Why I love my husband…

~ tahenryauthoress ~ 3 Comments

Several amusing things happened today which highlight why I love my husband.

A) We lost power this morning, fuse blew on the line at the road. I say “I really wish we had brewed coffee before that happened.” My husband replies, “Let’s go get coffee and go to the lake.”

-Ahhh heaven.

B) I’ve been coaching my son’s team and one of his favorite games is hit the coach. All the kids try to kick the ball into you as you run around. It’s a great game for teaching them to pass to a moving target, which ideally will happen during the game, and they get the fun of “hitting” the coach. Because they are five year old boys, I jazz it up by letting the one who hit me pick an animal, which I act like including sound effects, until the next kid hits me. So while at said lake, we were helping our son with his soccer skills. We played a little hit the coach and while my son was digging in the sand, my husband gently kicks the ball and it rolls into me. He says, “Hit the coach.” I ask what animal sound he wants me to make. Without missing a beat he replies, “warble like a nightingale.” I gave the only proper reply “tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet.” (It’s a Tiki room reference-one of my fave things at Disneyland)

C) driving home from the lake I complain I now have the tiki room song stuck in my head, to which my husband replies, “Well we’ve got to hold on to what we’ve got.” totally deadpan. Bastard. Now, I’m singing that.

D) We’re putting away the groceries my husband took our five year old to costco for….

E) yeah, the trip to costco deserved it’s own line item. Anyway my husband starts telling how he read this interesting fact the other day about cooking and the poverty class in history. After he gets done I smile and say “Yeah, on my blog.” ROFL

Someone quoted my blog to me. That’s never happened before.

We All Know the Feeling…

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I immediately flashed back to Revolution. It was a TV show I binge watched the first season of on Netflix. I loved it. I loved the slow pace. I loved how each episode focused on a character and gave you their back story, what they were doing when the black out occurred, how they survived since then, a little window into how they became who they are in this post power universe. The second and final season came out just before I had surgery last fall. I saved it. Saved the season to watch while I was recovering. And then each day I would think about starting that second season and decide against it. What if the second season wasn’t as good as the first? What if it was? How soon would I go through the episodes and be left with no more. I knew the show had been canceled and so the second season was all there was.
Would you believe six months later, I have only watched the first episode of the second season. It was kind of a disappointment. I think about watching more every now and again, but I hate to ruin what is still, in my mind, a great show with further lack luster episodes. oh the humanity….

That’s all I need, see how easy I am to please…

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At the end of the day, as a mother, housewife, home schooler, soccer coach, therapist for a special needs five year old, and shoulder for my friends – all I really want is a little time to take care of what matters to me outside of my family.

oh, you didn’t know I was allowed to care about anything more than my kid? my husband? my home?

yeah, some days it feels like no one else knows it either. sometimes not even me.

Recently a family member announced he was flying up for the day. How nice, I guess. Except he picked Wednesday to fly in. Wednesday, the one day a week I get to escape for 3 hours to be the writer me, to recharge my inner self, most of the time anyway, assuming my sitter shows up and I don’t take my son to write in with me. But I digress.

I take care of everyone in my life, all day every day. And I do a damn good job. My house is clean, I cook gourmet meals most nights of the week, my kid has learned more in two months with me than he did in four months at school, he has play dates 3-5 times a week. Have six kids over all afternoon? Sure, this mom will always say yes.

I yoga daily, walk the dogs, and shower at least 5 times a week. (if you’re thinking ick, trust me I am a paragon of cleanliness in the home school world)  I won’t embarrass us all by going on.

So on the heels of this loss of a Wednesday, a loss of three hours of reestablishing my identity as a human being, I had to sign my son up for co-op classes for next year. There were really, really good classes on Friday morning. But Friday morning there is a write-in. One that I do not make currently because I take my son to the co-op for classes. What a choice to make: another 2 hour window of feeding my soul each week or my son’s education? I agonized for weeks about this. Plus the schedule wasn’t final for a while and I kept hoping some of those great Friday classes might migrate to Monday or later to Friday afternoon. It didn’t happen.

It was simple for my amazingly supportive  husband. “He’s in first grade, go to the write in.” I nodded my agreement but still I heard that little voice that says, to be a good mother you must give up everything for your child. That voice is right, when your child is a newborn, through say age two. Most moms have a second child which forces them to separate a little, to split their time and devotion. For others elementary school comes along and enforces separation. I have neither. So I must work a little harder at it.

