Tag Archive | the faithful heart

What Writers Can Learn From Public Radio

Apr26

The local radio station that I listen to every day (WRTI in Philadelphia) is in the midst of its spring membership drive right now. That, of course, means hour after hour of the radio hosts going on and on about how I should pledge, how the station depends on me, and how the only reason they can say on the air is because of the support of listeners like me.

WRTI 60Well, I do pledge to the station. Every month, in fact. And I’ll confess, I tend to find something else to listen to for the ten days or so that it takes for them to reach their goals.

But then I started thinking…. Continue reading →

Writing With “What If?”

Jan30

So last week I read Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card for the first time and loved it.  As I mentioned in my review on Sunday, it was one of the best character books I’ve ever read.  Card is just so good at creating characters with depth and emotion and breathing life into them.  So yes, it is possible for a Romance writer to learn about the craft of characters through reading Science Fiction.

But there was another aspect to Ender’s Game that proved to be invaluable to my writing craft: the introduction.  I was lucky in that the version of the book that I read had a long introduction by Card that talked about how he came up with the story and characters of Ender’s Game and the response that he has received to the book.

I love reading writers’ stories of how they engage in their craft, be it Stephen King’s On Writing or C.S. Forester’s book that he wrote about his experience of penning the Horatio Hornblower novels.  So of course I devoured Card’s introduction eagerly.  And I recommend that any time a writer includes an introduction with their book, anyone calling themselves a writer on any level should read it and take note.

© Iryna Shpulak | Dreamstime.com

© Iryna Shpulak | Dreamstime.com

What struck me the most about Card’s explanation of how he came up with the idea for Ender’s Game is his use of the question “What if?”.  As Card explains, he was a major fan of Asimov as a youngster and devoured all of his books.  He knew all along he wanted to write, but he grew (and apparently grows) increasingly impatient with authors who are only trying to recycle Asimov or Tolkien, retelling the same story with different characters and settings.  This is not, he says, the point of writing.

Card came to the idea of Ender’s Game by focusing on tiny aspects of Asimov’s work and asking “What if x, y, or z had happened differently?”  This seems so simple, and yet it forms the basis of all really great writing.

We have to start with the assumption that there are no original stories.  At the same time, we can’t be like those writers Card loses patience with who tell the same story over and over.  The key is to take some well-known aspect of a genre or a particular story and riff on the idea of “What if this happened instead?”

I think that the Romance genre is ripe for this kind of riffing.  In Romance we’re working with a known set of parameters.  In order to be defined as Romance the story must be about the development of the relationship between the hero and heroine and the hero and heroine must get together at the end with an emotionally satisfying conclusion.  Anything else and it’s not Romance.

You might think that those parameters preclude any originality of thought, but I definitely don’t believe that.  Romance is criticized because everyone knows going into it that they hero and heroine will end up together in the end.  Yes they will.  But it’s how they get there that truly matters, and there are a thousand different ways to reach an HEA.

I am particularly fond of this idea of “what if?” because that’s what launched my career as a writer.  I’m grateful to Card for talking about it openly, because I’ve received a wee bit of criticism for my what-if-ing.  My first novel, The Loyal Heart, has been compared favorably and unfavorably to the Robin Hood legend.  That was both deliberate and unintentional.

Robin_Hood_Louis_RheadThe Loyal Heart started with two big What If’s.  The first was “What if the Robin Hood story were told with the actual history of the time period instead of the propagandized version that most people think they know?”  The second What If was “What if the heroine fell in love with the bad guy?”  The first question was a direct riff on Robin Hood, the second was a riff on just about every one of the many Romance novels I’ve ever read.

Incidentally, The Faithful Heart started with the What If of “What if the goofy side-kick had to man-up and be a hero?” and The Courageous Heart began with “What if you woke up one day and realized you were an asshole who had ruined everyone’s lives?”

