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Monthly Archives: September 2010
Monthly Archives: September 2010
Not my usual genre, but Lutishia Lovely and her film crew caught my attention with this one. The scenes are simple, and the cuts are standard, but what carries is it is the sound track and voice over. The actual trailer is one minute, with the rest showing the name of the book and scrolling the credits, so it’s not too long.
Eugene Long, sweetheart, you have a hell of a sexy voice. I hope you aren’t really a preacher. 😉
I had to post this one on a Sunday.
I used to be a normal person. I used to look forward to weekends.
Now, I see weekends differently. They always come too soon and I always give a little sigh of relief when they are over. That’s because Monday through Friday, I work: do research, read books, write stuff. Whether it’s for school or for my fiction, it’s enjoyable. On weekends, I do a lot of things I don’t particularly enjoy. Clean the house. Drive all over the place. Shop at Costco. Drive all over the place. Try to fight the crowds at Fun Places we are taking the kids.
Don’t get me wrong, the part I enjoy is spending time with the kids. But if we “do something” with them, beyond just crashing at my brother’s house for the day, it’s exhausting. For instance, yesterday we took them to a birthday party and to an aquarium and it took us FORTY MINUTES just to find a place to park the car. Circling and circling three levels of parking lot, with three crying kids in the car.
Can I just say: Oy.
I ranted in a previous post about deadlines, and I’m still a struggling to meet mine. So I’m up a 4 am this morning, at work again. I’ve reluctantly removed one story I had planned to include in the anthology, because I realized it needed to be re-written, not just edited. Too bad, because it was space opera and a had a happy ending. I’ve noticed that a lot of the short stories I write are kind of tragic. Or at least melancholy. That’s funny, because my novels are usually upbeat, and I don’t want the people who love tragedy to read my stories and then feel annoyed with my novels because they wanted more gloom, or people who are turned off by the sad endings of a few stories to not read the novels because they want HEAs.
I replaced the removed story with another story, that also has a happy ending, but it’s not space opera. But it was already published somewhere so it doesn’t need a lot of editing. The previous publisher seems to have gone out of business, so I am happy to bring this story back into print.
I’m also writing introductions to all of the stories. I like anthologies where the author shares a bit of the story behind the story; it’s like reading fiction with a side of autobiography. In some of the introductions, I’ve shared rather personal stuff, and now it’s making me nervous. I’m afraid maybe it’s TMI. After all, it’s NOT an autobiography. Maybe no one really wants to hear about how I was homeless that one time, or about how I tried and failed since I was nineteen to make it as a professional writer, or why I wasn’t accepted into college, or all the other ways in which I’ve managed to screw up my life.
I’ve read some other introductions to stories in anthologies, and sometimes they are impersonal and upbeat, other times they are more autobiographical and mention more serious things.
Hmmmm. *deep thought* Gotta decide by Monday. I need to send this baby to the editor.
An interesting journey to publication that starts with self-publishing, travels through mainstream publishing with HarperCollins and ends as an ebook. Ann Brandt tells how she published Crowfoot Ridge”
Of the eight agent responses from my submissions, seven were encouraging, but rejections none-the-less. One was a request to send fifty pages of “Crowfoot Ridge” to Jillian Manus. Three months later her rejection arrived. I did a lot of rewriting after the conference, then proceeded with a small press in NC and self-published. The jacket photo they wanted to use belonged on a Mad Magazine cover. I contacted DeWitt Jones, a photographer/speaker at Maui and asked for a mountain scene. He provided one for four hundred dollars. When the book came out I sent a few copies to him as a thank you.
He sent one to his good friend, Jillian Manus, who read it and called to ask if she could represent me. She had no memory of our previous encounter. I signed her contract and she put the book out on auction giving the publishers eight hours to respond. HarperCollins won the auction. They put me through months of rewriting with editors from many disciplines: story, dialog, grammar, and legal. Jillian asked once how I’d gotten a DeWitt Jones photo and went on to tell me he can receive $10,000 for one. In fact HarperCollins said they could not afford one of his photos and provided an in-house painting for the jacket they published in 1999. “Crowfoot Ridge” was sold in several countries, translated into German and French, and we had a few nibbles from the film industry. The e-book debuts on Kindle this month.
Three minutes plus — on the long side. I didn’t watch it all the way through the first time. But I did come back to it, because it’s well done.
This uses a technique of “pseudo-animation”: A series of cartoons or illustrations that accompany the text, or, in this case, voice over, at a sentence-by-sentence pace. Unlike a random jumble of stock images, the succession of cartoons gives the trailer a unified motif, holding it together with greater style. A few stock photos are thrown in, for instance, a shot of Bath. It works okay. The color scheme is simple but striking. The cartoonish b&w drawings are highlighted by red. A nice way to quietly shout: Hey! Vampires!
The voice over and sound effects really carry this trailer, even when the cuts could use a brisker pace. I laughed my head off when the ridiculous French accents began at 1:39. “Those English bastards! They cut of my…!”
The premise of the book is also a riot. Here we have the Jane Austen and the Undead craze joined with the Use Famous Writers as characters craze, and hell, a little Alt Hist thrown in for jolly fun. At least, when I last took my Survey of Modern European History Since the French Revolution, I don’t remember the French invading England twice. That alone made me want to read this book.
Jane of the Damned, by Janet Mullany.
“I did it with my last baby and it wasn’t totally accurate.”
— referring to a test that predicts the gender of a baby
Hm. It wasn’t “totally” accurate? Either it was accurate or it wasn’t, riiiiiight? Unless what you really mean is, “Well it predicted a male, but my baby boy is suspiciously fond of Tinky Winky.”
(The real answer, in case you were wondering? The test is a scam.)
There are some people who assume that just because a book is popular, it is well written. There are other people who assume that just because a book is popular it is poorly written.
Don’t make assumptions.