Tweet Me Well: @good2tweat

You met Alli Wesson, my personal chef character (from the “Dinner is Served” culinary mystery series I am writing) when she dropped by for an interview. She is quite a character, so to speak!

Anyway, Alli and I were talking about how we’re going to develop a marketing plan for the “Dinner is Served” series. One thing that occurred to me, and Alli just loved it, was to start a Twitter following of her recipes. That is such the hot thing these days among foodies.

So I set up a Twitter account. Follow me there @good2tweat. I promise some cooking tips, food facts, and recipes in miniature. Additionally, I have a food blog, "Parsley, Sage, and Rosemary Time" at www.sharonarthurmoore.blogspot.com. If you go to the food blog, take the garlic quiz.

I ordered Eat Tweet: 1,020 Recipe Gems (Maureen Evans), and I follow Maureen on Twitter. She is amazing! She does unusual stuff, complicated recipes, even ethnic ones and she does it in 140 characters or fewer. That includes spaces and punctuation by the way. To show you what I mean, here is a recipe from Alli that appears in Prime Rib and Punishment, the book I am currently writing:

Savory Butter: Pulse n mini fd proc .5cbutter/3T bell pep/1grn onion/1clv garlic.

Sprd bread or Portobello shrooms n grill. Srv 1T on cookd meat.

Alli and I are going to tweet some recipes to those of you who like word puzzles AND cooking! Look for me on Twitter now @good2tweat and you will find cooking tips, recipes, and food facts accumulating.

Whether you like to cook or not, you may have friends who do. Let them in on Twitter recipes. Build up my traffic for that Twitter account! Retweet me to all your friends.

I gotta admit that I am having trouble with getting my head around how much marketing we are expected to do for our books. I get it that budgets are tight, and I get it that NO ONE cares more about my books doing well than I do. Still. More on marketing in a later column.

Book Marketing Plan

I am submitting my “naughty novel”, Streetwalker, to Eternal Press early next week. I went on their website to find out the submission guidelines and discovered, for the first time since I have been looking at submission guidelines for fiction, that they require a marketing plan.

It shouldn’t have shocked me the way it did. I’ve written about this before. Every conference I go to, every class I take, someone, sometime mentions that you are in large part responsible for marketing your book. If you don’t care the most, who does?

In all my years of publishing non-fiction books, I was expected to know the target consumers and the competitive texts. My reputation in the field (based on presentations, articles, and other books) was part of the marketing plan. When I submitted a book proposal, I had to include sample chapters, an outline, and a skeletal marketing plan.

I get it.

But, fiction has been shielded from the worst of this for so long. Now, it is endemic. You must promote yourself and your works. At minimum, I learned at one conference agents/editors expect you to have a following through your blog, website, Facebook, and Twitter accounts. That’s the minimum.

So what does one do when one encounters this expectation for the first time, in real life, with consequences? The message I took away from the Eternal Press info re submissions was that my marketing plan was part of their consideration for whether to offer a contract. Hmm.

What did I do? I sent out a distress call to my two critique groups. They came through dutifully and beautifully. One critique partner in particular has a business background and her suggestions were amazing. Learn more about Sandra Evans and her many books with business applications at livinglegacyjourney.blogspot.com.

In a later blog, I am going to share what I send to Eternal Press in hopes it will help some of you who are facing the same thing.

It doesn’t even matter that we resent having to invest our time this way. It just is. So do it.

Setting as Character

In a horror story, setting is the unnamed character. The spooky house that you know she should not enter. The door he shouldn’t open. Movies show you what that setting is like replete with drippy candles and wax puddles and wind blowing the lace curtain. In novels, we have to create those pictures with our words. (That helps the director of my books see my vision so the movie will turn out exactly the same way I imagined it—NOT!)

I don’t write horror, but I do write mystery. And sometimes setting is the unnamed character there because these events couldn’t happen if the story were not set where it is. The walk-in refrigerator freezer plays a role in my WiP novel as does the setting of a culinary arts school. What I have planned requires those two (and other) settings.

But, that is not my strength, describing where my characters are. I am in awe of my critique partners who make me feel I am there in their books. I can smell the creosote after a desert rainstorm. I see the gleam of the cherry wood cabinets. I feel the fabric wales on the blanket. They do that so well.

Not I.

“I’d like to know more about the kitchen in this house. Is it messy? Upscale? Is it a show kitchen or one the owner uses?” asks Annie at our last critique meeting.

“I don’t know where we are,” says Sandy in reference to a page or paragraph opening sentence.

How easy to say, “Oh, I’ll put that stuff in when I revise.” Why do I not put it in as naturally as I do plot points? Why do I rarely call them out on setting descriptions. I am the most likely violator in our group.

Because setting is really important in mystery, sometimes providing clues to help solve the puzzle, it is necessary that I get better at thinking setting. I do believe that awareness, what’s around me at all times, is what is at root of this.