I know there’s precious little humor in this post and even less about actually writing but today I feel like there must be more of you out there who struggle to balance that drive to write (or whatever your dream is) with the drive to care for those around you. You are not alone. My son will not go to co-op on Friday this upcoming year. If that makes me less of a mom, then I embrace that it makes me more of a human.

People are strange, when they’re friends

~ tahenryauthoress ~ 3 Comments

and you’ve asked them to beta read,

people are strange when they are readers,

reading your work that you love, they are straaaannnnge.

I love people who volunteer to beta. Love them. Sometimes I don’t so much like what they say. And not always because it is so true it stings. Sometimes….it’s just….painful. I’ve been thinking a lot about something I heard a panelist say sort of under her breathe to another panelist at Norwescon “There is nothing worse than a beta reader who’s comments are all designed to make your voice as a writer more like their voice.” I don’t think she meant this comment to be heard by everyone but I sure heard it in every sense of the word.

I want to give some beat feedback examples, and I’m going to exaggerate to make the points clear.

-I got feedback once where the reader thought I should remove all the footnotes in my book. Now that is clearly a stylistic choice, one that I embrace. One that plays a seminal role in what defines me as a writer. To remove that flattens my work.

-“It is the worst thing I have ever read.” Really? Fabulous. Why? “It just is.”

This tells the author NOTHING. It is the worst commentary ever. It just is.

Remember when your mother told you if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all? Yeah, try this, if you can’t say something specific, don’t say anything at all.

-“I hate this. It’s horrible.” um, ok, can you tell me why? “I hate spy novels.” or “I hate smut.” or “I hate romance.”

I don’t know about other authors, but I can assure you, I warn every person who is beta reading for me what the novel is about, in general. Don’t say yes if you hate that genre of writing. You’ll just hate my book and waste both our time.

Ok so those were some pretty heavy simplifications. But all have happened to me in one form or another at some time in my writing career. So it happens, a lot.

Let’s talk about how to give good beta.

First, what did the author ask you for? Do they want a full line by line edit for grammar and punctuation, plot overview, time line correction, character assassination, etc?

I have two superb line editors. I never ask for that, except from them. I ask for where the story breaks the flow, places you were confused, things that seemed out of place, when did you fall out of the story and why.

Second, are you criticizing their voice, their style, their way of writing, or are you finding issues that interfered with your suspension of disbelief?

Third, do you seek to find fault or do you seek to help them produce the best novel they can write?

Actually this last one is not bad for life in general.

This is the last norwescon blog, I’ll ever write for you….

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This is the last time that I’ll tell you just how much I really learned,

This is the last panel post from Norwescon, this year anyway….

Special Warfare, a panel I waited for all weekend long. I knew it was going to be full of info I could use in my spy novel, given my characters. Four pages of notes, people. Settle in for a long one.

The first thing they asked was how many authors in the room, almost everyone raised their hand. To which the presenter gleefully responded, “Fabulous, my boss only gave me the time off because I told him I could be a liaison between Special Ops and the writing community and then maybe you’d all start getting this stuff right.”

We’re listening – educate us.

When you use the term Special Operations what that really designates is a multi tier system of teams from various entities which come together for one off assignments. Each team member will do something unique that forwards the team to the goal. The system is so compartmentalized that people on your own team may have no idea what you do until you do it.

Tier one: Special Forces guys. They specialize in unconventional warfare. Train local populations, area studies, recruitment, sneak and peak, intel gathering, setting up bases. They try to avoid going toe to toe if at all possible. Generally, they go not blow up bridges, take over airports, etc. Yes, yes, they have done so in some circumstances, hence the word generally.

Tier Two: Direct action. Popular example: Rangers.

Two definitions of a Ranger. A) serves in a Ranger battalion. E1-E4 are not eligible to Ranger qualify. They are technically Airborne Infantry. About 50% of E5s have gone to Ranger school. B) Those who have gone to and graduated Ranger school.

Rangers have a great quote: “If everything is going according to plan you’re probably in an ambush.”

These are the guys who seize the airport, blow up the bridge, grab the required human target.

