Blunders found Beta Reading

I’ve been doing a lot of beta reading lately, and thought I’d do a quick five minute post on some easy solutions for frequent problems I’ve been running into in my reading;

Repetition
Tell not show
Character reactions
Action sequences

Of all the things I pull people up on these are the ones that I come across the most and today I wanted to give you the tools to help get around these things by letting you know what I use to avoid these horrible things.

Repetition;

When I first started writing the “Repetition Stick” from my editor started out as a light touch and ended up as a bludgeoning stick.

I quickly found an excellent tool in Rhymezone.

It allows you to look up rhymes for poetry (yes, I write a lot of poetry, I have a project about that I’ll be sharing at the end of the year), but what Rhymezone also allows you to do is look up synonyms!

So all of a sudden the dark cave that’s super dark becomes the gloomy cave that’s inky depths stretch on into the dark.

I have also recently found Power Thesaurus which appears to be another excellent resource for these issues.

Tell not Show;

I recently beta read this absolutely lovely little story involving a scene scape and the author really captured my fascination with the ocean floor in one sentence and then lost it in another.

We hear this all the time; show, don’t tell!

HOW? What witchcraft is this!?

There are heaps of blogs out there but where this one crops up a lot is in scenery and action sequences, and I’ll get to action in a moment but for scenery what I recommend is a little writing exercise… that doesn’t involve writing!

Imagine you’ve crashed on an alien planet, there’s only one space suit, and you’ve got to go outside and see what’s out there. There are no windows, and no cameras, so out you go, and now you’ve got to tell the shipmates what you see…

What do you see? Tell me, out loud, describe the above for me. Yes, do it, I’m not here to stuff around. You may think I can’t hear you, but believe me I am going to be sitting here listening. DESCRIBE IT TO ME, SOLDIER!

If you’ve just said you see an alien city, the first question from the shipmates is going to be; is their life? What does I look like? They will have questions. Answer them.

Chances are you struggle to find the descriptive words you want to use when saying it out loud, so now try writing what you see, as though recording for future generations, not missing a single detail, you are the first person to find the ruins of an abandoned alien city. What do you see?

Here is what I see;

Spires of silver strike the sky, the grasping clasp of the jungle wrapping around the throat of each building to strangle the life that doesn’t exist within.

You do not need to spend a lot of time on a description, even a single sentence will convey a landscape well. Picture what you want to convey, remove the story and characters and focus purely on the single scene.

Character actions;

This is one thing that I run into a lot, and its usually for a very fundamental reason; the writer is focusing on the plot, and not the character.

The reactions your characters have to the plot points, such as the emergence of a stranger in town, is both in dialogue and in reactions.

I was reading a romance once where a character quite literally abandoned her friends to follow a stranger down a dark alley, because he was hot. There wasn’t even a supernatural aspect such as feeling they were bound together. She followed him down a dark alley because he was hot.

EVERY WOMAN’S SELF PRESERVATION INSTINCT IN REAL LIFE WOULD BE; LIKE, NO.

It made it completely unbelievable. I lost so much respect for the character, and while the writer made an excellent follow on scene out of it, I had already lost a lot of believability for the character and thus the story.

So, when you need your character to walk down an alley, look at why. Is it a shortcut? Would you do it? Ask around for better natural reactions, say to a spouse or friend; hey, why would you walk down a dark alley? Chances are its not the alley, but something on the other side.

This is true in dialogue too.

What people say to convey the greater story elements should be in character to their personalities.

You are not going to have a cautious self-protective friend let the protagonist walk down a dark alley after a stranger. But you can’t have her, go with them either, it’d run the moment with said hot guy.

So what to do?

“Call me when you get to your bus stop.”

“Take my pepper spray.”

“Are you sure you don’t want me to go with you?”

But above all, it shouldn’t be something like this;

“Wow,” she said, “he’s hot, go follow him and see if he’ll take you home.”

But especially from the over protective friend who wanted to get her friend a cab home with her.

Our protag is not a stray dog…

If you are questioning the actions of your characters but aren’t sure how to get it across, put yourself in their shoes, don’t force them into situations that aren’t feasible or you will lose a lot of believability in the characters, and that will lose you the reader.

