Of literal epiphanies

I had an epiphany yesterday about the book I’m currently writing, the Warrior’s Heart. There are smaller moments of enlightenment with every book, when I suddenly know how the story will enfold, but epiphanies happen more seldom.

The book is the next one in my Two-Natured London series. They’re paranormal romances featuring vampires and shape-shifters among other creatures I’ve created myself. I’ve put quite a lot of planning into my world in order to make it believable, logical and interesting, but sometimes I simply cannot design the details to my liking. Writing this book, I’ve struggled throughout with my vampires and their second nature. At times, I’ve been completely stuck, but mostly I’ve written on, doggedly, ignoring the gaping holes in the logic of my creation. 

And then, yesterday: an epiphany. Suddenly, I knew what I needed to do with absolute clarity. And it was so simple I couldn't believe I hadn't thought of it before. Adding one detail to my description of vampires made everything else I had created fall neatly to their place. No more holes in the logic.

Of course, now I have to rewrite the entire manuscript that was almost finished. But it’s worth it. The book will be that much better for it.

I’m sure there’s a lesson in this for me too. One that immediately comes to mind is that I cannot rush the story. I need to give it time to mature. And I guess the other one would be that even small details may make a difference so I should pay better attention to them. Good lessons for all of us, I'm sure.

For a sample of my upcoming book, visit my webpage, here.

Food for imagination

I love maps; always have, ever since I was a child. I love all kinds of maps from historical maps to road maps and atlases. I’m good at reading them, too, and usually end up as the navigator on family vacations to strange places; we’ve seldom got lost and have always found back home.

In addition to being helpful in practise, I find maps a great food for my imagination. I like to imagine what the places that are only lines on paper will look like in reality. They don’t even have to be maps of real places; those imaginary maps in most fantasy books are vital for my enjoyment of them and I consult the maps often during the reading.

I use maps when I write my own books too, although the books themselves don’t contain them. I want to see the places where my characters live and work, the routes they would take between the two and the transportation they would use. Sometimes I’ve changed locations for either or both because I’ve thought the commuting too much of a hassle; it’s easy to relocate when you can do it on paper. I've been writing a historical novel too that would be absolutely impossible to imagine without the help of old street maps. Maps, therefore, affect my writing.

Modern technology has added an extra dimension to all those maps: Google Street View. With a click of my mouse, I’m transported to another town to witness places I wouldn’t otherwise have access to. When I plan locations for my characters, I pick a neighbourhood on the map and click closer to see if it looks and feels like the kind of place where my character would live. If not, I’ll simply choose another one until I find one that fits. The pictures on Street View have all sorts of little clues that help me make up my mind. Maybe I’m looking for a family neighbourhood, but the street is filled with sport cars that give me a notion of a place where only single men live; maybe I want a neighbourhood for wealthier people, but the houses on the one I’ve picked need repair and the shop fronts are boarded over. So on to the next street.

I also use Street View to make action scenes more real. In At Her Boss’s Command, for example, Emily, the heroine, flees from point A to point B. With the help of Street View, I could describe her flight with greater detail, add little obstacles on her path to make everything more realistic. Street View prevents me from making embarrassing blunders too. The same scene, the way I originally wrote it, would have taken her straight through a huge construction site that wasn’t on the map but was visible on Street View. I could have made her round it, but in the end I relocated the entire scene to a more accessible location. I don’t know if readers would have known about the construction site, but it bothered me so I changed it.

Finally, I use Street View when I’m stuck in my narrative; when what I’ve written feels lifeless or when I can’t find the right words. I look at pictures of real places and start describing them to my readers, adding details that transform my narrative from dry words to something more alive.

So, here they are, my reasons for liking maps. Next time that you are stuck in your writing, try opening a map or Street View. Let your imagination free and see if it doesn’t help you too.

Of book series

As a compulsive reader, there’s nothing I like more than long series. I like to return to people and places I love again and again. The series that follow the same main character are the best – Harry Dresden, anyone – especially if there is a slowly evolving background story, but series that introduce new main characters in every book are good too, as long as there’s something to remind from the previous books. Some romance series follow that pattern. Nalini Singh’s Psy/Changeling series is a good example, even more so since it has an intriguing story beneath the romances, as are Suzanne Enoch’s Regency romances, most of them written in trios. I’ve realised recently too, that the books don’t really have to be any good for me to return to them. Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series hasn’t had a decent book in ages, yet I read them. I simply love some of the side characters – not even Anita herself – and have to return to them.

As an author, then, I’d like to produce a good series that readers would like to follow for many books to come. I believe I would enjoy writing a long series, because it would allow me to spend time with my characters longer. Everything I’ve published so far has at least one book planned to follow them, but the Two-Natured London series I have planned to be longer. It will be a series of paranormal romances set in the same world, with some recurring characters. The first book was about shifters, the second one will be about vampires, the next one – who knows. And I have another series planned – partly written too – set in the same world, a longer, more action driven series called the Crimson Circle.