I know of a few people who encourage writers to begin their query letter for a given novel with that What If question.  I’m not actually in favor with that, but I am in favor of beginning the whole novel-writing process by asking “What if?”  When you hit the ground running, when you start the whole thing with a question that you are burning to find out, you’re going to have an easier writing experience.  You’re going to go places that you wouldn’t otherwise have thought to go.  Most importantly, you’re going to have a good time doing it.

Asking questions leads you to answers.  Asking “What if?” leads you to realms of imagination that will keep you busy for weeks asking and answering even more questions.  The beauty of it all is that no two people will come up with the same answers.  Card could start with Asimov and ask “what if?” to take him to someplace entirely new.

I personally think that just because you start with a known story, like Robin Hood, “what if” will quickly take you out of the known and into the unknown, into the original and personal.  I’ve been asking myself “What if Sarah didn’t remember the words to the poem at the end of Labyrinth and lost the bet with the Goblin King?” since I was a pre-teen.  I’ve got a whole fantasy world of spells and tricks that has nothing remotely to do with Labyrinth now.  There are a million ways you can answer a single question about a single story.

So thank you, Orson Scott Card, for helping me to see that daydreaming about someone else’s story is not only okay, it can lead to a whole world.  Anything is possible when you ask “What if?”

What are your favorite “what if?” ideas?  Are there any stories you’ve told or would like to tell that started with “what if?”

2012 Year in Review

Dec31

As a Historian, I’m always a sucker for those year in review things that people do at the closing of each year.  And since 2012 was an exceptionally eventful year for me, here’s my own personal version.  And so I give you, 2012, a year I will be happy to see the back of!

January started out deceptively quiet.  Not too much going on.  But 2012 hit me upside the head with a brick on February 1st at 9:15 am when the company I work for did layoffs.  And since I’m not allowed to talk about that or the mess of incriminations and back-stabbing by coworkers that happened later in February and in March because they now spy on my blog from time to time….  Heh heh heh….

Moving right along.

After all that I still had a job, but things were about to get a lot worse.  Worse?  Really?  Yes.

My goofy, vibrant brother Kelly

My goofy, vibrant brother Kelly

My older brother Brian Kelly Farmer passed away very suddenly of cancer in early May.  We got the call in mid-April that he had been diagnosed, and once we were told how bad it was, my younger brother Stewart and I rushed out to Ohio to be with Kelly.  Well, what we discovered was not only a brother suddenly dying, but a family in dire distress.  I’m not sure I can even talk about the week of pure insanity – literally – that we experienced.  Between my mentally ill sister-in-law making poor medical decisions on my brother’s behalf, Kelly’s obvious pain and eventual decline into a coma, and my beautiful and brilliant but also belligerent 16 year old niece and a trip that ended with my sister-in-law threatening to call the cops on me if I didn’t leave my brother’s house where I had been taking care of my niece and nephew for a week … it was bad.

I still don’t think I’ve recovered from that nightmare.  I may never recover.  But things did start to look up again.  I had a book to write.

First, in June I published Our Little Secrets, which I had worked on and finished way back in January before things got crazy.  I had started The Courageous Heart early in the year too, but I had stopped when the rollercoaster ride began.  By June I knew my deadline with my editor was looming and I had to get serious about writing.  So I went into a focus mode the likes of which I have never seen.  I was diligent about writing the first draft of that book.  I have never worked so hard in my life.  But lo and behold, I pulled it out by the end of July.  And it was terrible.  But there were still revisions to do.

Then came my personal high moment for the year – out of nowhere, I might add.  On a whim I decided to offer The Loyal Heart for free for my birthday.  Long story short, about two weeks later I had had over 50,000 copies of the book downloaded!  And I proceeded to sell more when it went back to regular price and to sell several copies of the sequel, The Faithful Heart.  Huzzah!

Add to that the fact that my brother Stewart FINALLY proposed to his girlfriend, my best friend, Kristine, on June 23rd, and the summer was pretty good.

