Archive
Daily Archives: March 11, 2009
- by Tara Maya
Orc Armies, Please Apply Within
My goal for today is to finish the latest revisions to Book 1, then get it out to armies of beta readers, who, hopefully, will attack it like orcs in an elf village, and not only identify all the scenes which still REALLY REALLY SUCK but also give me some inkling how to improve them.
I know. I shouldn’t obsess. I should GET ON WITH BOOK 2. And I should STOP TALKING TO MYSELF IN ALL CAPS.
Here are the scenes which particularly worry me:
* An explicit sex scene. Do I really want to include this in the novel?
* A non-explicit sex scene. The only thing worse than explicit sex is vague sex.
* A scene which involves an abortion and a talking bear. (No, the bear is not the one getting or performing an abortion.) There’s just no way to do a scene like this right. (How did this even sneak into the book? I promise you, this was NOT my idea. I had no clue the characters were going to do this. Help!)
* A scene where I try to show my heroine as both suicidal and happy, at the same time. Huh?!
* Pretty much every scene to be found in the last 35,000 words of the book.
* A non-explicit sex scene. The only thing worse than explicit sex is vague sex.
* A scene which involves an abortion and a talking bear. (No, the bear is not the one getting or performing an abortion.) There’s just no way to do a scene like this right. (How did this even sneak into the book? I promise you, this was NOT my idea. I had no clue the characters were going to do this. Help!)
* A scene where I try to show my heroine as both suicidal and happy, at the same time. Huh?!
* Pretty much every scene to be found in the last 35,000 words of the book.
P.S. Sorry for the rash of blog entries. I always do this — squish in three dozen posts on my blog one week, then go for a month with nothin’. The number of blog posts is proportional to the amount of procrastination I am engaged in to avoid working on my wip. Please don’t feel obliged to comment, unless you too are procratinating something, in which case, make merry with remarkery!
P.P.S. I’m kidding about not feeling obliged to comment. You should drop everything else in your life to comment on my blog, otherwise I will have pressed REFRESH over and over again, obsessivly, compulsively, constantly, insanely for nothing.
- by Tara Maya
Secret Trucks Delivering Books
Might Apple be preparing to take on Amazon for the ebook market?
There’s something I keep hearing, and I don’t think I’d rank it as high as a rumor, but it’s an interesting story that I keep hearing, that for awhile, trucks loaded with books would arrive at a loading dock on the Apple campus, and offload big, big, big, big, huge loads of books, and then the trucks would leave empty. And Apple does not have a 100,000-book employee library there on the Apple campus. So one is prone to believe that they’re doing something with these books, such as turning them into text for some purpose we can only guess at. There’s been a long-standing rumor that Apple has been silently preparing to open a bookstore on the iTunes store, and they want to make sure that they have a very large stock of electronic titles when they do open.
Three reactions: Oh yeah! Oh no! and Squeeeeee!
Oh yeah, a bookstore on my mac akin to iTunes would rock.
Oh no, I hope this doesn’t mean Apple and Amazon each try to corner mutually exclusive platforms and formats on their respective devices (Kindle, Netbook, whatever). I was hoping the Kindle ap for the iPhone was an omen of fuzzy bunnines and sunshine, but it might end up being Beta vs VHS all over again. How tiresome.
And, finally, trucks loaded with books would arrive at a loading dock… offload big, big, big, big, huge loads of books, and then the trucks would leave empty… Squeeeeeee! Whether or not this is true, I love the image. Can I get secret trucks to offload big, big, big, huge loads of books at my house too? Please? Please?
* * *
Oh, wait. I do have that.
My stepdad has been dropping by lately with boxes and boxes of my late Grandmother’s library. This, however, is not the joyfest it should be, (1) because it makes me think of my gramdmama, which makes me sad, (2) the books were abused by the person who stored them, and are now moldy, broken, completely disorganized, and (3) most of the books are in German or French so I can’t read them.
I’m going to scan them into the computer. Then I’m going to find one which is (a) out of copywrite and (b) in English, and add zombies to the story. Then I’ll design my own ebook reader too, totally exclusive and incompatible with any other ebook reader in the world, so if you want to read Zombies Attack Heidleberg, you’ll have to buy my reader. BWAHAHAHAHA!
- by Tara Maya
Avoiding Melodrama
I’m writing a scene with high tension. A character has just been forced to choose between the life of her grandchild or her child. In her anger, at the world, at herself, she lashes out at an ally. How do I write this scene without slipping into melodrama?
It’s espeically difficult because the ally is a talking bear.
Any advice? Tips? Tricks?