Tier Three: Civil Affairs – the humanitarian branch. They also do psy ops. Counter insurgency, establishing the legitimacy of the government in control in the host country. Build schools, lay roads, dig wells. They have an all female cultural support team who have airborne, cultural sensitivity, and language training.

Their command and control structure is flexible. One of the presenters explained in his current command structure an O5 (E5 equiv) is over an O6, because the O5 has more experience.

Special Operations interviews people for positions rather than simply placing them. This had led to the idea that they don’t play well with others.  In the 70s, 80s, 90s the regular military was suspicious of Spec Ops and would deny them materials. Just in the last ten years or so are people who have gone the Spec Ops route being promoted into top positions, Admiral and General.

Both the Ranger and the Spec Forces men on the panel confirmed having women in their units. They also felt that after a trial period the men of the unit ceased to consider the sex of the soldier fighting with them, ie the woman was only a woman until she proved herself a soldier.

What does an op look like?

A rumored operation went something like this. In a joint Civil Affairs, Spec Forces, PsyOps operation they made it appear that a volcano was going to erupt. When the enemy forces in the area fled, SpecOps moved in and relocated the villagers who were hostage. Neat and Clean. Not a shot fired, or so the rumor goes.

I’ll leave you with a quote from one of the panelists (Joe Malik – http://m-j-malik.blogspot.com/)

“Special Operations enforces the political will of the nation through violence.”

Dog goes woof, cat goes meow….

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But there’s one sound everyone knows, what does the author say?

Yes, Yes, I am aware it is the lamest song bastardization I’ve done yet. Face it, it’s the weekend, the only person who’s going to read this is my husband. Yet, I post on in the hopes that you will prove me wrong. I would love to be more than a work day distraction.

So dialogue. Really fun panel, great chemistry. I wrote pages of notes in between laughing heartily, which I will distill for you here. (laughter not included)

-Does it sound like something people would actually say minus the “um,” “uh,” “like,” and “yeah.”

-Read your dialogue out loud. Listen to conversations and write them down. Read really bad books and read the dialogue out loud for what not to do.

-Change your character’s speech pattern for the situation at hand. Do you talk to your significant other the same way you talk to your brother?

-Use distinct dialogue and reaction to cut down on the he said-she said. By the same note most of the time it should be obvious how something was said it is written right.

-Balance information dropping disguised as dialogue with moving the plot forward via dialogue. The conversation shouldn’t go on too long from one person, unless they are actually lecturing for some legitimate reason.

-Choreography of dialogue: each conversation should reveal character or move the plot forward. Leave out the small talk, unless it is needed in the plot. (For example I have a character who loves to make small talk so he can control the situation. It reveals his character and is needed in my plot.) Each exchange should progress the goal.

-A characters voice should reveal it’s individuality and evoke the feel of the time period.

-Watch for unexpected or unintended double meanings.

Finally I will leave you with this thought from Simon R. Green on point of view. (http://simonrgreen.co.uk)

1st Person gives an immediacy to the story.

3rd Person gives multiple points of view.

2nd Person is just whack.

Why, yes, I suppose I am – Severus Snape

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Hero or Villain? The argument still rages on in certain circles where geeks have too much coffee or beer and need something to do late into the night. Snape may have been JK Rowlings’ greatest creation. I don’t want to launch a debate on that. But I do want to look at what I heard at Norwescon’s panel on balancing your characters so that each hero is a bit of a villain and each villain is a bit of a hero, complex and completes human beings on the page.

First, how to make your villain closer to grey:

-Give your villain some of your own characteristics, so you are sympathetic to them. It will translate in to your writing.

-Use a traumatic experience from your own past to build some back story for your villain.

-Look closely at the people you love, what are their bad habits?

-People love scoundrels and villains because they do what we wish we could do and they have fun doing it.

The one point about villains that really grabbed me, FEW people think what they are doing is evil. The villain of your novel is really the hero in his own mind. Write a scene from the villain’s point of view to grasp what is lovable and human about your villain and to see what flaws your hero actually has.

Hero:

-If you are convincing enough with the flaws in your hero, you will push buttons in your readers. But that might be the goal of your work.

-Flaws give room for growth in your characters.

-Their flaws should impact the story.

When sitting down to get to know your characters be sure to include their most appealing and least appealing traits. What’s that you say? You don’t have coffee with each character before you start writing your work? shaking head. You should know how each main character would behave in any situation, even the ones you don’t plan to include in your plot. Nanowrimo has a questionnaire to help, http://blog.nanowrimo.org/post/61118193819/nano-prep-the-official-nanowrimo-character

And it’s all just a little bit of history repeating….

