First 250 Blogfest

Today Elle Strauss is hosting the First 250 Words blogfest. Stop on by her blog to sign up and see the other participants.

Here's the opening to the book I'm pitching at a conference today. Because of said conference, I likely won't get a chance to make the rounds to read other posts till Sunday.

For comparison, you can see my earlier draft HERE (a somewhat unfair comparison, since it was 370 words--more like a page and a third).

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EXCERPT REMOVED

Today's rough and tumble independent publishing world made it necessary to remove all snippets and previous versions of my work from the blog. The existence of such a "publishing trail" can be used to file false DMCA notices about my novels.

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Any tips for pitching?

I've been intensely revising my first 50 pages in order to be pitch-ready for the Philadelphia Stories's Push to Publish Conference this Saturday.

Part of the day includes a "speed date" time in which we can pitch our projects. My query is in excellent shape (as in, garnering requests for pages), as is my two-page synopsis. I've done massive revisions on the opening chapters and had them critiqued by two writing groups.

On paper, I'm golden.

And they want me to TALK.

ACK!!! I'm trying to not have a total panic attack here. I'm usually most nervous about talking to big groups, but this feels like I'm stepping into the most high-pressure job interview of my life. Except I won't be able to fan open my portfolio and wow them with the graphic design work I did back in the day and hope they don't hear me babbling like an idiot.

Nope, it's just my babbling idiot self and an agent or editor or published writer. It's a first-come, first-served on the slots, so I may be with one of the latter categories. Not that it makes this any less terrifying.

Any tips for preparing to pitch? Tips for talking to strangers without babbling idiotically?

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Motion and emotion

One surprisingly helpful class from my undergrad days was a theatre course I took called "Basic Movement." In it, we learned some of the tools of the trade of acting--stances, carriage, gestures, playing to the audience, and of course, choreographed violence.

An ongoing assignment throughout the semester was keeping a "movement journal," in which we recorded observations about how certain body types move, motions unique to certain activities, and how people express emotion through movement. The goal of all this analysis was to build up our own repertoires of motion, so that we could embody various roles.

I've at times joked here about "stalking" students who remind me of my characters. These motion studies are particularly what I try to do. Once I've found the right body type, I've got the perfect model from which to get the data I need. I observe his stride--smooth, bouncy, swaggering, trudging? What's his usual posture? Is he apt to smile at strangers, or have a more closed expression? How does he hold objects? Ham-fisted? Gently by his fingertips? Loose and relaxed? Precise and uptight?

Emotional exchanges go on all the time on the college campus where I work. Because of that movement class, I now watch for the postures and gestures that make up the physical expression of those emotions. You don't even need to be in eavesdropping range to discern the kind of emotions people are expressing. Their bodies shout them.

A particularly powerful lesson from that class was our focus on the body rather than the face as an expressive vehicle. We had to wear dance unitards to every class, and did most of our in-class exercises and performances wearing masks. In many classes we did charades-like exercises: a pair would act certain emotions toward one another without speaking and in masks, and our classmates would have to guess what we were expressing. Those who'd put in the time researching for their journals usually won big time.

If you struggle with "talking head" dialogue, I recommend spending some time people watching and gathering data on how they move. Watch not only faces, but necks, shoulders, spines, hands, legs and feet. An acting class can be surprisingly horizon broadening, too.

Any of you also have some theatre training? How might a "movement journal" help your writing?

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I'm sure there's a story in here

Do you ever have one of those indecisive days? When you start six different blog posts and can't finish any of them? Maybe it's the total frenzy at work or the fact I was sick over the weekend. Anyway, after being unable to finish my other post ideas, I did a quick skim through my old blogger dashboard and found loads of other unfinished posts.

For lack of anything better, I thought I'd share this post I'd started for a blogfest back in the winter. I believe the prompt was to write on breakups. I should probably turn this bizarre freewrite into a story someday. It has some great humor potential.

To my young, single readers, here's your cautionary tale of the day.

Notes to self

In the future, take care to avoid dating or any other sustained social contact with any man who

-asks you out at a funeral

-has a name usually given to dogs

-is 15 years older than you

-still lives with his parents
-even though he is a company vice president
-and owns two Mercedes
-and belongs to a country club

-is a company VP with two Mercedes and a country club membership, but usually takes you to swanky places like Pizza Hut

-takes you to "the club" only when the place is practically empty,
-and tells you fiction writing is a waste of time
-and orders you a fish entree "because that dress is looking a little snug."

-thinks it's cute and romantic to say things like "when I was studying in Paris, you were in kindergarten," as if pedophilia were cute and romantic.

