Dog Days Blog Chat

Zestful Blog Post #173

The few times a year I send out full-on Newschats, I always make them my blog for that week. As always, apologies for the double if you’re subscribed both there and here. If you’re one of my blog friends, you’ve been the first to see some of these announcements and links below—but not all! Got a freebie going, and other new stuff. Thanks for skimming down. Oh, and to join my news group, pop over here.

Dog Days Newschat begins:

Dearest Correspondent,

The dog days are upon us—that is, the hottest part of the year (in the northern hemi): when Sirius, or the Dog Star, positions itself behind the sun in the summer sky. The star doesn’t make it extra hot—we remember that correlation does not necessarily equal causation—but psychologically, I think there’s something there.

Anyway, a dog days giveaway is at the top of my newschat today!

The second in the Rita Farmer series, The Extra, is free on Amazon Kindle right now, through the weekend. The Extra opens with Rita in police costume on a movie shoot near the Los Angeles river. She wanders away from the set to find something better to eat than the roachy sandwiches the low-budget production company provides, and winds up getting taken for a real cop and drawn into a real crime scene. The ensuing mystery concerns a runaway show beagle (so, like yeah, dog days), an inner-city charity mission with major secrets, and a creepy old crone up in Bakersfield. Nab yourself one!

All five Lillian Byrd crime novels are now available on Audible Books! They all have individual links, but here’s the one for Holy Hell to get you going. The narrator, Dina Pearlman, did a fabulous job. Here’s a little something about her:

“Dina Pearlman was born in New Jersey and raised in the fair hamlet of Teaneck, home of the Isley Brothers. After 4 years at Carnegie Mellon University, she came to New York to pursue acting professionally. She languished in sorrow and Fritos for a year and half, enduring a steady stream of rejection, broken occasionally by an appearance in a sparsely attended showcase production of an obscure play, somewhere obscure. One day, after having received a particularly painful rejection, she decided to get up off her tuchis and head down to Gladys' Comedy Room to try her hand at stand-up comedy. She wrote her act on the 2nd avenue bus whilst travelling between 81st and 53rd streets, had two gin and tonics, got up on the stage, and killed. She then decided that while acting would always be her first love, stand-up was a way to get her performing jones out in the meantime. Shortly thereafter, she landed a sketch comedy pilot on ABC, followed by some regional theater, followed by a Spike Lee movie, followed by more theater and TV, and so it went. Somehow or another, this ol' goofus from New Jersey had herself an acting career.”

Dina especially gets the humor of Lillian right: She doesn’t ham it up, and you have to be a good sharp listener yourself to get it.

New novel? Crimes in a Second Language? Yes, I’ve dangled it before you, but where the hell is it? Short answer: I’m dicking around with it. Do stay tuned.

Meanwhile, a new short story! Sarasota’s SCENE magazine has just published my newest in its August issue. “Go-Go Day” is about a woman past her prime, her dangerous backyard, and the perils of an unexamined life. You can read it for free online. Page 83.

Writer’s Digest Books honored me by including four chapters by me in their latest book on writing, Crafting Dynamic Dialogue: The Complete Guide to Speaking, Conversing, Arguing, and Thinking in Fiction. Other top writing authors in the book: Jeff Gerke, James Scott Bell, and Gloria Kempton.

Speaking of Writer’s Digest, check out a couple of issues on the newsstand now: The September issue includes my feature on getting the little stuff right in fiction (“It’s the Little Things.”) Because little stuff, if it’s good, can mean a lot! Also, see my piece “Revise Like a Pro” in WD’s current Novel Writing Yearbook. That was an especially fun one, because I excerpted before-and-after material from my own novels.

I might add, I’ll have articles in the upcoming January and February issues of the magazine as well.

To hear me talk about my career, check out this recent radio interview with Bradenton’s own Dona Lee Gould on RadioEar network. Dona Lee’s skillful editing makes me sound so much less muddled than in real life…

The rumor is true that I’m not taking on any new coaching/editing clients. I love the work, but it was just taking up too much of my time. I have some new initiatives that I hope will help me help more writers than working one-on-one. I’ll be focusing a lot more on new writing, as well.