Action sequence;

One of the easiest ways I see writers lose action sequences is with succinct specifics and order.

There is a lack of spatial awareness, as the writer becomes focused on telling you what’s happening that the details get missed.

A sequence I read recently (in my own damn writing), had a character the MC was fighting suddenly disappear for several moments. They vanished from the script while the MC fought someone else.

What were they doing? Standing there?

Think of yourself as a sports commentator if you will, you want to relay the sequence of events in tight punchy lines to better relay to the reader (who is a listener too), what you want to convey;

Player one kicks the ball to player two, who kicks it into the goal. The ball rolls as though shot out of a cannon.

Really? That’s it?

The sequence should be as follows;

Player one kicks the ball to player two. Player two kicks the ball hard enough it’s as though its shot out a cannon, and scores the goal.

This seems simple enough but check your actions sequence for flow and look at breaking them down into single action sequence.

Sometimes I’ll do this, especially with fighting, by watching videos of the action sequence and doing a small exercise in describing just what I observe, the same as the above section with the landscape. It doesn’t need to be lengthy, but it does need flow through, so the action sequences make sense.

Ultimately, you’ll find that you make these mistakes, it’s the whole point of revising and editing.

But if you can teach yourself not to make them as you go you can make doing these things much easier. Sometimes its hard to tell, and that’s where getting beta feedback and good editors are going to pick these up for you. The more you can get this feedback, you can better focus on where you fall down as a writer and how to help improve not just that story, but you as a writer in whatever you are working on right now.

July 20, 2019 2

Kindess Costs Nothing

The Writing Community on Twitter has become the largest, fluffiest blanket of love and communication on Twitter. Ask any writer or creative and all sorts and they will assure you that the community on Twitter has made them a better writer.

With people posting success and losses, times of trial and celebration, there are any number of people to reach out to for help, encouragement and support.

But for such a bunch of talented people, my goodness are some of them completely feral.

Forgetting that there are accounts that are nothing but serial retweeters, follower hoarders, and pedophiles floating around, there are legitimate accounts where if you say the wrong thing to them, you may as well close your account.

With the surplus of people using Twitter as a means to communicate and find other writers, some accounts have gone from a few hundred followers to tens of thousands overnight. That’s good though, people should be posting content that’s engaging and encouraging.

What’s not is when things get messy.

You’ve got 280 characters to express an opinion and if you don’t hit your mark just right you can be torn to shreds.

Time and again I’ve witnessed the owner of a big account (one with LOTS of followers) not agree with something that’s been said by a smaller user on their feed, which is fine, we don’t all agree on a host of subjects. What’s not is then having those said thousands of followers absolutely destroy the offender, even if what they said wasn’t that aggressive to begin with.

What this then devolves down to is targeted harassment.

Not cool, Writing Community.

You know that, and if I asked you, most of you would put up your hand and say; yes, I’ve been bullied, and I’ve been bullied online too.

This blog post, I’m shouting out the #WritingCommunityMum, Emma Lombard, who loves to look after new twitter users, and even has great advice for older ones! (I still don’t know why I should put a dot before I @ someone…)

Emma’s newest blog of her Twitter Tips for Newbies series includes a detailed post on bullying, but we’ve come together to give you a few tips on how you can handle these situations;

Should I really post that tweet/reply?

Emma: I avoid confrontational situations but even then, I sometimes hesitate when I’m about to send a reply, especially if it’s one that is laced with my own sense of humour. Not everyone will read into that humour, no matter how many emojis I add. I’ve caught a couple of tweets that could be misconstrued before I’ve sent them out, and a couple after the fact – in which case, I have chosen to delete my response and re-word it for clarification.

EJ: If I have even the smallest doubt about what I’m about to post it goes in the delete pile. If you can’t say something nice don’t say anything at all. Standing up for yourself shouldn’t be about tearing someone else down. Defending your statements should be about you and what you want to say, not about others and their flaws.