-invites you to his 20th high school reunion when you just had your fifth
-and tells you how to dress
-and acts surly and sulks when you wear "the wrong shoes"

Should you have the misfortune to tangle with such a character for, say 13 months or so, don't be surprised if he calls and:

- gets annoyed you didn't answer his calls last week
-despite the fact all the phone wires in your parents' house melted in their house fire
-is completely disinterested in how you spent the time apart working 18-hour days picking through the sooty detritus of your parents' burned-down house trying to salvage your family's belongings
-whines that you didn't ask how his week was
-breaks up with you over the phone



I think I've never done anything with this because A) it's all so painfully true; B) I'm apparently still a little angry with myself about it, more than a decade later; and C) I'm not entirely sure how to structure this experience into a story arc.

Do you ever trip across old freewrites? Ever do anything with them?
Do you ever write autobiographical stuff?

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Semi-serious punctuation help (a cleverly disguised rant)

Dear Editor-on-call:

When is it best to use a semicolon instead of a period?

Yours truly,
Pausing for effect
(aka Shannon O'Donnell at Book Dreaming)

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Dear Pausing,

True confession time. I despise semicolons.

When I became managing editor of a scholarly journal two years ago, I discovered an ugly secret. Academics use semicolons by the barrel-full to string together the most convoluted run-on sentences imaginable. Spend a few days with my copy-editing pile and you'll understand how hateful this problem truly is.

You might say I've been unduly influenced to see semicolons as the enemies of clear, brisk writing. They strike me as stuffy and really belonging to the realm of nonfiction. I rarely see them in genre fiction, except to clarify items in a series when there's already a comma in one or more of the items.

For example:
Buttercup packed her lacy, pink day dress; a floor-length, green velvet gown, which had once been Mother's; six chemises; and three sets of gloves.

Indeed, semicolons can replace the "and" in a compound sentence, when you want more separation than a comma, but less than a period. These instances should be rare.

For example:
Ginny's wand sailed out of her hand; it landed right in Neville's pudding.

Am I out of line here, hating on semis? Feel free to defend your precious punctuation in the comments.

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Honey, Baby, Bozo

I've been called a lot of things besides my given name at various stages of my life: shortened forms of my name, teasing terms about some undesirable trait, cozy pet names, cool nicknames, and long-story monikers.

Those nicknames often say more about my relationship with the name giver than about my personality per se. Try this little quiz to see what I mean.

Match the set of nicknames with the name-giver.

1. Lore, string bean, Ethel
2. Lars, lone xylophone, Lenzel, Lorolla
3. four-eyes, coral-doral, brainiac, freak
4. blossom, love, hon
5. Laurie, pumpkin, bird, sweetie
6. whirl, whoa-whoa, wa-wul

A. school bullies
B. father
C. nieces and nephews
D. brother
E. school chums
F. spouse

Answers at the bottom of this post.

How'd you do? Notice patterns?

A sibling loves and hates you and often calls you the strangest things based on your shared history. Parental pet names tend to be sweet and innocent, while spouses and lovers use more poetic or even suggestive terms of endearment. Tiny people often can't pronounce our names, especially if they are chock full of Ls and Rs. Bullies target qualities they don't like, or try to concoct cruel rhymes (in my case, these tended to make the bully sound stupid instead of cruel). Our friends give us nicknames that create our identities in our peer group and give us a sense of belonging--often tied to shared history or shared associations. For instance, we called my college friend Dave "Darth," because his last name was Vater. He relished it, though his expertise was Chewbacca impressions. But you get the idea.

Pet names and nicknames in the mouths of your secondary characters can communicate lots in a small amount of space. Not only the relationship, but the level of education, temperament, and background. For example, my MC's grandfathers call her "love" and "pumpkin." Pretty obvious which one's a Brit and which one's American, right?

Nicknames friends give can be shorthand for shared interests or "long-stories" that can be revealed over the course of a novel. In John Green's Paper Towns, Quentin and Ben call their friend Marcus "Radar" for such a hilariously convoluted reason, you can't help but laugh and like these guys.

If you find yourself drawn to weird names, I challenge you to consider instead giving your character a weird or funky or long-story nickname instead. Because you plucky YA heroine is going to be an unemployable adult if she's genuinely named Shimmer. Just sayin'.

Tell me about your experience with nicknames and pet names. How do you use them in your writing?

Quiz answers: 1. D 2. E 3. A 4. F 5. B 6. C

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Can't touch this

Writing a great first line is a bear, isn't it? I can't tell you how many times I've added and taken away entire chapters from the front end of my book. This past week I spent days doing one final pass on my opening, adding setup before the inciting incident, and, of course, sweating over my first line. One of the first things I did was pull books off my shelves and look at first lines.

Here's my very favorite, because has everything you'd want--action, voice, unanswered questions and hook:

"The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse."
--Charles Williams, War in Heaven (1930)

FYI: Williams was a member of The Inklings (the writing group that also included Tolkien and Lewis) who wrote these very trippy and intense supernatural thrillers back in the 1930s. Lewis's That Hideous Strength is heavily influenced by Williams's style.

What's your favorite first line? What do you admire about it?

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