tips for writers

My first NaNoWriMo

/ Melanie Marttila / 9 Comments

Winner, winner, chicken dinner

Off the top, I have to say this: I won!  My first time out and I won 🙂

Backtracking to my trip to Surrey

Before I even left, I was considering NaNo. The municipal liaison came out to the Sudbury Writers’ Guild meeting in September to promote. My leave would be until November 18, 2013, so I thought I’d probably have a chance.

While at SiWC, I heard several people talking about NaNo and how it had really helped them get their ideas down, break through writers’ block, built their confidence, and so forth.

By the time I got back, I was determined to give it a try.

I chose a project that I had outlined years ago. I’d had a little bit written, but I hadn’t touched it in years.

I was going to start over in any case.

The power of planning

I knew I was going away for a few days to visit some friends, and that I’d be going back to work before the month was out. I started out by front loading the work, trying to move ahead quickly at the beginning so I could coast a bit at the end if I needed to.

Still, when I went back to work, there were a few low count nights. I was worried.

To make time for my writing in the evenings when I went back to work, I tried using my smart(er than me) phone to keep track of my email and social media.

I got up a half-hour earlier than usual to check Facebook, WordPress follows, and my Feedly follows and share the interesting stuff on Twitter and Google+.

The pilgrim’s progress

Here’s a convenient table for you:

Day Count Total + or –
1 2161 2161 +494
2 2284 4445 +1111
3 2325 6770 +1769
4 travel 0 6770 +102
5 2122 8892 +557
6 travel 0 8892 -1110
7 1877 10769 -900
8 2168 12937 -399
9 2190 15127 +124
10 1675 16802 +132
11 1721 18528 +191
12 2284 20812 +808
13 2008 22820 +1149
14 1699 24519 +1181
15 1684 26203 +1198
16 1894 28097 +1425
17 1668 29801 +1462
18 1727 31528 +1522
19 return to work 1181 32709 +1036
20 549 33258 +82
21 507 33765 -1242
22 1822 35587 -1087
23 1814 37301 -1040
24 1707 39008 -1000
25 1731 40739 -936
26 1677 42416 -926
27 1692 44108 -901
28 757 44865 -1811
29 2232 47097 -1246
30 3802 50899 +899

What I learned

I don’t think I could do this working full time.

Having said that, it was fantastic to know that I could pull a 50000+ word draft together in 30 days. It was interesting to me because my first novel took me a year to write, working in the evenings and on weekends.

It gives me hope that if I do end up getting a deal for my work at some point and am asked to pump out sequels in swift succession, I should be able to do so. Also, if I end up going the self-publishing route, it’s always good to have moar material out there. If people like what I write, I can potentially supply the demand.

While my Samsung Galaxy Note II is quite lovely, I don’t think that I could manage my social media long term using it alone. Some of the information so easily accessible on my desktop is not so convenient to find in an Android app version of the program. Also, some things don’t translate well. Though the Feedly app appears to allow FB mentions in a post, it does not actually include them when posting to FB.

I have a few strange-looking posts over the last couple of weeks, and was not able to keep track of anyone’s birthdays on my phone, so apologies to anyone I may have offended or missed as a result.

Again, it’s good to know that I can do a minimally good job of maintaining my social media from my phone if need be.

Today, except for these blog posts, I have not written. I’ll get back on that horse shortly. I’ve also had to let a few submission deadlines slide because I just couldn’t manage to do it all. Everyone has their limits.

Coming up

I’ll be blogging in the future about my writing plans moving forward as well as a little about work. Interesting times I live in 😉

Writerly Goodness, signing off.

Mark Leslie workshop with the Sudbury Writers’ Guild

/ Melanie Marttila / 2 Comments

This past Thursday, November 28, Mark Lefebvre of Kobo, who writes under the pen name Mark Leslie, conducted a workshop on self-publishing for the Sudbury Writers’ guild.

Mark spoke a bit about his experience with self-publishing first.

Mark Leslie

Mark Leslie with members of the SWG and Barnaby

His horror short story collection, One Hand Screaming, was published using Lightning Source (now Spark) from Ingram.

For his anthology Campus Chills, Mark and his friend Steve formed Stark Publishing (Steve + Mark). They used the Espresso Book Machine, which got its name because in the time it takes to make an espresso, the machine could produce a book.

At the time, Mark was working for a university book store and convinced the store to invest in the machine. He made the venture a paying one, producing all kinds of books for various groups in the university and surrounding community.

Mark is also an editor, editing North of Sixty, and Tesseracts Sixteen.

More recently, he compiled stories with background research for Haunted Hamilton and Spooky Sudbury, which he co-authored with Sudbury journalist Jenny Jelen. Both books were published with Dundurn Press in Hamilton.

One of the things to keep in mind is that traditional publishing can get you into places that you could never get into alone, for example, Costco.

Now Mark works for Kobo (which is just an anagram of book, by the way).

Why authors choose to self-publish

  • For the new author, it’s a way to break in to traditional publishing, make a mark, get noticed.
  • For mid-list writers, it’s most often used to resurrect their backlist. As copyright returns to authors, they format for self-publication and keep their work in circulation longer than their traditional publisher were willing to.
  • For the NYTBS author, self-publishing offers control.

In general, self publishing offers higher royalties and faster payouts than traditional publishing.

Epub format is the industry standard.

Mobi is the Amazon standard.

Self-publishing is good for long-form journalism. (Mel’s note: we had a fair discussion of this. For those who don’t know what long-form journalism is, it is the full version of the article with bonus research materials. The print article may be a thousand or so words. The long-form version may be five or ten thousand. Think academic essay, but more accessible.)

It’s also good for publishing collections of short stories. If the stories have already been published elsewhere, then it can be seen as a kind of validation or pre-screening, and the collection may have a ready audience.