You’ve played the game, I’m sure, where you are asked to close your eyes and describe the room you are in. I do not do well with this game. I am better at the memory one, you know, the tray of stuff you study and then remember after it is removed. I focus. I pay attention when I am told to do so.

Left to my own devices, apparently I don’t focus or attend to surroundings enough. I believe that is why, when writing, I don’t focus or attend to surroundings. I don’t do it in real life, so why would anyone think I could do it in fictional life?

But, can I change? What if I consciously focus on setting at the beginning of every scene? What if I don’t let myself write plot or dialogue until I can picture where the characters are and do a word picture of that scene’s setting?

Hallie Ephron’s book (Writing and Selling Your Mystery Novel, reviewed in an earlier blog) has a worksheet for doing that. But I am talking about more. Writing a page or more on the setting for a scene would be work, most of which would never show up in the book. But, it would for sure help me know where my characters are right down to the gnat’s derrière.

Worth a try, eh? Or, I could just let my critique partners find the holes that I can patch later.

Stephen King and (Writing) Target Practice

So okay - there you are in your room with the shade down and the door shut and the plug pulled out of the base of the telephone. You've blown up your TV and committed yourself to a thousand words a day, come hell or high water. Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want. — Stephen King (On Writing)

I can do that! Write 1000 words a day, seven days a week? That’s only 4-5 pages a day. Shoot. I get up early. I can do this. That means 90,000 words can be completed in 90 days. Now THAT is motivation. I could be done with this sucker in three months?

Anyone as prolific as Stephen King has been and continues to be, has to have the discipline to keep putting down words, over and over and over. And he writes more than 90K books.

Here’s another Stephen King quote from On Writing: “ . . . I believe the first draft of a book—even a long one—should take no more than three months, the length of a season.” King’s writing goal is 2000 words a day, and he doesn’t quit until he does it.

I shared with my critique partners in Desert Flowers and Pens Afire that I set 1000 words per day (wpd) as my target for this new book I’m working on, Prime Rib and Punishment. Some were taken aback. I was reminded how differently we all write.

DH and I are very different writers. He spends forever crafting his sentences and then, in the editing phase, he changes them all anyway. He is a ruthless editor of his own and others’ work (a great guy to have in my bed, eh?). I, on the other hand, call my writing style “the blat syndrome”. I blat it out, all over the page. What a mess to have to clean up, but first drafts go pretty fast for me. Hmm. Maybe I am like Stephen King (see earlier blog on comparing writing styles)! Don’t I wish!

Sort of to my amazement, I am easily meeting my target of 1000 wpd, and I even got up to 2200 one day, so I am going to up the ante (not being a poker player, I have only a vague idea what this means). My new plan is to write 1500 wpd or about 10,000 words per week (wpw). I am writing 1000 wpd in just a few hours. I can add a couple of more hours and meet my target. That means I can write 80,000 word novel in 8 weeks. First draft. And, hey, I didn’t promise it would be good. Just done.

Website to Boost Your Ego

Need a break from your book? Want to keep thinking about writing rather than doing writing? Have I got the spot for you!

My oldest son sent me this website (“I Write Like”) a while back, and I have shared it with various writer-friends of mine. Everyone has enjoyed it thoroughly. You will probably bookmark it, too. It’s pretty addictive.

This website categorizes your writing style by comparing your prose to that of published authors. Here’s how it works.

Go to one of your manuscripts and choose a segment. I don’t know the limitation for number of words, but I know I have put in quite a few paragraphs. Select by highlighting. Click on “copy” from your “edit” menu.

Log in to http://iwl.me and “paste” your text in the box provided. Then click on “Analyze” at the bottom. Presto bingo! The site matches your writing style to an author and names the author you write like. I was pretty pleased that one of my manuscripts matched Stephen King. Wahoo! (Can I put that in a query letter? Hmm. Probably not.)

However, another manuscript matched me with an author I had to google to find out who he was and what he wrote. Still. I did match a published author with each manuscript segment I entered, and no surprise, since I write in a variety of genres, I had a bunch of different authors I matched.

It is better to match an author unfamiliar to me than to have the website come back and say, “Sorry. We could not find a match for your search query.” What could be a better boost for your ego than to say, "My writing is in the style of James Joyce"?

Dilettante is as Dilettante Does

I have accused myself of being a dilettante because I write in so many genres. It surely helps with writer’s block to have so many different projects going—plays to children’s books to culinary mystery to erotica to historical fiction to . . . well, you get the idea.

But, this time, I think I out-dilettante-d myself!

I started book two in my “Dinner is Served” series about two personal chefs and the murders they solve. Good you say? Not so fast. It’s not like book one is done. That’s the one I dumped and had to start over. But I can’t. Not yet.

It’s like there is static in my head. I want to “re-purpose” parts of book one, but I have to have a new killer and motivation. The red herrings change. Nope—can’t do book one right now. I can’t get a handle on the new story because part of my brain is still working on the old one.

