15 Greatest Avengers Quotes

“Aren’t the stars and stripes a little… old fashioned?”

Tony Stark: The Avengers. It’s what we call ourselves, sort of like a team. “Earth’s Mighiest Heroes” type thing.

Steve Rogers: When I went under, the world was at war. I wake up, they say we won. They didn’t say what we lost.

Tony Stark: Dr. Banner, your work is unparalleled. And I’m a huge fan of the way you lose control and turn into an enormous green rage monster.
Bruce Banner: Thanks.

Steve Rogers: Is everything a joke to you?
Tony Stark: Funny things are.

Steve Rogers: How can you not trust Fury?
Tony Stark: He’s a spy, he’s THE spy. His secrets have secrets. 

Thor: We on Asgard pretend that we are more advanced, but we, we come here battling like Bilgesnipe.

Steve Rogers: Stark, we need a plan of attack!
Tony Stark: I have a plan: attack!

Loki: I am Loki, of Asgard and I am burdened with glorious purpose. 

Bruce Banner: I don’t think we should be focusing on Loki. That guy’s brain is a bag full of cats. You can smell crazy on him.
Thor: Have a care how you speak! Loki is beyond reason, but he is of Asgard and he is my brother!
Natasha Romanoff: He killed eighty people in two days.
Thor: He’s adopted.

Natasha Romanoff: [watching the aliens come toward them] This is just like Budapest all over again.
Clint Barton: You and I remember Budapest very differently. 

Bruce Banner: Are you here to kill me, Miss Romanoff? Because that’s not gonna work out for everyone. 

Steve Rogers: We have orders, we should follow them.
Tony Stark: Following’s not really my style.
Steve Rogers: And you’re all about style, aren’t you?
Tony Stark: Of the people in this room, which one is A – wearing a spangly outfit and B – not of use?

World Security Council: Director Fury, the council has made a decision.
Nick Fury: I recognise the council has made a decision, but given that it’s a stupid-ass decision, I’ve elected to ignore it.

Nick Fury: I still believe in heroes.

Loki: Enough! You are, all of you are beneath me! I am a god, you dull creature, and I shall not be bullied by…
[Hulk flattens Loki with repeated smashes into the floor]
The Hulk: [leaving] Puny god.

Got any more to add?

WiP Wednesday – Excerpt from Blood – Autumn Pixies!

It’s tricky to find excerpts from Blood I can share with you that don’t contain too many spoilers! This is a nice scene for October, since the autumn pixies show up to pester Dindi….

“The slender girls wore crunchy skirts of fall leaves…” (Art by Anne Stokes)
At night’s tail, just before dawn, pixies jumped up and down on Dindi’s head until she had a headache, and kept jumping, until she woke up to shoo them off.
“You have got to be kidding me,” she groaned. “What is wrong with you fae? Have you never heard of sleep?”
 She rubbed her eyes, fighting déjà vu. Hadn’t she just been poked awake by pixies a few hours ago? 
Once again finger-sized pixies thronged around her sleeping mat, but this time instead of flori, they were all foli, autumnal pixies, mostly Orange, Yellow and Red. The slender girls wore crunchy skirts of fall leaves, and the boys caps and shields made from acorn tops and walnut shells. Kinnaras, bird-winged sprites, feathered like robins, jays, cardinals, tanagers and finches fluttered nearby as well.
“We want to sleep too,” complained the foli. “It’s coming on our nap season. But the Orange Lady has altered the song, and the music is calling us back to the trees. We already painted the leaves in gold and scarlet this year—are we to do so twice in one turn?”
“And we,” said the kinnaras, “have been preparing to arrange eggs in nests, but the song has been altered, and we see no eggs in the music now.”
“And I suppose the Aelfae have gone somewhere without me,” Dindi grumbled.
Tremendous snores suggested otherwise. When she sat up she saw the other Aelfae were all asleep—Hest was the source of the bear-like rumblings—except Vessia, who was already gowned and half way out the door. Dindi hastened after her.
Dawn on the mountaintop shuddered under bitter winds. Nothing of the usual vistas could be seen due to a skirt of cloud which had encircled the slopes. Rhythmic thumps indicated the slave women were pounding potatoes, unseen in their huts, but otherwise few people were awake. Some men had passed out drunk around the bonfires the night before and snored on mats arranged around the embers. 
Dindi trailed Vessia for a number of steps before the Aelfae acknowledged her, albeit without turning around.
“You? Again?”
“Did you hear what the foli and kinnaras said?”
“Of course. You think they did not approach me as well?” Vessia sniffed. “You will learn that the Lower Fae panic easily and complain frequently. It’s best not to overreact.”