Someone was rude:

Emma: Despite my very best efforts to be polite to people on line, I still had one snappy belligerent reply of “Whatever!” to one of my comments once. I was about to try and clarify what I had meant and that I had not intended it to come across as rude – and I was about to apologise too, when I stopped myself and realised that I wasn’t going to win that one. My mantra in these cases is no response at all. No explanation. No apology. No like. Just scroll on past and shake it off. How many of us post stuff that we know never gets seen because it is lost in the Twitterverse void without a single like. If you don’t reply to someone, there is no way for them to tell if you are ignoring the comment or if their comment was simply swallowed up, never to see the light of day.

EJ: Ignore it, leave it unliked. You don’t actually have to respond to those tweets you think are going to cause trouble. I’ve had the most random people walk into one of my threads and start shouting for attention. The best way to get rid of them is to not respond at all. Engaging these people validates your acknowledgement of what they are saying.

They have a big account, but I don’t like what they are saying

Emma: When I was new to the #WritingCommunity (with all 36 of my followers!), I was in awe of the accounts with huge follower numbers! I marvelled at what they must have done to grow like that. As I became more experienced, I realised of course that there are so many ways to gain huge followings, and not all of them are healthy or good for the followers or the followees, like blind following without screening followers and allowing hundreds of bots to follow you. As I now find myself in the supremely fortunate position of having 13k followers, I have realised that having such traction and such a wide reach online actually comes with a weight of responsibility to speak and act appropriately even more than ever. Just because you followed someone with a large following, doesn’t mean you are obligated to stay following them if you see behaviour that makes you uncomfortable. You won’t necessarily be able to get that person to see reason – in fact, I’ve seen too many folks try and get burned in the process, so I don’t recommend it – but you do have the power to quietly remove that person from your feed.

EJ: This isn’t facebook, just because you went to high school with that twit who joke asked you to prom doesn’t mean you HAVE to be friends. Fuck that. Unfollow them, mute them, block them if you want. I have a few dozen accounts I’ve done this to, mostly because I’ve found whatever they are saying offensive which is more about their platform, and their message. This is your platform, you are choosing to spend time on it, spend it with people who validate you.

I said something that was misconstrued and now I have a whole pack of people after me. What do I do?

EJ: If you did make a mistake, apologise, sincerely. Most people react well to it. Anyone who doesn’t accept and decides to verbally attack with name calling is someone you can and should block. Some of these people are treating the anonymity of social media as mask to cover their poor behaviour. Eleanor Roosevelt once said people don’t remember what you said or did, they remember how you feel. If you don’t feel good, hit that block button.

Emma: If what you said was well meant but was just misunderstood, the best way I’ve seen folks handle this is to give a quick apology for the misunderstanding and then move on, no longer engaging on the thread. It would be wise to mute the conversation so that you are not tempted to be drawn back into the conversation. When that mob mentality sets in, it is near impossible to try and get people to see reason when their blood is up. Depending on how ugly it gets, you might also see a truer reflection of some of the people you are following and this may be the decider for you to unfollow, soft block or hard block a bunch of people. It’s okay to do this in order to keep your feed full of the content and types of folks who you want to see. It’s all part of the continual job of Twitter housekeeping.

My friend is being attacked online. Should I dive in to defend them?

EJ: Diving is a hasty word, it relies on not taking into consideration what’s going on, or things that fall outside that thread. I saw an agent and writer get into a massive fight, but because they kept retweeting the other’s response with a comment, it got very messy. I was asked via DM to block someone who was racist. In both instances I looked at or round the offending tweets, and decided for myself. If you have a good friend, and they are being attacked, it’s good to come and support them, but you are also making yourself a target. As long as you’re ready for that, and what else comes of it, then you can do it. But sometimes you can’t talk to these people and butting in can make it worse. So don’t dive in. Make a clear and level headed decision, and if you think you should come to their defence THEN cannon ball that shite.

Emma: I’ve seen this happen a couple of times to folks I know online. I personally never dive into the conversation publicly but I rather contact my friend privately via DM (direct message) to offer support. I check that they are okay and then gently suggest they disengage from the toxic conversation.

This all sounds too hard and not worth it – I think I’m going to give up Twitter.