Services:

  • Kobo
  • Kindle
  • Nook
  • iBooks
  • Smashwords

Kobo started out with Reading Life for their ereaders, and then developed Writing Life for their authors. The Kobo dashboard allows the author to see stats, earnings, and sales figures globally at a glance. (Mel’s note: Hugh Howey used, liked, and promoted Kobo Writing Life.)

You can format your work in Word or OfficeLibre (formerly Open Office). Use Sigil, or Calibre to tweak formatting, and Kobo even has a native WYSIWYG editor which will be familiar to WordPress users.

Follow the formatting instructions of your chosen platform carefully.

A word on DRM: it only hurts paying customers.

Branding

It’s not just about your name.

Mark takes his skeleton, Barnaby, on the road with him wherever he goes. He puts a t-shirt on Barnaby and sets him up outside the bookstore. People wandering by sit down and have their pictures taken, post them on social media. It’s free publicity.

Vistaprint is a great source for promotional materials. Pens, mugs, and t-shirts are just some of the swag you can buy to give away and promote your work.

KDP and KDP select

KDP select is Kindle’s exclusivity line. You can only publish with KDP select, no one else. You can only price books for free on KDP select, but only for five days out of every ninety.

You can work around it. Just publish using KDP and also on other services. Price the book for free on Smashwords or elsewhere, and Amazon will price match if one of your fans reports the competitor pricing.

Diversifying is better. Get your work out there and into the hands, or ereaders, of your fans. Let them choose the service.

Price is a verb

$2.99 seems to be the sweet spot (right now). The lower you set your price point, the more your royalties will be reduced.

You have to know who your audience is.

$1.99 seems to be the price point of doom. Currently, no one knows why.

$.99 is good, as are $3.99 and $4.99.

Authors can experiment. One author change the price of her ebooks from $4.99 to $5.99 and saw sales across all platforms except Kindle increase slightly. Kindle sale went down initially, but within two weeks, they levelled out again and all was well.

The two biggest complaints from marketing about ebooks are:

The cover sucks; and

It’s priced too low.

Free can work as a gateway to a backlist.

Writer-tech: Dropbox on Wordsmith Studio

/ Melanie Marttila

Please go see my post on Wordsmith Studio: Writer-tech: Dropbox.

Image representing Dropbox as depicted in Crun...

Image via CrunchBase

Wordsmith Studio is a wonderful collective of writers that began through Robert Lee Brewer‘s April Platform Challenge last year.

Thanks to Lara Britt for inviting me into the designers group and encouraging my more active participation it the collective.

Hope you enjoy!

Writerly Goodness, signing off from Timmins, Ontario 🙂

Related articles

Writer-tech: Asus Transformer and Samsung Galaxy Note II

/ Melanie Marttila / 6 Comments

I’ve always been a bit of a technophile.  I think it comes from the fact that Phil is computer-dude supreme, a genius even, or, as one of our friends once called him, an ass in jeans 🙂  I like to joke that I learn things from him through osmosis.  I’m fairly certain that if it weren’t for Phil, that I’d still be tech-clueless and likely in a lot sorrier shape than I am now.

I’m still tentative about some things though, and learning something new in the technical realm that I’m not particularly motivated to learn can still stress me out.

Once upon a time …

In another life (that’s how long ago it was), I had an interest in creating Web pages, and with Phil’s help, I learned how to do basic HTML scripting, you know, the kind that you had to type out in Wordpad, tags and all?  I’d do my own graphics too, real basic stuff, that I’d put together in a freeware imaging editor that I no longer remember the name of.  I use The Gimp now 🙂

I did a few Web pages for some of my employers at the time: Huntington University, The Art Gallery of Sudbury, and ACCUTE (the association of Canadian college and university teachers of English).  Eventually, I graduated to Microsoft FrontPage, but I couldn’t compete with the new Web page design companies that were plentiful even in a place like Sudbury.

I maintained listservs too, and brought at least one employer into the world of Yahoo! Groups, then the only game in town, so to speak.

Enough of my techie history though.  I just wanted to give you some perspective, and to set the stage for my next revelation.

Let’s do the Time Warp!

Fast forward a few years and here I am happily writing away with a desktop, laptop, and USB keys to affect file transfers.  I was a confirmed bibliophile too, lived the smell and the feel of books, and didn’t want to enter the world of ereaders even after Phil bought one (a Kobo, by the way).  As Rupert Giles said to Jenny, knowledge should be … smelly.

I’d started my blog, been hacked, restarted my blog and was on a dedicated mission to build my platform.  I didn’t even understand what that was to begin with; I just know that I should have one.

My phone was what I affectionately called a “dumb” phone.  It was the dumbest I could find when my contract came up.  Called the Doro phone, it was marketed at seniors 😛 with a big number pad and no camera on board.  I had a digital camera.  I didn’t think I’d ever have need for anything else.  I just wanted to be able to make a phone call, and to receive one, maybe text a friend every once in a while.

Then things changed

I got tired of the dumb phone and its limitations, of paying more than half of what my friends were for their I-phones and Blackberries.  As my shelves were quickly filled with paper books, I began to see the benefits of an ereader.

Phil had given his Kobo to his mom and purchased an ASUS Transformer.  He began to use it every night, reading books off Project Gutenberg, comics, and even watching Netflix in bed.  I began to see the attraction.

So, I bought my own ASUS Transformer, and I love it!Transformer1

First, it was super easy to set up and learn how to use.  I was downloading apps from the first day.  There’s more than enough space on the dear little thing to keep me happy for a long time.

Second, it has a suppementary keyboard attachment which extends the battery life, memory, and data ports, as well as helping to protect your investment.

I have access to internet, email, all of my social media, WordPress, and just about anything else I’d want.  The only down side is that it’s not so easy taking my writing on the road.  Polaris Office doesn’t do a bad job, but there are some features that I’ve just gotten used to in Microsoft Word that Polaris doesn’t understand or offer.

Dropbox has the potential to replace my USB though 🙂

transformer2I also have, with the tablet, not only Kobo’s, but Amazon’s app too, so now I can read whatever I want wherever I want 🙂  I also have news, comics, and other readers, so I’m pretty much loaded for bear.