Of course, my awful car threw a spanner in the works in September by breaking down and costing me $3000 to replace the transmission.  And then two and a half weeks later it wouldn’t start and I had to spend another $300 on starter sensors or whatever that was.  And two weeks or so after that it had another issue, although I can’t remember exactly what that one was, just that it cost me.  Throw into that a car-induced incident in October that was one of my major low points for the year but that I won’t talk about because it’s still too painful that involved a family member I thought was close MAJORLY letting me down and showing their true colors….

IMG_0611But the end of the year was redeemed by preparations for Stewart and Kristine’s wedding.  The wedding was just this past weekend, on Saturday the 29th, and it was fantastic!  Kristine was beautiful, Stewart was awesome, and everything went off without a hitch.  It really was the best wedding I have ever gone to.

Granted, I hate what I look like in all of the wedding pictures I’ve seen so far and I think that when I smile like that my teeth take over my face and my face looks five times as fat and wide as it actually is, but hey, you can’t win them all.

So that was 2012.  Aside from the good book stuff and the wedding, I’m happy to see it go!  Too much loss and too much trauma.  I am ready for 2013.  My horoscope says that things will be much, much better in 2013 because of something having to do with where Jupiter will be and the fact that Pluto is no longer conjuncted with something?  All I know is that I could use a break.  I’m supposed to have romance in 2013 too.  Okay, I could deal with that, although I have the worst romantic luck in the history of the universe.  But we’ll see.

Here’s to 2013!  May it be full of new beginnings and easier times.

Revisions: Hell or Heaven?

Sep19

So for the last three or so weeks I’ve been neck deep in revisions of my latest novel, The Courageous Heart.  And through this process I’ve learned so very, very much about the fine art of revising.  Each novel that I write teaches me more about the craft.  It also makes me revise my former opinion of the process, no pun intended.  So here are a few tidbits of I’ve learned this time around.

First of all, The Courageous Heart is the third book in a trilogy.  The first one was “easy” to write.  The second one was relatively easy too.  And then I completely rewrote it.  But that was good.  The version of The Faithful Heart that I published was light years better than the first draft.  Because I worked on it.  But the third book?  Ah, that’s another story.  TCH and I did not get along very well during the creation process.  I was having an incredibly stressful couple of months and had to power through the first draft.  Which, of course, meant it was terrible.

Herein lies the lesson of this novel.  Because when you make it in this industry, when you’re serious about what you’re doing, you have to get the blasted thing written no matter how you feel about it and you have to make it good.  Once you start a series you can’t just toss it aside with a shrug and do something else instead.  Just like once you sign a contract with a publisher you can’t just change your mind and not write the book.  Well, I’m sure you could, but it wouldn’t reflect very well on you.

So there I was with a first draft that had a beginning, a middle, and an end but not much else going for it.  I found myself wincing and thinking “Welcome to Revision Hell”.  I reread the manuscript with a cringe and pulled out my favorite writing tool, a slick ballpoint pen and a legal pad.  It was time to take notes.  I was lucky because at least I knew who my hero and my heroine were, who the villain was, and what they all wanted.  And I knew which parts of the story worked and which ones made me want to hide under a rock.

The first step in a successful revision is remembering why you wrote the book in the first place.  Sounds simple, right?  And yet how many times do we get completely lost in the accessory details that we write in a moment of inspiration?  Since I write Romance, the first step in revising this novel was to remember what my hero and heroine’s goals, motivations, and conflicts were, what I wanted to get in their way, and how I wanted them to get together at the end.  As I read through I continually asked myself if the actions and reactions I had the hero and heroine go through are true to those goals, motivations, and conflicts and if they helped them to get to that happy ending. 

You’d be surprised how much fluff had snuck into the story!  It happens to the best of us.  We go along writing and come up with “brilliant ideas” that are sure to entertain.  Except that they don’t work.  Or we had those moments were the daily word count goal was looming and as a result a long description of the heroine baking a pie made it into the draft.  Yep, time to revise.  Which is not quite as easy as it sounds.