EJ: Twitter is a great platform, BUT ITS NOT FOR EVERYONE. It takes a lot of time, a lot of tweeting, and vigilance. You’re in a sea with a lot of other boats, some of them are friendly, others are not, no matter how nice you are. Some you’ll run into one by accident, other’s you’ll leave far behind. At the end of the day its still your vessel. How you use it is up to you. People take breaks from it all the time. Consider doing that if you feel harassed, and check in to keep it active but keep a pinned tweet saying your on a break. If you come back and its still not for you then dump it. At the end of the day its an app on a phone. It doesn’t define you as a writer.

Emma: The best way to navigate Twitter is to educate yourself about how it works and what functions you have at your disposal to mould your Twitter account into a place that makes you happy to come to. You can do this by searching online, or asking others in the #WritingCommunity for help to understand a particular aspect that is stumping you. Yes, EJ’s blog covers how to manage the nastier side of Twitter (which is actually super important to know) but there are also so many folks out there brimming with goodness and a desire to support and uplift other writers. Don’t be afraid to take control of your own Twitter feed – it all starts with who you decide to follow, or unfollow, in the case of when it goes wrong.

Happy Tweeting!

Ultimately, whatever you put ANY effort into, be it work, career, home, family, friends or a social media app, needs to be worth that time. If you don’t feel good, or are still uncertain, reach out for help. Its not the end of the world to mute or block someone. No one is calling you on your decisions, and if they do, remember that its your account, you can be an ass, or you can make genuine and life changing connections.

The #WritingCommunity has so much to offer, and it’s a shame to lose it for a few people who aren’t being kind. There are enough internal doubts and external negativity to what we writers do, that we don’t need the pressure of a stranger’s inflated ego making us feel bad. Kindness costs nothing, and if someone isn’t kind to you, don’t be afraid to remove them from your life.

May 9, 2019 1

1 Book in 25 Days

I wrote a book in 25 days.

Lets cut straight to the facts as they are;

I don’t have kids
I live in a rural area
I have a short commute
I worked fucking hard at it

I love the book, I think it’s a great stand alone story and for me that’s a rarity.

It sprung into my head after I halted work on the Last Prophecy series because buying houses is expensive and the budget said no to editing. Hell the budget said no to my damn haircuts, but we negotiated over vodka. I gave up desserts for it as part of keto.

Scott, being the wonderful and supportive person he is, rightly pointed out it’s just a delay so those of you who’ve stuck with me this far, I’m sorry. I’m still writing the stories, but the release dates are totally out of my hands.

Instead I’ve done some beta recommended rewrites on Queen of Spades the last month, and this other idea I’ve titled Behind the Veil.

The book wouldn’t shut up. It wouldn’t go away. I sat down and wrote it with no idea what was going to happen. I don’t think it’s a steaming pile of garbage but the verdict is still out from the first beta reader.

So, how did I write it?

Writers Block

When you don’t have an idea what happens next you need to think quickly and keep typing, keep writing, keep the momentum going. I’d start a chapter with a bang and finish it on a cliff-hanger of a comment which dragged me back into what happens next?

It kept the story moving briskly and my pace was very high. There was more to it than that but I’ve written articles on how I do this before.

Sprints

Fellow writer Zack Riley runs a cosy little discord channel that allows me to do writing sprints. I normally run for an hour, and will do several hours all in a row with 15 to 30min breaks.

The sprints have a bot timer so you have a prompt to keep you on track. You start a sprint, add yourself & your word total, and go when the buzzer hits. There is no TIME to stop and think, you’ve got to write as many words as you can and you are only challenging yourself. It takes practice to do it on command, (I’ve been doing it for 5 years) but after a while you can just sit and work on the story.

When I started I’d be lucky to get a couple of hundred.

Now, on a bad session, I’ll get 1200 words or so. On a good one I’ll get 2.5k words.

Outline

There wasn’t one. I just wrote Letitia’s story as hard as I possible could. I kept the story going as much as I could. Letitia may as well have been possessing me for how this story spilled out on its own.

I like to credit my imagination, but I read a lot of horror, I’d just never written it before, and it was exciting to be doing this for the first time.