Plus, it has a camera/video recorder with voice recording too!  Can my dreams of podcasting and vlogging be far off?

The Transformer’s all but made my laptop (and my camera) obsolete.  Who knew that an upgrade could actually lead to an overall reduction in the amount of tech I own/use?

plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

(The more things change, the more they stay the same.)

Around my birthday last year, I had done a lot of word-of-mouth research, asking friends and coworkers about the kinds of smart phones they had, about their service providers, and contracts.  How much were they paying a month and what were they getting for the price?

I’d had my eye on the Galaxy Note since Guy Kawasaki reviewed his purchase of one.  I looked up every review and the worst anyone had to say about it was that it was a little big.  Big whoop, I thought, I’ve got decent-sized hands.

As serendipity would have it, my service provider sent an upgrade offer to my email.

Phil, who used to have his own cell phone, then tired of it, had been forced back into a contract by his employer.  Then, as a cost-saving measure, his employer introduced a cost-sharing program, whereby Phil could get his own phone again, and his employer refund him for part of the monthly cost by way of compensation for using the service for work purposes.

So when I mentioned the upgrade offer, and that I was seriously considering the Galaxy Note II, it was perfect-tech-storm time 🙂

Galaxy1We went out and got ourselves a couple of Galaxy Note II’s that weekend.

Phil now uses his note to read/watch movies in bed 🙂  It’s lighter than the Transformer, even without the keyboard.  We have a wireless network at home and Phil has one at work, so we’re going to downgrade his data plan.  He almost never has to use LTE at all.

I’ve found it a boon because I can keep track of my email and SoMe notifications at work and better manage the time I spend online in the evenings.  I haven’t yet graduated to using it to create blog posts at lunch or anything, but I can see that happening in the future.

It’s essentially a tablet with a phone and text capability.  Because it’s an Android, like my tablet, I can have all the apps I have on my tablet on my phone too.  Many of them will even sync up.

I love the stylus feature though.  Included in the Galaxy Note II’s applications is a note suite galaxy2which has everything from basic notes, to meeting minutes, mind-mapping tools, financial planning notes, greeting card creation notes, drawing apps, etc.  I haven’t explored these thoroughly yet, but I have used it for shopping lists, to do lists, and reminders.

galaxy3You can simply write on your note, or use the text conversion feature to change your handwriting to text.  It works great for me.  It’s only messed up once, when I was demonstrating the feature to a friend.  I can definitely see this replacing my journal some day, but I still have about 10 or so paper journals to write through first.

I’m not an early adopter

For some things, I’m the first person to take an interest and conquer the new tech.  This happens most often in my day-job.  In general, I’m not the first person to pick up the latest technology.  I like to wait until the manufacturer has worked out the bugs and someone else has tested the product first, often Phil.

I haven’t been very quick on the uptake with respect to all the writerly apps I can make use of on my tablet and phone either.  I’ve barely scratched the surface, so I’ll leave you with a few sites I found that were very helpful to me in selecting the best apps for my droid.

I hope this post will be useful to those of you considering a tablet or smart phone.

Tomorrow, there will be a brief pupdate.  Come on back now, ya hear 😉

The best of Writerly Goodness 2012

/ Melanie Marttila

Well, since I only started blogging (in this incarnation) in March, it’s not been a year yet online, but I’ll give you an idea about what I think has been the best of 2012.

Best movie:  Definitely Cloud Atlas.  I don’t know why, but this movie really had me thinking and feeling.  I know that not everyone shares my inclinations, but Cloud Atlas blew me away.

Kim and I will be going to see The Hobbit tomorrow, but I honestly don’t anticipate that it will impress me as much.  I’ll enjoy the heck out of it, but Cloud Atlas affected me …

Best writing book: (A.K.A writing book porn): The Right to Write.  I’ve had the book on my shelf for years and it wasn’t until the Wordsmith Studio Goodreads group chose it that I actually cracked the cover.  I love Julia Cameron’s philosophy even if I am still struggling with morning pages.  Yum.  Yum.  Yum.

Runners up include Larry Brooks’s Story Engineering and Syd Field’s The Screenwriter’s Problem Solver.

Best fiction: The Hunger Games.  When my Mom read it before I did, I figured I better get around to the dear little thing.  I was pleasantly surprised.  Mind you, Larry Brooks’s 11 part analysis of the book was fantastic too, and made me think that I’d have some substantial writerly lessons to learn from it.

Riding Suzanne Collins’s heals are Hugh Howey’s Wool Omnibus and Juliet Marillier’s Daughter of the Forest, both of which I’m still reading, so I’m not sure, strictly speaking, that they count (!)

Best non-writing, non-fiction book: The Happiness Project, by Gretchin Rubin.  Again, still reading it, but it does speak to the control freak in me 🙂

Best writerly experience: The New York comes to Niagara pitch conference.  Fraught, yes.  Learning experience, double-yes.

Best local arts event: Hands down has to be the Launch of Kim Fahner’s The Narcoleptic Madonna, though Jon Bulter’s The LaCloche spirit: The equivalent light exhibit and Scott Overton’s launch of his novel Dead Air are close seconds.  Nor can I forget the 100 thousand poets for change event in North Bay.  Poetic road trips are the bestest.

Best posts
These have been selected due to the number of all-time views.

  1. Do you dress for success?
  2. The cadre … or should that be cabal?
  3. Feminist lunacy from Battle Chant
  4. Why did I call this category Alchemy Ink?
  5. Eight metaphors for persistence and why you’ll want to read this anyway – my very first post!  Awww … you guys 🙂
  6. Character sketches, part 2: Eoghan
  7. Character sketches, part 3: Dairragh
  8. Rethinking my online strategy
  9. Why spoilers are good for writers
  10. An Interview with Kim Fahner
hAPPY NEW YEAR

hAPPY NEW YEAR (Photo credit: Helgi Halldórsson/Freddi)

I’ll wait until New Years Day to post on resolutions.  So have a happy New Year all, and thanks a bunch for all of your support!

