Category Archives: Writing Tools

A discussion of the various software that authors employ to write, plot, backup, and ultimately use to write a novel.

As near as I can recall, the Fictorian blog was birthed—at least in idea form—on March 20, 2010 in the lounge of the Westin Hotel in Pasadena. (See photo to pinpoint more or less the exact spot.) A group of writers had assembled for the first annual Superstars Writing Seminar to learn about the ins and outs of the publishing business. We were a big group of strangers with a whole lot of high-flying ideals.

I’d like to think those ideals haven’t gone anywhere, but that big group of strangers doesn’t exist anymore. Alas, we are currently a big group of friends and trusted colleagues.

Of course, none of us went home from that seminar ready to start blogging. It took just over a year to get organized. Our first blog post, “The Benefits of Holding Hands,” went live on March 30, 2011—and it goes like this, courtesy of Fictorian alumnus Nancy DiMauro:

Writers help you stay motivated and hold you accountable. It’s like having an exercise or diet buddy. After all, who can understand the ups and downs of writing better? Writers need to network, commiserate and, well, get honest feedback about what they write from others who are wrestling with the same questions…

I don’t know if Nancy set out to write a mission statement, but this one would certainly do the trick. Four and a half years later, and one thousand posts, it still holds true. The Fictorians is about writers holding other writers accountable, keeping them motivated during the many and varied troughs of the writing life, and helping them to network.

All of these years later, the names and faces have changed, but none of the original Fictorians are at the same place in their writing careers than when they started. Without question, this blog has helped us to grow and stay connected with our tribe.

So, one thousand posts. Four digits. A really big part of me can’t believe we’re here. I’ve read somewhere that the average blog lasts two years or less. If that’s true, we’re beating the odds—and that’s largely due to the fact that we’re doing it together. Holding hands, so to speak. It’s not easy to keep an online presence going day after grueling day. With the Fictorians, it’s pretty effortless. When everyone makes a small commitment (one post month, loosely), it’s not hard to fill up the calendar with great content.

Well, perhaps you’ve noticed that we’re really very extremely excited about our 1000th post. It’s a big deal, a big milestone, so we figured, why not throw a little party? That’s why we’ve been giving away books all month. Seven last week, seven this week (it’s actually thirteen, since one of the prizes this week is a seven-book bundle), and fourteen more as the month rolls on. These are books we’ve written, books that our friends and guest bloggers have written, and even books that our mentors have written. There’s a lot of good stuff. For more details, click here, or simply log in to the Rafflecopter interface to your right.

Our celebration isn’t all about the giveaways, though. For over a year, we’ve been working behind the scenes to bring you this upgraded site interface. It was ready just in time for this month, the most pivotal of months. We hope you’re enjoying it so far!

If you’re a writer and you’re looking for a tribe, consider us in your corner. Read and comment on our articles. Get in touch with us. And if you’re really serious about doubling down on your writing career (and we’re all hoping the answer is yes), then consider signing up for the Superstars Writing Seminar. That’s right; the Fictorians are still around, and so is Superstars, going strong into its sixth year. There’s no better place to fulfill the above mission statement.

Evan Braun is an author and editor who has been writing books for more than ten years. He is the author of The Watchers Chronicle, whose third volume, The Law of Radiance, has just been released. He specializes in both hard and soft science fiction and lives in the vicinity of Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Feeding the Foundation

July 20, 2015

Kristin Luna

Author's Perspective Craft & Skills Evaluation Tools Kristin Luna Life Philosophies Making Progress as a Writer Reading Self-Awareness Starting a Career The Writing Life The Writing Process Writing Tools No Comments

As we grow not only in our craft but also as people, it’s important to establish or re-establish the foundation of why we write, what success means to us at this moment, and what fulfillment means across our lifetimes. And yes, those things can completely change in the span of a few years. Our perspectives shift, our goals change, our focus narrows. As that happens, it’s essential to revisit the foundations on which we built our dreams and goals in the first place.

Here are some general questions to help you consider the root of your inspiration for writing.

