Learning | Meredith Mansfield, Author

Posts Tagged ‘Learning’

Backstory

Posted in writing, tagged critiques, e-publishing, fantasy, Learning, revisions, sequels, series, world building, writing on June 17, 2015| Leave a Comment »

Backstory is such a delicate line to walk. How much is too much? What serves to add verisimilitude? Which bits enrich the story and which just drag the pace down? How can it be brought in elegantly?

I know the history of my world for the DUAL MAGICS series and how it got to be the way it is at the beginning of the story, but only snatches of that have made their way into the story so far. (Some day, I may write a prequel series about all of that.) For now, I try to keep to just what is needed for this story. But it looks like I haven’t put in quite enough.

I can’t emphasize the importance of critiques enough. Beta readers can tell me things about my story that I can’t see because, no matter how hard I try, I’m just standing too close. The first of my critiques for BEYOND THE PROPHECY has come in.

Among other things, it’s clear that I need to work in more background on part of this world. There are places where I can do that, I think, without slowing the story down.

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Cover Art and Fonts

Posted in writing, tagged Cover Art, e-publishing, fantasy, Learning, marketing, Multiple Projects, series, short stories, writing, Young Adult on April 5, 2015| Leave a Comment »

Possibly the single most important factor, especially for indie-published books, is the cover. It’s the first thing potential readers see. If it doesn’t intrigue them, they won’t click through to read the blurb or buy.

I started out doing my own covers because I couldn’t afford to do anything else. And my early covers weren’t just bad. They were horrible. I had to learn to do better.

Now, I probably could afford to hire at least some of my covers done, but I find I actually enjoy doing my own. But, of course, they still have to be good. I’m still learning. (I got a book on graphic design for my birthday, which I haven’t finished reading yet.) I also belong to a couple of cover art critique groups, now.

One of the areas it’s clear I’ve needed to work on is typography. With the cover for the upcoming BEYOND THE PROPHECY, Book 3 of the Dual Magics series, I changed the font to something less standard.

Which, of course, means I now have to change the other covers to match.

Here’s the first cover for THE SHAMAN’S CURSE:

Not bad. But here’s the newer version, which just went live yesterday:

I also changed the font on the cover of “Becoming Lioness”, which is a tie-in short story. And on the cover of “Modgud Gold”, another tie-in short story that I expect to release in the next week or so.

I’m also very happy with the font choice for DAUGHTER OF THE DISGRACED KING, which is available for pre-order. It releases May 18th.

Love that font for the title.

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The Shape of a Story

Posted in writing, tagged conflict, e-publishing, fantasy, first drafts, Learning, revisions, sequels, series, writing on March 11, 2015| Leave a Comment »

I’m a discovery writer. I know, I said that before.

One of the things that means is that I don’t always see the shape of a story when I start. In the case of BEYOND THE PROPHECY, which is the third book in a four-book series, I knew most of the events that would take place. I knew the theme. I knew the main conflicts. But I didn’t have a real feel for the shape of the story–the way those conflicts would fit together to bring the story from its starting point, through the climax, and on to some form of resolution.

I’m kind of a stickler for some kind of resolution to each book. That’s partly because as a reader I hate to be left hanging in the middle of a long story for months or a year for the next part–which often still doesn’t resolve anything. So I always try to structure my stories to reach some intermediate resolution in each book. I want each book to feel like a complete story in itself, as well as part of the larger story of the series.

Now, as I’m writing the beginning of that climax, I have a really good feel for that shape.

The downside of being a discovery writer is, as always, that the story needs more revision than a plotter’s might. All those things I figured out along the way are going to need to be set up in the earlier parts of the book. And they’re not set up in the first draft because I didn’t know about them when I wrote the first chapters.

That’s okay, because I actually don’t mind revising. Good thing. Even if I’d been keeping count (which I don’t), I’d be embarrassed to say how many revisions THE VOICE OF PROPHECY had to go through.

Certainly a record, even for me.