Virtual hugs!

Writerly Goodness.

Mel’s movie madness

/ Melanie Marttila

Beware! Here be spoilers!

Cloud Atlas

Cover of "Cloud Atlas"

Cover of Cloud Atlas

Last Sunday, I attended the film with my mother, mother-in-law, and sister-in-law.  I was blown away.  Loved it.  Like any good meal, fine beverage, or other work of art, it wants savouring.  It takes time to digest.  And so, here I am, a week later, blogging about it.

First, a word about music.

In a previous life (only about 25 years ago), I was a music major.  Total miscast, that one 🙂  But I learned a few things that have stood me in good stead as a writer.

In my first year, I was introduced to the structure of symphonies.  Like most other art forms, symphonies tell stories.  They’re told in several movements and bound together thematically by the leitmotif.

Think of Bethoven’s Fifth.  The opening bars provide the listener with the motif.  The motif appears throughout the work in its rhythm and interval, but it transforms through key and tonality.

Another example is Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique.  The leitmotif appears first as a lilting flute line, reflecting the main character’s beloved.  Through the movements, the motif transforms into a parodic witch’s dance on the main character’s grave and ultimately to the main character’s redemption.

Classical music is a wonderful exercise in structure.  Get into a music appreciation/analysis class sometime and you’ll see.

All kinds of good to be taken away to the writer’s desk.

So back now to Cloud Atlas.

Based on David Mitchell’s novel of the same name, the movie is a masterful symphonic composition.

Six stories play out simultaneously, weaving back and forth between one another and bookended by a seventh.

The movie begins with an old man telling a story around a camp fire under a starry sky.  His face bears markings reminiscent of Maori, or other aboriginal cultures, and he speaks in a form of pidgin English.

Though the movie moves back and forth between the stories constantly, I’ll lay them out in a more or less chronological fashion.

In 1849, lawyer Adam Ewing travels to the Chatham Islands to conclude a business contract for his father in law, Haskell Moore, a man famous for his tracts on the moral rectitude of slavery.  While on the islands, Ewing is horrified by the manner in which the slaves are treated.  He meets Dr. Henry Goose as he digs for evidence of cannibals and subsequently contracts some form of parasite, which Goose promises to treat for him.  One of the slaves stows away on Ewing’s ship and convinces Ewing first to hide him, then advocate for him.  Goose is actually poisoning Ewing in an attempt to steal his gold, and the slave saves Ewing’s life.

In 1936, gay composer Robert Frobisher leaves his lover in Cambridge and becomes amanuensis to famed composer Vyvyan Ayres in Edinburgh.  His goal is to complete his own work and while under the thumb of Ayres, he becomes embroiled in the drama of Ayres’s “Jewess” wife (remember this is pre-WWII), and seeks solace in the travel journal of one Adam Ewing.  He writes letters to his lover, Rufus Sixsmith.  Ayres hears Frobisher’s composition, The Cloud Atlas Sextet, and attempts to take credit for it.  Frobisher shoots Ayres and flees, completes his masterpiece living under the assumed identity of Adam Ewing, and ultimately commits suicide, leaving his work to Sixsmith.

We leap to San Francisco (coincidentally the home of Adam Ewing) 1973, where journalist Luisa Rey bumps into a much older Sixsmith, who is now a nuclear physicist.  Sixsmith wants to disclose something to Rey, but before he can, he is murdered.  As she follows the clues, Luisa discovers Frobisher’s letters to Sixsmith and falls in love with their story.  This leads her to a second hand record store where the proprietor plays The Cloud Atlas Sextet for her.  She determines to solve the mystery of Sixsmith’s murder.  At the reactor where Sixsmith worked, Rey meets Isaac Sachs, who gives her incriminating evidence against the plant’s owner who is purposefully looking to engineer a failure to feed Big Oil interests.  Though Rey becomes a target of the assassin, a war buddy of her father’s helps her out and she survives to write her expose.

In 2012, publisher Timothy Cavanaugh watches one of his authors throw a critic off a balcony in front of a room full of witnesses.  The spendthrift wastes the ensuing windfall and when the author’s criminal family come to claim their share of the profits, Cavanaugh flees to his long suffering brother, who institutionalizes him in a nursing home reminiscent of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  Eventually, in a series of comedic misadventures, Cavanaugh escapes and pens a screenplay of his story which becomes a major motion picture.  He also writes of Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his screenplay.  I believe Rey is one of his other authors.

In dystopian Neo Seoul of 2144, Sonmi-451, a fabricant waitress, comes to the awareness that she is a member of a slave race.  Freed by Hae-Joo Chang, a member of the resistance, she studies Solzhenitsyn and Cavanaugh’s movie as she is inducted into the underground.  Fabricants, told that they are going to ascend, are in fact slaughtered and recycled into the food that feeds them.  As the final battle between Neo Seoul military forces and the rebellion plays out before her and she watches Chang die, Sonmi-451 broadcasts her message of hope and freedom.  When she later tells her tale prior to being executed, she influences the man who interviews her.  He now believes as she does.

Finally, the post-apocalyptic Hawaiian Islands (approximately 2321) form the setting of the final story.  Zachry, a devotee of the goddess Sonmi, is plagued by visions of “Old Georgie,” his tribe’s version of the devil, after failing to save his brother-in-law Adam from the cannibalistic Kona.  A Prescient (the remnants of technological society after “the fall”) named Meronym visits from the mainland.  She is on a mission to save humanity by activating a distress beacon located on the island.  The beacon will send a call to humans who have settled off-world.  Radiation will kill everyone on Earth if they can’t evacuate.  In the process Zachry and Meronym find the recording of Sonmi-451’s broadcast.

We return to the even later, where the old storyteller, Zachry, finishes his epic tale.  His audience is composed of his many grandchildren.  At the end of the tale, Zachry shows one of the children where Earth winks in the sky, then ushers them inside where Meronym waits to embrace him.

