident.

[spoiler alert] The midpoint of my novel, After The Virus, is when the mute child, Snickers, falls in the river and Rhiannon--ever the hero--chooses (again, chooses), risking her own life, to dive in after the child. How is this tied to the inciting incident? By jumping in the river after Snickers, Rhiannon finds herself entering, under duress of course, the very city she escaped at the beginning of the novel. This midpoint also causes Will, the secondary protagonist, to step up and spring into action. There is literally no turn back from this point forward for Rhiannon or the plot.

Side note: speaking of being flexible with your 1st draft. What is now the midpoint of my novel (spoiler: Snickers going in the river) I had first thought was my turn into the 3rd Act (The Climax). As I was writing it became apparent I was wrong and this plot point was actually my midpoint.

4. The ending – ramp up to The Climax – after the midpoint this is what the entire set-up and confrontation of the novel has been building too, and, after this point, it is all resolution, which doesn’t necessarily mean we are in the happily-ever-after section of the story, but that everything that happens after the climax is a reaction to that climax.

This must be a big moment, ideally it should involve all your main characters, and it is (to paraphrase from Save the Cat) always the darkest night of the soul.

[spoiler alert] In After The Virus, the Climax is the moment Rhiannon stops fighting her (second set of) captors, willingly adopts the movie star persona, a mask which she has spent the entire novel attempting to shed, and chooses to face the evil she’s been running from, in order to save the child.

The 3rd Act of After The Virus opens with my absolute favourite scene of the novel. Here is the snippet:

A brisk, salty wind, they must be very close to the ocean here, blew through the buildings and billowed around and beyond her. The dress was instantly slicked against her. She could feel the light fabric lift about four feet behind her and her hair a similar sail. Her silk-sheathed nipples rose in protest of the chill, and a murmur, punctuated with gasps, rustled through the following crowd. She gritted her teeth at the exposure, at the perceived sexuality, at the perceived vulnerability of an involuntary bodily function.

They reached for her then.

Lining the sides of street, suddenly as far as she could see, they reached fingers for her, but didn’t touch.

She walked like that for a full block, so close she could feel the brush of energy from each fingertip--thousands of fingers.

What was she to them? The time before? Whatever it was, it wasn’t a role she was willing to accept, or that she was even qualified for.

That’s it! Just four elements with which to construct your 1st draft: Three Acts, Inciting Incident, Midpoint and Climax. Make sure the Inciting Incident, Midpoint and Climax are all tied together, like knots along the same piece of string.

Be flexible, let the writing just flow, don’t edit yourself…at least not until the 2nd draft!!

If you’d like to read my novel to see if I actually know anything about writing (which I hope to God - after all these years - I do, even if I don’t articulate it particularly well above), please check out, After The Virus:

Amazon.com

Amazon.co.uk

Goodreads ePUB

Four FREE chapters

And drop by my blog for a chat!

Thanks for reading,

Meghan

Blog Tour

Hey guys! I've put together a sort of blog tour for The Superiors, so feel free to follow all the goings on. There will be giveaways, reviews, spotlights, interviews, and posts. If you've missed some, make sure to check out the links. I will be adding more dates, so check back!

ALSO! I am including my book in the Smashwords Summer Sale! What does that mean? That means you can get my ebook in ANY format (Kindle, Nook, Sony, iPad, etc) AT HALF OFF! Just follow this link and enter the code SSW50 at checkout (the code is listed on the link, too).

Plus, I will be giving away ebooks on a few of the dates scheduled below! The schedule:

5/24 Interview with Haresh Daswani on Goodreads

5/27 Read The Superiors chapter 1 on Patti Robert's blog

6/02 Interview with James Oh

6/03 Spotlight with Ronnie Massey

6/03 Interview with Ronnie Massey

6/23 The Superiors Book Review by Jenn

6/27 The Superiors Book Review by Dale Ibitz

6/28 Interview with Ken Badertscher

7/1 Interview with Meghan Ciana Doidge

7/5 Giveaway and Interview with Dale Ibitz

7/8 Interview with A.F. Stewart

7/12 Spotlight with Lenore Wolfe

7/15 Guest Post on Ken Lindsey's blog

7/19 Interview with Traci Hilton

7/22 Guest post on Ben Wallace's blog

7/26 Interview with John Vander

7/29 The Superiors Book Review by Cassie

Book Review: Sophie's Choice by William Styron

Sophie's Choice by William Styron
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I finished this book a while ago, but I couldn’t decide what to think of it, so I held off on writing a review. But it really deserves a review, so I’m making myself sit down to write one before I forget what I wanted to say about it. I really wanted to love this book, and I did…until about ¾ of the way through. I wish I’d hated the whole book, because that would have been better than taking an amazingly written, moving story and ruining it with a pathetic, self-indulgent ending.