Fortunately, long ago I planned out multiple books in the series. So, I moved on to book 2 to get back into the series. The hardest question was do I make Cooks in the Can book two or should it be Prime Rib and Punishment? After a suggestion from one of my critique group partners, I began Prime Rib and Punishment, set in a cooking school.

Interesting to me, anyway, is that I am not writing it episodically as I wrote book one. I used Hallie Ephron’s planning guide then wrote first two chapters. Then I wrote part of last chapter because I read somewhere that when writing plays, if you write the last act first, you know where you are headed and can plant seeds throughout that ripen and come to harvest in the last act. Okay, so that’s make some sense. Then, I started getting scenes in my head, so I wrote two other scenes that will appear someplace, not sure where.

Have I planned my novel? Yep, but my pantser stepped in. I don’t know if that is good or bad. I just know I have no control over the flashes. This has happened to me before with other novels. When I get the scene flashes, I know to write them down. Even if they end up on the cutting room floor, the more I write about my characters and my story line, the better it will be for the final book.

I took the first two chapters to my Pens Afire critique group yesterday. There were multiple problems to fix (as is always the case, eh?), but the biggest one harkened to Sue Grafton’s comment re writing a series. How do you keep the recurring characters fresh? How do you introduce them to a new audience while not boring your fan base?

Writing Alli Wesson and Gina Smithson or Gina’s mom Maria and her pal, Pearl—pretty easy. I know these women! I like them, and I can tell you what they are likely to have for breakfast whether at home or when they go out to IHop.

But therein lies the problem. I am not reading this with the eyes of a reader new to my series. So Pens Afire (Sandra Bremser and Annie Weissman) called me on it. Good for them. Even though I knew of the danger, I skated right past the warning signs onto the thin ice. It’s cracking around me, but I now know, early in this book, to skate away. Thanks, Pens Afire.

Glyphs

I’ve been meaning to get to this, and given the time-sensitive nature of the exhibit, I better do it now. I recently visited the Kimbell Art Museum in Ft. Worth, TX and spent almost all my time in their special exhibit, Fiery Pool: The Maya and the Mythic Sea (until January 2, 2011). Not only were the pieces of Pre-Columbian art amazing, but the recorded Mayan language was an archaeological and linguistic puzzle for hundreds of years.

We all know about hieroglyphics, the Egyptian writing form. But the Mayan was much more complex, including both stylized pictorial and phonics elements within a glyph. The language researchers had to figure that out and then break the glyphs into their components.

And just what is a glyph, you might be asking. It is a relatively new word (18^th century) from Greek to French to English. The Greek word meant “carving.” A glyph is a sculptured character or symbol, a form of pictograph.

The Mayans carved these symbols into stone and painted them on pottery and walls. A few hundred years before the Spanish arrived, the Mayan culture was in decline. The people spread away from their cultural centers, so there were fewer who could read the old glyphs. The invading Spanish and their accompanying priests did a pretty good job of finishing the dispersal and trying to wipe the Mayan culture out. Those factors made translating more than a few of the enormous trove of glyphs an impossible task until late in the last century. Yes, the 1980’s!

An early-arriving priest had left a kind of Rosetta Stone that recorded some glyphs the Mayans of the time told him, but archaeologists still couldn’t “read” the panels of glyphs. There is a history of the small insights and understandings linguists had over the years you can read on Wikipedia. For example, they figured the numbers out pretty early.

The big breakthrough came with figuring out the word “water” and in realizing there were phonetic elements. Once linguists had decoded the glyph for “water”, they began to identify glyphs for sea creatures and others who lived by the sea. Somehow, amazingly they were able to go from those early glyphs to being able to read whole selections. Not all Mayan writing has been translated; it is on-going. But the major breakthroughs and the amount that can be read bodes well for the completion of the task.

I just love archaeology stuff in general, and being a language person, the idea that a written language has only been created a few times in history is intriguing. What motivated some cultures to figure out a way to document and pass along their stories and information? Who conceptualized the glyph system? How did he (or she) convince others to use it? Who taught the thousands of Mayans to read the glyphs? How universal was literacy? Well, youth wants to know (and so does old age, by the way).

There is still so much to learn about the glyphs and the Mayans. But think what a great historical novel you could do with chapters on translating the tale on panel glyphs alternating with the ‘real’ story behind the writing. I would have a woman creating the glyphs, of course! Why not? Maybe she has to pretend to be a male in order to be a priest. That could be a good story! Does she have a happy ending? Not in my tale. I’d have her unmasked and killed as a warning to other women not to try to enter the world of men. But her secret daughter carries on her mother’s work until the value is recognized and her mother’s contributions are acknowledged. Great story, eh?

I tried to paste in the glyph that means “scribe”. It didn't work, unfortunately. But check it out on a search for Mayan glyphs. Look at it and tell me you could have figured that out! And what about the syntax? However did they know that part of the glyph is a syllabary? Doesn’t this just sound like the most exciting job ever (except for author, of course)?