1. Why do you write?

This question gets passed around a lot, it seems. But dig deep. “Cause I’ve just gotta!” is a fine answer, but what compels you to do it? Dig deep. “Because I have unresolved issues,” is probably a more honest answer for all of us.

2. What do you want?

“Duh, to be famous.” Sure, that can be your answer. But consider the possibility you won’t be the next J.K. Rowling. Now, what do you want?

3. What is your writing routine?

Has it changed in the past few years. Does it need to change? What’s not working about it?

4. Are you still chasing dreams and goals that are rooted in a genre in which you no longer write?

For example, when I started writing, I wanted to write literary fiction. At this moment, I write mostly YA, which is a much faster market and demands faster manuscript turn-arounds. My goals need to change to fit the genre I’m writing, at least for now.

5. Do your short-term goals need re-evaluating to reflect where you are right now?

I had to re-evaluate my short-term goals when writing YA, as mentioned above, and those will constantly need to be reconsidered depending on the project.

6. Do your long-term goals need to change to reflect where you are right now?

For example, because I’m not writing literary fiction right now, and I had not considered I’d be writing YA, my long-term goals for my career need to adjust to include YA.

A Writer's Guide to Persistence by Jordan Rosenfeld — A Writer’s Guide to Persistence by Jordan Rosenfeld

There are some great resources out there to help you reflect on these things while also help you build your craft and routine.

I highly recommend The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron for an all-out overhaul, but be warned, it takes a lot of commitment to finish. Finish it. Commit to it. It’s worth it.

A Writer’s Guide to Persistence by Jordan Rosenfeld has been extremely valuable to me recently. I see it a lite version of The Artist’s Way. That’s not to demean it in any way; I simply mean it’s shorter and more compact.

Both books have been extremely valuable to me, and I hope they are for you as well.

About Kristin Luna:

Kristin Luna has been making up stories and getting in trouble for them since elementary school. She writes book reviews for Urban Fantasy Magazine and her short story “The Greggs Family Zoo of Odd and Marvelous Creatures” was featured in the anthology One Horn to Rule Them All alongside Peter S. Beagle and Todd McCaffrey. Her short story “Fog” recently appeared on Pseudopod. Kristin lives in San Diego with her husband Nic.

Mining the Pain

July 15, 2015

Travis Heermann

Conflict Craft & Skills Ideas & Plotting Life Philosophies Reader Investment & Empathy The Writing Life Writing Tools 1 Comment

Pain is a part of life. Suffering is the human condition. It rains down on us and we wallow in it. It eats at our guts and we keep feeding it until there’s nothing left but a shell.

If there is anything that every single member of the human race holds in common, it is one thing.

Love.

All of us have loved. Most of us have lost. Lovers, children, parents, friends, pets. Betrayals, unravelings, deaths, or simply unrequited yearnings. All love comes together, and then it must, inevitably, come apart. Someone said that all love stories ultimately end in tragedy.

Rather than philosophize all the live-long day, I should point out that this is going somewhere.

Artists are uniquely suited among us to use that pain to illuminate the human condition. Music and poetry and prose comes along at just the right moment, lances that boil of loss that’s festering in one’s soul and lets healing begin.

On the way to the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2009, I was driving through the forests of upstate New York toward New Hampshire, with a background noise of hurt emanating from how a woman I really loved was breaking my heart. And then some song I had picked up on a free Starbucks iTunes card cycled through my iPod for the first time and blasted a hole in my heart ten-miles wide, splattering bits of my soul all over the inside of the car. The song was “Sometime around Midnight” by Airborne Toxic Event, and it evoked a tidal wave of sad, sick, helpless desperation that I swam in for the next several hours. I listened to it over and over, memorizing every word. That song, in that moment, was about me.

So I arrived at Odyssey, started getting to know my amazing classmates and teacher, and settled in. The first week brought in the award-winning horror writer Jack Ketchum as a guest instructor. During his lecture, he said something I will never forget:

“In your writing, examine love always, and binding.”