First, about the writing. Styron’s writing is so luscious and delicious that sometimes I had to stop myself from actually licking the page. It was so rich and full of beautiful words and phrases that made me almost drunk with the prose. But, in the end, all that delicious richness left me with a stomach ache. It seemed like Styron fell in love with his own story and his own voice and it killed the book. Literary vomit was the end result.

I’d heard of this book and the movie a few times, but I didn’t even know what it was about before I picked it up. I knew it was supposed to be devastating and heartbreaking. What surprised me was how funny the book was. Told through the eyes of Stingo, a chronically horny twenty-two-year-old in the late forties, the humor in the book kept it from growing too dark. The protagonist’s sexual frustration and foiled attempts at getting laid made me laugh out loud. Throughout most of the book, I loved the story almost as much as the writing. There were several fifty or hundred page chapters I could have done without—long asides that did nothing to advance the plot and instead distracted from the narrative. I would have liked to hear more of Sophie’s story and less of Stingo’s.

The first part of the book was so dull I almost skipped it. I found some of it offensive or in poor taste, but I kept reading. Once Stingo meets Nathan and Sophie, the story gets better.

Nathan was brilliantly created and captivating, the best character in the book by far. Until…he has schizophrenia AND a coke addiction? It just didn’t ring true. I thought the story would have been stronger if he was just evil. Or schizophrenic, but with the good job he said he had. Once I found out that he had lied and was basically an invalid, the book just went downhill from there. It seemed inconsistent with the story, and it rang false to me. He was the best character, complex and full of rage and guilt and issues, and then Styron ruined it all by making him just some crazy guy who made up stories. I wanted his brilliance to be real, not a drug-fueled delusion.

Sophie’s character was developed well, as was Nathan’s. But again, towards the end of the book, it all started to seem hackneyed and false. Over three months she goes from beautiful, refined, and poised to this brazen lush who describes in detail how much she loves sucking cock? I doubt it. Even when she was drunk, she wasn’t the kind of person who would do that. I didn’t believe it. She was developed in a certain way, and then Styron wrote her doing all these things that her character would not have done or said.

Stingo: Although I felt for the guy and his obsession with unrequited love for Sophie, I started to lose sympathy for him at about the same time that the whole book fell apart for me. I understood that he was sexually frustrated, but it seemed like Styron kept building and building on that when he could have been focusing on something more interesting, like Sophie’s time in Auschwitz. And after a while, Stingo just seemed like a nasty pervert, so I lost sympathy. I really didn’t need to hear all about his wet dreams and such. And he was very rude to all the women in the book, which did not endear him to me. Then he takes advantage of drunken, heartbroken Sophie in a cheap hotel somewhere. Really turned me off.

From close to the beginning, I knew Stingo would probably hook up with Sophie, and I knew when he did, it would ruin the book for me. And it did. If not for that, this would have been one of the best books I’ve ever read. Now it’s a 3. It was just not believable that this beautiful, sexually insatiable thirty-year-old woman would have sex with a young guy who is only a friend and say he was a great lover. He was basically a virgin, and yet he claims his very first time he rocked her world even though she was quite experienced. Yeah, right. It felt like Styron fell in love with his own character and wanted to give him everything he ever wanted instead of telling the ‘truth’ of the story—what would have happened to those characters in that world. He based Sophie on someone he met but didn’t know—obviously someone he wanted to fuck. So he let Stingo do it for him. I just didn’t believe a virgin could rock Sophie’s world after she’d been with Nathan, her great love and lover. No way.

This book had a great story to tell, but unfortunately, it was mixed into a story that I had no desire to read. The whole book is this relentless trek towards Sophie’s choice and her demise. And then it’s all cheapened by this detailed sex scene where Stingo gets all he ever wanted and fucks her brains out. Really? Ugh. I read somewhere that Styron was accused of eroticizing the holocaust. Um, hello, because he DID. He also eroticized everything else. The book was beautiful and I devoured the sexually charged writing, but the plot lost all the momentum in the end. For me, it would have been much better if it had focused on the choice and the consequence without the completely unbelievable sex scene, which replaced the much more poignant climax of the choice. Completely ruined the book and detracted from the impact of the choice, which was what the book was supposed to be. It was called Sophie’s Choice. Not Stingo’s Fantastic Fuck.



