Tara Maya
Author Archives: Tara Maya
Tara Maya
- by Tara Maya
The Spandrals of Literature
It goes to show how out of touch with blogging I’ve been lately that three favorite literary bloggers are collaborating over at the Literary Lab and I completely failed to notice until now. Truly pathetic.
However, I believe my round of close edits is strengthening the book, and I’m only about a third of the way through. There’s still a few extremely hard scenes left to tackle; the very last conversation between my hero and my heroine before the end of the book, for one.
Meanwhile, I am ferreting out all the spandrels in my book. These are scenes which I originally included because I had to. You know, I had to logically explain how Person A arrived at Place B and how it connected to Plotline C, but beyond that, it wasn’t much fun. The scene was boring but functional. Beta readers didn’t always complain about these dull scenes, because it was obviously necessary to keep the roof from falling down on the plot, but no one danced the jitterbug of Oh-Wow-I-Love-This-Part over these scenes either.
My goal is to change all that. My goal is to make these spandrels included on the Highlights of the Cathedral tour, to turn them into panda’s thumbs, or even ballistic missiles. I want to take them from being dull but functional to riveting and critical.
One of the marks of a truly good book, I think, is when as a reader you honestly can’t tell the functional from the facinating scenes, the veggies from the dessert. Every scene serves a nutritious plot function, and every scene also delivers delicious plot frosting.
- by Tara Maya
Technomagic
In the show Babylon 5, there was an order of technomages, who used technology to simulate magic. Not surprisingly, there really are technomagicians like this one. His tricks in this video, according to my friend, were “done in real-time, no post-production graphics.”
- by Tara Maya
Edits Continue
I continue revivsions. I’m trying to follow Maass’s suggestion of making certain each scene has microtension — mini-mysteries and conflicts embedded at the sentence and paragraph level.
Also, I was stunned to discover Dindi Book 1 lacked cannibals. I’ve rectified that.
- by Tara Maya
Blog Lite and Notebook Computer
It’s not a notebook computer, it’s a notebook which thinks it’s a computer.
Blog Lite continues, I’m afraid, as I focus intensively on using the Maass book to strengthen The Corn Maiden. I’m finding book books to be extremely useful at this stage of my editing. I hope the changes I’m making will really help the book.