While it may seem that I’ve spelled everything out here, I haven’t.  The story, or stories, are much more complex than that.

On Theme

When I first emerged from the movie, in a bit of a daze I must admit, my first thought on its theme was: The truth shall set you free.

While I still think this holds true, there are many themes in Cloud Altlas, just as there are many stories that intertwine throughout the movie.  Slavery appears overtly in Ewing’s story as well as in Sonmi-451’s, but prejudice and the abuse of power go hand in hand with it.

Homophobia and anti-Semitism appear in Frobisher’s story and the abuse of the elderly in Cavanaugh’s story.  Zachry’s tribe lives in ignorance and is victimized by the Kona.  Cannibalism features in Ewing’s tale as well as Sonmi-451’s and Zachry’s.

The abuse of power shows up in all the stories one way or another, from Haskell’s assertion that slavery benefits the enslaved, through Ayres’s attempted appropriation of Frobisher’s work, corporate espionage in Rey’s story, Cavanaugh’s commitment, and the “right” of the Neo Seoul hierarchy to create a slave race to serve society, to the Kona’s slaughter of Zachry’s people and the abuse of secrets withheld from them by the Prescients.

Knowledge is power could also be a theme as well as the enduring power of the creative work.

With regard to the leitmotif, the endurance and influence of the creative work is one.  Each story connects in some way to the next through the creative medium.  Ewing’s travel journal, Frobisher’s letters to Sixsmith and The Cloud Atlas Sextet, Rey’s expose and resulting career as a mystery novelist, Cavanaugh’s screenplay, and Sonmi’s broadcast.

The actors form another set of leitmotif, as most appear in every story.  The make-up and effects are stunning.

If I was still in school, I’d be writing a thesis on this movie 🙂  It is that good.

Best movie I’ve seen this year. It’s the true-true.

Writerly goodness, signing off.

Fairy tales, Snow White and the Huntsman, and Mirror, Mirror

/ Melanie Marttila / 2 Comments

Once more, I find myself a day late and a dollar short, but for good reason.  Last night, I attended the Sudbury Writers’ Guild meeting and caught up with my fellow writers in arms 🙂

A lot is happening up here in the north.  Matthew Del Papa published Green Eyes through Capreol, a collection of short stories based on life in the railway town.  Scott Overton had one of his short stories accepted into the recently published Tesseracts 16, will have his first book, Dead Air, launched October 11, 2012, and next week, he will take part in the LUminaries reading series at Laurentian University along with Mark Leslie and John Forrest presenting on the topic “The Power of Popular Fiction.”

Several members are nearing completion of their various works in progress (yay!) and the Guild is moving forward on an anthology of northern writers.

Exciting creative times in Sudz!

____________________________________________________

Last week, I was a little out of sorts.  My response to stress seems to be to heap more of the deadly stuff on until my overwrought brain insists on a break.  Thanks to the kind comments of my writer friends, I embarked on a dedicated weekend of relaxation, and as part of that, I watched a couple of movies: Snow White and the Huntsman, and Mirror, Mirror.

In the beginning

Both movies are based on the fairy tale of Snow White.  Now the original story is much the same as the one most of us have become familiar with through Disney.  With a few subtle differences.

A young queen, desperate to have a child, sits spinning at her wheel.  She looks out through the ebon-wood frame of the window, onto a snowy field.  So distracted, she pricks her finger and three drops of her blood fall.  In that moment she wishes for a child black as ebony, white as snow, red as blood.

She has the child, but dies in childbirth.  The king remarries a vain woman who owns a magic mirror.  As the child grows in beauty, the new queen grows jealous and orders her huntsman to murder the girl.  The huntsman, touched by her beauty, cannot kill her, and she runs into the woods.

The huntsman figures the girl will be killed by wild animals in any case and shoots a deer with his bow, taking its innards (not just heart) to present the queen.  In the meantime, Snow finds her way to the home of the dwarfs and they allow her to stay if she will cook and clean for them.

The queen learns from her mirror that Snow still lives, and the artefact is so kind as to tell her where.  So she disguises herself and visits the dwarfs’ home while they are away working.  First, she gives snow a lace collar that once tied around the girl’s throat, chokes her.  The dwarfs return and remove the collar, restoring Snow.

They warn the girl not to receive strangers but the naive thing does so twice more, once to be poisoned by a comb placed in her hair, which the dwarfs also remove, and then to be poisoned by an apple, a mouthful of which lodges in her throat.

The dwarfs cannot revive her this last time, and determine to encase her body in a glass coffin.  As they transport the coffin to a mountain top, a traveling prince literally runs into them, upsetting the coffin, and dislodging the poisoned apple.

The prince announces he will marry Snow and invites everyone in the land.  The queen, preparing to attend the great feast and not knowing the identity of the bride, checks once more in her magic mirror, and is told once again that Snow White and not she is the fairest in the land.  The mirror neglects to tell her where Snow is this time, however, and she goes to the wedding still ignorant.

At the feast, the queen and her treachery are exposed and she is presented with a pair of iron shoes that have been heated in the fire.  She must dance until she dies.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes, in her anthology of the Tales of the Brothers Grimm, writes:

A tale invites the psyches to dream upon something that seems familiar, yet often finds its origins in a far away time.  In entertaining the tales, listeners are re-envisioning the meanings of them, “reading with the heart” these important metaphoric guidances about the life of the soul.

As my recent foray into Fairy tale blogging madness will attest, fairy tales have an enduring fascination.  Snow White has been given homage in many novels and movies as a result.

Snow White and the Huntsman

This movie is quite faithful to the original fairy tale at the outset, but then takes a radical departure.

**Warning: Spoiler alert!**

Snow White & the Huntsman

Snow White & the Huntsman (Photo credit: Ludie Cochrane)

The queen, a fearsome sorceress who drinks the life force of beautiful maidens to remain young and beautiful, murders the king and keeps Snow White a prisoner for ten years while the country grows desolate around them.