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Guest Author: Interview with Traci Hilton

1. Tell us about your current work

Eminent Domain, the sequel to Foreclosed: A Mitzy Neuhaus Mystery. was just released in April. It continues the story of Mitzy, her real estate office, her fiery relationship with Alonzo Miramontes and the trouble and the Victorian mansion, which is more work than they were bargaining for. In Eminent Domain, Mitzy has to contend with the Feds, the City Council and just possibly the mafia (again!) And of course, she has to figure out if her business sense and her Christian values go together or not. (You know, is it okay to send the FBI a pod of toilets when they really want the antique furniture?)

2. How did you come up with the idea to write this book?

I love cozy mysteries and really wanted to create an amateur detective that hadn’t been overdone. As a Realtor she has access to all sorts of private property and every new job is a new cast of characters. It seemed a natural fit.

3. How long have you been writing?

Probably since I first learned my ABC’s. I’ve been writing novels since 2008 and before that was an award winning playwright.

4. Is this the first book you ever wrote, or do you have more (published or unpublished) that you wrote before?

Foreclosed, the first Mitzy Neuhaus Mystery, is the first novel I’ve completed. But I’ve got four or five that didn’t hatch, so to speak.

5. Describe your writing process.

I scratch ideas on any paper I can find. Then I organize them, outline them to make sure there is enough there for a proper novel, and then I get to it. Eventually I story board it to make sure the story is actually in order.. Then I send it off to every writer’s best friend, my amazing editor.

6. Who are some of your literary influences? P.G. Wodehouse for his overthetop, lighthearted humor. Agatha Christie for her tightly written, perfect mysteries. And Neil Simon, the king of dialogue.

7. What kind of books do you read, and is it different from what you write?

I read tons of cozy mysteries, like the Jane Austen series by Stephanie Barron. I also love lengthy family sagas like And Ladies of the Club by Helen Hooven Santmier. Another favorite was Life of Pi. I just love really well written, meaty books.

8. Where do you come up with your characters? Do you base them on people you've seen or met?

Inspiration can come from anywhere! But I do see parts of my family, myself, and my friends in my characters. One of my favorite characters in the Mitzy series is Ben the graphic designer. He’s a namby pamby kind of gadget geek. I’ve known so many of those guys over the years. Ben is my homage to their absurdity.

9. Do the names of your characters reflect anything or mean anything in particular? Is there a reason behind the names you choose?

Well, Neuhaus/new house…it just seemed perfect. A great moment for me was when a real Realtor named Neuhaus who had read my books contacted me on Facebook. Otherwise, I go for names that are legit to the era and age of the person and just “sound” right to me.

10. Is this part of a series, and if so, when will the next book be available?

Yes, yes it is. The third installment, tentatively called Death Buys a Condo will be available this winter.

Marketing blahs

Well. It seems like forever since I've posted just a regular old post from me, about this journey I've undertaken to publish my own novel. It's hard work. Harder than I thought possible. I spend hours online, until my eyes are dry and my contacts blurring. Doing what?

Not writing. Not editing. But that evil monster, Marketing. Yes, sometimes it seems it has taken over my life, and all my time for writing. It's shameless, and somewhat embarrassing, to have to plug my book. Tell people I don't even know that they should read it. Even giving it away for review is somewhat akin to begging ('please give me a good review!') I pray as I hit 'send' on my years of hard work, sweat, and laboring over word choices, sentence structure, dialogue order...all for free, in the hands of a reader who might hate it and give a 1-star review.

(Thank God I haven't gotten one of those yet).

So, is all that marketing work paying off? Are my hours of discussing Twilight translating into sales? Hard to say. It's a slow process. I can only hope it will one day lead somewhere. For now, I'm setting up a blog tour. More hours of work. I will post the dates when I have it all figured out.

Book Review: Stranger with my Face by Lois Duncan

Stranger with My Face by Lois Duncan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I didn't know what to expect when I got this book from the library. I had heard of the author, but I'd never read anything by her.

Duncan does an amazing job creating suspense. It was SO HARD to put this book down every time I had to stop reading. It caught me and never let go--the pace is relentless. This should be required reading for suspense writers, because so many get it wrong. Duncan is a master.

That said, I didn't really care for the main character. I tried hard to like her, and succeeded only partially. I did have sympathy for her, but some of her decisions were just so stupid it made things harder. Like, how did she NOT know Leah was evil? And I found parts of the book way too predictible for a suspense novel. I knew the second Leah tried to get her to leave her body that Leah was going to steal it.

Overall, though, I did enjoy this book. It was very well crafted. A little less foreshadowing would have made me like it more. Also, the whole thing with the boy with the damaged face really added interest to the story. I liked how the ending was good, but not all shiny happy, either. For some reason I didn't really believe in the relationship between the protagonist and the boy with the messed up face, though. It just happened so suddenly I was like "WHAT? Since when? Come on, make me believe it a little more than that.

Fun, interesting, absorbing read. Very exciting and suspenseful.


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