Do You Need To Know How Your Book Will End Before You Begin?

Looking back at all the on all the books I’ve started, I noticed that some stories I never managed to get further than a few chapters. I’ve accumulated dozens of Chapters One through Three on a particular tale I’ve been struggling over on and off for years. What’s wrong with these stories? What makes them different from the ones I started and finished?

It’s not that I never struggled with the books I eventually finished. Often I left them and came back multiple times. But I realized that there was a crucial difference. The stories I was able to come back to were the stories whose ending I already knew.

The mechanics of getting to that ending might have stumped me for a while. But even if I had to switch my car for a plane a few times, I knew my destination. I knew the payoff. That’s what kept me going.

I try always to begin a novel with the end in mind. The end may change along the journey, but at the start, I find knowing where I’m headed is crucial.

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Pancake Sunday Advice on Novel Writing

It’s pancake Sunday and we’ve got the whole gang, kids and cousins, here to chow, so this will be a sweet stack with some bacon on the side! And what the heck does that mean?

Moving on to writing rules…  Rules?! We don’t need no stinkin’ rules! But I love ’em anyway. As we approach NaNo, it’s time to start scouring the new and the bookshelf for the best advice out there. Here’s some insights I thought were spot on (the numbering is off). Visit the blog to read the whole thing:

  1. I outline, but my outlines vary; I’ve written novels of 90K words where the outline was 30K in itself. I’ve written novels with 500 word outlines that have come in at 120K. The purpose of the outline is to map the journey in my opinion, but it is not the law.

Oh, outlines? Hello, YES. I mentioned a while ago I was experimenting with a “rich outline” that’s almost more like a draft for Book 6. How has that been working out? Extremely well, as it happens. It’s no panacea. I was a little worried that writing such a detailed outline, which was almost a draft, would just make me feel like I’d finished that part (see below for my problem with this) and like I didn’t want to revisit the material.

I did suffer a bit of that, but you know what? I revisit material all the time, and I had to revisit it a lot more with my other method, to the point where I’d become so sick of it I couldn’t work on the novel anymore. So far… this is better.

  1. A hard and fast rule for ‘scenes-per-chapter’ is outside my purview. Rather, I approach chapters with an eye towards “what must be accomplished here?” This applies to character as well as plot/story. Each chapter is a brick in the road, in this sense. Not knowing the purpose of a chapter, in my opinion, leads to a bad chapter that you end up deleting later.
     
  2. If you’re looking for some very literal advice, I would make a point of setting a word-count/day – something you can meet, but something that will test you. Then write that much each day. Not less, sometimes more.

    And don’t stop your day’s work at the end of a chapter, or the end of a scene, or even, if you can help it, at the end of a sentence. Leave yourself hanging. To mix metaphors, the element of the unresolved chord will bring you back into the work that much faster, especially if you’ve begun your work by rereading your previous day’s writing.

I’ll be honest, this last one doesn’t enthuse me, but I’ve heard it before, so it’s probably one of those things that depend on your personality. I’m not sure it would be a good idea for me. My worst habit is to leave things a little undone at the end but treat it as though it were finished, so I suspect that if I left a chapter dangling… it would continue to dangle as I just raced past it the next day. In fact, I know that would happen, because, due to completely unreasonable demands of my family, like dinner. (Seriously, what’s up with dinner having to happen every day? Wouldn’t every other day be fine?)

  1. Final piece of advice? Scare yourself – not in the sense of writing something that gives you the creeps, but in the sense of pushing your boundaries; if you can write something that makes your own heart race or ache, the odds are you can give that same emotion to the reader. Don’t go easy – not on yourself, and never on your characters.