When Snow White escapes into the dark forest, where she has no power, the queen recruits a huntsman and binds him with the promise that she will resurrect his dead wife if he will kill Snow White.

In the forest, Snow meets the dwarfs, who have fallen on hard times.  The huntsman finds Snow White, but Snow convinces him that the queen has deceived him and that they will both die if he takes her back to the queen.

They flee with the dwarfs, through various adventures, and joined by Snow’s childhood playmate, the son of a neighbouring duke, they defeat the queen’s brother and his men.  The queen, however disguises herself as the duke’s son and offers Snow the fateful apple.

When she is revived, Snow convinces the Duke to go to war against the queen and in a final confrontation, a Snow that appears more like Joan of Arc than a fairy tale princess, kills the queen.

What I liked about it:

  • The queen.  She was a brilliant villain, made more complex by a back story of abuse and tragedy, and more creepy by implications of incest with her brother.
  • The dwarfs.  They were a mystical, gruff bunch.  Bob Hoskins was fantastic 🙂
  • The lord of the forest.  At one point, the group enter fairy lands, and the lord of the forest blesses Snow.  It was a scene reminiscent of Princess Mononoke, with the lord of the forest appearing as a giant white stag with gloriously branching antlers, though I much preferred Myazaki’s Puff ‘n’ Fresh-like head rattlers to Huntsman’s eerie fairies that crawled out of the bodies of animals.
  • The scarred women.  To protect themselves from the queen’s predations, the widowed and orphaned women of the land scar their faces.
  • The awakening kiss.  Though it is the duke’s son who loves Snow, his kiss does not awaken her.  It is the huntsman’s kiss that proves to be the kiss of true love, but not because he loves Snow.  It is a kiss born of his sorrow for failing Snow as he failed his wife before.  I liked that a lot.
  • The ending.  Snow White, having defeated the queen and reclaimed her kingdom, sits on the throne, no man by her side, not the duke’s son, and not the huntsman.
  • The song.  Breath of life by Florence + the Machine is awesome!

What I didn’t like:

  • Some of the plot points were too convenient.

Why keep Snow White a prisoner?  The queen could have just killed her, or better still, take the girl’s life force to maintain her beauty.  It’s only when the mirror reveals to her (ten years on) that Snow’s heart will keep her forever young that she thinks to do anything with her rival.  Why did the mirror wait so long to tell her?
The queen has no power in the dark forest, so she recruits the huntsman, but she still sends her brother in after Snow.  Why didn’t she just send her brother in the first place?
The duke’s son gets himself recruited to the queen’s brother’s hunting party, but when they find Snow, he’s more concerned about maintaining his cover than in helping her.

  • The fairies creeped me out.
  • Snow is innocent and pure.  It’s that purity that allows her to defeat the queen, but for the final battle, she’s done up in plate mail.  It promises bad-assery that Snow fails to fulfill.  The queen tosses her around like a rag doll and she only succeeds in killing the queen because she’s lucky.

Mirror, Mirror

Mirror, Mirror, from the outset, seemed a movie that didn’t know what it was trying to accomplish.  It starts with the queen, narrating her own story in a British accent, which she doesn’t maintain.

There are moments in it that are potentially dark, but they are overwhelmed by the silly.

In this revision of the fairy tale, Snow is merely locked away while the queen fritters away her money on parties and trying to look young.  She is advised by a maid to go out and have a look at the kingdom herself.  Snow is horrified by the poverty she sees.

When the prince comes on the scene, the queen settles on him as a means to continue her wastrel ways.

The prince, however, has fallen in love with Snow (who rescued him after the bandit dwarfs left him hanging), so the queen decides to get rid of her, sending her chief boot-licker out to do the job.  That part is faithful to the fairy tale.  The boot-licker is unable to kill Snow, but leaves her to the beast that lives in the forest and shows the queen some organ meats that were left in the kitchen.

The dwarfs are highwaymen in this version.  They rob the prince twice, and in keeping with the fairy tale, permit Snow to stay with them if she cooks and cleans for them.

As the queen tries to seduce the prince, Snow becomes a highwayman herself, insisting that the dwarfs return the money they steal to the townspeople to whom it truly belongs.

The queen eventually sends “the beast” out after Snow and the beast turns out to be her father.  Snow breaks the enchantment, marries the prince, and when the queen sneaks into the wedding feast and offers Snow the gift of an apple, Snow sees her for what she is, and refuses to be fooled.

What I liked:

  • The mirror.  In this version, the mirror is a kind of portal to another place where the queen communes with the mirror, which is herself.  Kinda nifty.
  • Snow as a highwayman.  She delivers on the kick-ass, though not terribly convincingly.
  • The beast/the king.  It was Sean Bean!  He got to live, for once!

What I didn’t like:

  • The queen.  Shallow and careless.
  • The prince.  He’s depicted as a doofus from the beginning and totally unworthy of Snow.
  • The dwarfs.  Though they’re thieves, they run around on stilts and do circus stunts.
  • The potion.  In the queen’s attempt to seduce the prince she gives him a potion without first examining what it is.  It turns out to be puppy love.  More doofus action for the prince.
  • The puppets.  The queen sends marionettes after Snow and the dwarfs.  Lame foes and once Snow sees their strings, she easily cuts them and saves everyone.
  • The Bollywood production at the end.  Totally misplaced.
  • The soundtrack.  Very traditional orchestral stuff.  Probably very good, but easily ignored given the ridiculousness of the movie.

Takeaways

  1. Villains that have a reason to be villainous and who do truly terrible things as a result are always better than purely selfish divas.
  2. In the same vein, flawed heroes are better than the goody-two-shoes, but …
  3. Heroes need to be heroes.  No doofaci (the plural of doofus, don’t ya know?) need apply.
  4. Convenient plot points will always be noticed and called out by the faithful reader.
  5. Go for the subtle twist.  The kiss of true love doesn’t necessarily mean what you think it means.
  6. The trails that your characters go through have to be dangerous, dire, challenging.  If no one is truly in danger, the reader won’t care.
  7. Even minor characters can be awesome: the scarred women.
  8. If in doubt, borrow from Anime before going to Bollywood for inspiration 😉
  9. Similarly, go for the quirky new artist rather than the traditional soundtrack for inspiration.
  10. Your story doesn’t have to end with a kiss, or even a relationship beyond mutual respect.