You should have some idea of where it is going, just don’t be afraid if the story turns into something else, if its pressing you to write it, then its exciting, not just for you but hopefully the reader too! If its becoming boring and predictable to you, how is it going to feel to the reader? Try just letting yourself go, and sprints is a great way to do that.

No breaks!

No capes, no breaks.

I would get up in the morning and write, I would write at lunch, I’d get home and write, and I’d write for as much as ten hours on a weekend. I felt invigorated and refreshed by the constant appeal of not knowing what was going to happen. The story that was whispering in my ear, kept me coming back, even dreaming about it. By the end of it I just wanted to go back and edit it because I was in love with it.

No games. No TV shows. Nothing but writing and reading breaks (with the odd Armello game with Zack).

It meant I watched a couple of movies with my husband. We live alone, and we’re far from friends, so my time was able to be utilized to write, and knowing it was important he was incredibly supportive and reminded me to eat.

You can do this too

I am lucky in that I don’t have kids or other commitments that consume too much of my time. I live in a rural area I’m new to which means I don have many local friends.

But I work 40plus hours a week.

I have a dog that needs walking twice a day.

Hubby & I share the housework evenly. Sure he might have cooked more, but I do my part.

It was how I utilized my writing time. Rather than socialize on Twitter, I told people I was writing.

Rather than stuff around doing other things I focused solely on what time I sat down at my computer and how much writing I could put into that time. It wasn’t something I could do when I started five years ago.

All of this takes years to balance and even now I feel overwhelmed and overworked some days.

You can do this too, remember what time you sit down at a computer and ask yourself what do you want to get out of that time.

Do the writing sprints and get better with practice.

Take the story other places, let it guide you, learn to listen to it.

At the end of this all I want you to take away is that you could do this.

You could write a book in 25 days.

Ask yourself how you are utilizing your time, and what you want to get out of it.

Learn how to do writing sprints and how to fly by the seat of your pants. Even if you plot, you really just have to know what you are writing next, sit down, and do it.

I had to give up on a part of my life that had never made me happier. The Last Prophecy series is my calling to write. But while its on hold, and while I can write like this, I know a two very important things;

I’ve never been poorer, & I’ve never been happier.

I’ll write my own stories, my own way, and every time I figure out a new way to do it I’ll share it with you.

February 22, 2019 1

Helping Writers

Its come about thanks to a Twitter post that my Book Tour schedule is full for the rest of year, and my Author Interviews are also heavily booked, so I wanted to ask that if you are a writer with a website you help too.

So, where to start?

This is both the easiest and the hardest part. You just get started, you open your website and start posting. Six months ago I hadn’t started this, and now I’m fully booked. You’ve just got to knuckle down, send out a well tagged tweet, and wait and see.

Plus… you know… I’m a writer too, you could ask me… *ahem* Moving on…

There may be other ways to do this, but I just went to other people’s websites, worked out how I wanted to set it up on mine, and got the pages ready. I use WordPress, and I am not great at it but I’ve got mine trucking along. The more you use it, the more you learn and get better.

Start by setting up your pages for Book Tours, and Author Interviews. Feel free to explore mine and other author websites on how they’ve gone about this. I also have another sub-section for archived author interviews. Then I have a space specifically for Indie and Traditionally published book reviews, which also has an archive. The reason I have separated the two is because I don’t want to show I read just one type, I want to show I read widely, and not every book is perfect. I’ll go into how I post reviews, both good and bad.

Draw up a Google spreadsheet/Excel/preferred scheduler and work out how often do you want to post. Once a month? Once a week? I do mine twice a fortnight, because I work full time and it does take a bit of time to put it up. I’m getting faster the more I post, but a Book Tour post will take about 30mins, and an Author Interview about an hour. Sometimes its less but I’m slower because I’m careful.

I therefore have two lines, for two times of the month, and then the corresponding months at the top of the column. Yes, I’m drilling down into basics but not everyone is familiar or comfortable with excel/spreadsheets.

On a second tab I list the name, email address, links, a marker whether I’ve emailed them and whether I’ve received all the relevant information I need to make the post at the time. I then have a folder in my emails for correspondence for Book Tours & Author interviews as two separate folders to help me stay organised.