The second step in a successful revision is being honest with yourself about what works and what doesn’t work.  I was so impressed with the essay I read recently about plot versus story line.  One of the things it drove home to me was the importance of having each event, the things that make up the core of every scene in the book, be connected to each other in a chain that both holds the tension of the story and carries it along to the next thing.  And then when I looked at my novel I realized that far too many of the scenes I’d written didn’t actually carry the load of the story.  There wasn’t a connection that moved it forward.  And my heroine was really whiney.  Out came the scissors.

I’ve never had a novel that fought me so hard in the first draft and I’ve never chopped a novel up as drastically in revisions as I did for The Courageous Heart.  There are some scenes that I really loved, that I thought were really good, that had to go the way of the dodo because they ground the action to a halt instead of pushing it forward.  The trouble is, I really, really didn’t want to cut them at all.  But I had to be honest with myself.  They didn’t work.  And when you’re revising there’s no room for ego.  If you go to work thinking you can’t improve on perfection then you’re going to end up embarrassing yourself when other people read your work.

The third step to a successful revision is to WORK.  HARD.  For me we’re talking waking up at 5:30 every morning and spending an hour hammering away, spending my hour-long lunch break tweaking, and slaving at the computer for two hours in the evening.  And that’s weekdays.  Weekends involved 4-6 hours sitting in my “weekend office” at Panera Bread coffeeing up and pouring through text.  The book needed that level of commitment.  Every book needs that level of commitment.

It’s one thing to be honest with yourself about what doesn’t work with your book, but it’s something else entirely to put in the work necessary to find out what does work.  That’s where my pen and paper came in handy.  I wrote page after page after page of notes, thoughts, and ideas, clarifying what I had done and where I needed to go and throwing out possibilities of how to fix the problems I knew I had.  Writing by hand helps my brain do what needs to be done.  I’m actually convinced that my right hand has a brain of its own that can figure out writing problems when the brain in my head can’t. 

So once I had worked out issues on paper, it was time to put them into action in the manuscript.  Piece by painful piece.  One bit at a time.  Partial scene by partial scene.  For me that meant more or less rewriting the entire first half of the book.  The good news is that what I have now is better than what I had before.  The bad-ish news is that it’s still not right.  I still have a lot of honest trouble-shooting to do and clearer solutions to puzzle out.

The fourth step to a successful revision is time.  This is actually the first step, and the second, and all of the steps.  It happens at every point of the revision process.  You can’t revise effectively without time.  In the first place, you need to let a manuscript sit after the first draft.  Then you need to let the changes sit once you’ve made them.  You also need to be patient with beta readers and editors once they get their hands on the manuscript.  And then you have to step back and breathe some more and let things percolate.  You can’t rush the process if you’re going to do it right.  You have to reboot the computer known as your story brain now and then to let it sort out the jumble of creativity you’ve ground out onto the page.

Yeah, it sounds so easy to enumerate all these points of revisions, but actually doing them is the complicated part.  But it all has to be done.  The big thing that I’ve learned from this novel is that your writing is only as good as your revision process.  Inspiration can only get you so far, and sometimes it is slow to come when you need it.  Where inspiration ends, work begins.  But the work doesn’t have to be dismal.  In fact, the more I slave over this novel the more I like it.  I love the challenge of taking something mediocre and making it good, damn good.  It’s been harder to love these characters, but the love has grown stronger as the process rumbles along.

And that’s why I’m going to have to revise my statement about “Revision Hell”.  In fact, revisions are heavenly.  The gratification I’m finding in working to create the best story I can is exciting.  It’s fun.  I’m crazy for saying that, but it is.  I’ve set the bar high for myself and I intend to reach that goal.  I also think that it’s this kind of hard work and diligence that will enable me to make writing a career in a couple of years.  Because trust me, it’s the hardest job I’ve ever done.

