Thursday, June 28, 2012

Selling Handcuffs, An Angel Day Novel. Chapter Three The Secret Police Stat

This is the third chapter, after the Background/SetUp chapter, which is Chapter Two: The Bat Cave. If you haven't read that one yet, I'll leave it up a little while longer. 


If you haven't read Chapter One, an Ice Monster! scene, you can click here to read it now. It'll be posted for one more week, but then it will go away. 


As always, these blog posts are rough drafts. I appreciate your comments a lot but, just so you know, this is pretty much how the novel comes out of my head, although I do clean up the commas. This prose will go through another very rigorous draft plus polishing before it sees the light of day. 



The first 25% of your novel or story should set up your main character and show them as they are, with all their flaws and all their virtues. It should show the relationships that they have in place and introduce many of the major characters.

This chapter includes the start of the Big Plotline that will stretch over several of the novels in this series, as well as the start of this novel's Plotline. So far, this is a routine call-out for Angel, but that will change in the next couple of chapters. I'll probably have to shorten this chapter, mainly by line-edits, to get to the meat sooner.

Also, Angel convinces Tony of a lot of stuff during their conversation. I think she'll probably have to do more badly in this scene, because she still relies on violence to solve her problems. She's too logical and negotiates too much, now. She should do this badly, perhaps even make the situation worse, and she should consider all the violent ways that she could solve this problem, none of which will work, of course. This will probably be a major change in the second draft.

I will probably need to add some more characters to Bravo Team, the Phoenix PD's sniper team, and Alpha Team, the Phoenix PD's assault team, but I don't want to overwhelm the reader with 30 minor characters right at the beginning, either. A tip to other authors: when you're writing a book with a high body count, start with a lot of characters so you still have some left after the bloodbath. 

If you sign up for email updates (over there on the right side bar), you'll get an update when I post Chapter Four: Blood on the Sand.

Sunday, June 24, 2012

Carl Sagan on Reading and the Freedom of the Mind

“Frederick Douglas taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom, but reading is still the path.”―Carl Sagan

Thursday, June 14, 2012

Quick Writing Tip: If You Have A Day When You Can't Write

Writing tip: If you don't have time to write for a day, at least read the last 1-2 scenes and do a light edit. Keeps your head in the game.

Today, The Kid was home from school for his first day of summer break. He didn't want to go to camp on his first day off. He wanted to stay home. Okay, I get that.

So we went to the library and a local bookstore. We got him The Adventures of Tintin at the library, and Diary of a Wimpy Kid #5 at the bookstore. He reads the Diary and Big Nate books over and over, so they're worth the buy.

Then we came home, ate lunch, played chess, I exercised, then more chess, other stuff, supper, getting ready for bed, and he went to bed at about 9:30pm, which is late as all dickens for him.

During that time, I got some semi-private time, like while I was sitting next to him while he played his 17 minutes of Wii time. I'm not a total wuss about my writing environment, but sitting next to a Kid who is fighting his enemies with a virtual lightsabre is not conducive to writing first draft prose.

So, I edited. It kept my head in the game. I'm still inside the novel. This novel. 

You do what you can.

TK

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Quick editing tips to tighten your fiction

That -- About 80% of the times that you use this word, you can delete it, and the sentence will still mean the same thing.

Up and down -- Ditto. Just cut them unless the sentence needs them.

Dialogue attributions, e.g., he said and she said -- If two people are talking, you only need 1 tag about every 5 lines of dialogue, or less. Try to make the words used by each character distinctive.

Do not cut one word of emotion or characterization unless it is redundant.

She saw/heard/thought/surmised/considered/theorized -- Remove this part and just let the observation stand on its own, unless you have not recently centered the narrative in the character. If you've been describing other stuff for a while, use this to re-center the narrative within the character. If you've been inside the character a lot, remove this to open up the narrative to the setting and world.

  • She thought that [T]he contradiction was obvious: if they had all planned to be gone and to set off the sarin remotely, why did they have a sealed safe room inside? (Remove the "she thought" and the "that.") 
  • Angel heard the rain on the tin roof above her, the roar of the tanks' big diesel engines, and her own heartbeat. (Don't remove. Centers the narrative in the character.)  

Good luck and happy writing,
TK Kenyon






Monday, June 11, 2012

Selling Handcuffs, An Angel Day Novel. Chapter Two: The Bat Cave


This is the second chapter after the Ice Monster! scene. If you haven't read that one yet, I'll leave it up a little while longer. 

These scenes are a bit of lull, some character development, some establishing the baseline that gets disrupted, before all heck breaks loose very soon. 

The first 25% of your novel or story should set up your main character and show them as they are, with all their flaws and all their virtues. It should show the relationships that they have in place and introduce many of the major characters. 

If you haven't read Chapter One, an Ice Monster! scene, you can click here to read it now. It'll be posted for a few more weeks, but then it will go away. 

If you sign up for email updates (over there on the right side bar), you'll get an update when I post Chapter Three: The Secret Police State. 



Chapter Two: The Bat Cave


Friday, June 8, 2012

Writing Tip: Character Population

#Writingtip: if you know that you're going to mass murder some characters, start with a lot of characters so you have some to choose from.

I'm going back and salting in characters, all of whom are DOOMED.

New chapter soon. With new DOOMED characters.

TK