Once you have your schedule ready for both you can do the following;

Book Tour

This is easy, put a post up on Twitter offering spots on your website. Take it as first in first served and close it off quickly once you are booked up.

I then put the twitter tag against its date in my schedule, grab the details off the person via a DM, and send them an email with all the info I need. This is a drafted email I copy and past to save on time. It asks for the following information;

Book Cover
Blurb
Book link to Amazon (or most commonly used publishing site)
An author pic and short bio

I usually have word restrictions to make sure people don’t go overboard, it also helps to say to people that most blurbs are about 150 words, (fantasy 180). If people’s blurbs are longer you can politely let them know that, some people just dont know. If you or anyone you know is struggling with a blurb, put out feelers in your community to ask for help, or come to me, I am always happy to help.

Once they’ve emailed you, mark it off on the spreadsheet, and make sure to post it on the date. You can go to my website or just Google search Book Tours to get an idea of what other sites are doing and how they are displaying this information.

Author Interviews

This is pretty much the same as the above, I have a drafted letter and enter people as I book them on the spreadsheet. For the interview of course, there are questions too. Its good to have something less formal and more customizable as a first or final question. The others are then pretty standard about writing, but find your own way of asking questions. Think about what you want someone to ask of you in your writing.

Limiting the word count here is paramount. Some writers can waffle on for hours about absolutely nothing, including yours truly.

You can also check out mine and other author websites for how they manage interviews.

3. Book Reviews

This is not a service I offer.

I will sometimes give away reviews, but its rare.

The reason being is that there are a lot of authors who go out woefully under prepared, and that’s on their manuscript alone. I feel that way about my first novella, and so will be pulling it down off Amazon in the coming weeks, and offering it for free on my website. Its not a bad story, but it’s a slow world and character build.

I write fiction that likes to amble along beside you, not come up and punch you in the face.

We all write differently, and we all read different styles, we are allowed to not like everything we write and read.

Therefore when you go to start reviewing, be prepared for negative reactions. Not everyone is going to like, appreciate, or want your feedback. I have been dragged down into petty arguments by people who didn’t like what I thought of their book.

So I buy the book on Amazon usually, sometimes Kobo, and I leave a review on my website, Goodreads, & Amazon/Kobo.

I always try to use the critique sandwich; good stuff, bad stuff, different good stuff. It’s a great format, but points out issues to the writer.

When I first started writing I needed that desperately, and still do to a large extent. Beta readers are usually people you know, and in turn will be kinder. Someone’s who paid for your book is going to be far less so. You don’t need to be cruel, but you also don’t have to shower praise over it.

This is why I leave reviews for both Traditional and Self published books, because I like to make the clear distinction I dont see them any differently. I’m here for the story. I will rarely pick on editing unless its truly dreadful, and a deterrent to the book. I also don’t usually post anything less than 3 stars, and my reasons for doing so are that its seems cruel not to find anything nice about the story. Most stories that make it to any form of publication have something redeemable about them. When I come across a book that I’d rate that low, I am usually very specific in my review as to why.

If you are going to offer reviews please be prepared to expect a backlash if you give a book a less than savoury review, especially when its badly articulated and lacking in itself. If you are going to upset an author its better to phrase it well, and kindly, so they take the advice on board and look to improve themselves, rather than be bitter and tear you down in return. Which has happened to me. It was vile and unpleasant and its why I’m stressing that you be careful when doing this.

Here is the other thing to be wary of ⸺ some authors will refuse anything other than five stars.

This is why I prefer the anonymity of picking and choosing what I will and wont review, it doesn’t give the author a choice. This is just my preference however, how you want to review is up to you, its your website, and your reviewing platforms.

The most important thing to remember is that you dont have to do all of this, or do it this way. Go out and explore, work out what you want to get out of this, and how you want to go about doing that. All I get is the warm glow that I’m helping, and added benefit of website traffic. But mostly the warm glow.

My aim as always been to help other writers, with whatever I can, as much as I can. Will you join me?

January 4, 2019 3