Have you seen any movies lately that got you thinking?  Do you watch movies for plot?  Learn anything about your craft in the process?

Writerly Goodness must hit the hay.  Reading at the 100 thousand poets for change event in North Bay tomorrow!  And you know I’m going to blog about that 🙂

Nine (plus) world building resources

/ Melanie Marttila / 7 Comments

Open any book on writing fantasy or science fiction and you’ll find a section on world building.

Cover of "The Craft of Writing Science Fi...

Cover via Amazon

Four cases in point:

Bova writes a section on “Background in Science Fiction” in which he discusses the uses of background (back story and world building elements), offers a complete short story as an example, and then practical suggestions on how to apply the techniques he’s discussed in the context of the story.  Bova makes reference to the greats of SF (Bradbury, Niven) as well as to literary works to round out his advice.

Card also has a chapter on “World Creation” which he summarizes thusly:

How to build, populate, and dramatize a credible, inviting world that readers will want to share with you.

Kinda speaks for itself, doesn’t it?

Killian writes a chapter on “Creating Your Fictional World,” including the following topics: A symbolic reason; A sense of what is natural; Parallel worlds; and Fantasy worlds.

Gerrold’s book contains several chapters on world building: Setting the stage; To build a world; Detailing the world; Building aliens; Believability; and Fantasy worlds.

Once again, every book on writing SF or Fantasy will include a section on world building in one form or another.  The more you read about it, the more you learn and the better you get at this whole world-building thing.

Books specifically about world building

I’m going to start with a book by fellow Canadian Authors Association member, Sandra Stewart.  She offers workshops in world building based on this publication.  Go check out her site for more information, or to get a copy of her World-building Workshop Workbook.

Sandra’s philosophy is to build from the micro to the macro and she gets into all the details from arts and entertainment, through calendar, to war and wizards.  She covers common pitfalls too.

Three more from Writer’s Digest:

If you’re interested in creating planets and star systems, this is the book for you.  In fact, I’d recommend the whole of the Science Fiction Writing Series, which delves in-depth into Space Travel and Time Travel among other subjects.

Ochoa and Osier cover some topics, like space stations, spaceships, civilizations, and other technological jumping-off points that some of the other writers don’t treat in quite the same way.

Contributors include Terry Brooks and Sherrilyn Kenyon.  As detailed as the above references are regarding the creating of a science fiction world/universe, this book is just as thorough with respect to the creation of a fantasy world.  It covers law and commerce, costume, myths and legends, and castles among other topics.  It’s a great starting point for research.

And finally:

Though this book might more appropriately belong in the books on writing SF and Fantasy (above), Scott fills more than half of it, pp 27-120, with various aspects of world building.  Like Stewart’s World-Building Workshop Workbook, I’d recommend Scott’s book because it offers a woman’s perspective on the techniques of world-building.  Further, Scott was Harvard-educated, which makes her perspective even more unique.  Her apology, “A brief defense of Science fiction, or why does someone who went to Harvard write this stuff anyway?” is both a humorous and insightful look at how SF is really a way to deal with our essential discomfort about change.

If I’d wanted to go tub-diving in my basement storage, I could have come up with half a dozen more books to recommend, but it takes something really special to make me dare the Rubbermaid jungle 🙂  Yes, I’m a book-addict.  Ask my husband, and if you do, have a beer ready for him to cry into!

Do you have any books on or containing sections of world-building that you’d recommend?  Share in the comments so everyone can benefit!

As a friend of mine says … heading for Bedfordshire.

The peregrine and all that followed

/ Melanie Marttila / 2 Comments

A.K.A inspiration, happiness, desire, Buddhist philosophy, and semiotic journeys

The peregrine

This morning, as I walked my dog, we neared a series of well-manicured cedars … and something flew out of them.  It looked about pigeon-sized, but it didn’t fly like a pigeon.  I like watching birds, okay?  I know what pigeon-flight looks like.  I know what it sounds like too, the rhythmic pumping of the wings that seems to push a little sigh with each down-thrust.

Pigeons don’t “kree” either.

This happened fast and I noticed most of it peripherally, but my interest was piqued, and the motion drew my eye to a nearby rooftop where a peregrine falcon was just landing. I saw the markings on its tail feathers and wing tips, and when it turned, I saw the pale breast, its feathery “pants.”

I mock you with my feathery pants.

It was beautiful, perfect even.

The words were out before I even knew I’d spoken: thank you.  The world shifted around me slightly.  My day was made.  Gratitude can do that to you.

I let Nuala sniff about for a bit.  She hadn’t noticed the peregrine, so I was able to watch.  It bobbed its head, assessing the threat.  I figured we must have disturbed its breakfast, that it downed something tasty and was having at in between the cedars.

So we moved on and let the peregrine get back to business.

I know we have peregrines in Sudbury.  In the past, they’ve nested at the University and of some of the buildings down town, but it’s not often I get to see one, and rare that I see one so intimately.

It got me thinking of several things.  In no particular order, they are:

There’s a poem in this

In my Thursday poetry posts, I often write a few words about the inspiration for the poem.  When I see something like the peregrine, and it touches me, usually there’s a poem in the moment.

If the moment is fleeting, I have to get it down, and quick, but if it has some staying power, the moment has to rattle around in my head for a few days, maybe a few weeks, gathering images and words like a mental tumbleweed until it gets so weighed down it can’t move anymore.  Then it’s time to write.

That’s what’s happening now.  Wee little tumbleweed, rolling around in my skull … 🙂

Happiness

The thing that made the world shift around me, that made me utter thanks, it feels like a “ping.”  It makes me take notice.