The Promo That Changed Everything

Aug15

Yes!  The numbers are (mostly) in at last and I can tell you all the story of the most nail-bitingly terrifying and outrageously successful book promo that I’ve ever done!  This was the big one, folks.  This was the one that changed everything, hopefully permanently.  Here’s what happened….

So for my birthday I decided to run a little promo.  I had read months ago in The Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success, by Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords that a good free promotion should last at least a week.  I had done a mini free promo of the first book in my medieval romance series, The Loyal Heart, over Easter weekend and saw a handful of extra sales.  Cool!  So taking what I knew from the book I planned to extend that a little more.

© Daniel Gilbey | Dreamstime.com

On about July 14th I set the price of The Loyal Heart at free on Smashwords.  Yay!  In the next couple of days I saw some downloads.  Twenty, fifty, up over a hundred.  Awesome!  I was pleased.  Sometime at the beginning of the week the book went free on iBooks.  Now, because I distribute through Smashwords I couldn’t see the exact number of free books I was giving away, but I did notice that I was suddenly getting more star ratings.  A handful a day as opposed to one every month or so.  Okay, that must be good.  A day or so later, The Loyal Heart went free on B&N.  Still hard to tell exactly how many copies were being downloaded, but my rankings were inching up, so that was nice.Then came my birthday.  I had been getting a lot of star ratings on iBooks, so I went onto my iTunes product page to see what the specifics were.  Well, a LOT of the ratings were 5 stars.  A couple were one or two stars.  Sweet!  Bad ratings mean legitimacy!  Then I went looking for my ranking.  Lo and behold, I was in the top five books for What’s Hot in Historical Romance!  These are not just free books either.  It was ALL Historical Romance.  On Saturday I was at number one.  I then spent the next week hovering around on that list in various spots.  Very, very cool.  But I still had no idea what the numbers were.

Then it all blew up.  I awoke on Tuesday morning, July 24th to notice that The Loyal Heart was suddenly free on Amazon through price-matching.  Yes, you don’t have to be a part of KDP Select to have a free book on Amazon.  The thing with Amazon, however, is that you can see your book sales/downloads in real time.  When I first looked at the page it said 151 free downloads.  I clicked over to Facebook and about a minute later I went back to Amazon.  The number was at 163.  I blinked.  12 copies of my book had been downloaded in one minute?  I clicked refresh.  The number jumped to 169.

By lunchtime it was at 1200.  The next morning it was over 3000.  By the weekend it was at 20,000.  By Monday it was 36,000.  I hit number two on Amazon’s list of free Historical Romance downloads, number one in Historical, and I topped out at number 9 on Amazon’s top 100 Free Kindle Books.  During the time The Loyal Heart was free on Amazon I averaged at around number 20 on the list of Top 100 Free Kindle Books.  That’s for all genres combined.

I kinda felt like this
© Kiankhoon | Dreamstime.com

Fantastic, right?  Well, sort of.  The problem was that I had no idea when it was going to stop.  No control whatsoever.  The numbers were so mind-blowing that I became obsessed with checking them.  Every hour or so I would feel the insane pull to look online.  It wasn’t comfortable at all.  It was all a little like being in a runaway train and not knowing when it was going to jump the tracks or fall off the bridge.  And then came The Bad Review.  Because the thing about having a popular free book is that people download and read it who don’t actually like the genre or the premise.  They’re just reading it for free.  Whether they “get” it or not is another story.  And still the book continued to be free.  Even though I was ready for it to stop.  For the love of God, STOP already!I set the price back to normal on Smashwords on Saturday, July 21st.  By the end of the next weekend Smashwords’ price distribution engines had finally gotten the message across to iBooks and B&N.  The book returned to its regular price of $2.99.  It took about two or three days to have it switched from regular price to free, but it took over a week to have it switched from free to regular price, about three times as long.  But it was still free on Amazon.