Upcoming appearances:

I’ll be kicking off this year’s Visiting Writers Forum at the Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota at 7 p.m. on August 23. The event is open to all, and I’m pretty sure it’s free. I’ll read a little bit, discuss the craft of writing, and do Q&A. Information as to venue and parking will be posted on my blog when I get it.

And hey, consider joining me at the following upcoming conferences, where I’ll be a presenter:

Sleuthfest on Saturday, put on by the Florida chapter of Mystery Writers of America on October 8.

Florida Writers Association annual conference, October 20-23.

I’ve joined Novelists, Inc., a selective organization of serious authors. I’ll be attending the upcoming annual conference next month in St. Petersburg, Fla. and will report about it in my blog.

Zestful Writing, speaking of blogs, continues to cook along, my once-a-week, idiosyncratic posting of my best ideas on writing and my experiences as a writer and learner. A couple of weeks ago it popped up as #94 on Feedspot’s top 100 writing blogs.

OK, that’s more than enough for now!

Love,

Elizabeth

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Breaking the Rules of POV

Zestful Blog Post #133

Recently I got three inquiries in a row from aspiring writers wanting advice on point of view in fiction, specifically shifting POV from one character to another, and even more specifically, mixing first-person POV with other styles—third person limited and omniscient: can we do it? should we do it? how do we do it? (Thank you to D, J, and E for giving me the idea for this post.)

The novels of my first series (Lillian Byrd crime) are all in first person, which has its joys. The reader gets to know the main character intimately—if you’ve done your job well—and the limitations of the form can help shape your plot. One character can’t know everything, which automatically introduces an element of suspense. I chose first person for my first books because I was told by some magazine article (probably & ironically in Writer’s Digest magazine) that all first novelists should use it, because at least then you can’t screw up POV.

LOL.

Alternatively, writing gurus often tell new authors to stick with one style of POV: pick either first, third-limited, or omniscient, and stay there. Yet messing around with POV is interesting, and it can be just the thing for your story. Yet it’s fraught.

In many novels old and new, an omniscient narrator tells the story, shifting frequently from one character’s viewpoint to the next. If done well, we get not only a literal unfolding of the story, but also the characters’ inner worldview—their thoughts and judgments as to what’s going on. But the narrator becomes a bit of a character as well, which can be helpful or annoying, depending on the skill of the author.

For The Actress (Rita Farmer mysteries) I wanted more flexibility than simple first person, because my story was more ambitious, wider ranging, with more characters. Yet I liked the intimacy of first person. So I looked around to see if any novels mixed first with third limited and/or omniscient and found a few that worked (don’t ask me; I forget), so I figured I could do it too.

Yet I hated reading novels where the POV sticks with one character for almost the whole book, but shifts quickly and inexplicably to another character’s POV as a way out of plot jams, which is cheap. Suddenly—gosh!—we learn what the bad guy’s thinking, just at the exact moment we need an explanation of what the hell his motivation is. Then we’re back to the hero for the duration. In such cases, shifting POV is a way to avoid telling the story with discipline and fluidity. And it’s pure plain jangling to readers. It’s especially bad when readers constantly have to re-orient themselves to rapidly shifting limited POVs. Note I say limited: This is worse than just choosing omniscient, which imposes its own demands of reason and plausibility.

So I structured The Actress to begin from the perspective of Rita, my protagonist, and to shift POV only at major breaks. Sometimes it’s a chapter break, other times it’s a mid-chapter shift from one scene and set of characters to another. I carried the same pattern into the other two Rita books. By On Location I was pretty comfortable with it.

Currently I’m writing a final draft of a novel told in a mix of third limited and omniscient; no first person. It happens in Los Angeles, it involves a retired schoolteacher, her illiterate (and undocumented) cleaning woman, and a gang of corporate saboteurs. It digs into why people help one another, why they betray one another, and how far into the abyss they will go for money—and sometimes love. The title is Crimes in a Second Language.

Bottom line answer to the questions on mixing POVs: Yes, we can do it. We should do it IF the story demands, or at least prompts it. Keep your artistic integrity handy and never shift POV to get yourself out of a tight place you’ve gotten yourself into. When mixing first with third limited / omniscient, do it sparingly.