And then Ketchum went on to explain that stories are almost always about love coming together, coming apart, or strengthening, renewing, reaffirming the bonds between characters. There are, of course, exceptions, but anytime you’re dealing with human beings in conflict, the crux of the story is almost always one of love’s multitude of forms. Even war stories are often the about the camaraderie among soldiers.

His lecture crystallized for me what I had been writing about for years. And throughout the rest of the workshop, I applied this newfound insight in every story I wrote.

And all that pain I had experienced in the car, I poured into the stories. They were raw, dripping with emotion. But they were real.

Today, in the midst of writing this, I was procrastinating over on Facebook, and another quote popped up on a friend’s feed:

“Great writing is not perfect; it’s real. It bleeds and leaves a trace.” – Jordan Rosenfeld, A Writer’s Guide to Persistence

The writing I produced in the midst of that pain back then is still some of my favorite, because it all came straight from the depths. It was far from perfect, but it certainly left a mark on me.

Writers of all stripes are uniquely suited to distill our pain into art. But what makes it “art,” rather than commonplace catharsis? Does anybody really want to read your therapy? Unlikely. It’s not the fact that you’ve had the courage (or neediness?) to put your pain on the page and show it to people. It needs to offer the reader something of value: a unique insight or perspective. What do you want the give the reader as they walk away?

Growth is a good place to start. People lose patience quickly with those who wallow in their pain for interminable periods and never learn from it, never get past it, or repeat the same mistakes over and over, and so will readers. What did you learn from your pain? Will your characters learn it too? What does your story have to say about love and binding? This discussion is leading us straight into the idea of “theme.”

You may not know what your story is about until you type THE END, but you should be able to look at it with an objective eye and identify its theme. The hard part here is being able to look past whatever emotions you mined to build the story to look at it objectively. All that raw emotion feels absolutely, 100% true and real to you, but not necessarily to the reader. You still must have the ability to lead them into it.

Just like nothing should get in the way of love, the writer should allow nothing to get in the way of writing about it, especially not worries about who will read it. You may have loved and lost, but maybe you can get a good story or two out of the experience.

About the Author: Travis Heermann

Travis Heermann’s latest novel Spirit of the Ronin, was published in June, 2015.

Freelance writer, novelist, award-winning screenwriter, editor, poker player, poet, biker, roustabout, he is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop and the author of Death Wind, The Ronin Trilogy, The Wild Boys, and Rogues of the Black Fury, plus short fiction pieces in anthologies and magazines such as Perihelion SF, Fiction River, Historical Lovecraft, and Cemetery Dance’s Shivers VII. As a freelance writer, he has produced a metric ton of role-playing game work both in print and online, including content for the Firefly Roleplaying Game, Legend of Five Rings, d20 System, and EVE Online.

In August, 2015, he’s moving to New Zealand with a couple of lovely ladies and a burning desire to claim Hobbiton as his own.

You can find him on…

Twitter
Facebook
Wattpad
Goodreads
Blog
Website

Audio Books: The How and Why of it All

June 25, 2015

fictorians

Guest Posts Publishing Terry Odell Writing Tools 14 Comments

A guest post by Terry Odell.

I’m delighted that I was invited to be here today to share some information about audio books. I’m a firm believer in casting as wide a net as possible, but the audio market was one I’d ignored, thinking it would be too expensive. Not so. I’ll share what I did, which is the easiest and cheapest way into the system. There are other routes, but I can’t talk about something I’ve had no first-hand experience with. Therefore, this post is about using ACX to create an audio book. While I was going through the process with 5 of my books, I did my own blog posts about each phase. I’ve included links for those who want more specific details.

The pros: Audio book sales have been growing in double digits. It’s a new audience. It’s easy to do. It’s a way to make a little extra money. There’s little, if any, up-front money required. Narrators are waiting. And using ACX puts your books at audible.com, Amazon, and iTunes.

The cons: It will take time. It’s a new audience, and if you’re a digital/print person, finding the listening audience is a new marketing effort. Income is unpredictable.