That’s when I started noticing sales of the second book in the series, The Faithful Heart.  Free books are one thing.  People forking over $4.99, yes, $4.99, not $2.99, for the sequel is another thing entirely.  That was the true test.  It started with a sale here or there.  Then those sales picked up to high single digits per day.  Then they moved into double digits per day.  Something was definitely catching on.

After eight days of being free on Amazon because of price-matching, The Loyal Heart finally returned to regular price.  So what was my total free download number on Amazon?  Just over 42,000.  Total free downloads on B&N was about 2000.  Apple hasn’t reported free downloads yet, but I’m going to make some assumptions and estimates based on where it was in the sales ranking all that time and say that I probably had over 50,000 copies of The Loyal Heart downloaded across various retailers during this promo.

What about residual sales, you ask?  Everything I’ve heard from my fellow Indie authors who have done a free promo in recent months suggested to me that the moment the promo was over the numbers for The Loyal Heart would drop back to what they had been before.  Yeah, that’s not what happened.  Since the book went back to full price on Amazon on August 1st, I have sold for real cash money well over 200 copies.  Since the start of the promotion I’ve sold over 400 copies of The Faithful Heart on Amazon and over 100 between iBooks and B&N.  Oh yeah, and several copies of Our Little Secrets on all three of those platforms as well.  I keep waiting for the momentum to slow down.  It hasn’t yet.  It might at some point.  Or maybe it won’t.

To all this I have but one thing to say:  WHAT THE HECK?????  What did I DO????

And you may be asking yourself, what did you do that I can do too?

The truth is, I have no earthly idea what I did.  I can tell you this much, I did several guest blog posts in July, The Loyal Heart was reviewed in In’Dtale Magazine right before the promo and was featured on Romcon.Inc during the promo, and as soon as it went free in all its different locations I posted the link on Twitter and to all of the Facebook groups I’m a part of.  But that’s it really.  I don’t think I did anything drastically different than anyone else.  Maybe I somehow pleased the algorithm gods?

I will tell you one thing that I did do.  I wrote the best book I could.  I had it professionally edited and I had a professional cover design created for me.  Never underestimate the power of professionals to do what they do best.

But I will say this too:  Not knowing how long the promo was going to run or how many bad reviews I would get out of it was absolutely terrifying.  I do not enjoy being out of control like that.  It was incredibly stressful.  So was my temporary addiction to checking numbers and reviews.  It reminded me of my days suffering from anxiety disorders.

So would I do it again?  No and yes.  I don’t think I will ever offer The Loyal Heart or any of the Noble Hearts trilogy for free again.  But once I have all four of the books in my Montana Romance series published I do believe I will offer Our Little Secrets for free.  But I will expect it to be free for about two weeks.  Also note, I won’t do it until the entire series is finished.  Why?  Because as fantastic as my sales have been this month, I’m kicking myself for not waiting until The Courageous Heart was published as well.  Then readers who got hooked on the first book could have bought the entire series instead of having to wait.  Lesson learned.

So the moral of the story is that free sells.  Oxymoron, I know, but it’s true.  Did I devalue my work by offering The Loyal Heart for free as many of my fellow Indie authors (who I absolutely respect to pieces) like to argue?  I don’t see how when hundreds of people have been willing to pay $4.99 for the second book in the series and hopefully the third when it’s out.

And maybe it was luck that put me in exactly the right place at exactly the right time across three different platforms, but that’s the kind of luck I will take any day.  Well, I’ll take the luck and I’ll take the royalty checks that I will be getting this fall.

UPDATE:  A wonderful writer friend of mine shared with me today after reading this post how she had posted the link to a review she had done of TLH all over Twitter via Triberr and on a Reddit message board for free book links.  I believe that this really helped the initial download spike, which probably seriously helped the algorithm and enabled the book to get such a high ranking so soon.  So when and if you do your free promo, be sure to post the links to your book on as many free book sites, message boards, and Facebook pages as you can!