Moreover, don’t be cowed by the process. Relax, jump in, and give it a try.

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Subprime

Zestful Blog Post #90

Hi there! I hope you survived this week’s storm of the century. Here’s the next installment in EPH (Elizabeth’s Publishing History). Let’s call this one:

9) Subprime

The Actress was released in the summer of 2008. Does this time period resonate in your memory? You betcha: the mortgage meltdown, the government bailouts of banks and General Motors. (As a native Detroiter, I shake my head at that: in the days of tail fins and pushbutton radios, GM could have bailed out the government.) The dark dawn of the Great Recession.

Just about everybody’s net worth went down a little or a lot, and the most significant result was that people did not rush out to buy The Actress.

I might add that they didn’t rush out to buy debut hardcovers by just about anybody else, either.

The efforts of the Macmillan marketing machine were mighty (felt I ought to stick with the alliteration as long as possible there), and the book did sell some in stores and online, as well as, notably, to thousands of libraries across the country. God bless all librarians everywhere. It still does my heart good to hear from a reader who found my books in their local library (even recently in Canada, which surprised me, given that country’s restrictive content laws governing book sales (another subject)).

Side note: It’s true that a library copy represents just one sale, and usually at a reduced royalty rate because publishers sell to libraries at special discounts. Some authors actively scorn library sales. I remember watching a filmed interview of James Ellroy during which he recounted a fan approaching him somewhere and gushing that she got L.A. Confidential out of the library and LOVED it. He said that he replied, “Well, that doesn’t do me a goddamned bit of good, does it?” But the point is, that library copy gained him a fan, and library fans will often buy the paperback, or even the next hardcover because they don’t want to risk a waiting list. James was perhaps not brought up to receive compliments gracefully.

When the financial crisis got going, even before my book was published, I immediately thought, ‘This bodes ill for The Actress,’ and I was right.

[Original cover.]

My deal with Macmillan was for two books. As soon as I signed the contract in 2007, I got right going writing the second in the series, The Extra. So when The Actress came out in 2008, I had already turned in The Extra and they were happy with it, and they offered me a contract for the third in the series.

The plan was to release the mass-market paperback (that is, the small-format, pocket edition) of The Actress simultaneously with the hardcover of The Extra in 2009, about a year after The Actress’s debut. That is a common practice.

The economic storm was rolling, but nobody knew how bad it was going to be, nor how long the pain would last, so most publishers were doing business as usual. I might add that Amazon was getting rolling on this thing called, sinisterly, “Kindle”. The Actress and the other books in that season’s Macmillan catalogue were the first books published by that company in e-book format.

When Macmillan saw that sales for The Actress were less than hoped, in spite of an almost uniformly enthusiastic critical reception, one of their responses was to redesign the cover for the paperback. This was a great move, because the original cover had issues.

So, backing up to pre-hardcover release: I had expected the cover for The Actress to be kicky and bright, to suggest the biting humor and almost over-the-top plot, along the lines of chick lit. I know there’s a mystery and some graphic gore (what with my killing off a main character, see Zestful Blog post #87), but I felt the book was wacky and light too. I didn’t get such a cover, but when I first saw it I was thrilled, because compared with the original covers of the Lillian Byrd series, which were predominantly black and pretty consistently horrible, it was good. It was professional.

The cover told the story, we all thought: it showed, from the back, a blonde-haired woman (Rita, my protagonist) dressed in a business suit, facing a courtroom. The thing that only struck me after I’d lived with the book staring me in the face in my office for a few months was that it was not a welcoming cover image. Someone standing with her back to you does not draw you in; when you walk into a party, do you immediately approach someone with their back to you? Customers in bookstores are like party guests.

So, a redesign was done. No, my opinion was not solicited; I didn’t even know they were doing it until they sent a proof image to Cameron, who forwarded it to me.

The redesigned cover still lives as a ghost on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Actress-Rita-Farmer-Mysteries/dp/0312377282/ref=tmm_mmp_title_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=&qid=

What happened to the mass-market paperback of The Actress? Tune in next week.

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