In order to write an intriguing series, I’ve tried to figure out what it is that draws me back to the series I follow. So far, I haven’t found any one thing that would define all of them. For a romance, I’d like the chemistry between the main pair to be sizzling so knowing that the author can produce that will make me read them; for a fantasy, I’d like the plot to be compelling enough to keep my interest, but the best ones have more than one thing going for them. It’s a challenge then, to try and write books with the similar allure. Readers have liked the first book in the Two-Natured London series, but how to repeat the same when the characters change? And in the longer form, how complex would the story need to be to hold the readers’ interest?

The only solution I have come up with so far is to write each and every book as well as I can. Will that be enough? Well, it’s early days yet, but if you stay with me along the way, you’ll be the first to find out. And if you'd like to share the thing that draws you back to your favourite series, please do so in the comment section.

Incidentally, there are a couple of reviews of some of my favourite series in the reviews section of this blog. There aren't that many yet; as I mentioned in an earlier post, I'm new to the reviewing, but I'll add them as I go.

Hello, dear void

I’ve been hanging out on Twitter for two months now. Not terribly long, but long enough for me to have got some hang of it. Well, of the basics anyway. I haven’t figured out all the hashtags yet, nor do I employ those that I know very often, but I have come to understand one thing about the nature of Twitter. This may be self-evident to you; my husband revealed it to me before I even opened the account, but I didn’t quite believe him. Tweeting is not about communicating; it’s not a dialogue, it’s a monologue.  A cluster of monologues that all happen at the same time. Everyone speaks and no one listens.

Once I figured that out, tweeting has been fun. I don’t have to care about what people think of my tweets. They won’t read them anyway. I can talk about myself, or mention something that has taken my fancy that day, be it a cute kitten or a piece of information for writers. Once it’s out there, those who follow me have a half an hour at most  to see it and then it’s gone. And since most of those who follow me live on the other side of the world from me, the chances are they never read anything I tweet; it will be lost in the influx of other people’s monologues in their feed long before they wake up in the morning.

I think most of those who tweet have realised the one-sided nature of Twitter. At least if you look at their tweets. Most of the content isn’t meant to be reacted to, unless the tweet asks you to buy something. Of six hundred accounts that I currently follow, only fifty have content that I actually read regularly. Apart from institutions, like newspapers that produce quantities of genuinely interesting tweets, the tweets that I read are usually something personal that make me take interest in the tweeter, or something funny. Considering the number of people who tweet because they want people to buy something from them – me included – it’s surprising that so few of them make an effort to ensure their tweets actually get read. 

   

So, it’s a challenge, making my tweets interesting enough for people to read them regularly so that the couple of times I mention my books won’t get lost. I don’t think I’m quite there yet, but I’m trying. It’s time consuming though so I can understand why some would want to maintain a Twitter presence with automatic tweets that repeat their books’ links many times a day with the hopes that one of the tweets catch. But since I don’t read the automatic tweets, I have to assume mine wouldn’t get read either if I resorted to those. So they’re counter-productive, really.

In the long run, the monologue might become disheartening. But then, occasionally, someone reacts to my tweet, retweets it or answers to me. For a brief moment, there is a dialogue and then we go to our separate ways. Those encounters are wonderful, they make everything worthwhile. I can imagine that I’m not shouting into a void after all. I’m not alone.

Now that I have the tweeting figured out – to a degree – it’s onto the next challenge. I opened a Google+ account as Susanna Shore, one of my pen names. I have no idea how it operates, or how to get people to follow me there. So if you have an account there, look me up. Perhaps you can share a few pointers with me about it to; create a dialogue.

A new year, a new cover

A new year is about new starts, right? Well, I’ve never been good at making New Year’s resolutions; or, I can make them, I just can’t keep them. My new leaf is, therefore, a new cover for an old book. Those of you who have read this blog before may remember that I have a tendency to change the covers I make every now and then. However, the cover for ‘At Her Boss’s Command’ has been troublesome from the start (see the old covers here and here).

The trouble with the covers of this book has been that they haven’t really reflected everything the book is. The first one was too sexy and the second one too romantic. And neither of them conveyed the suspense side of the story. What I needed was a cover that combines all three aspects. This time, I think I’ve nailed it.

The picture of two shoes, man’s and woman’s, lined side by side hit me instantly as the one I needed when I came across it on Dreamstime. They’re elegant shoes, suitable for business people; they’re facing each other, very close to one another, giving a notion of two people embracing; and the man’s shoe dominates the picture and thereby the other shoe, the woman. And empty as they are, just two nameless shoes, they hint of a mystery as well.

Fonts took a great deal of pondering over. In the end, I chose a colour scheme that complements the woman’s shoe. Contrasting the soft hue, the font face of the title is a serious serif font you might see on a cover of a detective story instead of a rounder font more popular in romantic stories, and I added a catch-phrase that I think will pique readers’ curiosity – although it will most likely be illegible in a thumbnail size. Together, the fonts and the photograph form a nice and balanced picture.

So yes, I’m happy with my new cover. I’ve uploaded it already – so it’s too late to influence me – and it should show up on the product page on Amazon within a couple of days; it takes a bit longer for the Look Inside feature to update. However, if you do like to give your opinion, leave a comment. It may be too late for this book, but there’s a sister book for this one coming up later this spring and I found another shoe picture for that one that I will use if this one works.

There you have it, a new start. Happy New Year, everyone!

At Her Boss's Command by Hannah Kane