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Graphic Design and Book Covers

Posted in writing, tagged Cover Art, e-publishing, fantasy, Learning, marketing, research, sequels, series, writing, Young Adult on March 1, 2015| 2 Comments »

I’ve been reading–admittedly slowly because it’s just not as much fun as reading fiction–a graphic design book, trying to improve my understanding of what I’m doing when I design a book cover. I actually looked for a course at my local community college, but they didn’t have one. Graphic Arts, yes, but not Graphic Design, specifically.

I think typography will likely be an area where I need to get into more depth. I have a tendency to just pick a standard font and go with it.

This is particularly apropos because I’m trying to get a start on two covers right now. The one for BEYOND THE PROPHECY, the third book in the Dual Magics series. And one for DAUGHTER OF THE DISGRACED KING, a young adult fantasy romance that I wrote over a year ago.

I actually have the concept for BEYOND THE PROPHECY pretty well in hand. Not that it will hurt to have a better understanding of the principals of design. But the background theme–blue and red on a dark background–is already well established. The backgrounds advance from lightning, to a veritable storm of lightning, to smoke, and finally to flames. The only thing I really need to choose for those covers is the foreground image. For BEYOND THE PROPHECY it will be a white eagle (or as close as I can get, which may be a gyrfalcon. There aren’t very many images of truly white eagles.) That might, or might not, give you an idea of what happens in the story.

DAUGHTER OF THE DISGRACED KING is proving more difficult. I think I may finally have a concept. Something I may try out on a couple of Facebook groups I belong to, to see how it flies. That’s very helpful, too.

Indie authors have to wear a lot of hats.

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Promotion Wrap Up

Posted in writing, tagged e-publishing, fantasy, Learning, marketing, sequels, series, writing on February 8, 2015| Leave a Comment »

Okay, my $0.99 promotion for THE VOICE OF PROPHECY finished on Friday. The results were mixed.

Now I should say that I didn’t have enormously high expectations to begin with. I knew I was going with a relatively new site. (That’s why it was free, after all.) Also, part of it was my fault. My first tweet of the promotion had the purchase url wrong. Can’t expect people to buy something if they can’t find it, now can you?

Now, there are two things I hope for from a promotion.

Enough sales to pay for itself
Most importantly, more people aware of the book. This is the single hardest thing for an indie author.

I don’t have any way of assessing the second. I suppose time will tell. For the first, well since the ad didn’t actually cost me anything directly, the only costs to recoup would be the decreased royalty from the price drop. I would have needed approximately three times as many sales as normal to offset the drop. That didn’t happen. Well, I’ll qualify that. I did break even in the UK, but not on Amazon.com.

My sales are still down a bit, but that’s to be expected following a sale. Hopefully they’ll rebound quickly.

So, what did I learn?

I probably made another mistake in promoting the second book in the series, even though it’s the new release (and this was a new-release promotion). It probably would have done more good to promote the first book–or to promote both together. I’ll try that next time.

Will I use SciFiFantasyFreak again?

Yes. Of all the promotion sites out there (that I’ve found so far) it’s the one that aims right at my target audience. The bigger and better-established sites are all more general, though the best of them do at least allow subscribers to choose their genres of interest instead of being bombarded with a lot of titles they’ll never buy. (Hint: There is no point in marketing a spy thriller to me. If I’m in the right mood, I might invest a couple of hours in the movie–for free on tv–but I’m not going to buy the book.) And I do think that as their subscriber list grows SciFiFantasyFreak will only get better.

Next time, though, I will try harder to combine that promotion with one of those other sites. That’s something I definitely haven’t mastered yet.

I subscribe to several of these bargain e-book sites. (Sometimes, I even buy something that’s advertised. Mostly, I consider it market research.) I often see books that turn up on more than one of the sites on the same day or within a day of each other. I don’t know how those authors manage that level of organization–while working, writing the next book, and trying to make at least a swipe at all the things that need to be done around this house. I need to figure that out.

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Promotion

Posted in writing, tagged e-publishing, fantasy, Learning, marketing, sequels, series, writing on February 4, 2015| Leave a Comment »

So, I’m nervous right now. I’ve got a promotion going this week. (It started yesterday afternoon and runs through Friday.) It’s a $0.99 Kindle Countdown deal on The Voice of Prophecy.