Ironically, stretching yourself as a writer can get harder once you’re published. You suddenly feel like every time you change clothes, you’re doing it in the middle of a crowd. So it’s tempting to just wear the same thing rather than risk public nakedness. As soon as I figure out how to combat that, I’ll let you know. Meanwhile, if you’re not published yet, and you fear that no one will ever read the book you’re writing, cherish that. Just think how freeing it is. No one need ever read the book you’re writing! You can write whatever you want.

Should Writers Blog About Writing?

Here’s the problem with writers who blog. What should we blog about? It seems like we’re always being told what NOT to blog about. To wit, you may be have received advice like this:

1.) Don’t write about yourself. No one wants to hear about what you had for breakfast, or your cat’s vet appointment.

2.) Don’t write about writing. That appeals to other writers–not to your readers.

3.) Don’t write about politics or other incendiary topics. That will alienate half or more of your audience.

If you take this advice seriously, the first thing you’ll notice is that most other writers don’t.

There are highly successful writers (who are also highly successful bloggers), like David Brin and John Scalzi, who blog about whatever stuff they want, including politics. There are gobs of other great bloggers, like Michelle Davidson Argyle, Lindsey Buroker and Joe Konrath, who write about writing. There are others who blog on specialty interests which have nothing to do with the books. Deb Harkness had a wine blog; Jodi Meadows blogs about knitting. Davin Malasaran blogs about the important question What’s Davin Eating? (It often includes updates about what his dog Peanut is eating too–sometimes the answer is books. See? Related to books after all.)

So, as usual the advice is only half right. Don’t be too quick to dismiss that half, however. I think a good rule of thumb for blogs is the same as for novels: begin as you mean to go on. If you feel like having a blog about your breakfast, just remember, you have to maintain that. If you’re going to talk about politics, you better have something insightful, not just something inciteful, to say. And do it regularly.

What doesn’t work well is to have a blog about cooking and then randomly thrown a post in about writing, and then another post about the presidential debate. Your regular readers will be wondering, What is this crap?  Consistency of topic is more important than what the topic is.

There’s only one thing more important than consistency, and that’s passion. Duh, right? It’s great to do your research into the perfect blog that will attract 20,000 readers per day, but if you have no actual passion for that topic, you’ll end up burning out quickly. And guess what? It’s better to have a blog on a specialty topic that you post to frequently than a blog on a super-popular topic that… has no posts.

Finally, for fiction writers, we need to remember that blogging is not our main form of writing. My novels come first. If I have to neglect my blog for a week, a month or a year, to finish a novel, I’m not going to apologize for it. (We have all been there, right? “Sorry I haven’t blogged in a while…”)

So here are my three “rules” for a fun blog:

1.) Blog about something you love.

2.) Begin as you mean to go on. Pick a main topic, plus a few related things you’re willing to branch out to sometimes, and stick with that.

3.) Don’t let your blog writing overshadow or squeeze out the time you spend on your other writing.

What actually happens for me is that when I’m going strong on my novel, I’m also usually more interested writing posts for my blog too. When I’m too depressed to write my novel, I’m usually too depressed to write  anything. Or do anything. (It’s not pretty.) When I’m excited about writing, I want to not only write scenes but write about writing scenes.

And that’s why I write about writing. I know a lot of my readers aren’t interested in the scaffolding behind the scenes, and I have no problem with that. But I don’t see my blog as just a big advertisement for my books. Sure, it’s part of the whole “doing social media” blah blah blah that writers, and everyone these days, is “supposed” to do. But if that were it’s only purpose, I couldn’t keep it up. I’m not much good at doing what I’m supposed to do. (This is one thing Dindi and I have in common.) I write about issues that are actually interesting to me. I give “writing advice” not because I think I’m such an expert (oh, I should have warned you about that) but because I am learning about it myself. As I figure something out (or think I have) I like to write about my process of discovery.  Then you’ll see some post about first chapters or subtext in dialogue pop up on my blog.  😉

Also, readers of mine who do read this blog… be happy if you see a lot of posts. It means I’m going strong on the next book….

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