Moments of happiness and gratitude are all around you.  You experience them all the time, every day.  Pay attention.  It really does make the rest of the madness of life easier to put into perspective.

I don’t want to sound all hokey, but there’s sacred in those pings.

Desire

Which got me thinking about want.  A writer-friend posted to Facebook last week that she’d enjoy writing so much more if she wasn’t so invested in the whole publication thing.

I didn’t want to preach, so I didn’t comment, but what I wanted to write was: then stop worrying about publishing.  Write.  Act with purpose.  Continue submitting, by all means, but don’t hang your hopes on publication.  Persistence and practice pay off.  If you’re not enjoying it anymore, then you shouldn’t be doing it.  Take a break.  Give yourself a chance to remember why you love writing, why you really don’t want to do anything else.  Find your passion again and just write.  When passion fuels your efforts, you will write amazing things.  Shop those amazing things around and someone will accept them.  But stop wanting.  Just be a writer.  Write.

Another writer-friend posted this on Facebook today:

Take the “I want” out of anything, and you’ll find the happy.  It doesn’t come easily all the time, but if you can manage it even occasionally, you’ll be a happier person.  It’s this whole wibbley-wobbley, timey-wimey thing … No, that’s Doctor Who.  Sorry, obsession of mine 🙂

Really, it’s Buddhist philosophy

I read the Bhagavad-Gita not long ago, and that’s the central message of the text: stop wanting.  Stop desiring.  Be in the moment.  Act with conviction.

See the beauty, the power, and the terror (or the Krishna, if you’re a Buddhist) in everything.  It’s all connected.

Which brings me back to the peregrine.  Isn’t it a lovely little circle?

Oh, and something else

Peregrination.  Isn’t’ that a lovely word?  It means to take a journey, a pilgrimage.  Isn’t that what all of us writers do?

It’s all a wonderful semiotic mess 🙂

More insight into the mind of Mel.  Terrified yet?  Where has your mind been going lately?  Has it been going there without you?  How do your mental peregrinations influence your creativity, your art?  Do tell.

Three great books on self-editing

/ Melanie Marttila / 10 Comments

(A.K.A. more writing-book porn!)

Since I started serious writing practice and got down to the business of trying to turn my idea into a publishable work, self-editing has been an obsession of mine.  I started out with a good grounding (2 degrees in English), but soon learned that there is always room for improvement.  Always and forever.

When the publishing boom of the 80s and early 90s changed directions, agents and editors state one principle requirement: write a damn good book, and write it well.

Here are, in no particular order, three books that have helped me immensely.  Just ask my Author Salon critique group, I am the queen of nitery-pickery (I’m not sure why I choose to write it like that, but I suspect it might have to do with the character of Rockery Hud-Peck from The Fintstones—that’s just how my brain rolls).

1. Revision & Self-Editing: Techniques for transforming your first draft into a finished novel by James Scott Bell (The Write Great Fictions Series, Writer’s Digest Books, Cincinnati, OH, 2008).

Bell divides his book between self-editing and revision, which he states are two separate processes.  They are 🙂

In his introduction, he references Browne and King’s Self-editing for Fiction Writers: How to edit yourself into print, another of my selections (see below), as well as a slew of writing gurus ranging from Brenda Ueland to Natalie Goldberg and Ray Bradbury.

Bell begins each section by presenting his philosophy of the task, then proceeds through self-editing with various chapters on each aspect of the work (character, plot, POV, etc.), asking probing questions along the way to get the writer deeper into their novel, and offering exercises to assist with the understanding of the element at hand as well as its relevance in self-editing.

When he gets to revision, it’s more about process than elements and analysis, but Bell is equally insightful in his discussion.

Bell is a skilled author and editor.  He writes from his experience in self-editing.  This perspective is what sets my first pick apart from the others.

2. The artful edit: On the practice of editing yourself by Susan Bell (Norton, New York, 2007).

Susan Bell is a veteran editor and author, but her authority and perspective derive from the former role.

She breaks the self-editing task into Macro and Micro phases, again, providing examples, checklists, and exercises to deepen understanding. Then Bell offers what she calls her Master Class, provided in the form of experts in different creative fields (photographer, film, etc.) and what each can teach writers about how to make their story come alive.

Finally, she provides an overview of the evolution of editing, fascinating in itself.

Bell applies investigative zeal to her book, and it offers unique insight into the world or authors and editors, their relationships, where one begins and the other ends, and what the writer can do to become both.

3. Self-editing for Fiction Writers: How to edit yourself into print by Renni Browne and Dave King (Second Edition, William Morrow, New York, 2004).

First published in 1994 by HarperCollins, Self-editing for Fiction Writers is seen by many as one of the definitive works on the subject.

As with the James Scott Bell’s book, Browne and King’s breaks the task of self editing into its elements (characterization, dialogue, voice, etc.) devoting a chapter to each with examples and exercises.

One thing that I appreciate is the first chapter: Show and Tell (emphasis mine).  The point is made, and I fully agree, that while the writer should endeavour to show, that there are some places in your novel where telling is not only appropriate, but necessary.  It is the skilled writer who knows the difference and knows what technique should go where.

I also enjoyed the collaborative tone of the book.  When the authority is identified by “we” and not “I,” something rhetorical and clever happens: readers begin to feel that they are a part of the illustrious editorial team that wrote this book.

It’s an inclusive way of writing that empowers reading-writers to believe in their ability to self-edit.  The doors of the country club have opened, my friends, and we have all been invited in for drinks 🙂

The Wordsmith Studio Goodreads group is currently reading this book and it’s been a wonderful opportunity for me to get reacquainted with some old friends.

I recommend all three books highly (not to show favouritism or anything).

Do you have any books on self-editing that you would recommend?  Share their titles and maybe a few choice words of review in the comments so everyone can benefit from your experience 🙂

Writerly Goodness is calling it a night.

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