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Last night at the Wednesday writer’s cafe, we started talking about what topics from Norwescon I still had in my little notebook to cover for my blog. When I got to Writing with Historical Accuracy, my dear friend David asked just what is historical accuracy and why should anyone care?

The second part of that question is easier to answer than the first. If a writer is taking the time to write historically based fiction, they obviously care about the history. And as a reader if you pick a historically based piece of fiction you care as well. Otherwise you’re just writing fiction. Speaking as a realist, you either have the history bug or you don’t. shrug. Dusting off hands, moving on.

So now to tackle the first part. I went to a number of panels at Norwescon that provided historical information. I’ll try to merge it all together here into one sort of historical interest list.

-Try to make the circumstances fit your character.

-Roll your well researched historical details into your plot points, so they don’t just feel like window dressings.

Military:

Army infantry moves at about 1 km a hour if you want them to be able to fight when they get to their destination. For further information about movement rates, water and food requirements http://fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-05-213.pdf. Happy Reading.

Women who fought:

23% of the soldiers in Victorian England were women.

The binding of feet in China was a response to how brutal the women were as soldiers.

Japan had entire female armies of the Samurai class.

During the religious crusades, the Muslims buried their female warriors as honored combatants.

Random Bits:

Did you know in a given county in early rural European states the wagons were made to the width of the ruts in the road, reinforcing said ruts. Made it hard to go across multiple counties in one go.

Until the 1800’s if you were poor you ate out. Kitchen construction and cooking fuel were expensive.

When traveling, an inn would not provide you with a plate or bowl for your stew. Those were expensive. In fact they were an excellent way to store your wealth, metal plates. Enjoy your crust of bread with stew in it.

Looking back I don’t feel like the panel on Historical Accuracy really talked about how to be accurate or why you should be accurate. So I’ll say this on how. Research. I spent 3 months last year researching for my Nano novel, and that was just a fluffy little chick lit/romance piece. Go to your library, make friends with the librarian. Get really familiar with the catalog system to your library. I have found by playing with my keyword search and choosing an abundance of sorting characteristics I find books I had no idea would be a gold mine of information. Then read. Read. Read. Read.

Final thought, when all else fails find a historian for your time period, make friends with them, keep them in drinks, buy them dinner, clean their house, so they keep feeding you interesting historically accurate information to hang your plot on.

Shot through the heart and you’re to blame

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darlin’ you give b plots a bad name.

You play your part and I make my name

you give b plots a bad name.

-My thanks to Bon Jovi for writing songs so easy to parody.

So just what is a b plot you ask. I’m glad you did. Let’s pretend I am writing a novel about a time traveling journalist, the main plot is that fantasy and what happens to him in that fantasy. But man can not stand alone. So let’s give him a wife who’s constantly being irritated by the fact that he leaves his breakfast dishes on the side of the sink every morning instead of putting them in the dishwasher. Now if we leave it at that the story is somewhat flat. The wife serves no purpose other than to put her husband’s dishes in the dishwasher each morning when he pops off to another time line. (And we wouldn’t want that now would we honey?) So how does one write a purposeful b plot?

Thankfully Norwescon provided a panel for that too.

-Humanizing your characters adds a level to your storytelling.

-The A plot and the B plot should thematically work together. The resolution of one should resolve the other.

-Even though men do not emote you need to help your reader feel their emotions, because they do have them.

Common Mistakes in B plots:

-B plot characters that are robots designed to serve the A plot character.

-The relationship moves too fast, with instalove.

-Writers add the B plot as an after thought.

-Lack of romantic conflict in the B plot.

I’ll add a mistake that frequently bothers me when I read fiction. I’ll use a little quote from my son who didn’t know I could hear him while he was playing lego star wars. “No Luke, don’t destroy Boba, he’s really a Jedi in disguise as a bounty hunter.” Unless you are a five year old, these one sentence reveals of epic proportion that change the entire direction of the saga, will not fly no matter how high it’s midiclorian count.

Your B plot can add a lot of emotional resonance if you give it some forethought. Don’t just toss in a relationship robot to do your main character’s bidding, unless you’re writing for Joss Whedon.