Of course, the big question is, “Is it worth it?” but I can’t really answer that. What I’ll do here is lay out the process, and you can decide if the time required would make it worthwhile for you. I’m not putting a roof over my head with my audio book sales, but I know others who are. And I’ve liked it enough to start production of my Mapleton Mystery series soon.

How to start.

ACX is part of Amazon. If you have a book on Amazon (and hold the rights to them), you’re already in the system. Just go to ACX.com and “claim” your books. Easy-Peasy.

Next, pick one of the books you want to turn into an audio book. You’ll get a bunch of screens asking for information. Most of it is obvious. Since I had no money to ‘hire’ a narrator, I chose the royalty split option. This means I only get half the royalties, but I have no out-of-pocket expenses. And, since it’s a split, narrators are likely to market the book. I was also lucky to have my books included in ACX’s stipend program, which means ACX gives narrators a bonus, so you’ll get more auditions.

Here’s where there’s a little more effort required: You have to ‘sell’ your book to narrators. There’s a box for description, and it’s smart to mention your ‘reach’ – social media, newsletters, blog, awards – anything that will let the narrator know you’re serious about your career.

Be sure you specify the genre of the book (I made sure my prospective narrators knew they’d be reading a sex scene) and any other specifics from the myriad ACX provides. Narrators audition by reading a short passage you provide, about 3–5 minutes of narration. I tried to find sections that had narration and dialogue between two characters so I could hear how they did the voices, as well as whether I could detect spoken dialogue from interior monologue from straight narration. Also, your audition script doesn’t have to be consecutive text, so you can pick and choose parts that you think will help you decide. More details here

Choosing a narrator. Can you record your own? Yes, but you need a professional recording studio. It makes a huge difference, and ACX will turn down projects that don’t meet their standards. One of my narrators showed me how she worked on Finding Sarah’s characters. No way could I have done that. More details here.

Keep things professional. As someone who hates saying “no” to people, it was difficult to be on the ‘send the rejection’ instead of ‘receive the rejection’ end of things, but since there are audio book listeners who won’t buy a second book if they don’t like the narrator of the first, or who choose books solely on the basis of the narrator, it’s an important decision. I tried to be professional about it and let my ‘rejected’ narrators know so they could move on. I was surprised at their response. More details here

Cover art. You can’t use your ebook cover for an audio cover. ACX wants them square. This was the only expense I encountered, and my cover artist did them for a pittance. More details here

What do the narrators think? I interviewed mine. Details here. and here.

Proof listening. Once your narrators recorded the book, you have to approve it. This is where most of your time will be spent, because you can’t ‘skim’ listen. I had my manuscript open and followed along word for word, although I know other who just listened. I’d written the books years before and wouldn’t have caught a missing word, phrase, or paragraph (it happens) otherwise. Sometimes the inflection didn’t sound ‘right’ to me. In a few cases, the character seemed ‘off’—too gruff, or too chipper for my visions of the scene. Also, although my narrators checked with me about words they weren’t sure how to pronounce, if they didn’t think it was a problem, they didn’t ask, so there were some corrections along those lines we had to make as well. A side benefit—sometimes the narrators caught mistakes in my manuscript (gasp!), which I was then able to correct in the other versions as well. More details here.

I hope this gives you some insight and a place to start thinking about doing an audio book.

You can win one of Terry’s audio books! Go to her website here, pick which book you’d like, and tell us in a comment. On Tuesday, June 30th we’ll announce the winner here and on our fictorians fb page.

Terry’s Bio:
From childhood, Terry Odell wanted to “fix” stories so the characters would behave properly. Once she began writing, she found this wasn’t always possible, as evidenced when the mystery she intended to write turned into a romance, despite the fact that she’d never read one. Odell prefers to think of her books as “Mysteries With Relationships.” She writes the Blackthorne, Inc. series, the Pine Hills Police series, and the Mapleton Mystery series. You can find her high in the Colorado Rockies—or at terryodell.com.