The promotion is on SciFiFantasyFreak. Not one of the big promotion sites, but at least hopefully targeted to my main audience. (And within my price range.)

I haven’t done a lot of promotion for my books. Not very good at it, though I know I need to learn to be. And my record for what I have done is kind of spotty. Some have worked pretty well. Some have fallen flat and actually hurt sales. Here’s hoping this falls in the first category. I’ll let you know on Sunday.

Any help getting the word out would be greatly appreciated.

Writing is the fun part, but people have to be able to find the stories, too.

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You Never Know What You’ll Find

Posted in writing, tagged characters, e-publishing, fantasy, first drafts, Learning, Real Life, sequels, series, writing on January 28, 2015| Leave a Comment »

In real life, one of my current projects is to organize that room. Just about every house has one. The room that doesn’t get used very often (maybe it’s a guest room) and so ends up being the place where you put anything you can’t find another place for–or things you just don’t want to week out, yet. In my case, it’s variously referred to as the back bedroom or the closet room. Somehow, no matter how many times I’ve tried to organize it, it always ends up looking like some giant has stirred it with a stick. I think there’s a poltergeist at work.

There are literally corners in that room I haven’t been able to get to for years. Not without a lot of work, anyway. I pulled a lot of stuff out of that room when I designated a portion of my new office space for crafts. Made sense to organize and store most of the craft supplies in one of the closets. That should make it easier to organize what’s left. Somehow, it seems to have had the opposite effect.

The thing is, you never quite know what you’re going to turn up when you start poking into corners like that. Among the things that have turned up are very early versions of some stories that I later rewrote. (Must remember to shred those at some point. The writing is truly dreadful.) And an abandoned writing journal.

I knew that the characters and at least some of the events of the Dual Magics series had been kicking around in my head for a while. Now I know just how long a while. 1987. Yikes. Back then, I used to write long hand in spiral notebooks.

Of course, it’s not quite the same story now that it was then. It’s much better and richer than that early version.

After I abandoned the book as a writing journal, I apparently used it to write down impressions on at least one vacation. The last entry is:

Long way home. Fog, rain, pelicans.

Well, at least it’s not verbose. I must have been tired.

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Reading–and Writing–Battles

Posted in writing, tagged action, conflict, e-publishing, fantasy, first drafts, Learning, Reading, sequels, series, writing on January 25, 2015| Leave a Comment »

Fantasy, especially epic fantasy or sword and sorcery, very often includes battles. And a few things this week have come together to get me thinking about what makes a written battle work–or not.

It’s a good thing to start thinking about. Towards the end of BEYOND THE PROPHECY, I’m going to be writing the first really big battle of this series. Not that there isn’t action of other sorts, and even other fights, earlier in the story. But this will be the first of two large groups colliding. (Much more of that in the fourth and final book of the series.)

First, I recently finished a book that included a multi-chapter battle. I mean multi-chapter, as in twelve chapters. Twelve. With almost every move of four separate POV characters detailed. All right, they were short chapters, mostly. But still. I was so ready for that battle to be over and to move on with the story. Only, the story didn’t go much farther. Didn’t really have what I’d call a real denouement. Just set up for the sequel–which I won’t be rushing out to buy. (No, I’m not going to name the book. Just because it failed for me doesn’t mean someone else might not enjoy it.)

All right. For me, at least, that’s probably not the way to write a battle scene.

Now, immediately the thought occurred to me that Tolkien had also written a long battle scene in RETURN OF THE KING and that one didn’t bother me. So, I got out my copy to take a look at that. The Battle of the Pelennor Fields starts towards the end of Chapter IV (The Siege of Gondor). But then it’s broken up by the Ride of the Rohirrim in Chapter V, which only returns to the actual battle at the end of that chapter. Then Chapter VI all and only about the battle–and it’s a fairly long chapter, because a lot happens in that battle. But Tolkien doesn’t attempt to tell us every sword stroke or skirmish. He evokes the chaos of the battle and then only really shows us the highlights.

I like that approach much better.

Now, while I’ve had a fight scene of some kind in most of my books, I think I’ve only tackled a pitched battle twice.

Once was in FIRE AND EARTH. That was two chapters. Three, if you count the chapter where the heroes worked out their strategy. And then one from the point of view of each of the two main characters.

The other is in “Becoming Lioness”, which is actually a compressed version of one of the battles that will be in the fourth book of the DUAL MAGICS series. That one is mostly told from the reactions of the main character in that story.

Meanwhile, as I continue writing my way toward those battles, I’m reading Rayne Hall’s, WRITING FIGHT SCENES–and getting some good ideas.

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Outlining vs. Discovery Writing

Posted in writing, tagged e-publishing, fantasy, first drafts, Learning, sequels, series, short stories, writing on January 4, 2015| Leave a Comment »

I know I’ve blogged about this before. I consider myself a modified discovery writer. Modified because I once wrote a whole novel-length work that didn’t come out to be a story. I knew it wasn’t a story as I was writing the end, though it took me–back then–a few tries to figure out why.

The reason was because it wasn’t organized around a central conflict. Once I figured that out, I knew how to fix it. (I’ll confess here, that not-a-story, written back in 2009, was actually the very earliest version of what became THE VOICE OF PROPHECY.)

See, you really can fix anything in the revisions. I need to keep reminding myself of that as I work on the first draft of Book 3 in the DUAL MAGICS series, BEYOND THE PROPHECY. Part of my brain keeps wanting to slow down and make it like a revision, not a first draft.

Just get the story down. Fix it later.

After that experience, I no longer just launch blindly into a story. (Well, sometimes I will on the rare occasions that I write a short story, but that’s not nearly the same investment of time that a novel is.) I try to at least map out the central problem and the high–or low–points of the story. Not anything like a real outline. Just a few paragraphs to guide me along the way.

I’ve done that for BEYOND THE PROPHECY, but that doesn’t stop me from getting things a little out of order.

Sometimes, that central problem is the antagonist. The Dark Lord (whichever particular variety of Dark Lord appears in a given story) must be stopped. And the main character’s internal journey and growth is a secondary plot. But sometimes that’s reversed and the internal journey is the main conflict, while the antagonist is more of a complication. THE VOICE OF PROPHECY was like that, which is probably what threw me off years ago and why it took me becoming a better writer to be able to pull it off.

BEYOND THE PROPHECY is not like that. In Book 3, the antagonists come back to the fore. Yes, I meant that to be plural. There are two. If you’ve read the excerpt of BEYOND THE PROPHECY included in the (ebook version) of THE VOICE OF PROPHECY, then you know Gerusa’s back and making more trouble–and not just for Vatar. The other antagonist is actually someone (or someones) from the first book, THE SHAMAN’S CURSE. (No, it’s not the shaman come back to life.) And, eventually, they’re going to join forces.

The reason this topic came up today is that I started to write that chapter, then realized I was making that alliance way too early. That’s got to happen much nearer the end of this book.

That’s okay. I’ve written the chapter (or most of it) and it’ll probably stand as is, at least for the first draft. Just not where it is. Now I have to go back and figure out what does happen in that space. My few paragraphs of proto-outline don’t cover everything.

And remind myself, it doesn’t have to be perfect in this draft. That’s what the final draft is for.

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2014 Writing Goals–How I Did

Posted in writing, tagged e-publishing, fantasy, first drafts, Goals, Learning, Multiple Projects, revisions, writing, Young Adult on December 28, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Well, it’s that time of year. Time to look back and see how well–or poorly–I did in meeting my goals this year and look ahead to what I want to accomplish next year.

My 2014 goals were:

Publish THE BARD’S GIFT.Done.
Query my middle grade novel, MAGE STORM. Well, I did. This one will turn up again on my 2015 goals.
Complete and publish THE SHAMAN’S CURSE and THE IGNORED PROPHECY (since retitled THE VOICE OF PROPHECY). Oh, yes.
Complete what was then called MAGIC AND POWER–now DAUGHTER OF THE DISGRACED KING and query that. Yes. This one will also turn up again on my 2015 goals.
Write something new. Well, I’ve started BEYOND THE PROPHECY. I really think I meant something in an entirely different world, though. Maybe next year.
Continue to learn and improve. Always.